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It was a Tuesday night, and the apartment was quiet in the way apartments get after everyone else has gone to sleep.
He knew the main hall before he walked into it.
Not because he had been there.
Because his brother had been there, in 1998, on a chunky PlayStation in their parents’ basement, and he had watched over his brother’s shoulder at nine years old and never forgotten the way the statue caught the light through the skylight, or the groan of the staircase under the weight of what was waiting upstairs.
He was thirty-six now.
The game he was playing had come out in 2019.
The main hall was the same main hall.
The statue was the same statue.
The staircase groaned under the same weight.
He had never played the original Resident Evil 2.
He had only ever played the remake.
To him, the remake was Resident Evil 2.
The game from 1998 was a rumor, a YouTube video, a thing his brother sometimes mentioned at Christmas.
The game from 2019 was the one he …
