No Sleep Was Given

The Spare Room

For some reason my first reaction was to start shouting and swearing that I was going to cause whoever was in the kitchen real bodily harm. I wanted to frighten them away, but really it was I who was terrified.

I ran into my bedroom and grabbed a golf club from my set, which had been languishing in a cupboard since I'd moved in. As I wandered into the hall, the fear got the better of me. I unlocked the front door, opened it, and ran out into the hallway, which I share with the other residents, and then out into the street. After a minute or so I was around the corner out of sight, phoning for the police.

30 Minutes later, the police arrived. I only entered the flat once they had searched it thoroughly for the intruder. Nothing seemed to have been stolen, but the kitchen door had been shut as I thought. The police entered the room, but found no one and told me that if someone had been in the flat, that they had already left.

The kitchen itself was intact, but bizarrely the intruder had turned on the lights, opened the oven and left it running on a high heat. The police seemed satisfied that no one was there, and while they told me to phone the local police station if I saw anyone suspicious, it seemed clear to me that they thought I had imagined the entire thing. Even I began to question it myself, wondering if I'd left the oven on from the night before and forgotten about it, dosed up on cough medicine.

The following night I knew there was more than just my imagination at play. I tried to put the previous day out of my mind, but the sounds of footsteps and banging doors stayed with me. I've always thought the best remedy for a weary mind is sleep, so that's what I intended to do.

I went through my nightly routine before going to bed:

Front door locked - check.

Windows closed - check.

TV and other appliances switched off - check.

I shuffled off to bed, curled up and put the TV on so I had something to fall asleep to, the noise keeping me company and any paranoid thoughts at bay. Then, about five minutes later, I heard an unmistakable noise. A click. It was the light switch in the hall and was accompanied by light trickling underneath my door into my room.

I'm sure I must have taken in a sharp inhalation of air, but I remained silent; still and frozen. Someone was standing at my bedroom door. I could hear the floorboards creak under the weight. Before I had time to react, the intruder walked slowly down the hall away from my room, stopped for a moment, and then - I was sure of it - entered the spare room.

It took me a few seconds to piece together what had just happened. For a moment I hesitated again, wondering if I should phone the police or whether this was just another flight of fancy. Suddenly I heard a loud clattering noise. My things being thrown around violently.

I called the police quickly and then frantically moved a wardrobe up against my bedroom door, hoping that I would be left alone. Then I heard the intruder again. A door creaked open quietly, almost inaudibly, and slowly, surely, the footsteps began walking towards my bedroom door. They then stopped right outside my room, as if the person were about to enter. That was the most terrifying thing, having to wait to see what the intruder would do next. Suddenly, I heard a banging sound - the police were knocking on my outside door. The footsteps then turned, marched down the hall into the living room and then kitchen, before ending the entire ordeal abruptly with a loud bang of a slammed door.

By the time I let the police into my flat, I was visibly shaken. And yet they found very little: at first. The kitchen was as it had been before. The oven door lying open, spewing out heat into the night.

The spare room, however, was another story entirely. Everything in there had been violently thrown around, much of it broken and torn. An old mirror smashed, and most of the boxes and furniture upturned. I swore to the police that the intruder had never left, that they couldn't have, and that they must still have been in the flat somewhere, hiding. But that suggestion was greeted with an unhealthy amount of incredulity.