It wasn’t until the third day after moving into this old Victorian apartment building that Jack truly understood the weight of the landlady’s parting words.
That evening, the sky was as gloomy as a dirty rag. When the landlady pressed the keys into Jack’s hand, her fingers were as cold as if she’d just pulled them out of icy water. She locked eyes with Jack and whispered, “Remember, after 10 p.m., whether you hear marbles rolling on the ceiling or someone dragging heavy furniture, you must absolutely, absolutely not look up.”
At the time, Jack just brushed it off as an old woman’s quirk and nodded with a smile.
Nothing happened on the first night. On the second night, he worked overtime until the early hours of the morning and fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow, exhausted.
It wasn’t until late at night on the third day, when the clock struck exactly eleven, that it began.
“Tick… tick… tick…”
An extremely faint sound came from the ceiling directly above him, like a glass marble hitting the old wooden floor, followed by a grating scrape, as if someone were dragging a heavy solid-wood chair in slow circles around the room.
Jack’s eyes snapped open, and cold sweat instantly soaked through his pajamas. He remembered the landlady’s words, staring intently at the wall in front of him and deliberately holding his breath.
“Tap… tap…”
The sound stopped directly above him.
Immediately afterward came a spine-chilling silence. Jack swallowed hard, thinking it might just be the pipes in the old house expanding and contracting with temperature changes. He reassured himself that as long as he didn’t look, nothing would happen.
Just then, a drop of warm liquid fell onto his forehead.
Jack froze, slowly raising his hand to find it coated in a sticky, dark red substance. He trembled as he looked up—
There was no leak in the ceiling, nor any cracks.
A deathly pale, contorted face was pressed firmly against the ceiling like a gecko, hanging upside down and staring down at him. Those pupil-less eyes were fixed intently on Jack, and the corners of its mouth were stretched all the way to its ears.
And right above that face, a piece of loose, precariously hanging drywall was pressed against the ceiling.
“You… looked up.”
A hoarse whisper, barely recognizable as a human voice, sounded right against the tip of Jack’s nose.
The next day, when the real estate agent brought potential tenants to view the apartment, he discovered Jack was gone. There were no signs of a struggle in the room—only a blood-soaked, eerily human-shaped stain on the ceiling.
The agent sighed, jotted down a new rental listing in his notebook, and added a note in the remarks section: “After 10 p.m., no matter what sounds you hear, never look up.”
