The Table’s Hollow

The first time Daria and her friends summoned the writer, it was a lark. They were sixteen, bored, and Daria had just moved into her older sister’s apartment on the second floor of a crumbling building in the old part of town. The floorboards creaked, the radiators clanged, and the wallpaper peeled in strips like dead skin. But it was cheap, and it had a certain charm. Their guts told them otherwise, but they dismissed it.

They used a board they’d made themselves, cardboard and a shot glass, and they called on a name they’d found in a tattered anthology: Boris, a minor poet of the Silver Age, known for his bleak verses. The glass slid to ‘yes’ immediately. They asked questions, silly ones, and Boris answered with wit and frustration. Then they grew tired, and one of them said, ‘We’re done. Goodbye.’ The glass spelled ‘niet.’ ‘No.’ They tried again, ‘Goodbye,’ and again, ‘niet.’ Panic set in. They yanked their fingers away, as if the glass might burn. After a long, silent minute, the glass slid to ‘goodbye’ on its own, and they scattered.

That night, Daria’s mother, who lived miles away, woke from a nightmare. In it, a gaunt man in a high-collared coat stood at the foot of her bed, reeking of dust and mothballs. He said, ‘Tell your daughter to never call me again. I could harm her.’ The words felt like ice in her bloodstream. She called Daria at dawn, her voice cracked. Daria listened, her stomach churning, but told her mother it was a coincidence, a bad dream.

Three weeks later, Daria’s resolve broke. She and the same friends tried again, laughing nervously, assembling the board. The glass moved instantly, not to ‘yes’ but to ‘why.’ They asked who it was. The glass spelled ‘you know.’ They tried to leave. The glass stayed, spelling ‘niet’ over and over, until they physically shoved the board away. Then it would stop. But every time they tried to leave, the glass would return to ‘niet.’ It only ended when they turned off the lights and ran out into the hallway. They did this again, a third time, a week later, and this time the glass slammed so hard against the board that it cracked.

After that, no one wanted to stay in that apartment. Visitors would enter, take a few steps, then get a sudden headache, a sense of wrongness, as if the air itself was rejecting them. They’d mutter an excuse and leave. Daria’s sister, tired of the unease, moved out. The apartment sat empty for six months, dust collecting like a funeral shroud.

When her sister decided to reclaim it, she asked Daria to clean. Daria reluctantly agreed. The place smelled of stale paper and rust. She started in the kitchen, scrubbing the greasy stove, sweeping the floor. She was on her hands and knees, wiping under the table, when she noticed a groove in the linoleum. She traced it. It was a circle, about a foot wide, and inside it, faintly, was a dark stain. She remembered the cracked glass, the last frantic session, the way the glass had spun before breaking. She’d never noticed the stain before. It looked like dried ink, but darker.

She leaned closer, and the hair on her arms stood up. The stain didn’t smell like ink. It smelled like cold stone and wet earth. She reached out to touch it, and her finger came away black. She wiped it on her jeans, but the black spot remained. She tried to scrub the stain off the floor, but the more she cleaned, the darker it became, and it also began to spread. She backed away, her heart thumping. She turned to flee, but the door to the kitchen swung shut on its own, the latch clicking with a final, heavy sound.

She turned back. The stain had grown. It was now the size of a dinner plate, and it was not a stain anymore. It was a dark, liquid mirror, reflecting not the ceiling but a night sky with no stars. She recognized that darkness. It was the darkness behind her eyelids when she tried to sleep those weeks. From the surface, a voice rose, dry as dust, speaking in a language she didn’t know, but she understood the meaning: ‘You stayed. You asked. Now you owe.’

The table began to tremble. The cupboard doors rattled. The grime on the floor seemed to writhe. Next to the dark patch, the shape of a handprint appeared in the dust, and it was not hers. She knew, in that moment, that the apartment had never been empty. The previous tenants, the visitors who’d left so quickly, they hadn’t left because they were uncomfortable. They had left because the thing under the floorboards was watching, measuring, waiting for one who would overstep again. She had overstepped three times.

A whisper, like the rustle of old pages, filled the room. ‘You called me,’ it said, ‘and I came. I came, and you are the only one who still speaks my name.’ The dark patch rippled, and from its center, a pale, long-fingered hand emerged, grasping at the air. Daria stumbled back, hitting the wall, the breath knocked out of her. The hand reached for the table leg, and the table began to slide toward her, pushed by an unseen force. She scrambled to her feet, but the door remained locked. She screamed, but no sound came out. The hand, now with an arm, elongated, impossibly thin, reached for her ankle.

The last thing she saw was the dark patch turning into a mouth, wide and bottomless, and the table’s hollow, dusty underside, where years of forgotten crumbs and a single, cracked shot glass lay, as if waiting for another game.

When her sister came to check on her an hour later, the apartment was silent. The floor was clean. The table stood in its usual place. But Daria was gone. There was no sign of struggle, except for a small, dark stain under the table, shaped like a handprint, and the faint smell of old paper and dust, which was the same smell as the room always had. Her sister never moved back in. She sold the building to a developer who planned to tear it down. But, as the workers began to rip up the floorboards, they found something in the gap beneath the kitchen linoleum: a notebook, yellowed, filled with Daria’s handwriting. The last page had a single word, repeated over and over, in a hand that was not hers: ‘niet.’