My Fright Night Fight

“Hey!” I yelled, shooting to a sitting position on the side of my bed in a manner my back would later send me a harshly worded memo about. “Who are you?!”

Before I knew what I was doing I’d flung my pillow at the apparition at the base of our bed. Another second and I reckon I would have played this a bit differently but I hadn’t quite worked out the inconsistencies in what I was seeing yet..

“What is it?” Tracey said, startled awake by my actions. She snapped on the light. “What’s going on?”

“Um…” I said, looking around the room and realizing the only thing out of place was my pillow lounging at a jaunty angle against the wall. We were alone. “It appears…nothing,” I added rather weakly. “Nothing is going on.”

What had been going on in my head, however, is another matter.

Over the years we’ve not been strangers to odd things happening in this house. Not everyone can boast a nice resident ghost, for example, but this wasn’t her (refer to Our Haunted House Guests post for more on that). But last night I’d woken up and seen a different sort of shape at the end of our bed. This isn’t unusual either. My eyes love to play tricks on me. But this was definitely different because the shape didn’t change into a shirt or shadow. It still looked to me like someone, or something, was there.

Of course, when the lights came on, I saw it wasn’t anything sinister but rather the duchess, the alarm clock, the shelves and possibly sleep in my eyes.

I explained all this to my wife, who looked at me in an almost amused way but mostly looked miffed she’d been woken up. I decided, considering for a second or two I thought there was a real threat, she should be praising me. I mean, I was chuffed with myself for reacting so fast.

“It’s good to see my natural instincts kicked in,” I explained to her.

“You started a pillow fight,” she said, unimpressed. “It’s up there with a freak petrol fighting accident. And what if it had been one of the kids?”

“It all happened so fast. But I knew it wasn’t a kid because the silhouette of the head was so high.”

“You saw a head?”

“No, I saw a head shaped silhouette,” I corrected her. “It was where the alarm clock is.” Then I remembered something. “In fact, the red numbers of the clock was part of the whole thing.”

“The eyes?”

I wish. That would give the story a nice b-grade movie feel, wouldn’t it?

“No,” I said sheepishly, knowing this wasn’t going to come out well. “The bow. On the shadow’s head.”

Yep, another second and I reckon I would have worked out I could keep my pillow and simply shut my eyes.

Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his Big Family Little Income Facebook Page

 ”Raising a family on little more than laughs.”