Behind the Door*

***

I woke up in the middle of the night—some strange sounds had woken me.

I always locked the door leading from the hallway into my room. I don’t know why I did it. On the very first night after moving into that apartment, something at an intuitive level prompted me to lock the door—not just close it, but latch it tight. Perhaps that’s what saved me from something that still comes to me in nightmares.

I was an ordinary student; at that time my thesis defense was already ahead of me. Since my main studies had successfully ended, I decided to spend my free time earning a little money, but the job I was interested in was in a stanitsa neighboring the university, so I had to move there and rent an apartment.

At first, living in my new rented place was, in principle, fine. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t living there alone. As if I were merely a guest who had been taken in for the night by some хозяин—some owner—but nothing more, while I had begun to get cheeky and imagine myself the rightful resident. This strange feeling made me uneasy, and with each passing day it grew stronger. Closer to sunset I would start to feel uncomfortable: an inexplicable fear forced me to constantly listen to what was happening in the apartment, to look around whenever I sat at my laptop, each time expecting to see “him.” Who? Or what? I don’t know, but something was watching me, and my presence in this apartment apparently irritated it more and more with each day.

I thought that maybe it was all just in my head. I tried to convince myself that living alone in an apartment was playing tricks on my vivid imagination, fraying my nerves. Our inner voice sometimes tries to warn us, to alert us to some threat our rational mind cannot even imagine. I didn’t want to listen to it—I was no longer five years old, and it felt shameful to be afraid of imaginary boogeymen.

However, I stopped sleeping peacefully. I began to have nightmares, but every time I woke up, I couldn’t clearly remember what had come to me in my sleep, what had frightened me so much. And that made everything even more unsettling. I remembered only that this something was always chasing me until the moment I managed to run into my room and lock the door. That entity couldn’t open it—I have no idea why, but that door was a barrier that saved me every time. Waking up at night, I would lie there for a long time staring at the closed door, trying to calm myself and convince myself that it was all just a bad dream and nothing more, that no one was standing there now and nothing threatened me. All this time I diligently brushed aside every delusion and the feeling of a чужое присутствие—someone else’s presence. I managed, but only until that ill-fated night.

Waking up then and not realizing what had awakened me, I calmly checked the time on my phone. It was around three in the morning. I turned onto my other side and tried to fall asleep. But I heard the sound again—now not through a dream, but in reality: something was scratching at the door. The sound was quiet, but in the dead of night it was perfectly audible. At that moment I deeply regretted not having gotten a cat—then I could have blamed it all on her—but alas, besides me there was no one else in the apartment. I became all ears. I heard my own breathing, heard how fast my heart was beating, how somewhere in the distance a dog was howling, and how something was slowly scraping its nails—or claws, hell knows—against the door to my room.

I don’t know how long I lay there on the bed listening to that vile sound—maybe a minute, five minutes, or half an hour: I lost track of time. My brain desperately tried to find a logical explanation for all this, something that would help me cope with the fear. Perhaps some person had broken into the apartment and decided to scare me in such a simple way? I know the thought was stupid, but at that moment I was grasping at any straw. However, I clearly remembered locking the front door with all the locks—a burglar would have had to work hard to get in, and I would definitely have heard such commotion. No, that wasn’t it. Then what was it? What? Maybe someone else in my place would have calmly gotten up, opened the door, and finally looked to see what it was. But I couldn’t—the same inner voice was desperately assuring me that I shouldn’t do it, that I shouldn’t, period.

And then, in the darkness, I noticed some movement below, in the gap between the door and the floor (it was fairly large). I carefully, trying not to make a sound, took my phone and shone its light there. I wish I hadn’t. There were fingers—human fingers, black human fingers. They had slipped under the gap and were disgustingly scraping their nails against the door from the inside. After that everything was like a fog—I screamed at the top of my lungs, ran out onto the balcony, and jumped down to the ground. Thank God I lived on the second floor.

After coming to my senses a bit, I walked around the five-story building, sat down on a bench near my entrance, and stayed there until dawn, trying to think about anything but what had just happened. It was good that someone had forgotten to take down the pants drying on a clothesline behind the building, otherwise I would have been sitting there in just my underwear. When the long-awaited morning came, I called the landlady, said I had lost my keys, and asked her to bring the spare set. Naturally, when she arrived, my appearance surprised her, to put it mildly. I didn’t tell her anything—she would have surely taken me for a lunatic. Making something up about an unfortunate night of partying, I simply asked her to open the apartment. I dared to go inside only after she did. Everything in the apartment seemed normal, except for one thing—scratch marks on the door to my room.

That very day I said to hell with it all and moved out. I didn’t ask the landlady about any deaths in that apartment or strange incidents. I don’t want to know what it was; I don’t care. I want only one thing—to forget that night, to forget it like a terrible dream.