I rented a cheap apartment in Minsk. My neighbor told me to “always count to three

[Note from poster: I found this drafted text file on my younger brother Egor’s laptop. He went missing from his rented apartment in Minsk, Belarus, about three weeks ago. The police found his place completely trashed, the heavy front door shredded to pieces, and… a single, perfectly intact sheet of human skin spread out on the living room floor. The police closed the case as an “unsolved homicide”. I’m posting this here because nobody will believe me.]

Minsk welcomed me with gray, drizzling rain that seemed to be a permanent resident here. I am—or was—a twenty-two-year-old programmer who had just escaped my parents’ nest in the quiet city of Gomel. I thought this rain was a symbol of my new, adult life. Romantic, isn’t it?

I found the apartment online. The rent was laughably low for the capital, which should have been my first red flag, but my tight budget was thrilled. The neighborhood was called “Serebryanka-9″—a local branch of residential depression consisting of five identical, twenty-story concrete towers standing in a semicircle, as if embracing a desolate, overgrown courtyard. My new home was Building G.

The apartment was a typical “grandma’s place”: old floral wallpaper, carpets on the walls, the smell of mothballs. But it was clean, and the view of the city lights from the seventeenth floor was mesmerizing. On my very first day, while dragging boxes inside, I bumped into my neighbor, an old woman from the apartment across the hall. She sized me up with faded, suspicious eyes.

“New guy, huh,” she croaked, more of a statement than a question. “Yes, hello. I’m Egor.” “Listen to me, boy,” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “the walls here are thin. No matter what you hear, do not open your door. Especially at night. And remember: always count.” “Count? Count what?” I didn’t understand.

But she just waved her hand, as if dismissing my ignorance, and disappeared behind her heavy faux-leather door, locking three deadbolts. Weird, I thought, but in these old buildings, all the elderly have their quirks.

The first week was spent settling in. I tore down the wall carpets, threw out the old furniture, and slowly turned the Soviet legacy into something resembling a modern loft. The neighborhood was quiet. Too quiet. Sometimes it felt like out of the hundreds of apartments in these five monoliths, I was the only one living here. In the evenings, I barely saw any lights in the windows opposite mine, and I rarely ran into anyone in the stairwell. The few people I did meet—a gloomy man with a dog, a young mother with a stroller—all bore the mark of some shared exhaustion and deep anxiety. They avoided eye contact and responded to my greetings with curt nods.

I chalked it up to big-city alienation until I met Katya. She lived three floors below me, and we bumped into each other by the elevator. She was a pretty girl around my age, an artist. She was the first person to actually smile at me since I moved in. We started talking, and thrilled to have some human interaction, I invited her up for tea.

Sitting in my kitchen, she looked out at the city skyline with admiration. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “If you don’t think about what happens inside.” “What do you mean?” “You really don’t know anything about these buildings, do you?” She looked at me, dead serious. “Well, besides the fact that the most unfriendly people in Minsk live here, no.”

Katya sighed. “They’re just scared, Egor. Very scared. Especially right now.”

She proceeded to tell me the local legend. Or rather, not a legend. Something like a terrifying urban myth that parents tell their kids so they don’t open the door to strangers.

Every three years, always in the autumn, It appears in Serebryanka-9. Nobody knows where it comes from or where it goes. They call it “The Guest” or “The Knocker.” It looks like a man, very tall, wearing an old, worn-out coat. But those who have caught a fleeting glimpse of it talk about unnaturally long fingers with black, claw-like nails, and a smile that is far too wide, full of needle-sharp teeth.

It never uses the elevator. It starts on the first floor of the first building and methodically visits all five towers, floor by floor. It approaches every single door and knocks.

Always three times. Not too loud, not too quiet. A distinct, measured rhythm. Knock… Knock… Knock…

If you don’t open the door, it stands there for a minute and moves on. But if you do…

“What happens if you open it?” I asked, feeling goosebumps erupt across my arms. “My uncle… he lived in Building B. Three years ago,” Katya’s voice trembled. “He was a skeptic, laughed at these ‘fairy tales’. Thought it was just neighbors pulling a prank. The police found him a week later. They said… they said his apartment looked like a canister of red paint had exploded. And as for him… all that was left was his skin. Neatly peeled off in one single piece, laid out on the floor like a rug.”

A cold chill ran through me. “But that’s insane. It’s just some serial killer.” “A serial killer who appears every three years at the exact same time? Who no one can ever catch? Egor, the people here know. They can feel when the time is approaching. That’s why everyone is so quiet. They’re preparing. Stocking up on food so they don’t have to leave. Installing new deadbolts, covering peepholes. Praying. The old lady across from you… did she tell you to count?”

I nodded, remembering her bizarre advice. “Three knocks. If you hear them—do not open the door. Even if it sounds like a crying child. Or someone begging for help. Or even if it’s your own mother’s voice. It’s It.”

I didn’t believe her. I mean, I was spooked, sure, but my rational brain refused to accept this absolute nonsense. But that night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the sounds of the building. And around 2:00 AM, I heard it.

Far below. Probably from Building A or B. A faint, but distinct, rhythmic sound echoing up the concrete ventilation shafts. Knock… Knock… Knock… A pause. And again, slightly closer. Knock… Knock… Knock…

My heart hammered against my ribs. I jumped up and checked my door. Two old, flimsy locks. I felt entirely defenseless on my seventeenth floor. It had begun its patrol. And I had very little time to start believing in fairy tales before it knocked on my door.

The following days turned into pure psychological torture. Life outside our complex went on as usual—cars drove by, people rushed to work—but inside our little micro-district, sheer terror reigned. I didn’t leave my apartment. I worked remotely and ate the meager groceries I had managed to buy. I taped over my peephole with black electrical tape. I don’t know why, but the thought of It looking through the lens at me from the other side made me physically sick.

I didn’t sleep at night. I sat in the kitchen with my laptop, trying to distract myself with work, but every fiber of my being was straining to listen. The knocking was slowly, steadily approaching. Every night it sounded louder, climbing higher. Building A, Building B… Sometimes, after the knocking, there were screams. Short, filled with primal, animalistic horror, and they always cut off so abruptly, as if someone had simply pressed ‘mute’.

After that came silence. A silence far more terrifying than the screams.

I texted Katya constantly. She was also locked inside. “It’s going to be in our building tonight,” she wrote me. “It starts on the lower floors. Please, Egor, be careful. Do not open the door for anyone.”

That night, I sat gripping the edge of my kitchen table. I heard It enter our stairwell. I don’t know how I knew, but the air in my apartment suddenly felt incredibly heavy. I heard its footsteps on the stairs—slow, heavy, shuffling.

First floor. Knock… Knock… Knock… Silence. Knock… Knock… Knock… Silence again. Either nobody was home, or they knew the rule.

Second floor. Third. My forehead was slick with cold sweat. I pictured this monstrosity: a towering silhouette in the dark stairwell, raising its grotesque hand to measure out three strikes of fate.

When the knocking reached Katya’s floor, my heart skipped a beat. I held my breath. Knock… Knock… Knock… I prayed she wouldn’t open it. I prayed she was safe. A long, agonizing silence followed. And then I heard it again, one floor up. Thank God.

I didn’t notice when I dozed off, my head resting on the table. I woke up freezing and surrounded by absolute silence. The sky outside the window was turning pale with the dawn. Was it over? Did I survive? I felt a wild wave of relief mixed with extreme exhaustion. I stood up to finally go to a real bed, and at that exact moment, the knock came.

Right on my door.

It wasn’t loud. It was intimate, almost gentle. Three clear, distinct strikes that made my heart stop. Knock… Knock… Knock…

I froze in the middle of the room, unable to breathe. It was standing right there, three feet away from me, separated only by a thin wooden door. I slowly, on trembling legs, backed away into the depths of the apartment. Silence fell. It was waiting. I could hear my own breathing, loud as a train whistle.

And then, a voice spoke. “Son, it’s me. Please open up. I forgot my phone at home, I can’t reach you.” It was my mother’s voice.

I paralyzed. My brain screamed that it was a trap, that it was impossible—she lived in Gomel, three hundred kilometers away. But the voice… it was perfect. The exact same intonation, the same slight undertone of maternal worry. The memory of Katya’s warning violently clashed with an instinct ingrained in me since childhood: help your mother.

“Egor, honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Please open the door, I’m scared!” The voice trembled, on the verge of tears.

I covered my ears with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. “Go away,” I whispered. “You’re not my mom.”

The thing behind the door fell silent. And then, the voice changed. It became cold, hissing, filled with inhuman malice, but it was still my mother’s voice. “You ungrateful little piece of shit. I raised you, and you won’t even let me in?”

Instantly, the voice shifted to another. Katya’s voice. “Egor, help! It’s breaking down my door! Please, open up!” And then I heard the crying of a child. Desperate, agonizing.

I slid down the wall to the floor, wrapping my arms around my head. It was a calculated torture, designed to break you, to make you doubt your own sanity, to make you commit one single, fatal mistake.

Outside, the silence returned. I thought it had finally left. I thought I had passed the test. I slowly raised my head.

And that’s when a new sound started. A scraping sound. Loud, confident metal tearing into wood. It hadn’t left. It just stopped knocking. Its long claws had dug into my door, and it started tearing it apart.

Wood splinters flew into the hallway. I crawled backwards in absolute horror. A hole appeared in the door, right at my eye level, and through it, I saw… an eye. Not human. Massive, entirely black, devoid of iris or sclera, filled with an ancient, starving emptiness. It stared right at me.

Then the door flew off its hinges with a deafening crack.

It is standing in the doorway right now. A towering, hunched silhouette in a dark coat. Its head is tilted to the side, and saliva is dripping from lips stretched into an impossible, razor-filled smile. The sickle-like claws on its hands are coated in something wet and red.

It’s taking a slow step into my apartment. I’m typing this as fast as I can.

The rule was simple. Don’t open the door. But nobody ever told us what happens if the door isn’t strong enough. It’s raising its hand.