Okay, while this is fresh in my mind I am going to write it down…and then maybe my heart will slow down.
Last night (Saturday here) we were all slumbering peacefully in our beds when we were awoke by the most blood curdling screams. I had not understood the true meaning of “curdling” until last night…but when my blood was freezing in my veins, I had a revelation moment. Dad and I both jump out of bed and head to the living room where we find Danielle on the floor in the living room kinda near the base of the stairs but not quite in the middle of the room. A basket of laundry that wasn’t carried up last night laid strewn around the base of the stairs and the plastic basket was shattered. Lexi, the doberman, is dancing around Danielle and at that moment it was hard to tell if Lexi was attacking her, trying to console her, or defending her against something. At the moment we walked up though, Lexi was agitated enough to bark AT us!! (in hindsight I think we are blessed that we didn’t get bit!)
Danielle is in complete hysterics. From the floor where she has fallen, she manages to tell us that she woke up and saw someone’s lower legs and shoes preparing to lower themselves into her bedroom from her attic. This doesn’t sound crazy to us because we have heard of many times of robberies where the thieves have broken through the roof or through an empty dwelling next door to gain access to a home. So we tell Danielle to get the Little Girls, Mary and Chantal from their beds and gather them in one room with Madeline. Up the stairs both Mark and I go with Lexi, the doberman, in tow. I can’t remember what Mark had in his hand…but at the top of the stairs, I grabbed a hat rack and was holding it like a spear. In retrospect, I can’t stop laughing because Mark had a crazed redhead holding a hat rack “backing him up” and a doberman that was so scared she didn’t want to go into the bedroom again.
Mark thrust Lexi through the doorway and put his hand around the doorframe to hit the light switch… no one in the room. The attic door doesn’t appear to have been dislodged a bit. It is a small room so there isn’t any room for someone to hide. No one in the bathroom in the hall. The attic access door is padlocked from the outside….the boy’s room!!! Mark and I leap over to the boy’s room and find the door locked from the inside! So we begin pounding on the door and calling for Seth. Both boys sleep like the dead so it was probably a full 60 seconds of pounding before skinny Seth in his pjs and now utterly terrified, comes to the door and dares to open it. No one in their room. So Mark thrusts both boys at me and tells me to go downstairs with the girls. So we go downstairs and go into my bedroom with everyone and we lock the door.
The baby is sitting big eyed on the bed…”Where my daddy eeees?”
“Daddy is upstairs, babe,” I tell her. I sit down on the bed and little Chantal attacks me. She propels her body onto mine with such force that I almost go off the bed. She is shaking from one end of her body to another! Rat ta tat tat…vibrating so hard that it is like she is being electrocuted. She says, “I don’t feel cold on the inside…but I can’t stop shaking,” she says through gritted teeth. I remained silent but could only think “Join the club, honey!”
Now the fear is worse in the bedroom than it was going up the stairs and rounding the corner with a hat rack in my hands. We can hear nothing…obviously, we can’t see anything. Danielle, who hasn’t told the children anything yet, then tells the children why they are all in there. This tale brings Mary to tears…she says that she heard someone walking around her bed before and it was scary. (This mysterious walker has been visiting ever since we moved bedrooms around. In the girl’s room, you can hear Danielle as she brushes her teeth and such because her room is right overhead. Thus…”walking sounds.”)
So on the bed, we have a baby sucking her thumb in a very violent fashion and watching the door for her daddy like a hawk, one girl crying, one girl trembling like a leaf, two boys who are just in a sleepy daze, Danielle who is starting to breathe normally and myself. We hear Dad talking to the guards in the courtyard. That must mean he is going after the ladder and hasn’t found anything on the third floor or we would have least heard Lexi barking. Then we hear the ladder coming upstairs and it gets very, very quiet again.
It seemed like a long, long time passed…but it was probably just 10 minutes. Dad comes back into the room and tells us that he has gone up in the attic and looked to all the far corners of the attic. No one is there and no evidence of anyone EVER being there. The roof is intact and it is all secured. So now it is apparent that no one was EVER there. But the children are all too scared to return to their rooms…including Danielle who now knows that no one was ever there. We may have a big bed, but there isn’t room for the two of us, five littles, one teenager, and a doberman. So Madi isn’t going to leave her daddy now that he has returned. She did however let him take a shower since he had been in the attic.
So Chantal and Seth are to go to bed down on her bed, Danielle and Christopher with Mary go to sleep into the girl’s room with the doberman. At least that is the plan. So I send Danielle and the boys up to get their pillows and Lexi’s doggie bed. They come racing back down the stairs with NOTHING in the hands. “There is a hole in the ceiling now!” Danielle yelps.
I ask, “What do you mean a hole in the ceiling? Dad has checked it all out.”
Mark steps out of the bathroom, dressed in clean sleeping clothes. He says “the hole where I put my foot through the ceiling while I was walking around up there.” ARGH! Now we have a broken ceiling!! So they go back up and get those things and everyone goes to their assigned sleeping spaces. It is hours before Mark and I can sleep again but the children in our room go to sleep rather quickly.
This morning I am stiffly walking outside with the dogs to feed them. The guards are not normally there when I come down on Sunday mornings because their church service is at the crack of dawn. But they have stayed in order to speak to me. Dtha, which is the Cambodian word for grandfather, is kinda hard of hearing. But he makes it a point to tell me that EVEN HE was woke from a sound slumber with Danielle’s screams. They wanted to hear the whole story. So I try WITHOUT COFFEE YET to explain in a different language what had occured. From the look on their faces, I don’t think I helped. But they also went on to tell me how the ENTIRE neighborhood was disturbed by the screaming! Danielle woke the whole village!
So that is how our Sabbath Day started over here in Cambodia. It began at 1 15 AM with terrified screams bouncing from the concrete walls and reverberating through the entire neighborhood. But with a start like this…it can only get better!
Breathing in, Breathing out,
Rhonda

The hole in the ceiling made by Mark’s foot.

Hat rack that the red headed mother used to defend her children…