What I found in my attic horrified me.

We have been together for two years now. Me and my girlfriend (El). I have always called her El, which is actually short for Ellenore. I've called her this for as long as I can remember, and it doesn't bother her. We like to give each other little nicknames, she always calls me curls, I figure it's because of my curly hair. I don't mind, though, it brings a certain sweetness with it that keeps reminding me how lucky I am to be with her.

We have been living together for 3 months now. I finished school already and have my own job now, El is in her last year of art school. She wants to become a graphic designer*. Quite an ambitious choice*, I always found. But she proved me wrong. The things she can do with a pencil and a piece of paper always seemed to amaze me. I don't mind the fact that El doesn't have a ‘real’ job yet, my job pays well enough to support the both of us, as long as we don't take expansive vacations or purchase expansive things we don't need.

Maybe us moving in together was too fast, I don't know, but so far everything was great, perfect almost… All my friends tried to tell me that maybe I had to think twice about me moving in with El but Me and El both wanted to do it, so we said: “Screw it, let's do it!” Before we moved in together, we had never spent a whole night alone with each other. Our parents were both really strict about it, so when I went to tell them about the news, they didn't seem too pleased. “But, well, what could they really do?” I asked myself. I was twenty-two, and it was time to move on and start a new chapter in my life.

The first two and a half months went smoothly. El and I got along great. Spending every night and weekend together. I loved spending all that time with my girlfriend, doing all kinds of different things. Watching movies, baking cookies, playing games, cooking together etcetera. “My life is complete.” Is what I told myself. But then things started to get odd…

It was a Thursday night, me and El both got into bed pretty early. I had to work the next day, and I was pretty tired. El had school the next day, so we called it a day. After swiping for a little while on my phone, I kissed El goodnight and fell asleep pretty quickly.

I woke up in the middle of the night, but noticed my partner wasn't laying next to me anymore.

I got worried, El never got out of bed during the night. She told me she hated to get out of bed: “I get so cold.” El also was the total opposite of a light sleeper, so I was really confused when she was nowhere to be seen. I called out her name, I thought she must be in the bathroom, even though she absolutely loathed getting out of her cozy den. Pure silence is the response I got. In fact, it was so quiet, saying you could hear a feather fall was understating it.

Just as I thought I heard something in the attic, my girlfriend responded from out of the bathroom. “Hey Curls, I'm just in the bathroom. Don't worry about me, I’ll be back in a minute.” Relief fell over me as I heard the familiar voice of El. It was then that I noticed I was holding in my breath all that time. Normally I’d never hold in my breath like that, but I guess I was just scared, but knowing El was just in the bathroom and would be back in bed soon made me feel at ease again. I found myself fast asleep within two minutes. When I woke up that morning, El was already out of bed, making breakfast or doing some other chore in or around the house. It was the weekend and for El to wake up before me AND start with chores all by herself was… weird. To say the least.

As the time flew by I forgot all about the small ‘incident’ if you can even call it that. That was until things got even weirder. It was two weeks later in the middle of the night. I found myself tossing and turning in bed. It was work, it stressed me out, and it effected my sleep. I don't know the exact time, but it was around 2am. I felt El move next to me, and then I heard her light footsteps on the hardwood floor. She tiptoed around and exited the bedroom. I was just about to call out for her when I thought by myself: “Why would she get out of the bedroom?” You see, our bathroom was connected to our bedroom, so you wouldn't have to leave the room. But El did leave the room.

I was curious what she was up to, so I decided not to call out for her and just listen where she would be going. I wasn't worried or anything because she also could have been really thirsty and craved some juice or a late night snack. I counted her steps toward the stairs, but in the middle of the hallway, the footsteps stopped.

I heard El fold out our stairs to the attic.

Let me explain how you get to our attic: to get access you have to fold out a couple of small stairs that are set on top of a hatch on the ceiling. The hatch is located in the middle of our hallway, so you have enough room to access it. We didn't mind this because we had enough room in the house and didn't need an attic. Hell, I've only been there once, and that was when we first moved in, so I could store some of my junk that I knew I wouldn't need for a long time.

So now things got really weird. I couldn't come up with a single reason why El would need to get up into the attic, especially at this time. And I couldn't shake the feeling something was wrong.

El must have been up there for about 10 minutes, and when she climbed back down the stairs and I heard her footsteps approaching, I figured my best course of action was to pretend to be asleep and ask her about it in the morning.

As I woke up, I instantly remembered what had happened last night. When I entered the kitchen, I didn't even take the time to greet El. “Why were you in the attic in the middle of the night?” El looked up at me as if she didn't remember a single thing about last night, she stayed silent. “Why were you in the attic last night, Ellenore?” She sighed, “I thought I heard mice in the attic and I wanted to check it out.” She watched me frown, and looked at me with her hazel eyes as if she wanted to tell me: ‘please don't ask any further.’ I wasn't buying it, but I didn't ask her any further. In fact, I had already made up my mind: I was going to check things out myself. Of course, I didn't tell her that, but as she left for school, the first thing I did was call in sick to work.

I thought about not going up the attic for a brief moment, but my curiosity got the better of me, and before I knew it I was standing in the dark attic. I could smell the dust up here. The first thing I did was check if there was anything out of place. Everything was neatly stacked. I grabbed the first box and spitted through it. It was only photo albums and empty picture frames… the next box was books and the third just more stuff we didn't need in the house. I looked through 11 boxes before I found the box. It looked like an ordinary box, so I didn't expect to find anything, but what I saw when I opened it horrified me.

The brown box contained four skulls. I'm no expert in these sorts of things, but i almost immediately knew they were human. And after a little bit of research, my suspicions were confirmed. I didn't know what to think about the situation. It was as if I didn't even know my girlfriend anymore. Panic started to kick in. What was I supposed to do? Confront my girlfriend? No, she could be dangerous. Call the police? No, I’d lose my girlfriend and maybe even the house. I was at a loss.

I had one idea, but it was a stupid idea. I was going to call my girlfriend’s ex. The skulls I found looked old, so maybe he knew more about it. El had one ex, and sometimes she spoke about him, not in a good way though because El told me they ended their relationship on relatively bad terms, so I wouldn't know if he would want to speak with me.

It's 11:02am and the phone is ringing. I'm not sure what I'm going to ask or say, but I want answers.

“Hello?”