The Red in the Corner

My name is Elias Voss, and I grew up in the flat, misty province of Friesland, in a town where the canals froze solid each winter and the church bells tolled for the dead. When I was a child, I saw things I shouldn’t have seen. Pale faces pressed against my window at night, a woman in gray who stood at the foot of my bed, weeping silently. But as I grew, the veil thinned, and by the time I was thirteen, my visions faded, and I convinced myself they had been nothing but the fevered imaginings of a lonely boy.

Years passed. I became a man of logic, a history teacher with a fondness for obscure folklore, but I never truly believed in the supernatural again. Then, last autumn, I moved into a small apartment above a bakery in the heart of the old town. The building was ancient, with crooked beams and floors that groaned like tired bones. It was there, in the first week of October, that I realized I was not alone.

I couldn’t see them, not like before, but I felt them. There were two presences, as distinct as day and night. One was gentle, almost comforting, like a warm breath on the back of my neck when I was reading. The other was malevolent. It filled my room with a pressure that made my ears pop, and it never let me forget it was there. The angry one, I called it, for lack of a better name.

The angry one announced itself through small, insistent sounds. My gas stove, which I knew was off, would click and pop as if igniting. The heavy curtains, which hung motionless, would rub against the wall with a dry, reptilian hiss. And worst of all, from my collection of antique music boxes, came a scratching, as if something were trapped inside, trying to claw its way out. I checked every one of them, their mechanisms were pristine, their melodies clear. But at night, the scratching would start, relentless, and I would lie in bed, staring at the darkness, feeling unseen eyes on my skin.

One evening, in a fit of frustration and ill-advised curiosity, I took out my digital camera and snapped a photo of my room, hoping to capture evidence of my tormentor. The photo was ordinary at first glance, but when I enlarged it on my computer screen, my blood ran cold. In the far corner, where the shadows pooled deep and thick, there was a smear of vivid red. It was not a natural red, not the red of paint or cloth. It was the red of fresh blood, but it glowed with an inner luminescence, as if it were alive. And it seemed to be looking back at me.

After that night, the angry one’s behavior escalated. The noises became louder, more frequent. The scratching turned to gouging, and I feared my music boxes would be ruined. The gentle presence, which I had come to rely on, began to fade, as if it were being pushed out. I grew desperate. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. My students noticed the dark circles under my eyes, and I began to hear whispers in the hallways, but I didn’t care.

And then, about two months ago, the angry one vanished. Just like that. The pressure in the room lifted. The sounds stopped. The feeling of being watched disappeared. I should have been relieved, and I was, for a while. I slept deeply for the first time in weeks. But soon, a new dread crept in. The silence was too complete, too profound. The gentle presence, too, had gone. I was truly alone, but not in a peaceful way. It was as if the room itself was holding its breath, waiting for something.

I began to notice changes in my apartment. The music boxes, which I had wound and checked, began to play on their own, not with melodies, but with discordant notes that made my skin crawl. My reflection in the mirror seemed to lag a second behind my movements, and once, I swear, it smiled when I didn’t. The red in the photograph had grown, spreading from the corner across the wall, like a stain seeping through plaster. I didn’t dare look at it anymore.

Last night, I woke to a sound I had never heard before. A low, rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat, but slow and ponderous. It seemed to come from within my walls. I got up, my legs shaking, and pressed my ear to the cold plaster. The heartbeat grew louder, and I realized it was not inside the wall, it was behind me. I spun around, and there, in the corner of my room, the same corner from the photograph, a shape was forming. It was a figure, tall and thin, made of shadows and that terrible red. It had no face, but I could feel its gaze, burning into me.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The figure raised a hand, and in its palm, a music box materialized, one I had never seen before. It was black, with a lid of red glass. The lid opened by itself, and a melody began to play, a lullaby I remembered from my childhood, the one my mother used to hum to me before she died. Tears streamed down my face as the figure stepped closer, and the room grew cold, so cold I could see my breath.

Then, in a voice that was not a voice, but a thought pressed into my mind, it spoke. ‘You saw me. You captured my image. You tried to cast me out. But I am not the one who left. The kind one, the one you favored, is gone because I consumed it. And now, you will join it.’

The music box snapped shut with a click, and the figure dissolved into a cloud of red mist that swirled around me, entering my nose, my mouth, my ears. I felt it invade every part of me, a cold, searing pain that made me collapse to my knees. As I lost consciousness, I saw my own reflection in the window, and my eyes were the color of blood.

I do not know how long I lay there, but when I woke, the sun was streaming through the curtains, and the apartment was silent. I stood up, feeling strange, as if I were not entirely myself. I walked to the corner where the figure had been, and there, on the floor, lay one of my antique music boxes. It was open, and inside, instead of a tiny dancer, there was a small, red stone, like a ruby. I picked it up, and it was warm to the touch. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that this was all that remained of the kind presence, and that I would never be free of the red thing that now shared my soul.

Now, I sit in my classroom, trying to teach history, but all I can think of is the corner of my room, where the red stain has grown, and the music boxes that play their discordant tunes at night. I can feel it watching me, always, from the corner that is always just out of sight. And I know that one day, when I look in the mirror, I will see not my face, but the red in the corner, smiling back at me.