Tuesday night is one I won't soon forget.
Christa, I'm sorry to write about this, I know it bothers you to think about. I need to process it somehow. Just skip this post if you want.
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I had just finished the first draft of this week's editorial at a little after midnight. Christa was getting ready for bed and I was lying down already.
She came in from the washroom and said that she'd randomly had the urge to close the bedroom door, which was odd because we sleep with it open. Always.
She left it open and came to lie down. I went out to check that the door was locked, which I always do, then came back. As I entered the room, my hand closed the door. That's the best way to put it. My hand closed the door in the way we do things unconsciously without realizing we do them. I noticed and commented and decided to leave the door shut.
I said that while I've not seen much evidence of things that don't fit into a rational worldview, that doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact, if such things exist, it makes sense that evidence of them is hard to find. Because of that, I said, I tend to think people should trust their gut. And ours seemed to say the door should be closed that night.
Then Christa said she had always wondered if on the nights where you get paranoid for no good reason and check locks and windows if it's for a reason.
"I mean, you wake up in the morning and everything's fine," she said. "So, obviously there was no axe murderer running around inside the house."
She went on to say that despite that, she wondered if on those nights it was good that you heed your gut, because if otherwise something bad
would have happened "like an evil spirit sucking you out of the world or something."
It was at this point that I decided I wasn't going to be able to sleep for a while and we promised that if either of us woke up and had to use the washroom, we'd wake the other person so that they wouldn't be awakened after this conversation by the sound of the door opening and being alone in be.
Then she fell asleep and I started to read.
About ten minutes later I heard a noise outside the bedroom door.
The hairs on my neck stood on end - hush about cliches, they did - as I put the book down, picked up my bo (martial arts staff) and stared at the door. The noise had sounded like something moving across the floor, with a another sound that had sounded like a low growl. The irrational part of my brain was saying werewolf. The rational part was saying shut up so I can listen.
I listened and watched the door knob and waited for about a minute, then I heard the sound again. It was exactly the same, except this time it was coming from the neighbour's yard and I was hearing it through the open bedroom window and it was clearly not a werewolf. I breathed easier, listened some more and then went back to reading.
A little while later I was feeling like I wasn't on edge anymore and that I could sleep. I rolled half off the bed to put the book on the floor, then rolled back.
When I rolled back, my back brushed Christa's. She started to cry out in her sleep. I thought she was having a bad dream and I hugged her and tried to wake her up.
That's when the world stopped making sense.
Instead of waking up, she started screaming. Loud, high-pitched, I'm-being-murdered type screams.
I was still hugging her when she got her feet between herself and the bed and tried to jump backwards over me and off the bed. We crashed onto the bed with me on my back and her in my arms. She was screaming and struggling to get away the entire time.
She was wearing her sleeping mask when she went to sleep - so the reading light wouldn't keep her up - and I thouht it was still in place. I thought she didn't know it was me, so I let go as I tried to shout it was me, it was Aaron. I was so freaked out my words were a garbled mess that weren't even close to the volume of her screams. The second I let go, she jumped off the bed and turned on the floor and stared right at me and kept screaming like her worst fear had followed her out of nightmare.
Then she stopped.
She stood breathing hard and looking at me. I sat looking at nothing.
"What happened?" I said when I could.
Her voice was almost calm.
"There was a spider," she said.
I chuckled once at the absurdity and then went back to my near catatonic trance.
She said I was freaking her out. I tried to shrug off the shock that had me tight now that it was over. I looked at her and we talked. We figured out that she hadn't really woken up until she was on her feet, that in her sleep she had seen an unnatural looking spider on the bed inches from her face and when she 'woke up' on her feet and saw me looking at her with terror on my face she thought there was another on her shoulder and I wasn't doing anything about it. We went to bed and tried to calm down and couldn't. The bedroom door was still shut and reminding us of our earlier conversation.
Picture the last time you were alone at night in a creeped out mood, perhaps after watching a scary movie or after freaking yourself out. The kind of mood where you feel like there's something behind you and when you turn to look, there's nothing there, but now that you've turned your gaze behind you, there's something behind your head now. The kind of mood where you need to either watch mindless television for a bit or have your roommate come home and then everything's okay because someone else is there proving there's nothing inherently terrifying about the place you're in.
This was four times worse and we were both in the same mood so we couldn't calm each other down.
So I called Ian and put him on the speakerphone and he calmed us down. I knew he'd be awake even though it was nearly 2 a.m.
We left the door closed and the light on all night though.
