Only I know the hell I went through.

And no one will ever believe me.

Twenty years ago I was playing hide-and-seek with some other kids that lived down my street. It was summer of 2003, about 1:30 in the afternoon. The sun was shining bring and the heat irradiated from the stones in the sidewalk. The soles of my feet were properly calloused from that period of my life. Many would say that I had a good childhood, and I’d agree. I just wish that, in that particular day, I had stayed home.

As my weekends usually went, I had lunch and headed straight to the street to do something with my friends. I walked through the neighborhood looking for them, and one by one we gathered. In the blink of an eye, it was late afternoon and we were all covered in sweat and dust from playing soccer for hours. I was the one who had the idea to play hide-and-seek. I’m also the one who suggested that we did it on a different street than usual.

I made the decision that we’d go somewhere a few blocks down from where we were. It was the kind of street that moms forbid their kids from going. Dead-ended, dirty and sparsely inhabited. There were very few homes dotted between the fields of tall grass that filled the empty lots. From the half a dozen decrepit homes, only two were inhabited by some weird-looking squatters, which I often noticed peeking their heads out to watch us. It wasn’t a proper place for children to be at, much less without an adult. But what kind of kid has common sense?

We gathered in the middle of the street and decided who were the hiders and who’d seek. I ended up hiding, and I already had a place in mind. A wooden, run-down house. It had been abandoned ever since I could remember, and nobody ever cared to remove it. I knew there was an unlocked door on the side, and I was going to find the perfect place to hide.

Overconfidence is a common feeling right before something goes incredibly wrong. In my mind, as a child, I didn’t feel like it could happen any other way. I’d hide and wait until I could hear the other kids running around, then I’d leave and run towards the home base. That was the plan. I got in the house, went to the furthest room and stuck myself between a smelly bedframe and the wall. When a good 15 minutes passed by, a thought crossed my mind. “I should probably leave and see if they’re still playing.” But I stayed. The light faded with each minute that passed, and I knew it was already getting darker than it should, but I still stayed.

Suddenly, I was engulfed by darkness and the thought of leaving crossed my mind again. I blinked, and something appeared in the corner of the door, right in front of me. There was a face looking straight at me.

The ghostly face of one of my friends stared directly at me. His eyes had an eerie glow, with no body attached to the head. Only a static face hovering above the floor. I stared at it frozen in place. The sun continued to lower with each minute, and the glow in his eyes got increasingly more intense as it got darker.

When I finally got out of my hypnosis, I looked to my side and noticed that I couldn’t even see the bed that I was holding on to. Pitch-black darkness. I could only smell the sweat and damp wood, and sink in a silence so still that I could hear my heart beating in my ears, and the air coming in and out of my mouth. My breath got warmer and I started to feel feverish. Suddenly, my body felt weak and a sense of urgency flooded me. I had to get out of there. NOW.

I held onto the bed and pushed myself up, struggling to maintain balance. I felt my eyelids heavy and a paralyzing exhaustion took over me. I could fall asleep right then and there. Even with a blurred vision, I saw that the face wasn’t by the door anymore. I slowly walked up to it, trying my best not to collapse to the floor. I analyzed the room I had just entered, and there was a single beam of yellow light coming inside, slashing through the thick black and outlining the dark silhouettes around the furniture.

In that darkness, everything looked like a person standing until I looked directly at it and comprehended the piece of furniture. Then, the one beside it looked like a person. And then the next one, and the next... I started seeing people all around me. That’s when I heard the first noise apart from my quick breathing.

“Hey.” whispered a manly, raspy voice, almost touching my right ear. “Don’t be afraid, alright? I’m here to take care of you.”

The stench that hit my nose made my eyes water. It was sour, sulfuric. The breath touched my ear with a little warm, humid breeze. My body froze.

“Come here.” said the man whispering while moving away from me. “Don’t be afraid.”

I felt a pressure around my head, and my mind got filled with noise. A thousand thoughts rushed through. I couldn’t move a single muscle, even if every fiber of my body told me to run. Sweat streamed down my forehead and dripped from the tip of my nose. My hands and feet were full of pins and needles.

“Come.” the voice came from another room to my right.

I didn’t want to look. I swear I didn’t. But I looked. I turned my head just enough to see him in the corner of my eye. And there he was, standing by the door.

He was nude and his body was disproportionate. His silhouette was that of a person drawn by a child, crooked and nonsensical. His thighs were thin as sticks and his torso was much wider than it should be. He had long, lanky arms and a disheveled head. His genitals dangling between his legs.

“If you don’t come, I’ll get you.”

A shiver rushed through my whole body and my eyes filled up with tears. I still couldn’t move, only shake in place, but now, for some reason, I was turned towards and facing the man.

When he took the first step in my direction, I shot to the nearest exit while screaming and crying.

It was too late.

His feet stomped the wooden floor as he ran after me, sounding like a thunderstorm.

He caught up and grabbed me. His fingers were cold, and I felt his nails digging in my arm on the first tug. I flailed my arms and legs, cried and screamed for help.

But no one heard it.

Nor came looking for me.

He locked me in a windowless room, and I spent the whole night screaming until my mouth tasted like blood. I beat and thrashed against the door until I had scraped all the skin from my firsts. I kicked the walls until my toenails bled. All I wanted was for somebody to hear me.

In the next morning, without having closed my eyes for a single minute, the door opened with no warning. He comes in and, without a single word, grabs a fistful of my hair and drags me through the kitchen, where a door hid a staircase that led to a basement. On our way there, I caught a glimpse of the house and noticed that all of the windows had been blocked by blankets, keeping the sunlight from coming in. Despite that, a few dots of light could be seen on the wall, between a few of the boards. I could see that it was daytime.

Ripping my hair out of my scalp by the clumps, he dragged me down to the basement. It was completely empty except for a chair right in the middle. He tied my arms and legs to the chair and left me there, alone. A sour smell took over the air in the room, and it made my nostrils sting every time I took a breath. I screamed for hours, but nobody ever came.

After a very long time, the door opened and he came down the stairs. Sometimes he’d sit down in front of me and just stare wide-eyed at me for hours. Sometimes he walked around me screaming furiously, biting and spitting on me. Every so often, he’d leave and come back with a bucket full of organic waste, and dump it around me. It rot further as time went on. I could make out pieces of dogs, cats and birds.

Even after all of this, I couldn’t properly see his face. Even after my eyes got used to the darkness, even when he screamed right in front of my face. His head had something like a mist that covered it.

I can’t say how long I was stuck to that chair. I can’t say how long I went without food or water. It could’ve been days or weeks. I only clearly remember the dread of thinking I’d die there, longing for my family and how much I wanted to leave that place.

I lost count of how many times he came by to rip out another nail or bite another piece of flesh off my body. I lost count of how many times I tried to speak to him. I lost count of how many times I threw up on my own feet, not being able to tolerate the stench of the pile of flesh that only grew each day.

I had dreams of his twisted laughter, and jolts of pain ran through me.

After a certain point I gave up hoping to escape. I stopped trying to convince him to stop.

When my blank stare didn’t flinch anymore when he stuck his fingers deep in my nose to make it bleed. After my tears ran dry and my will broke.

Those were my last days of torment.

One hopeless day he stomped down the stairs as usual, came up to me and said the first thing I could understand since he locked me up.

“Very well. Now you’re truly mine.”

His voice echoed in my head and I felt dizzy, like the world had turned upside down. My vision spun until everything got dark.

When I opened my eyes, I saw myself laying down between a rotten bed and a wooden wall. The smell of sweat and damp wood. I slowly recovered my senses and saw that I was in my hiding spot, from that day when I decided to play hide-and-seek. It felt like it happened a lifetime ago. It was dark and it took me a while to stand up. The memory of my torture was as fresh as it could be. The man, his twisted body, and every way that I felt pain. Every night that I spent calling for help.

I noticed that every wound on my body had vanished. My legs worked, and my fingernails were back in place. I walked across the house, and on my way to the exit I saw the door from where he ran after me, I saw the windowless room and the kitchen with the door leading to the basement. I remembered everything.

I left the house feeling disoriented. I looked up and the sky was a warm orange color. The moon also shared the space with those few last rays of light.

One of my friends ran past me, screaming and laughing.

— Found you! — he said, sprinting towards the home base. — I’ll get there first!

I stood in place trying to understand what had just happened.

I just lived an endless hell, but it seems as if nothing happened.

It felt like it wasn’t real.

Over the following years I never returned to that street, or got near that house again.

Especially because right after leaving it, while recollecting myself, I looked back at it one more time.

And right by the doorway stood a nude man with a disproportionate body and a face covered in mist.