I started renting this flat about a year ago. After three hellish years of sharing a small dorm with three other university students I decided I’ve had enough and set out to get a place of my own. Last summer, I finally found something I could afford with my measly savings and the money I was earning by tutoring high schoolers. It wasn’t too far off from my university, so the move was quick and uneventful.
I never actually met my landlord - apparently, those bastards are too lazy to even drive to their properties. Instead, I was greeted by an old lady, who introduced herself as the housekeeper, though, like I mentioned, she didn’t own the place. She handed me the keys to the flat and told me all the ins-and-outs of living in a rented apartment (when I needed to pay, who to call if something breaks, etc.) She was very kind and compassionate, which reminded me of my own grandmother, so I quickly came to like her. She left me her phone number, saying that I could call her whenever I wanted to talk.
On her way out, she stopped in the doorway for a moment, her hand patting the wall. Her back was turned to me, but I was still able to hear her say “Take care of him, will you?”. The next moment she was gone, leaving me confused as to the meaning of these parting words.
At first, I assumed that there was an animal in the apartment, and now I was unknowingly roped into taking care of it. But, after thoroughly examining every room (and there wasn’t a lot of them – only a bathroom, a kitchen and a bedroom doubling as a study), I couldn’t find anyone other than myself. Eventually I concluded that the lady must have assumed I had a boyfriend – why she would have done that, I have no idea, but old people are sometimes weird.
Then the school year started, so I had a lot on my mind other than cryptic housekeepers. I settled into the flat easily enough – it was small, yes, but I found it very cozy. The floorboards creaked if you stepped on them too hard, and the walls groaned during particularly windy nights. The light in the kitchen needed several moments to turn on, and the lock on the bathroom door didn’t fully lock, but since I was living alone, this wasn’t much of a concern. Overall, for the price I paid, the place was perfect.
The weird things started happening a month after I moved in. I don’t remember what day of the week it was, but I had lectures early in the morning, so I had to wake up before the sun was up. I’ve never been a morning person – I’ve never been a night-dweller either, for some reason my body needed no less than ten hours of sleep to properly function. But, alas, I couldn’t have such a luxury during the academic year, so six in the morning was the waking hour for me. That day, like usual, I firstly went to the bathroom to brush my teeth (and do the other bathroom activities), and after I was done I came into the kitchen to have my cup of coffee.
Only to find that the kettle was already on.
As soon as I opened to door, it clicked off, as if startled by my appearance. I could hear the water boiling and the smoke flowed out of its spout, so it must have been on for a while. Obviously, I didn’t remember ever turning it on, but I quickly dismissed this strange occurrence. I often got lost in my own thoughts and frequently lost items by absentmindedly leaving them lying around in strange places. Once, after I was finished talking on the phone, my brain apparently decided that I must leave it inside the fridge. I only realized that something wasn’t right a couple of hours later, when I reached for my phone to look at the time only to find a jar of milk next to me.
So I could’ve easily went into the kitchen in my half-awake state and automatically turned on the kettle without even realizing it. I didn’t have any time to ponder about any other explanations that morning, and the incident was forgotten.
The next morning, I found the kettle turned on again. And the next, and the next.
I knew I couldn’t have turned on the kettle without my awareness for so many days in a row. I concluded that my kettle was broken, but, since I didn’t have the funds to fix it or get a new one, I simply decided to leave its cord out of the power socket when I wasn’t home, as I didn’t want my house to catch on fire due to a malfunction. So, after coming up with this plan, I finished my coffee cup, plugged out the kettle, and went to the university.
On the day after that, I woke up to find the kettle plugged back in. There was also a steaming cup of coffee on the counter.
Needless to say, I was freaked the fuck out. In retrospect, it seems kind of ridiculous that I almost had a breakdown over a cup of coffee, but I think it was the implications that were more frightening. Was someone breaking into my house? Was someone in my house currently? Did they steal anything? Did they watch me sleep? Did they do anything to me while I was asleep?
I couldn’t call the police or anything like that, obviously. They would’ve just chalked it up to me not being fully awake when I made the coffee – just like I at first dismissed the kettle turning on by itself. But I knew myself, and I knew that I couldn’t have done that. Clicking on a button? Sure. But pouring hot water into the cup and adding spoons of instant coffee? I couldn’t have done that in a half-asleep state.
I didn’t know what to do. I was scared to leave the apartment, afraid that the intruder would take the opportunity to steal something while I was gone. But staying seemed far worse, considering I could be trapped in an apartment with someone who could potentially mean me harm.
So there I was, sitting at a kitchen table, staring at the steaming cup of coffee (I was afraid to drink it – what if it was spiked with something?), when it clicked. Of course, I thought, there is only one other person who had the keys to the apartment – the housekeeper! It seemed to be the only reasonable explanation: of course, a nice old lady like her would want to do some kind things for me. It was a bit strange that she didn’t leave a note or stick around to say hello, but maybe she was in a hurry, only stopping by my flat as a second thought. And, well, old people are sometimes weird.
I quickly found the number that she left me with and, after a couple of moments spent to collect myself (I always got irrationally nervous before phone calls) I pressed dial.
She answered me happily, apparently not perturbed by the early hour. I explained the situation to her, phrasing it as though I was simply confused and haven’t been scared out of my mind moments prior. She listened to me patiently and, after I was finished, stayed quiet for a few moments before saying “You’ve really taken a liking to this place, haven’t you?”
Her response didn’t make any sense in the context of what I’ve been talking about, but her tone told me everything I needed to know. I could hear the amused smile, and I was almost able to picture her silently laughing at me. She spoke with the same tone parents use to tell their kids about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, delighting at the little devils eating up their every word. The same tone your friend would use to make you shake his hand, assuring you that there wasn’t glue on it this time, for real.
Oh, how I misinterpreted the housekeeper’s intentions. She wasn’t doing this out of kindness – not fully, at least. Under the façade of a nice old lady hid a mischievous prankster. No doubt she was doing this out of boredom – there wasn’t much a person her age would get up to, anyway. Well, I thought, I might as well indulge her in this little scheme of hers. Not like it was causing any harm, anyway.
I answered that I did, indeed, like the place a lot. She was very glad. She then told me not to mind the coffee, as it wasn’t meant to scare me. I thanked her and hung up. Then I realized I was very running very late, so I quickly downed the coffee – done exactly as I liked it – and hurried to catch the bus.
After I came back to the flat that day, I found a full dinner waiting for me on the table. A bowl of chicken soup and a plate of mac and cheese, which reminded me of the stuff my mom used to make for me as a kid. It was still hot.
At first I wanted to call the housekeeper again to tell her that there was no need to cook for me, but I eventually decided against it. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. And besides, my wallet was getting a bit thin, so I needed to save up wherever I could.
And that’s how it went for a while after that: I woke up, I drank the coffee prepared for me, and after I returned home, I ate the amazing dinner the housekeeper made for me that day. I honestly expected the dinner to be a one-time ordeal, but after a week of eating delicious home-cooked meals, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to stop making them. I did however start feeling a little guilty – no doubt, she was spending a lot of money on me, and I couldn’t even give her anything in return. I assured myself by reasoning that she wouldn’t keep on doing it if she didn’t want to, but the shame kept eating at me.
Eventually, I decided to leave a note for her. I’ve never been that good at expressing emotions to other people, so I settled on a simple “Thank you! :)” I left the note on the kitchen table when I went to sleep. Next day, it was gone. No “You’re welcome!” in return, just a cup of coffee waiting patiently for me. So there was that.
But that’s not what you’re here for. You read the title, you know this story isn’t really about my nice housekeeper, no matter for how long I’ve gone on about her. So let’s get to the point.
By that time, I’ve already been living in the flat for four months. The end of the semester was quickly approaching, exams looming on the horizon. We’re usually given a couple of weeks in advance to study for them, so I was spending my days at home, rereading the material and writing helpful notes for myself.
One of those nights I woke up with a start. I’ve always been a light sleeper (you can understand why living with three roommates had been hell on earth), so it might have been just a dog barking or a car alarm that woke me up. But no, I could definitely remember that it was neither of those – instead, it was a loud sharp sound, like something falling or a door being slammed. I lay in the dark for a few moments, straining my ears to hear any other noise, but there was only the quiet humming of my laptop and the usual city noises coming from outside. Eventually, the tiredness won and I fell back asleep.
I found it in the morning.
I didn’t see it when I woke up, as I kept my lights off. But after I washed my face with some cold water and drank my morning coffee (prepared for me by my lovely housekeeper, as usual), I returned to my bedroom to continue studying and turned on the light.
There was a crack in the wall. It went down from the ceiling to about the height of my desk which was placed next to this wall. It was thin, but I could still see the darkness peering at me from the inside of it.
Now, I want you to know that I’m not the kind of person that gets scared easily. Like you do, I also look for things to scare myself with on the internet, which made me sort of desensitized to certain types of horror.
But that crack… I don’t know. I can’t rationalize it. All that I know was that as soon as my eyes landed on it, I could feel my whole body just stop. My knees went weak and I grabbed onto the doorframe to keep myself standing, not tearing my eyes away from the darkness pouring out of my wall. I wasn’t scared of my landlord blaming its appearance on me, and I wasn’t afraid of the repair bills – no, I was frightened of IT. This thing being in my room, it was just wrong. I felt my breathing getting ragged as its edges blurred in front of my eyes. As if in a daze, I took a couple of steps towards it, even though every cell in body was screaming at me not to do that. My arm rose against my will, like I was a doll being puppeteered by an unseen force. My hand was almost touching the pulsating darkness, when I was snapped out of the daze by the sound of a slamming door. I turned around to check out the sound but saw no one there. When I looked back at the crack, I found that it seemed normal again. It didn’t cause me numbing panic like the first time I saw it, though the sense of wrongness was still very much there. I decided to study in the kitchen.
Now, here the thing: I probably could’ve - and should’ve – called someone for help about this. If anything, the landlord definitely needed to know about his property breaking down. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Every time I picked up the phone, determined to deal with this issue, I was struck with this hot panic again, and not because of the usual anxiety I came to associate with making calls. I somehow knew that someone else seeing this crack would have irreversible consequences. And so I put the phone back down, angry at my own helplessness.
I tried to not look at it afterwards, which was rather difficult, considering how small my apartment was. I took to spending most of my time in the kitchen, though when nightfall came I had to face it. I wanted to keep the lights on for the night as it brought me a false sense of safety, but I found I couldn’t fall asleep in a bright room, so I had to turn them off. I slept with my back facing it, stupidly assured by a childlike mindset of “If I can’t see it, it can’t see me”. So that’s how the next few days went.
When I woke up after apparently turning around in my sleep and opened my eyes to find the crack staring at me, I knew I couldn’t take it anymore. I found a roll of duct tape and taped it along the crack. It may seem foolish to you, following this “out of sight, out of mind” ideology, but when the crack was finally hidden behind a thin layer of tape, I felt like I could breathe freely again. No more sense of being stared at, no more coldness seeping out of it, no more primal fear ringing in my bones every time my eyes accidentally landed on it. It was finally over.
Or, well, so I thought.
The night after I thought I defeated the crack, I got into bed with an overwhelming sense of relief. Finally, I could feel safe in my own bedroom. I lay down facing the hidden enemy, as it was the side I preferred to sleep on, and fell asleep unusually quickly.
I was rudely awoken by a harsh light piercing though my eyelids. At first I had thought that it must be morning and that the sun rose already, which was strange, since I set an alarm to wake me up before sunrise. Still very sleepy, I rolled over and blindly reached for my phone to check the time. 4 am, it said.
And so I turned around to look at the light source.
The thin crack was blazing with brightness, momentarily blinding me. As I blinked away involuntarily tears in the corners of my eyes, I breathed a sigh of relief after seeing that the duct tape still ran along the crack, the bright light shining through it. I couldn’t even start to think about the potential reasons for it glowing like that before the ringing started.
Well, ringing isn’t really the right word, but I can’t find any fitting ones to describe what happened. It was just… vibrations. I felt them piercing my body, rattling through my bones, and I couldn’t hear the sound with my ears, but the vibrations felt like ringing. And not the ringing of a phone, but something more akin to a church bell, low and foreboding.
And then something behind the crack started moving.
I didn’t see its shadow, no, it was more like this being was the light itself. I couldn’t see its full shape though the thin crack, but I definitely could see the way the duct tape bent under its touch. But instead of tearing it away from the wall or cutting through it, the creature just- reached through the duct tape.
Oh, how foolish I have been to think that a piece of plastic could save me.
The force of the vibrations filling the air around me got stronger as the being now breached into my room. I could not hear – or feel – anything else now besides them, and with an even more growing terror I realized that the vibrations were the creature’s voice.
The being continued its advance. It reached even further, its appendage bending at a certain point and stretching to the floor, using the surface to prop itself further out of the crack. At this point I was more than terrified – I didn’t even feel like I was in my own body anymore, unable to move, shackled by the sight of this being and weighted down by its voice surrounding me. It now had an appendage the size of a person breaching my room, and I think I lost the ability to breathe when it started bending again and again, morphing into a vile mess of unnatural corners and angles. And it just kept coming.
Frozen in my horrified state, I thought that at least this couldn’t get any worse. And then the shaking started.
I long since lost the awareness of my body, but I saw the walls beginning to tremble frantically and the floorboards starting to jump around, as if my house started sliding down a hill. A strong surge threw me and the other objects in the room into the air, and I landed painfully on the floor, my senses coming back to me for a short second. Unfortunately, that also meant that I was closer to the thing. I opened my mouth to scream as its horrifying mass twitched around, a mayhem of joints trying to get closer to me, but I heard no sound coming out. Only its voice winding through me, paralyzing my whole body.
Another hard shake, and the being’s voice impossible doubled in silent volume, making me feel like I was now close to being torn apart by the violent vibrations. Its appendages convulsed as if in a seizure, and in a brief moment of clarity though the crippling fear I realized that the crack though which it was pouring out from was shrinking. Bit by bit, with every harsh shake and jump of the walls, it was becoming smaller. The vibrations were now searing my insides as the creature was wailing in agony.
Painfully slowly, its bended appendage unfolded and pulled itself back though the crack. The light dimmed with every flinch of the walls, and as soon as the tip of the appendage disappeared into the last remaining slit of light, it was over. The room was dark.
As if my ears popped, I came back to the awareness of my senses. My throat ached, no doubt from the soundless screaming, my whole body was shaking and there were wet trails going down my cheeks, though I didn’t remember when I had started crying. I wiped off my face with the back of my hand and continued sitting on the floor for some time, breathing unsteadily and staring at the line of duct tape on my wall. After finally finding the strength, I stood up on my shaking legs and took a couple of steps closer to the wall. I raised up my arms and carefully, bit by bit, pulled off the tape.
The crack was no longer there. I ran my fingers along where it had been. The wall was smooth, not even a trace remaining of a nightmare that plagued me for the last few weeks.
My legs gave out under me and I fell into a heap on the floor. I started to cry again for some reason. Probably relief.
I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Who would’ve been able to, after that? I stayed huddled in the corner of my bed, jumping at every slight little sound, until the alarm on my phone rang, telling me that it was time to start the day.
After I collected myself enough to stand up, I briefly stopped by the bathroom to splash cold water into my face, carefully avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. I knew I looked like shit, no need for the reminder.
Then I went straight to the kitchen. I settled myself at the table, grabbing a hot cup of coffee waiting for me like usual. I got through a couple of sips, enjoying the burning feeling on my tongue, when it hit me.
I had stayed up though the whole latter half of the night, and with the strung up condition that I have been in, there’s no way that I could’ve missed the housekeeper coming into the flat to prepare a cup of coffee for me. Then how…?
Like images in a slideshow, memories resurfaced for me to connect the dots. The walls gluing themselves back together to keep out the being from entering my room. The coffee made exactly to my tastes, the dinners that reminded me of my childhood. The housekeeper saying quietly, as if her words were not directed at me, “Take care of him, will you?”
I looked up at the kitchen ceiling. The slow-on-uptake lamp blinked back at me. I turned to look at the creaky floorboards, stained darkly by previous homeowners. I raised my hand to pat the walls gently.
“Thank you,” I said to the house.
The walls creaked lovingly around me. And although they couldn’t say any words, I still got the message.
You are welcome.