An old woman took pity on a young guy who had nowhere to spend the night. During the night, the woman woke up to the guy slowly entering her room, approaching the bed, and doing this…
The guy was simply in a desperate situation, with no support to expect from anywhere. Relatives had turned their backs on him, and he had no friends left.
Then a distant relative—a good-natured but naive man—thought that since an elderly acquaintance lived alone in a large apartment, why not let a lodger stay with her? That way, she wouldn’t feel so lonely, and he would have a safe place to sleep under a roof.
The guy was about twenty-five. He came to the old woman with a small backpack that barely held a couple of shirts, a notebook, and an old photograph of his parents. He seemed quiet, modest, and even shy. When the grandmother saw him, something in her heart stirred—she felt pity for him, as if he were her own flesh and blood.
She immediately led him into the house, fussing over him, asking if he had eaten that day, whether he’d like some potatoes with onions, and promising oatmeal in the morning. She even let him wear her son’s old clothes—her son who had long since moved away and rarely called.
That evening, the grandmother made up the bed for him in her son’s room, straightened the pillow, made the sign of the cross over him, and softly wished him good night. She went to her own bedroom, smiling—for the first time in a long while, someone was staying in the house, talking to her.
It seemed to her that God had sent this young man to brighten her loneliness, even if just a little.
The grandmother lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the floorboards creaking somewhere in the next room. She couldn’t sleep. And just as she was finally beginning to drift off, a faint rustling suddenly came from the adjacent room.
The grandmother opened her eyes and, through the dim light, saw the door to her bedroom slowly creak open. The young man stood in the doorway. In his hands, he held something, and in the faint glow of the nightlight, his face looked unfamiliar, harsh—with no trace of the gentleness she had seen during the day.
He crept toward her quietly, stepping carefully, as if afraid to wake her. But the grandmother wasn’t asleep—she watched him, holding her breath, feeling her heart pounding wildly in her chest. The young man stopped at the head of the bed and stood there for a long time, as if wrestling with himself—should he do what he had planned, or not? The grandmother silently began to pray.
“God, what is he planning? What is he holding? Why did I let a stranger into my home? What if he—”
Through half-closed eyelids, the grandmother watched in horror as the young man suddenly did it… (Continued in the first comment)
The young man slowly raised his hands, holding a pillow.
“It will be better for both of us,” he whispered hoarsely, and pressed the pillow against the old woman’s face.
The grandmother jerked, let out a muffled, desperate cry, and began thrashing, pushing him away with her hands. The pillow fell to the floor, and the young man recoiled, frightened that she wouldn’t die quickly. The old woman screamed with all her might:
“Help! People! He’s killing me!”
The neighbors came running within seconds—the door hadn’t been locked. One burst into the bedroom, another ran to call the police.
The young man stood against the wall, confused and pale, as if he didn’t understand what had just happened. They subdued him and led him out into the yard.
Later, when the police arrived, it became clear that the young man was not at all who he had pretended to be.
His parents had died many years ago under mysterious circumstances—he had been the only witness at the time, and the investigation had never been able to prove what really happened. Since then, he had lived under various aliases, until he came up with a new plan: to move in with a trusting old woman, then stage everything as an accident in order to take possession of her apartment.
