“Monday night I fell asleep on the couch” is a perfectly ordinary way to start a scary, awful, utterly ordinary story.

I sleep on the couch fairly often. I like to stay up and my wife likes to go to bed early. She’s also a light sleeper, so if I disturb her she’s likely to wake up and stay awake for hours. Plus, it’s a comfortable old couch. I know I’m describing a cultural metaphor for a troubled marriage, but that’s not the case. One of the reasons my wife and I are still so in love is that I try to give her a good night’s sleep once in a while.

Anyway, over the 32 years we’ve been together, we’ve lived in two apartments in the same neighborhood, and both of those apartments had the same basic layout. After so many years in the first one, I didn’t much care to change things around. So I’ve been living with the same features for most of my adult life: dutch door with no screen door, big bay windows, tall, narrow windows on the outer edge that slide open. That sort of thing.

On Monday night, I had done exactly what I’d done many times over the years. I’d nodded off over the ending of a novel (This time a James Lee Burke novel from the nineties), pulled a flannel blanket over me, and left the sliding window behind the couch open a few inches for some fresh cool-but-not-cold October air.

Around two am, I was stirred awake (slowly, because unlike my wife I sleep heavy) by a really annoying noise. Then I felt something.

I’m sure that people with cats or small dogs are familiar with the feeling of a pet walking across the back of your legs while you sleep.

But we don’t have any pets.

The noise that had bothered me was a rat chewing a hole in the screen. The little feet on the back of my legs was a rat walking across me.

Obviously, I flipped the fuck out, although I managed to keep my voice down so I wouldn’t disturb my family. I have a genuine horror of rats. Heights, too, but heights can be avoided pretty easily. Heights you can usually choose, but rats just show up.

By the time I got out from under the blanket and onto my feet, the rat was nowhere to be seen. But that fucking hole in the window screen made it pretty clear what was going on. I searched as best I could for a small, filthy invader, but I couldn’t find any signs. I sat up for three hours, listening for movement and trying to instigate movement.

Eventually, I decided that me kicking myself awake had frightened the rat so badly that it went back out the hole, so I shut the window. I got what confirmation I could when I later saw movement on the ledge outside as it tried to come back.

Obviously, I stripped the couch down, and used steam from an iron to destroy any leftover hantavirus in the fabric of the couch.

My wife (bless her) tried to convince me it might be a squirrel instead of a rat, partly because they’ve become a little too courageous in our neighborhood, but I didn’t believe it, mainly because I really, really wanted it to be true.

But damn. It’s been thirty-two years, and this is the first time we’ve had an actual burglar rat that tried to get inside our place.

I hate it. And I’m not going to forget that feeling of some small thing scrambling around on the back of my legs anytime soon.

In other news, today, October 21st, 2026, is the one year anniversary of my wife being struck by a car. So, everything is hunky-dory around here.

In other, other news, I’ve started what I hope will be the final polish for the last Twenty Palaces novel. Currently, it’s over 140K words long, with is too long. Also, this project has taken more than two years of my life already, with is also too long.

Which leads me to thank everyone for their support. Thank you, Patreon backer, readers, and folks who are just spreading the word.

Soon I hope to post a bit of a Halloween movie roundup, as I sometimes have in years past. We’ll see.