So last night around midnight I was trying to fall asleep in bed when I heard some noise coming from a window. In the summer this window has one of those screens with the bracing handles that snugs into the frame of the window. I had noticed that it wasn’t completely sealed into the window frame but figured it would keep 95% of the bugs out so I didn’t bother to fiddle with it. Anyway, it was dark so I couldn’t see anything but there was a scurrying and scratching noise. So, I turned on the light and almost immediately a small black object fell to the floor under the window and immediately opened its wings and flitted around the room. It was a bat. I woke Camera Girl and like the good woman she is she ran screaming from the room. Being a man of action, I started swatting at it with a sweatshirt I had on hand. That proved to be less than useless. So, I procured a kitchen broom and ran around the room swatting at it. No go. I opened up the door to the balcony and tried to force him out that way. When a second bat entered the room by the door, I reconsidered this tactic and closed said door. Now I was ineffectually swinging a broom at two bats that were swooping around the room.
Having a low tolerance for useless effort I closed the doors to our closets and bathroom and beat a hasty retreat to the hallway outside where Camera Girl confronted me on my failure as a protector of the marital bedroom. I declared a temporary retreat but swore a terrible oath on the River Styx that in the morning I would reconquer our sacred homeland and evict the flying vermin with all of my strength and cunning. So, we were marooned in one of the spare bedrooms and greatly was I wroth. After a surprisingly comfortable sleep I woke up raring to settle the score with these winged interlopers. I brought a six-foot ladder, a child’s butterfly net and a stiff piece of cardboard to trap the beasts inside the net.
After a somewhat thorough inspection of the ceiling, I couldn’t locate my enemies. Then I looked behind the blinds of one of the other windows that was opened and found one of the critters wedged in the upper corner between the screen and the frame. I lowered the open window as far as I could while still allowing my hands to force the screen outward and then pushed. Now the screen was hanging below the window on the outside of the house. I assumed the bat would fly off in fear. I was mistaken. The stupid creature was clinging to the screen. I got my head and shoulders out of the window and with the leverage I now had I banged the screen against the wall and finally the bat let go and ended up on a flat roof below the window. Apparently stunned, he later flew off.
I went back and made a closer inspection of some curtains and found the other varmint tucked between the wall and a curtain rod. I angled the butterfly net and the cardboard as close to the critter as possible and then scraped him off the wall with the cardboard and trapped him with the net. With Camera Girl nervously entering the room to open the balcony door (and quickly shutting it behind me!) I was able to shake the flying invader out of the net and whoosh; he winged into the woods.
Dunwich has many hazards. Vampires, lycanthropes of various descriptions, ghouls and even Democrats haunt the swamps and graveyards of this cursed land. But I feel that my actions today deserve some very special tribute. Some kind of testimonial with perhaps a cash award would be reasonable, I think. In a more creative era, the local poet laureate would dedicate an epic poem, possibly in dactylic hexameter, to immortalize my titanic struggle to make Camera Girl safe in her own boudoir. Maybe I can get Grok or ChatGPT to put something together.
Let’s see.
Sing Muse of that hero skilled in the netting and ejecting of chiropteran monsters in all their horror
Who climbed to great heights and swung the broom to protect the goddess Camera Girl from any harm
Bring him to my mind’s eye and let me praise him with great praise. What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man!
Or something like that.
A Homeric tale if there ever was! I had a similar labor thrust upon me when I domiciled in the far land of Plattsburgh, in the province of York the Younger. Two of the Household Guards, Hite Smokey and Pyewacket, alerted me to its presence, in their attempts to leap upon the ceiling fan it was circling. Athena granted me the insight to guide it to an upstairs bedroom where I secured the door and opened a window to grant it egress. Apparently, the Wisdom granted me was balanced by the idiocy of the creature which flew out the window,… Read more »
Verily Ed, you performed a labor of Heracles. Your name will live on in the songs of the bards. Or something.
A shotgun would have been best the answer, thereby eliminating the vermin and increasing ventilation simultaneously.
Tom, in the mood I was in after the second one showed up I probably would have blown a bunch of holes in the walls with nothing to show for the effort. Those damn things are fast and agile as hell.