Amusingly enough, this actually happened to me.
I was awoken one morning at about 6am by clinking glass from the kitchen. I listened to it for a moment, and decided it sounded like a cat or some other small animal had gotten into the house, and was rummaging around in the sink.
I got up, put on a t-shirt, sweats, and slippers, and moved slowly from my bedroom down the hall toward the kitchen. I didn’t turn on any lights, and I moved quietly. If it was a raccoon or something, I didn’t want to startle it and get clawed up. My plan was to check it out, then retreat to the front door, open it, flip on the lights, throw something down the hall into the kitchen, and retreat behind my bedroom door for a bit, giving the animal a chance to find its way outside. I was carrying one of my broadswords (I have a collection of more than a dozen blades of various types) to swat the animal away if it suddenly turned on me.
I got about halfway down the hall, where I could see into the kitchen, and suddenly stopped. Through the large kitchen window above the sink, I could see a man on the deck outside, trying to force the window. The clinking glass I had heard was the stuff on the windowsill being knocked off into the sink: spoon rest, small flowerpot, etc.
I stood and watched him for a moment. He was thin, unwashed, uncoordinated; his threadbare short-sleeved t-shirt was filthy and full of holes. Unknown to him, the window was actually nailed shut, and wasn’t supposed to open. After a couple of minutes of shoving on it, he still hadn’t figured this out, and was alternating between working and resting. Every time he stopped to rest, I could see he was shaking and out of breath. Clearly he was some kind of junkie.
I watched him for a few seconds, trying to decide what to do. I thought about calling the police, but I knew they wouldn’t be there for a few minutes, and this guy was maybe a minute from gaining entrance. If he succeeded, he’d have a selection of butcher knives right there on the counter, and I didn’t think that would be such a great idea. I also considered going upstairs and waking up my roommate, who slept with a Glock under the pillow. Again, this might take too long, and I was a little worried my roommate would just up and shoot the guy, maybe leaning out his window. Also, not such a great idea. I briefly considered going back out the front door, around the house, and confronting him, but dismissed that as really not a great idea.
My decision was guided mostly by my emotional reaction. I wasn’t scared at all of the guy; he was more pathetic than anything. Whenever he stopped to rest, he’d look inside, gazing covetously at the copper cookware hanging over the stove. Without a doubt, that was his target. He’d unload them at a thrift shop, or maybe just take them to a foundry and sell them for the metal. He wasn’t here to do us harm; he was chasing the dragon, nothing more. There’s no way this guy had a weapon of any kind, I was certain. He had no jacket, which limited his concealment options. If he had a knife, he’d be using it to get the window open. If he had come across a gun, he would immediately have sold it to get money for drugs. Junkies like that are rapidly stripped of all of their personal possessions, anything that can put a few more dollars of rock in the pipe.
So I leaned the sword against the wall, flipped on the light, and stepped forward to the kitchen door.
He froze at the light, with an almost comically confused look on his face, like a cartoon character who just heard a big dog unexpectedly growl from offscreen. After a moment, he looked over and saw me standing there.
Long pause.
I raised my eyebrows, spread my hands, and shrugged in perplexity: Hey dummy, what are you doing?
He blinked at me for a moment, then bolted. It had been raining, and the deck was wet, so he couldn’t get purchase as he tried to run; he ended up sailing headfirst down the stairs. Luckily for him, he cleared the wooden steps entirely, landing in the soft, wet soil at the bottom. By the time I got to the window, he was gone, leaving only the large dent where he had hit the ground.
I stood there for a couple of minutes, looking outside, and then I went upstairs to shower and head off to work. Never saw him or anyone else come back.
Why did I react this way? Two reasons.
First, I’d had another intruder scare when I was 12 or 13. I was on a weekend visit with my dad and stepmother. I was woken up in the middle of the night by noises downstairs – you guessed it, clinking dishes in the kitchen. I listened to make sure, then went and woke up my dad. He was pissed, but then there was another clink. He got his little revolver (a .22) and sneaked down. Long silence. Then my dad lets out a bloodcurdling scream. Another long silence, as I wait with my now-awakened stepmother; my younger brother comes out, likewise startled awake. Finally my dad stomps back upstairs, pissed off: “Fucking cat. I almost shot it.”
Second, I’d had an apartment robbed a couple of years before. Thousands of dollars of stereo equipment was taken. The cops came in, did a bit of fingerprint dusting, had us sign a complaint, and that was the end of it. I certainly didn’t expect them to catch the thief, but I was mildly surprised at how routine this seemed to them, as if I were telling them about picking up laundry instead of finding stuff stolen and a huge crap on the bathroom floor. And of course, I heard absolutely no follow-up from anyone; my little tragedy was obviously very small potatoes in the grand scheme.
So, when I heard noises, I immediately thought “cat.” And when I saw the would-be thief, I viewed him as a pathetic junkie rather than an evil home invader. I scared him off and went about my business without bothering to call the cops. When I told my roommate about it later (without mentioning my concern that he might have capped the guy), he was equally nonchalant: “Really? Weird. You want pizza?”
My sentiments exactly.
