You may
remember that some time ago, I told you about how spider assassins want me dead. Well, it seems they’ve upped their game. They hired Squeakers, the
black-ops mouse.
It all
started at 5:00 am last Wednesday. I awoke to this scrabbling-scratching sound.
Never one to jump to conclusions, I waited and listened carefully. The sound
came again. It sounded exactly like the sound they use for unseen rodents in
movies. The third time I heard the sound, I was convinced and I woke my wife to
inform her we had something skittering around our bedroom.
We turned
on the light to search, but couldn’t find the intruder. We did, however, find
confirmation that there was, indeed, a mouse in our bedroom. Squeakers had left
a calling card in the middle of my bedside table, not a foot and a half from
where my sleeping head had been a moment before.
That was
when I realized that Squeakers was no ordinary mouse. No. The sounds that came
in the middle of the night, in our bedroom where we feel safe enough to sleep.
The dropping, placed so perfectly to assure us that those sounds were real, not
a figment of imagination or the result of branches brushing the house on a
windy night. These were deliberate actions, intended to instil terror.
Clearly, Squeakers had to be a black-ops mouse, skilled in the use of asymmetric
warfare.
Since the spider
assassins have unsuccessfully sought my death for years, it was easy to guess
that they were the ones who sent Squeakers. Needless to say, I didn’t get much
sleep the rest of the night. Squeakers was an expert. Every time I came close to
drifting off to sleep, there came a sound of one sort or another. Colleen
somehow managed to sleep through it – but then, she can sleep through anything,
whereas I’ve been woken up by someone silently looking into my bedroom before.
Well, the
next night was a little worse. My mother-in-law (living in the other half of
the house) told us she had mousetraps, but with it being so close to Christmas
she hadn’t gotten around to setting it up. The sounds were less frequent this
time, but I was too tense to get any sleep until the sky started to brighten
with the coming of morning. Even with then, I doubt I got even two hours of
fitful sleep.
That day,
the trap was set. It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house,
every creature was stirring, including the mouse. From downstairs, I heard the
mouse scurrying in the ceiling well before going to bed. Yet, when I did go to
bed, I was so tired from the previous two nights (and secure in the knowledge
that the only food available for the black-ops mouse was bait), I dropped right
off to sleep. Until...
SnapThump!
A sound woke me up at 4:00am. The trap, perhaps? Indeed, when we shone a light
down the hole in the floor (it was extremely obvious how the mouse was entering
our room), it was clear that the trap had been set off. It didn’t look like
Squeakers was in it, though. It seemed like the cunning black-ops mouse had
gotten away.
I managed a
fitful half-sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, I declared that in
spite of getting such poor sleep for the past three nights, I was sort of glad
Squeakers had survived – and received a Christmas dinner, to boot. Of course,
later, when the trap was actually checked, there was Squeakers – a mouse small
enough to be missed.
It’s nice
to be able to sleep soundly through the night again, but I can’t help feeling
sorry for Squeakers. We suspect that this talented black-ops mouse was quite
young, separated from his/her family when they were chased out during recent
renovations. Lost, alone and unable to find food, Squeakers wandered through
the foreign upstairs of the house, seeking the means to survive. There,
Squeakers fell under the influence of the spider assassins who, ultimately, led
him/her to his/her demise.
Here’s to
you, Squeakers! The most talented black-ops mouse that ever there was. You may
no longer be with us, but your memory shall live on – thanks to the internet.
If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.
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