The tap-tap-tapping on the window was keeping me awake. Most children that I know would be a little scared by this constant noise on their bedroom window, but not me. One thing that I have learned in my rather short time is that, on the whole, and generally without exception, there is always an explanation for most things that sound like monsters creeping around your house in the middle of the night. That creaky floorboard that sounds like someone coming up the stairs long after everyone has gone to bed, well that’s just heat expansion. That banging of the pipes that makes you think of someone trying to break into the house, is just the sound of water stopping and starting through the old water system. And that ghost calling out to you in the middle of the night, well that’s just your brother being annoying, either that or your dad has had one too many beers!
This particular tapping was the sound of June bugs throwing themselves against the window. I say June Bugs of course, but that’s the wrong name for them this month, because this month is May, which means of course that this month, the June Bugs are called May Beetles. Just so that you know, there are no July Bugs, or July Beetles, or July Annoying insect that keeps throwing itself against the window pane. This is because that by July the beetles have done their thing and skid-addled.
The fact that the May Beetles were committing certain suicide by trying to get into the house by the way of the closed window, meant that someone must have left the porch light on. And the only way that I was going to get to sleep, was to go downstairs and turn off the light. The problem with going to turn the light off, was that it meant leaving My House and entering into The House.
I guess that I probably need to explain that a little. My House is actually a flat inside a converted estate house, and The House is an old 18th century house that has been carved up into flats. I say flat, but it’s not actually flat, the way the builders split the house up means that most of the flats have two floors; so technically they are not flat. My dad once told me that it’s really a maisonette, but I don’t like that name, it seems cumbersome to say, and rather grandiose. Ok yes, grandiose is just as cumbersome as maisonette. Anyway, I actually prefer to call it an apartment, but apartment is very American, and I’m not American, so I shouldn’t really call it that, after all, it’s bin not trashcan, and film not movie. But, I actually prefer the sound of apartment, and it is my story, so from now on I shall call it an apartment, or more likely, I’ll just call it My House.
So, back to the May Beetles. The light at the front door was always left on, as it helped the residents to see where they were going when they came in through the main communal entrance door. However, toward the end of May and early June, there was an understanding that the light in the main hallway would be turned off so that the beetles would stop throwing themselves to certain death. In order for me to turn the light off, I would need to head downstairs, leave the apartment through our front door, walk across the hallway, and flick the switch next to the front door.
This, on the whole would be fine, apart from, the return journey would involve walking past The Window in the dark. Remember everything that I said earlier about the explanation for sounds? Well, that doesn’t apply to The Window, because that is about listening and The Window is about looking. And whenever you look out of The Window when it’s dark, you tend to see things that are not there.
Ok, the observant among you will see exactly where this particular tale is going, to those not paying attention at the back, for the sake of brevity, I shall skip to the part where having switched the light off, and tried to make my way back to My House without looking out of The Window, I accidentally looked out of The Window, and saw a shape-shifting water spirit.
Obviously I didn’t know that it was a shape-shifting water spirit at the time, because at the time it looked like a rather large hedgehog.
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