My Brain Still Hates Me

Last night, I turned off all the lights before going to bed and then checked that the front door was locked. I’m on the 6th floor of a secure building, so it isn’t like it much matters. But the other apartment on my floor is used for meetings and presentations and twice, now, someone has walked into my flat, believing that I was the one hosting their meeting.

I’ve asked for a sign for the door. I’m hoping for “Sylvia Wrigley, Author-in-Residence”, but I think what they’ve decided is to put a sign on the other door, which will probably say something like “This One, You Fool”.

There’s a doorway to a corridor to my bedroom and that door also has a lock, a simple little latch from the inside. That door needs to be closed to stop the sunlight from streaming in and so while I was closing it, I thought I might as well lock it.

It’s an odd thing, to have a lock between the kitchen/living room area and the bedroom/bathroom. I can’t quite think of a circumstance where that would be important, in a one-bedroom apartment. I mainly locked it because it was there.

I went to bed and swiftly to sleep until 04:45 when I sat up straight in bed. Someone had been knocking on the door. Rap, rap, rap! Three sharp, loud knocks.

My heart pounded as I tried to replay the sound in my mind to see if I could work out which door.

The knocking sounded like it was right next to me, not the least bit muffled.

The closest door was of course the one at the end of the corridor, but if someone had knocked there, that meant they were in my apartment.

There are two ways in. To get to my front door, you needed to get into the building, which is locked during business hours, and then you need to have a fob to use on the elevator for access to the sixth floor. The receptionist seems to give them to anyone who asks. But at this time of night, there was no receptionist on duty.

There is also a stairwell which no one used and the door there had a lock on my side of the landing. Had I locked it after peering around to see what was there? I was pretty sure that I had locked it.

The other way into my apartment would be to somehow access the roof of the building and get onto my terrace. But the door from the apartment to the terrace can only be opened from the inside, a problem when I’ve wanted to sit outside in the evening but not let all the cold air into the apartment. In order to get in from there, I thought, you’d have to smash a window in.

(Lying there, in the dark, I did not think of the TV-show diamond blades and suction cups used to carefully cut a rectangle out of any pain of glass, allowing someone to crawl through from the outside.)

(This is good, at a quarter to five in the morning, I found some solace in the idea that I would have heard the broken glass which helped my brain to stop panicking as I ticked through the possibilities.)

(Besides, I reasoned, if someone HAD smashed their way in and I had somehow, miraculously, not heard it, the last thing that they would do would be to knock on my bedroom door to ensure that I knew they were there.)

So, the question was, who would have access to the 6th-floor landing and a key to my front door?

The building administrators had a spare key, maybe the friendly receptionists, as well. But why would they come to my apartment in the dark, three hours before the building was officially open?

The police had an access card, so they could come to the sixth floor but could they get into my apartment? Perhaps they would have access to a key in reception, allowing them access in case of an emergency.

More likely than the police was the fire department, I thought. Once, in Tallinn, the fire department had knocked on the door to inform me that there was a fire in the basement and they were evacuating the building.

But surely, if there was a fire and they needed me to come out, then they wouldn’t just knock the once. They would keep knocking, banging on the corridor door to make sure that I heard them.

(Why was there a bolt on that door, I wondered again. What normal scenario would require me to lock myself away from my own living room? What was the designer thinking? Somewhere to storm off to in an argument, ensuring that the wife couldn’t follow?)

By now, I was convinced that it was not an idiot burglar trying to get my attention, and it was not a gaggle of frantic firemen, for surely they would try harder to rescue me.

The logical conclusion was that there was no knock. I had dreamt it. As I went to bed, I had wondered why the lock was there and my brain clearly kept chewing on the problem after I drifted off, was still chewing on it now. But instead of coming up with a rational answer, it decided to consider the consequences of a locked bedroom door and what it might mean if someone knocked hard, rap rap rap, right on the door. Sadly, my brain was not content to consider the scenario in the background, but instead insisted on sending it to me as a nightmare: rap rap rap!

I finally fell asleep again, lulled into tranquility by the fact that in every scenario that I could think of, there was absolutely nothing that I could do other than get up and unlock the door and see if anyone was there.

That was not going to happen, just in case it was a serial killer posing as a burglar pretending to be a fireman.

This morning, there was no sign of anything, of course, except for the twisted sheets where I’d woken from the sound of the knocking with the sure knowledge: it was coming from inside the house. My brain isn’t even very original with its horror stories.

The only question now, is whether I will sleep better tonight if I lock the door or if I leave it unlocked.

(Photo by Nathan Wright)