Heck

 Olka and I have been friends since school. Then they went to university, got married. Olya's parents are rich — when she got pregnant, they gave her a three-room apartment, so to speak, to kick into the future. A wonderful boy was born, named Vitaley in honor of Olga's grandfather, we affectionately called him Vitka. When the baby turned one year old, Olya and her husband moved into a renovated new apartment to start a happy life for a young family. But the baby immediately began to get sick there often, to be moody, to cry. Later, the tantrums reached such a point that the child somehow climbed over his crib and ran to his parents in the bedroom. Olya complained that now they had no peace from their son. He didn't want to stay in the room at all. Vitka was a completely normal child among his grandparents, but at home he seemed to be replaced.

One day, the mother gave the baby felt-tip pens and paper while she was cooking lunch. When I came to look, I was horrified: the son drew a perfectly clear scary devil sitting next to the bed, the whole sheet was covered with black lines mixed with yellow and red. Vitka couldn't really explain what he had drawn, he said the word "damn" and pointed under the bed.

So a year passed. The boy was still restless. At night, he consistently ran to his parents and lay down between them. He had already started talking pretty well and was constantly complaining about some devil in dark corners. Psychologists and psychiatrists unanimously argued that the boy sees negativity on TV and projects it into reality. Naturally, neither the experts nor the parents wanted to believe in mysticism. The mother was punished by any means to wean the child from the parental bed.

And so Olga took an extreme step. I read somewhere on the Internet that the child was put down and locked up, he cried, and then got tired and fell asleep. After talking to the child that there was no damn thing, that he had made it all up, she went out the door without turning off the night light and locked the boy.

It was quiet for 20 minutes, but then the boy started crying. Olga suffered, but somehow it is necessary to wean the child. With tears in her eyes, Olga sat and waited for the baby to calm down and fall asleep. But Vitka started shouting. Thinking that the neighbors would come running to swear, the mother opened the room. His son was sitting on the windowsill, pressed against the glass, his eyes were wet, and he was sobbing nervously. There were fresh bruises on his son's arms and legs. Stuttering, the child continued to say that a terrible devil was coming out from under the bed, which wanted to bite him and drag him along. The mother, exhausted by her son's phobias, ran to the doctors with the boy again tomorrow morning. Vitka saw nothing but cartoons, which were taken away by his son's parents. He also didn't look at the scary pictures. Where did this terrible fear come from in the child's head? The doctors were already throwing up their hands. Some believed that the parents were beating the baby, but he said that mom and dad had never beaten him, the neighbors described the family as positive — in general, there was no evidence except bruises. Mom and baby went to a sanatorium for a week to relax. There the boy was calm and slept on his own without shouting and scandals.

Upon arrival, everything resumed again. And then Olga couldn't stand it. On the advice of an elderly neighbor, she decided to consecrate the apartment. When the priest came, he immediately said that they lived in an unclean place, and that the boy should be taken care of.

It was a quiet evening after he left, and nothing foreshadowed trouble. Olga was preparing to meet her husband from a business trip, she put her son in her bedroom, and she was cooking. It was late when she discovered that there was not enough flour. She went out to the neighbors. As they were talking, suddenly there was an inhuman terrible scream, and immediately silence fell. Olya and her neighbors quickly returned to their apartment. What my mother saw left a deep impression on her whole life. Her dead little son was lying on the bed with his arms outstretched, his whole body covered with bites, his eyes rolled back in horror. Running up to the child, the mother discovered that the boy was not breathing.

The examination revealed multiple human bites on the baby's body. The investigation concluded that the parents were innocent of his death, and the woman had an alibi, because the boy was screaming right when she was talking to the neighbors from above.

Then Olya and her husband told me a big secret that they later found out about the apartment. Ten years ago, a man shot himself in it, who also suffered from nighttime meetings with the devil. Olya now believes in mysticism, she has not found any other explanation for the death of her child. They did not find any in the police either.

My friend says she still cries a lot for the baby. They sold the sinister apartment, and they sold it to people who didn't have children.