**The Trace**

My boyfriend and I decided to move to Moscow. I was finishing my fifth year at university and planned to move right after graduation, while he had already found a job and rented an apartment. I was over the moon with happiness.

I came to see the apartment on the weekend. My boyfriend seemed kind of gloomy. I started looking around the place: everything was solid, Soviet-style—good parquet floors, sturdy furniture, a china cabinet. There were little elephant figurines standing in the cabinet. I immediately rearranged them to my liking, and right after that I felt as if goosebumps ran all over my body—it suddenly became creepy, for no clear reason. I quickly put the elephants back the way they had been. I didn’t show it—I didn’t want to upset my boyfriend. But it really was unsettling.

We had dinner, drank some champagne to celebrate the housewarming, and went to bed. I had nightmares all night. It felt as if someone was breathing nearby, but it wasn’t my boyfriend—I could distinctly sense someone’s stale breath. I kept reciting the Lord’s Prayer, falling asleep, then waking up again in fear and praying once more…

I got up early. I decided that I just needed to tidy up the apartment, and everything would be fine. I vacuumed everywhere and then started washing the parquet floor. The room was of medium size; it had a sofa where my boyfriend was sleeping and a daybed. There was a small rug next to the daybed. I was washing the floor under the rug and found a fairly large stain there. I started scrubbing it. I didn’t move the rug all at once, but gradually, as I cleaned—wash a bit, move it a bit. The stain just wouldn’t come off.

At that moment my boyfriend woke up, and his eyes went wide. I wondered why he was staring like that—well yes, my hair was a mess, I was wearing rubber gloves… I asked, “What is it?” And he said, “Move the rug.” I moved it, but still didn’t understand what was wrong. Then he told me to step back a little and look from the side. I stepped away, turned around… Up until then I thought people’s hair standing on end only happened in books. Turns out it happens in real life too.

The stain I had been scrubbing was a brown imprint of a human corpse. You could clearly see how the person had been lying: on their side, arms near the head, legs as if in mid-step. As we later found out, the owner of the apartment had fallen and died; no one knew, no one came… The body began to decompose, leaving a brown, foul-smelling mark on the parquet.

I was so terrified that I can’t even describe it. We moved out that same day. The money we had paid a month in advance was returned. It turned out this happened because the woman was lonely, the apartment was part of a housing cooperative, and there were no heirs—so the chairman of the cooperative decided to rent it out. And apparently before us, no one had really gone in there—they were probably afraid. Also, as we were leaving, I noticed splinters sticking out near the front door—meaning the door had been broken open…