Dripping pipes

I live in a typical nine-story building, a very standard three-room apartment, which, among other things, also has a storage room—the pipes from the kitchen run there. It's a typical closet, where I keep all sorts of household items: a mop, a vacuum cleaner, bags and bottles of detergents and solutions. There's also a wooden shelf with jars—well, an assortment of pickles and preserves. The door there is also very simple—still Soviet-era, with a Soviet-era latch that's quite stiff to open and close, so it's long past time to replace it with a more modern one. Oh, and I was also locked in this storage room as a punishment as a child: I was afraid of the dark back then, so this form of punishment was the most effective for me.

We currently live in this apartment—me and my wife, Ira. And our cat, Barsik.

And recently, a month or two ago, something started dripping in the storage room. Judging by the sound, large drops of water were slapping onto that very shelf with a nasty "drip-drip-drip" sound.

"Damn, I think the pipes are leaking," I said.

"If it bursts, the neighbors will flood," Irina worried.

There was nothing to be done, so I grabbed a flashlight and went looking for the leak. And... I found nothing: I'd crawled all over the place, but the pantry was as dry as the Sahara. Then I was relieved: it must have been my imagination, and the pipes were fine. And the sound disappeared as soon as I went inside.

But not a day had passed before the sound returned. Drip-drip-drip! And I examined the pantry again. This time Irina climbed in with me—as she jokes, I "wouldn't notice an elephant in a cage." And again we found nothing: dry pipes, dry shelves, a dry pantry. And the sound disappeared, just like last time.

"Believe your eyes," we concluded, and the dripping water was dismissed as "something noisy from the neighbors upstairs."

Meanwhile, the annoying sound repeated itself several times a day, which, of course, was quite annoying. So yesterday, when Irina went out to visit, I couldn't stand it any longer and decided to look at the pipes again. I left the door open, since I couldn't find a flashlight, and began examining the shelving unit, following the sound, which this time hadn't disappeared. "Drip-drip-drip!" came a slap right next to me, and I reached in...

The door slid shut. I turned and, perplexed, pushed it with my foot. It didn't budge—someone had locked the latch.

"Irina, open up, it's dark," I said automatically, and then stopped myself. Irina had left, and only the cat and I were in the house. "Drip-drip-drip!" rang out in the darkness. "Drip-drip-drip!" came a slap from the other side.

Instinctively, I did the same thing I did as a child: I sank to the floor and peered through the narrow crack under the door where the light was pouring. "Drip-drip-drip!" the sound came from all sides. "Drip-drip-drip!" it was as if I were caught in an invisible rain.

"Drip-drip-drip! Drip-drip-drip!"

I don't know how long it lasted—an hour, maybe two. I heard the sound of the front door opening and Irinka's voice calling for Barsik.

The damned drip-drip-drip immediately disappeared, as if it had never been there. I got up and called my wife to open the door and let me out.

"Max, how did that get you locked in there?" was all Irinka asked. 

I had to wriggle out of it and make up a story about a draft slamming the door so hard that the latch locked—I really didn't want to scare my wife. I don't know if she believed me.

Barsik doesn't go into the closet—no, he doesn't hiss, he doesn't growl, he doesn't arch his back. You just can't force him to go in there—he resists.

I don't know what it is: the house isn't in any Indian cemetery, the apartment didn't belong to anyone before us, no one died in it. But that damned drip-drip-drip keeps going there, in the closet.