person

Timofei

the watchman

also: сторож, Тимофей

The unnamed graveyard watchman of the story's opening line, addressed once as Timofei by an unseen voice near the end; challenged in the dark by a passer-by claiming to be a wandering pilgrim, he is talked into escorting the stranger, then terrorized into standing motionless while the man's confederates rob the cemetery church.

Reading notes

An Evil Deed §1 Who goes there?
The story opens mid-scene, in the watchman's own voice, with no narrator's introduction -- Chekhov withholds any establishing description of the setting until section 2, so the reader is dropped into the dark and the challenge-cry at the same moment the watchman is.
An Evil Deed §59 a heavy, cold fear
The watchman's fear is described as physical and involuntary even though he explicitly does not believe the passer-by's claim to be a ghost -- Chekhov distinguishes superstitious dread, which operates on the body regardless of belief, from the watchman's still-functioning skepticism, a distinction the story needs for its final twist to work (the danger turns out to be human, not supernatural).
An Evil Deed §67 Sensing something very evil
The story's title phrase, "недоброе" (nedobroe, "evil/ill/no-good"), recurs here and in the final line, marking the shift from supernatural dread to the watchman's dawning, correct intuition that an actual crime -- the church robbery -- has taken place under cover of the ghost story used to immobilize him.