Someone was in my kitchen last night.
I moved to this apartment about a year ago, and I swear that I havenât gotten a single good nightâs sleep since then. Every day, itâs been the same: get up, shove some cheap crap down my throat, go to school or work, come home, veg out in front of the computer, try to sleep. And I do mean âtryâ when I say âtry to sleep,â because I have to try to block out the sound of scratching in the walls. Just thisâŠscratching, faint, but just loud enough that I know Iâm not imagining things. At least, I donât think I am.
Iâll be lying in bed, bundled up in maybe two or three thick blankets if itâs winter, and just about to fall asleep when it starts. Itâs always quiet at first, and I donât think I consciously register it at first, but I definitely notice it after a minute or two. Scratching. Just this scratching in the walls, under the floor, sometimes in the ceiling. It always gets louder, or closer, every time I almost manage to shut it out. It used to keep me up for two, three days at time before Iâd just pass out from sheer exhaustion. Iâm taking sleep aids now, butâŠIâm not sure thatâs a good idea anymore.
I used to think it was rats in the walls, and of course I reported it to the landlord. As run down as the rest of the apartment is, with its water stains, ancient plumbing, and unreliable furnace, my landlord takes any kind of infestation very seriously. No one wants to get a reputation for having bed bugs and rats in their buildings, after all. I think it took him maybe two, three days to get an exterminator in to take a look at the apartment. Not that it did any good; the exterminator spent maybe two or three hours scouring every nook and cranny, poking his nose into every dark space behind and beneath my furniture in search of even one scrap of evidence that some kind of pest was in there.
Nothing. He didnât find so much as one whiff of a rat or a cockroach, not one stray hair or tell-tale dropping. He must have thought I was a crazy, because I pushed him to look just one more time, to stop just short of actually tearing open the walls, but he couldnât find a thing. So when I heard the scratching in the walls again that night, I tried to tell myself that it was all in my mind, that I could just will it to stop.
It didnât, of course. I wouldnât be writing this if it had just been that easy. It just kept happening, keeping me up every night, and Iâd lay there, exhausted but wide awake and hoping, praying, that it would just stop. I even started leaving traps and poison around the apartment, but nothing would ever be taken in the morning. I think thatâs about when thingsâŠstarted getting worse, actually. I think I might have pissed itâŠthemâŠoff by trying to kill them.
It wasnât just scratching in the walls anymore; Iâd hear things moving around outside my bedroom, like animals walking around, or things being moved around on the table or counters. Iâd hear the quiet bump of something being put down, or the shuffle of something being pushed or dragged, but nothing would be out of place. Itâs like someone was re-arranging my stuff at night, then deciding that they liked the way I had it better. I bought a camera to try to catch whatever it was in the act; I wanted to buy more so that I could have one in every room, but I could only afford the one. Since most of the movement seemed to be coming from my kitchen, thatâs where I set the camera.
I set it in the corner where itâd see most of the room, turned it on, went to bedâŠand woke up to find that the camera had gone missing. Just the camera. The tripod was still there, completely undisturbed, but the camera was gone. When I was looking for it, I found a small, neat brown envelope tucked in my couch cushions that I sure as hell hadnât put there. My hands actually shook and I could feel my heart pounding against my chest as I picked it up and turned it over. No address. No signature. Not even a name. I donât know why I was expecting these things; maybe I was just trying to find some strand of normalcy to cling to, some safety line to grab onto in the face of thisâŠinsanity. I opened it, nearly tearing it in two because my hands were shaking so badly, and I nearly pissed myself when I saw what was inside: the memory card.
I didnât even bother packing my bags before I left. I just had to get the hell out of there, away from whoever had decided to pay me a âvisitâ in the night. All I grabbed was my wallet, my phone and my laptop; the wallet so I could at least get a motel room for the night, and my laptop so I could see what the fuck was on the card. The second I was settled in this crappy, cheap little motel room with a bed that probably housed STDâs still unknown to the scientific community, I popped in the card. There was a single file on it, spanning from midnight to 4 am.
Thatâs when they took the camera. Or at least thatâs when they came in and turned it off. Most of the video was just dead air. Nothing was moving, nothing was being moved. I couldnât see anything that could explain why I had heard things moving around all night, not a person or an animal or objects moving by themselves. I couldnât believe it; not one thing was out of place the entire night. Nothing fell, nothing slid around. Nothing. I skipped to about 10 minutes before the end of the video, hoping to God that Iâd get something to prove that I wasnât going insane, but dreading the possibility of actually seeing whoever, or whatever, was responsible for tormenting me.
The kitchen was completely dark except for the night light Iâd plugged in to keep myself from running into things on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Well, that was the idea, anyway; you can guess how often I willingly got up to use the washroom in the middle of the night once everything started happening. The light cast this kind of greenish glow on everything, more giving shapes to the shadows instead of really lighting up the room. I couldnât see anything out of the ordinary, but it was so close to the end of the video that I didnât want to fast forward in case I missed something.
9 minutes. Still nothing, but I swear I saw the light dim ever so slightly.
8 minutes. Did a shadow just move? No, I decided; probably. It looked too similar to how it was before.
7 minutes. Was that a thump in the background, or just a digital artifact from the mediocre microphone?
6 minutes. Did the camera just shift a little?
5 minutes. The camera is trying to focus on something. Thereâs nothing there, but itâs trying to focus on something.
4 minutes. The ambient noise has just cut out. The video is completely silent, but checking the audio information shows that the camera was recording every sound in its range the entire time.
3 minutes. The ambient sounds are back, but I swear theyâre louder.
2 minutes. I definitely heard something moving out of frame. Itâs quiet, like it doesnât want to be heard, and it sounds very close to the camera. I think itâs behind it.
1 minute. The night light goes off. It takes the camera a second to adjust to the complete darkness, and everything is still much darker in comparison to the rest of the video when it does.
30 seconds. The camera shifts just a little, like something bumped the tripod.
20 seconds. I think I can hear somethingâŠbreathing.
10. The breathing is replaced byâŠstatic. I want to call it static, but itâs more like these distorted, animalistic noises mashed together and forced through some digital filter. Fuck.
5. Something moves out of the shadows. It looks like a person, but the way it moves it like itâs a part of the wall detaching itself and gliding toward the camera. It justâŠstands there, staring straight into the lens for a few seconds. I say âstaring,â but only in the sense that itâs facing the camera. I canât see any details. No clothes, no distinction between its limbs and its body, no face. Itâs like itâs just this shadow existing where it shouldnât be able to, standing there like it has some solid existence, like itâs not some violation of physics.
1 second. The entire frame just goes dark. I go back to examine it more closely, and I realize that this thing had actually covered the lens with its hand because I can see a couple of small slivers of the background between its fingers.
I canât go back. This thing, this fucking thing, is still there, and itâs fast. I check the video, and it justâŠthere was no transition between it standing and it covering the lens. One frame itâs standing and staring, and the next itâs right up in the camera. I looked through the rest of the video, and this goddam thing was standing in the shadows the whole time, just standing there perfectly still. I was still technically in the room for the first few seconds because I had to walk from the camera to my bedroom after turning it on. I was in the room with this thing, and I never saw it.
Iâve been watching the shadows in my motel room for a few hours now, and I donât think itâs followed me, but how can I be sure? Can I even see this thing with my own eyes? I donât know what to think anymore. I think I can hear someone pacing in front of the door, but that might just be a cleaning lady or another guest. I just wish theyâd leave already. Itâs been an hour, and they havenât stopped pacing.
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I love this story and the ending!
I like that there really is no real description of the something. Nor do we ever find out what it is or anything like that. Let the mind fill in the details.
This was pretty good, but I feel like there is no conclusion to the story. It’s as if the story ends with the climax.
I also really enjoyed the timeline aspect. Great pasta.
Eh it was alright. Not very spooky to me, too many creepy pastas with the same sort of theme. Of course I’ve been an avid reader for years so I could just be used to spooky now.
Timeframe breakdown isn’t something I see very often. It gives a great eerie anticipation.