Forgot to check, 4.5 units. I had just turned off my bedside light last night, and was mentally preparing myself for sleep by listening to the reassuring sound of breathing on the baby monitor, when I was shocked wide awake by a sibilant voice evidently addressing itself to my son. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, which is a phenomenon I read about far more often than I experience it. I shook Mrs H awake to tell her about it, which took a while and a lot of “Whassup?s”, by which time the thing had stopped. Still, I was completely sure that I had heard someone or something in The Baby’s bedroom. An admittedly unlikely event, but made more credible by the fact that Mrs H had recently complained about finding The Baby’s bedroom light ablaze when she went into him in the morning, when she was sure she had not turned it on during the night, and I certainly had not done so as I had not been in the room at all. In addition, we had both heard footsteps in his room when we were all downstairs. In fact, I have been hearing footsteps in that room, which is above my sitting room, ever since I moved into the house 22 years ago, but explaining them away as the result of expanding hot water pipes, a prowling dog, mice or simple hallucinations.
With any luck it will be one or more of his great-great-grandfathers, who lived nearby, returning to rub their ghostly eyes in disbelief at this most unlikely continuation of their line. At any rate The Baby seems remarkably unfazed by it all, and was chattering happily away long before we went to get him up this morning. We used to assume that he was talking to the large collection of cuddly toys in his cot. Now we are not quite so sure.