All this nonsense

Max and Alina are my good friends, and they're quite serious. Now they're married and live in their own apartment. And I'll tell you a story that happened to them while they were still looking for an apartment to build their "family nest."

They searched for a long time. And finally, our young couple found their perfect apartment—a two-bedroom apartment in a residential area not far from the city center. A supermarket is nearby, and both guys are close to work. And the price is quite average for the area. Basically, all positives. In their joy, they didn't even ask who owned the apartment, why they were selling it, or any other details. They decided to sign a contract—live in the apartment for a couple of months, and if no pitfalls surfaced, they would buy it.

I must say, there were no unusual things at first. It wasn't until they were disinfecting the apartment, cleaning, and washing it that Alina noticed small crosses painted on the top doorframe of the bathroom, three of them. She didn't wash them off, thinking the previous tenants were religious, and that they were supposed to be a talisman. And on the bathtub itself, she discovered streaks and small, barely noticeable grooves, as if someone had scraped and tapped it with something metallic. She told Max, who examined the scratches and shrugged, "It's nothing, we'll replace the enamel later."

A couple of days later, they moved into their new home. They did everything right—they let the cat in first, made the corners of the house crosses, and celebrated the housewarming party... Only over time did they begin to notice that the bathroom felt uneasy. It was unpleasant to look in the mirror, as if a stranger were watching, not your own reflection. The same sensation arose from the air vent (I think many of us had this feeling as children—as if something was sitting there, watching you). Maxim, terribly embarrassed, even admitted that he covered the vent with a towel when he showered, to make it less scary. When Alina noticed this one day, she laughed at Max: “Oh, you! You’re a big man, and you’re scared? What nonsense! It’s nothing like that. It’s all nonsense.” She said it, but her skin crawled. It was after this statement that something happened that made her believe in “all this nonsense.”

A couple of days later, while Alina was taking a shower, she turned off the water and began to lather her hair with shampoo, closing her eyes so that the soap suds wouldn’t get in hers. Then she heard a scraping sound coming from the bathtub. Not a loud, metallic sound, but a soft, barely audible one.

 "Maybe the neighbors are fixing the faucet. The acoustics are good here," Alinka mused. But the sound continued. "Or is Max trying to scare me, that's why he's scratching at the door?" But the sound was coming from the bathtub itself, right under Alinka's feet. Curiosity got the better of her, and she cracked one eye open. That's when horror gripped her. Two thin, apparently feminine fingers protruded from the drain hole. Curved, they scraped the surface of the bathtub in sync, right near the drain.

Alinka's eyes widened. With an inhuman scream, she flew out of the bathroom, ran into the room where Max was watching TV, and hid in the far corner of the bed, pulling the blanket up to her chin. A dumbfounded Max peered into the bathroom, but of course, he saw nothing strange. Chattering teeth, a terrified Alinka told him everything as it happened. And she flatly refused to go into the bathroom, even to rinse the shampoo out of her hair. She had to fumble around in the kitchen with a basin and kettle.

That same day, the guys "fled" from there. They temporarily moved in with their parents, and Max and his friends removed all their belongings from the apartment within a few days, as Alinka flatly refused to set foot in that lovely apartment. The guys later tried to figure out what could have happened there—maybe a murder or something... They never found anything; the apartment hadn't appeared in any police reports. Max himself has one theory: it's quite possible someone was dismembered (or simply murdered) in the bathtub, which explains the nicks on the enamel, as if someone had stabbed her with something sharp. Max doesn't tell Alinka this theory. She says those fingers still give her unpleasant dreams.