When the Flying Rodents Entered Our Home

[Late 2000 through mid-2003.] ⁽¹⁾

I was a homeowner at age twenty. Is that strange? It can be considered strange. I’m open to that.

Instead of finishing college right away or having any sort of drive to take a break, I bought a house. No grasping at any semblance of interest in travel or general young adult recklessness. I just somehow decided to jump head on into adult responsibility. Taxes and furnaces and installing new toilets and a mortgage and hiring electricians and mowing my “lawn” of chives and violets. This was before I could legally even get into a bar. 

Don’t ask me. I wouldn’t have made this same choice if I was able to do it over. Another lifetime ago.

The caveat: the house was in Kankakee, Illinois and it cost $42,000 and I mortgaged it with another guy. We rented a room to our friend Jason, and we all lived together there in the Shikadance Household. In a show of socialism, we split the mortgage payment and bills three equal ways. My share of the mortgage was still way less than my $200 car payment. I was okay. 

I remember when we sat at the closing with my dad, our realtor, we brokered a deal with the seller, Doctor Sante, an optometrist. He resided in Flossmoor but had a practice in Kankakee. Per his contract with the local hospital, he was required to maintain residence within the City of Kankakee. But he didn’t.

Doctor Sante’s scheme was that he’d pay us $100 a month to keep our address active for his incoming mail. We’d deliver said mail to his practice and keep his phone line intact (which he also paid for). His incoming calls to the landline would be forwarded to another line so he could pretend he lived at our house, and we were free to use the phone for outgoing calls. 

To say the least, a free outgoing landline phone with zero attachment to our personal names was the stuff of dreams for kids who enjoyed performing prank calls. 

Three or four Christmases we lived there. Each year the hospital would mail Doctor Sante a gourmet apple pie. The pie never made it to the good doctor’s office. It was devoured on a yearly yule tide basis by the three irresponsible roommates residing at the Osborn home in Cobb Park. 

We had a makeshift recording studio in the basement to record all of our various bands and rap projects. We shot movies there. We had a blast with CD burning parties with our external CD burner which only burned music in real time. We’d have friends over and spend hours trading CDs to burn for each other, while listening to them and conversing.

Red House Painters, Reggie & the Full Effect, Coalesce, Rainer Maria, At the Drive In.

“Jeff Buckley or Radiohead? Both, simultaneously.” ⁽²⁾

Rounders, Boiler Room, Blow, The Godfather.

As time went on the rental room became a revolving door of various friends who would live with us for a stint paying us an increasing dollar amount, ticking upward per tenant as our socialism slowly gave way to capitalism.

All was Kosher. Before the bats.

The bats came one at a time in a series of five. Each representing a note of the anhemitonic pentatonic scale. When the bats came, the idea of living there went from an okay investment endeavor with friends, to a haunting hellscape of fear, regret, paranoia, and a previously unforeseen potential for rabies.

The First Bat

The first bat materialized at the witching hour. I was asleep in my baby blue emo bedroom and was awoken by the yelling of my housemate, Chey, from his room. I went in there. The nocturnal flying rat was perched on its inverted crucifix on the windowsill. A demonic shadow of vile wretchedness.

Chey’s screaming sent the bloodthirsty creature flying right past me, down the stairs and into the unknown whereabouts of the ground level. Not only were we stunned and petrified and half asleep, but we had already lost visual.

We slowly trekked down the stairs like Abbott & Costello sheepishly hunting Frankenstein. Zero clue on where the thing went, what we were doing, and how long we’d be up jostling curtains searching for it.

As we reached the kitchen area, just like a Blue Angel, out of nowhere the furry rogue bastard bombarded our heads and we ducked just in time to feel the stale breeze. Veiny wings extended, it flew in radial loops around our living room, over and over again, echoing its vampiric waves off the walls in a blind rodent circus.

We hit the decks and witnessed it fly directly under the door to the basement at a unit of measure no wider than a CD case. Just swiftly shot through it with pristine measure. I’m here to tell you it was a non-issue. I’ve never seen anything like it since.

We armed up. I grabbed a broom, and Chey wielded his state-of-the-art tennis racket. We opened the basement door and descended another floor to the haunting dank netherworld as a distant pipe organ began to play a gothic waltz in a ballroom of horror.

What happened then is a blur. I remember the creature flying toward us and I smacked it with my broom like I was a vigilante scarecrow. Laid it out cold. Dead.

I remember feeling guilty at just how feeble the mischievous thing was, to be knocked out of midflight, killing it, with a straw broom. Our cellar, it’s coffin. We left it there to deal with the carcass the following day.

I’ll never forget my roommate, exhausted, searching for words at 4 AM as we climbed the stairs back to our respective beds:

“Dude…that was the messed-up thing”.

The Second Bat, The Third Bat, and The Fourth Bat

The second bat landed on our roommate Roy’s shoulder as he slept. I remember being shocked that he didn’t seem to care. He woke up, looked at it, and just rolled over. Went back to sleep. A friend of the savage minibrutes, Roy was unafraid. The venomous sonic rascal fluttering away to an unknown void of filth, never to be seen again.

A few months later we were watching something on television and the third bat appeared out of nowhere, flying in the concentric circles of the Black Mass from the connected kitchen, spare room, and living room. Zipping through in a show of squeaking, chirping dominance, scaring the shit out of us. We sunk into the couch as our hearts sunk into our chests. A burning ghost of the Virgin Mary appeared before us as we then understood this was our dilemma. Our plague. We were haunted by fanged clairvoyants with superspeed.

Was this the true reason Doctor Sante moved out? He didn’t mention the bats. God knows I wouldn’t mention this internal obsolescence to the next potential homebuyers either.

The fourth bat swooped about in Grant’s room roughly six months after Roy moved out. Leaning towers of old pizza boxes on the floor like buildings in a greasy metropolis. A cardboard Gotham City for the bat to maneuver.

Grant wasn’t home and I can’t even recall how we knew the bat was in there. The series of winged scamp mammals had become wearying by that point. It had become more than fear. Being perennially paranoid was now my way of being.

The dark villain perched itself on a typical ledge next to little league trophies that Grant had for some reason moved with him into the house.

Chey grabbed one of Grants trophies and smashed it against the bat, mauling it with a spray blood like a silver stake through the heart of a shapeshifter. Squealing and sizzling in the ghoulish death of an aswang. Chey became Vlad the Impaler, spiking the monster’s abdomen with a third-place pinewood derby award.

Crimson blood dripped down the wall as was spun a macabre narrative not fit for the faint of heart. A second murder.

…

Finally, we had the bright idea to have a pest control inspector come out. He couldn’t seem to find any specific entry way for the bats. He informed us that next time all we needed to do was get a cheesecloth and swing it around until the bat gets stuck in the cheesecloth. He didn’t even supply us with a cheesecloth. I didn’t know what a cheesecloth was, and I still sort of don’t.

I got a really tall ladder, and I stapled sad pieces of screen over any slat I could find in the wood siding toward the attic area of the house. In reality, I couldn’t see why it would matter. For one, there would have had to have been a million tiny slats I wasn’t even noticing. But mostly, after I saw that first bat slip under the basement door gap with the ease of greased lightning, mid-flight, I knew these tiny savages could defy physics. It was futile. I might as well just burn the house down. ⁽³⁾

The Fifth Bat

The final note in the demonic pentatonic dance with death came as I slept in my bed.

By that point I had bought the other guy out, and I owned the property outright. A fresh breath of zero roommates. It was my first time ever living alone, and at twenty-three I truly reveled in that freedom. I mean I got to use the bathroom with the door wide open!

The fifth bat came as the clock struck midnight. As the bell tolled, I felt a chilled waft cross my face as a flurry of odd scratching pumped absolute dread into my soul. The twisted fuzzy-bird hybrid was there – flapping around my head while I slept, ready to sink its fangs into my god-damned throat.

I sprung out of bed and across my room like a child of the night trying to escape Nosferatu, leaping over a red glowing Pythagorean pentagram I quickly shut the thing in my room. I blocked the door gap with a towel, and rummaged through the phone book. I called some 24/7 Ace Ventura type guy to come get it.

My one warning for the man was that I had a loaded .40 caliber Glock pistol lying on the bed. I always slept with it. Sixteen in the clip and one silver bullet in the chamber for the first werewolf.

I was done. I rented the house out for the next two years before selling it. No more bats came during that two-year tenure of various tenants.

…

Over the multitude of bats in the legend in the Dark Age, none will ever hit like the first bat. At this point, over twenty years later some of the tales have become folklore, but the initial offense of witchery has stuck with me ever since. It is still extremely difficult to visit bat exhibits at the zoo. Animals evolving from a cruel morphosis, never meant to exist. Walking on boney elbows, eating mosquitos.

Hobgoblins avoiding natural light and holy water.

…

…

1. I understand this is deemed as cruel, and I agree at this point in my life. If this were to happen to me nowadays, I’d handle it differently. At the time, through my perspective then, for one, we were basically children. In my entire life I have never and would never harm an animal outside in the wild. To me, at age twenty, if an animal was loose in my home, then all bets [bats] were cancelled. I was afraid of them. My main knowledge of them was that they bit and that they had rabies. I found out later that five percent of the local bats did carry rabies. Not a high number, yet not a completely unfounded fear.

2. An intentional misquote from Vanilla Sky. Yet another film we watched so much it began to affect our lives.

3. Which…did actually happen to the house next door. Yardchicken’s Section 8 house. It burned down, and I think it was arson by the owner. A whole other tale to be told.

Happy Halloween!