I found a hidden journal under my floorboards. I’m not the first blonde girl to live here

​I moved into this apartment three months ago. It’s a charming, old studio in the city—creaky floors, high ceilings, and a price that felt like a steal. The only thing that bothered me was a single floorboard right next to my nightstand that groaned every time I shifted my weight in bed.

​Last night, while I was reaching for a dropped coin, I noticed the board wasn’t actually nailed down. When I pried it up, I didn’t find dust or old pipes. I found a small, black leather-bound journal held shut by a frayed elastic band.

​At first, I felt a pang of guilt. I thought it was just the private diary of the previous tenant. But curiosity is a persistent beast. I sat on the edge of my bed and opened to the first page, dated exactly two years ago.

​”He’s still here,” it began. “I can hear him breathing the second I kill the lights.”

​My stomach did a slow somersault. As I flipped through the pages, the entries described a slow descent into absolute paranoia. She wrote about feeling watched while she showered. She found her furniture moved by just an inch or two. The most chilling part was when she mentioned her toothbrush—it was damp in the morning, even though she hadn’t brushed since the night before. She called the police multiple times, but they found nothing. No forced entry, no broken locks, no fingerprints.

​Toward the end, the handwriting became jagged, frantic, almost unreadable.

​”He doesn’t come from outside,” she wrote in an entry from four months ago. “He’s already here. He knows my schedule. He waits for my eyes to close before he crawls out of his hole.”

​I tried to laugh it off. A poor, schizophrenic woman, I told myself. But the very last page, dated just days before I signed my lease, stopped my heart. It was a single sentence written in trembling, oversized capital letters:

​”HE’S BORED OF ME. HE SAYS THE NEXT ONE SHOULD HAVE LONGER HAIR. HE SAYS HE PREFERS BLONDES.”

​I’m a blonde. My hair reaches the small of my back.

​I dropped the book, my hands shaking so violently I had to grip the mattress to stay upright. That’s when I noticed a detail I had overlooked for months. Tucked partially under the wooden frame of my bed is a small maintenance hatch for the crawlspace. It’s supposed to be sealed shut with layers of old white paint.

​But the paint around the screws was chipped. Freshly chipped. Small white flakes were scattered on the rug right beneath my head.

​I lunged for my phone on the nightstand to call for help, but the screen stayed black. I’d had it plugged in all night. When I pulled the charging cable out and looked into the port, I saw it was jammed with something small and white.

​I picked it out with a shaking fingernail. It was a tiny wad of chewed-up paper. I unrolled it to find a crude, hand-drawn face with a wide, toothy grin and a single word written in dark ink: “Hush.”

​The realization hit me like a physical blow. The creaking floorboard I heard every night? It wasn’t because of my weight. It was because someone was stepping on it from underneath as they climbed out.

​I’m sitting on my bed now, typing this on my laptop with the last 10% of my battery. I can’t run to the door; I’d have to pass the bed hatch to get there. And as I stare down at the gap between the hatch and the floor, I can see it. A human eye, bloodshot and wide, is staring back at me through the darkness.

​It hasn’t blinked in three minutes. And I just heard the wood of the hatch creak upward.