Seventeen-year-old Igor goes back to the ruined old school to test the strange voices and impossible sensations that have been haunting him for weeks.
The abandoned high school on the edge of town had become a dare, a legend, a place where bored kids sneaked in to scare each other. Tonight, it was Igor who cut across the cracked pitch, torchlight shaking in his hand. He told himself he was here for answers, but his pulse gave him away. If what had been happening to him for the past few weeks was real, then this place was somehow part of it.
The building loomed over him with blind windows and half-collapsed corridors, its walls stripped of colour and memory. Inside, the air felt wrong, charged, as if every broken tile and splintered desk were still holding onto something. Igor had started noticing it after training three days ago, when he clipped a lamppost on his bike and should have ended up bruised and shaken. Instead, the world had hummed. Voices had seeped through the air, faint at first, then unmistakable, as if the ruins of old places were speaking directly into his skull.
He crossed into the gymnasium, where the roof had partly caved in and rain had eaten the floor in dark patches. He closed his eyes and listened. Not to the silence, but through it. His own heartbeat sharpened. Then the room answered.
An echo rolled through the emptiness, but it was not empty at all. It carried fragments of thought, flashes of fear, scraps of memory that did not belong to him. Igor flinched as the air rippled around his outstretched hand, and for an instant the ruined gym filled with images: shouting, running feet, a slammed door, someone crying in the dark. One voice cut through the rest, clear and urgent.
Find the key before they come.
Igor's eyes snapped open. His torch beam jerked across the room and landed on a dented metal locker, its number almost worn away. Somewhere behind him, a door creaked.
He moved toward the locker anyway, every muscle tense, every nerve alive. Then came a hard metallic crash from the stairs leading down to the hall. Igor froze. The torchlight trembled in his grip as he reached for the locker handle, and in the sudden silence, something on the other side of the door began to breathe.