Posty

Bricks

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Obraz
**** The sound of shattering glass and a crash woke me up. The noise was right by my ear. I jumped out of bed and looked around in the darkness. Everything was quiet. I turned on the light. The clock read 4:30 a.m. Outside, it was pitch black. I couldn’t see the reflection of the room in the window. That’s when it hit me—the window was broken. Sure enough, shards lay on the floor. “How?” I asked myself, but in the next second, a brick flew through the window and slammed into the wall half a meter from my head. I jumped to the side and looked around, realizing it was already the second one: the first, which had broken the window, lay in the center of the room; the second near the wall. Of course, our neighborhood wasn’t the quietest, and we had our share of hoodlums… But all that seemed trivial compared to the fact that I lived on the seventh floor. A third brick flew through the window at an angle. I stepped back toward the side wall. It passed right in front of my nose. There was no t...
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The Lodger

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Obraz
Two years ago, my grandmother rented out a room in her apartment. The first and last tenant was a young 22-year-old woman who was studying at university. My grandmother quickly found common ground with the tenant and tried to help her as if she were her own granddaughter. The tenant was very striking in appearance – long black hair, black eyes (as they say, coal-black), black eyebrows and eyelashes. Her face, in contrast, seemed unusually pale. Their first week passed in friendship and harmony. A week later, one night, my grandmother heard unusual sounds coming from the tenant's room (loud snoring, whistling, smacking sounds) – the kind young girls usually make when sleeping. At first, she thought there was a man in the room besides the girl. She decided to check it out and went to the door, intending to wake the tenant and reprimand her for the presence of strangers in the room. When the grandmother pulled the handle, the door was unlocked, and she peered into the room. An old wo...
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The Tenant

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Obraz
**** On the evening when I met my friend, my group and I were wandering around an abandoned construction site. They say that about two years earlier, the bodies of five students had been found here. After that, the authorities fenced off the concrete shell of the building with a tall fence and put up a booth for an eternally drunk watchman. But in exchange for the gurgling opportunity to stay drunk for one more night, the watchman let people like us through—those who wanted to enjoy the romance of an abandoned building and scare the girls a bit. In the building, covered in graffiti from basement to roof, bottles left over from previous parties clinked in every corner. Local homeless people collected them; the watchman regularly let them in as well, to spend the night. Other than partying students and vagrants, no one went into this building. Or so we thought. “… Kostik, there’s a person sitting there,” Marina said, her eyes wide with fear, dust marks on her blouse. “In the attic, in th...
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Apartment No. 103

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Obraz
In 2000, a truly terrifying experience happened to my family and me. I was 10 years old at the time. My parents bought a four-room apartment, number 103, on the ninth floor. We'd been living with my grandmother before, but we'd always wanted our own place. So when my parents saw the ad for this apartment, they were immediately hooked. The apartment was absolutely enormous—we were all so thrilled to have it sold to us that we didn't even notice the suspiciously low price, which, compared to other apartments in the building, was almost half that. I have my own room in this apartment, which I was incredibly happy about. My parents were also quite happy with the purchase. But things weren't so great with the residents of the building. There were constant complaints about us—sometimes they'd say something was stomping around on the floor in our apartment, sometimes they'd hear bloodcurdling screams coming from our apartment all night long. The police even came to our...
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The Apartment Upstairs

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Obraz
**** One day, on an utterly ordinary and unremarkable day, I was lying on my couch at home, watching TV, puffing on a cigarette and holding a can of cold beer in my hand. My wife was at work until six, the kids were at kindergarten. I had a day off and decided to relax from the morning on—I got up, washed up, went to the store, and now I was lying there, enjoying my rest to the fullest. On TV they were showing a replay of a football championship match, Russia versus the Czech Republic. And there I was, stretched out on the couch, relaxed, bothering no one, when suddenly I heard footsteps on the floor above, in the neighbors’ apartment. Don’t think I panicked or got scared because of some stupid footsteps. At that moment, they made me angry. I was exhausted after what felt like endless days working on a rotational shift and I just wanted to unwind. Naturally, any extraneous noises irritated me. But was I really going to go to the neighbors over that? That’s what I decided then, and I ke...
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An Apartment with a Secret

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Obraz
After my divorce from my husband, I rented a one-room studio apartment. While moving my things in, I noticed some markings—triangular ones on the ceiling, round ones on the floor. Ignoring them, I tore them off and threw them away. At night, I heard various noises and rustling sounds in that apartment. For a while, I attributed them to the nervous shock of that period. But one night, I was awakened by the sound of breaking glass. I checked all the windows—nothing. Entering the bathroom, I saw a shattered mirror on the floor, but both the screw and the frame were intact... The next episode wasn't long in coming. That afternoon, I received a call from the company located below my apartment, saying I was flooding them. When I ran home from work, I discovered the kitchen faucet was running full blast, and water was already flowing from the kitchen into the living room and hallway. Meanwhile, the apartment was filled with a very strong odor, and I couldn't figure out where it was c...
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An apartment with mirrors

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Obraz
This happened three years ago. My friend Sonya and her boyfriend rented an apartment. They found it through a newspaper ad and moved in right away. The house was near the cemetery on Bogdanka Street. The view from the balcony looked out onto a field, and beyond that was the cemetery. My boyfriend often went to Moscow to work, and while he was gone, my friend and I would get together. We usually stayed overnight there, as for some reason she was afraid to be alone in the apartment. There was nothing particularly alarming about the apartment—it was on the second floor, only one room was rented out, and the other was locked. The bathroom and toilet were separate, and the kitchen was small. There were also a lot of mirrors in the apartment: three in the hallway, and another one in the bathroom, in the living room, and in the kitchen. One day, after another get-together, everyone left, and Sonya was left to spend the night alone. She begged for someone to stay, but no one could, including m...
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Apartment Number 48**

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Obraz
** I live in a simple five-story building in Moscow, in apartment number 47. Naturally, next to me is the apartment with a slightly crooked yellow plate on its door bearing the number 48. It is this apartment that I want to talk about. And no, to answer the obvious question — as far as I know, no one has ever died in this apartment during its forty-year history. The people who lived there never complained of strange noises, visions, or chairs sliding across the floor on their own. By all appearances, it is an average one-room apartment with all the amenities, a perfect home for single young people (or not so young). In fact, even among the local residents, it doesn’t have a bad reputation — there are no tales or legends of a “cursed apartment.” If I think about it, I’m probably the first and only person to notice that something is wrong in apartment number 48 — and even then, only because I live right next door. I’ve lived in this building for twenty-eight years, and during that time, ...
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The Apartment Across the Hall*

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Obraz
*** This happened about six years ago. I had just returned from the army, my head full of plans for the future. First thing I decided to do was move in with my father in a bigger city and start a new life with new opportunities. The only problem was my stepmother. Can you imagine the stereotypical evil stepmother from movies and books? Well—that was her. I know it’s hard to believe, since she had no objective reason to hate me, but there it was. So my search for housing became even more intense. Finally, success! I found a place that suited me in every way. There was just one snag: the landlady asked me to wait two weeks before moving in. Everything was agreed upon, the deal was basically done—except that I’d have to endure the spawn of hell (my stepmother) for two more weeks. I decided to move somewhere—anywhere, really. At that moment I would have gladly moved into the ninth circle of hell if they could guarantee my stepmother didn’t work there. I quickly found an ad and went to see ...
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An Apartment in a Yakut Settlement

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Obraz
**** Before moving to Yakutsk, I lived in a small settlement, in a three-room apartment in a relatively new stone building. I emphasize: a *stone* building, not a wooden one—meaning strange sounds and voices couldn’t simply “settle” into its walls the way they supposedly do in wooden houses. The things that happened there weren’t outright terrifying, but they were deeply unsettling and made you feel uncomfortable. --- ### Incident One I was in the fourth grade and slept in the same bed with my mother because she was very ill. At night she suffered from nightmares, and my role was to be her “alarm clock,” waking her up, since she rarely came out of those nightmares on her own. That night everything was as usual: Mom was asleep, and so was I. But suddenly I woke up. It felt as if I had been yanked out of some space where time didn’t exist—it was such a strange sensation. It was nothing like ordinary drowsy awakening. As soon as I opened my eyes, I involuntarily looked toward the hallway ...
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The Apartment in Smolensk

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Obraz
**** At the time I was sixteen or seventeen. I had just finished school and enrolled at one of Smolensk’s universities. Since I didn’t actually live in Smolensk itself but in the surrounding region, a classmate friend and I had to find an apartment to rent. As it turned out, that wasn’t so easy at the end of August, when students start frantically searching for housing. We looked at three options, but none of them suited us: the apartments were in terrible condition, and the prices were outrageous. Finally, for seven in the evening, we had an appointment with a real estate agent to see one last option. We really liked the apartment. It had everything—old, of course, but we didn’t mind. Hot water, a fully equipped kitchen, furniture, carpets, dishes… And the price was symbolic—5,000 rubles. My friend and I were thrilled: such an apartment, so cheap, close to the university and the city center. We agreed right away. One thing was notable: the landlady lived on the first floor, and we wer...
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