The Black Monday Club

For a couple of years, I was a regular at a specific weekly gathering. We'd gather in a café, a tight circle of six or seven people, to listen to scary stories, supposedly told firsthand and almost true. Besides me, the Black Monday Club's regular attendees were its leader and founder, Petya, and his best friend, Yegor; the rest of the cast was constantly changing. Petya scouted out the latest storytellers on forums and in a VKontakte group. The stories were mostly banal and repetitive: glowing orbs, haunted apartments, black clots pressing on the chest, love spells, ghosts in abandoned buildings. Occasionally, people with obvious mental disorders would wander into our welcoming gathering. Over time, descriptions of their bizarre fears and hallucinations began to evoke genuine sympathy rather than terrifying horror. The stories I'm sharing here don't fall into any of those categories—they stand out from the rest of the horror stories, being told by normal people who were of sound mind and sound of mind. I sincerely hope they're all doing well now, and that their encounters with the inexplicable remain isolated.

LENA'S STORY

One evening, Lena's friend came to visit. Naturally, the hostess made tea and poured it into cups, but while the girls chatted, they completely forgot about it, and the drink sat there, cooling. At some point, Lena noticed a persistent, strange sound—like a dripping or quiet tapping sound very close by. Her friend heard the same thing. Well, it's just a dripping sound, maybe the faucet in the bathtub is leaking, no big deal. But soon a strange pattern emerged: as soon as someone took a sip from the mug, the tapping stopped. At first, they laughed nervously, but when they quieted down, it became obvious—the tapping was coming from Lena's mug. Drip-drip, tap-drip, drip-drip, tap-drip, tap-drip—in absolute silence. This absurd detail scared the girls senseless. Their friend's face immediately vanished, she turned pale, and quickly got ready, not even bothering to come up with an excuse to leave. Lena begged them not to leave, but apparently that was the kind of "friendship" they had. Alone in the apartment, Lena summoned all her willpower, rushed to the ominous mug, and with one movement, poured the contents into the sink. The sound immediately died down. For a couple of minutes.

As soon as the girl picked up her phone, a knock came from the back of the screen—knock-knock, knock, knock-knock-knock. Something rattled against the glass closet door whenever she approached it. It banged loudly against the mirrors in the hallway and bathroom, completely unabashed.

Lena ran outside as she was wearing, saying she barely remembered her actions at that moment—she thought she'd caught a ride. The driver must have taken pity on the sight of a terrified girl in just a robe and slippers in fifteen-degree frost. She made it to her parents' house...

She'd just come to her senses and tried to tell her relatives why she'd visited them looking so strange when she heard a faint knock on her mother's watch. A minute later, any mirrored surface would start knocking if Lena was nearby. For a week, Lena was easily driven to hysterics by any smooth object—someone was persistently trying to get in through the reflective barrier. The pursuit ended abruptly. According to Lena, the day before the persistent knocking stopped, she felt rather than realized that all she had to do was break the glass or mirror and It would be able to enter. In fact, this was what It was trying to achieve. What it was remains unknown.

ANYA'S STORY

At the age of 12 or 13, Anya loved sending chain letters. The girl naively believed that the chain of messages she had started would inevitably lead fate in the direction of fulfilling her cherished desires. Boys, rhinestone-studded jeans, talking ponies. She approached her hobby with the utmost responsibility—she wrote out her wishes in neat letters, drew kittens with flowers in the margins, generously sprinkled caramels into each envelope, and personally delivered the letter to the mailbox. The girlfriends weren't told about the ritual—it would jeopardize the wish's fulfillment. Anya didn't find throwing such gifts at the neighbors particularly interesting. Remote neighborhoods, random streets, and apartments were deliberately chosen for the lucky mail.

Many girls played this way back then—it was a veritable epidemic. Maybe you weren't spared it either.

Anya grew up, then grew a little more, and then graduated from high school, went to university, found a part-time job, and led a normal life, only occasionally recalling her teenage eccentricities. Until one day, she received a string of text messages reading:

"Hello, Anya! All this time, I've been working up the courage to write to you and thank you for changing my life forever."

"Remember Yulia? She was in the same class as me? That's me."

"Your number was first in her phone book. I figured you'd be next."

"I've been following you for a week. And then I saw you walking straight to my house, entering my entryway."

"You noticed me, right, brave little one? :)."

"From your letter."I saw that you understood everything and forgave me in advance. I reread it ten times and cried."

"I made a promise to myself then, and I've kept it. Since that day, I've never offended a single girl."

They were sent by email, apparently in a whole text. At first, Anya found these messages incredibly funny. Until she remembered the incident with that same Yulia. They weren't friends, they'd simply said hello when they saw each other, and they'd exchanged phone numbers by chance at some school picnic, never intending to actually call them. And then Yulia disappeared on her way home from school. The search yielded no results: no witnesses, no leads. Her parents probably still console themselves with the hope that she simply ran away...

Anechka's peaceful sleep returned only a year later, after she drastically changed her place of residence, moving to our city.

MARGARITA'S STORY

As a young child, Margarita was, for some unknown reason, terrified by the innocuous abbreviation "tel.", so common in newspaper ads. Even after her parents explained it to her, she continued to distrust this combination of letters. Rita couldn't clearly explain her fear—the word and the sequence of numbers that followed it seemed like a kind of spell, the meaning of which could only be deciphered by those privy to its mysteries.

As an adult, Rita was once leafing through a weekly newspaper, one of those freely dropped into mailboxes. Lost in thought, she mechanically flipped page after page, not really paying attention to the contents. For a split second, her gaze stumbled upon that ominous "tel." from her childhood in one of the ads. Nothing special; the abbreviation wasn't before the phone number, as usual, but after it. A routine typo. The ad offered to sell obsolete electronics, even those inoperable (cassette players, tape recorders, game consoles, etc.), for a reasonable fee. Rita had more than enough of this kind of junk, and the chance to not only free up storage space but also get paid for it was comparable only to winning the lottery.

She immediately dialed the number, silently thanking her childhood friend for the lucky tip. The phone was answered almost immediately, and a young male voice answered. The reception was terrible—a howling and hissing sound, as if the person on the other end of the line were standing in a snowstorm in the middle of an open field, trying to shout through it. Rita wanted to hang up right then and there, but for some reason she changed her mind and, out of a ridiculous sense of politeness, asked the guy if it was okay to talk. Oddly enough, the answer was yes. Margarita had barely managed to say she was calling in response to an ad when a voice, as if through a blizzard, interrupted: "Margo, do you even realize this is treason? Who are you planning to sell our equipment to?"

At this unexpected turn, the conversation had to end. The madman called back a couple more times. Rita frustratedly wondered if she'd have to change her phone number now. It was only after about fifteen minutes that it dawned on her—she hadn't managed to reveal her name in less than a minute of exchange. That was the first warning bell, sending an unpleasant chill down her spine. The second rang out deafeningly as Rita passed the closet where the very same equipment was gathering dust, ready to be "written off." A Soviet calendar had hung on the storage room door for over twenty years—a cluster of polar station barracks amidst gray-white ice stretching to the horizon. And a tiny human figure with a raised hand, as if greeting someone looking down from the sky.

Rita didn't look like someone suffering from schizophrenia or a mental disorder. She concluded her story by saying that the stranger hadn't tried to call her again, and the calendar and the equipment had found a new home in a nearby landfill.