CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: SOME THINGS THAT DON'T GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

What's that noise? It's either a monster in the closet or too much garlic in the spaghetti sauce.

It was about 4 o'clock the other morning and something woke me out of a sound sleep.

Was it the building creaking? A car pulling into the parking lot? An ax murderer hacking down the door of my apartment?

I lay mulling the possibilities for a few minutes before deciding it was too hot in the room to think clearly. I opened the window, got back in bed and was just about to slide off to oblivion when a fluttering curtain jerked me back to wakefulness.

Or maybe it was panic.

So, I thought to myself, of course the curtain is moving; the window's open. But I checked for shoes peeking out at the bottom just in case.

It's very quiet at 4 o'clock in the morning in my neighborhood. Too quiet, sometimes, especially if I'm straining to hear what's not there.

Actually, it's not what isn't out there that worries me; it's what might be out there.

What actually is out there is an unlucky combination of the wind, the building settling and too much garlic in the spaghetti sauce, but sleep deprivation often prevents me from figuring that out.

I'm a single woman who lives alone. The doors are almost always locked, but when the wind rises and the house creaks, I remind myself that someone could have crept in while I was taking the trash out and hidden in the closet or the spare bedroom or the deck or the cabinets under the kitchen sink....

The superhuman-bad guy myth, courtesy of all those "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th XXVI," doesn't help when it's very dark and very quiet and you've managed to scare yourself silly imagining Freddie Krueger is hiding under the bed or in the closet.

And all those ghosts we discover in childhood tend to reappear at inconvenient moments. When I was a kid, my grandmother kept a coat rack at the top of the second-floor landing, complete with a ragged old coat and hat, and to this day, my personal bogeyman lurks in an old navy blue overcoat and battered gray homburg.

The cat, I should point out, was sound asleep the whole time. There's the temptation to think that if a bad guy breaks in, the cat will at least run and hide or meow and warn me.

Cats are good judges of character as far as finding out whether or not the invader in question likes cats. They can't sniff out serial killers.

That's what dogs are for.

When something awful really does happen, we can call for help, and the police or fire department or paramedics will come.

But there's no heeby-jeebies hotline available when every creak and groan sounded as the building settles signal an unwelcome guest or tree limbs scratching on the window pane conjure up bloody phantasms.

Some enterprising person should start up a "monster check" service. Call at 4 o'clock in the morning and they'll come over and check under the beds, in the closets, the shower and up on the roof.

Actually, some people already provide that service. They're called parents. But they usually drop the "monster check" duty after their offspring pass 20 or so.

Of course, there's always the risk that the guy purporting to be the monster-checker (MonsterMaster?) is really an escaped lunatic who overpowered the real guy on his way to your house....

Sweet dreams.

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.