Estimated reading time — 30 minutes

January 16, 2012. Klakzkrig.

​Exhausted, I was sprawling face-down in bed, feeling like I’d been dragged through a combine harvester and then forced to plow the rest of the field by hand. The day had been an absolute piece of shit: I’d been slaving away since dawn, completely wiped out, and to top it all off, my parents decided to finish me off with chores. We live in this godforsaken shithole of a small town where every second person has their own smallholding, so child labor enforced by mom and dad is just a standard routine. Got used to it by now.

​It was already 11 p.m. And then, through a haze of sleep, I heard a sound from above. Someone was coming down from the attic.

​At first, I didn’t even pay attention. Figured it was just my old man stomping down. He used to keep a junk warehouse up there, had a workbench, all that shit—he was always pottering around up there at night. Nothing out of the ordinary, or so it seemed. But the footsteps… they just kept going and going.

​My mild unease turned into a cold dread in my chest. I jerked upright in bed, my sleepiness instantly vanishing as adrenaline spiked in my system. And the footsteps just kept coming. It was so completely unnatural that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I mean, the attic ladder is tiny. It’s physically impossible to spend that long walking down it. The footsteps echoed loud and heavy, like the invisible guest was already stomping right at the bottom of the ladder, right in front of the hatch. But the sound didn’t stop. It just dragged on, looping endlessly in some psychedelic cycle.

​Honestly, I practically shat a mountain of bricks. Scared the absolute living piss out of myself, because deep down I knew something deeply fucked up was happening.

​Without a second thought, I bolted on pure adrenaline into the next room. Naturally, I didn’t have the balls to ask anything straight from my bedroom. Shaking, I barked into the dark hallway:

​”Dad, is that you?!”

​And that exact second, the footsteps cut out.

​”Dad, is that you?! Who’s up there?!”

Silence in response. That was the moment I completely lost my shit. It was way past the point of no return—I was ready to drop dead right then and there.

Could my dad have been pulling a prank? My old man is a weird guy, definitely got a few screws loose, and his sense of humor is pretty twisted at times. But pulling a stunt like that after we’d been slaving away all day? Even for him, that was a stretch.

​Anyway, deciding my sanity was worth more, I threw my hands up. Who knows what kind of shit a dead-tired brain can conjure up when you’re hallucinating from sleep deprivation? I split from that part of the house and shuffled down to the first floor where my parents were sleeping, feeling like a five-year-old pussy running to mommy to hide from a nightmare.

​I made it to their door and knocked timidly. And right then, my dad’s voice came from inside. Caught completely off guard, I lost my shit for the second time that night, just standing there frozen, tongue-tied.

​A second later, actual, human footsteps echoed from inside the room. Dad swung the door open: glasses sitting on his nose, a look of pure reproach in his eyes—clearly he’d been reading a book or staring at the newspaper before bed. Behind him in the dim light, I could make out the silhouette of my mom, knocked out cold, lucky bastard.

​Dad looked at me like I was a total moron and asked in his deep bass:

​”What the hell do you need at eleven o’clock at night?”

​I mumbled back something like, nah, nothing… just imagined some bullshit, forget it, go back to sleep.

​His eyes practically bulged out at me.

​”Because you fucking imagined something, you panicked and dragged yourself down here?”

​He always did that. He thinks I’m supposed to grow up to be a real man’s man and never complain about anything. Even if I felt like someone—or something—was persistently trying to come down our stairs…

​Well, yeah, I imagined it. That was probably it. And here I was, just standing there fucking with my own head and my dad’s.

​I went back to my room, convinced that exhaustion had genuinely fried my brain. And sure enough, when I settled back into bed, there were no more footsteps.

​Just imagined it.

​…Or so my naive ass thought.

​Every single night, at precisely eleven o’clock, that noise repeated. As soon as the hands crossed the eleven mark, that familiar sound echoed from above again: thump-thump-thump.

​Something heavy, monotonous, and relentless was walking. The attic stairs were built in a particularly sneaky way—crooked, with a sharp bend, and right before the opening into the room, a massive arch completely blocked the view. Thanks to this architectural nightmare, it was physically impossible to see who or what was trying to come down. You’d stand at the bottom, your heart hammering in your throat, blood pounding in your ears from the adrenaline, but you couldn’t see a damn thing besides the terrifying darkness behind the arch.

​And that fucking thing just stubbornly kept walking.

The footsteps would reach the very edge, hit an invisible barrier right behind the arch, and start pacing in place. Over and over again. A dull, rhythmic thudding that turned my blood to ice. It was like it was stuck a single step away from freedom, unable to cross that fucking threshold. And this surreal stomping would last until midnight on the dot. At twelve o’clock, second for second, the sounds cut out. Until the next night.

This went on for about seven days. For an entire week I lived in constant anticipation of this nightly performance, terrified to even step into the hallway, trying to drown out the footsteps with headphones—which, of course, didn’t do shit.

And then came the turning point.
I was heading back home at dusk, wiped out after another day of slave labor in the garden. Walking through the yard, staring mindlessly at my feet, some invisible force suddenly jerked my head up and forced me to look up.

Framed by the pale evening sky, right in the dark rectangle of the attic window, a figure stood out clear as day.

It was pitch black. No details, no facial features, no outline of clothes. Just a solid silhouette of something human-shaped, pressed against the window opening. That fucking thing stood dead still, seemingly drilling right through me with a sightless stare. The sight turned my insides into a tight knot. Cold shivers ran down my spine from the top of my head to my toes.

That was the exact moment my brain completely snapped. These weren’t auditory hallucinations from fatigue, not a play of shadows, and not my dad’s stupid jokes. Someone had broken into our house. Some fucked-up psychopath, some bastard had snuck into the attic and was mockingly tormenting my nerves every night, staging this creepy footstep show.

Enough. The silent treatment was over.
I stormed into the house, slamming the door so hard the walls shook, and headed straight for my parents. I was done playing the scared kid afraid of his own shadow. It was time to put an end to this clusterfuck.

I burst into the living room where my parents were calmly sipping their evening tea and spilled the beans right from the doorway. I dumped everything on them: the nightly stomping on the stairs, how that thing hits the arch and can’t come down, and the silhouette in the attic window I’d just seen with my own eyes. I blurted it all out in one breath, my voice cracking with adrenaline, trying to prove that someone was hiding in our attic—some fucked-up lunatic or bastard deliberately tormenting me every night.

Dad set his mug on the table, let out a heavy sigh, and looked at me like I was insane.

“Are you completely out of your mind? What bastard? What attic?” he spat out irritably, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I went up there myself this afternoon to clean up and check the tools. There’s nobody up there, nor could there be. How old are you to be believing in fairy tales like this? What are you, a five-year-old shitting his pants over every little creak?”

“What the fuck do creaks have to do with anything?!” I snapped, feeling a surge of helpless rage boiling inside me. “I hear that piece of shit walking down the stairs with my own ears every single night! It comes down, hits the arch, and can’t get out! And I saw the black figure in the window clear as day, Dad! I’m not hallucinating!”

A heavy silence hung over the room. I looked at my mom—she had gone pale, her fingers clutching her teacup as she exchanged a glance with my dad. They were trying to keep a straight face and act skeptical, but a flash of panic crossed their eyes. They understood it too; they were just afraid to admit it out loud.
Dad’s face darkened. He toned it down, crossed his arms over his chest, and made an executive decision:

“Alright, look, Max. Enough with the hysterics. If this noise is fucking with you that bad, let’s keep it simple. Tonight you sleep in the guest bedroom downstairs. And I’ll sleep in your room upstairs. I’ll listen to whatever you think you’re hearing every night myself, and we’ll close the curtain on this circus once and for all. We’ll sort it out in the morning.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. The thought of my old man going up there to deal with that bullshit instead of me surprisingly brought no relief. A gut feeling told me something terrible was coming.

“Alright…” I squeezed out softly, taking a step back. “Just… be careful up there, Dad. Please.”

Dad chuckled, shaking his head, and tried to brush it off with a joke:

“What are you, stupid? What do I have to be scared of? Go on, get to bed, hero. Darla, Jesus, this is all your raising. Look at him…”

Mom jabbed him hard in the ribs with her elbow. Dad winced in pain and raised his hands in surrender, trying to appease the most ruthless member of our family.

I shuffled off to the guest bedroom, locked the flimsy latch, and lay down on the bed as a cold wave of dread washed over me. The clock read ten to eleven. Just a few minutes left until the nightmare began, but now, up there in the dark of my room, something far worse than terrifying footsteps was waiting for my dad.

***

I woke up to a heavy feeling in my chest, and my very first thought was right back to that attic. I groaned into my pillow, feeling like a total dumbass: great, fucking awesome, now I’m even waking up with this shit on my mind. No peace and quiet for me; looks like this paranoia is here to stay forever.

I barely managed to drag myself out of bed and shuffled toward the smell of food. Mom was already waiting for me in the kitchen, making quick work of a massive stack of pancakes. We sat down for breakfast, chewing on pancakes and washing them down with hot tea.

Mom poked her pancake with a fork and asked cautiously, beating around the bush: so, how are you feeling? Still scared of that nonsense in the attic?

I almost choked on my tea:

“Are you serious?! You still don’t believe me?! I’m not making this shit up, I literally hear those footsteps every single night!”

She waved it off, trying to switch into caring mom mode:

“Oh, come on, come on… You know, when I was little and growing up in this house, I used to imagine all kinds of weird shit too. It’s just that age, your imagination…”

“Mom, drop it!” I snapped, feeling my temper flare. “I’m not some little kid, I’m sixteen, calm down! You’re acting just like…” I froze mid-sentence, hanging there with a piece of pancake stuck in my mouth.

A weird mental black hole suddenly opened up in my head. I wanted to use someone as an example, but I genuinely couldn’t figure out who. Whose name was even on the tip of my tongue? I blinked, brushing it off: ah, whatever, screw it. Probably just sleep-deprived.

Packing my bag for school, I glanced at those same crooked stairs leading to the attic. Right then, a weird thought crossed my mind: wait, why the fuck did I sleep in the guest room anyway?

I mean, sure, I obviously bailed in a panic yesterday, but… I’d been hearing that damn noise for a whole week straight! I was half-used to it, half-hated it with every fiber of my being. I was, so to speak, battle-hardened by this bullshit. What made me suddenly jump up and run to sleep somewhere else? My brain stubbornly refused to offer a logical answer. It was like a chunk of yesterday’s decisions had just been sliced clean out.

Shaking my head at the mounting surrealism, I threw on my backpack and trudged off to class.

The school day dragged on like a rubber band. Teachers were doing their usual mind-numbing routine, stuffing our heads with useless garbage. During long recess, my buddy—my bro from freestyle wrestling where we both slave away like dogs—walked up to me and asked:

“Max, bro, you going to the inter-school tournament next week? Locked and loaded?”

“Yeah, I’m going, where the fuck else would I be,” I grunted.

He nodded, hesitated for a second, and asked:

“Listen, do me a solid, can you lend me your hand wraps and mouthguard for a bit? I’ll buy you brand-new ones, I swear! I left mine at home today, but you know my place is way past the city line, so…”

He trailed off into some rambling explanation that I didn’t really listen to. I rolled my eyes, but I wasn’t gonna be a stingy dick about it. I walked over to my locker, yanked the door open, and reached inside to grab the gear. Naturally, everything inside was right where it always was. I mechanically pulled out what he asked for to hand it to my friend, but my eyes accidentally caught a photo taped to the inside of the locker door.

I stared at it, and everything inside me went dead cold.

The picture was of me. Grinning ear to ear, clutching that exact trophy to my chest after my very first, seriously epic match—the one I somehow miraculously clutched out. I remembered every single detail of that day. But… something was fundamentally missing from the picture.

I was holding the trophy, but the other half of the photo was completely blank.

Just a grayish-white void, as if a piece of the shot had been rubbed out with an eraser. My fingers trembled as I flipped the card over. On the back, written in neat handwriting, was: “First match win — champion!” followed by a bold exclamation point.

I stared at the letters, and a terrifying realization hit me: I had no fucking clue who wrote that. Not me. It wasn’t my handwriting at all.

I stared back at the photo, standing all by myself against a blank background, and my brain completely refused to compute what was going on. Before, this picture always seemed totally normal. I’d looked at it hundreds of times and not once—not a single fucking time—did I ever stop to ask: why the hell is this photo cut in half? Why do I only take up the right side while the left is totally empty?

It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of boiling water over me. That thought had never, ever entered my mind before. But now it dug into my brain like a red-hot iron hook, sending cold sweat dripping down my back.

The rest of the day went by in a haze. I made it back home on jelly legs, immersed in some existential nightmare. Dinner took place in a silence so thick it was deafening. Mom was also bone-tired from the day, and I sat at the table in a trance, pushing cold, clumpy pasta around with my fork.

I decided to probe the waters anyway:

“Mom…”

“Yeah, sweetie?” she replied tiredly, not raising her eyes from her plate.

“Do you remember who was with me at my very first match? You know, when I won the trophy?”

She looked up at me in surprise:

“What do you mean, who? I was there, of course.”

I nodded, clinging to this thread:

“Yeah, but that’s not what I mean. Was it you who signed my photo after the win?”

She blinked repeatedly, staring at me as if I’d started speaking Swahili:

“No, sweetie. I didn’t do that.”

“Well, you remember taking the picture yourself, right?” I blurted out, my composure slipping.

“Yes, I remember,” she sighed. “Is there writing on it? Honey, I don’t know, I have no idea. Maybe you signed it yourself in a burst of excitement and forgot? Or one of your friends did. Why are you letting such nonsense get into your head?”

“Because the second half of the photo is completely blank!” I barked, feeling like I was losing my mind once and for all. “There’s literally a piece of the frame erased!”

Mom let out a heavy sigh, switching into ironclad logic mode:

“Well, who knows… It probably got ruined while sitting in a damp school locker. Faded over time, these things happen.”

“Mom, it was inside a closed metal locker, not under the scorching sun to fade out into a gray spot!” I pressed on.

She just gave an indifferent shrug, clearing the dishes:

“I don’t know, sweetie. Enough frying my brain, leave it alone for God’s sake, my head is splitting as it is.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

Do homework after dinner? To hell with their algebra and history chapters. At eleven sharp, that fucking performance on the stairs was going to start again; I didn’t give a damn about sines and cosines. All I wanted was to catch a glimpse of whatever bastard was fucking with my head at night.

Sitting on my bed, I suddenly slapped my hand against my forehead so hard it rang through the whole room.

A camera!

Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?! I should have dropped by our trashy local flea market shop ages ago—the one peddling cheap old Chinese junk—bought some dirt-cheap digital point-and-shoot camera, set it up right across from the attic arch, and recorded whatever the hell was creeping around up there at night! My brain frantically clung to this idea, but it was already too late—the local shops had been closed for hours.

For the rest of the evening, mom and I ran around the yard like madmen, hauling heavy bags of feed, shoveling manure, nailing gates shut, and watering the garden beds under the light of a dim lantern.

I genuinely couldn’t understand how the two of us were pulling off this crushing workload every single day. My body was broken, feeling like I’d been doing hard labor on a galley without a single smoke break: every joint was aching, my back was giving out, my muscles burned like fire, and my head hummed with exhaustion. I had never been so thoroughly drained in my life.

At some point, my strength just gave out completely. Before I could even make it under the covers, dressed in my dirty work clothes and sneakers, I collapsed face-down onto the mattress and instantly dropped into a heavy sleep.

A few hours later, I was violently yanked out of my blackout by that familiar, soul-chilling sound. Heavy, shuffling footsteps began their slow descent down the attic stairs again.

I let out a loud, frustrated groan. My whole chest burned with anger from this agonizing insomnia.

And in that exact second, the footsteps on the stairs froze.

I cut short, instantly doused in cold sweat as the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. Ever since that first night when I barked “Who’s there?!” into the dark, that piece of shit upstairs had never shut up so abruptly at my slightest move. Before, it just kept walking until midnight, no matter what. But now… it had stopped.

A frantic thought flashed through my head: wait a second… back on that first evening when it went quiet, I explicitly thought of a specific person. I was dead sure I knew whose mug was sneaking around up there. But the second I tried to pull that name out of my memory—nothing. My brain hit a concrete wall, dissolving the memory into a blob of gray slush. Who the fuck was it?!

Meanwhile, the footsteps behind the arch resumed with renewed intensity. Except now, something happened that was so far beyond the usual realm of fucked up that my insides shriveled into a tiny knot and my jaw clenched in a spasm.

Before, everything was straightforward: a creak, a rhythmic stomping, hitting the invisible threshold of the arch, and at midnight—silence. But tonight, the rules of the game broke.

First, from around the corner of those crooked stairs, instead of the usual shuffling, a strange, wet sound echoed—as if someone or something wasn’t walking down the wooden steps, but dragging a heavy bag with a squelching scrape. Like a carcass of meat being hauled upstairs… or down from there.

I held my breath, pressing myself into the mattress, afraid to move a single finger. The air in the room turned ice-cold, even though the window was shut tight and the radiators were blasting heat like crazy. The desk lamp suddenly flickered with a smooth motion. It didn’t buzz; it just went dark for a second, then snapped back on—except the light wasn’t yellow anymore, but a dead, pale blue-tinted glow.

But the most mind-fucking part began a second later.

The sounds of the footsteps… split into two. No, not even that. They sounded simultaneously from above, in the attic, and right from the corner of my room where that damned staircase was located. A synchronized, heavy thud of footsteps rang out from two places at once, even though physically it was completely impossible.

Had paranoia over that fucking noise and that stupid photograph finally fried my brain for good? Or had everything been an illusion all along—school, dinner with my mom, and this godforsaken small town with its five thousand people where everyone knows everyone?

The air in the room grew thick, smelling of damp earth and stale dust. And the footsteps coming from the corner of the room and from the attic merged into a single deafening roar that drilled straight into my skull, knocking out the very last shreds of my sanity.

The last thing I remember before I completely lost my mind was that unbearable, skull-shattering thunder from both sides and the dead radiance of the lamp.

And then the story just snaps off. A chunk of my memory was scorched clean out, like someone had flipped a breaker in my head.

The next conscious sensation—blinding light digging into my eyes, my mouth dry as if I’d been eating sand, and the air smelling of cheap disinfectant and dampness. I’m sitting on a chair in some stuffy room. Nearby, cops in their hideous official uniforms are milling around.

Some guy with badges and a sour face explains to my utterly shocked self: “Great performance, kid. An hour ago you were sprinting through a stranger’s cornfield screaming your head off, squealing, and causing absolute chaos in the neighbors’ yard right in the middle of the night.” And the best part—bare-fucking-foot! Paramedics had already checked me out, felt me up: miraculously, I dodged major cuts or sprains, even though my soles were rubbed raw to the blood.

Mom is sitting next to me, white as death, trembling all over in pure shock. Honestly, I’m sitting there in such utter disbelief that words fail me. What fucking cornfield?! What running in the dark?! All I remember is my room and that thunderous roar.

Somehow, they took me home. We got into the car and pulled away. Mom is driving, eyes glued to the road, while her left hand nervously strokes my head. Her fingers are trembling.

“Sweetie…” she whispers softly, not taking her eyes off the highway. “If all of this is because of that attic… the house is old, it’s totally warped, it creaks all the time… You know you can sleep in any other room. You don’t have to torture yourself like this, do you hear me?”

I stay silent for several long minutes, staring out the side window as the dark silhouettes of trees float by.

“You don’t believe me,” I throw out softly.

Mom lets out a heavy, strained sigh, but says nothing in return. The road rolls under the wheels in silence. In the end, they actually moved me to another room, far away from that cursed staircase. And there, in the new spot, at least nobody bothered me anymore. The night went by relatively quiet.

First thing in the morning, I make an executive decision: fuck this school. Today I’m in no mood for their damn classes when my head is swarming with paranormal trash that’s melting my brain.

I split from the house, head down to our trashy local flea market shop, and snag a used camera for half price. It looks like it’s been chewed up by a train, the recording quality couldn’t be worse, pure blurry mush. But if some ghost crew starts coming down from the attic again, I’ll definitely spot that shit on the screen, whether it’s pitch dark or black-and-white.

Next, my feet carry me straight to the town library. We never had internet at our house—I was constantly being fed promises like “we’ll get it hooked up soon, just wait.” And right there, my brain glitches again: wait a second… who exactly promised me that? Definitely not mom. But who? I have no fucking clue. That infuriating black hole opens up in my head again. Once more, that feeling like I forgot something, erased it from memory, and the fact itself pisses me off so much I want to grind my teeth in sheer helplessness.

I sit down at a beaten-up library PC with a bulky CRT monitor and start frantically googling. First, I try to figure out where this amnesia is coming from. Google dumps tons of garbage on me. What could cause it? Overwork? Well yeah, I was slaving away on those garden beds like a dog, maybe my brain just shut off from exhaustion. Or extreme terror? Also a possibility. Or what if I’m just going fucking insane?

Right then, I find some online express test for schizophrenia. I sit there answering dumb questions for a solid half hour. In the end, jack shit—the test says I’m completely sane. Not schizo.

Then what the fuck is happening to me?!
Rage takes over fear. I type the most insane thing into the search bar, describing my actual nightmare: “unending footsteps coming from the attic like someone is walking down but there’s nobody there and the footsteps keep going.”

I hit Enter. The page loads for a couple of seconds, spitting out a bunch of links to old forums, creepypastas, and local urban legends.

I began frantically opening links, digging into this internet bullshit.

One story was mind-bogglingly insane, the second one a bit weaker, but the core was roughly the same everywhere. Obviously, all of this was just stupid urban creepypastas, written by local internet nutjobs on forums. And yet the details… they matched my case so dead-on that goosebumps ran down my back, like worms crawling under my skin. Absolute unfiltered horror.

In these posts, people described the exact same nonsense: someone said an invisible entity was walking around in their attic, endlessly descending without ever reaching the bottom; for others, footsteps echoed in basements or behind walls. The comments section was the usual internet circus. Some were dead serious arguing about spatial glitches and bugs in the matrix, like we’re living in a simulation with server ping spikes. Others were spewing esoteric bullshit about spirits and portals. Reading that garbage and the comments from all those morons made me shake with internal rage—I was just so pissed off by all that trash. I was ready to close the tabs and give zero fucks.

But my hand moved on its own toward the message box. I wrote to a few authors of those threads anonymously: “I went through the same thing. Is this actually real?”

Of course, I expected nobody to reply. What idiot would seriously answer such a crazy request? I was clinging to these forum fairy tales like a drowning man grasping at straws out of pure desperation. Whatever, I thought. Worth a shot.

And then, boom! Less than half an hour later, a notification pops up. A reply.

The guy wrote with surprising speed for the internet. The message was long, and every single word radiated an unhealthy coldness: “I’m glad someone is interested in this, because my story is 100% real. I know damn well nobody will believe you. I went through it myself and I’m still living through it. Every day I feel the paranoia building up like a landslide. But that’s not even the scariest part—I feel whole chunks of my life being sliced out of my head. I constantly forget important things, entire layers of memory vanish, and I can’t bring them back. My brain just glitches out, and that’s it…”

I almost recoiled from the chair in the library, and the monitor screen blurred before my eyes.

It was so spot-on, such a perfect mirror of my own clusterfuck of memory gaps that it felt like boiling water had been dumped over me. With shaking fingers, I started typing a reply: “I have the exact same thing! I feel like I’ve genuinely forgotten something, chunks of my memory are just erased…”

I sent the message and waited. Five minutes—silence. Half an hour—jack shit. An hour—dead quiet.

Wired to the extreme, my head buzzing with raw anxiety, I burst out of the library and dragged myself through the trashy streets of our small town. All around me, oblivious, brain-dead people are bustling about, buying coffee, blabbering about useless shit while reality is collapsing inside my head. Fury, rage, uncertainty, and fear followed right at my heels until I limped all the way home.

Mom hadn’t gotten back from work yet, but that didn’t mean I could relax. Holy fucking shit, the sheer volume of household chores in our giant house with this massive smallholding was enough to make my stomach turn just thinking about it. There were only two of us, mom and me. How the hell were the two of us pulling off this backbreaking load? Handling a farm like this isn’t like tapping away on a keyboard in a library—your back gives out after thirty minutes.

And while I was hauling those damned bags and clearing out the yard, one obsessive thought kept looping in my head. I flipped it back and forth until it finally hit me.

I had never once in my life asked myself: where the hell did my father actually go?

I grew up totally fine with my mom, I was cool with everything, I never brought up the topic, I didn’t give a shit. But now, against the backdrop of all this surreal paranoia, that question stood out like a sore thumb. Why don’t I know a single thing about him?

I waited until mom got home from work, exhausted as always. Helped her unload, whipped up a quick meal to get on her good side, and while she was sitting at the table with a cup of tea, I dropped the question point-blank:

“Mom… where’s my dad?”

Mom slowly raised her tired eyes toward me, rolled them heavily at the ceiling, and spat out through her teeth:

“I knew all this sudden filial care wasn’t coming out of nowhere.”

In response to her reproach, I rolled my eyes at the exact same time, mirroring her signature gesture to a tee. And delivered with an air of offended innocence:

“Hey, take it easy! For your information, I show care on a regular basis.”

I stared at her pointedly, reminding her who actually busts their ass doing household chores while she sits around at work. Then I deflated anyway, turned red as a lobster, and awkwardly rubbed the back of my neck:

“Fine, fine, forget it… But the question still stands. Where’s dad?”

Mom froze thoughtfully, staring into her teacup, when suddenly her face contorted in sharp pain. She grabbed her head with both hands, wincing:

“Oh… damn it… of all days, you just had to nag me about this today.”

I jumped up right away, instantly losing all my sarcasm, and started fussing over her:

“Mom, hey! What’s wrong? If you feel like shit, go lie down and rest, to hell with this conversation!”

She shook her head heavily, swallowing with effort, and waved it off tiredly:

“Nah, it’s fine… In the end, what difference does it make whether it’s today or a week from now? Sooner or later we’d have to talk about it anyway. He just vanished from my life. I barely… hell, I don’t remember him at all. When I was discharged from the maternity ward, only my mom was there to meet me—your grandmother. And your… well, that prick… he was kind of on the horizon, flashed by a couple of times at the very first meeting, and then his trail went cold.”

An arsehole thought instantly flashed through my head: right, a kid from a random hookup. What, Max, were you counting on some grand and tragic story behind your birth? Dream on.

But right after, I let out a disappointed snort, feeling like a total idiot. Here I was thinking I’d finally caught a real thread, some actual shift in this paranormal madness that would lead me to a answer. And it turned out to be jack shit. No mysteries of the universe, no creepy lore, just a plain old trashy drama about a abandoned mom and a runaway deadbeat dad. Another piece of bland bullshit, nothing more.

Meanwhile, the day was rolling toward sunset, inexorably pulling me closer to the moment of truth. I was hard at work setting up my trap: dragged a stool over, set it right across from that damned arch, and secured that exact piece-of-shit used camera from the flea market on top of it. The plan was simple: wait until 11:55 p.m., hit REC, and play it by ear from there. Either sit on the bed and stare into the dark, or, if I got totally terrified, slam on the brakes and get the fuck out of the room—preferably out of the house altogether.

I sat on the mattress, eyes glued to the digital clock. Time crept by with a bitch-like slowness.

At 11:55 p.m. sharp, my trembling fingers pressed the record button. The camera screen flickered, spitting out a grainy, muddy picture full of noise. Quality was total trash, but the outline of the stairs and the arch was clear enough. If that paranormal circus decided to crawl out, the camera would catch it. Period.

I sat on the bed, holding my breath, and waited.

And then it started. The hands crossed the mark and that sound echoed from above again. But this time, it wasn’t like before. No monotonous, rhythmic footsteps. The steps were jagged, crooked, completely fucked up—as if whoever was coming down could barely drag their wooden limbs. Stumbling, tripping, and slamming into the walls and steps, making a vile, scraping noise.

This unnatural hideous shuffling threw off all my plans. I felt like this next-level surreal nightmare was going to make my brain explode right inside my skull. I sat on the bed completely petrified, paralyzed by primal horror, unable to move a single finger. And I cursed myself with the foulest words possible: why the fuck did I stay in this room?! Why didn’t I bolt to the first floor before this scum started its parade?!

It was coming down… closer, closer, heavier, and more misshapen.

And suddenly, it went dead quiet.

That sudden silence made the hair on my head stand straight up, and my heart dropped somewhere into my stomach. Before, this nightmare stopped strictly on schedule or only when I raised my voice to snap back. But now, this thing shut up on its own, without a single sound from my side.

An ice-cold realization hit me with terrifying certainty: it saw the camera. This piece of shit realized it was being watched, recognized the lens, and froze right there behind the corner of the arch, half a step from the exit.

Panic hit my head so hard that I reflexively jerked my arm toward the window, frantically thinking: smash the glass and dive out from the second floor?

And at that exact moment, a voice echoed from the dark behind the arch.

Male, deep, but raspy and whispering. It sounded like the vocal cords hadn’t been used in a hundred years. Primitive horror locked me down tight. My hand remained frozen in mid-air, raised toward the window. I froze in an awkward position, and in that same second, with soul-chilling despair, I realized that I had gone dead still in the exact same way as that thing on the stairs. It was like we synchronized.

And that raspy baritone spat into the silence of the room:

“Do you want to remember me?”

It sounded so mind-bogglingly terrifying that words can’t even describe it. It wasn’t the voice of a human, no. It was the abyss itself talking to you.

And then something happened that I’m ashamed to admit, but holding it back was physically impossible. A hot lump welled up in my throat, and my eyes stung with tears. Real, childish tears of pure, unadulterated terror. I was so animalistically frightened that I just wanted to howl out loud and sob like a little bitch. Deep down, with every cell of my stupid body, I knew that this wasn’t some basic psycho intruder in our house—this was something completely unearthly.

Meanwhile, the voice continued.

It sounded a bit closer, inside the room itself, even though nobody had moved. And in that disgusting, raspy timbre, a gentle, caring note slipped through:

“Don’t cry…”

As if that thing was trying to comfort me.

That’s when a primal howl burst out of me. I shrieked at the top of my lungs like a terrified kid who had his favorite toy ripped away, only with the bitter taste of instant death.

I bolted for the exit on pure adrenaline, knocking over everything in my path: tripped over the stool, slammed my shoulder into the doorframe, kicking the junk scattered across the floor. And behind my back, right at that moment… it happened.

Footsteps. But not those crooked, dragging ones of a heavy carcass crawling down the steps. No. Now they were fast, confident strides. The thing was rushing after me in two leaps, closing the distance at insane speed.

I screamed even louder, tearing my throat out, calling for mom with all my might, praying she’d hear this hellish nightmare.

And then—snap! My wrists were twisted in a vise grip. Ice-cold fingers locked onto my arms with a death grip, burning my skin with the chill of a morgue. I shrieked at a frequency I didn’t know I had. With a violent jerk, I was spun around 180 degrees, face to face with my pursuer.

A man was standing right in front of my nose. A completely normal-looking guy, except his skin was gray, dead-pale, like he’d been pulled out of a freezer. But overall, just an adult man’s face. And this guy was grinning widely right into my soul.

The raspy, unearthly voice rang out again, right in my ear, even though the creature’s mouth was shut tight and didn’t move at all:

“I thought you’d give me a warmer welcome…”

I was shaking in hysterical paralysis so hard my teeth were rattling, scraping off enamel. Tears poured down my cheeks in torrents, mixing with snot and spit, while my tongue went completely numb, turned into a dry rag—I couldn’t squeeze out a single sound. And in that moment of madness, stealing a quick glance at his face, a wild thought hit me that made my sanity completely collapse.

This guy… he looked sickeningly like me.

Yeah, he was older, taller, broader in the shoulders, physically way stronger. But the facial features? That was my own face. A mature, weathered-by-the-years copy of myself that I looked at in the mirror every day, only dialed up to the maximum level of sinister absurdity.

And suddenly, right in the middle of this nightmare, the creature’s joints went completely limp. As if all the energy had been drained out of it in an instant, severing invisible strings. Its head lolled helplessly and fell onto its shoulder with a loud crack. The vertebrae in its neck seemed to vanish, turning to slush, leaving the skull hanging like a wet rag.

At that sight, I screamed again, choking on air.

And the head hanging helplessly on its shoulder, without even moving its lips, softly whispered straight into my mind:

“Quiet… you don’t want to wake mommy up.”

***

Early morning splashed a dull, grayish-yellow light through the windows. Darla woke up feeling like she’d been run over by a steamroller, tossed in the scrap heap, and then put back together with broken hands. Ahead lay the standard endless wheel: first to work, slaving away until she was blue in the face, and upon returning home, the never-ending, soul-crushing nightmare of dealing with this damn smallholding.

It wasn’t just everyday life anymore; it was pure, unadulterated horror in broad daylight.

She was so exhausted it felt appropriate to just lie down and kick the bucket right in the middle of the yard. Darla couldn’t even comprehend how she’d pulled this off before. Carrying this unbearable load all by herself for years? What the hell for?! She had zero strength left—literally none; inside was a scorched desert. A saving grace of a thought grew louder and louder in her head: sell this huge, crumbling house to hell, drop this dead weight along with the cursed land, and get out into the big world, anywhere her eyes led her. And who cares if her entire childhood was spent here—it could all burn in a blue flame. She felt uncomfortable within these walls, as if the very air around her was gnawing at her insides with sheer misery. Where did this mind gloom come from? God only knows.

She slapped on some quick makeup to hide the dark circles under her eyes and sat alone in the kitchen, staring mindlessly at a cup of cold coffee.

Life had become so unbearable it made her teeth grind. Why had she even tolerated this for so many years? She could have taken off at any moment, left, vanished into any other place, but instead she kept clinging to this useless, unwanted piece of land, burying herself alive. And all for what? For twelve hours of hard labor a day? It felt like she’d been living under hypnosis her whole conscious life, in some fucking haze, and only now was the veil starting to lift from her eyes. Time to put an end to this. She needed to make a move, fast, before she completely lost her marbles.

Darla stood up decisively, threw on her jacket, and was already heading for the door to jump in the car and drive to work when she slammed on the brakes.

The set of keys. Where were they?

Remembering that after a brutal shift yesterday she’d dragged herself home and for some reason shuffled straight up to the second floor—god knows what urge carried her up there, maybe to drop off a towel or check closed windows—Darla let out a heavy sigh. She had to turn back and trudge upstairs.

She walked into that far room on the second floor, grabbed the keys off the nightstand, and was about to head down when her ears caught a strange, persistent noise.

Beep… beep…

Some faint but distinct electronic chiming was coming from the depths of the hallway. Darla froze. The sound came from a vacant room she hadn’t looked into for probably several years. What for? The house was huge, rooms out the ass, and she lived in it alone. Swinging by those dead zones made zero sense.

But right now, something in there was showing signs of life.

Inside, everything turned ice-cold. Her first thought was that burglars had broken into the house. Just what she needed! On tiptoes, trying not to make a single sound, she quietly crept up to the ajar door, pushed it open silently, and slipped inside.

The source of the sound turned out to be a small, cheap camera set up on a plain wooden stool.

Darla raised her eyebrows so high they almost hit her hairline. What fucking camera?! She explicitly remembered that she’d never bought anything like it in her life, let alone set it up on a stool in the middle of dusty abandonment. Why would she even engage in such absurd bullshit?

The beeping didn’t stop—the device’s battery was dying. A recording indicator glowed faintly on the screen. Paralyzed by a sticky sense of dread, she took a step closer: by the looks of it, the camera had captured something, some file was saved on the memory card. But in the very next moment, the screen flickered one last time and went completely black, not letting her watch the recording.

A nasty chill ran down her spine at the sight. It was bad enough that someone had apparently snuck into their house like a rat, but the bastard had also brought a camera in here and done some hidden filming. The sheer thought of it made the hair on her neck stand on end.

There was zero time to figure it out right now—work was right around the corner, and she couldn’t be late. Cursing under her breath and feeling paranoia tightening its noose around her neck, Darla snatched the camera off the stool and shoved it deep into her bag, deciding to dig out the truth later.

She burst out of the house, slammed the door shut with a vengeance, turned the key in the lock, exhaled, and dragged herself to the car. The bag with the stranger’s sinister discovery weighed heavily on her shoulder.

Darla sat in the office all day on pins and needles, with nothing but that camera looping in her head. Her mind was mush, and her work went completely to shit. In the end, after bugging her coworkers with questions, she managed to scrounge up a matching cable, plugged the thing in right at her desk, and sat there waiting for it to show even a flicker of life.

A bad feeling had been sucking at the pit of her stomach since morning, and it had no intention of letting go.

When the workday finally ended, she didn’t want to go back to that damned house at all—her legs simply refused to move. But you can’t sit in the office parking lot forever. Darla dragged it out until sunset, drove up to her property, and cut the engine right by the porch.

With a heavy heart, she pulled the charged camera out of her bag and pressed the power button.

The screen flickered to life, spitting out a grainy, muddy picture. The camera was aimed straight at the stairs leading to the attic. Darla frowned, taking in this gloomy angle. What kind of total psychopath would break into someone else’s house just to set up a camera and film empty steps? A sensible thought flashed through her head that she should call the police right fucking now, but curiosity won out. First, she just wanted to watch the recording.

For the first few minutes, absolutely nothing happened on screen. Darla was already convincing herself that the battery had died for nothing and there were no big secrets here—just someone placing a camera to record an empty corner, some meaningless, brainless nonsense.

Clicking her tongue in irritation, she jabbed the fast-forward button.

The footage sped ahead, and suddenly the picture—or rather, what was happening in it—shifted drastically. Darla let go of the button, holding her breath. Right then, sounds began coming through the speaker.

Just the noise itself made her insides shrivel into a tight knot, sending icy goosebumps racing down her spine. Someone was coming down the stairs. But the way they were coming down! Normal people don’t walk like that. The sound was disgusting, jagged—the steps were unsteady and lurching, as if the person were drunk, mutilated, or had zero control over their own body. Constant thuds and scraping echoed out, as though something was falling, collapsing sideways, and slamming into the walls and steps because its own legs flat-out refused to hold it up.

A hideous, distorted shadow loomed in the darkness of the lens. That thing paced in place at the very edge for a long time, making vile, grating noises, and then… went dead quiet.

The sheer realization that this fucked-up nightmare was happening right in her house, just a few meters from her bedroom, made Darla press herself deep into the car seat. Sitting in the car was terrifying to the point where her knees were shaking.

And then, out of nowhere, a voice came through the camera’s speaker.

A raspy whispering male voice.

Terrified, Darla almost dropped the camera from her instantly weakened hands. That unearthly rasp pronounced clearly in the silence of the cabin:

“Do you want to remember me?”

And silence again. But now, a horrifying realization crawled under her skin that this question wasn’t meant for some random viewer. It was addressing her directly. Whoever set up this camera knew damn well that she would come back, grab it, sit in her car, and hit play. He knew she would hear this.

Who? Who the fuck was she supposed to remember?

Terror welled up in her throat like a hot lump, choking off her breath. Tears instantly blinded her eyes from sheer helplessness, panic, and a bone-chilling realization: all this time, she had been living in this huge, cursed house completely alone.

And right then, that very same raspy, dead voice exhaled softly right out of the speaker:

“Don’t cry…”

This time, Darla shrieked out loud.

She snapped, hurling the camera in disgust onto the passenger seat next to her, and frantically slammed the power off. Her brain refused to process what was going on. How—what kind of person had the power to know that she was sitting right here, watching this recording, and sobbing her eyes out?! That thought was driving her completely off her rocker.

Cursing like a sailor, Darla violently turned the key in the ignition, the engine roared, and the car peeled out with a screech of tires.

Her brain was bursting with a suicidal urge to steal one last glance back.

She jerked her eyes toward the side mirror and her whole body shuddered.

From the dark windows of the attic, two male figures were staring right at her.

She bit her lip until it bled, choking back a fresh scream, and slammed the gas pedal straight into the floor. The car surged forward along the broken road, leaving behind the house, the attic, and breaking every single rule of this godforsaken backwater town.

Credit: Atsure

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