The Co-Dweller

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To some, this story may not seem scary, maybe even banal, but it frightened us quite a lot. I’ll start from the beginning.

It all started six years ago, after my husband and I got married and moved into a two-room apartment our parents had given us. About a month after the wedding, our friends (a young couple) and my six-year-old nephew Zhenya stayed the night with us. My husband, Zhenya, and I slept in our bedroom, and our friends stayed in the living room. In the morning my husband and I went to the living room and lounged in front of the TV with our friends. Then we heard a child’s bare feet slapping across the parquet floor from our room to the kitchen (we didn’t have carpets yet). My husband even said to me, “Go feed Zhenya.” I went into the kitchen—he wasn’t there. I thought he’d gone back to the bedroom, but when I went in there, he was sleeping like an angel, clearly hadn’t woken up. We were surprised then—four of us couldn’t all have imagined it. The story would have been forgotten if not for what followed.

Two months later my grandmother died, and I found out I was pregnant. Every day I went home for lunch since I lived very close to work. One time I was sitting in the kitchen, and our kitten Barsik was lying on the windowsill. Suddenly he jumped up and started pouncing on someone—on someone invisible. I got so scared that I quickly got ready and left. After that I tried not to have lunch at home. Barsik always hissed when he passed the built-in wall wardrobe opposite our bedroom. And later he ran away from us altogether…

August came, and I gave birth to a son. At night, when he wouldn’t sleep, I would go with him to the living room so as not to wake my husband. We had just bought a computer then. One night I was sitting on the couch, feeding my son, when the computer turned on by itself. To say I was stunned is an understatement. Of course I turned it off and told my husband in the morning, but he couldn’t find the cause of the spontaneous startup. We decided it must be some factory setting. But the next night it happened again. In the morning my husband disconnected all the wires and cables from the computer.

That evening I went to the bedroom calmly, put my son in his crib, and lay down myself. Back then we left a nightlight on the bedside table so I could easily find my way to the crib at night. I fell asleep, but then it felt as if someone called me. I opened my eyes and screamed in horror: in front of me stood a small creature, covered in black fur, about the height of a three-year-old child. My husband woke up, I was shaking all over and telling him… He believed me immediately.

We invited a priest. He blessed the apartment, read prayers in every corner, put up images with crosses on the walls facing each direction of the world, and then placed a candle on my bedside table opposite that very wall wardrobe and said that there was the most evil there. After that everything stopped for a while, but occasionally we still heard some rustling.

Three years passed, and for New Year’s we gave our son a Scottish Fold kitten. He was overjoyed, but on January second another inexplicable incident occurred. We came home from my parents’ place and heard a wedding march melody playing. From where—unclear. For about ten minutes we walked around the apartment but couldn’t find anything. Then it dawned on me: back at our wedding my uncle had sent us a musical card, and it was lying in a bag with all the other cards in that same wall wardrobe. My husband took it out and tore out the mechanism, separating it from the battery. In my nervousness I stuffed the whole thing into the pocket of my robe. Imagine my surprise when the next day that disassembled mechanism started playing in my pocket!

After that the rustling became more frequent again. By then my husband and I had turned our bedroom into Artyom’s room and slept in the living room ourselves. And I should say that the kitten always followed anyone who went into Artyom’s room, as if guarding it.

Then one evening, while my husband was working on his laptop and our son was already asleep with the cat, I decided to start the washing machine. Our bathroom was located between the bedroom and that same wall wardrobe. I threw in some clothes (bright, colorful ones) and started the machine. I went to the kitchen and heard the machine humming strangely. I called my husband. He turned it off… and it turned out our cat was inside. I had a hysterical breakdown—I cried, screamed, couldn’t calm down. My husband went to bury the cat. Thank God Artyom was asleep, and we told him the cat had run away.

When my husband came back, we moved our son into the living room with us, and we couldn’t understand how the cat could have ended up in the washing machine—it had been sleeping with our son, and the bedroom door had been closed. When we stopped discussing it, I still couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Then my husband said to me: “Get dressed, let’s go to your parents’. I have the feeling he’s standing in the doorway and grinning.” His feeling matched mine. Without thinking long, we got ready and went to my parents—they lived in the next entrance over. There we decided we would sell the apartment, which we did in the following weeks.

Later an elderly woman told us that our “co-dweller” probably just didn’t like it when someone new appeared in the house, and he started driving out the weaker ones. And that’s exactly how it was—he made himself known whenever there were either children or animals in our home.