Existential suspense/horror mystery.

This city had never conveyed anything but a deathly feeling to Millicent. It was scattered with busts and fountains carved from limestone blackened by the damp of the years; here and there the eye would catch marble surfaces coated in moss, ivy climbed thick and wild up the walls, choking entire buildings in its embrace, lilies sprang up in the most unlikely gutters of the streets, cracked stone wellheads, puddles thick with nenuphars. As far as Millicent was concerned, this city was little different from an abandoned mausoleum.

And perhaps that was why she wasn't especially surprised when she first caught that foul odor coming from the apartment across the hall...

There's no need for lengthy descriptions of the associations that dreadful smell conjured up. Suffice it to say that it was a moldy, damp, sticky odor; sticky in that it had the property of clinging to the clothes and skin of anyone who found themselves within its domain.

"Some mouse must have died in a pipe somewhere. Or a cat, who knows," she thought.

Millicent duly raised the matter at the building's residents' meeting, but her words fell on deaf ears. The smell hadn't yet crept into the other floors. The tenants suggested, indifferently, that she get in touch with the management company. Which she did.

She went up to the building's fourth floor in the elevator, accompanied by Mr. Anthony, the manager's caretaker. The moment the smell reached his nostrils, Mr. Anthony went white as a sheet and immediately covered his snout with a handkerchief:

"But... but that's the smell of a human corpse...!"

Millicent's legs gave out from under her:

"No...! No!"

"Yes! Yes, I'm telling you! I've worked in a morgue, I should know!"

Dimitris Apergis was born in Larissa, Greece, in 1978. He graduated in BA (Hons) Film Studies in England. He lives in Greece. He has received several awards for his literary work.