*The Neighbor in the Apartment**

*

This happened a long time ago, definitely more than three years back. My uncle went to Moscow for work for a couple of months, and I stayed in his apartment.

It started almost immediately. At night, from the bedroom, I could clearly hear someone walking around the living room. You’d think: let them walk—I'd long been used to things like that. In almost every apartment I’d lived in, there had been one such poltergeist (or just a strange sound effect like the “rolling ball phenomenon”) that would walk along the hallway or kitchen. In other words, whatever the nature of these phenomena was, I’d long gotten used to the mere fact of nighttime footsteps, and honestly their nature had never interested me much. The less you know, the better you sleep (and in this case, quite literally). But these sounds weren’t like the footsteps of an adult I was used to. They were quieter and more frequent. It crossed my mind that they sounded like the steps of a child, and that thought made me uneasy. In horror movies, the creepiest characters (of course, after evil clowns) were evil children. And the idea that something like that might be wandering in the next room was unpleasant, but by itself it still didn’t keep me from sleeping peacefully.

Then things got more interesting. One evening around seven (it was either spring or summer, and it was still light outside), I went to walk my grandmother’s dog. I left the building and, already crossing the yard, remembered I’d forgotten my player. I decided to take the dog first and then come back for it. That’s what I did. But when I entered the apartment again, from the hallway I caught a glimpse (it all happened very quickly) of something dark darting out from under the table in the living room (about knee-high to me) and running toward the balcony (from my angle it almost immediately disappeared around the corner). It would have been nothing—who knows what one might imagine—but the swaying edge of the tablecloth clearly suggested it wasn’t just an optical illusion. And not only that—the dog pricked up its ears, stretched its neck, and with obvious curiosity tried to look around the corner. An unpleasant chill ran down my spine. But, first thinking of more mundane things—like burglars or cats (I didn’t have time to think about why burglars would be sitting under the table or why a cat would be so huge)—I nudged the dog so it would go ahead of me. Unexpectedly, the dog tucked its tail (it was a Rottweiler) and backed away, flatly refusing to enter the room. But I practically kicked it in and forced it into the living room anyway.

No one was in the living room; the balcony was closed. I went into the bedroom and, just in case, even checked the storage room, but everywhere was empty. Only the tablecloth was still swaying, as if in mockery. I thought—what exactly had I expected to see? I shrugged and went to walk the dog. When I returned (naturally, without the dog), it was a bit unsettling to enter the apartment, but nothing jumped out from under the table this time, and I calmed down.

Going to bed that night was, of course, somewhat creepy. Before, I could mentally write it off as “seems like it,” “must be the neighbors,” “that’s just how the floorboards creak as they cool.” But now it had become somewhat problematic. There really was something wandering around there. No, the mere fact that something was wandering around the living room didn’t bother me much—let it wander, no one was being harmed. If it had intended to hurt anyone, it had had plenty of opportunities, but for a month it only wandered. Still, the idea that something might be wandering nearby while I slept didn’t appeal to me at all. I mentally went through all the nighttime stompers I’d ever known, and all of them had stayed within one room. That reassured me. Sometimes I lay awake for a long time, listening to the steps in the living room, but my cowardice didn’t go so far as to run away from the apartment. How could I look at myself in the mirror afterward, knowing some stomping creature had driven me out?

But then something even more amusing happened: one evening, as I was coming out of the bathroom, in the large mirror hanging on the open bedroom door (the actual doorway to the bedroom wasn’t visible from there, only the door with the mirror), I saw something dark dart out of the bedroom. Where it went after that, I couldn’t see. A thought flashed through my mind: “Visual hallucinations usually don’t appear in mirrors” (meaning that people with hallucinations, seeing an image, don’t see its reflection in a mirror if one is nearby). And I stood there thinking: should I be glad it wasn’t a hallucination, or upset because this “not a hallucination” was apparently capable of entering the bedroom? I sat down in the bedroom so I could see both doors at once (the front door and the storage room door) and began to think about what to do next. On the one hand, nothing had really changed: if it had run out of here now, it could have come in before, but nothing had happened to me. On the other hand, the fact itself was unpleasant, and I understood I was unlikely to sleep tonight. The only option was to evict it somehow. But I had no idea how—I’d never had to drive away harmless poltergeists before; they’d never bothered me. I consulted a friend on ICQ, and he suggested drawing runes (I don’t remember which) above all the doorways. I drew them. That night I left the nightlight on and listened for a long time to the sounds from the living room, but I didn’t hear any footsteps and eventually fell asleep.

There were no more incidents. Nothing jumped out from anywhere, and nothing stomped around anymore. When my uncle returned, I told him about the nasty stomper that (what a shame) had frightened me so much I decided to drive it away. He replied, “What, again?” I asked what he meant by “again,” and he told me the following story.

When his dog Nika (also a Rottweiler) died, he buried her, but after some time he began hearing something walking around the living room (and he could be in the living room himself, unlike me—I only heard the sounds from the bedroom), breathing, grumbling, and fussing under the table (that had been Nika’s spot). Basically, doing everything the dog used to do. At first it didn’t bother him, but later, with the “stomper,” a corpse-like smell began spreading through the room. Each day it got worse. When the stench became unbearable, he went to the grave and asked the dog not to come anymore. And she, he claims, didn’t appear again.

But apparently, when he left, she decided to visit again—doing her best, it seems, to remain incognito: she only walked around after I went to bed or left the apartment. That at least explains why the steps were so frequent, like a child’s. Then I felt even more ashamed that I’d been frightened of a dog. But, in any case, whatever it was never appeared again. That’s such a silly story. I’d probably have been happy to write it all off as imagination after a couple of years… but the memory of the swaying tablecloth and the dog pricking up its ears still doesn’t let me do that.