Nighttime Intruder

Tuesday night as we got ready for bed, I told Dave about my scary, creepy, vivid dreams from the previous night. At the end of the second dream description, he jokingly told me to stop talking about it or he would have bad dreams too. As we prayed together before going to sleep, he asked God to give me sweet and dreamless rest. Then we exchanged a kiss, rolled over and... oblivion.

At 3:00 a.m., I got up to use the bathroom. As I prepared to resume sleeping, I heard a slight rustling noise. Hmm, I thought. Sounds like the fan is blowing a plastic bag somewhere in the room. Oddly, the rustling came intermittently rather than constantly, and I sleepily realized that I hadn't set the fan to oscillate. That's weird. But the sound faded away, and I started doing the same...

The rustling again. I looked at the clock. I hadn't been sleeping for long, if at all. There must be a grocery bag in line with the fan's breeze... I wonder if I should get up and move it? Nah... it's not that bad. But the sound kept coming, quietly, randomly recurring as I drifted through various stages of not-quite-asleep.

When almost an hour had gone by since my initial wake-up, I turned onto my side and stared at the wall over my husband's head. Suddenly, the rustling was distinctly closer. What on earth could that be? I wondered, as my heart began to pound. I know we've had both mice (in the basement) and squirrels (in the attic) before, but never anything running around our room in the middle of the night! I scarcely had time to finish the thought before a shriek left my mouth. I gasped, then shrieked again. Dave jolted awake and leaned toward me. "Cara!" he said, touching my face. The thought flashed through my head: He thinks I'm dreaming. And I shrieked again.

"I'm awake!" I squealed to my husband. There's something falling on our bed!" I had seen them three times-- shadowy forms falling from the same spot on our ceiling, right onto our comforter. Dave lay still for a moment, probably gathering his poor, shocked wits, and then with a swift motion threw the comforter onto the floor. He got up and turned the light on, found his glasses, and jerked at the comforter to see what would spring out at us. Nothing.

I explained what I had seen. Dave had the heard the rustling as he came to, so he didn't think I was totally insane. Cautiously, we poked around the room, looking into shopping bags, behind dressers and under the bed. As I mentally replayed what I had seen, I realized that they were probably an it, and that whatever-it-was had probably been flying rather than falling. It was something with sort of a swooping flight pattern: probably a very large moth or a bat. But we couldn't find either one.

We gave up and got back in bed. It was no real surprise that neither of us could sleep. Personally, I was wide awake, my pulse quickened and my mind playing tricks. For the first time, I understood what people mean when they say, "my skin was crawling." Still, the room was quiet except for the sounds we made rolling over in bed. At one point I thought I heard a crinkling from the far end of them room, but then... silence again. After almost an hour, I heard Dave start to breath evenly. At least someone's getting some rest, I thought. Then the rustling started again. And it was getting close, fast. Dave started awake. "Did you hear that?"

"Yes," I said, "it's back."

At this point we gave up the notion of sleep altogether. My husband and protector valiantly volunteered to take on the search-and-destroy mission and sent me downstairs to try and rest on the couch. As I gathered my king-sized pillows (without which I sleep nowhere) and prepared to leave the room, Dave crouched down to look under the bed again. "Wait a minute," he said.

"What?" I replied, freezing in my tracks.

He stood up, glancing quickly around the room, then grabbed one of the nearest objects: my hairbrush. Crouching back down, he tossed the brush under the bed so that it slid across the floor. Immediately a series of frantic, high-pitched squeaks erupted. "It is a bat," Dave said grimly.

Well, I exited the room quickly and went downstairs to wait out the chase. Dave grabbed our kitchen broom and headed back to the bedroom. He opened our front window (which, fortunately enough in this case, has no screen to worry with), nudged the bat out of its hiding place, and watched it swoop madly around the room. Hoping to urge it gently toward to window, he took aim and tried to assist the flying rodent toward the exit. KA-THWOP! The thing soared across the room, hit the wall and slid to the floor. (My hubby doesn't know his own strength sometimes.)

After emitting some outraged/exhausted/terrified/mortally wounded (or all of the above?) squeaks, the bat reluctantly latched onto the broom with which Dave was lightly prodding it. Dave stuck the end of the broom out of the window, hoping our intruder would take off, but it hung on stubbornly, upside down, in the stereotypical bat-in-a-cave position. When Dave tapped the broom firmly against the window sill, the creature finally gave up. Dave said he thought it just let go and fell straight down into our yard. "I hope I didn't kill it," he said later. And apparently he didn't, because when we went outside first thing in the morning, there was no bat in sight.

And so the tale of our Nighttime Intruder draws to a close. Of course, several questions do linger in our minds. And those are: how in the name of drywall did that thing get into our bedroom? Does it have friends and family? Do they know the way into our bedroom too? Do bats carry grudges? Are they vengeful? And does Home Depot sell bat-proofing kits?

If you have answers to any of these questions and wish to set us our minds at ease, please contact us a.s.a.p. In the meantime, my sincere prayer for everyone reading this is that you will never know the anxiety--indeed, the terror--of having a bat visit your boudoir at 3:00 a.m.

Believe me, I'd take bad dreams over that experience any night.