Imagine that you’ve come home from a late night of gaming, and you’ve gone to bed to get rest for a long Halloween day of orchards and trick-or-treat. Then at 4am you’re awoken by strange noises from the living room - the doorknob rattling, the outside holiday decorations clattering against the door as it swings open and then shut again, and footsteps across the livingroom floor. That’s what happend to me early Halloween morning.
Since Abby has been having some difficulty staying in bed at night, Berta was sleeping over in her room at the time. She lept out of bed and yell-whispered into our bedroom, “I think there’s someone downstairs!” We listened as our intruder stumbled among Abby’s toys in the dark living room, and something heavy fell onto the big couch.
Could it maybe be a friend? My bleary mind considered that maybe roommates Dave and Larry had a tiff, and that Dave had fled to our house. Wary to call the cops on someone we knew without really knowing what was going on, I tried to think of a solution.
Our house is wired with home automation lighting. I can turn the living room lights on and off from a remote in our bedroom. I did so, hoping that if it was Dave, he would realize we were awake, and present himself for explanation. The lights were on, and we waited. The house remained silent. Now we were obviously dealing with an intruder, and I tried to keep lucid while fighting off both fatigue and adrenaline.
I looked in our bedroom closet for the little league bat that I keep there for just this possibility. Gone. I looked at the phone sitting on the nightstand, and observed the coiled-up cord, left unhooked from the wall because the upstairs hadn’t yet been wired for phone on the new system, which had recently been acting flaky anyway. It looked like I would have to go downstairs if I wanted a phone at all.
No weapon, no phone, I slowly headed downstairs to see what we were dealing with.
As I rounded the bottom of the staircase, I saw who had entered. He was slumped at the end of our couch, his face not visible. He wore jeans with new-looking black shoes, and a dark gray t-shirt with blue trim around the sleeves and collar. He seemed reasonably tall, and his hair was cut short, but I still couldn’t see his face.
When he didn’t react to my presence, I moved closer. He didn’t move. I tried to angle myself so I could see his face, but he was too slumped. He had a piercing in his right eyebrow, and what looked like 3-day beard growth. He smelled like he had bathed in cigarrette ash, and I surmised that he was simply too drunk and passed out to be an immediate danger.
Satisfied that this guy wasn’t going to jump me if I walked past, I slipped into the kitchen and picked up the phone, immediately switching it on. No dialtone? Quickly returning to the living room, I snatched my cell phone from its perch above the intruder’s seat, and headed back to the relative safety of the second floor to make my emergency call.
A few items are of note in what followed: The 911 operator was particularly bland, which might be what they teach them, but was not particularly reassuring. At one point in our terse conversation - which consisted of asking about pointless details of obstructions to the police in my well-lit lawn, the ethnicity of the intruder whose face I told her I couldn’t see, the number of weapons I couldn’t have known he had - I actually had to ask the woman, “Are the police on the way, or am I wasting my time here?” She finally bothered to tell me that the police were coming, and they had almost arrived on-scene.
When the police did finally show up, it was a quick ordeal. Berta, Abby, and I stayed tucked away in the bedrooms while they dealt with the guy. When they did rouse him, we heard him say that he was going to spend the night here. Obviously, that couldn’t be true if we had called the cops. We heard them wrestle him to the floor, and then take him out the front.
The remaining officer inspected the rest of the floor, which was empty. On his way out, he locked the front door.
I don’t know who the guy was, and I truly don’t know how he managed to come upon our house. Hopefully that’ll be the scariest thing that ever happens to us on Halloween.
