The advert said three nights, four hundred pounds, and all you have to do is sleep. Two of those nights were a formality.
The advert said three nights, four hundred pounds, and all you have to do is sleep.
It was on a corkboard in the corridor outside the university library, between a room-to-let and a poster for a jazz society, printed on a colour laser printer with a proper letterhead and a phone number with a real extension. I was in the second year of a degree I couldn't afford and I had eleven pounds in my account, so I took a photograph of it before I'd finished reading it.
The screening was normal. That's the thing I want to establish. I went to a building on the north side of campus, in the basement of the psychology department, and a woman about my mum's age took my blood pressure and asked me forty questions off a laminated sheet. Do you smoke. Do you take anything. Have you ever had a seizure. Does anyone in your family sleepwalk.
I said no to all of them except the smoking, which I lied about.
She had me sign three forms and gave me a copy of one of them, which I still have, and which says at the top **PROTOCOL 11: CONSOLIDATED SLEEP ARCHITECTURE IN YOUNG ADULTS**. It's very boring. It's four pages of very boring. I've read it maybe two hundred times since.
There is nothing in it about the third night.
The room was a room. Single bed, blackout curtain over a window that turned out to be a false window with a wall behind it, a chair, a small camera in the corner near the ceiling, and a bundle of leads on a tray.
A technician called Danny, young, tired, friendly in the way of somebody working nights for money, glued fourteen electrodes to my scalp and face with a substance that smells like nail varnish and does not come out of your hair for a week. Two on the chin. Two beside the eyes. One on each collarbone. He explained each one as he went, unprompted, which I appreciated.
Then he said the line that I keep coming back to, and at the time I thought it was small talk.
He said, "First two nights are just to get you used to the wires."
I said, so it doesn't matter if I sleep badly?
And he said, "Tonight? Not really." And he laughed, and I laughed, and he turned the light off.
Night one I slept badly and it didn't matter.
Night two I slept better. Danny said my numbers were fine, showed me a strip of my own EEG on a monitor and pointed out where the spindles were, which he clearly enjoyed doing and I clearly enjoyed being shown. I asked him what they were looking for and he said "consolidation," and when I asked what that meant he said "how well your brain files things," and that was the last completely honest exchange we had.
On night three there were two people.
Danny, and a man in his fifties in a shirt and no tie who was introduced to me only as "one of the investigators." He didn't give a name. He wasn't rude about it. He shook my hand, he asked whether the gel had irritated my skin, he said the word "lovely" twice, but he did not give a name, and when I filled that gap in myself and said something like *and you're Doctor...?* he simply carried on with the sentence he was already saying.
There were three extra electrodes on night three. Two behind my right ear, low, almost on the neck. One on my sternum.
Danny didn't explain those.
I asked. I said, what are those for, and Danny looked at the other man, and the other man said, "Same as the rest. We just want more of the picture tonight."
And there was a new thing on the tray: a small black box, about the size of a paperback, with a single cable coming out of it and a rocker switch on the side. It wasn't connected to the computer. It had its own battery pack taped to the back of it with electrical tape, the way a thing looks when a person made it rather than a company.
I asked about that too.
The man said it was a metronome.
I want to be very clear that I was not restrained, drugged, threatened, or lied to in a way I could prove. Everything that happened next happened to me while I was asleep, in a bed I could have got out of, in a building with a fire door I'd been shown.
Here is what I remember.
I remember going to sleep normally. I remember the ordinary run of thoughts you get, the ones that go nowhere.
Then I remember waking up, or something like waking up, and the room was exactly as dark as it had been, and I could not move, which I knew even at the time was sleep paralysis, because I'd had it twice before in my life and it is unmistakable, the weight on the chest, the sense of the room being occupied.
What was different was the sound.
There was a click. A single, hard, mechanical click, about a metre from my right ear. And then, after what I would guess was two seconds, another one. And another. Perfectly even. The most patient sound I have ever heard.
A metronome.
And with each click, something in my chest answered it. Not my heart. My heart was going far too fast, I could feel it in my throat. Something underneath the heart. A small tug, precisely on the beat, like a hand testing a rope.
It went on for a long time. Long enough that I stopped being frightened and got bored, which is a thing I have never been able to explain to anybody, and then long enough that I got frightened again on the other side of the boredom.
And at some point in the middle of it, a voice at the foot of the bed said, clearly and quietly and not to me:
"That's not him."
I woke at ten past seven with a headache and gel in my hair and Danny bringing me a cup of tea, and everything was completely normal, and I want to stress that too. Nobody was strange with me. Nobody hurried me out. I was paid in cash from an envelope with my name on it, four hundred pounds in twenties, and Danny walked me to the door and said thanks, seriously, that's a real help.
I asked him, on the step, what the metronome was for.
And Danny, who I had liked, and who I think was about twenty-four, and who I do not believe was in on whatever this was in any meaningful way. Danny said, "What metronome?"
Three things, and then I'll stop.
The first is that I went back eight days later to ask for a copy of my night-three data, which the consent form I still have says I am entitled to on request. The basement corridor was there. The door was there. The room number on my form was B-14. There is no B-14. There is a B-13 and there is a B-15, and between them there is a stretch of wall about three metres long with a noticeboard on it.
I have stood in that corridor and paced it out.
The second is that I emailed the address on the letterhead and got a reply four months later, from a different address, from an administrator who was clearly forwarding something a lawyer had written. It said that Protocol 11 had been "concluded and archived," that individual data could not be released as it had been "irreversibly anonymised," and that they had no record of any equipment matching my description. It was three sentences long and it did not say sorry.
The third is the one I actually think about.
For about a year afterwards, whenever I was very tired, the specific kind of tired where you're in bed and you've missed the moment where sleep was easy, I would get a click.
Once. Just once, on the right, about a metre away.
I always waited for the second one. It never came, and eventually I'd sleep.
It stopped in the spring of the following year and it has not happened since, and I would have told myself I imagined the whole thing, except that in the spring of the following year my sister came to stay in the spare room of my flat for two weeks.
And on the fourth night she came into the kitchen at three in the morning, completely calm, and asked me, in a voice she has never used with me before or since, why I had a metronome in my room.