I Could See My Roommate Sleeping and I Still Could Not Scream

The worst part of being frozen is the math you do. You lie there and you think, if I could just move my little finger, if I could just kick the wall, if I could just make one sound, my roommate would wake up and this would end. Six feet. That is all the distance was. Six feet of dark dorm room air between my bed and hers, and I could not cross it with so much as a whisper.

We had moved in together in the fall, two strangers assigned by a housing office, and by spring we were the kind of friends who left the closet light on because neither of us liked total dark. That light is important. That light is the only reason I saw anything at all.

I woke, if you can call it that, sometime after two. I knew I was awake because I could see the closet glow and the shape of Danielle under her comforter and the poster of the mountains she had taped crooked above her desk. My eyes worked perfectly. Nothing else did. My arms lay at my sides like they belonged to a mannequin. My chest felt strapped down. When I tried to call her name the word formed somewhere behind my teeth and died there, and all that came out, I think, was a thin dry click.

I told myself to stay calm. I had read once that this happens, that it passes, that it is just your body being slow to wake. I held onto that. I really did. And then the door handle moved.

Our door was shut. We always shut it. And the handle, that cheap silver lever, tipped down slowly, the way it does when someone on the other side is being careful not to be heard. My heart went off like an alarm. I stared at it and willed Danielle to wake up, willed the handle to stop, willed my own throat to work.

The door did not open. The handle rose back to level. And the cold came instead, moving across the floor and up over my bed, and with it the sense that whatever had tried the handle was already in the room and had never needed the door at all.

I could not turn my head but at the edge of my vision, near the foot of my bed, the dark thickened. It was not a person. I keep saying that to people and they keep hearing person, so let me be exact. It was a place where the dim light did not reach the way it should have, a column of wrongness standing where nothing was standing, and it leaned. It leaned toward me the way you lean over a crib.

I screamed with everything I had and produced silence.

Danielle rolled over in her sleep. Just a normal sleeper shifting. And that small ordinary movement was the cruelest thing, because it proved the room was real, the night was real, she was really right there, and none of it could reach me and I could not reach it.

I do not know how long it lasted. Long enough to memorize the ceiling tiles. Then, the way it always ends, my body snapped back on. My hand flew up and hit the wall hard enough to hurt and I gasped so loud that Danielle actually sat up and said what, what is it.

I said I had a nightmare. I did not tell her about the handle. What would I say. That the lever moved. That the dark leaned. She would have believed I dreamed it, and maybe I did, but I have felt my own dreams and they do not include the specific terror of trying to scream and being answered with nothing.

We propped a chair under the handle after that, not because I told her the truth but because I said I felt safer that way and she loved me enough not to ask. The chair is still there. I graduate in a month.

Some nights I wake and I check the handle first thing, before I even check whether I can move. I have my priorities in order now. Watch the handle. Then try the finger. If the finger works, you are fine. If it does not, do not waste your strength screaming. No one can hear you in there. I have learned that much.