My wife has a thing for weeds. Maybe I've written about this before, but she buys them and decorates the house with them. I'm not a fan, but I don't hate them either. Maybe indifferent is the right word here.
Saturday night she was visiting family in Nevada. I was home watching puppies and taking care of Otto. My son and I stayed up late playing Diablo III because it has a new expansion pack.
Otto stirred in the middle of the night. He's been doing this due to pain, and sometimes he needs to go outside. He wasn't grumbling about the pain, and he had a pretty good weekend. At this pace, he'll be back to his old shenanigans in a couple of months.
This time he was upset about something. He didn't bark, like he would if a neighbor dog barked or someone was in the park next door, but something had him shook up. I walked over to him and put a hand on his head.
Then I heard something like the sound of water being poured on a hard floor. That's the best way to describe it. It had to have been about three AM, and I also thought of a rattlesnake, but that would be completely absurd.
I opened the bedroom door to peek into the kitchen. It's the only hard surface we have right now. Then I heard it again. It was behind me.
I walked to my nightstand and turned on the lights, and it sounded from my wife's jar of weeds. Now the windows are closed and they are away from the air conditioning vent too. I glanced left and right of them; nothing.
It sounded again. This time the weeds toward the middle were vibrating. The megaphone shaped arrangement seemed to be causing a mild amplification to the noise.
My first thought was mouse, but we haven't had a mouse ever since we moved to Idaho.
It sounded again, and I picked up on the rhythm of the noise. I shook the vase, but couldn't get it to sound again. I am certain that a moth fluttered in there and got stuck.
At this point the puppies were thoroughly interested too, so I forced them all to go outside and go potty… Otto too. When they finished, I went back to sleep and never gave it a second thought.
As an author, you can bet I chalked it up. I may never use it, but it could enhance a story or turn into a Macabre Macaroni type story at some time.
Has anything like this ever happened to you in the middle of the night?
Ok, were you playing the new necromancer character in DIII? If so, maybe you channeled a spirit into the vase 😉
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I was, and good thought. I need to see if I can make it explode now.
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Get that corpse explosion happening!
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Reblogged this on Anita Dawes & Jaye Marie.
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And you managed to go back to sleep? What a man!
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I was more concerned about how the dog was feeling. It was interesting though.
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I live in a house built in the 1940’s, pier and beam. Rodents and squirrels and raccoons and what have you like to get into nooks and crannies and then in the middle of the night either get into a fight with another rodent or decide that right then would be a good time to try to claw their way through the sheet rock. Loudly. Also, I have written about the giant rodent sized cockroaches that live in the south. One of those scuttling across the old hard wood floors can wake me up, too. Always scares the bajeebers outa me.
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I think I would deploy chemical warfare under those circumstances. Take another trip and gas the place while you’re gone.
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It got better after placing chicken wire over strategic entry spots AND I keep the pest control guy on retainer. I live in the middle of town and yet have caught countless armadillos, possums, and raccoons in my “humane” trap. I don’t think animal control *really* takes these things away… their release program must be in my backyard. I am going to start tagging them to find out. Some old lady down the street thinks it is fun to feed the raccoons and other wild life (no joke). I have never felt violent toward anyone until a baby raccoon died in my attic and the carcass could not be removed. That was about a week of unimaginable stench.
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Gross. Bio-hazard.
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I’m a light sleeper, too. Spider walking across a wooden dresser woke me up one night.
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Wow, I’m not that sensitive. It took the dog to alert me. I once heard a tarantuala walking across the Las Vegas desert from fifty feet away though. You get away from the city and it’s quieter.
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It would have taken me a lot longer to get back to sleep… If I even managed to!
Glad Otto had a better weekend.
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Thanks, Victoria.
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The fun of night noises. Nothing really in the house here, but we have stray cats that occasionally make sounds outside. Half-sleep, I mistake them for babies, which is bizarre. Any loud thuds I simply chalk up to a truck hurrying down the main road not too far away.
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I can see it making an interesting scene in a book one day.
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Cats at night always make things creepy.
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Yeah we can hear them when we leave the windows open. They never seem to upset the dog though. People upset the dog at night.
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Makes sense. Dogs would be worried about a person breaking in, but cats are just another animal.
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Wow, hat is SO wired! Got the chills in the middle while reading! I’m glad it was all ok in the end but… wow, how weird!
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Our millers (moths) have a certain tempo to their fluttering. I’m sure that’s what it was. Strange though.
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Wow, very
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Hmm. Round here, I’d say it’s a June Bug. Creepy to be sure, seemingly invisible forces rustling in the night.
Usually when we’re woken up, a true calamity has occurred — kid fell out of bed, dishes crashed to the floor — that sorta thing.
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We had those days too. We get a moth called Millers in the summer, and they make a lot of racket.
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Maybe her weeds had a hitch-hiker?
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It’s possible.
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I think I heard that sound after too much sauerkraut.
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Even worried the dog.
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I would have had to empty the vase and see what was in there.
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I should… in the daylight.
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I love that someone else also thought your Diablo character channeled a spirit into the vase! LOL.
I have had weird things happen like that, but thankfully it’s been a while. My weirdest thing lately is wondering if something weird will happen on the baby monitor while simultaneously sacrificing to every God and Goddess in existence that it doesn’t. I don’t look scary paranormal stuff!
Glad Otto is on the mend. 🙂
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A friend of mine made baby monitors a key element in her book Cleaved. No paranormal, I promise, but scary just the same.
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Noooooooo thanks. I may consider reading it when I am done using them. Haha.
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