It’s quite a relief to know I don’t have a demon (as once suspected) living in my walls. I’m not a big believer in ghosts or UFOs, until I have something in my walls, sewer line or attic. Usually, it turns out to be a squirrel, but at first I always suspect spirits … or worse.
Take the other night, very late in the evening, when my wife jumped up in bed.
“What’s that noise?” she asked. “Can you hear it? A buzzing in the wall?”
Indeed it was. I had heard it the night before, but chalked it up to critters.
It’s funny, though, how when you’re woken up in the middle of the night by your wife who hears a strange noise, it takes on added significance. This was a dull noise, almost a hum, and yes, kind of a buzz. Suddenly, it was a little worrisome. What WAS that noise in the wall? Wasn’t there an Edgar Allen Poe story about just such a thing? Oh crap, now I’m freaked out.
What could it be?
Simple things, most likely. Trees brushing against the roof? Yeah, yeah, that’s got to be it, until dressed in only shorts (which might have been Nancy’s) and a pair of dress loafers, I trekked out into the backyard with a flashlight and found no tree branches brushing the roof. Curious.
Maybe a frayed wire in the walls. Yeah, yeah, that’s got to be it. Nothing to worry about. House is just going to burn down. But not an old man stuck in there scratching to get out. Except, there aren’t any wires there.
A frog with laryngitis. A cricket with a trick leg. An echo. The house settling, or falling into a sink hole. A rat playing Nintendo. Or was it really evil things?
I didn’t sleep well that night.
Next day I put a ladder up to the wall and climbed to the soffit to take a look. I was a bit nervous. Who wants to poke their head into something and have a cougar reach out and rip their face off?
So I went slow, carefully peeking around, hoping to find some simple explanation, like a frog smoking a cigar.
And I looked, and I looked. At first nothing, then I heard it! I heard the sound! Emanating from deep within a piece of trim. The demon was in there! How sad, I thought, to be damned for eternity haunting the inside of my rickety trim.
I nearly jumped clear and ran, ready to leave the house, the family, everything behind in the haunted house.
Until I saw the hole. A deep hole burrowing into the trim and in it the answer to my question. With little fanfare and in an anticlimactic flash, suddenly a carpenter bee emerged. A carpenter bee! He sounded like he had a ragtime band in there and I pictured him putting up a sign that read, “If the soffit is a rockin’, don’t bother knockin’.”
Daggone noisy bee!
“Maybe he’s just snoring,” Nancy said after I reported my findings.
Snoring that you can hear through the wall?
So now we’re trying to figure out what to do with the bee. My goodhearted wife doesn’t want me to squirt him with insecticide, and would much rather I “move” him somewhere else.
“Move him!” I said. “How the heck am I going to do that? You think he’s going to pack his bags and take money for a taxi?”
“Well, they move problem bears all the time,” she replied. “You just take him somewhere else. I’ll go on the Internet and research it.”
I can just see it now. Me toppling from the ladder as a bee wrestles with my nose. On the bright side, it’s not paranormal. But if anyone has any ideas on convincing a carpenter bee to move, I could sure use the advice.