With the housing market ripping the skin off everyone under thirty, I finally found a decent house that fit my budget after years of searching and researching. I thought I would live on rent forever.
I paid a good down payment with money saved since I was eighteen. I would pay the rest in the next twenty years, with monthly payments well below the price I would pay for a rental, due to the high down payment.
The nice house sealed my last financial goal in life. Now, the only thing left was to find a nice girl, get married and have children, closing my ephemeral life with everything a person could want.
The house was located near the company where I worked. No longer needing to take the bus for half an hour to get there and half an hour to get home was fantastic.
The first week was uncomfortable, it’s difficult to adapt to a new place. The neighbors made noise the whole night, not very loud, but my brain couldn’t shut off with that new ambient sound, so I woke up constantly.
In the second week, I think my body got used to the constant noises, after all, I started sleeping like a baby, without waking up in the middle of the night not even once.
The house still had some things from its previous owners. In the room, a painting of a lady in Victorian clothes stood out. After finishing organizing my new house, I removed the artwork and stored it in a back room, planning to sell it later.
The next morning, my weird nightmare began: The painting I had stored in the back room was hanging on the wall again. Had I dreamed that I had taken the painting off the wall? There was no sign of a break-in in my house, nothing was missing, and no one would come in just to redecorate my living room…
Weird as fuck.
I removed the painting, placing it again in the unoccupied back room.
The next day, when I woke up, I walked through the living room to go to the bathroom. An uneasiness dominated my entire existence when I realized that the painting of the Victorian lady was on the wall again. Was someone really breaking into my house? Or was I a sleepwalker redecorating the house at dawn? What the fuck was going on?
This time, I hid the painting in a locked closet before going to bed.
When I woke up, to my horror, I saw the painting on the wall again, having even overcome a lock.
Feeling helpless with the bizarre situation, I left the painting on the living room wall and called my best friend, William, to have a beer and hang out at my house.
I told him about the strange situation: the painting returning to the wall while I was sleeping. William advised me to place cameras at the entrances to my house, stressing how dangerous this situation was, someone breaking in while I was asleep sounded completely insane. With me vulnerable while asleep, the invader could even kill me.
With my eyes opened by William’s speech, that night I left the computer camera in my room on, pointed to my bed. This way I would know if the intruder was just breaking into the house or if he was doing something to me too. But I don’t know, I think if someone opened my bedroom door, I would wake up immediately.
The next day, the first thing I did when I woke up was go to the computer to check the recording. The footage started with me adjusting the camera and going to bed, and then rolling around a little trying to fall asleep. About half an hour after, I could hear on the sound recording my bedroom door opening and footsteps approaching the camera. Taking advantage of a blind spot, the invader went to the camera undetected and turned it towards the wall. Then the footsteps didn’t go outside the room; instead, I heard my bed crunching, as if the intruder had laid down next to me.
Then, a female voice began to sing a lullaby, stopping after a few minutes. After that, complete silence.
Analyzing the sound track of the recording, I fast forward when there was no sound.
Just before my alarm time, I could hear the bed creaking, footsteps around the room, and the door opening and closing.
Even though I didn’t see any images, I had no doubts: someone completely insane was lying in my bed and sleeping next to me.
After seeing (listening, in this case) the bizarre recordings, I didn’t go to work. I really was in danger. Instead, I went to a store to buy cameras and install them in the house. I also changed all the locks. I put a camera at the front gate, front door and back door.
Taking advantage of the fact that I could now identify the intruder, I removed the painting from the wall again, after all I was already sure that it wasn’t me walking around in my sleep, there was a second person wandering around my house at night.
The next day, even after all the locks had been changed, the painting was back on the wall.
I checked the images from the cameras, which didn’t identify anything. Whoever was breaking into my house was using a secret passage, and they weren’t even trying to stay hidden, after all, why put the picture up on the wall again every night? Had the person broken into my room, even though it was locked, and laid down with me again?
I decided to change the position of the cameras. I placed two in my room: one by the window and one by the door, both covering almost my whole room, and the third in the living room, pointing at the painting. Whoever was invading had some affection for that artwork.
The next morning, I went to check the recordings.
This time, I managed to capture what was happening.
Even knowing how everything that had happened in recent days was bordering on impossible, I still could hardly believe my eyes when I looked at the footage.
The painting (if I can still call it that), transformed into a woman dressed in Victorian attire. At first glance, it was a normal person, but as soon as the girl set her feet on the ground, she identified the camera and approached it. The unblinking eyes were larger than normal, black as pearls. The mouth, when facing the camera, opened a smile, almost like a “got me” expression. The sympathetically opened mouth had another detail that made it clear that I wasn’t dealing with something human: pointy teeth decorated the opening, and, instead of there being a tongue and an amygdala, all I saw was an infinite pitch, as if there were a black hole inside that being, and the human skin of a refined and attractive woman was a hollow shell that housed another universe within itself.
The lips sealed and only a faint smile remained, facing the camera with those two disproportionately gigantic irises. The woman then walked out of the camera’s view.
I switched to the bedroom camera, which recorded the same woman opening the door and entering. This time, she decided to let me watch, she didn’t turn the camera away from the bed.
Maintaining eye contact with the lens that recorded her, she undressed, taking minutes due to the complexity of the archaic clothes she wore. Then, completely naked, the woman lay down by my side, spooning me. A scene that would seem normal in a bed of a married couple got a grotesque detail seconds later: the woman opened her mouth in an impossible way, revealing the blackest endless hole I had ever witnessed living inside her body. Her face, previously delicate and perfectly symmetrical if it weren’t for her unusually large eyes, practically became the opening of her mouth, as if her eyes and nose had ended up on the back of her head.
The grotesque opening of the mouth, having already completely replaced her face, then “bit” into the area of my skull, “swallowing” half of my head.
I put my hand in my hair, the back of my neck and forehead immediately after watching that scene, looking for teeth marks, saliva, any sign that there had been a mouth swallowing half my head the night before.
Nothing. If I hadn’t been looking at the recordings right now, it would be as if the event hadn’t happened, there was no aftereffect or sign.
I watched the recording until the end, accelerating the recording speed. The woman spent a few hours with her huge mouth swallowing half of my head, and, a few minutes before I woke up, her mouth shrank, returning to normal and stopping to “suck” the area of my brain. She then got up, put on her complex Victorian costume and returned to the living room, transforming herself into the painting again, in a gesture so quick that even with me pausing the frames of the filming I couldn’t follow the metamorphosis.
I don’t even need to describe how terrified I was by this. I missed work again that day, claiming I was feeling unwell.
Aiming to find solutions, I started with the most obvious: destroying the painting. I tried throwing it away, burning it, hacking it, locking it up, nothing worked. The painting thrown into the river miles from my city returned to my living room wall. The fire and axes didn’t even scratch the artwork. The locks of the places where I locked it were opened easily, as if the woman didn’t need keys and could mentally order the locks to open.
I tried to stay awake all night, hoping to confront that being, but the woman didn’t come. It seems like she knew exactly when I fell asleep.
After waking up, already in the afternoon, I watched on the recordings the woman performing the same bizarre gesture of “swallowing” half of my head and remaining like that until minutes before I woke up.
Having not found permanent solutions, I tried a temporary one: I slept in my parents’ apartment for a few days, claiming I needed to pest control my house after an insect infestation.
My boss discounted the consecutive days I was absent, I was almost fired. My expenses increased, having to pay for transport again, and the money spent on cameras exceeded my budget for the month.
But a week later, I had to go back to that cursed house. What could I do? I had already cut expenses to be able to pay the monthly installment on the house, there were still twenty years of payments left. Even if I tried to sell the house, it would take a lot of time to find a buyer, and I probably would lose money too.
When I returned home, there was a message on the door, in red:
“Don’t run away, I won’t hurt you, sleep with me.”
Whatever this creature is, it has consciousness and can talk to me. What does it used to write the message, blood? I ran my finger through it, and after finding the texture familiar, I deciphered that it was just ketchup. The monster had opened the refrigerator and used the condiment to send the message to me.
So, I thought of one last solution: If it was impossible for me to confront the monster while I was awake, since he was waiting for me to fall asleep, maybe William could help me. After all, if I called the police, they would call me crazy.
“Hey, I need a favor, can u help me?” I sent the message to him.
Following my request, he came at night. I explained that there was indeed an invader, but I softened it by saying that it was a crazy, unarmed woman. I asked him to confront the intruder, asking her what she wants and telling her to stop invading. I told him that, somehow, she knew exactly if I was asleep and only invaded afterwards, which is why I needed him to confront the crazy woman. I didn’t show the recordings, saying I had already deleted them.
I… thought that the lady in the painting was harmless, that since she hadn’t hurt me, she wouldn’t do anything to William. My reasoning was fucking stupid.
I positioned the cameras, and with the guarantee that someone would be awake watching me, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, there was no sign of William. “What a traitor”, I thought, thinking that he had succumbed to boredom and went home, giving up on helping me.
However, when l watched the recordings, I visualized the grotesque scene that will burn in my mind forever.
The images showed my friend sitting at the computer and the woman of the painting entering the room. William looking at the Victorian figure, confused. Without any dialogue, the woman opened her mouth in a colossal way and swallowed my friend in seconds, without chewing, as if he were a snake. The piercing desperate screams heard on the recording didn’t waking me up made it clear: I would never be able to wake up while the woman was walking around the house, she somehow kept me in a constant sleep.
The piercing howls of despair lasted only a few seconds. Within moments, William had been completely consumed by the woman, who, after the merciless murder, once again undressed and lay down beside me, resting her impossibly open mouth on the area of my skull.
Having exhausted all possible options, I went to the painting, in a last desperate act:
“What do you want? Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you kill me once and for all? Why did you kill my friend?”
To my surprise, for the first time since the bizarre event began, the woman’s face jumped out of the frame, moving her lips while leaving her pointy teeth and the endless hole living in her mouth exposed with each movement:
“It’s a shame for your friend, but I couldn’t take any more of your attempts to get rid of me. I needed to show what I’m capable of.”
“Why? If you’re so powerful, why don’t you go to another house? Why do you sleep next to me?”
“I’m not “sleeping” next to you, I’m consuming your dreams. Sweet chaos of the mind organizing itself, delicious random scenes, but which reveal so much from your essence. I will not comment on my choices and what I can do. But I promise you: as long as you don’t try to get rid of me anymore, I won’t hurt you or anyone you love. I also want you to stop filming and delete the recordings, I like my privacy.”
The face retracted and became a painting again. I tried to ask a few more questions, but none were answered, the entity had said everything it wanted.
I obeyed. I deleted the recordings and didn’t try to get rid of the painting anymore.
The following week, police officers came to question me about William’s disappearance. I told them that he went home that night. I think I’m clear, the cameras are already stored and they’ll never find his body.
That was months ago.
I miss being able to dream. I don’t know if it’s the stress, but I feel like I’ve aged a few years in the last few months, and that my memory isn’t the same anymore. I’m thinking about packing my bags and moving, giving up the down payment I gave on the house, with the money from my salary I can get a small apartment.
But I’m afraid. Will the woman in the painting get mad? Can she follow me, do something to me, hurt my loved ones?
I searched everywhere, describing the characteristics of the monster in angelic skin, but I couldn’t find any answers. I don’t know what will happen if I try to escape.
So, as a last resort, I’m posting this here, begging to everyone who read this: if you have a solution, if you know what this entity is, please help me.