My daughter Lisa is eight, and she has never been the kind of child who makes up scary stories.
If she had a dream, she said so. If something frightened her, she came straight to me. That is why her words unsettled me so much that morning, while she sat at the table calmly eating her cereal.
“Mom, why does that man only come to your room at night?”
At first I did not even understand. “What man?”
Lisa looked up at me. “The tall one. He comes when you’re already asleep.”
I glanced at my husband. He was standing by the coffee machine and did not seem to have heard.
“You’ve seen him?”
“A few times. He opens your door really quietly and goes in.”
My blood ran cold. I asked her what he looked like, but all she could tell me was that he was tall, always wore dark clothes and carried a small black case.
Then she added, “He always goes to Dad’s side of the bed.”
After that, there was no way I could forget it. All day I tried to find a sensible explanation. Maybe Lisa had seen a shadow. Maybe she had mixed up a dream with real life.
But there was one problem. For the past few weeks, my husband really had been acting strangely. He had started going to bed earlier and kept complaining that he was tired. Several times I noticed he had left the front door unlocked at night. Whenever I asked why, he just shrugged it off. “I must have forgotten.”
That evening I said nothing. We had dinner, put Lisa to bed and went to sleep ourselves around eleven.
“Reading late again tonight?” my husband asked.
“No, I’m tired.”
I switched off the lamp. He fell asleep almost immediately. Twenty minutes later his breathing turned slow and even.
I lay on my side facing the wall, trying not to move a muscle. An hour went by, then a bit more. I was starting to think Lisa had been wrong after all when I heard a very faint sound.
The door handle turned. The digital clock read 1:13 a.m.
The door opened slowly and a man stepped into the room. He was tall, about thirty, in a dark jacket. In his hand he really was holding a narrow black case.
He closed the door behind him and stood in the dark for a few seconds. My heart was hammering so loudly I was afraid he would hear it.
Then he walked toward the bed. Toward my husband. He set the case on the nightstand and opened it. I was about to leap up when something happened that I never saw coming.
My husband opened his eyes. He had not been asleep either.
“Is she asleep?” the stranger whispered.
My husband looked straight at me and said nothing for a few seconds. Then he answered, “Yes, yes.”
My hands went ice cold.
The stranger took a small flashlight from the case and leaned closer to my husband. “Tonight is the final check,” he said. “If the result is confirmed again, tomorrow you’ll have to tell her everything.”
I could not lie there any longer. I snapped the lamp on. Both men froze.
“Tell me what?”
My husband went pale. I was reaching for my phone to call the police when the stranger calmly raised his hands. “I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor who sneaks into someone’s bedroom at one in the morning?”
My husband sat up. And then he told me what he had been hiding for almost a month.
A few weeks earlier, he had started waking up in different places around the house with no memory of how he got there. One morning he woke in the garage. Another time he came to by the front door with the keys in his hand.
But the scariest thing had happened two weeks before. The hallway camera had recorded him walking into Lisa’s room in the middle of the night and standing beside her bed for almost a full minute. The next morning, he remembered nothing.
That was when he quietly contacted a sleep clinic. He had been too afraid to tell me, because he thought I would take our daughter and leave.
For several nights the doctor had been coming to our house to monitor my husband’s brain activity while he slept. The black case held his medication and the equipment for the sleep tests.
It was the last thing I had expected.
