Ninaa heard squeaks and tiny scratches the first night they moved into their new apartment. At first, she never thought about it as something serious,, even though the squeaking felt weird.
Tobi had kissed her lips and asked her to relax that it might probably be her mind playing tricks with me, or maybe it was just adjusting to their new environment
But the squeaking never stopped on the third day. By this time, the sound felt closer, slower, like someone listening to every word of their conversation.
She barely slept at night. Unlike Tobi, he didn't just sleep, he snored too. Nina wondered why he wasn't scared. Did he not just hear the weird squeaks, or was he just pretending not to care?
Well, she couldn't answer that question as it pricked her mind every night.
By the third night, Tobi began hearing the squeaks. This time, they came with weird occurrences. By morning, there would be rat hairs on their food. Crumbs on the kitchen counter, even on nights they ate out. Shredded slippers, food packs, and important documents.
"We need to get a cat,” Ninaa had joked, trying to shake off the chill crawling down her spine.
Tobi chuckled. “Or just borrow one of Mama’s owls from the village.”
They both laughed, but deep down, Ninaa still harbored this fear within her.
One week later, while scrubbing the kitchen floor, she found a hidden door that led to a hidden room, cold with rusting chambers and metal cages lined up on the walls. Then the weirdest part of the room was the faded bloodstains on a strapped table and scattered notebooks filled with cruel experiments on mice.
She had called Tobi, and together they explored the room. On the floor, we're tiny metal tags, rusted and thin. One of them read: Subject #49.
"Must be from the old owners. Maybe they had a pet mouse they trained." Tobi had said. He didn't just want to get Nina scared.
"There are a lot of tags here plus cages. Just say it as it is." She looked her husband in the eye. There were small flickers of doubt in his eyes.
"This is a lab."
"They were experimenting on mice here." She whispered. Then she looked to the floor, and there lay a book. She picked it up and read: "Subject #49. Experiment failure. Result: unusually intelligent. Displays signs of learned vengeance. Weakness: water."
She looked at her husband, who returned her gaze. Their eyes wide and mouth open. That confirmed their fears. Ignorantly, they had bought a house with a bad past. As they were still trying to understand it all, the door that led to the room slammed shut. Then a shrill squeak echoed through the air.
Tobi quickly ran to the door, twisting the knob. “It’s stuck!” he shouted.
The strange squeaking immediately increased, filling the room with sharp and angry squeaks.. The air grew heavy, and the lights flickered, casting their shadows in jerking movements across the stained walls.
Then, in one corner of the room, they saw the rat. It had sharp teeth and a vengeful look in its eye. It was the size of a Rottweiler.
Ninaa immediately clutched Tobi’s arm. “It’s him. Subject #49,” she whispered.
"They must have hurt him so bad that he's seeking revenge?" Tobi explained.
The rat let out a high-pitched shriek through the air. It wasn’t the normal sound a rat makes. Then slowly, it made its way towards them.
They stood there, scared, with no idea of what to do.
"Do something, Tobi," Ninaa screamed in fear.
Tobi looked around for something, anything to protect themselves. He saw the book Nina held in her arms and quickly grabbed it from her. He read through the pages again. “Weakness: water.”
Without thinking, Tobi ran to a corner of the room where a fire extinguisher was hanging. He pulled it off. “This counts as water, right?” he asked Nina.
She nodded slowly.
Without waiting, he sprayed the extinguisher against the rat. The rat squeaked loudly. Gradually, they watched as its skin began to peel as the rat struggled for life. Without thinking, Tobi grabbed Nina's hand and ran out of the room. Out of their house and into the streets.
They called the cops, but at first, the police found their story to be weird. Not until they searched the house and found the rat dead in the hidden room. It had died from the water poured in its skin.
For days, Ninaa and Tobi couldn't sleep in their house. They resorted to sleeping in Tobis' cabin down by the river on the outskirts of the town.
Till today, nobody knows if they had gone back to their new home.
