Intruders

About a week before Halloween, the year after our encounter with the bat, I was awakened from a deep and peaceful sleep by a loud noise from within our home. Sitting straight up in the bed, I looked at the clock and saw that it was just past one a.m. Connie had heard it too and grabbed my arm. “What was that,” she said, in a frightened whisper.

“Shhhh...” I hissed, and listened carefully to the silence we were now drowning in. It was one of those ridiculous moments when you want to hear the noise again, to confirm that it really happened, but also didn’t want to hear it, because that would prove that something was making the noise.

I swung my legs off the bed and set my feet quietly on the floor. The noise replayed in my head over and over and I tried to make my best guess as to where it had come from. When my mind cleared from its sleepy fog, I reasoned that the sound must have originated downstairs. It was not the sound of breaking glass, but could have been something knocked over as an intruder stumbled around in the dark.

I slowly made my way out of the bedroom and into the hallway; my hands reaching out along the way for something to use as a weapon but finding only a hairbrush and some jewelry on top of the dresser. I tried to remember where my baseball bat was and then recalled that it was in the storeroom downstairs, along with anything else I might conceivably use to protect myself and my family.

I cautiously opened the door to the basement a few inches and listened. At first I couldn’t hear anything, but then I could make out a strange break in the silence. It didn’t register as a recognizable sound, but more like a soft change in the tone of nothingness.

I slipped my hand through the doorway and flipped on the switch for the light on the steps. I half expected to hear footsteps and the hurried rush of our intruder to escape, but there was nothing. I knew that this could be either very good or very bad news.

At this point I had the option of calling 911 or investigating for myself. With no weapon and having little or no skills at martial arts or hand to hand combat, the logical thing would have been to close and lock the basement door and call the professionals. I, however, in an extremely rare moment of perceived masculinity, decided to live free and die hard. My name is Bruce W. after all.

I moved carefully down the first few stairs, cringing with each alarmingly loud creak of the wood beneath my feet. There were six stairs down to a landing and three more stairs after turning a blind corner before reaching the basement. If someone was waiting on those lower steps, I would have little time to rush back up the stairs to lock the door.

I listened again and the odd, broken noise was louder. If I could describe it, I would say it sounded like someone with asthma taking a long, wheezy breath. I froze. The sound was almost identical to the breathing noise that Jason Voorhees made behind his mask in the Friday the 13th movies. My mind tortured me with the words that followed his intense respiration on film…”kill, kill, kill.”

Then my nostrils flared at a sudden, pungent smell that I didn’t expect. It was a hot smell, not like wood burning or fire, but like burning hair. It was strong and getting even stronger.

I slid down the wall and peeked around the corner, not sure what I might encounter, but very relieved to see the sliding glass doors that led outside were closed and locked, glass still intact. The breathing sound continued to grow louder and the stench was beginning to smell like burning rubber. My heart beat furiously in my chest and my own breathing was becoming somewhat panicked.

I moved onto the landing and stepped down, but stopped short of the last step. The light switch for the basement family room was just around the corner and I twisted my arm around blindly to find it. I half expected someone or something to grab my hand in the dark, which would have surely caused me to drop dead of a heart failure or at the very least awaken everyone within a five block radius with my high-pitched siren scream.

I found the switch and with a deep breath flipped it upward, bathing the area in the warm glow of soft white bulbs. The noise and smell did not alter or stop; and whatever was causing it apparently had no fear of me or any weapon I might be bringing with me down the stairs. I considered yelling out some manly threat like, “I’ve got a gun,” or “the police are on the way,” but I was pretty sure that the fear in my voice would come out sounding like Barney Fife or a six year old girl, so I stayed stoically silent.

Gathering all my nerves, I peered around the corner to see what horror awaited me. My eyes scanned the room for shadowy figures or grotesque monsters and finally settled upon two furry lumps lying calmly on the green felt of our pool table.

The grey tabby looked at me like I had just woken her from a peaceful slumber. The black cat was more alert, but taunted me with a “what are you doing here?” look on his face. If not for the loud, hissing breathing sound still emanating from somewhere in the room and the stench burning my eyes and nose, it could not have been more peaceful.

Let me stop here and explain a little bit about the cats. It’s no secret that I am not a pet person. This is not to say that I don’t like animals. That is not true. I enjoy visiting zoos and love a good horse movie. I think aquariums full of fish are really swell and I was a big fan of the Lassie shows as a kid. I like animals just fine. I just don’t particularly want to have a pet.

I’m can’t remember how we got those two particular cats, but I know that I had nothing to do with it. Like most of our horrible experiences with pets I’m sure it started off with someone’s best intentions. You know the kind. They always say things like, “Every child needs a pet, blah, blah, blah,” and “those allergies are all in your head.”

As usual, I went along for the ride (mostly in the backseat, and sometimes in the trunk).

Anyway, the cats were not guests in our house for a very long period, and their untimely demises (which I assure you were not of my doing) are now the stuff of neighborhood legend, but in their brief stay we seemed to have had a mutual agreement to stay out of each other’s way. Most of the time, it worked out just fine.

I stepped down and walked over the table, relatively sure at this point that no one was lurking in a corner to get me, but still completely perplexed over the continuing noise and the overpowering smell. The cats watched me with their wide, glassy eyes and I asked them, “Okay, what did you do?”

And then I saw it.

Behind the pool table, lying on the floor, was our ironing board…and beside it, hissing loudly and burning its way through our carpet and the foam pad beneath, was our iron.

I grabbed the hot iron and pulled it from the sticky, melted mess of the carpet and pad. Thank goodness for the cheap material of the low cost floor covering because a good shag rug would have probably burst into flame rather than melt into black goo. We were very lucky.

One thing I know is that Connie is very vigilant about turning off the iron when she uses it. Most of the time she unplugs it, but she always turns it off. Anyone who’s seen my wrinkled shirts knows that I rarely iron, so that left me with one explanation. Obviously one of the cats had jumped on the ironing board and toppled it over. When the iron hit the floor the switch had somehow turned on.

After unplugging and safely putting away the ruined iron, I gave the cats one last disappointed look (which they totally ignored) and made my way back to bed. Connie looked relieved when I walked back into the room and asked what had happened. It was too late and I was too tired to go into detail, so I just said “stupid cats…” before collapsing into bed and pulling the blanket over my head. She knew me well enough to let it wait until morning for the rest of the story.

Going Batty

It was a dark and stormy night…

Actually, no…it was dark, but the sky was clear and the air was crisp and cool. It was a beautiful October evening; the night before Halloween 1996. I swear upon the grave of Daniel Webster that the story I am about to share is true.

It was a little after 9pm. We had just tucked our Shelby and Ashlyn into bed and Connie and I had settled onto the couch to watch a little television. I can’t remember what we had planned to view because within minutes of sitting down, the phone started ringing. I stepped into the kitchen to answer the phone and barely started the conversation when I heard Connie scream.

Our kitchen at the time had a door on one end that opened into the hallway that led out of our living room to our bedrooms. The other end was open to a small dining nook and back into our living room. Essentially, you could make a circle through our kitchen into our living room and back.

As I looked up in reaction to the frightened yell of my usually calm and rational wife, I heard the strange flap of wings and came face to fangy face with a large bat. It swooped past my head and flew through our kitchen, making a wide turn through our living room and back past my face again.

This was not one of those little bats that you see flying out of chimneys and caves at twilight. I’ve seen those before. I don’t like them, but I’m not completely freaked out by them. This was what I call a “movie” bat. The wingspan was over a foot wide and its head looked to be the size of a tennis ball. It looked like the thing that Gilligan turned into in that weird vampire episode I watched growing up.

I know what you are thinking. I am obviously exaggerating the size of what was simply a regular bat. Or maybe it was even a bird that I mistook for a bat. In the hysteria of the moment, I could have only thought it was a bat. That is logical, and if I were alone when it happened, I would tend to agree. However, as I said, my very logical and clear headed wife can confirm my story. It was a bat. It was big. And it was in our house.

I hung up the phone (after politely saying I would have to call them back) and told Connie to run back and close the kid’s bedroom door. Crawling quickly through the flight zone, she did just that, and locked herself in with the girls.
I dodged the next pass of the bat and ran to the front door, unsure of what to do except hold the door open and hope that it would fly out on its own. From behind the glass of the storm door I watched as it circled, again and again, and wondered how long I could wait. Looking once again at the wingspan and the pointy ears on its massive head, I decided I could wait a good, long while. It was a beautiful night and I decided that the fresh air would do me good.

After twenty minutes of watching and carrying on an anxious conversation with Connie through the window of the bedroom where she was trapped, I saw the monster bat finally fly through the opening and disappear into the night sky. I hurried inside, closing and locking the door.

We checked all the windows and access points (upstairs, downstairs, attic, and basement) and could find no obvious point of entry for the creature. We never found a sign of its existence. No scratch marks on the walls, no little bat droppings. We had no idea how long it had been in the house before it made its presence known. It could have been hiding under our bed or in one of our closets for days or even weeks. It was more than a little un-nerving.

The mystery has never been solved.