Who Are You With?

**“”**

When my husband and I were living and working in Ivanovo, we rented an apartment there. It was surprising that such a nice apartment was being rented out for almost nothing. Without attaching much importance to it, we paid the landlady for the first month and began moving our things in. The apartment was fully furnished; even belongings from the previous tenants were still there.

My husband is a long-haul truck driver, so almost immediately he left for a two-day work trip to St. Petersburg, and I stayed home alone, since I wasn’t working at the time. On the very first day of being alone, out of boredom I decided to look through the papers left behind by the former tenants — old black-and-white photographs, magazines from the 1960s, newspaper clippings… Among all this junk I found something like a diary. It seemed to belong to either a surgeon or a pathologist. Almost everything in it was incomprehensible to me — it described procedures performed on patients, autopsy results, and so on. It made me uncomfortable, and I put the strange diary aside.

Soon it got dark. A friend of mine was supposed to come over to spend the night. Since she didn’t know where my new apartment was, we agreed that she would get off at the bus stop and call me right away, and I would go out onto the balcony and signal to her. Our apartment was laid out so that the balcony and the windows of the other two rooms all faced the same side.

So she called. I looked out the window, saw her, waved my hand, then went out onto the balcony and shouted the entrance door code to her.

As soon as my friend entered the apartment, she immediately asked:

— Olya, who are you with? Didn’t Seryoga leave after all?

Bewildered, I replied:

— What do you mean, “who are you with”? I’m alone here…

And then a wave of such fear hit us that we ran out of the apartment without a word. On the way out, I only managed to grab the keys and some clothes. Already outside, my friend began to explain:

— I’m walking through the courtyard toward the building, I see you in the window waving at me, and next to you there are two more people standing there, peeking out from behind the curtain, also waving. I couldn’t make out who they were — I thought you’d invited someone else over, or maybe your husband had come back. Then you went out onto the balcony, and they followed you out and stood behind you…

I was shaking for a full hour. Naturally, we didn’t go back — I stayed with my friend for those two days. When my husband returned, I told him everything. We packed our things and moved out immediately. Notably, the landlady returned the money without protest and didn’t even seem surprised that we moved out so quickly.