The cursed summer house.

 My parents bought this cottage for a pretty decent sum. We lived in it for two seasons, landscaped it as much as possible, laid out a garden and even dug a small pool under the apple trees. But then my mother died, and the cottage was abandoned for several years. Over time, my father recovered and returned to the country again. However, he died four years later. They found him in a cottage with a stopped heart. A heart attack, that's what the doctors said.

I wasn't particularly interested in the cottage, but sometimes I went there, keeping it from falling into disrepair as much as possible, and several times I spent the night there either alone or with friends. I've never noticed anything like this behind this cottage and the surrounding area.

One day, after a hard week at work, I decided to spend the weekend in nature and went to the country. I spent Saturday lying on the grass under the apple trees and reading books, and in the evening I had a modest dinner and watched three and a half channels of an old TV. By the time the nightmare described below began, it was a windless but already cool August night. I turned off the TV and was debating whether to go to bed or read some more.

And then, in the midst of the universal silence, which you will never hear in the city, someone knocked on the door of my house. You will understand my horror, which twisted my stomach and made me feel colder than I have ever felt in my life, when I explain the following. The door of the cottage did not open into the alley, but into the garden. To get to the porch, it was necessary to enter the site through a gate, follow a path surrounded by plum trees and rose hips, and at the same time bypass the house almost around the entire perimeter. There was no other way to get to the door. The site was surrounded by a high grid, which was impossible to climb over, except to fly over.

I would have assumed that the neighbors were knocking. But it was hardly them, because, firstly, the nearest neighbors were sleeping two houses away from me, secondly, normal neighbors would still knock on the lighted window facing the alley or shout from the street, and thirdly, I personally closed the gate at night on an impressive hanging the lock is on the inside.

So, when I heard the knock on the door, I experienced inexpressible sensations, and, probably, I almost fainted from the overwhelming feeling of fear. While I was thinking about all this, the knock was persistently repeated. I crossed the room where I was watching TV, went into the room that served as an entrance hall, and froze at the door. There was silence on the porch, not a word, not a rustle.

I gathered all my willpower and asked in a trembling voice, "who is there?"

In response, I heard a faint unintelligible murmur and some kind of giggling. It was unbearably scary. I thought I was dreaming and having a nightmare, my head was blurred with fear, my eyes were foggy, and my ears were ringing. After about ten seconds, the mumbling stopped, and I heard a smacking sound, the kind of sound usually produced when voicing kisses in cartoons or cartoon movies.

I realized that something was wrong and I had to defend myself somehow. I don't know by what hitherto unnoticed forces I pulled the bedside table away from the wall and put it against the door. There was a commotion on the porch and continuous knocking on the door, mixed with louder muttering and smacking.

I jumped out of the room and realized that, in general, it was incredibly easy to get into the house through two wide windows - all you had to do was break the glass. The only solution for me turned out to be to climb into the attic and drag the ladder behind me, which was also not easy, and which I also unexpectedly lifted up in a couple of moments. I closed the hatch to the second floor and deftly pinned it down with a ladder and some bags of junk.

Once in the attic, I took a deep breath and looked around, desperately wondering what to do next. The knocking on the door did not stop. The rest of the sounds were also perfectly audible – the summer house was built from lightweight materials for the purpose of leisure, but not defense.

I saw a pale light in the attic window overlooking the garden and realized that the porch light was still on. The temptation was unbearable. I jumped up to this window, leaned my face against the dusty glass and tried to see what was happening at the threshold.

I couldn't see the door itself, but what I saw was enough for me to last a lifetime. I was on my knees, but my legs gave out so much that I fell to the floor and started crying. On the part of the porch that I could see, I saw a shapeless dark mass, shining black blue in the light of the lantern. It seemed to be swirling and bubbling, with some appendages constantly extending out of it and disappearing inside again. She was pulsating and agitated, and it seemed that these waves did not end at the volume, but went further through the air, poisoning everything with horror.

But that's not all. Next to the porch, in the shadows, I saw two frozen figures. Non-human figures. Long, thin, without arms, like giant matchsticks, they swayed slightly as if in the wind. I couldn't see their eyes, but I knew they were looking at me.

I jumped away from the window, fell on the boards and started crying. I heard the knocking stop and the door creak violently. I heard something crack–the door lock must have broken–and the bedside table rattled on the floor when it was moved. The muttering came from right below me. Through the cracks in the loosely fitted floorboards, I saw that the lights in the house had gone out. There was nowhere else to go.

And then a doomed determination appeared in me. In two jumps, I reached the window opposite, which overlooked the alley. Fortunately, it was opening. I barely remember getting out of it, jumping to the ground into the jasmine bushes and probably scratching myself badly. I don't remember very well how I climbed over the gate – I probably jumped over it. I remember running down the alley to the neighbors' house, where the lights were on, and shouting something, banging on the gate and afraid to turn around.

A neighbor came out to my screams, silently without words, dragged me over the fence, and then there was a gap in my memory. Apparently, I fell into a state of shock, and fragments of memories are quite difficult to put into a normal narrative. I woke up, or rather, I woke up on my neighbor's porch. The neighbor stood and looked at me attentively. I remembered the whole nightmare, and I started shaking.

The neighbor ordered me to get up and go with him. Together we went to my cottage. The gate was wide open, the door to the house was broken down, the gutted bedside table was floating in the pool in the garden. All the light bulbs and electrical devices in the rooms were smashed. The trapdoor to the attic was closed, but it was stained with what looked like dried slime.

The neighbor again said nothing, but took out a coil of copper wire. We began to stretch this wire at a level of three centimeters above the ground along the perimeter of the area along the fence. Under the gate, a neighbor ordered me to dig a hole about one and a half meters deep. He went to his house and brought something in a bag. He buried the contents of the bag under the gate, but I couldn't make out what exactly. I was slowly coming to my senses and tried to get an explanation from my neighbor. He cut me off: - It's better for you not to know. It won't happen again. But he asked me not to go outside the precinct on a full moon.… You'd think I'd even want to spend a day here, not just a night.

By the way, when I passed by my neighbor's cottage later, I saw a tarnished wire running along his fence. I didn't notice anything unusual under the gate.…

Since then, I have not spent the night at that cottage and unsuccessfully tried to sell it. My cousin came from another city several times, and with my reluctant permission, he spent the night at the cottage with his friends. He just laughed at the warnings about devilry and said that I was overworked at work. My brother didn't mention anything strange during these carousals. And I'm starting to think that my father's heart attack wasn't caused by natural causes.

Who these creatures were, what they wanted– the more I think about it, the worse I sleep at night.

However, after three years, I'm already starting to doubt that this happened to me. It seems to me that I made it all up – this is how my body tries to protect itself from shocking memories. The wire in the fence is torn in several places, and it would be necessary to replace it. But it seems like some kind of ridiculous joke to me, and I leave it as it is. I really want to believe that none of this happened.…