I'm a first year resident at the local hospital, so I often work long hours and I'm always sleep-deprived. I do make decent money, if not nearly as much as a licensed doctor, but on account of student loans I live in a crappy apartment.
The bedroom of this apartment is tiny and the only spot for my dresser is immediately to the right of the entrance. It's just a bit too long for the space, so the door only opens halfway before it starts pressing against the corner of the dresser, and it makes an awful splintering noise when you've gone too far. This happened often enough my first month here that I've already left some big dimples in the wood. Outside, the bathroom is down the hall on the left, the living room to the right. The hallway is just wide enough for the bedroom door, with a couple of inches leeway on either side for the frame.
Why is this important?
About two weeks ago, the door to my bedroom moved. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I had just worked my second thirty-hour shift in three days, and on four hours of sleep I was getting up for another one. When I pulled open the bedroom door something struck me as off, and it took me a minute to realize what it was– the door had opened completely. I looked to see what had happened, discovering that while my dresser was still flush against both walls, there was an extra inch of space between the dresser and the door.
I shrugged, chalked it up to some fluke of the apartment walls, and proceeded down the hall to shower before heading into work. When I got home thirty hours later, exhausted and desperate for sleep, the door was pushing against the dresser same as always.
Nothing unusual happened for a couple of days, but on Thursday morning I was going out for another long shift when the door opened even wider. It looked like the doorway had shifted even farther left, far enough that I could see a half-inch of the hallway wall sticking out beyond the door frame. It was as though the contractor had miscalculated when he built the place, slightly displacing the doorway from the hall. An inch more and I'd have been able to see insulation and wiring.
I stared at that sliver of drywall for a few minutes, dumbfounded, while my mind tried to come up with some rational explanations. The building was old, settling, and this was just the result of natural wall tensions easing. This disjunction had been there this whole time, and I had been too busy or too tired to notice. I'd slept through an earthquake, during which my room got displaced a couple of inches from the hall. All of the explanations seemed plausible.
With work coming up in half an hour I really just wanted to get some coffee and get out of there, so I decided to call the super after I got off. However, when I got home the next morning the door was back to normal, and I was tired enough to not even care.
Everything was ordinary the next day, too.
On Saturday, I was headed to the hospital again when I found that although my door only opened halfway, grinding against the dresser as usual, the hallway itself had shifted a good foot. The entire wall and then some was clearly visible. To the left of the wall, where I should have been looking into my bathroom, there was this black, inch-wide gap. The light from my room only went a couple of inches into that shadowy space, but I could see a floor that looked to be made of concrete – smooth, featureless, and gray. This musty smell emanated from inside, like from an old, dry basement, or maybe an attic that had been left untouched for too long.
My first instinct was to just close the door. Clearly this was a hallucination brought on by working too many hours with too little sleep, but...the doorknob clattered against solid drywall. My door wouldn't close.
Confused and more than a little disturbed, I initially thought to just leave. Get the hell out of there and worry about the details later. The need for a rational explanation, however, coupled with a morbid sense of curiosity, kept me from bolting out the front door.
