**A Gaze into Nowhere**

At the end of summer, I finally moved out of the apartment where I had lived with friends since finishing school and rented a small one-room place near the metro. The apartment had just been renovated; the owners had moved into a new four-room flat and taken almost all the furniture with them. Only a table and a couple of chairs remained in the kitchen.

I didn’t quite manage to bring the furniture from my old place in time, but I really wanted to spend at least one night in the new apartment—even if it meant sleeping on the floor on blankets. On the evening of September first, taking a blanket and my laptop with me, I headed to my new home, stopping by a shop on the way to buy cigarettes and a bottle of beer. It never occurred to me to invite my classmates for a housewarming, and besides, I wanted to celebrate this event alone—after all, that was the whole point of it.

I settled myself on the floor as comfortably as I could, plugged in the laptop, poured the first glass of beer, and lit a cigarette. It was quiet—unusually quiet—and that was wonderful. I went out onto the balcony and smoked a second cigarette. In the twilight, the neighborhood looked very beautiful. Returning to the room, I decided to look for internet access. I didn’t have much hope, but to my surprise I found an unprotected Wi-Fi network.

In the thickening dusk, illuminated by the glow of the screen, I sipped my beer and surfed the web, blowing streams of smoke straight at the display. The buzz of alcohol and cigarette smoke wrapped me in a warm, soft haze. I sat like that until about two in the morning, when I stumbled upon an interesting link—a collection titled “Photographs That Shocked the World.” Damn it, I don’t know what possessed me to download that archive. Inside were photographs by famous photographers from battlefields, sites of technological disasters, and similar places. My mood soured when I opened a photograph taken in India after an accident at a chemical plant. It showed a dug-up grave, and inside it—a dead child (view photo). I’m no expert, but it looked like he had been dead for about a week. His face was swollen, his mouth open. I suddenly understood why people are afraid of the dead. A human being is not just a body. When a person dies, something meaningful—something that makes them human—leaves, leaving only a corpse in which there is nothing human left except the outlines, and even those are distorted, because they have lost their meaning. It is this terrible resemblance to the living that frightens us.

The most horrifying thing in that photograph was the dead child’s eyes: cloudy, swollen, like those of a dead fish. And yet they were looking—looking at something beyond, looking through our world as if through a windowpane. And I was afraid, because the darkness beyond the monitor was thickening, and those eyes seemed to grow, filling my entire field of vision, and I couldn’t look away, couldn’t touch the keyboard. I already regretted that there was no one else nearby.

I sat like that for a quarter of an hour, until the beer demanded release. Shaking off the obsession, I closed the photograph. I desperately needed to use the bathroom, but I didn’t want to step into the dark corridor just yet. I could still hold it, so I decided to restore my peace of mind by reading “IT Happens.” The first couple of stories were still creepy, but gradually I calmed down. After laughing my fill at stupid users, I stood up and went to the door.

I couldn’t remember whether I had closed the door behind me when I returned from the toilet the first time. Of course I hadn’t—why would I hide from anyone if I was alone in the apartment? Still, I wasn’t sure, and the sight of the slightly open door made anxiety rise again. The gap, about ten centimeters wide, was absolutely black. On the other side of the door was darkness—inky black, utterly otherworldly, without a single ray of light. As if on purpose, there was no overhead lighting in the room—the stingy owners had unscrewed the bulbs. Suppressing a nervous chuckle, I pulled out my phone and turned on the built-in flashlight. And who would have thought that its deathly pale light would scare me even more? Because the light vanished into the black gap without a trace—the darkness simply swallowed it.

That’s when I got angry. I had never been afraid of the dark, and now suddenly I was trembling like a little child! But those eyes… I could physically feel, from behind the door, that dead man’s gaze into nowhere. And that was worse than the darkness.

Meanwhile, the beer had rebelled—I could barely hold it anymore. A physiological need overpowered fear. I decided that if I didn’t look into the darkness with my own eyes, it would be easier. Naturally, my phone had a camera, and I switched it to viewfinder mode (the image appears on the screen but isn’t saved). Extending my arm with the phone in front of me and looking at the screen, I opened the door slightly and peeked into the corridor. The flashlight beam illuminated the empty hallway and reflected off the bathroom door. The fear passed; I even felt ashamed. I tore my gaze away from the screen, opened the door wider, and stepped into the hallway, turning toward the kitchen and the toilet. There was no “inky darkness” here, and I saw no dead eyes. In the soft half-light there was nothing dangerous. I was about to turn off the camera when I lowered my eyes to the phone and saw…

I don’t remember how I ended up back in the room or how I slammed the door shut. Only later did I realize that I had wet myself—for real, right there in my pants. I stood there, leaning my shoulder against the door, staring at the phone screen; the hair on my head was standing on end, and goosebumps ran all over my body. Because in that most terrifying second of my life, when I looked through the phone’s camera at the dark corridor, I saw that I was not alone. The image of a human silhouette against the orange glow of streetlights from the kitchen window burned itself into my memory. A silhouette I saw only on the screen, but not with my own eyes. And I saw it long enough to understand that it was not an optical illusion.

I don’t know what it was. Most likely a hallucination. Or maybe I just lost my mind. But my life has been turned upside down since then. More than anything in the world, I used to want to be far away from people—and now I can’t afford that, because I am deathly afraid of darkness, loneliness, and enclosed spaces. I spend more time with friends now; whenever I can, I invite them over to sit with me; I even moved a girl in with me—I do everything I can not to be alone with myself. Especially at night, when there are so many inky-black corners from which the eyes of a dead man stare, gazing into nowhere…