Bad Architecture

BAD ARCHITECTURE

I have lived in this condo for, what, almost a year? In all that time, I would never have guessed …

About a week ago, I got up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night. I’d been out with friends the night before, and we had drunk some wine. It was around three in the morning, when I woke up, parched, so I stumbled half asleep into the ensuite bathroom to get some water. This is my home, and I know it pretty well, and I have pretty good night vision, so I hadn’t turned on any lights, with only ambient light showing me the way.  

As I was standing in front of the mirror, looking at my sleep-deprived face in the dim light of my apartment, a strange light started shooting out of the bathroom mirror. It was a white light, moving erratically, shining out into the bathroom, like a frenetic laser beam. It moved up and down, would wink out momentarily, then it would be back. 

I was so startled and terrified that I dropped to the floor so that I was out of the sightline of the mirror.  

I had no idea what it was, but I did know that I did not want the light to shine on me. I was scared and completely freaked out.  

What the hell is that? What the hell is happening?  WTF!  

I must have asked myself the same questions a thousand times while I sat on the floor, frozen in place, paralyzed by fear. Waiting for what — I had no idea. My rational brain knew there is no reason for a light to shining out of my mirror in the middle of the night. My irrational brain whispered ghosts, aliens, black magic — something not of this world.

The light only shone for a few minutes, then it was gone, but I was too frightened to move. Finally, at dawn, I screwed up my courage enough to crawl into my bedroom, and shut the ensuite door behind me. I called in sick to work. I had been sitting on the floor of my bathroom, scared to death, for hours — I was in no shape for work.

I didn’t want to go back in the ensuite bathroom, ever. I did have an alternative, the guest bathroom, but I would eventually need to go in there, but definitely not in the foreseeable future. 

Eventually I called my friend Brian, and told him what had happened.

“How much wine did you have last night, Elsa?”

“Haha. Very funny. Two glasses and I was home by ten, so no, I didn’t imagine it.”

“Uh-huh," he said, skeptically.

“I’m telling the truth Brian. I’m kinda frazzled, and I need you to come over tonight. Let’s make it a sleepover. I want you to be here in case it happens again.”  

“Are there nachos involved?” he teased.

I smiled for the first time in hours. “Yes, Brian, there will be nachos. And cold beer or wine. Whatever you want, as long as you come over.”

He agreed to come over by eight that night.  

I spent the rest of the day mining the Internet, to see if anything like this happened to anyone else.  

There were a lot of high creep-factor articles — articles about the souls of dead people getting stuck in mirrors and haunting the owner of the mirror, and articles about mirrors having been broken, and the owners experiencing seven years bad luck. Then there was the whole genre of haunted mirrors that dealt with paranormal events, where people brought home mirrors that were possessed and they caused all kinds of ills and bad feelings and supernatural happenings.  

 There were the dark mirror phenomena, where a person would look in a dark mirror and it showed horrible things from the future, like the person’s death, or the death of someone close to them. On a lighter note, there was the whole mirror meditation fad, where you meditate by looking into a mirror, and it's supposed to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. Like I was going to stare into a mirror anytime soon! Not after last night. 

Maybe this is a new type of haunting, twenty-first century style, a paranormal light show.  I snorted, and continued my research.

There was all kind of weird and unusual, but nothing about lights coming out a mirror. I was stumped. Creeped out from all the mirror-is-haunted stories, but still stumped. What had happened? It was like the light was coming from behind my mirror.  

Stop! Wait! What? … It had looked like light was coming from behind my mirror. I walked into my bedroom and opened the ensuite door, turned on the light, and had a good look at the mirror.

What is behind my mirror? I asked myself, knowing that the bathroom was on the shared wall with my septuagenarian neighbour, Millie.

This was a new build, and I’d been the first owner of this unit. The mirror was just that — a mirror. It was nice enough, with a chunky stainless steel frame. It was pretty big — as wide as my sink, and thirty inches tall. But still, just a mirror.

I pulled the corner of the mirror. Nothing. Then I grabbed the sides and pulled. It moved a little. I pushed it back in. I left the bathroom and called Brian

“Can you come over early? I think I know what’s going on.”

Brian was at my door half an hour later.

“So, what’s up?”

“Come on into the bathroom.”

He followed me into the bathroom, and I showed him that I could slide my mirror out.

“I don’t think that the mirror is attached to anything. I think it’s just stuck in the drywall. I need your help. It’s too heavy for me to move by myself.”

We each grabbed a side and pulled.  

The mirror slid out of its hole, and we placed it on the floor, leaning on a wall.

“What the hell?” I looked at the space where my mirror had been. I pulled out my phone, and used the flashlight app to look around beyond my bathroom wall.

There was a significant void behind my mirror. My wall ended, and then there was a three foot space before the wall of Millie’s unit began.  

“Elsa,” said Brian, looking up. “Is that a camera?”

A jerry-rigged brace was attached to the framing above where my mirror had been, with an arm that hung away from the wall, holding a small video camera pointed to the space where back of my mirror had been.

“Son-of-a-bitch! It is a camera!” I was stunned. Then I looked at my mirror. We had leaned it against the wall, with the back facing us.  

“What the hell?” I turned back to get a closer look at the back of my mirror. I shone my flashlight at it, and could see the light shining through it, reflecting on the wall.

“Mother fucker! That’s a one-way mirror," I said. Now I was really pissed.

“Elsa, that means that someone’s been spying on you!”

“No shit!” I looked at Brian. “How many times, over the last year, have I stood naked in front of this mirror? Checked myself out. God! How embarrassing!”

“Let’s get the camera.”

“NO!” I said, vehemently. “I want to find out who the pervert is that’s doing this.” I stuck my head into the void, and looked around. “But first, I want to find out how he — and I’m assuming it’s a he — got back here.”

Standing on my bathroom counter, I started to climb out of the hole, then realized that I wouldn’t be able to crawl back in. I went back into my unit, and retrieved the step-ladder that I keep in my utility closet.

“You coming?” I said to Brian.

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world!” he said, climbing out after me.

It was dark, the only light coming through the hole in my apartment wall. We both flipped on our flashlight apps, and stared into the void. The air was stale and still. It was dusty, construction materials abandoned on the floor. I turned around, completely, taking in the space. This made sense now. My unit was supposed to be bigger than it was, and now I could see why it wasn’t. The garbage chute was beside my apartment, and instead of building my unit around it, the builders had just left the space empty, shaving off three feet from the length of my unit. That’s why my walk-in closet was more of a squish-in closet.

To the right of the opening, about four feet away, was the back wall of the garbage room, which opened on to the common hallway. The chute was on the far wall, away from my unit, so the wall facing me was the back wall where the recycling bins were stacked.  

“Ah ha! There’s a handle.” I grabbed it, and slowly pulled. It didn’t budge.  

“You probably have to open it from in the garbage room,” said Brian.

“Right! Good call,” I said. “Why don’t you run around, and see if you can get in.”

“'Okay.”

“And don’t let anyone see you.”

“Seriously?” He shook his head. “Oh yea of little faith.”

Brian climbed back into my apartment. As I stood waiting, I looked around. I could see the cement wall that my apartment should have been built to — the side of Millie’s unit. The garbage room wall silently swung open, with Brian standing there.  

“Wow,” I said. “This access is no accident. Someone planned this carefully.” I looked around, a bit creeped out. “Let’s go back to my place, and decide what to do next.”

“I’ll go back the way I came, but you’re gonna have to open the door. I’m locked out,” said Brian, smiling sheepishly. “I was so excited about finding out if there was a way in here, that I forgot the keys.”

“No probs. Meet you at the front door.”

When I let him in, I said, “What next?”

Brian shrugged. “First off, the camera. It’s a game and trail camera, so it’s motion activated, and it has night vision.” We walked back into the bathroom. “It’s a—“ He stuck his head out of the opening, again brandishing his flashlight toward the camera. “Bushnell.”

Brian wiped out his phone, and keyed in the information about the camera. “Good. It isn’t bluetooth compatible, so it uses an SD card.” He hopped out of the hole, and removed the SD card from the camera. “We’ve got to erase this, or he’ll be able to see us when he checks it.” He handed me the card, and I took it to my laptop, copied the files, then erased the SD card.

I returned to the bathroom, and handed it back. “Done.”

“Okay, so let’s put it back in the camera, but not turn on the camera — make it look like he didn’t set it properly.” He re-inserted the SD card.

Brian turned and looked at me. “I think that you need to get a camera of your own, a better camera—“ he looked back down at his phone. “A doorbell camera you can monitor online. It’ll send an alert when it's activated.”

“Brian! You’re a sneaky devil. Remind me never to get on your bad side!”

He smiled at my compliment. “Let’s go get one.”

We put the mirror back in place, and Brian locked the garbage room door before we left.  

When we got back from the electronics store, I was the proud owner of a motion-activated doorbell camera, with night vision and sound. And, as a bonus, it was ready to go right out of the box. We pulled out the mirror, and using a step-ladder, attached the camera to the wall above the perv-cam (as I had taken to calling it), turned it on, and violá, I received my first notification. It was a real-time video of Brian and I standing in front of the opening in my wall. We waved at the camera.  

We climbed back into my unit, and hefted the mirror back in place, hopefully for the last time. Now, all we had to do was wait for my stalker to show up. 

I had no expectation that it would be tonight, but Brian had already arranged to spend the night, so we made the best of it — nachos for dinner, then Netflix, popcorn, and wine. Around midnight, we called it a night. We went to bed — me in my room, Brian on the couch.

At almost three a.m., just like the night before, my phone notified me that someone had activated the camera in the dead space. The ensuite bathroom door was closed, so I quietly went out to wake up Brian. 

We looked at the phone. There was a man I assumed was Pervy Guy, checking his camera. He didn’t seem to notice my camera mounted above his. I called nine-one-one, and Brian ran to the garbage room, securing the door from the inside, locking him in. He was trapped.

Pervy Guy was none-too-happy. He started banging on the door, yelling to be let out. By the time the police arrived, a number of neighbours were awaked, and milling around in the hall, including Millie.

I explained to the two uniformed officers what had happened, and that my stalker was locked inside the void.

We all stood back, and waited as the police opened the door. An indignant man of about forty, dressed all in black, stomped out of the void, sputtering, and demanding to know who locked him in.

“I did,” said Brian.

“Officers, I demand that you arrest this man for unlawful confinement.”

I spoke up. “Why were you in the dead space behind my apartment?”

“I, uh, I, I heard a noise, and went to investigate,” he stammered. “Then this monster locked me in!” he said, indicating Brian.

“I don’t think so. How’d you know how to get in?” I asked. Pervy Guy said nothing. “I think you were filming me, through my bathroom mirror.”

“Preposterous!” said the man.

“Again, I don’t think so.” I held up my phone and played the video of him checking his camera, and switching out the SD card.

Just as the officers were taking a handcuffed Pervy Guy away to be processed at the police station, a pair of detectives arrived on the scene. They introduced themselves as Detective Terry Waits and Detective Carlos Ito.

“So,” said Detective Waits, looking at the crowd in the hall, “who called the police, and why?”

I stepped forward, introduced myself, and explained, again, what had happened. I took them through my unit into the ensuite. Brian and I removed the mirror, and showed them Pervy Guy's set up. Then Brian took Detective Ito through the garbage room entrance, and I showed Detective Waits the my camera feed. 

“You know,” said Detective Waits, “I wonder if there is a similar set up on any other floors.”

She told Brian and me not to touch anything, and they went to examine the other nine floors of my building. It was almost five in the morning when they arrived back at my unit.

“Well, you weren’t the only one. The perp— “ she looked down at her notebook, “Roger Ringman, has been busy. There is similar access on all the floors — but cameras only on the apartments of young women. So, of the possible ten units, he had six cameras set up.”

“Oh my God.” It started to sink in. My image, and the images of everyone else victimized, would be out there, in cyberspace, forever. My eyes welled up. I was still angry, but I was also very sad.

After Waits and Ito left, Brian put his arm around me, “It’s going to be alright.”

*****

The next day Waits and Ito returned to get my formal statement.  They also came bearing good news.  

Pervy Guy, Roger Ringman, was apparently one of the architects of the building, and he had changed the floor plans so that the void was left undeveloped, and created the garbage room access on each floor. He had also arranged for the one-way mirrors to be installed on the ten units. But the good news, Waits said, was that he had only just installed the cameras.  

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Well, two things. First, he had receipts for eleven game cameras purchased last week. And second, we scoured his electronics, and found no indication that he had downloaded anything, yet. He did have a cache of SD cards, but they were all empty. The only recordings were in the cameras right now.” She looked at me, “Except for the camera outside, which had an empty SD card. Know anything about that?”

I did waffle back and forth, about what to admit to, but in the end I told the truth. I had looked at the downloaded files, and there had literally been nothing other than Brain and I in the void. I showed the detectives the file.  

That was last week. I’ve been busy since then. I contacted the other victims. Did I mention I’m a lawyer? No? Well I am.

And I had a discussion with the building management, and they were most eager to see this issue resolved quickly and quietly.

First, management is waiving our condo fees for as long as we own our units. Second, we each get a seventy-five thousand dollar settlement, for pain and suffering. Third, we get our apartments rebuilt to the proper specifications, based on the floor plans we had originally purchased. And during construction, they will be footing the bills for hotels and meals. 

Not bad, and yet still really, really terrible. It could have been so much worse if I hadn’t seen the light.