Chameleon

This story, as I tell it now, sounds absurd and even somewhat comical, but it really happened — and when this horror occurred to me, I was far from laughing.

It all began when our old grandmother passed away, and her old apartment was left to us as an inheritance. My parents decided to sell Grandma’s apartment and then our own, and with all the money buy a three-room apartment in the city center (we had been living on the outskirts in a two-room flat that was in rather poor condition). That’s exactly what we did; in the autumn of 2011 we celebrated our housewarming. The apartment we moved into wasn’t new, but the building had been constructed in the 1990s and had all the conveniences like an elevator and an intercom. Moreover, it was located on one of the city’s main streets, so our new home made a very good impression on us. We hadn’t heard any “ominous” stories connected with the building or the apartment — before us, a pleasant young family had lived there, and they were moving to another city to be closer to relatives, which was why they had put the apartment up for sale.

For the first month, I slept in the room at the end of the corridor. The second room became my parents’ bedroom, and the third, located opposite the other two, turned into something between a study and a storage room for unnecessary things. But over time it turned out that in the neighboring apartment, behind the wall at the end of the corridor, there lived a family with a small child. The child often cried and kept me from sleeping at night. Eventually, my parents and I decided to swap my bedroom with the storage room. So I “moved” into the other room with all my belongings. It was even more spacious there; the only downside was that there was no window, but that didn’t bother me much.

Immediately after the “move,” I began sleeping poorly. I started having some murky, incomprehensible dreams that I would forget by morning but that left behind a heavy feeling. On my mother’s advice, I even began taking calming remedies like Novo-Passit before bed, but it didn’t help. As time went on, the same dream started recurring more and more often: I would dream that I was lying in my bed, and then the door to the room would open by itself and some creature would come in from the corridor, sit at the head of my bed near the pillow, and begin squeezing my head with its hands. It didn’t hurt, but there was a very unpleasant sensation of pressure and internal tension, the kind that usually accompanies sleep paralysis. I couldn’t wake up, and I would suffer for a long time, feeling the presence of this hostile entity beside me.

By the way, the creature in my dreams had no permanent appearance. Obviously, it was the same being each time, but outwardly it looked different on every occasion, usually adopting some image that had stuck in my memory from the day. So, after I watched the new “Freddy Krueger” on my computer, the nighttime visitor looked exactly like Freddy — wearing a hat and with metal claws on his hand. When I went to see an ENT doctor about my sinusitis, that very doctor in his white coat appeared to me in my dream. And so on — before bed I often play computer games or watch TV series, so there was no shortage of potential images for the creature.

One evening, after watching a new episode of “The Big Bang Theory” on my laptop, I went to bed. I fell asleep quickly, but woke up in the middle of the night with a vague anxiety and realized that the familiar nightmare was starting again. I had forgotten to turn off the desk lamp on my table, so the room was relatively well lit. I began looking at the door, curiously waiting for the “guest” to appear. For some time now, I had been amusing myself by trying to guess which guise the creature tormenting me would take this time. The door opened by itself again, and from the dark corridor into my bedroom stepped the main character of the series I had watched before going to bed — the eccentric scientist Sheldon Cooper. He was even wearing the same clothes as in the episode — a red T-shirt with a large yellow lightning bolt on his chest. At first I felt like laughing, but when he approached my bed, the amusement vanished. In earlier dreams, I generally couldn’t clearly see the face of whoever came up to me — partly because there had been no light from the lamp, but mainly due to a certain “blurriness” typical of dreams — you don’t see individual details, you perceive the whole image at once. This time everything was different: Sheldon was like the real one; I could see him as clearly as on the computer screen. On his face was a horrifying frozen grin (the kind the character sometimes actually shows on screen when trying to portray humor or sarcasm). He looked straight into my eyes, with what seemed like hatred. I tried to relax and wake up, but I couldn’t. The creature in Sheldon’s guise silently sat on the bed and began squeezing my head. I tried to breathe deeply and ignore the disgusting sensation, as if I were drowning in a viscous liquid. I reassured myself that it was just a dream — soon I would wake up in my bed, as had happened many times before. In front of me I saw only the red T-shirt of my tormentor and the yellow lightning bolt on it.

Just when it seemed to me that awakening was near, Sheldon suddenly stood up from the bed and struck me very hard in the chest with his fist.

I froze in surprise. That had never happened in my dreams before. The blow responded not with pain, but with a cold sensation, as if ice had been pressed to my chest. Sheldon again looked at me with his “pasted-on” smile, bending over me — and this vision was not funny in the least. I tried to scream, but not even a thin squeak came out of my throat. Meanwhile, the creature struck me a couple more times in the same area of my chest, and suddenly I felt that I was becoming truly ill — not in the dream, but in reality. I began to wake up, and Sheldon, as if hurrying not to miss his chance, was hammering his fists against my chest.

I came to drenched in sweat, gasping for air. My heart stabbed painfully with every attempt to inhale. I managed to croak out a scream and call my parents for help. One look at me and they immediately called an ambulance. I could barely breathe; my heart sometimes beat like crazy, and sometimes, it seemed to me, stopped altogether. The doctors arrived, gave me injections, and said I had suffered a heart attack. I was taken to the hospital and discharged only a few days later.

The strange thing is that I had never complained about my heart before — I had no illnesses, I was one of the best in my class at physical education, and I loved lifting kettlebells and barbells in our gym. After that incident, of course, the doctors forbade me from engaging in heavy physical exertion. When I returned home, I spent the first night in the same room, but I had the same nightmare again. I don’t remember now what form the nighttime creature took that last time — it seems it was something not very distinct. After that night, I told my parents in detail about my dreams and insisted on moving back to my former room. Let the child behind the wall cry — that’s still better than facing the “chameleon” every night that tries to kill me.

When I returned to the room at the end of the corridor, all the nightmares immediately stopped, and healthy sleep returned to me. I’m still a little afraid in the evenings to be alone in the storage room — but, thank God, nothing strange has happened in our new apartment since then.