Four girlfriends and a house by the sea: a tale as old as time. One of us had been dumped by her boyfriend, she didn’t take it well and we took her to the beach to relax and heal. This is all you need to know about us, pretend that my friends are called Faith, Hope and Charity and imagine us suburb or ghetto, whichever you prefer. We were just four girls like many others. The house was a building from the early 1900s, a simple and elegant villa designed to accommodate the wealthy vacationers who passed by. The ground floor had been completely renovated and used as a holiday home, it was a modern and practical space perfect for younger tourists like us. We had access to every room and to the whole garden, including the swimming pool. On one condition: never try to sneak upstairs, which had never been renovated and was unsafe and full of rubble. The hostess looked just normal even though she was smiling a little too fixedly when she added that last recommendation.
Perhaps it was from that smile, or perhaps from boredom or stupidity, that on the third day I sneaked upstairs while the others were asleep. I have been practicing urbex for many years and I know how to open an old door, I was able to get in without problems. The landlady had lied: there had been no renovation but the house was empty, clean and absolutely free of rubble. The ceiling was perfectly intact. There was only one piece of furniture in the whole house, a wrought iron double bed that got dust in the master bedroom. And on that bed there was a dead woman, but she was also alive. It’s been two years since it all happened and I still can’t describe it. It was the corpse of a woman, a mummy with long fair hair in an old-fashioned yellowed nightgown, fidgeting, rattling the handcuffs that kept her chained to the headboard. She spoke incomprehensible words.
Of course I ran to warn my friends, told them to pack their bags and jump in the car, but they didn’t listen to me. As in the worst horror movie, two of them decided they wanted to see the monster in the attic too and we started fighting. Hope and I had grown up in the kind of family that teaches you very early on that you have to mind your own business to survive, Faith and Charity instead were used to calling for help when they saw something strange or wrong. They optimistically believed that asking for help in a loud voice would be enough for someone more important to take care of the problem. However, if we had just taken a peek, maybe nothing would have happened. We would have come out of there upset but unscathed and then we would have pretended to forget everything. But Charity screwed everything up. Maybe because she had been a scout girl, maybe because she was really too optimistic about the world, she decided to untie the mummy. Before we could say or do anything to stop her, she had already broken those rusted and decades-brittle metal rings. The mummy sat up on the bed, stared at us with her empty eye sockets for a few seconds, and bolted out of the room. Literally, she ran off like a terrified wild animal.
We did the same. Reciting a rosary of WHAT THE FUCK and OH MY GOD, we threw ourselves into the car and drove away from there as fast as we could. But apparently we weren’t alone: at every stop, at every red light, she was there. No longer a mummy, however, but a blond woman in a dressing gown staring at us malevolently. Wherever we went, she was standing there just a few steps away from us. We could see her from the windows of gas stations, from the windows of supermarkets and from the windows of the crowded shops where we hid. And we saw her again last night, for the last time. Before Charity went to meet her to escape that life of terror. They are both gone now. I don’t know where Charity is and I don’t want to know: I’ve learned my lesson. I say this to you too: mind your own business.