My second year of college was relatively dull: classes, dorm, late-night studying, until the day that became imprinted in my mind forever. I was walking home after a long afternoon lecture, half-listening and planning what to have in dinner. It was at that moment my phone vibrated. His voice was strangely tight, my roommate.
“Open the door of your bedroom,” he cried. Puzzled, I said to him I was not at home. His voice altered in a moment, and was edged with panic. I swear I hear some one dribbling a basketball in your room, he said. That brought me to attention. My ball was always in one corner of my room– nobody played with it but me.
As I was returning to the dorm, my roommate was possibilities white as a ghost. Gray and wide-eyed and with clenched hands, he persisted that he had heard, distinctly, unmistakably, the sound of a basketball bouncing against the floor. We crept open the door to my bedroom. There was nobody inside. But it was different–some of my things had been definitely moved. The basketball was not in the place where I had left it. No trace of force, no message, no simple answer. The dorm was thoroughly locked and we never knew what actually transpired that day. Yet something did.
This experience was at the back of my mind until a couple of years later when an even more frightening event occurred. I had by this time transferred into a two-story apartment, the upper two stories of a little complex with two patios of my own. It was a nice neighborhood, secure, no cause of alarm, until the night of 3 am when my dog startled me awake.
She does not normally bark during the night unless there is something seriously going on. The night of it, she was not contenting herself with barking, she was in my face, restless, anxious. She ran directly to the sliding door which goes out to the upper patio, so I assumed she wanted to go out. I opened the door, and, instead of going out, she smelled the air, looked around the patio thoroughly, and rushed back inside and up the stairs.
That was the point at which I began to feel uncomfortable. Dogs do not pretend to be afraid. I obeyed her, and went up stairs, where she stood at the top landing, growling in her throat, and looking down toward the lower level. She plainly wished me to come down after her. I took a bat–just in case–and went down slowly. She had been sniffing round the room, as though she had a mission, and then she suddenly stopped. Her gaze flew to the glass door opening to the lower patio. She did not bark, this time–simply growled, with bared teeth and hackles up.
I peered through the glass and my stomach turned upside down. Out on the balcony there was the figure of a man. Perfectly still. I only saw the shape—the broad shoulders, the erect position–no stirring matter. I thought frantically: nobody could have accessed that patio without entering my apartment, unless they had climbed the building some how. I hesitated but a moment before I switched on the patio light. I looked twice as soon as the bulb was lit. The patio was bare.
No sound, no footsteps, no creak of doors, nothing. The place was absolutely quiet. I went out of doors, held on to the rail, glanced round. No soul about. and that patio? It can only be entered or exited in one way, through my apartment.
I have never yet been able to determine what I did see that night. It must have been a optical illusion, it must have been that someone had discovered how to climb up and down without making an impression. But what I sometimes cannot sleep about is that my dog saw it as well. Whatever, it was not all in my head. The thought of being watched, by someone or something, is so creepy, because you may never realize it until it is literally at your doorstep.
