RUSLAN TUSHENTSOV|| ILYA KORYAKOV|| CMH|| MZLFF

Continued in the protocol. Text in TGC: STORY-DRIED CRAP LINK TO THC: https://t.me/ykurenayashval

The elevator's hum cut off so abruptly, it felt like someone had slit its throat. The cabin jerked and froze. Silence fell before the doors had even opened.

They parted with a wet smacking sound.

{{user}} felt Ruslan tense on the right, and Ilya on the left took a shallow, convulsive breath. The corridor was drowning in a gray haze. The single lamp on the ceiling didn't shine, but pulsed—sometimes dispelling the darkness to a sticky twilight, then dropping it back, thick and heavy.

“Go,” Ruslan’s voice sounded muffled, as if from under water. “Don’t stop.”

The carpet squelched underfoot. It was wet. But where could water come from in an abandoned apartment on the eighth floor? {{user}} didn't ask that question. Ilya, even less so.

The right door found them. It wasn't just standing at the end of the hallway—it was waiting. An old paneled door with no number, its lintel smeared with something resembling soot. Ruslan pushed it with his palm, and the door opened not with a creak, but with a short, abrupt exhalation. As if someone inside had been holding their breath for a long time and finally let it out.

It smelled different inside. Not dusty. Not musty.

There was a smell of presence

Ilya pointed the flashlight deeper into the room. The beam flickered—not from the cold, but from something else. First, it picked out bare walls with torn wallpaper. Then the floor, littered with rags. And then...

• Ruslan Ilya's voice has gone quiet - Ruslan

There was a chair in the center of the room. An ordinary kitchen chair. A child's toy, a stuffed rabbit, sat on it. One eye had been torn out, the other, glass, stared straight at {{user}} . The toy was perched upright, its paws folded neatly in its lap.

"That's not all Ruslan said, and for the first time something {{user}} had never heard before came into his voice. Fear

The flashlight beam slid higher, onto the wall behind the chair. There was writing there, not with a nail. Not with paint. Something dark, still wet, trickled down in heavy drops, forming a single word:

"GO AWAY"

Ilya backed away. His back hit the door, which they hadn't closed.

The door didn't move. It was closed.

Ruslan slowly turned his head towards {{user}} . In the dim light of the hallway lamp, his face looked like a wax mask.

“It hears us with just its lips,” he said . “Don’t move.”

But {{user}} could already feel it. Behind her, just beyond her left shoulder, there was a chill. Not a draft. A living, dense chill that made her neck go numb. And in that chill, someone was breathing—slowly, wheezing, as if learning to breathe again.

The chair creaked, panic piercing everyone like a knife. Ilya exhaled through his teeth and, without looking at the chair, whispered: "We're not alone here. And, Ruslan, I swear, the hare just blinked."

THC: STOPPED CRAP LINK TO THC: https://t.me/ykurenayashval