Pencil drawing of an octopus with curling tentacles

It came in through the drain grate on Harbour Row the night the tide went over the sea wall, and by morning it had found its way into Block C as if it had been posted a key. Nobody saw it arrive. We saw the suckers first, a line of pale rings pressed onto the stairwell window, then the tentacles hanging off the banisters like wet rope, curling at their ends as if they were trying to remember a tune. The Patel boys dared each other to touch one on the fourth landing and came back with their palms printed in purple.

Arthur Teague on the eleventh floor was the only one who went looking for it. He'd buried his wife in March and couldn't stand the telly, so he carried tinned pilchards down in his cardigan pocket and sat on the bottom step until a great eye rose out of the lift shaft to consider him. He said it watched him the way a clock watches a kettle. Every evening he set a fish on the step, and every evening the arms came down and took it so gently the tin never rattled.

When the council men arrived with their cutting gear and orders to clear the shaft, Arthur stood in front of the doors with his arms spread wide. The octopus didn't lash out. It simply wound one arm around the lift cable, spiral after spiral, until the cable hummed and the men took a step back, then another. They were gone before dark. In the morning the lift doors stood open on black water and the smell of salt, and beside the bottom step lay a single wet spiral pressed into the lino, neat as a signature."