The road wound like a snake along the slope until it finally led to a plateau, a mansion that used to be a boarding school where you had to spend several years. The building was both a home and a prison during your childhood. The abandoned building stood on a bare rock, the highest point for many miles around, like a bird of prey's nest. The dilapidated dark stone walls absorbed the dim light of the fading day, and the empty windows looked out onto the encroaching forest.

As soon as you stepped inside, the smell of mold and something metallic hit your nose. You walked through the corridors where children's feet once ran. Now the floors were covered with a layer of dust and debris, but here and there other traces appeared... rusty brown splashes on the walls and all too clear, sticky prints of bare feet, as if someone had recently walked through a puddle.

Your heart pounded as you entered the former dining room. What you saw there made your stomach clench into a tight knot. In the middle of the room, under a thick layer of cobwebs, stood a huge antique scale. On one pan lay a pile of dark, dried-up fragments that your brain refused to recognize as parts of human bodies. On the other, nothing. They were in perfect, eerie balance. You recoiled and almost stepped on a piece of paper lying at your feet. Then another, and another. Notes. In childish, crooked handwriting, they told a story that you seemed to have always known on an instinctive level.

"Sister ###### said my laughter was a sin. She took me to the basement. It smells like iron and rotten meat there."

"He hangs the guilty on a hook. I saw blood dripping on the floor."

"If you don't finish your porridge, Father will cut off your finger."

You crumpled up the notes, feeling goosebumps run down your spine. You had to leave. Right now. But as soon as you turned to run, a figure appeared from the archway at the end of the corridor. A tall, thin man dressed in a long, mourning black robe, similar to a cassock. His face was pale, with black eyebrows and thin, pipe-like lips... and his eyes... black, full of hatred, were fixed on you. In his long, bony hand, a knife as long as a cleaver glinted.

Your eyes met. For a second, there was silence, broken only by the whistling of the wind in the crevices. And then his thin lips twisted into a silent, terrifying scream. He didn't make a sound, but with his whole being, with all his tense flesh, he roared and rushed at you.