The night wasn’t just quiet—it was deaf. Muffled. Absorbing any sound. The darkness didn’t look like an absence of light. It was a thing. Dense. Pooled across the floor and the furniture, clinging to her feet.
Anya opened her eyes at exactly three in the morning.
She didn’t turn on the light. First she slowly—very slowly—sat up on the bed, as if haste might startle something in the dark. She sat motionless, listening not for sounds but for their absence. And from that emptiness came the sense that if she turned her head now, she might see something that wasn’t meant to exist.
She got up. Unhurried. Too steady. As though someone were holding her by the shoulders and showing her precisely how to move.
The long white nightgown Viktor had bought looked like a shroud in the dark. The fabric rustled softly—and that rustle didn’t belong to her.
The hallway was black. Anya stretched out a hand and found the wall. Cold, smooth. She moved forward, letting her heels barely graze the floor.
I’m creeped out, she thought suddenly, and surprised herself with it. Not I’m afraid he’ll punish me. Creeped out—like in childhood, when you’re certain someone is standing in the dark, just waiting for you to turn around.
She stopped right in front of his bedroom door. Her fingers found the cold metal of the handle, but she didn’t turn it.
Her body began to sway in a measured, barely noticeable motion, back and forth—like a pendulum.
Thud.
Her forehead touched the door softly, carefully.
Thud.
The sound was the same each time—dull, measured: she wasn’t knocking, she was marking time. And the silence between the blows became part of the rhythm; the house waited for the next thud the way one waits for the next tick of a clock.
“Da… ddy…”
The word wasn’t hers. It didn’t sit right in her mouth—she had to learn it again.
Thud.
And from somewhere deep in the house came:
Drip.
Anya froze for a fraction of a second, but her body kept up its pendulum sway.
Thud.
Drip.
Too steady.
Thud.
Drip.
Her skin prickled. She told herself it was the pipes. That it was water. That it had always been here.
But the drip didn’t falter.
“Da… ddy…”
Thud.
Drip.
Thud.
…silence.
No drip, no rustle. Emptiness—so dense that when she swallowed, it felt as if the dark swallowed too.
She didn’t stop. Didn’t speed up. Only blinked.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Da… ddy…”
Thud.
Drip.
Not right after. Half a beat late. As if someone in the dark had waited—and then answered anyway.
Nausea rose in her. It felt as though the house wasn’t simply hearing her, but adjusting, choosing, evaluating.
She caught herself thinking she no longer dared look back. As though turning her head would confirm that something really was there behind her.
Behind his door—at first, nothing.
Then—a sharp, heavy rustle, as if someone had woken not gradually, but all at once, with a jerk. And another second of silence, in which you could hear someone holding his breath, listening.
The lock clicked.
The door opened a crack—exactly enough for Viktor’s face to appear in the gap.
He stood in the doorway, pale and disheveled, his eyes too wide for sleep. He held the door with one hand, braced the other on the jamb—he needed something to hold on to. He looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her—and recognized her far too well.
Anya swayed and struck her forehead again—missing the door itself and hitting the edge of the frame instead.
Thud.
Silence.
“Da… ddy…”
Neither her breathing nor her rhythm nor her expression changed—like this wasn’t happening to a living person, but to an empty shell someone had set in motion.
His face went ashen, like a dead man’s.
“A… Any…a?..” dragged itself out of him. Exactly as it should never be said aloud. She didn’t know whom he was addressing: her, or her imitation of his dead daughter. He probably didn’t, either.
Viktor carefully opened the door a little more. He wanted to come closer, but didn’t dare open the door fully. As though that might let in not her, but whatever stood behind her, farther down the corridor.
“Da… ddy…”
His hands began to shake. With effort he lifted his left hand—and cautiously touched her hair at her temple. Not an embrace. Not a grab. Just the way one might touch skin to see whether it was warm, whether it was alive.
The skin was warm.
That should have calmed him.
It didn’t.
Because her eyes didn’t change. No plea appeared in them, no recognition. Only emptiness and that word.
“Da… ddy…” she repeated, quietly, stubbornly.
A sound broke from Viktor—either a short sob or a laugh that died at once. He understood something terrible: not about her. About himself.
He pulled his hand back and for a second covered his mouth with his palm—as if afraid to say a forbidden word. Then he looked at her again and whispered—pleading, begging:
“Don’t… Don’t do this…”
Anya kept swaying at the threshold and leaned forward again. She missed with her forehead—her temple took the blow, the motion came out crooked, late.
Thud.
Viktor’s legs started to tremble. He slowly sank to his knees right in the doorway—on the threshold between the room and the corridor. Not fully retreating inside, not coming out to her. Frozen there, as if on a line he could not cross.
He stared at her feet, his hands covering his mouth, and his shoulders shook with soundless crying.
And Anya stood over him in pitch-black darkness and, for the first time in a long while, felt neither triumph nor cold calculation, but a real, sticky, superstitious dread: she was thudding not against a door—but against a grave.
She stood another second—as if waiting for a cue. And then, without any sharp movement, simply turned around.
And walked farther down the corridor.
At first Anya didn’t understand that she was the one walking. Her legs moved on their own—straight, calm, as if along a learned route. Her head was empty, like a room with the lights off. Only somewhere deeper, beneath that emptiness, a sticky wave of terror was beginning to rise.
Where? Why?
She didn’t answer herself. She didn’t even try. The words wouldn’t come.
Her body chose the route before her mind did.
Blood seemed to freeze in her veins. Her fingers went cold, alien. She walked, and with every step something inside screamed louder—but over that scream lay another, icy force, much louder: don’t break the role. Don’t think. Don’t stop. Finish it.
She had a guess where she was going. And that made it worse.
The stairs down.
A dark flight.
The smell of concrete that was hardly a smell at all—just something that existed, like stone.
Viktor disappeared. Either he shut himself in, or retreated into the dark, or in that minute he had simply ceased to exist. And that scared her more than his footsteps ever could. The empty house suddenly felt alien—its owner was gone, and only a shell remained inside.
Anya went down into the basement.
Not like a captive. Like a thing that belonged where it should be.
She reached that spot—on the concrete floor by the false wall. The place where the air seemed a little heavier, where the darkness was denser. She dropped to her knees, then lay on her side and pressed her cheek to the cold concrete.
And closed her eyes.
From the outside it looked like sleep.
Inside her, everything was screaming—not in words. In a cold, animal signal.
She was terrified not because of Viktor. She was terrified because something in her—or near her—had answered.
Because “Da… ddy…” had sounded as if it hadn’t come from her, but through her.
But over that silent scream lay a smooth, icy crust, and it wasn’t pleading—it was commanding:
Lie still. Breathe evenly. Sleep.
Anya hadn’t planned to go down to the basement. Not even close. It wasn’t part of the calculation. And that was what truly made her feel sick: she suddenly understood that right now she wasn’t in control of what was happening.
She had summoned something at his door.
And now that something had taken her all the way down the stairs.