Chapter 3: The Unseen Tenant

Chapter 3: The Unseen Tenant

The morning light was merciless, exposing every shard of glass scattered across the hallway floor. Alex knelt, his head pounding in a painful rhythm, carefully sweeping the glittering fragments into a dustpan. He told himself the story he needed to believe: He was overworked, emotionally drained from the bizarre funeral, and had taken too many sleeping pills. The result was a night terror, a vivid hallucination so powerful it had sent him crashing headfirst into the mirror. The word, scratched into the glass? A trick of the light on the cracks. A figment. It had to be.

He wrapped the larger, web-fractured pieces of the mirror in an old towel, a makeshift shroud. He didn’t want to look at his own splintered reflection. He certainly didn't want to look for that jagged, hateful word again. Out of sight, out of mind. He dumped the entire mess into a black trash bag, tied it off, and shoved it into the back of his closet, a secret he was keeping from himself.

But the apartment wouldn’t let him forget. His sanctuary had become a hostile space, turning his own senses against him.

It started subtly. He was at his desk, trying to salvage his workday, when he caught a movement on the black, glossy bezel of his monitor. In the reflection, his head turned slightly to the left. But he hadn’t moved. He was staring straight ahead, his hands frozen over the keyboard. When he blinked, the reflection was still again, a perfect mirror of his own rigid posture. He shook his head, blaming fatigue. His eyes were playing tricks on him.

Later, while making coffee, he heard it. A faint, dry whisper, like dead leaves skittering across pavement. It seemed to come from the empty hallway where the mirror used to hang. He froze, straining to listen. Silence. It was just the building settling, he reasoned. The wind in the vents. An old radiator hissing to life. There was an explanation for everything, if you just looked for it.

But he couldn't explain the cold.

It was the same profound, invasive chill he’d felt when his cousin David grabbed him. It no longer clung to his memory, but to the air itself. A mobile pocket of absolute zero that drifted through his apartment. He’d be sitting on the sofa and the patch of air to his right would suddenly drop twenty degrees, raising goosebumps on his arm. He would get up and walk to the kitchen, and a moment later, he’d feel it behind him, a frigid presence at his back. It followed him like a loyal, invisible hound from the arctic.

He started leaving lights on, playing music constantly to fill the oppressive silence. But the whispers found their way through the gaps in the melody, and the cold spots seemed to thrive in the artificial brightness. His home was no longer his. He was a guest, an intruder in the presence of an unseen tenant.

By evening, the rationalizations had worn thin, shredded by a constant, low-grade terror. He felt a gnawing loneliness that was deeper than anything he had ever experienced. The numbness he had cultivated for years was cracking, and raw fear was seeping through. He needed an anchor. He needed to hear a voice that wasn't a disembodied whisper.

He scrolled through his contacts, his thumb hovering over his father’s name. His dad had been strange at the funeral, distant and tense. But he was still his father. He had to know something. About Great-Aunt Lillian. About why the entire family had looked at Alex like he was a lamb being led to slaughter.

He took a deep breath and pressed the call button. It rang three times before his father answered, his voice gruff. "Alex? Everything okay?"

"Yeah, Dad. Fine," Alex lied, his voice sounding thin. "Listen, this is going to sound weird, but I was thinking about the funeral."

A heavy silence stretched over the line. "What about it?" his father asked, his tone suddenly guarded.

"It was just… strange. Everyone was so tense. And Lillian… I know we never met her, but what was she like?"

"She was an old woman. Kept to herself. That's all," he snapped. The answer was too quick, too dismissive. "Why are you asking about this?"

Alex’s heart hammered. He had to push. "I don't know, I just... I had a weird dream about her. And a word kept coming up. A name, maybe." He hesitated, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "Dybbuk."

The reaction was instantaneous and violent. "Where did you hear that word?" his father roared, his voice cracking with a mixture of rage and something else. Something Alex recognized from his cousin David's eyes: pure terror.

"I told you, it was in a—"

"Stop it!" his father cut him off. "You stop it right now. You don't know what you're talking about. Some things are better left alone, you understand me? You forget that word. You forget about Lillian. You leave the dead alone and you get on with your life!"

"Dad, wait—" Alex pleaded, but it was too late.

The line went dead.

Alex stared at his phone, the dial tone a mocking buzz in his ear. The anger, the fear, the sheer ferocity of his father's denial was more terrifying than any whisper. It was confirmation. His family knew. They knew what was happening to him, and they had locked the door behind them, leaving him alone in the dark with it.

A wave of cold dread, more profound than any cold spot, washed over him. He was completely, utterly alone. The whispers, the reflections, the crushing paralysis in his nightmare—no one was coming to save him.

He turned to the only lifeline he had left. He sat down at his desk, the glow of the monitor pushing back the shadows. His hands, shaking with a mixture of fear and grim determination, moved to the keyboard. He opened a search engine. The blinking cursor was a patient, silent question.

With a final, shuddering breath, he typed the seven letters his father had forbidden.

D. Y. B. B. U. K.

He hit Enter.

The screen filled with text. Links to folklore archives, paranormal encyclopedias, and terrified blog posts. His eyes scanned the snippets, his blood turning to ice.

…a malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person…

…latches onto a living host, particularly one in a state of emotional emptiness or despair… a vessel…

…manifestations include nightmares of paralysis and suffocation, auditory hallucinations, unexplained cold spots, and severe physical exhaustion in the host…

…it is a parasite that feeds on fear and loneliness, slowly draining the host of their will…

He clicked on the first link, an article detailing historical accounts. He read about victims who sleepwalked nightly, who were found with words mysteriously scratched into walls or mirrors. He read about families who treated the possessed with fear and isolation.

It wasn't a story. It wasn't a myth.

It was a perfect, chilling description of his life for the past week. Every detail, from the funeral to the shattered mirror, was laid out on the screen in cold, black text.

He wasn't going crazy. He wasn't having night terrors.

He was being haunted. And now, his unseen tenant had a name.