An open door

Yesterday, I almost turned gray—a terrible thing happened. I'm not really a timid person—I don't faint at the slightest noise, and I can easily spend nights alone in any apartment. I'm more than accustomed to knocks and noises in apartment buildings—the soundproofing in Chinese buildings is so good that it feels like all 1.5 billion Chinese people live right there in your house. But what happened yesterday almost killed me.

I'm currently staying with a friend temporarily. Yesterday, he left for work and said he'd be back late. I must say, when he left, he left me the key, but there's no other key. That evening, I'm sitting home alone, not going to bed, waiting for my friend to come home from work. Around 10:30, he calls me on my cell phone and asks if I'm asleep—he says he's on his way home.

Five or ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door. I'm about to jump up to open the door, but then I suddenly realize with some sixth sense: it's not Sergey... I know in my head that all these irrational fears are worthless, but I can't bring myself to go to the door. My feet feel like they're glued to the floor, and I'm shaking. And then there's a knock on the door... I grab the phone and dial Sergey's number. Then the receiver says, "The subscriber's phone is switched off or out of range," and his cell phone rings behind the door—it has a recognizable ringtone. I dash into the bedroom, pull the blanket over myself, shaking. And then there's someone pounding on the door... And, most importantly, there's no other sound coming from there, only the pounding, and that makes it even scarier.

At some point, I lose my composure and scream, "Go there and there, why are you bothering me?!" Only this sentence didn't contain a single curse word, and it was much more detailed. After that, I immediately lost consciousness. I came to because someone was punching me in the face and calling my name. I started to fight him off, and then I realized it was my friend, terrified. "What happened?" he asked. "What happened here?" And then I realized there was no way he could have gotten in—he didn't have a key, and you could blow up the door to this apartment with a missile warhead and it wouldn't hurt.

"How did you get in?" I asked.

He looked at me in surprise:

"The door was open."

At this point, I had a fit of hysterics. A long one, with roaring and howling. Sergey gave me some valerian and then told me he'd entered the building, started to climb up, and then heard me screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs. He leaped up to the second floor in two leaps, grabbed the handle, and found the door unlocked. He said he'd thought I'd opened the door to a stranger and someone had broken in. He walked in—the apartment was dark and quiet. Incidentally, when I retreated to the bedroom, the light in the hallway was on. He started calling my name, turned on the light, and the apartment was silent. The layout here is such that from the hallway you can see all three rooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen, and the doors are all wide open, so it's immediately obvious there's no one in the apartment. And the "intruder" wouldn't have had time to escape. He slammed the door and rushed to look for me. And found me in the corner.

Because of all this, I'm really scared today. I don't know what to think or whose figment of my sick imagination to attribute this story to. It turns out that someone first knocked on my door, then somehow got inside, opened the door for Sergey, and turned off the lights in the apartment... And Sergey is at work late again today...