☆Creepypasta Stories☆

~Something was in my kitchen last night~

I moved to this apartment about a year ago, and I swear that I haven't gotten a single good night's sleep since then. Every day, it's been the same: get up, shove some cheap crap down my throat, go to school or work, come home, veg out in front of the computer, try to sleep. And I do mean "try" when I say "try to sleep," because I have to try to block out the sound of scratching in the walls. Just this...scratching, faint, but just loud enough that I know I'm not imagining things. At least, I don't think I am.

I'll be lying in bed, bundled up in maybe two or three thick blankets if it's winter, and just about to fall asleep when it starts. It's always quiet at first, and I don't think I consciously register it at first, but I definitely notice it after a minute or two. Scratching. Just this scratching in the walls, under the floor, sometimes in the ceiling. It always gets louder, or closer, every time I almost manage to shut it out. It used to keep me up for two, three days at time before I'd just pass out from sheer exhaustion. I'm taking sleep aids now, but...I'm not sure that's a good idea anymore.

I used to think it was rats in the walls, and of course I reported it to the landlord. As run down as the rest of the apartment is, with its water stains, ancient plumbing, and unreliable furnace, my landlord takes any kind of infestation very seriously. No one wants to get a reputation for having bed bugs and rats in their buildings, after all. I think it took him maybe two, three days to get an exterminator in to take a look at the apartment. Not that it did any good; the exterminator spent maybe two or three hours scouring every nook and cranny, poking his nose into every dark space behind and beneath my furniture in search of even one scrap of evidence that some kind of pest was in there.
Nothing. He didn't find so much as one whiff of a rat or a cockroach, not one stray hair or tell-tale dropping. He must have thought I was a crazy, because I pushed him to look just one more time, to stop just short of actually tearing open the walls, but he couldn't find a thing. So when I heard the scratching in the walls again that night, I tried to tell myself that it was all in my mind, that I could just will it to stop.

It didn't, of course. I wouldn't be writing this if it had just been that easy. It just kept happening, keeping me up every night, and I'd lay there, exhausted but wide awake and hoping, praying, that it would just stop. I even started leaving traps and poison around the apartment, but nothing would ever be taken in the morning. I think that's about when things...started getting worse, actually. I think I might have pissed it...them...off by trying to kill them.

It wasn't just scratching in the walls anymore; I'd hear things moving around outside my bedroom, like animals walking around, or things being moved around on the table or counters. I'd hear the quiet bump of something being put down, or the shuffle of something being pushed or dragged, but nothing would be out of place. It's like someone was re-arranging my stuff at night, then deciding that they liked the way I had it better. I bought a camera to try to catch whatever it was in the act; I wanted to buy more so that I could have one in every room, but I could only afford the one. Since most of the movement seemed to be coming from my kitchen, that's where I set the camera.

I set it in the corner where it'd see most of the room, turned it on, went to bed...and woke up to find that the camera had gone missing. Just the camera. The tripod was still there, completely undisturbed, but the camera was gone. When I was looking for it, I found a small, neat brown envelope tucked in my couch cushions that I sure as hell hadn't put there. My hands actually shook and I could feel my heart pounding against my chest as I picked it up and turned it over. No address. No signature. Not even a name. I don't know why I was expecting these things; maybe I was just trying to find some strand of normalcy to cling to, some safety line to grab onto in the face of this...insanity. I opened it, nearly tearing it in two because my hands were shaking so badly, and I nearly pissed myself when I saw what was inside: the memory card.