I haven’t slept in days. 

It started with our security alarm, triggered at one o’clock in the morning. 

The alarm system texted me — kind of creepy in and of itself — that the breach occurred at my back door. 

Um, OK. Terrifying.  

Like, scuba terrifying. 

Did it help that my horror movie podcast just completed a season on home invasion? 

Yes. Yes it did. 

I knew what to do. And what not to do. 

So. Use anything as a weapon? For sure, thanks to You’re Next and Hush. 

The 2016 version of Hush. Not the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Hush, which is delightfully bad but not about home invasion and therefore useless in this scenario. 

I mean, please. Get your head in the game. 

Now, should I turn down a marriage proposal? Not unless I want to wind up like Liv Tyler in The Strangers. 

I do not want to wind up like Liv Tyler in The Strangers.  

I peeked in on the kids, sound asleep despite the shrill alarm.  

So reassuring. 

Then I checked the back door. 

If someone had broken in, they were either polite or obsessive — the door was locked tight. 

Heart racing, I made my way through the house. I checked obvious hiding places like closets. 

I also checked obscure hiding places, like the dryer. 

Nothing. 

Wide awake now, I looped through the house again. And again. 

And again. 

Still nothing. 

Shaky with adrenaline, I found sleep impossible.  

If someone was in the house, he’d attack before five in the morning.  

So I just had to stay up until five. 

That — that makes sense, right? 

I checked out The Meg 2: The Trench. With a two-hour run time, I had time to watch it. 

Twice. 

So that is how the rest of that night went. 

As dawn broke, I found the culprit — the source of the triggered alarm. 

It was a man. 

Just kidding. 

The motion sensor on the back door had somehow detached and flown across the room. 

“How did that happen?” my husband texted. 

“I don’t know,” I replied. “A ghost maybe. Or a poltergeist.” 
 
“Obviously,” he texted back. 

Such a relief to finally have him on board with the paranormal stuff. 

Two nights later, my dog — an elderly beagle named Pete — was awakened by what I assumed was an enlarged prostate. 

It was two in the morning. 

I let him outside, then curled up on the sofa in a ridiculous attempt to doze. 

But 10 minutes passed as Pete continued to roam the yard. I turned on Who’s the Boss? 

I was an episode and a half in when I heard a knock at the back door. 

A single, eerie tap.  

Then I heard a long, high-pitched whine, like blowing on a blade of grass wedged between thumbs. 

It was Pete. He was standing at the door, a long, thick, bloody bone in his mouth. 

He had killed someone. 

Just kidding.  

Again. 

It was a gift, that bone. From the butcher shop out by our cabin. My son bought it for Pete. 

Pete’s two o’clock wake-up call wasn’t his prostate. It was his beagle instinct telling him the bone he buried a few days before was in peril of discovery. 

So he dug it up. 

And decided to bring it in the house. 

You know, for safekeeping. 

I’d rather have an intruder breaching my back door.  

I explained to Pete his bloody bone, still with tendrils of meat clinging to it, was staying outside. 

Pete whined again. He tried to — I don’t know, walk through the storm door? — tapping his bone against the glass in a macabre knock. 

It took him another one and a half episodes of Who’s the Boss? to give up on smuggling the bone into the house. 

Funny how he slept through the security alarm but not the call of his bone. 

The next night, I collapsed into bed, exhausted. Surely, this night would be better. 

Surely, I’d fall asleep in moments. 

But sleep eluded me. For hours. 

As the clock rolled to one, I finally — finally — drifted off. 

That’s when the beeping began. 

Somewhere, a smoke detector nursed a fading battery. 

Isolating a dying smoke detector is like seeking a four-leaf clover — just when you think you’ve got it, you’re proven wrong. You to start over — with the same maddening results. 

There’s more to this story, more I’d love to share. 

But, well, I’m tired. 

And there’s a smelly, bloody bone on my deck. 

And I probably have a dude hiding in my house. 

I hope he lets me sleep.