A mustachioed police officer with the rank of lieutenant asked us about the neighbors from this apartment, about which of us had called the police, scribbled something in a notebook and knocked on the ill-fated brown door. As I expected, there was no response. The policeman loudly warned that they would break down the door if the owners did not open it. Zero reaction. "Break it down!" the mustachioed man shouted, and one of the Berkut soldiers slammed a sledgehammer into the door. The lock shattered, and the door slowly opened and began to crawl towards us. The guy with the sledgehammer yanked open the door and stood behind it, looking puzzled at his colleagues, who, instead of breaking into the apartment, stood rooted to the spot.…
I pinched my side. No, it was clearly not a dream. The passage behind the door was bricked up. It was so tightly packed, only at the top there was a black gap about three centimeters wide. The guards exchanged glances, and then glared at us angrily: some at me, some at Alyona. We just spread our hands, and the lieutenant, twirling his finger at his temple, was about to turn around and walk down the stairs, when a distinct stifled sob was heard from the apartment.
We all turned to the brickwork at once. The lieutenant turned white and gave the order to smash the masonry. The guy with the sledgehammer persistently pounded the bricks for about ten minutes, sleepy, angry neighbors ran to the sound, demanding to stop the noise immediately. Most of the tenants present in the entrance were my age or slightly older, and they could not say anything about the apartment's inhabitants when the lieutenant questioned them. The lieutenant quickly signed me, Alyona, Dashka, and three other guys, who had floated out of our apartment like an obsession, as witnesses, and the Berkut soldiers, shining flashlights into the darkness outside the door, disappeared into the doorway, creaking the broken brick with their boots.
Behind them, clutching a Makar's service pistol, the lieutenant stepped into the darkness. Two sullen police officers stayed with us. Footsteps could be heard from the apartment, the clatter of special forces equipment, and the beams of lanterns flashed in the doorway, picking out bizarre silhouettes from the darkness. There was a quiet "All right, stand down" — and one by one the tall Special Forces soldiers came out of the opening, and then the mustachioed lieutenant. His shirt was smeared with something black.
"Do you have a flashlight?" The moustached policeman asked me. I nodded and brought my powerful camping flashlight, and I also took a large circular lamp with a built-in radio. We entered the doorway with the police officers, the witnesses, and one Berkut soldier.
— It's neat here. Keep your light on," the lieutenant warned, and I followed his advice. There were charred floorboards, some shards and fragments, crooked rusty nails underfoot. I looked around. The walls were covered in soot, but there were fragments of antique wallpaper with silly flowers under the ceiling. My heart was pounding alarmingly, and I wrapped my free arm around Dashka, who was hobbling next to me, nervously gnawing on a nail, looking around with wide eyes.
"Now, someone explain to me," the lieutenant began, turning to face us, "what the fuck is going on here?"
Naturally, we couldn't explain anything. The police officers let us go to our apartments, having previously collected the data and sealed the apartment with a brown door. The next morning, I called my grandmother, from whom I rented an apartment. She agreed to come and tell me everything she knows.
We gathered in our kitchen: me, Dasha, Alyona and her son Kostya, the guys who were signed up as witnesses, our district police officer and the lanky investigator who was assigned to lead the case. Everyone was waiting for Baba Nadia, the owner of our apartment. She arrived much later than promised. I sat down at the table, dripped some drops for myself, and drank. The policemen were nervously sorting through the papers, Alyona and Kostya went to our gym to play. Baba Nadia began her story.
I will omit unnecessary details of family life and the origin of Nadezhda Pavlovna's family, I will leave only what is connected with the apartment. Anyway, her sister and her husband lived in that apartment. Her husband worked at the factory, and she drove a tram. One day, my husband was injured in the foundry — his face and hand were burned, so much so that the skin on his face was badly burned, and only one eye remained. The arm was amputated altogether. Medicine did everything it could at that time, but the young man was crippled for life, and, as they say, "the roof went off." He started drinking, he beat his wife, because she was pretty, but he turned into a monster. I loved him, no matter what, I felt sorry for him. When he beat me, I used to run out of the apartment in my clothes, but I always came back.
And then one day, when he was really raging, the unfortunate girl ran away from home and hid until morning with her sister, Nadezhda Pavlovna, that is, in our apartment. Before dawn, her husband broke plates, broke furniture, knocked on the door of Nadezhda's apartment, but she did not open it, and ordered her sister to sit quietly. In the morning, Baba Nadia went to work, and her sister returned to her house, to her husband. When Nadezhda came home for lunch, she saw a fire truck, an ambulance and a police bobik near the entrance. It turned out that the son-in-law first tortured his wife, cut her face and chest with a knife, and then tied her to a radiator and set fire to the apartment. Both spouses died.
After that incident, an old brown door was put in the apartment, donated by one of the neighbors, but soon the tenants in the stairwell began to complain that it rattled and slammed from the draft at night, and glass was put in the broken windows, and where there was not enough glass, they nailed the same baby blanket to the frame. The passage was bricked up so that it wouldn't blow and stink of burning. The apartment has not been entered for twenty years.
After listening to the rest of the grandmother's story, the young district policeman laughed, and the investigator, with a deliberately serious look, said: "We'll figure it out." I escorted the law enforcement officers to the door, and all our guests left, except Baba Nadia. I closed the door and out of the corner of my eye I saw the landlady in the kitchen, I heard her saying softly to someone: "Well, what are you... hush, hush... It's all over. I'll come to you soon too..." Nadezhda Pavlovna noticed me and smiled sadly, going home (she lived somewhere in the private sector).
"If you move out this month, I won't charge you," Baba Nadia said goodbye to us and hobbled to the bus stop. When I returned to the apartment, I noticed oblong black spots on the carpet in the hallway. I took a closer look and realized that these were bare footprints somewhere in size 36. I felt sick.
The next day, we moved out of that apartment, and my old workmate moved in almost immediately. Then he told me that he also heard sobbing outside the door in the stairwell, and rustling, banging and dissatisfied booming grumbling behind the wall. It was only when he was informed of Baba Nadia's death that the sobbing stopped, as did the extraneous sounds behind the wall. And that apartment with the brown door was bought out for some kind of office.…
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