The House at the End of Vargmyren Road

I have avoided writing this down for almost seven years.

Whenever I tried, I would get as far as the first night and stop. Not because I had forgotten anything, but because I remembered too much: the smell of wet wool in the hallway, the sound of ice tapping against the kitchen window, and the dark shape standing between the trees.

Most of all, I remembered the telephone ringing in a house that had no telephone line.

The Road Through the Forest

This happened in January 2019, when I was twenty-eight years old. I had recently separated from my girlfriend and needed somewhere quiet to stay while I worked out what to do next. My uncle owned an old house in western Sweden, several kilometres from the nearest village. He used it during hunting season but rarely visited in winter.

The house stood at the end of a narrow road called Vargmyren Road. The name roughly translates to Wolf Bog Road, although I had never heard of wolves being seen there.

My uncle offered me the house for two weeks.

“You’ll have electricity,” he said. “There’s firewood in the shed. The mobile signal is poor, but you can usually get one bar upstairs.”

He hesitated before handing me the key.

“Don’t use the small bedroom,” he added.

I laughed because of the way he said it.

“Why not?”

“The window leaks.”

That was all he told me.

I arrived shortly before four in the afternoon. It was already getting dark. The final stretch took me through dense forest where the trees crowded so close to the road that their branches scraped the sides of the car. Snow covered the ground, but a single set of tyre tracks led ahead of me. They looked fresh. Their edges were still sharp, and loose snow had not yet blown into them.

I assumed they belonged to my uncle.

The house appeared suddenly between the trees. It was larger than I remembered: two storeys, painted a faded yellow that looked grey in the winter light. The roof sagged slightly in the middle, and icicles hung over the porch like long, transparent teeth.

There were no neighbouring houses. No streetlights. No sound except the engine and the low hiss of snow beneath the tyres.

When I stopped the car, I noticed a dark shape in one of the upstairs windows.

It disappeared before I could focus on it.

I stayed in the car, staring at the window and telling myself that a curtain had moved.

The front door was stiff from the cold. I had to press my shoulder against it before it opened. The hallway smelled of dust, old timber and something damp. Several coats hung from wooden hooks along the wall.

One of them was wet.

I touched the sleeve. The fabric was cold and heavy, as if someone had recently walked through falling snow.

That unsettled me more than the shape in the window. I called my uncle. The first attempt failed. I moved closer to the open door and tried again. This time he answered, but his voice broke apart through the weak signal.

“Did you come here today?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“There’s a wet coat in the hallway.”

There was a pause.

“It’s probably snow from the roof,” he said.

“Inside the house?”

“I don’t know. Hang it near the stove.”

The call ended. The coat was too small for my uncle. It was dark brown wool with narrow shoulders and old-fashioned wooden buttons. I checked the pockets. They were empty except for a small amount of black grit.

I hung it over the back of a chair in the kitchen.

The Small Bedroom

The kitchen was the warmest room in the house. It had a cast-iron stove, a heavy wooden table and white cupboards with chipped paint. My uncle had left bottled water, canned food, coffee and a note explaining how to restart the heating if it stopped.

I unpacked before darkness fully settled. The upstairs contained three bedrooms. The largest faced the road. The second had boxes stacked against the walls. The third was at the end of the corridor.

The small bedroom.

Its door was closed.

I opened it. The room was nearly empty. There was a narrow bed, a bedside table and a wardrobe with one door missing. Frost had formed around the window frame, but I saw no obvious leak.

A child’s drawing lay on the floor beneath the bed.

It showed the house surrounded by tall black trees. A red figure stood at one of the upstairs windows. Another figure, coloured entirely in black, stood outside.

He comes when the house is quiet.

The writing looked as though it had been done by a child. The letters were large and uneven. I photographed the drawing with my phone and sent it to my uncle, but the message did not go through.

I placed the drawing on the bedside table and closed the door.

At around seven, I cooked soup and listened to the radio. Only one station came through clearly. It played classical music, interrupted every twenty minutes by local weather reports.

The temperature was expected to fall below minus twenty degrees. The announcer warned drivers to avoid isolated forest roads.

I remember smiling at that.

Footprints Beneath the Window

At nine, I went outside to collect more firewood. The air had become painfully cold. Every breath felt sharp inside my nose. My boots sank into fresh snow as I crossed the yard.

The woodshed stood behind the house.

While carrying the first load back, I saw footprints beside the kitchen window.

They were human footprints.

They began at the edge of the forest and continued across the yard toward the house.

There were no prints leading away.

I put down the firewood and followed them with my flashlight. The footprints were long and narrow. Whoever had made them wore shoes with smooth soles, not winter boots. The steps were uneven, as if the person had been dragging one leg.

They ended directly beneath the kitchen window. The snow there was disturbed. A shallow depression marked the place where someone had apparently stood for a long time.

Looking inside.

I raised the flashlight toward the trees. The beam reached only a short distance before the darkness swallowed it. Snow drifted through the light. Branches moved in the wind.

Then something moved behind a tree.

A person stepped out.

He stood perhaps forty metres away. I could not see his face. He was too far beyond the strongest part of the flashlight beam, but I could make out his shape: tall, thin and bareheaded.

He seemed to be wearing a long coat.

“Hello?” I shouted.

The figure did not answer.

“This is private property.”

Still nothing.

I picked up a piece of firewood and held it like a club.

The figure took one step forward.

It was not a normal step. His body moved first, while his head remained turned toward the house. Then the head slowly followed.

I backed toward the door.

“Who are you?”

He took another step.

I ran inside, locked the door and switched off the kitchen light. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped the key.

From the dark kitchen, I watched the forest.

The figure was no longer there.

Three Knocks

I called the police. The dispatcher asked if the person had threatened me or attempted to enter the house.

“No,” I said. “He was standing in the woods.”

“Could it have been a hunter?”

“Not dressed like that.”

She told me that a patrol was covering a large area and might take more than an hour to arrive. I should stay inside, lock the doors and call again if the person approached.

No patrol came. At least, I never saw one.

I checked every window and locked the back door. Then I closed the curtains and carried a kitchen knife upstairs. I chose the large bedroom facing the road.

The wind grew stronger after midnight. The house creaked as the temperature dropped. Pipes knocked inside the walls. Loose branches scratched the roof.

I did not sleep.

At 1:13 in the morning, I heard three knocks on the front door.

Not loud knocks.

Slow, patient knocks.

Knock.    A pause.    Knock.    Another pause.    Knock.

I sat upright in bed, gripping the knife.

For several minutes, nothing happened.

Then the knocking came from the kitchen window.

Three taps against the glass.

I moved into the hallway. The upstairs floorboards were cold beneath my feet. From the top of the staircase, I could see the front door. Moonlight shone through the narrow window beside it.

A shadow passed across the glass.

Someone was standing on the porch.

I called the police again. The dispatcher said a patrol had driven along Vargmyren Road forty minutes earlier but had not found the house.

“That’s impossible,” I whispered. “There’s only one road.”

She asked me to confirm the address.

When I did, she became quiet.

“What?” I asked.

“Sir, are you certain that is the road name?”

“Yes.”

“Our map shows Vargmyren Road ending before your location.”

I told her that made no sense. The house had an address. My uncle paid taxes on it. There had been tyre tracks all the way to the property.

The dispatcher asked for my GPS coordinates.

My phone could not find them.

While we spoke, the front door handle slowly turned.

Once to the left.

Then back.

Then to the left again.

The Drawing Changed

I moved away from the stairs.

“There’s someone trying the door,” I said.

The dispatcher told me to remain upstairs and find a room I could lock.

The small bedroom was the only bedroom with a key.

I ran down the corridor, entered the room and locked the door behind me. The temperature inside was much lower than in the rest of the house. My breath turned white in front of my face.

I pushed the bed against the door.

The child’s drawing was still on the bedside table.

Except the drawing had changed.

The black figure was no longer outside the house.

It was standing in the hallway.

I know how that sounds. I stared at the page, trying to convince myself that I had remembered it incorrectly. Perhaps the figure had always been in the hallway. Perhaps there had been two drawings.

But I still had the photograph on my phone.

In the photograph, the black figure stood outside. I held the original drawing beside the screen. They were not the same.

On the paper, the outside figure was gone. A black shape now filled the hallway behind the red figure in the window.

Beneath the earlier sentence, new words had appeared.

Do not let him see your face.

The front door opened downstairs.

I heard it clearly: first the scrape of wood against the floor, then the slow creak of hinges. Cold air moved through the house.

The dispatcher was still speaking, but her voice had become faint. I pressed the phone against my ear.

“Someone is inside,” I whispered.

She told me the patrol was trying to locate me. I needed to stay silent.

Footsteps crossed the kitchen.

One dragging step.

One normal step.

One dragging step.

The sound entered the hallway and stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

I switched off my phone screen.

The footsteps began climbing. Each stair creaked beneath the person’s weight.

I crouched beside the bed, keeping my face turned away from the door. I do not know why I obeyed the warning on the drawing. Fear makes strange things feel reasonable.

The footsteps reached the landing.

They moved past the first bedroom.

Then the second.

They stopped outside the small bedroom.

The door handle turned.

The bed shifted slightly against the floor.

A man’s voice spoke from the other side.

He used my uncle’s voice.

“Open the door. The window leaks.”

I covered my mouth.

The voice came again.

“Open the door.”

The handle turned harder.

Then it stopped.

Silence filled the corridor.

The Face at the Window

I waited. A minute passed. Maybe two.

Something tapped on the bedroom window.

I looked up before I could stop myself.

A face was pressed against the glass.

The room was on the second floor.

The man outside had no reason to be there. There was no ladder, no roof beneath the window and nothing he could have stood on.

His skin was pale and stretched tightly across his skull. His eyes were open, but they looked cloudy and colourless. Snow had gathered in his hair. His mouth hung slightly open.

He was smiling.

Not widely.

Just enough to show that he knew I had looked.

The phone line went dead.

The man lifted one finger and placed it against the glass.

Then he tapped three times.

I fell backward. The window frame groaned. A thin crack appeared in the glass, beginning where his fingertip rested and spreading outward like a spider’s web.

I crawled toward the door.

At that moment, the bedroom handle began turning again.

The man was at the window.

Something else was in the hallway.

I pulled the bed away from the door, unlocked it and ran. The corridor was empty.

I reached the staircase and looked down. The front door stood wide open. Snow had blown across the hallway floor.

The wet coat was gone from the kitchen chair.

I ran into the large bedroom, grabbed my car keys and boots, then went downstairs without stopping to put the boots on properly.

As I passed the kitchen, the telephone rang.

There was an old black telephone mounted on the wall near the pantry. I had not noticed it earlier.

It rang again.

I knew I should keep running.

Instead, I answered.

“Hello?”

At first, I heard only static.

Then a child whispered, “He saw you.”

The line clicked.

A deep breathing sound followed.

Not through the receiver.

Behind me.

The Man in the Brown Coat

I turned. The tall man stood in the kitchen doorway.

He wore the brown wool coat.

Up close, I could see that his head leaned unnaturally to one side. His skin was grey and marked with thin black lines. Melted snow ran down his face, although the kitchen was still freezing.

His cloudy eyes fixed on mine.

His smile widened.

I threw the telephone at him and ran through the front door. I slipped on the porch steps and fell into the snow. Pain shot through my knee. Behind me, the hallway floor creaked.

I forced myself upright and reached the car.

The engine did not start.

I tried again.

Nothing.

The house door remained open. The man stood in the entrance, watching me.

On the third attempt, the engine started.

I reversed so quickly that the rear of the car struck a fence post. Then I turned onto the road and accelerated. The headlights shook across the trees.

The tyre tracks I had followed earlier were gone. Fresh snow covered the road completely.

I drove faster than was safe. The car slid around bends, and branches scraped both sides. I kept looking in the mirror.

The house disappeared behind me.

After several minutes, I saw the man standing beside the road.

I passed him at nearly eighty kilometres per hour.

He did not move.

A minute later, I saw him again.

This time he stood closer to the road.

I passed him.

Then I saw him for a third time.

He stood in the centre of the road with his back toward me.

I slammed on the brakes. The car slid sideways and stopped less than five metres from him.

He turned his head.

His body remained facing away.

The head continued turning until I heard a faint cracking sound.

I put the car into reverse.

The man began walking toward me.

One dragging step.

One normal step.

One dragging step.

I reversed until the car hit a snowbank. The wheels spun uselessly.

The man came closer.

Then headlights appeared behind him.

What Burned in 1987

A large vehicle approached from the opposite direction. The man vanished into the darkness beside the road.

The vehicle was a snowplough.

The driver stopped when he saw my car. He was a middle-aged man named Anders. I remember his name because he made me repeat mine several times. He said I looked confused and close to hypothermia.

I told him someone had chased me from the house.

When I mentioned Vargmyren Road, his expression changed.

“There’s no house there,” he said.

I became angry. I told him I had spent the night inside it. My belongings were still there. My car had been parked in the yard.

Anders asked me to show him.

We drove back together.

The road seemed shorter on the return journey.

When we reached the end, there was no yellow house.

There was only a collapsed foundation covered in snow.

Charred stones formed the outline of a building. Several blackened beams rose from the ruins. Young trees had grown through what had once been the kitchen.

I stepped out of the snowplough and stared at the empty space.

My tyre tracks ended beside the ruins.

Anders would not let me walk closer.

He drove me to the village, where I called my uncle. This time the signal was clear.

I asked him what had happened to the house.

He did not answer at first.

Then he told me the truth.

The house had burned down in 1987.

A family of three had lived there: a mother, a father and their eight-year-old daughter. The mother and daughter died in the fire. The father disappeared.

Investigators believed he had started the fire after killing his wife, but his body was never found. Several people claimed they saw him walking through the forest during the days after the fire.

The strangest detail involved the daughter.

She had told a teacher that a man had been standing outside her bedroom window at night.

Her bedroom was on the second floor.

The teacher contacted the mother, who said the child had been having nightmares. Two weeks later, the house burned.

I asked my uncle why he had given me the key.

He said he had not.

According to him, I had called two days earlier and said I was going to stay at his hunting cabin near Åmål. He had told me where the spare key was hidden.

That cabin was more than ninety kilometres away.

I checked my coat pocket.

The key I had used was still there.

It was long and dark with rust. A small metal label was attached to it.

1987

The Photograph

My belongings were never recovered.

The police searched the ruins and found no sign that anyone had recently been there. They suggested I had driven to the wrong location, become disoriented and imagined the house while suffering from cold and exhaustion.

I might have believed them if not for the photograph.

The child’s drawing remained saved on my phone.

For years, it showed the yellow house, the red figure in the upstairs window and the black figure among the trees.

Then, in November 2024, the image changed.

I discovered it while transferring photographs to a new phone.

The house was still there.

The red figure was gone.

The upstairs window was empty.

The black figure now stood much closer to the person who had taken the photograph.

At the bottom of the page, beneath the child’s original warning, a new sentence had appeared.

He knows where you live now.