FOUR
Gabriel lay in bed. His dreams usually took place at work or in his parent’s former home, two places, he guessed, in which his subconscious felt more invested than one third of a rundown house in Somerville. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dreamed in his apartment, but he felt as if he were dreaming now, dreaming with his eyes open. His room was dark but not pitch-black. Silver light framed the curtain at the windows and the door to the hallway was open. He knew he was still asleep was certain this was a dream because he couldn’t move his arms or his legs, and the edges of his field of vision faded out like looking through lenses frosted round the circumference.
As he lay there and knew that he was asleep, he also knew with one hundred percent certainty that there was someone in the hallway, someone just beyond the rectangle of slightly greyer-than-the-dark-of-his-room light beyond the foot of is bed. Someone was there and any moment they’d enter the room. Someone was there and they were moving silently toward the door to his room. No rustle of cloth, no footsteps on the wooden floor, but they were closer now. In a moment they’d break the frame of the door, he’d see a hand, an arm, a leg. He’d never been aware of his breathing in a dream before, but it was rapid and shallow now. They were closer. <Was that a shadow?>
Gabriel coughed and sat up in bed. He gasped for breath; he had no idea why he should be short of breath and had no memory of actually coming awake. The light in his room was dimmer than it had been in his dream… but it still seemed that someone was in the apartment.
“Hello?” he said before thinking, <if someone’s in the apartment, it’s not to make friends, idiot.> No one answered, and a quick perambulation of his rooms pretty much proved he was alone. He checked the doors and tested the windows with a tug.
He padded back to his bedroom working hard to ignore the leftovers in the fridge. Midnight binging he did not need.
As he slipped back under the sheet, Gabriel couldn’t shake the feeling of a presence in the apartment, or in his bedroom really. <Just Madge or Mabel awake with heartburn,> he thought of the neighbors in the other downstairs apartment. <Or Kyle getting home from some mid-week, late-night party.> Often when the frat boy upstairs walked around his place, it sounded like someone was in Gabriel’s apartment.
He knew he’d never get to sleep with this awful sensation that someone was right next to him, and 3 a.m. was far too early for him to get up when he didn’t need to be to work until afternoon. He sighed and grabbed the novel off his bedside table.