Strangers in the House

Whenever I heard doors creaking in my empty apartment, or someone walking or breathing next to me in bed, I always chalked it up to the terrible acoustics. Honestly, sometimes someone really does drop a vase three floors up, but it feels like it's right next to your ear. Right now, as I'm writing, I can hear my alcoholic neighbor upstairs complaining about something.

When my Xbox 360 suddenly turned on and its disc drive opened in the empty room, I chalked it up to a power surge. I chose to deliberately ignore the fact that power surges usually throw off all digital clocks, and that nothing of the sort happened that time. You never know—I'm a humanities major, not a techie. Besides, otherwise, I'd have to look for an explanation. After all, anyone who owns an Xbox 360 knows that to turn it on, you have to hover your finger over the button—there's a sensor there. Who could do that in an empty room? Sorry, I didn't really want to know the answer.

Just recently, as I was getting out of the bathroom, I saw streaks on the fogged mirror, as if someone had been standing there a second before I pulled back the curtain and moving their hand across the glass. Friends said this happens when someone has done it before—they say the "grabbed" surface fogs up worse. I hope so.

And finally, yesterday, my dad and I were enjoying my little brother's Christmas gift—a thing called "Kinect." It's a game that tracks your movements, allowing you to control the game by moving your arms and legs, without the need for joysticks. In the bottom corner of the screen, there was a small segment that depicted my dad and me, like a thermal imager. At one point, I casually glanced at it and froze. The Kinect detected three people in the visible area: me, Dad, and a figure sitting on a chair by the door. Except there were only two of us in the apartment at the time. Dad saw the silhouette too. We looked around—the chair by the door, of course, was empty. After a while, the silhouette disappeared, and Dad blamed it on the chair's heavy back, saying the Kinect had recognized it as a person. Of course, besides that chair, there's plenty of tall furniture in the room, and a Christmas tree. Why didn't the device recognize them as people?

You know, I'm writing this—and somehow it's not scary at all. If this creature had wanted to harm us, it would have had plenty of chances over the long years we've lived in this apartment. Who knows, maybe there's a rational explanation for everything, and it really is a glitch in the device. Or a glitch in the space around us...