It was a more or less typical Saturday afternoon. As usual, I had been out late the night before and was still sound asleep in my bed come 12:30 in the afternoon.

I was startled awake by several sharp reports on the door of my room. “Arggh mmph who’s there!” I exclaimed as I judo-chopped the air and instinctively put myself into the double-special sleeping snake defensive stance.

No response came from beyond my door, so I dragged myself out of bed to investigate. I had meant to wake up earlier and go to the Christmas parade. Anyhow, maybe my roommate next door had knocked to get me up. Or perhaps it was one of my friends reminding me to go drink beer and watch the UNC game. As I hobbled out into the kitchen and squinted through the early afternoon haze I expected to find the culprit who had so jarringly interrupted my slumber.

Lo and behold, my apartment was devoid of life save the mold growing in the bottom of my sink and the savage pubic hairs that had developed a primitive society under the futon. “I’ll have to vacuum that before we play pong again,” I muttered to myself.

I checked on my roommate next door; he was dead asleep. I woke him and asked him if he had knocked on my door earlier. “Of course not,” he replied. “What time is it anyhow?”

I informed him of our position in space-time, and he jumped out of bed with the realization that the location of his 1:00 commitment lay, for all practical purposes, outside of his future light cone. “Who could have woken me up this morning?” I asked myself, unfazed by my roommate’s sudden haste.

I was understandably perplexed, but as I’ve learned from past mysteries like “The case of who peed on the kitchen floor last night” and “The mystery of how long that quart of milk has been behind the couch,” a solution generally presents itself. A good detective is first observant of the facts around him — you can’t put a puzzle together without the pieces.

I decided to go along with my day as planned. Obviously whoever had woken me had done so with a purpose in mind, and I expected that his or her purpose would come to light as the day progressed.

I threw on some shorts, put a hat over my bed head and moseyed on over to a nearby apartment to watch the UNC game. I arrived during the second quarter and proceeded to make myself a breakfast of a plate of barbecue and a cup of beer. “No sense working on an empty stomach,” I thought, “I’ll need my wits about me today to solve this mystery.” I chatted it up with the local party-goers, and I was getting nowhere toward solving my mystery awfully quickly. None of these people had a motive to bang on my door this morning, and more importantly, nobody had the means to come into my apartment in the first place.

I always do my best thinking in the shower, so I strolled back to my place to wash off during halftime. I realized Facilities workers occasionally wander into our apartment unannounced to do odd jobs, but nobody from Facilities would be working like that on a Saturday afternoon; it must have been somebody (or something, I realized with a shiver) else.

“Surely we couldn’t have a ghost in our apartment; the building can’t be more than two or three years old,” I tried to convince myself. “Nobody has even died here, right?”

I soon put my worries aside; the outcome of the Chapel Hill game forced everything out of my head but my dislike for UNC. It was a good thing, by this time my friends were beginning to think I might be on drugs. Someone had suggested that I dreamed the knocking, but I insisted there was no way it could have been my imagination. I’ve imagined things before, of course, but I know my imagination and it would have startled me awake with something really scary like a grotesque Kenny Rogers chicken monster, not a simple knocking.

While I still have yet to solve the mystery of the phantom knocker, I’ve narrowed my list down to a number of possibilities. While I know that ghosts are out of the question, I haven’t ruled out paranormal activity. My current theory is that some sort of interdimensional traveler woke me up, kind of a Donnie Darko-ish type twist. Maybe fate decided I was sleeping in too late, and it had to wake me up somehow.

Have no worries, my dear readers. No matter what happens, somehow, I’ll get to the bottom of this. If I have to, I’ll sleep into the afternoon every day until I hear that knocking again. Next time, you won’t get away with it, fate!

E-mail Kenneth at [email protected].