Last night while I was driving home from a party a really odd thing happened to me.
First, let me set the stage. I live in a pretty quiet little suburb. After midnight most of the porch lights are out and all the windows are dark except maybe for the blue flicker of a television. It’s so quiet that even the kids with the ‘thumpa thumpa’ sound systems in their cars have figured out that cops are not deaf, have radios, and have nothing better to do in the middle of the night than hunt them down. So I’m driving through my little ghost town of a neighborhood at about two in the morning when I see something odd. It’s a little girl (maybe ten or eleven) in a white nightdress, barefooted, eyes wide, walking tward me down the center of the road, and at a pretty good pace too.
Side note: Ever notice that if you place an adorable little girl in an inappropriate setting (in this case a totally empty street lit only by those dim yellow sodium vapor street lights) you get instant creep-out factor? Think about movies like Poltergeist, or Village of the Damned or The Bad Seed – that kind of thing.
Anyway, my first thought was “Oh shit! Something is seriously wrong here”, and all sorts of terrible scenarios start running through my head. Stuff like: ‘My daddy fell down and I can’t wake him up’ or ‘The baby-sitter left me, and there’s smoke everywhere’ or ‘Daddy hit mommy, and she won’t stop crying’.
I turn to the curb, jump out, and she just zips past me, oblivious, so I run after her. I should mention at this point that I was in a tuxedo with formal shoes – CLOP, CLOP, CLOP! I grab her by the shoulders, spin her around and say something like “Are you okay honey? What’s wrong!”. She just looks up at me, takes a look around, and says “I should go home now” (if nothing else, the kid sure has a gift for understatement). I tell her that I’d like to walk her home, so I slip off my shoes (CLOP, CLOP, CLOP) and just kind of pad beside her down the empty sidewalk.
Now, if this little girl was in any way frightened by suddenly finding herself accompanied by James Bond, she gave no indication of it. I on the other hand found it eerie walking down a deserted street in the middle of the night guided by a little barefoot girl in a nightdress, and kept wondering when the little wings would pop from her back and she’d lead me to the tunnel with the light at the end.
Her house was a surprising distance from where I stopped her. We walked up the walkway the the still ajar door, and she asks “are you going to tell my parents”? I said I thought she should do it herself, in the morning. She nodded, closed the door and tripped the bolt.
Only walking back to my car did it occur to me that she might be sleepwalking (confirmed when I talked to her parents today). I always thought it was a myth, but there’s quite a bit about sleepwalking children on the web (they almost always grow out of it).
Anyway, that was my little adventure.