Chapter 10
It’s unsettling how much your sense of time can collapse when you’re living in a constant state of hypervigilance.
It replaces small things first.
The way you think, the way you hold your body, and one day… you look up, and the boy you used to be feels like someone you barely remember rather than the shell you grew out of.
But time passed, and suddenly I was sixteen.
Not that the number really mattered; numbers are only useful for other people. They give them something to measure, something to place you within. But internally, I felt like time stood still and that I had stopped aging in ways that made sense long before that.
Still, if you had seen me then, you would have noticed the difference.
Puberty had not been subtle with me. It rarely is with boys who have something to prove, even if they don’t know who they’re proving it to.
My body had caught up in ways my mind had already surpassed years ago.
Taller and harder in places that used to be soft, and suddenly, I stood level with Bartosz.
That mattered more than you might think.
Because power doesn’t begin when you surpass someone, it begins the moment you realize you almost can.
That realization changes the way you breathe in a room with them.
It changes the way you look back when they look at you. It changes everything.
I had built something in those years. Not in a way that anyone would have praised, but internally there was structure now.
Two things kept me stable.
Books, and my body.
Krystyna's library card became mine without her ever formally giving it to me. She liked the idea of me reading. It made her feel like she was forming something. Cultivating something. She never understood what she was actually feeding.
I chose things that answered something.
Philosophy.
Psychology.
Stories where people were broken and didn’t stay that way. Stories where something inside a person turned and never turned back. And when I wasn’t reading, I was working out.
At first, it had been instinctive.
Push-ups on the floor of my room, pulling against the doorframe, small and quiet repetitions that no one paid attention to. Over time, it became a system. Pain measured, progress tracked, muscles responding the way the rest of my life never had.
Your body doesn’t lie to you, little Ghost. It doesn’t pretend. It gives you exactly what you earn from it, nothing more, nothing less. And when everything else in your life is unpredictable, that kind of honesty becomes addictive.
I needed that. Because everything else remained exactly the same.
Or, well, almost everything.
One night, I had nearly managed to forget about the locked door. Buried the memory of it beneath grief, exhaustion, and every pathetic attempt I could make to escape the reality I was trapped in. Until…
THUD.
The sound tore through the house hard enough to jolt me upright. Like a massive cabinet had tipped over and crashed against the wooden floor. Or Bartosz had gotten too drunk again and fallen out of bed.
Honestly, with him, it could’ve been either one.
I stayed sitting upright in my bed, my ears straining as I tried to catch something that could explain the loud crash.
Footsteps against the floor, followed by heavy breathing from someone trying to lift whatever had fallen back into place.
The sound of Bartosz grunting and complaining in some pathetic attempt to drag his drunken body back into bed.
Just something, anything that could explain the sudden disturbance and make it feel normal again. But nothing came.
The only thing filling the room was my own pulse ringing violently in my ears while I sat frozen in the dark, waiting for another sound that never came.
I tried to remember where the sound had come from, trying to place it somewhere specific, tie it to something real, but the house had already fallen back into stillness, and after that, there was nothing.
It should’ve ended there, but something about it stayed stuck in my head.
Night after night, I lay awake, turning endlessly in bed while my mind kept circling back to that sound, no matter how hard I tried to let it go.
I could’ve sworn I’d started hearing someone moving around the house at night. Footsteps somewhere beyond my room.
Furniture dragging slowly across the floorboards.
Just this constant feeling that the house didn’t feel the same anymore, like there was another presence moving through it now besides the two I’d gotten used to living with.
Some nights, my curiosity came close to taking over completely, but I also knew how little it took to push Bartosz over the edge.
One wrong sound from my room.
One floorboard creaking at the wrong time.
If he caught me wandering around the house at night, he’d probably convince himself I was sneaking around with Krystyna behind his back, and then he’d beat the shit out of me again.
Or maybe he wouldn’t even need to believe it.
Maybe he’d just use it as an excuse to put his hands on me one more time. Krystyna didn’t stop.
She adapted; so did Bartosz.
And I learned to exist inside both of them without breaking in ways that were visible. Breaking is inevitable; the only real question is whether anyone sees it happening. At sixteen, no one did.
Ever since the first night Krystyna visited me, on my twelfth birthday, my inner world had disappeared. I tried reaching for it again a couple of times after that, desperate to fall back into it the way I used to, but it never worked.
I could still lie in bed and build the images in my head like before.
The same little escapes I’d hidden inside for years. But I couldn’t disappear into them anymore. Not really. Something had broken after that night, and ever since then, it felt like there was always a part of me stuck back in that room, no matter how far my mind tried to run from it.
The only thing that stayed the same was the spider in the corner above my bed.
After all those years, it was still there every night, resting in the same place like it belonged to the room more than I did.
Or maybe it wasn’t even the same spider anymore.
Maybe a new one had crawled in and taken its place somewhere along the way.
Still, that spider ended up being the only company I had that didn’t seem to hate me in one way or another.
I started watching it with a kind of hyperfocus that could, if only for a moment, pull me away from everything else around me.
The tiny movements of its legs. The way it moved across the web in those careful, almost weightless patterns.
The faint trembling running through the strands whenever some small fly got caught in them, trapped there with nowhere left to go.
I used to love watching the struggle. The way the fly kept throwing itself against the web, even after it was obvious there was no escape left.
The panic in its movements slowed little by little while the spider waited nearby, patient enough to know it didn’t need to rush something that was already doomed.
One night, I was lying in bed, staring into the dark the same way I had done thousands of times before. Sleep wasn’t something that came easily to me, still isn’t.
My mind didn’t slow down when the world did; if anything, it became clearer in the dark. Thoughts coming back on themselves. Hours passed like that.
I shifted once, twice.
The sheets twisted around my body, and then the familiar feeling of dryness in my throat. I sat up slowly, letting my feet find the floor without making noise.
I opened my door carefully and stepped into the dark hallway. Not complete darkness, just enough ambient light bleeding in from somewhere distant to outline silhouettes.
I moved toward the bathroom, each step carefully placed.
The water was cold. I drank straight from the tap, letting it run over my fingers first before bringing it to my mouth.
The sound was too loud; I think the night does that to everything.
When I turned it off, the silence that followed pressed in even thicker than before.
That was the first thing. Not something you notice immediately, just different.
I stepped back into the hallway, and that’s when I saw it.
The door.
The one detail in the house that had always remained the same.
It stood slightly open, and the padlock was suddenly hanging loose.
For a moment, I didn’t move. I couldn’t think.
Because some things don’t make sense immediately, and when something doesn’t make sense, your mind hesitates.
It tries to place it somewhere familiar. This didn’t belong anywhere familiar.
The gap in the door revealed nothing, only darkness. Heavy and still, like it existed on its own. I lingered there, just staring into it, waiting. For a movement, for a sound, for anything that would explain it.
Nothing came, but my body reacted anyway. My heartbeat had shifted; each beat dragged more than the one before. A strange sense of something familiar flushed over me. The kind that arrives before understanding.
You’ve felt that before, haven’t you, little Ghost?
That moment where something pulls at your attention in a way that feels almost personal, like it’s aware of you noticing it.
I took a step forward, then stopped. My impulse told me to open the door, to look inside, but I couldn’t.
Because another part of me, a more dominant part, warned me against it.
Instead of standing there arguing with myself about what my body was telling me, I went back to my room.
The door closed behind me with a soft, familiar sound.
I exhaled slowly and moved toward the bed, letting my body settle back into the space like nothing had happened.