The main text is in English.
One hot summer day, my friends Anton and Andrey and I went for a walk as usual. The weather was wonderful; staying indoors on such a beautiful day would have been a real sacrilege. We lived in a small summer village, so there were many abandoned houses everywhere, which we loved to explore, imagining ourselves as great archaeologists studying the ancient ruins of an unknown city.
People often buy summer houses, hoping to go on vacation to the village, but not everyone manages to find free time or pay off their debts, so there were plenty of abandoned houses to keep us busy exploring them for a lifetime.
There were only three people in my gang: quiet and calm Anton, always active Andrey, and me. With these goofballs, you could go to hell and not be afraid of anything on your way, which, in fact, we did, descending into the darkest basements of our village's abandoned houses. We explored many summer houses together and did not want to stop there. In our dreams, we imagined becoming famous archaeologists and exploring the ruins of great ancient cities, searching for the most incredible artifacts of antiquity.
Anton kept track of all our great discoveries, and Andrey was always the first to run and find incredible artifacts that could be borrowed for our museum of antiquities. But after that hot summer day, we no longer dreamed of becoming archaeologists, we no longer dreamed of studying ancient cities, and we never explored the abandoned houses of our village again.
Recently, we started exploring a new house, as Anton called it, a house made of white brick. An old rusty lock hung on the front door, and it looked quite flimsy, so it could be broken with a hammer without much effort. There were no other doors in the house, and all the windows were intact, and we did not dare to break them; who knows, someone might see and report to our parents, and then we would be under house arrest. We couldn't take that risk. And the lock was already rusty, it would soon fall off. No one would notice how a couple of goofballs would knock it off with a single hammer blow. From the street, the interior of the summer house was difficult to see, the view was obstructed by white mesh curtains, so popular with the older generation, but at least some outlines of the room were visible through these curtains. The main room after the front door was quite empty: just an old wardrobe. Looking through other windows, it was clear that there was a second room besides the main one, but where exactly the entrance to it should have been was not entirely clear to us; perhaps, as Anton suggested, that old wardrobe blocked the passage. Who thought of blocking the passage to the second part of the house in this way, and for what purpose, was unclear. From the interior of the second room, we could only make out an old, probably creaky bed, as its appearance was quite depressing due to the thick layer of rust it had accumulated over many years of standing in this old house.
Andrey volunteered to bring the hammer. His father had a workshop, and there were no problems with tools. Gathering that summer day, we set off to commit our act of vandalism in the name of great discoveries. Upon arrival, Andrey, being the strongest in the team, began to assess the lock, the weight of the hammer, and his strength to quietly and with one blow knock off the old lock. Anton and I took positions on the property so that no passerby would notice us. A light and short metallic ring sounded, and the lock, breaking into two parts, flew in different directions. The passage to the ancient halls was open, and we hurried into the house so that no one would see us.
There was enough sunlight filtering through the mesh curtains to reveal the interior of the house. Dust and cobwebs, which were almost part of this hall, gave this place a truly old look. The shabby old wallpaper and peeling ceilings indicated that this place had been abandoned for a long time, and only the white curtains were still as snow-white, though covered in dust from top to bottom. The old Soviet-style wardrobe was empty, except for a couple of dried cockroach corpses on its bottom and a daddy longlegs spider skin, left on a dusty cobweb in the corner.
Examining the room and the wall behind the wardrobe more closely, we concluded that everything was as Anton had suggested: behind the wardrobe was the passage to that very second room of the house. Now, we faced a new task: somehow, we needed to move the wardrobe. Leaning all together with our backs against the wall and our feet on the right side of the wardrobe, we put all our efforts into toppling this obelisk that blocked our passage to the mysterious part of the ancient structure, and the obelisk yielded.
The wardrobe fell, opening the passage to the second part of the house, raising a layer of centimeter-thick dust into the air, momentarily depriving us of the opportunity to see the scene of the next room... It was just as dusty, cobweb-covered as the main room of the house. In the middle of the room stood a bed on creaky springs, long corroded. On the bed, in a dog-like pose, was a creature. Horror froze in our eyes, none of my friends or I could even move from the stupor that gripped us at that moment. The creature looked human, but it was so emaciated that it barely resembled a person. It was a hideous-looking creature, resembling a dried-up corpse; it stared at us with its dead eyes. A terrible smile was frozen on its face, revealing a mouth full of rotten black teeth. And it jumped, bounced on the old creaky bed, but no creak was heard; not a single sound. It silently bounced on such a springy bed, contemplating our amazement, our horror, and apparently deriving immeasurable pleasure from it.
I was the first to come to my senses. Grabbing my friends by the wrists, I rushed to the door, dragging them behind me, kicked the door open, and threw Anton and Andrey outside, slamming the door shut. All this time, the creature continued to silently jump on its bed, not taking its empty black eyes off us.
Later, we told our parents about it, and surprisingly, they believed us and forbade us from visiting the abandoned buildings of our village again, and we, in fact, no longer wanted to explore the old abandoned houses that we once had such a great attraction to.
P.S. Thanks to Daniil for the great idea for this story.
Author: Isergil Van Der Velde.