Another Sergey

****

The apartment that my (now former) boyfriend Sergey, my sister Olga, and I decided to rent was nothing special. A typical two-room flat in a quiet residential area, located near a technical college (which made it popular with students), with cozy bright rooms and calm neighbors. In short, no matter how closely you looked, there was nothing mystical to be felt or seen there. After moving in, we lived there peacefully for half a year, and only then did my first encounter with the supernatural occur.

It all began after Sergey brought a kitten into the house. The little ginger miracle quickly settled in and was named Apricot. One weekend day, I was lying calmly on the couch, playing with my pet using a candy wrapper tied to a string. Suddenly, screams came from the kitchen, and then my sister burst into the living room with crazed eyes, claiming that the kitten had jumped on her from behind while she was sitting at the table and had clawed at her neck. Twirling my finger at my temple, I explained to Olya that this was impossible even hypothetically, since Apricot had been with me the whole time and had never left my field of vision. Turning pale and widening her eyes even more, my sister nervously assured me that she wasn’t joking and that someone really had dug claws into her neck. When I looked at her neck, I saw three distinct marks with small bruises, but they didn’t look like scratches from an animal’s claws — they looked more like marks left by human fingernails. Deciding that this was another one of my sister’s “pranks,” as she always liked to make things up, I asked her to stop talking nonsense and scaring me. But Olga wouldn’t calm down: examining the scratches in two mirrors with horror, she kept muttering that she hadn’t done it herself and didn’t understand who could have scratched her. Looking at her trembling hands, I felt that she wasn’t lying, but my mind refused to accept the truth, because that would instantly shatter my familiar, cozy little world and let in something wrong, irrational. After giving my sister some tea, I somehow managed to calm her by suggesting that maybe I really had been distracted and that the kitten had indeed misbehaved, and I just hadn’t noticed him leaving. I was soothing not only her but myself — and in the end I succeeded, firmly convincing myself that this was exactly what had happened. Harmony returned to my soul — the incident was soon forgotten. But not for long.

A couple of days later, as often happened, I was woken by the sound of a key turning in the lock and the door opening. That meant it was about ten minutes to midnight, and my beloved Sergey had come home from his second shift. Gradually waking up but not opening my eyes, I waited for the hallway light switch to click, for the familiar rustling sounds, and for him to enter the room. Seconds passed, but no further sounds followed. No footsteps, no rustling. Nothing. Fully awake and puzzled, I opened my eyes and sat up slightly in bed, turning my head toward the door. Light from a streetlamp filtered through the curtains, illuminating the scene before me quite well. Holding the door handle with one hand and leaning against the doorframe with the other, my Sergey was looking at me. He stood in the doorway and smiled broadly. I was just about to open my mouth to ask what the hell he was doing and what kind of joke this was, when I suddenly realized that it wasn’t him. He was wearing the same striped sweater he’d gone to work in, the same jeans — but it wasn’t him. As if someone else had put him on and was looking through his eyes, like through a mask. His smile, always wide to begin with, now stretched from ear to ear — unnatural, insane, malicious. Not a smile, but a snarl. And even in the dim light, it was clear how dark his eyes were, like two deep voids. Wide open, terrifying — their gaze was just as mad and evil as the smile.

I want to shake the hands of people who, when faced with something mystical, manage to scream, wave their arms, run away, cross themselves — do anything at all — because I was so terrified that I couldn’t even reach out and turn on the lamp on the nightstand next to my bed. I couldn’t even scream; instead, only hoarse, gurgling sounds came out. And “the other Sergey” kept staring at me, making no attempt to move or speak. He didn’t even blink. An oppressive silence filled the room, broken only by my futile attempts to scream. The paralysis gripping my frail body loosened a little, and whimpering, I pulled the blanket over my head. It’s hard to say how long I sat there, repeating every prayer I knew and soaking my pillow with tears. Looking out and glancing toward the door was out of the question.

My quiet hysteria and the silence were broken by that same ill-fated sound of the lock opening — but this time it was accompanied by all the usual sounds a person makes when entering a home. The click of the light switch, footsteps, the rustle of a plastic bag…

I burst into tears like a small, frightened child. My voice returned as suddenly as it had disappeared, and I let it loose completely. Hanging onto the neck of my utterly confused boyfriend, I sobbed and wailed, unable to explain coherently what had happened.

Sipping a sedative that Olya kindly handed me after being awakened by my screams, I haltingly told them about the nightmare I had experienced. Naturally, they suggested the first reasonable explanation — that I had dreamed it all. But as I had already described, by the time the demonic Sergey appeared before my eyes, I was fully awake and clearly aware of everything that was happening, so there was no way I could have confused dream and reality.

They believed me. The next day, my beloved brought a priest, who blessed the apartment and assured us that it was now safe to live there and there was nothing to fear. The priest didn’t lie: indeed, nothing mystical happened in the apartment after that. But living there still felt uncomfortable to me, and I was afraid to be alone there. My boyfriend and sister didn’t object, and within two months we found another apartment and moved there. It felt calmer that way. By the way, Apricot disappeared a couple of days after the horror I experienced. I don’t know whether it was connected to the events described above, but no matter how much we searched for him or called for him outside, we never found him.

Later, we often recalled this incident, made assumptions, scoured the Internet, but we still haven’t come to a definitive conclusion about what kind of entity was entertaining itself there.