Night Terrors
Saidy Bober
There is a man clapping outside. I tell this to my roommate who thinks I am mad. I can see from the glint of her eyes. But I tell you that I am as sane as anyone could be, living in this musty old dorm. It is indisputable. There is a man and he claps.
It happens every night when the hour strikes two. I can sense him coming to stand outside the door. I can hear the crack of palm to palm. It bleeds under the wood of the door. The handle shakes as he jiggles it. Sometimes, I think he dances and I can hear his footsteps loud and strong. Sometimes, I think he jumps up and down as he claps like a jubilant child.
My roommate thinks I am a child. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the ghost of a man who claps in the night. She is an early riser, early to bed, so she has never heard the man at two o’clock when he claps. But one night she stayed up late with me, working on a lab of some sort for her science class. Of course she pretended not to hear the claps. She is a woman of science, a woman of medicine, and sometimes she gently suggests that I walk over to the health center next door, that I ask someone to take a look at me. Mostly I know she wants them to look at my head. My roommate is a psychology major and carries all of her major’s unfortunate trappings.
But I have to tell you that if you were there! If you heard it for yourself! My roommate has a rigid mind and has already decided that there was no man; that’s why she didn’t hear the smack of flesh to flesh from outside, his chuckle as he stuck his foot under the door. I swear to you that sometimes his clapping gets so ecstatic that it sounds like a raucous chorus of applause. As if there are many men clapping and not just one. As if all the men are standing out there together, clapping at my door in their glee.
But why clapping? my roommate asks. For what purpose? Sometimes I also hear him muttering, so you see it is not just clapping, whatever she may claim. And sometimes the muttering is so loud that I swear I hear every word he speaks through the wood. Odd things. Fragments, almost. The outline of an intellect. Stories of Abe Lincoln and his famous top hat. If you use baking soda you can get stains out of anything. A loop in a computer program is—
He whispers through the peephole. I swear he puts his lips to it and presses his whole body against the door. Hissing sweet nothings through his teeth.
In the morning, he is always gone. When I open the door, there is no one but a faint odor of sulfur. My roommate insists she smells nothing, but I know it is there. I tell you it is true. A liar would not care this much about dispensing her lies. A liar would lie once and spend the rest of her life in fear of having to say it again. A liar—
A liar’s roommate does not vanish. I fell into an exhausted sleep and in the morning she was gone. That odor lingering in the hallway.
It was as if she had never existed. Friends did not drop by to visit. Family did not inquire. The school informed me they had a sudden surplus of housing and so would allow me a single room for the rest of the semester. An investigation was carried out but soon forgotten. There was no witness, no evidence, no camera footage from that night. In short, they had nothing and Alice was gone.
Oh, Alice, why couldn’t you have believed me? So bright too, you would have been a doctor, you would have changed lives, Alice, goddamn you! He is here now growling so faintly—his breathing is growing stranger—I can hear him salivating, drooling onto the wooden door—the room is dark, so dark, oh god, oh Alice, where are you now? He is seething. He cannot open the lock with his bare hands. Something hard and metal cracks against the knob, and the door opens—
Saidy Bober (’28) is a in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program and is majoring in English with a minor in math. She is from Fanwood, NJ.