Dear friend,

This is no chain letter, hoax or prank.

It is a sincere warning about your home and the entity which dwells within.

Your home has been haunted for quite some time.

I am sorry that I could not personally deliver this document.  I did not even post it myself.  The postmark on the envelope will not help you, should you ever attempt to locate me.  When this letter is complete, I shall entrust a friend in another country with repackaging and sending it on my behalf.  This letter also may or may not have been translated from its original language.

You do not know me.   You must never know me.

Neither do I know you, beyond your name, address and appearance.  I have seen you in person but you have not seen me.

Think back to the day that you moved into your home.  I contrived to pass by as you stood outside.  I saw your face, but you did not so much as glance my way.  I did not stop moving: I simply committed your face to memory and departed before you became aware of my presence.

Why did I want to see you?

I suppose my conscience drove me to it.  Just as it compels me to finally write this letter.

I wanted to see exactly who I was passing the entity on to.

Chances are, you already know this thing only too well.  I may be preaching to the converted, in which case I hope you will at least draw comfort from the fact that my partner (who I shall refer to as Tom, although he may or may not be male) and I once knew your misery.

The entity exists within your home.  You may not be aware of this yet and I suppose you may not thank me for informing you.  But please trust me: it is present.

You see, Tom and I lived at your address in the years prior to your arrival.

I feel for you, my friend, because I am partly responsible for your situation.  You are stuck with this apparition.  I am afraid I cannot tell you how to free yourself.  I can only pass on certain warnings and ideas for coping with it and keeping matters somewhat under control.

Tom and I were happy enough when we moved in.  The location was fine for our purposes.  I will not disclose our professions, but we worked in very different sectors.  Everything seemed to be going our way.  We had been together for seven years.  We had each other.  We had our health.

You only tend to appreciate such things when they are gone.

I was pleased with most aspects of our new home.  The kitchen sink could be difficult at times, as you may also have discovered, but what really bothered me was sleep.  I had always been a sound sleeper: I never even had cause to think about it.  So after a year of residence there, I was surprised when my nocturnal patterns took a turn for the worse.

I would wake in fits and starts throughout the night.  I was no longer getting the deep sleep, the ‘REM sleep’.

In the dead of night I would stir, blink and wonder why I was suddenly conscious.  Sometimes Tom would already be awake and we’d peer at each other, bleary and confused.

Often as I was drifting off to sleep, I would snap awake, my whole body jolting.  Other times I would feel paralysed while asleep and had to struggle to wake myself back up.  It felt like I was drowning, breathless, lost in the pitch-black fathoms of the night.

Since Tom shared my symptoms, I was reassured.  Selfish I know, but truthful.

We tried turning the mattress over.  We tried new pillows.  A new duvet.  Nothing changed the apparent fact that we had lost the ability to sleep well.

I am sure much of this will sound familiar to you.  If not, then believe me it will.

Two years after moving in, Tom and I were far more fatigued than we should have been, even given how hard we worked.  Some mornings we would feel as though we had not slept at all, suffering from headaches and barely able to peel open our eyes.

Tom would always call it “the unfair hangover”, since we drank moderately.  Or at least, we did when this all began.  Later on, I would often drink heavily just to help myself through the night.

I am already surprising myself by giving you more detailed information than I had intended.

When I began this letter, I wanted to briefly and bluntly outline your situation, offer you some useful advice and get out of here.  Yet writing this document is a potent source of catharsis for me.  Maybe I will give you a full account of our experience.  I have time on my hands and here, in my part of the world, the day is young.

So.  Those unfair hangovers became a daily occurrence.  We learned to keep Ibuprofen on bedside tables to deal with the morning headaches.  When we awoke feeling like death, knowing we’d have to deal with the latest heavy schedules at work, strong coffee became our saviour.  If I could, I would have eaten the raw coffee beans.

My lack of sleep gave everything an unreal tinge and a sluggish inertia.

I seized upon a diagnosis of carbon monoxide poisoning, but subsequent, hastily-arranged professional tests led to nothing.  I installed a carbon monoxide detector by the fridge, which continued to produce negative results.

Tom and I both made silly mistakes at work.  Cracks were really beginning to show.  In my line of work in particular, this was unacceptable.  It would cause major problems and put other people’s lives at risk.

One night before bed, I found myself staring into the bathroom mirror, surrounded by darkness.  Virtually in a state of fugue, I barely realised what I was doing.

I peered into my own reflected eyes, vaguely wondering when Tom and I might grab a decent night’s sleep like everyone else in the world.

In a flash, those mirrored eyes transformed.  They became blank with a grim-blue tinge, staring right back at me.

I recoiled, afraid to meet that unearthly gaze again.  Gripping the sink, I struggled to calm my breathing.

When I finally dared to look back into the glass, my eyes had returned to normal.  I blinked and the reflected eyes followed suit, making me sag with relief.

It struck me just how dog-tired I was.  I was seeing things which were not there.

As I lay beside Tom, I silently debated telling him about the mirror.  I chose not to.

A few nights later, I heard him yell something in the bathroom.  Dashing through, I found my partner with his hands over his face and his back to the mirror.  He was actually crying, which disturbed me.  I’d always thought of Tom as strong and reined-in.  Exhaustion had rendered us overwrought, forcing our emotions to the surface.

Coaxing his hands away from his face, I gently encouraged him to open his wet eyes, but he would not.

“They changed,” he said, gently sobbing as we embraced.  “My eyes.”

I hated the thought of him feeling alone.  “Mine did too.  They became... blank, right?”

Tom looked so astonished and shaken.

“We’re just tired,” I said.  “That’s all it is.”

We practically collapsed onto the mattress and drifted off into sweet, precious sleep.  Sadly, Tom and I now did little else on that bed.

The next thing I knew, maybe two hours later, there came a gurgling, choking sound.

A bizarre, grating rasp.

I jerked awake with a start.  As usual, I didn’t know why I had woken up.

Threads of moonlight illuminated great strips of the room.  Everything was so very silent, as though we were in a vacuum.

There was a strange, heavy feeling in the air.

Wondering why I felt so apprehensive, I cautiously studied the room.

Then I saw it.

The small, dark figure.

It was little more than a silhouette.  The silhouette of what resembled a small child, perched on the foot of the bed with its back to me.

As if sensing my gaze upon it, the figure seemed to drop smoothly, soundlessly down towards the floor, out of sight.

My whole body seized up, the bed sheets bunched tightly in my hands.

I stared down the bed’s length at the spot where the figure had been.

Had it really been there or was it a shadow, a trick of the light?  Was I dreaming?

I wondered what the hell to do.

Mindful not to wake Tom, I gently shrugged the covers aside and grabbed a torch from under the bedside table.  Being the careful type I always kept one there, wherever I was in the world.

As my bare feet touched the floor (which was carpeted in those days – you or an agent may since have had this removed), I shivered, expecting something to grab me.  When nothing did, I rose to my feet.

I crept around to the foot of the bed and examined the area where I’d seen that figure.  Even shone the torch on it.  I surveyed the floor and everywhere else I could think of.

I found nothing.  I had no idea of what I was even looking for.  But in the pit of my stomach, there was an unquestionable disturbance.

Had I witnessed the supernatural?

No.  That ‘thing’ at the end of the bed had been an illusion, made all the more tangible by my feeble state of mind.  No sense in adding to my problems.

Over some much-needed coffee, a friend suggested that Tom or I might be snoring.  We hadn’t considered this possibility as neither of us had ever experienced the issue.  Like Tom, I kept myself trim enough and it seemed to me that excess body weight was a primary cause of snoring.

Research, however, quickly brought me the facts: snoring could be borne of several factors, including smoking (which neither of us did), sleeping position and allergy.

I decided to run a test.  My God, how I wanted snoring to be the answer.  This nightly problem threatened to wreck our livelihoods and relationship.  Tom and I were become short-tempered.  Our usual saintly patience for each other’s defects was running low.  One evening, what would normally have been a good-natured debate over the washing-up became a screaming row.  Tom even smashed a plate on the cooker.

Devouring more research, I was concerned to read about Sleep Apnoea, a disorder involving abnormal pauses of breath.  It could even prove fatal.  I remembered that choking, gurgling sound, which had stopped abruptly as I awoke.  It seemed to fit the bill, which made me wonder if I did have this illness.  Perhaps I really was snoring all night, waking both myself and Tom up on a regular basis.

I decided to record us both asleep, for the duration of the night.  This would surely find us some answers.

Having prepared the recording device, I tried to sleep.  My memories dredged up that shadow-child on the foot of the bed.  With a shudder, I tried to forget him.  Medical science could, and would, explain all this.  It had to.

Morning sun bled into the room.  Having had a typically splintered and fruitless slumber, I dragged myself out of bed, deciding to let Tom sleep in.  He really needed the rest, such as it would be.

The device presented me with a crude graph of the night’s readings.  A thin line, like a mountain range, denoted regular spikes of noise throughout.

I surveyed the recording, winding my way through and playing the audio at random intervals.

Silence...

Silence...

More silence...

And then, about an hour in: those hideous, all-too-familiar sounds of gurgling and choking.  There was an increasing urgency to them.

God, was that really me?

I very much wanted the answer to be “Yes”.

“Yes” would have been infinitely easier.

But it sounded nothing like me.  It sounded nothing like Tom.

It had an altogether different tone.  A higher pitch.

It sounded, for all the world, like a child.

Those night-graphs all looked the same.  Regular spikes, peaking roughly every half an hour.  Sounds of gurgling and choking iced my blood.  I couldn’t play these recordings to Tom: he was already going crazy trying to maintain his focus on work and I refused to compound that stress.

The more I played the recordings through headphones, the more I noticed a trend.  Each outburst of breathless noise eased off after about two minutes, becoming calmer... only to return with a vengeance half an hour later.

I had no idea what this meant, but I was soon to find out.

One night, somewhere around 4am, I found myself in that hazy mental limbo in which one is neither fully asleep nor fully awake.

Fear uncoiled inside me as I heard the gurgling, the choking.  No longer through headphones, but right here in the room.

Being conscious this time, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t making this sound.

That taut feeling again: the sense of a storm about to break.

Becoming more vividly alert with every second, I came to sense a presence, directly above me and all too close.

Oh my God.

My entire body rippled with dread.

I inhaled deeply, but only the thinnest air reached my lungs.  I couldn’t breathe properly!

Raw terror kept my eyes tightly shut.

Something was in the air right above me.

Even as I tried to draw oxygen, it was sucked right back out of my mouth.

I gasped in horror, feeling my lungs twitch as the very air was stolen from them.

Writhing, full of dread, I just wanted this thing away from me.  Flinging the bed sheets over my head, I rolled violently to one side, briefly fell through space, then felt the dulled impact of landing on the floor.

I must have been crying out.  Next thing I knew, Tom was down there too, carefully unwrapping me.  He was full of comforting words, as if I’d had a bad dream.

I inhaled so greedily that I began to hyperventilate.  Now that the storm had passed, the air tasted so fresh and vital.

Although I paid cheery lip service to Tom’s explanation, this was absolutely no dream.

I am sure you can imagine how I felt after that.

I had never felt so afraid.

There followed a foolhardy phase in which I tried to avoid sleep altogether.

I would load up on coffee and caffeine pills, then sit by the bed, rocking to and fro, watching over Tom in case our spectre returned.

I lasted two nights before feeling deranged.  The quality of my sleep had already been drastically reduced, so to wilfully go without was dangerous.

The night had a habit of over-amplifying the slightest sound.  I would over-react to each and every one, jolting and goggling at shadows.  I was becoming a basket case.

On both of those nights, that pre-storm tension fogged the air again.  I could feel it pressing against my chest.

During the second night, glass smashed in the bathroom.  Miraculously, this didn’t wake Tom.

Running through and turning on the light, I was alarmed to see that the mirror had come crashing down.  There were big shards of glass in the sink and on the floor.

Good.  I had hated the mirror ever since seeing the eyes in it.  Plus, this incident gave me something to do.  I spent time using a dustpan and brush to clear up the glass.

In desperate need of sleep, I decided to surrender.  I really had no choice.

Padding back towards the bed, I froze at the sight of a small shadowy figure which appeared to sit astride Tom’s chest, its face close to his.

It was unmistakably a child.

A child which seemed to be made of shadows.

I opened my mouth but couldn’t shake any sound loose.

The thing on Tom’s chest jerked its head towards me.  Those sickly blue eyes were only too familiar, being the ones I had seen in the mirror.

Against all instinct, I darted towards the bed, not knowing what I was doing.  I realised this thing was not on Tom’s chest: instead, it hovered inches above him.

With a thick, breathy wheezing sound, it seemed to fly apart, like scattering crows.  Melting away into the black, it was nowhere to be seen.

Tom woke with a start, confused and breathless.

He saw me and jumped half out of his skin.

“Jesus,” he said. “You gave me a fright.”

As I climbed into bed, I flashed him a reassuring smile.  God only knew how convincing it was.  My heart was pounding so hard, I was surprised he couldn’t hear it.

Switching on a small side-lamp, I curled up behind my partner, tightly wrapping my arms around him, as much for my sake as his.  Thanks to my raised, insistent heartbeat, I would inevitably now stay awake until dawn.

The day was only just getting started.  It would be the very worst of my life.

When Tom woke, he felt nauseous and dizzy.  I hadn’t known him to take a sick day off his job in years, so knew he must be feeling bad in order to do so today.

As I left for work, he was planning to catch up on sleep.  I didn’t like the idea of him sleeping while I wasn’t around, but couldn’t justify telling my ill partner not to rest.  Besides, it was daytime.  Everything was fine in the day.

At work, I had to fight to concentrate.  Not solely due to my lack of sleep, but because the supernatural had entered our lives.  This changed everything.  I had always sat on the fence, neither denying nor believing the paranormal’s existence.  And now I knew it was real.  There was some kind of apparition in our home – now your home, may God save you – which visited us on a nightly basis, doing whatever the hell it did.

Stealing our breath?

I was put me in mind of the old wives’ tale about cats and babies.  Around the 18th Century, cats were believed to steal babies’ breath as they lay in the crib.

I batted that image away and tried to focus on the job at hand.

And while I did that, Tom died.

I found him on the sofa, beneath a blanket.

Skin the colour of ash.  Eyes wide, lifeless, full of fear.

Shocked, I dropped my bags and ran to him.

I frantically administered the kiss of life.  When no response came, I laced my fingers over his chest and pushed down repeatedly, attempting to resuscitate.

My Tom just stared up at me.  Blind.

I’d seen more than enough dead people to know he wasn’t coming back.

I gently closed his eyelids, my tears splashing him.  After calling for an ambulance and police, I held the cold hand of the man I loved.  I tried to say goodbye, but the words came out a mess.

Ever since, I have often wondered whether Tom’s death was my fault.  If I had been on a different bus that day, seven years ago, we would never have met.  It was also I who chose this place for us to live.

But how was I to know?  How?

A detective questioned me at the police station, with precious little urgency.  It felt like she was going through the motions.  This was appropriate, as I was doing much the same.  I sat there in that small airless room, robotically answering questions about Tom, our life together and my movements in the hours prior to his death.  None of it felt real.

A post-mortem confirmed my lack of culpability.  Tom had suffered from a heart murmur.  One of those invisible defects: a time bomb waiting to blow.

A bomb which, as far as I was concerned, had been detonated by the entity with whom we shared our home.  I knew this from the terror on Tom’s face.

I hate to break the news to you, my friend, but this thing can strike during daylight hours. It comes whenever you sleep.

I hated that spectre.  Whatever it was, I wanted it destroyed.

Work had granted me compassionate leave, which was a relief of sorts.  I didn’t need to maintain the facade that I could still handle my job.  On the other hand, I harboured grave doubts as to whether I could ever return.

All I knew for sure, was that I needed to get away from the place where Tom died.

As I checked into a local hotel, I could hardly believe I was getting a break from the ghost.  Perhaps, in my absence, it might lose interest in that property and decamp to another.

If only Tom and I had thought to move.  I should have insisted on it, at the first sign of trouble.  Why didn’t I?

Because all of us pour souls, being eternally gullible, assume things will work out and improve.  That’s why.

My hotel room offered a view of a brick wall.

On that first night, I downed several vodka and lemonades in my favourite bar.  You’ve probably been there.  Nothing special about the place besides familiarity.   By that point I existed in a haze, looking drunk whether I was or not.  Sometimes I would fall asleep then jerk awake, a hardcore narcoleptic waiting to happen.

Right there and then, ‘Familiar’ was good.  In fact, ‘familiar’ was an essential anchor.

Back on the hotel bed, I flicked the complimentary mint-biscuit aside and rested my head on blissful duck-feather pillows, still fully clothed.

Even as I cried myself to sleep over Tom, I felt relief that I wasn’t doing so at home.  I could breathe freely, all night, without that filthy leech assailing me.

Oh, how very naive that belief was.

Three hours later, as I slept, I became dimly aware of gasping, spluttering, choking.

A terrible feeling spread through the room.

The familiar wasn’t always a source of comfort.

Slowly waking up, eyes still closed, I shuddered as breath was snatched from my mouth, nose, throat, lungs.

That sense once again, of something directly above me.

The thing which killed Tom.

I propelled myself faster, up through the dark waters of unconsciousness.  Although terrified, I needed to see what I was dealing with.

I forced myself to look at the entity.

I cried out in shock.

The child hung above me, suspended in nothingness, gazing down, its face horribly close to mine.

Those blank eyes spoke of the grave.

They were circles of pallid, featureless blue with an unnatural shine.

The mouth was a small, round hole clumsily punched into worn, mottled flesh which clung loosely to what passed as a face.  The nose had rotted away altogether, leaving just two tiny holes above thin, puckered lips.

The thing’s withered arms stretched out at either side, its wasted frame clad in black rags.  Filthy, age-old hessian cloth.

I goggled up at this abomination, barely able to breathe as it eagerly plundered my lungs.

My hatred for the thing was eclipsed only by fear.

Acting fast while I still had energy, I rammed both palms up hard against cloth, bone and clammy flesh, shocked by how corporeal it all felt.

The thing was sent hurtling back into the shadows, arms and legs outstretched, rags blowing around it, eyes like twin sparks of light.

And then it was gone, leaving me breathless and spent.

Clutching my chest, getting my wits back, I slowly sat up on the side of the bed, appalled.

The thing had followed me.  It had followed me here.

I sat by the window, gazing out at the brick wall, head spinning.

I had never felt so trapped.

Why had Tom and I never heard these sounds, or sensed the oppressive atmosphere, in the first couple of years at the property?  My theory: it had taken us time to tune into the frequency.  Once you had registered that stuff, you became so much more aware.  You wondered how you ever missed it.

The rest of my hotel stay was rendered joyless by the knowledge that the entity was haunting me, rather than the place where I lived.  Checking out five days early, I returned home, closed the front door behind me and looked around feeling defeated.

I couldn’t believe what had happened to my world.  I used to be so carefree.  Now, I would have paid any amount of money, I would have given it all, to claw back even a tenth of what I had.

I found myself in antiquarian book shops – vast dusty places, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with oversized, cloth-bound tomes – searching for help with expelling ghosts and demons.

I didn’t know which topic to focus on.  Was this thing a ghost, a demon, something else?  Eventually, I slapped down my credit card and hedged my bets, buying all the relevant books I could find.

I was soon sprawled on the living area’s floor, surrounded by outdated knowledge.  My aching eyeballs did their best to scan yellowed pages.

I found a Papua New Guinea ritual from the 16th Century, which purported to specifically banish “all nocturnal visitations.”  I carried out that ritual, using various items acquired from local stores.  A splinter from a broom handle, a stuffed mouse... all that garbage.  It took me many, many attempts to read the text aloud coherently.  Clearly, my brain had started to curl up and perish.

The ritual didn’t work.  Still, all this half-hearted amateur sorcery kept my mind off Tom.

I awoke the next day without having detected the entity during the night.  This, mind you, was more disturbing than if I had.  I could tell it had aggressively drained me as I slept: my head was thick and throbbing, my eyes prickly as though rubbed with sand-paper, my bones weary.

The answer to all of this couldn’t lie in archaic books written by madmen.  So where?

It came to me when I opened a kitchen cupboard and found a small pile of old mail addressed to previous residents.

I was mentally hauled back through time, to the previous resident of our home.  Tom and I met him while viewing the place with an agent.  A quietly-spoken, 30-something Russian with a gaunt face and striking olive eyes, he had courteously shown us around.

As I leafed through the sealed envelopes, this guy’s name was easily recognisable on one of them: Dimitri Filischkin.  I recalled this singular piece of mail falling through our letterbox a few days after we moved in.

So.  Here was the big question, which you, in turn, will be wondering about me: when Dimitri Filischkin moved out of there, why didn’t the entity follow him to wherever the hell he went?

What changed?

Determined to find out, I scoured the globe and made numerous calls.

I searched for every Dimitri Filischkin across the world.  How many could there be?

Almost two days later, I stood beside a wide bay in San Sebastián.  I held up a hand to protect my eyes from the sun.

The search for Dimitri Filischkin had led me here.  I had discovered a fairly recent photo of him in a place called Bar Plaza.  In fact, crucially, it was a photo of two men.  Turned out the younger man, the one I’d met, was actually Dimitri’s son Vsevolod Filischkin.  Perhaps I’d merely assumed Vsevolod was Dimitri or, more likely, it had been a deliberate smokescreen.

(Note: I would later create a similar smokescreen for you.  In my last official weeks of residency, I paid actors to pose as dwellers in the property, for when people came to view.  These amateur performers were expressly forbidden to sleep there, for obvious reasons.  In truth, I do not know if you met them, but wanted to reveal this artifice, in case you tried to hunt these innocents down.  Trust me, they had nothing to do with this whole sorry business and have no idea whatsoever of where in the world I now am.  They merely assisted me, without realising their true purpose: to prevent you from knowing my identity.)

By now, I had transcended mere tiredness and even exhaustion.  I had entered an unnatural twilight realm and things also felt different inside me.  Something bad was happening to my body and I wondered how long I could fight it before total collapse occurred.

I strode as resolutely as possible towards San Sebastián’s Old Town.  Tom and I would have enjoyed this place for a holiday: it had a sandy beach, fair weather and seemed very authentically Spanish, even though locals would quickly point out that it was actually in Basque Country.

My gaze lingered on a mountain top, from which a enormous statue of Christ stared balefully.  I felt a flash of anger, wondering why God had allowed Tom to die.

My friend: I know you will tire of this bitter travelogue.  You want to know whether I found Dimitri Filischkin and what he told me, right?

I’ll cut to the chase.

The tiny Bar Plaza was nestled deep in the labyrinth of tall, traditional buildings which formed the Old Town.  These buildings were close together, with narrow streets threading between them.  They bustled with locals and tourists who scurried between tiny tapas bars, ‘disco pubs’ and restaurants.

I was surprised to find Vsevolod Filischkin behind the bar, pulling back a large creaky optic in order to fill a customer’s glass with frothy beer.  Some of the ceiling was decorated with hanging meat: substantial legs of ham which swayed gently on hooks.

Vsevolod flashed me a nod, but it wasn’t true recognition.  This was clearly a gesture afforded to any and all entering customers.

The second time he looked at me, something clicked.  He stiffened, tiny muscles rippling at his temples.  After dealing swiftly with his customer, he signaled for me to lean over the bar towards him.

“You must leave,” he said, face set in stone.  “Leave now.”

His demand only served to fire me up and I held my ground.  “I need to see your father.”

A small shake of the head.  “You cannot.”

“I’m not leaving until I’ve seen him.”

The Russian’s nostrils flared.  He reached over to a high shelf at the back of the bar.  Pride of place there went to an elaborately decorated urn, which he seized.

He placed the urn on the bar, his face betraying indignation and sorrow all at once.

“There,” he said.  “Now you’ve seen him.”

I looked at the urn, heart sinking.  Still, surely Vsevolod himself would know something.

As if reading my mind, the Russian gripped the handle of a small hatchet, keeping it low, flush with the counter.  As his eyes burned into mine, the implied threat was plain.

I glanced around at the other, oblivious customers and sloped out.

When Bar Plaza closed, hours later, Vsevolod yanked down the shutter which covered its front, then locked it.

I covertly watched him do this from a shop doorway along the street.  Seeing him glance around, I stepped back out of sight.

Peering back over again, I saw Vsevolod heading off in the opposite direction, through the pedestrian throng.

I followed Vsevolod halfway across the Old Town, a journey which ended at a communal front door to what looked like apartments.

As the Russian unlocked the door, I blended in with pedestrians, walking towards him.

As he opened the door, I drew as close as I could without him seeing me.

Before he could shut the door behind him, I darted across and jammed my foot in the gap.

Barreling inside, I clumsily grabbed Vsevolod by his collar.  I glimpsed his shocked expression as I rammed his head against a wall.  I was unaccustomed to violence; a hopeless beginner.  The only factors on my side were desperation, sleep deprivation and a basic plan.

As a dazed Vsevolod struggled to regain his balance, I produced an empty gin bottle from my pocket and smashed its base against the wall.  I hoped that holding the bottle’s jagged top-half out between us would complete the illusion that I was not someone to mess with.  I also really hoped he wouldn’t see my hand shaking.

Drawing back a fist to swing a punch my way, the Russian caught sight of the broken glass and froze.  He kept his eyes fixed on the razor-sharp edges, as if talking to them.

“Okay.  What exactly do you want?”

I extended my arm, moving the broken glass a few more inches in his favour.

“I want to know what happened to my life.”

Next door in Bar Extebe, a ‘Pinball Bingo’ machine made a distracting racket beside Vsevolod Filischkin and I.  He lit a Russian cigarette, drew in a fat, measured puff, then expelled smoke through his nose.

“How you find us anyway?  Russians in San Sebastian.”

He had flat-out refused to take me to his apartment.  Said I’d have to kill him first, in fact, so I guessed he had a loved one up there.  I didn’t want to kill him, and doubted I’d be capable of such a thing, so we agreed to go to a bar instead.

Vsevolod was making short work of a beer.  I cradled an espresso cup, gently tipping the liquid to and fro and enjoying the warmth of the porcelain on my hands.  I had learned to appreciate the simplest, smallest pleasures and cling to them.

I let the Russian’s question crumble away without an answer.

“You know what I’m going through, right?” I asked.

Smoke blossomed around him as he nodded.  “My father suffered at the boy’s hands for many years.  Many, many years.”

“It’s a he?”

I had known this, I supposed, but the confirmation felt like real progress.  It was incredible to meet someone who matter-of-factly acknowledged the spirit’s existence.

“It took us years to find out… what was happening.  How you say: ‘trial and error’?  And all that time, my father would not let me go to any of his homes.  ‘Just in case he takes a liking to you too,’ he told me.”

A wave of dizziness hit me.  Every now and then I would also experience a quick rush of euphoria, which seemed so wrong in a grieving person.

“Who is this boy?”

“In time, my father and I found his name, tracing back to old newspaper, family tree, obituary.  In life, this thing was called Josef.  A Czech boy, from Pisek.”

I stared at this man; this living proof of my sanity.  I wanted more.

Vsevolod knocked back more beer and sighed.

“In 1898, Josef’s father thought his son was possessed by Devil.  He hired priests to try to… you know… exorcise the child.  One night, he found out Josef kill family dog.  An old Czech newspaper ran quote from police.  It said how, in middle of night, Josef’s drunk father strangled him as he slept.  Josef woke up dead, you may say.”

My face prickled hot.  All that gasping, spluttering and choking.  In my shattered state, it seemed as though I could hear it, right there and then in the bar.

I shifted uneasily in my seat.

“I... I have heard him dying,” I managed to say.

“My father heard him too, many times.  First of all in apartment he rent in Budapest.  He did not notice for four years, but then he say it sound like someone being murdered every night.  And at same time, his own breath was taken.”

I nodded hard and licked my lips, aware that my mouth had become very dry.

“Eventually, my father moved apartment to somewhere else in same city.  Josef followed.  My father moved to Mexico City, Perth, Peru.  Josef followed to all.”

“He follows me everywhere too,” I said.  “It’s like he homes in on my mind.”

The Russian hesitated and surveyed the smoky air around him.  His voice became quieter, conspiratorial.  “It is not your thoughts he is linked to,” he murmured.  Before I could ask what he meant, he continued: “He will remain where you last sleep.  If you go somewhere new, he will come to you only when you sleep again.”

I opened my mouth, trying to pool my brain cells to form a concise question.  I really wanted, needed, to know how to break this ‘link’.

“Josef followed my father to what is now your home,” said Vsevolod.  “That was the last place.  After that, my father broke free.”

“How?”  The word rocketed out of me.  “How did he free himself?”

Vsevolod drained the rest of his beer and firmly shook his head.  “Sorry, impossible.  No.  I must protect myself and family.  If you became free of Josef, he might find way to return to Filischkin bloodline.  I cannot take risk.”

Desperation clawed at my guts as I glared at the Russian.  “Tell me,” I insisted.

Vsevolod gave me a small shrug, expressionless.  “What you gonna do?  Smash another bottle?  Next time I will be ready, believe me.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling so weak.  I no longer had it in me to feign the capacity for violence.  If Vsevolod wasn’t going to tell me how Dimitri rid himself of this accursed child, was there other information I could glean?

As I spoke, my voice cracked, thick with emotion.

“How did your father die?”

Vsevolod said nothing for several seconds, looking at the table between us.  Then he stood, sweeping a long coat around himself.

“In the end,” he said, “they would not take.”

A slight smile from him.  A kind smile, as if he had just given me something.

He headed out into the street, leaving me to sit at the table for some time, pondering those words.  What had he meant?

When I finally drank the espresso, it was cold.

Sitting on the harbour wall, I dipped in and out of a bag of fresh, salty prawns I’d bought, numbly pushing them into my mouth.  Boats bobbed and creaked on the moonlit water.  San Sebastián’s coast line was daubed and speckled with golden light.

All that beauty hurt my mind.  I just wanted to lie down and sleep forever.

It seemed strange to finally know Josef’s name.  The more I ran my mind over the child’s story, the more tragic it seemed.  Back in 1898, Czechoslovakia was an insanely superstitious place, much like the rest of the world.  It wouldn’t take much for a paranoid, God-fearing man to believe his troublesome son was in league with Satan.  The poor kid probably didn’t even kill that dog.

I still despised Josef for what he had done to Tom, but felt conflicted.  I wondered if there was a chance of reconciliation between he and I.  Maybe ‘reconciliation’ was too strong a word.  An arrangement.  Could we co-exist?

(Incidentally, I know you may now be planning a visit to San Sebastián’s Old Town, in the hope of prising more information from the Filischkins.  Please be advised that Vsevolod no longer runs Bar Plaza.  Wanting to thank the Russian for his help, I could find no trace of him in the entire city.  He and his family may as well never have lived there.)

That night in the hotel I slept on my front: an experiment, to see if it prevented Josef from gaining access to my airways.  It had no effect, since my head still needed to rest on one side to allow me to breathe.  At around 4am, I felt the opposite edge of my pillow crumple as someone, something, exerted weight on it.

There he was, Josef, beside me.  Undead eyes wide, fleshy mouth gaping, choking, tremoring.

Staring at Josef as he urgently drained air from my lungs, I now realised that those eyes weren’t blank after all.  At the top of those rancid orbs, you could discern the lower crescents of his irises.  His eyeballs were rolling up into his head as he relived his father throttling him for the millionth time.

With a swipe of my arm, I pushed this spirit off into temporary oblivion, but did so with less malice than before.  This phantom child clearly didn’t know what he was doing.  I had begun to perceive him as an echo, trapped in time, doomed to repeat himself.

Even if Josef was essentially a victim, however, my predicament remained.  He and I were predator and prey, and as such I could only last so long.

Come morning, I felt 80 years old.  Killing time before my journey home, I meandered around the Old Town, often feeling faint and having to lean against walls.

I chanced upon a shop which dealt in strange, occult items.  At first I had no wish to enter, after all those pointless rituals back home.

Then I saw it, there in the window.

I saw the Ouija board.

That board came back with me, to the place which you now call home.  It was dispiriting to walk in and see those same walls staring back at me, but at least I had a mission in mind.

Rendering the living area dark and candlelit, I removed the Ouija board from my suitcase.  I felt no shame in attempting this.  My world had become so grotesquely distorted that a seance made perfect sense.

I hadn’t yet tried talking to Josef out loud, but figured the Ouija board might improve our chances of communication.  It was fashioned from cheap plastic, but bore all the letters, the numbers, the ‘YES’, the ‘NO’, the ‘GOODBYE’.

A small spark of optimism burned within me.  I would make Josef realise he was slowly killing me.  Upon understanding this, he would relent and move on.

Sitting on the sofa, I balanced the board on my lap.  I put the cheap marker-device on the board, holding it with the fingertips of both hands, just as I’d seen people do in horror films.

I looked around the living area.  I’m sure that, even by candlelight, it appeared much as it does to you now, although Tom and I never had a television.  We never had time for one.

As my sight adjusted to the gloom, I was able to discern the letters on the board.

I wondered what to say.  Finally, I decided to start with his name.

I spelt it out, letter by letter.

“J-O-S-E-F”

I carried on until I had spelled out the following:

“I…

“… M-U-S-T…”

“… T-A-L-K…”

“… T-O…”

“… Y-O-U”

Another pause.  Next I spelled out:

“A-R-E…”

“… Y-O-U…”

“… T-H-E-R-E”

The room seemed intensely silent as I waited.  There was a brooding, loaded hush.

Raucous laughter exploded, from out of nowhere.

I quickly realised it originated from outside and tried to relax again.  I was so highly strung that even this false alarm had me close to tears.

I wondered what was supposed to happen next.  Would an unseen force compel my hands to move the marker?

The seconds crawled by.

I wondered if Josef understood English.  As he had presumably haunted some English speakers in his time, I hoped he had picked up a few words.

All of a sudden, my hands were moving that marker.

A very odd feeling.  I hadn’t initiated this activity in any way and yet it was happening.  I had no idea where the marker was going, but it was going there nonetheless.

The marker stopped over the word ‘YES’.  Then it was back off across the board in search of new letters.  I watched as words formed.

“I…”

“… A-M…”

… H-E-R-E”

I swallowed hard, feeling more awake than I had in some time.

Various replies jostled for pole position in my mind.  Before I could settle on one, the marker was back in play.  At first, the action was repetitive, sliding to and fro between two letters.

“H-A…

“… H-A…”

“… H-A…”

“… H-A…”

“… H-A”

I suddenly felt very cold.  From here, the marker moved more quickly.

“Y-O-U-R…”

“… M-A-N…”

“… I-S…”

“…H-E-R-E…”

“… I-N…”

“… L-U-N-G-S…”

“… O-F…”

“… H-E-L-L”

From there on, the marker wanted to repeatedly alternate between ‘H’ and ‘A’ again, but I wrenched my hands away from it.  My brain surged out of control as I snatched up the board and hurled it against a wall, shattering the marker.

I tipped over the sofa on which Tom had died.  I smashed everything within arm’s distance.

I wanted to kill that little bastard so badly.  So very badly.

Unfortunately, Josef’s father had already done the job in 1898.  How could you kill something which had already been dead for decades on end?

To think I had begun to sympathise with the child!  Josef’s father had been right: he really was possessed.  The thought shook me, as the light at the end of my tunnel winked out of existence.

Outside, the sun had already begun its descent.  I watched shadows lengthen.

Night ominously drew closer with every jittery heartbeat.

I wanted to lay a trap for Josef.  Stretching out on the bed, I feigned sleep.  This was harder than it might sound.  Every fibre of my being was so cooked that I could easily fall headlong into genuine torpor.  It took immense self control and constant mental awareness games to keep my consciousness afloat as I lay on my back, waiting.

Come the small hours, silence reigned.

Silence was all.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the room’s atmosphere thickened and congealed.

There was a low, breathless rasp.

The rasp grew in intensity and volume, becoming a splutter.

This time, the splutter was different.  It also sounded like… laughter.

Josef was laughing at me.

Sensing him above, I flicked my eyes open.

The child grinned as he descended towards me, displaying tiny brown stumps which may once have been milk-teeth, his blue-moon eyes aglow.

Enraged, I reached up and seized him around the throat with both hands.

The room’s temperature plummeted.

I swear the very foundations of the night itself shook.

Josef’s grin became a grimace, his lips curling like a rabid dog’s.  Yet my hands had not actually reached his neck.  They had instead stopped about an inch from the rancid flesh, prevented from touching it.

Some kind of hellish protection system had been triggered.

I realised I couldn’t move.  I was paralysed from head to toe.

My eyes darted around as I tried to cry out.  The message left my brain but never made it to my vocal cords.

Josef’s face twisted with spite, transforming dramatically, demonically.  Real hellfire raged in those eyes.

This snarling, transparent beast drifted out from between my rigidly outstretched hands, passing through my very bones.

Slowly, deliberately, Josef continued his journey down towards my face.

That grim hole of a mouth hovered near my own.

Josef fed upon me, his face a sadistic mask.  It was a mercy that I was able to close my eyes.

He devoured my air so ardently that I couldn’t breathe at all for extended periods.  Consciousness often began to slip away… only for this demon to grant me a moment of respite, allowing limited oxygen back in.

As I urgently sucked in gulps of the air I so badly needed, Josef’s obscene laughter rang in my ears.  The process amused him.

As he tortured me, I was denied oxygen for increasingly long stretches.

I was completely powerless.  I could live or die, entirely at Josef’s discretion.

The one thought which gave me hope throughout that whole, terrifying ordeal?  It was in Josef’s interests to let me live.

When it finally ended, maybe two hours later, I was a sobbing wreck.  My body was all but numb.  I groaned, moving slowly and awkwardly as I reached to turn on a light.

Getting dressed took some time, but I was determined to get out of that place.

In the middle of the night, I headed out through the streets, feeling low.

I tried to come to terms with the fact that Josef and the demon which seemed to drive him were in total control.  The boy’s ability to inflict paralysis explained all those early nights when Tom and I felt we couldn’t move while asleep.  When I’d previously managed to touch Josef, I’d taken the spirit by surprise.  This time he’d been ready and I’d provoked him by going for his throat.

I had incurred the wrath of the devil within him.

Was Josef’s demon a separate entity or were boy and demon the same thing?  To whom had I spoken via the Ouija board?  Perhaps the demon – Satan himself? – had possessed Josef while he was alive and would continue to tug this Czech boy’s puppet-strings even in death, for all eternity.  Maybe the two of them had become indistinguishable across the long decades.

Either way, it was clear I could not win.  It all seemed hopeless.

In a café, resolving to make myself eat breakfast, I slumped onto a seat like a broken rag doll.  Seemingly through sympathy, I was offered two free coffee refills.

The rest of the day was spent in a downbeat stupor, slumped on my sofa, neither asleep nor awake.  All the fight had been knocked out of me.

Over the next few nights, I slept all the way through ‘til morning but woke up feeling horrific.  My limbs either tingled or were numb, which always suggested that Josef had feasted royally.  Perhaps I had finally become so weak that I had lost the ability to awaken at all as he gorged himself on my oxygen supply.

One morning, when the worry became too much to bear, I somehow found the energy to slump into a taxi.  Receiving a quizzical look from the mildly alarmed driver, I managed to say, “Hospital.”

Since you’ll already have guessed this, I may as well come clean: I worked at this place.  I was a consultant there, until Josef wrecked everything.

The building may have been familiar, but as the taxi pulled up in front of it, I felt sick.  Dealing with other people’s health was a matter of routine, but when it came to being treated myself, I turned pale.  To be precise, I had tomophobia: the fear of surgery.

Thankfully the initial tests weren’t too stressful.  It was no surprise to learn that I was suffering from hypoxemic hypoxia: an inadequate supply of oxygen to the body as a whole.  I nodded as a concerned registrar told me the things I already knew.  He ran through all the risks, such as seizures, coma, priapism and good old death.

One of my former colleagues ran up to me, shocked by my condition.  The bags under my eyes, the dramatic weight loss, my delayed responses, the fact that I was hardly able to focus on her.  The rest of my so-called friends completely blanked me.  My guess is that they just couldn’t handle it.

The whole thing was depressing and my fear of treatment was blooming out of control, so I made my excuses and headed towards the hospital foyer.

I felt like a ghost among the living.

I intended to go home and let Josef drain the last vestiges of life from me.  My mind was in tatters, my legs like concrete slabs.  I knew I was beyond saving.

An orderly crossed my path, pushing a patient in a wheelchair.  They disappeared through a doorway with the word ‘Transplants’ above it.

I stopped for a moment.  Swaying, I sat heavily on one of a row of chairs.

In my deteriorated state it was all the harder to piece things together, but after a while I got there.

I thought about what I had just seen.

I thought about what Vsevolod Filischkin had told me, when I asked how his father became free: “In the end, they wouldn’t take.”

In this context, the meaning suddenly became clear.  Why hadn’t I grasped it already?

I thought about Vsevolod’s description of Josef’s link to his victims.  “It is not your thoughts he is linked to.”

If not the mind, then the body.  Some part of the body…

Wait a minute…

I thought about the wording of Josef’s Ouija message to me: “Your man is in lungs of hell.”

Lungs.  Yes, oh my God, the lungs.

I thought about my connections in this hospital.

After some time in that corridor, I realised what I had to do, even though it felt akin to climbing a mountain.  I felt confident I had solved the riddle.  As I hope you will appreciate, my friend, I am also solving it here for you, even though I originally had no intention of doing so.

Why am I being so charitable?  Part of it, I confess, is sheer guilt.  The rest has arisen from the process of writing this letter.  In reliving the lion’s share of my experience, I have been vividly reminded of what you yourself may now be enduring if you have tuned into Josef’s frequency, registering the physical and mental toll of his nocturnal visits.  I have also painfully recalled how it felt when Vsevolod Filischkin shut me out and would only offer me the slightest hint at a solution.

On that day when I saw you outside your new home, however fleetingly, I suppose I made a judgement call which lives on today.  This may have been an incorrect assumption, but you didn’t look like someone who deserved to have Josef in their life.

After my epiphany in the corridor, I retched and was violently sick.  I was so scared by what I would have to do.

Remaining in the hospital, I visited a surgeon friend.  I didn’t explain everything, because he would think me insane.  I was stammering and jabbering enough as it was.  I simply impressed upon him, at torturous length, my dire need for a lung transplant.  At first, he was incredulous, dismayed by what I was asking him to do.  Then I offered him most of my savings as an added incentive.  Yes, a bribe.

I’m only slightly ashamed to say that the results of tests on my lungs were subsequently faked, to conclude I had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.  I wonder, to this day, whether Dimitri Filischkin was stuck with Josef for so many years that he genuinely contracted a terminal illness which necessitated a lung transplant.  Perhaps he and Vsevolod thereby chanced upon the solution to Josef’s curse.  They might have realised that the devil-child twinned himself with the lungs of whoever was unlucky enough to sleep where he currently called home.

Me?  I had to pull strings, in order to do something which petrified me.  I’m convinced several members of staff saw through my and the surgeon’s deception, but turned a blind eye.  And yes, as a result of my jumping the queue, someone else on the waiting list may well have died.  All I can say, is that I was driven by a sudden will to live which overrode all other concerns.

A suitable set of lungs became available after five days.  Without them, I would certainly have perished.  As if he knew what I was planning, Josef seemed to feed on me all the more ferociously back home.  I would wake up wheezing, panicked, wondering if this was the morning my heart finally gave out.

An ambulance had to take me to hospital for the operation.  As I was carried out through the front door of my home, I barely gave a thought to the fact that I would never, could never, return.

After my operation, Josef would be trapped back home.  He would wait for me to fall asleep, in order to zero in on my lungs.  However, the next time I slept I would have new ones.  There would be nothing for him to locate.  He would be stuck in the place you now call home, waiting for a signal which never came.

Lying on a trolley in a pre-op theatre, I did my best not to tremble.  I was loaded with fear and dread, as a stern, bearded anaesthetist who I’d never met tapped the back of my hand, trying to find a vein.

I kept telling myself: soon, you’ll wake up.  The operation will have been done and you’ll be free.

I tried to keep my mind off the thing in my hand.  Vsevolod’s words ran through my head.

“He will remain wherever you last sleep…”

“Okay,” said the anaesthetist.  “Just going to thread a line in...”

I shuddered as the thin ‘line’ entered the back of my hand.

“If you go somewhere else, he will come to you only when you sleep again.”

Suddenly, fog cleared in my mind and truth hit me like a train: I was about to sleep.

As soon as the anaesthetist knocked me out, Josef would come to me.

My beleaguered brain tried to work it out.

Yes, if I went to sleep now, Josef would home in.  He would come here.  When the old lungs were removed, he would lose his link to me.  This room, maybe this entire hospital, would become his new haunting ground.

He would attach himself to whoever next slept in the vicinity.

For the majority of patients, his attack would be fatal!

“And count to five for me, please,” murmured the anaesthetist.  “One… two…”

“Stop!” I said, “Please stop.”

He frowned.  “Now, we talked about this.  The needle’s already in, if that’s your worry…”

“No, just take it out.  Please, take it out.”

I sat bolt upright, terrified that the anaesthetic might already be inside me.

He sighed, as if he really didn’t need this today.

There followed a lengthy debate between the anaesthetist, the surgeon and I.  It was difficult and delicate, because I was unable to voice the real reasons behind my argument.  They were amazed I wanted this option, given my rampant tomophobia, but eventually they caved.  They allowed me to have a double-lung transplant without general anaesthesia.

It was a horrific prospect for anyone.  For me, truly unimaginable.  I just kept telling myself, over and over, that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as knowing I was responsible for a string of unexplained future deaths in that operating theatre.  Or living a short, unhappy life being drained by an evil apparition.

Unsuccessfully striving to stay calm, I found myself hooked up to a machine which created a mechanical bypass outside my body.  I had seen this thing employed many times, but never expected to feel it pumping my own heart and lungs.  I tried to convince myself this wasn’t happening: it was just a machine, unconnected to me.

A serious epidural and some strategically-placed nerve blocks thankfully kept most pain at bay.  I listened to music through headphones and kept my eyes closed.  Nevertheless, I was aware of certain heinous moments.  I cried out as the surgeon made an enormous incision across my chest.  As my lungs were lifted from my open cavity, it took whatever reserves of mental strength I had left to stop myself having a panic attack.

Whenever my brain screamed “Let me out!”, I had to keep calming it down, over and over.  I would play the same song over and over, trying to memorise all the lyrics.  I would think about Dimitri Vsevolod, who must have endured the same thing, perhaps even on the same operating table.  Anything which took my mind off the fact that surgeons were meticulously installing fresh lungs in me.

Then came the very worst moment of all.

Even with my eyelids screwed shut, I suddenly saw twin circles of blue.

Sickly blue light.

They suddenly winked into existence, then drew closer and closer…

Josef was there.

I balked and squirmed, causing hands to quickly hold me still.  Even over the music in my headphones, I heard people saying “Relax!”

Tears filled my eyes and my voice came out as a wail.  “Oh God, he’s found me, Josef’s found me, please get rid of him!  Please!”

Those blue lights continued to close in.

I had made a terrible mistake.  The new lungs had changed nothing!  Waves of nausea crashed into me as my plans toppled down.

Someone gently tugged a headphone away from my left ear.  “No one’s here,” said a soothing voice.  “Don’t worry.  We’re almost done but we need you to hold still, okay?”

I cautiously peeped upwards, dreading what I’d see.

Two assistants loomed over me, each holding a pen-like torch.  Held a couple of inches apart, these devices emitted light with a blue tinge, shining into my open chest for the surgeon’s benefit.

I carried on sobbing, but this time through sheer relief at my mistake.

After that, the rest of the seven-hour procedure was a breeze.

That night, I slept in an intensive care unit, with brand new lungs.  Josef was incarcerated back home, unable to track me.  I was off the grid.  To all intents and purposes, dead.

And for what felt like several days straight, I slept like the dead.

I will leave you shortly, my friend, to think about this letter and no doubt study it many times.

You have a great deal to consider.  Even though I have handed you the solution on a plate, it is clearly an extreme measure and, unlike me, you may not have sufficient privilege to draw upon in order to make it happen.

Once again: you will never find me.  If you do attempt to track me down, with the intention of inflicting Josef back on me, or exacting revenge, I solemnly swear that I will take drastic action just as Vsevolod might, had I pushed him too far.  You may also be able to guess which hospital I have been talking about, but I warn you not to enquire there.  You have nothing more to gain from discovering my identity.  I have told you everything and been more than generous.

You now possess information which I have not divulged to anyone else on Earth.  Do not abuse it.

Having carried out further research, I now gather that a few of Josef’s past victims did not realise what was happening to them for a whole decade or even two.  Perhaps they never realised until their premature deaths, simply taking their lethargy for granted as Josef and his demon used them like human air-tanks.  Everyone has different constitutions and levels of alertness.

Even if you have yet to notice Josef in your home, I implore you to act quickly.

It is already too late to move somewhere else.  Josef will only follow.  As you have seen, whenever you fall asleep anywhere other than your own bed, he will come to you, as relentless and inexorable as nightfall.

My best advice when it comes to dealing with Josef?  Do not resist him.

This will seem counter-intuitive, but please understand.  Deprive Josef of the oxygen he craves and he will only draw more when he gets the chance, just as the human body stores more fat than usual when it thinks it faces starvation.  If driven to extremes he may become demonic, paralyse you and drain you of life altogether, whether by accident or design.  As you will already have gathered, you must never attempt to touch the phantom’s throat.

I recommend purchasing a tank of pure oxygen and using it at regular intervals, day and night.  I did not have the presence of mind to do so while cursed, but wish I had thought of this.  After being awoken by an attack from the spirit, take a hit from the tank.  In the morning, take one hit of the stuff for every hour you have slept.

Exercise regularly, while you still have the strength.  This is vital.  Eat well, with a particular focus on carbohydrates, which assist the body’s ability to transfer oxygen to cells.  If you smoke, give up at once, by whatever means available.  Try to keep alcohol to a bare minimum (Josef’s attacks will worsen hangovers, making them more incapacitating than you ever thought possible.)  Caffeine and Ibuprofen will be your friends.  You may often dream of the colour blue, which must be attributable to the wretched hue of the spirit’s eyes.  It is almost certainly a sign of him feeding while you sleep.

If you would understandably rather not see Josef, wear a thick eye mask while attempting to sleep.  Never look yourself in the eye in reflections for more than five seconds.  I believe Josef naturally dwells in glass and various reflective surfaces.   Perhaps, back in 1898, the child’s spirit leapt into the nearest mirror when his father dispatched him.

I have come to think that Josef only latches onto new people when he has no-one.  Tom and I must have been unlucky enough to sleep at the same time, on our first night at that damn property.  If there are two or more of you, you could try a ‘shift’ rota.  One of you sleeps, while the other watches over you.  When Josef materialises, he can be hounded away.  I never had a chance to properly try this.  While it might offer your health a much-needed break, it may soon inflate the entity’s frustration to critical mass.  Use with caution: I would not like to speculate on what Josef may do if consistently denied air.

So.  You now know what you ultimately have to do, if you are ever to be free of this lurking parasite.  I pray that you have sufficient reserves of bravery and fortitude in order to see the process through.

I sincerely hope that one day, your new lungs ‘take’, as mine did, severing Josef’s link to you.  I am living proof that it is possible.  My health will never be what it was, but I am at least working again and enjoying my life as much as possible.  In fact, I am probably enjoying life more than ever.  This letter certainly feels like a huge weight off my shoulders.

When lying vulnerable on that bed in the thick of the small hours – sensing movement among the shadows, as an arcane ambience sours the room – you must find inner strength.  Try not to fear these nights too intensely.  Bodily tension will only compound the spiraling fatigue.  Hypertension may even prove fatal.

Goodbye my friend and good luck.

Best wishes,

‘John Smith’

PS… One last thing.  You may have noticed an unexplained, pungent odour in the property.  There is a reason for this.

While being monitored in hospital, I somehow persuaded my surgeon to carry out one last errand for his money.  He took my former lungs to my former home and hid them under the floorboards.  I am sorry but he never told me in which room.

He reported that the place looked “trashed” – no doubt a result of a deprived Josef turning violent.  All mirrors and most windows had been broken, and would need regular repair over the next few months.

Concealing my lungs in the property was an added precaution, admittedly influenced by my paranoid, prescription drug-addled state, to doubly ensure Josef stayed within those walls, psychically tethered to the dead organs.

At least until someone new slept there and he latched onto that person instead.

Someone like you.

Please forgive me, my friend, and dispose of the lungs at will.

You have been reading…

A SINCERE WARNING ABOUT THE ENTITY IN YOUR HOME

by

Jason Arnopp

If you would like this story to be mailed to you as a personalised physical letter, take a look at details of the Bespoke Deluxe Edition at ShortHorrorStory.com

First published in the UK by Retribution Books, 2012

Copyright © Jason Arnopp, 2012.  All Rights Reserved

www.jasonarnopp.com

Cover design © Jason Arnopp and JMR Higgs, 2012.  All Rights Reserved

The right of Jason Arnopp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Arnopp is a scriptwriter and novelist.

He wrote the 2011 horror feature film Stormhouse, which world-premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival that year.  He also script-edited urban thriller The Man Inside (2012), which starred Peter Mullan, Michelle Ryan, David Harewood and Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas.

He is the author of the acclaimed horror novella Beast In The Basement.

Arnopp has written various official works of fiction for the world of British TV series Doctor Who, in the form of prose, audio books and audio plays.  These include the audio books Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion (2011) and The Sarah Jane Adventures: Deadly Download (2010), both published by AudioGO.  In 2006, he wrote further official tie-in fiction with the novel Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat for Black Flame.

A former journalist, Arnopp is the author of the non-fiction book How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else (2011).

Arnopp runs a website here, has an official Facebook page here and can be found on Twitter here.

As you can see, he’s an expert at talking about himself in the third person.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BEAST IN THE BASEMENT: A NOVELLA

“I reached a certain point and wanted to stop and applaud my Kindle.  On a tube train” – SEBASTIAN PATRICK, writer/editor of the official RED DWARF website.

"When the biggest turn in the story occurred, I actually exclaimed (out loud with great exuberance), ‘Holy shit, that's so fucking clever!’” – MICH MASOCH, CHS REGIME

This psychological suspense-thriller is set in a big house in the English countryside, where a recently bereaved and increasingly unstable author toils over a book which will close the trilogy of best-selling Jade Nexus fantasy novels.

Speculation and rumour are rife among hardcore Jade Nexus fans that their heroine will die at the book’s conclusion - a possibility against which they loudly protest via social media as the release date nears.

How do you deal with grief under such intense pressure?   How do you cope with distractions from your work such as a violent intruder, panicked messages from your agent and a potential love interest moving into the cottage across the field? Far worse than any of those problems, what do you do about the Beast in your basement?

Beast In The Basement is a contemporary horror story about obsession, revenge, censorship, blame culture and personal responsibility.  A dark and twisted tale with a kick like a mule, from the writer of A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home.

Read it fast before someone spoilers you!

Parental advice: this novella features strong violence, profanity and some sexual scenes. Not recommended for minors.

MORE PRAISE FOR BEAST IN THE BASEMENT

“This is enormous spooky fun and reads like lightning!” – JENNY COLGAN, author of The Good, The Bad And The Dumped, Meet Me At The Cupcake Cafe and Doctor Who: Dark Horizons (as JT Colgan)

“This short sharp shock of weird horror cuts right to the quick. Writing about writers is tricky, but Arnopp handles it with beastly aplomb” – CHUCK WENDIG, author of Blackbirds, Mockingbird and Double Dead

“Jason Arnopp snares his poor readers using inch-perfect plotting and compulsive suspense so that, once hooked, he can inflict his own dark brand of please-no horror on their unprepared psyches. Beast In The Basement is highly recommended for anyone who doesn’t realise how much an author can love and hate his readers at the same time. Hell’s teeth, what's the matter with the man?” – JMR HIGGS, author of The Brandy Of The Damned and I Have America Surrounded: The Life Of Timothy Leary

“A wonderful, creepy tale that winds the tension extremely tight, culminating in an explosive ending that will certainly make your jaw drop” – THE RELUCTANT GEEK website

“A gripping, gruelling horror story that's the perfect length for reading in a single sitting. Just don’t read it before bedtime, especially if you have a basement” – EL DINK website

“A deliciously dark little slice of horror, touching on madness, grief, guilt and the power of the written word” – BYTE THE BOOK website

“While the writing is lovely, the story itself is an absolute belter. It will have you guessing and double-guessing yourself right until the end. This is a writer on top of his game” – RICHARD DINNICK, author of Doctor Who: The Rings Of Ikira and Doctor Who: The Underwater War

“Beast In The Basement is the rarest of things, a story that manages to keep you guessing right up until the end. Arnopp obviously delights in messing with his readership’s heads... I really can’t get enough of writing like this” – THE ELOQUENT PAGE website

“The suspense is palpable and almost cinematic at times, the descriptions of some scenes painting themselves on the mind’s eye with HD clarity.  This is a taut tale of the some of the worst excesses of human paranoia that will leave its mark on the reader long after they have finished the last page” – CHRIS LIMB, THE BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY website

For full details on Beast In The Basement, visit: HorrorNovella.com

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HOW TO INTERVIEW DOCTOR WHO, OZZY OSBOURNE AND EVERYONE ELSE

“This guide to interviewing is tremendous fun, with some genuine insight into the whole process. Fascinating stuff, and properly amusing too. Brilliant!” – TOM SPILSBURY, editor of Doctor Who Magazine

“With a great sense of humour and a sharp ear for the telling quote, Jason Arnopp is an interviewer who always gets the goods. Read and learn” – ANDREW HARRISON (Editor of Q and former Editorial Director of Mixmag and Smash Hits).

“Boy, I wish this book had been around when I started out. You can buy it as a PDF direct from the author for less than the cost of most magazines, and I’d advise new journalists to do so” – CATHERINE BRAY, editor of Film4.com

Want to learn how to interview people as a journalist?

Maybe you’re curious about the methods journalists use when interviewing people.

Maybe you're a pro in need of a refresher course, perhaps with a few new thoughts thrown in.

Either way, the acclaimed ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else will be your guide!

Drawing on 23 years of experience and with over 1000 interviews behind him, Jason Arnopp aims to tell you everything he knows about interrogating the great and good. While Arnopp has spent these decades interviewing celebrities and rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne and Doctor Who star Matt Smith for the likes of Heat, Doctor Who Magazine, Q, SFX and Kerrang!, the vast majority of the principles described here will also apply to quizzing a Marrow Of The Year winner for your local newspaper.

Written in a engaging, conversational style, How To Interview... packs in over 28,000 words of practical wisdom. You’ll learn about the craft of interviewing, all the way from deciding how you’ll record your interviews, to devising questions, to dealing with various types of interviewee, to writing and editing your article.

Beyond that, however, you’ll get a real feel for what it’s like out there on the front-line. The surprises which PR folk may spring on you when you arrive to conduct your interview. The challenge of getting a reluctant, or even downright angry, interviewee to warm to you and open up. Even what to do when you realise that your recording device has failed to record the interview!

Sections in the book include the following:

Five Qualities That Make For A Good Interviewer

Seven Ways To Set Your Interviewee At Ease

The Eight Types Of Interviewee

Fandom Vs Professionalism

The PR Establishes A No-Go Area

Can An Interviewee Ever Become Your Friend?

Underhand Tactics & Grey Areas

Becoming A Fly On The Wall

The Dreaded Roundtable Interview

Transcription: A Necessary Evil

How Verbatim Do You Need To Be With Those Quotes?

The Structure Of An Interview Article

Author Arnopp even throws in a personal guarantee: if you’re left with an unanswered question, you can ask it courtesy of a special Formspring account!

For the full details: HowToInterviewPeople.info

“Jason Arnopp is one of those ludicrous, funny people who manages to get the most reticent of stars to tell him things that they really shouldn’t. As a journalist, he is blessed with a remarkable bedside manner. He might be able to teach you a thing or two” – PHIL ALEXANDER (Mojo Editor-In-Chief and former Kerrang! Editor)

“It was my very happy experience to work with and read Jason Arnopp for a number of years on Kerrang!  Jason’s interviews were always funny, smart, passionate… blah, blah, blah. But one singular thing marked him apart in his field – he had the invaluable ability to ask the unexpected question that caught both subject and reader off guard, and unfailingly meant you found out something new about whomever he was interviewing” – PAUL REES (former Editor of Q and Kerrang!)