wind-up whacko

I laid in a twin bed just across the Idaho border, feet hanging over the end as if I were a tall person, (which I'm not), when I heard it first:  a rather

 loud, distinct sort of pattering, followed by a few stragglers scraping and bumping along.  It was so obviously... obvious that at first I wasn't alarmed, thinking it was perhaps my backpack readjusting itself on the floor at the foot of the bed, or a kid moving about in the hallway.  A half minute later or so there were a couple more pats, clearly something moving on the carpet either just inside or just outside of the room.  As I couldn't see anything, it was apparently something very small, or even conceivably someone lying down.

I'm not the type to get jumpy when I'm alone, or freak out at strange "house" noises.  But these persisted for nearly a minute and I admit it, my imagination began its inexorable grind toward hysteria.  What should I do?  What could I do?  If I stepped out of the bed to investigate, would whatever it was launch itself from under my bed, attaching itself in rabid fervor to my ankle?  I certainly didn't want to disturb my cousins down below; I was in my underwear, it being a hot night, and how ridiculous would it be for a scantily clad 30-some year old woman to come creeping downstairs saying "there's something under my bed" and waking the whole household at 2 in the morning?

After a few more moments of consideration, and

 unable to see any other way, that is exactly what I did.  With a bound I flew over most of the floor (so that it was less likely to be able to reach me in my moment of vulnerability) and minced down the stairs.

"Jen!" I whispered from the hallway outside the room she shared with her husband.  "Jen!"  We had just parted a mere 15 minutes earlier; hopefully she was still awake.

No such luck.  "Is that Anne-Marie?" murmured the sleepy, disbelieving voice from the bedroom.  

"There's something in my room!"  I hissed agitatedly, hating myself every second.  

"Well I don't want to look for it!" she answered worriedly.  "Troy will."

"No!" I exclaimed passionately!  "Don't wake him up!"  But it was too late.  The hard-working farmer had been awoken in the middle of the night by his bizarro cousin-in-law, a guest in his home, cowering in her underwear in the dark and blubbering on about strange noises in her room.  Ah well.

I flew up the stairs ahead of them and hid in the room next door.  Poor Troy (in his underwear, incidentally) stalked through the doorway with his flashlight, followed closely by a nervous Jen, and knelt down by the bed.  He flung up the bed skirt and crouched down, scanning his light back and forth along the carpet....

Now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there had most definitely been something moving in the room.  But I also knew just as certainly that there would be nothing there when Troy bent to look.  And, wonder of wonders, there was not.  The kind man looked for a good 15 minutes around the floor as I apologized continuously from the neighboring doorway. 

Eventually we came up with the theory that perhaps a toy had spontaneously come to life for a few seconds in the night.  We couldn't find a toy that made the noise I had heard, but I knew of such a toy.  Colin has one; a little wind-up spindly thing that jumps up and down maniacally and looks like this:

I couldn't find it anywhere, but I knew it was there.

Eventually, Troy was satisfied that there was no animal running around his house, and he and Jen went to bed.  I felt ridiculously foolish to be sure, but knowing there was nothing under the bed gave me enough peace of mind to fall into a deep, restful slumber...

This morning as I was packing my things, there under the dress I wore yesterday, resting innocently on Cian's flame-decorated Target backpack, was the very toy I'd suspected.  I'd been right.  It gives me hollow satisfaction.  I can only hope that this incident is one that Troy and Jen will forget as quickly as it will take me to teach that toy a thing or too about disturbing people in the middle of the night in its underwear...  or was that me?