beeping rapists at the bates motel.

I was staying at the Bates Motel, which my parents owned and ran. In their defense, I'm sure they got the place for a song. For some reason, I was staying in some sort of crawlspace. It was an underground hallway with bunks that were attached to the walls like berths in sleeping cars. I had to brush aside the cobwebs to get to my bunk. I was so sleepy that I didn't even care.

BEEP.

There were actually two bunks right next to the door. One was up high, so high that I'm not sure how someone was supposed to climb up there. But then again, I'm not sure who thought this would be an appropriate sleeping area. There were half a dozen stairs down, then maybe ten feet of narrow hallway, and finally another half a dozen steps back up, leading to a doorway opposite me. The other door was open and the lights were on in the room beyond, which is how I saw the second bunk, the one I could reach.

BEEP.

Ugh, that infernal beeping. I needed to make sure and tell my parents about it in the morning.

BEEP.

I started to wake up from my Bates Motel dream, but even as I did, I was convinced that I was at my parents' house. It was the beeping that did it, reminding me of those times at home when the smoke alarm's battery would die and I would have to wait until morning. My parents would sleep right through it.

BEEP.

Finally, I woke up enough to realize that I was in my own house, and if someone was going to change the battery in the smoke alarm, it would have to be me. And I might as well do it now, because I wasn't going to get back to sleep otherwise. The clock read 2:37 as I stumbled out of bed and into the hallway. There was a smoke alarm. I stood underneath it and looked up into the red light. Did red mean that it was working or that it wasn't working? Was this even the right alarm? I stood underneath it, waiting.

And waiting. It was like waiting to hiccup after holding your breath. My brain, having recently put me up for a night in the Bates Motel, decided to think about how a clever rapist might use a beeping noise to get some unsuspecting female out of bed so that he could attack. Why he couldn't just attack me while I was asleep rather than bothering with a decoy smoke alarm was beyond me. How should I know, I'm not a rapist. These are the thoughts that happen when you're standing in the hall, under a smoke alarm, waiting for it to beep in the middle of the night.

I got tired of waiting, so I found a chair to stand on while I fiddled with the alarm. The text on the outside said "DISCONNECT POWER BEFORE REMOVING," which made no sense to me. How was I suppose to disconnect the power before removing when I had to remove the case to disconnect the battery? Once I got the case off, I realized that the alarm was directly wired into the house's electrical system. That's very clever. No more waking up in the middle of the night to stand on a chair and change batteries. Except that I was standing on a chair in the middle of the night.

At that point, I decided that I had imagined the whole thing. There was no beeping rapist, or even a beeping smoke alarm. I used the bathroom while I was up, so at least getting out of bed hadn't been a total waste of time. I got back into bed and did not go back to sleep. I tossed. I turned. I thought about the Bates Motel dream and how I had been able to feel the cobwebs as I swept them aside.

At 3:30 or so, I was finally starting to drift. My eyelids were drooping, and my thoughts were sort of flowing over one another, jumping from thing to thing without any real connection, finally I was getting back...

BEEP.

My eyes snapped open. I waited, very silently and very still, to see if it would happen again. It didn't, but I was again fully awake. Maybe this smoke alarm only beeped every half hour or so. It seemed to beep a lot more frequently before, but I had been asleep and confused then. Back to tossing and turning and being angry at smoke alarms, clocks, boys whose best friends were their mothers.

BEEP.

The clock, that stupid and reliable clock, said 4:13. I decided to use the same course of action as last time. If the alarm really only did beep every 43 minutes, then maybe I could get some sleep and not have to worry about it until the -

BEEP.

Well, that was sooner than 43 minutes. That was like twenty seconds. To sum up, I've been awake for nearly two hours as some mysterious smoke alarm definitely beeped off and on, depending on when it felt -

BEEP.

- like it. Fine, I'm up I'm up I'm up. I poked my head out of the bedroom door to listen and play the waiting game again. I was afraid to get too close to the alarm, in case I spooked it into silence. Or in case there really was a rapist.

BEEP.

That was definitely not the upstairs alarm. I would have to go downstairs, which meant I would have to turn on a light, which meant I was playing right into the rapist's hands. But it was 4 in the morning and I was tired and grumpy. By the time I got downstairs, I realized I hadn't heard a beep in thirty seconds or so. I also realized that I had no idea where the other smoke alarms might be. From the dim upstairs light, I could see that there was an alarm in the hallway that led to the spare bedroom. It looked like the same kind that was upstairs, meaning it would be connected to the house's wiring. I used that reasoning to avoid going down the hall, which was very dark and looked like exactly the kind of place a rapist might hide.

I went into the kitchen, where I noticed yet another alarm. This one was not like the others. I stood on another chair and twisted the alarm off, revealing a nine-volt battery. I didn't even take the time to wonder what the alarm would do if the battery were completely removed, I yanked it right out. Nothing happened. I left both the alarm and the battery on the counter, knowing that I wasn't even sure that this device had been the interruptor of dreams. If I didn't hear the beeping again, I would know it was the right alarm. Either that or the rapist had caught sight of me, stomping and scowling in the middle of the night, and decided it was not worth it.