I Just Wasn’t Afraid Enough

The first thing was the mug. I noticed it on a Tuesday morning because I was already late for work. I had left it beside the couch the night before, half full of coffee that had gone cold while I watched television. I remembered thinking that I should bring it to the kitchen, but I decided I would do it tomorrow. When I woke up, the mug was sitting upside down on the drying rack, completely clean. I stared at it longer than anyone should stare at a mug, then laughed. I must have washed it. That was the explanation. I had washed it and forgotten. People forget things all the time. The second thing was harder to explain. Three nights later, I woke up at 3:17 in the morning and saw that my bedroom door was open. I always slept with it closed. It wasn’t because I was afraid of anything, at least not then. I just liked it closed. I got out of bed and pushed it shut. The apartment was silent, so I checked the front door. It was locked, the deadbolt was turned, and the chain was attached. I went back to bed. By morning, I had convinced myself that I had gone to the bathroom during the night and forgotten to close the bedroom door afterward. That was possible. Everything was possible when it only happened once. Then things started happening more often. My bathroom light was on when I came home from work. The television was on a different channel. A kitchen drawer was open. My bedroom window, which I never opened, was unlocked. A bottle of shampoo had moved from the shower to the sink. Nothing disappeared, and that almost made it worse. If my laptop had vanished, I could have called the police. If my television had been gone, I could have said someone broke in. But what was I supposed to tell them? That someone moved my shampoo? I called my sister instead. She told me I was stressed. I insisted I wasn’t, but she pointed out that I was calling her at eleven at night because my shampoo had moved. I told her that when she said it like that, it sounded stupid. “It is stupid,” she said. I thanked her sarcastically, and she told me I knew what she meant. I did. She told me to get some sleep, so I tried. That night, I put a chair beneath the handle of my bedroom door. I felt ridiculous doing it, and I felt even more ridiculous when I woke up and the chair was exactly where I had left it. For four days, nothing happened, and I started feeling better. Then, on Saturday morning, I found the photograph. It was sitting on my kitchen counter. It was an old photograph of me and my mother at the beach when I was six, and I had not seen it in years. My mother was kneeling in the sand behind me, both arms wrapped around my stomach while I grinned at the camera with my two missing front teeth. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, were the words, “Maya - August 2007.” I called her and asked where she had gotten the picture. She had no idea what I was talking about, so I sent her a photo of it. Three dots appeared on my screen, disappeared, and then appeared again. Finally, she called me. She asked where I had found it, and when I told her it had been sitting on my counter, she said that was impossible. “Why?” I asked. “Because it’s here,” she said. I didn’t understand. Then she explained that the exact photograph was sitting in an album downstairs at her house. I suggested that maybe she had given me another copy years ago, but she insisted she hadn’t. She was looking at the original as we spoke. Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. Then she told me to change my locks. I did that afternoon. The locksmith replaced everything while I watched. He gave me two keys. One went on my keychain, and the other went into the small safe in my bedroom closet. For the first time in weeks, I slept peacefully. Nothing happened on Sunday or Monday. Then, on Tuesday morning, I woke up to find the chain on my front door hanging loose. I called the police. The officer was kind, which somehow made it more humiliating. He checked the windows, the closets, under the bed, and the fire escape. There were no signs of forced entry. He asked whether anyone else had a key. I told him no. He asked about a boyfriend, an ex, family members, and maintenance workers. I explained that maintenance would only have had the old key. Then he asked whether I had ever sleepwalked before. I hated him for asking. I told him I hadn’t. He asked about medication and drinking, and I answered no to both. Then he wrote something down in his notebook. When I asked what he had written, he said they were just notes. “You think I’m doing this,” I said. He told me he hadn’t said that. I told him he thought I was moving things and forgetting about it. He closed his notebook and said, “I think there isn’t evidence of someone entering your apartment.” That sentence stayed with me. He had not said nobody was entering my apartment. He had only said there was no evidence. I bought a camera that afternoon and placed it on the bookshelf facing the living room and front door. I didn’t tell anyone. That night, I locked everything. I checked the deadbolt three times, pulled the chain tight, and closed my bedroom door. Then I took a picture of the living room with my phone so I would know exactly where everything was. I slept badly. At 6:42 the next morning, I checked the footage. At first, there was nothing. I sped through six hours in minutes. Cars passed outside, headlights moved across the wall, and the refrigerator light appeared briefly when I got water around midnight. Two o’clock passed, then three, then four. Nothing happened. I felt stupid, but relieved. Then the footage reached 4:36. My bedroom door opened, and I stopped breathing. A figure stepped into the hallway. It was me. I walked into the living room barefoot with my eyes open. I stood completely still for almost a minute, then walked toward the camera. I leaned down until my face filled the screen and stared directly into the lens. Then I smiled. I slammed the laptop shut. For several minutes, I couldn’t move. Sleepwalking. That had to be it. I was sleepwalking. It explained everything: the doors, the lights, the shampoo, and maybe even the photograph. Maybe my mother had given it to me years ago and forgotten. There was no intruder. There was no one in my apartment. There was only me. I started laughing. I actually laughed. Then I called my sister and told her she had been right. When she asked what I meant, I told her I had bought a camera and discovered that I was sleepwalking. There was a short silence before she laughed too. She reminded me that I had terrified myself for three weeks. I called myself an idiot, and she agreed before telling me to go see a doctor. I promised I would. For the first time in weeks, I felt safe. That night, I didn’t put the chair under the door. I didn’t check the locks three times, and I didn’t inspect the apartment. There was nothing to be afraid of. I slept better than I had in weeks. In the morning, I made coffee and opened my laptop. I almost didn’t check the camera because there was no reason to, but curiosity won. I skipped through the footage until I reached 3:52. My bedroom door opened, and I walked into the living room with the same blank expression and the same bare feet. This time, I didn’t approach the camera. I walked into the kitchen, stood there for a while, and then returned to my bedroom. Fine. Sleepwalking. I moved the cursor forward. At 4:11, something moved beneath my couch. I froze, rewound the video, and played it again. At first, I thought it was a shadow. Then a hand appeared. Fingers curled around the bottom edge of the couch, and slowly, silently, a man pulled himself out from underneath it. I stopped the video. My coffee slipped from my hand and shattered across the floor. The man was painfully thin. He wore dark clothes, and his hair hung over his forehead. He remained crouched beside the couch for almost a minute before standing. Then he looked toward my bedroom and walked down the hallway. I couldn’t breathe. I skipped forward through the footage. At 4:13, the room was empty. It was still empty at 4:30, five o’clock, and six. I had woken up at 6:31, but the video never showed him leaving. I ran. I didn’t take my coat or my shoes. I grabbed my phone and keys and ran into the hallway barefoot, then called 911 from the stairwell. The police arrived eleven minutes later. Two officers entered, followed by a third. They searched the closets, cabinets, furniture, curtains, and fire escape, but they found nothing. One officer watched the footage twice and asked if the man ever left. I told him he didn’t, at least not on camera. He asked whether there was another exit, and I said there wasn’t. They searched again. Eventually, one of the officers entered my bedroom closet and stayed there longer than the others had. Then he called another officer over. They pulled my clothes from the closet, moved the safe, and lifted the rug. Underneath it was a square cut into the floor. It was a hatch, and I had never seen it before. They opened it and found a narrow maintenance space between my floor and the apartment below. Inside were blankets, water bottles, food wrappers, a flashlight, a phone charger, and dozens of photographs. There were pictures of me sleeping, eating, watching television, and getting dressed. Some had been taken from inside my bedroom. One had been taken so close to my face that I could see individual eyelashes. The oldest photograph was dated seven months earlier. The police never found him. The building had old maintenance passages connecting several units, most of which had been sealed decades earlier. Most, but not all. I moved back in with my mother. I broke the lease, changed my number, and deleted every photograph I had of the apartment. For a while, I thought that was the end. Three months later, my sister asked me over breakfast whether I still sleepwalked. I told her I didn’t think so. She stirred her coffee and said that was weird. When I asked why, she admitted that she kept thinking about the first video. I asked what she meant. She reminded me that I had walked straight toward the camera and stared directly into it. I told her I had been asleep, but she said that wasn’t what bothered her. “You smiled,” she said. A chill moved slowly across my shoulders. I asked why that mattered, and she pointed out that I hadn’t smiled in the second video. The night the man came out from under the couch, I had simply walked into the kitchen and gone back to bed. I knew what she was suggesting, and I didn’t want her to say it. She reminded me that during the first video, I had looked directly into the camera as though I knew it was there. I told her that of course I knew it was there because I had installed it. She shook her head. “Not you,” she said. My stomach dropped. She pulled out her phone and told me she had watched the footage again because something about it had bothered her. She opened the video and went to 4:36 a.m. My bedroom door opened, and I stepped into the living room barefoot with my eyes open. I approached the camera until my face filled the screen, and then I smiled. My sister paused the video and zoomed in on the darkness behind me. My bedroom door was still open. At first, I saw nothing. Then she increased the brightness. There, inside my bedroom, barely visible behind the doorframe, was a hand resting against the wall. Someone had been standing behind me, watching. My sister looked at me, and neither of us spoke. Suddenly, I understood something I had spent months trying not to think about. The man had been living inside my apartment for seven months, but I had only started noticing things three weeks before I found him. Something had changed. Maybe he had gotten careless. Maybe he had wanted me to notice. Or maybe there was another explanation. I stared at the frozen image of myself smiling into the camera. Maybe I had not been sleepwalking at all. I still don’t know what happened during those nights. I don’t know why I walked around the apartment, why I stared into the camera, or why I smiled. But there is one thing I know now. My fear was justified. I just wasn’t afraid enough.