{"id":9974,"date":"2021-07-02T09:26:28","date_gmt":"2021-07-02T17:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9974"},"modified":"2021-07-03T10:25:32","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T18:25:32","slug":"a-blade-our-bed-a-knife-in-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9974","title":{"rendered":"A Blade In Our Bed, a Knife in the Night."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s bright and sunny this morning. The BUG and I joke and feed the cats. I’m sitting on the front porch as I type this. BOG is curled up at my feet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago, I was creeping around the back of our house in the darkness, trying-to-find\/hoping-not-to-find whoever had thrown a knife at us in our home while we slept. [Ed. update:<\/strong> apparently only I had fallen asleep. The BUG was awake.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It hadn’t been the most restful night anyway, up to that point. Some idiot evidently decided the whole damn neighbourhood was going to celebrate Canada Day whether we wanted to or not, and we were going to start doing it after midnight on July 2nd<\/sup>. That’s when the fireworks started\u2014just a row of houses and one small cul-de-sac over, from what we could tell\u2014and they cracked and banged and concussed and made those weird little spinny hissing noises for a solid forty minutes or so. The BUG said they were pretty spectacular, a whole level up from the usual consumer product; she could see them from the bathroom window when she went to pee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just lay on the bed and waited for them to stop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They did, eventually. At around 0040. I rolled over, came in for the cuddle. Snoozed. Rolled away again when the BUG roused herself briefly to look out the window, alerted by some noise from the back garden. No big deal. We have cats, raccoons own the neighbourhood. Something furry is always bumbling around back there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then something whispered past my ear like a bird, and landed on the bed. Startled, I reached out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What was that?” Caitlin said. It was 1 a.m. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a fucking knife.<\/em>” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The scene of the crime. Crimey thing bottom center.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A pretty big one, too. No butter knife, here: a fucking chef’s<\/em> knife, not some piece of junk you happen to pick up while prowling the ravine. (A friend of ours, a professional chef among other things, examined the weapon just an hour ago and declared it of professional quality, full-tang, and really sharp.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The window was open a couple of inches, tops; the knife had sailed through with clearance on both sides (at least, there’d been no sound of one object grazing another). Whoever had thrown it must have stood on the patio chair against the outside wall, looked in at us while we dozed. They must have pushed that knife as much as thrown it, in order to guide it so cleanly through such a narrow gap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took a few moments to get my cell phone; another to switch on its flashlight, face-down on the table, then whip it up hard against the glass so we could see the yard and not just our own reflections gaping back at us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grabbed an old wooden riot baton acquired from some New Zealand law enforcement agency (long story) and headed out the back. No one there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came back inside, put on shorts and shoes, went out again. (In hindsight the whole clothing thing might have been better done up front, but I didn’t want to waste time. Besides, I can be reasonably intimidating when naked, depending on the angle at which I hold the flashlight.) Crept down the garden path to the big hole in the fence that used to be blocked by the shed we had demolished just yesterday; swept my light into the ravine beyond. Nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crept around the house, along the side, out front, unable to stop reminding myself that every time I shone my light ahead<\/em> someone could be coming up on me from behind<\/em>. No one did. I didn’t catch a face, a shadow, a flicker of motion. Not even a raccoon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately there was nothing much to do. I retreated indoors, set the porch motion-detector to Red Alert (usually it just records video of the various beasties who wander by for later enjoyment over coffee; now it flashes lights and raises a siren in the office). Sealed the windows, blacked out the one in the bedroom. I kept my shoes and shorts on, left the baton within easy reach, dug out an old LED headlamp from my field-biology days so that next time I could engage with my hands free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The motion detector went off every fifteen minutes for the next hour. Raccoons every time. Finally I just threw them some kibble and disabled the siren. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I finally dozed off, my brain was trying to make sense in the most nonsensical ways\u2014because really, why would someone part with a perfectly good (and reasonably expensive) chef’s knife just to scare the shit out of a couple of strangers? They could’ve thrown any old shit through the window and we would have been just as freaked out. The nature of the weapon almost implied premeditation rather than impulse; nobody just found<\/em> that particular implement, they rummaged through their kitchen and selected it before heading into the night. Was it targeted? Do I have enemies whose initiative actually extends beyond twitter rage? Does the BUG have a jealous boytoy I don’t know about? Nothing really makes sense… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that was really our knife all along? Maybe it was just, I don’t know, stuck in one of the headboard bins or something and one of the cats…no, that doesn’t make sense… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the sun was up and all was right with the world and the first thing Caitlin said when she rolled over was “It almost seems like a dream…” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it wasn’t a dream. Someone stood just the other side of our bedroom window, watching us sleep. Someone very carefully threw an expensive and very sharp knife at us while we lay in bed. If it was just some random joker out to scare strangers, I don’t know why they invested so much in the prop. If it’s some sort of radical marketing strategy for Ginsu knives, I can only say they’ve misjudged their focus group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the upside, we now have a very high-quality knife in our possession, sharpened unto perfection. So if you happen to be the perpetrator, and you’ve any kind of mind to make a habit of this, take note: we could use a nice serrated paring knife with a ceramic blade… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s bright and sunny this morning. The BUG and I joke and feed the cats. I’m sitting on the front porch as I type this. BOG is curled up at my feet. It’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago, I was creeping around the back of our house in the darkness, trying-to-find\/hoping-not-to-find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9974"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9988,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9974\/revisions\/9988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}