Night arrived without warning—as it always did. Viktor’s house thickened into darkness again: not the absence of light, but a darkness with a presence of its own.
Anya fell asleep quickly—and then something yanked her back.
She dreamed that her bedroom door was opening.
In the dream, it was so clear there was no doubt: the click of the lock, a faint creak, a thin strip of dark widening. She saw it, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even take a deeper breath. Her body wasn’t hers—heavy, nailed to the mattress.
A girl’s silhouette stood in the doorway. Pale—not because light fell on her, but because she wasn’t made of this air. Her hair hung straight, unmoving. Her face was smooth, expressionless. Her eyes… not black, not empty. More like what you see when you look into a completely dark well: there’s no gaze, but there is depth.
The figure came to the bed and sat down beside her. The mattress dipped slightly—Anya felt it beneath her, and that made it worse: it wasn’t “just a dream.”
Cold fingers touched her cheek—then closed around her jaw, as if ice had been dragged across her skin. Anya tried to jerk away—nothing. Tried to scream—nothing. Her throat was locked, as if someone was holding it from the inside.
The figure leaned closer. Very close. So close Anya didn’t smell anything—she felt the absence of smell, a blankness.
And then it did the thing that made something inside her snap—not a kiss, not a caress.
It inhaled.
It wasn’t drawing in air—it was pulling in something else: thin, living, warm. Anya felt it not in her chest but deeper: strength being pulled out of her, thread by thread. Noise swelled in her ears. Her body grew even heavier.
For a moment, she thought she had opened her eyes for real.
And she still saw it.
The same silhouette. The same bottomless eyes. The same cold fingers at her cheek.
She squeezed her eyes shut with all her strength, clamping her lids as if she could crush her eyeballs. She tried to sit up—and suddenly her body obeyed.
Anya jerked upright, grabbed her head with both hands, and screamed.
The scream tore out at once, on the exhale, like someone had wrung her lungs dry. She couldn’t stop. Inhale—scream. Inhale—scream. She was afraid to open her eyes, afraid to see it still beside her. She pressed her palms over her ears, but that only made it worse: the scream was inside. It didn’t need air.
The bedroom door flew open.
Viktor burst in immediately. His hand fumbled along the wall, then he snapped the switch—and light slammed into the room.
The world became sharp, flat, domestic. The bed, the nightstand, the wardrobe, her white nightgown stuck to her body, wet with sweat. Her hair a mess, her face streaked with tears. Anya was shaking so hard her teeth chattered.
Viktor stopped for a second—like someone confronted with a genuine hysterical fit. Then he came closer quickly, without sudden movements.
“Anya. Look at me. Breathe. Can you hear me?”
She could hear him, but the words weren’t getting through. The sensation of that “inhale” was still pulsing in her head.
“There…” She gulped air. “There… was…”
She glanced wildly at the door. It was open—Viktor had come through it. That didn’t calm her.
Anya grabbed his sleeve sharply, pulling him toward her.
“Do you have… cameras?” Her voice tore and broke. “In here? You do, right?”
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Viktor blinked.
“For security,” he answered, a little embarrassed.
Anya clung to that “security” as if it were a handhold.
“Show me the recording…” She swallowed. “Now. Please. I… I have to see. I don’t want…” She gasped again. “I don’t want this to be real.”
He saw the state she was in and didn’t argue.
“Okay. Right now. Wait—don’t get up.”
He left and came back quickly with a tablet. He sat beside her, keeping a little distance, tense.
On the video: her room. The camera aimed at the bed. The door in frame. Closed.
She lay motionless. Asleep.
A couple of seconds—nothing.
Her face twitched slightly. A shoulder tightened. Then a low, strange moan. At first barely audible, then louder. And there really was something wrong with it: not the sound of fear, but as if her throat had been shut off and the sound was being forced out.
On the bed, Anya began to toss.
And at that moment the frame jerked. Not like a blur, not like the camera had shifted—like a glitch: a second ago her head had been closer to the edge of the pillow, her face turned toward the door—and then, with no transition, she was lying a little differently. The blanket had shifted too—but it hadn’t dragged after her body; it had jumped with her.
Anya flinched at the jolt in the footage, and Viktor went pale instantly. He stared at the bed as if trying to understand what, exactly, was wrong—and couldn’t.
Right after that break the picture continued, but where there was movement on the bed the image started to crumble: blocky squares, pixelated noise. The motion tore the frame apart. Everything else stayed clean—walls, door, nightstand. Only the bed was distorted, like interference.
Anya felt her fingers go cold. And then—sound.
First came a scream. But on the screen she didn’t bolt upright. She was still “lying there” inside those squares. The scream arrived noticeably earlier than she sat up.
Then, a second later, she sat up sharply—and began to scream for real, and that “real” scream caught up with the first one. As if something had screamed instead of her, and she woke and continued.
Viktor stared at the screen, not believing his own eyes.
And when, on the recording, he himself burst into the room and switched on the light—the squares vanished instantly. The picture normalized. The audio returned to normal. Everything was “as it should be” again.
For a second, silence hung.
Viktor does not look away and silently, with a single motion, rewinds the recording by several seconds. He needs to check whether he imagined it or not.
He played it again.
Again it was “too early”: the bed broke apart, the walls and door stayed clean, and the scream appeared while she still hadn’t sat up.
Viktor stopped it. Rewound again—slightly farther.
Third play.
Anya didn’t want to look at the bed anymore—it was too close to what she had felt herself. Her gaze slipped to the corner, to the numbers.
And she saw it so clearly that everything inside her went hollow: the seconds ran… and then they jumped. It had been 02:14:08—and suddenly it was 02:14:11.
Not a speed-up. Not a “skip.” A hole.
Viktor stared at the screen in a stupor—not like a viewer, but like someone who had just been shown the impossible.
He hit pause. The image froze.
Anya sat on the bed, staring at the frozen frame. Tears ran on their own, without sobs. She swallowed and understood she wasn’t afraid because of a nightmare. She was afraid because the recording hadn’t helped. It had made it worse.
Inside her, something was rising that wasn’t panic anymore—real, sticky fear. Not “I dreamed it.” Not “it’s my mind.” Something beyond both. Something she had let in that night through the door. Something that now knew how to answer.
“Don’t go,” she breathed, and her voice didn’t sound like her own—raw, stripped. “Please… not now.”
She gulped air and, on one breath, blurted it out:
“Or… take me with you. Just—I… I can’t…” She stumbled, gripping the edge of the blanket. “I can’t, I don’t want to. I can’t be alone right now…”
Viktor froze. For a second, at the sheer inappropriateness of it, the Architect flickered through him. But he looked at her: wet lashes, trembling lips, sweat at her temples, and hands still searching for purchase in the fabric.
She was not playing games, and she was not manipulating him. She was small, frightened, and almost absurdly honest in her weakness.
“It’s okay, Anya. I’m here.”
She stared at him with wide-open eyes, and his jaw tightened.
“You can’t… come with me,” he said softly. “That’s… not right.”
He took her hand—carefully, the way you take the hand of someone who might fall apart from a touch.
“But I’ll stay here. I’m not going anywhere until you fall asleep. Do you hear me?”
She nodded. Fast. Convulsively.
“Thank you…” she whispered.
He stood and moved a chair closer to the bed, but not right beside it—exactly far enough that his presence wouldn’t press on her, and so he could see the door. He sat down. Straightened. Almost military—but his gaze was softer than usual.
Anya lay back down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She was still trembling, but now there was someone alive in the room. That mattered more than any proof on a video.
She didn’t close her eyes for a long time. She blinked rarely, afraid to drop back under. Viktor was silent and simply sat there. Sometimes he spoke quietly:
“Breathe. One… two… one… two…”
“I’m here.”
About half an hour later, her breathing evened out. Her eyelids grew heavy. Anya drifted in jerks—sinking, then snapping back.
Viktor remained sitting there for a while longer, listening to her sleepy breathing. Then he carefully got to his feet, adjusted the edge of the blanket with a single motion—quietly, without waking her—and stopped only when he reached the door. For a second, he stood in the dark corridor and listened. Then he quietly closed the door and left.
The house became dark again. Only now that darkness no longer felt empty.