There's something on the roof.
I can hear it scraping, scratching, padding about. It's been up there for days now. Intermittently.
Every so often, there it is...scrape, scrape, scrape *pause*, pad pad pad pad.
Scrape.
My mind has conjured cats, rats, birds and a small urban mongoose-like creature which subsists entirely on roofing tar and is hitherto unknown to science.
The time has come, the....no.
It couldn't possibly be a walrus.
Although you do hear stories of people keeping bizarre pets in apartments. But if you were going to release a walrus into the wild, you'd do it at the river, right? Lumping a pubescent walrus onto the roof would be too much work, even for our neighbours...
Maybe it's up there now, with a teenage walrus moustache, sharpening its increasingly long tusks on our roofing material...it does have a kind of toothy texture to it.
There's nothing for it.
I'm going up there.
Wish me luck...because I have to clear out my closet to get up there.
See proof positive. Marriage rots your mind and drives you insane. :-)
Nothing wrong with my mind, Sevitz.
I, for example, now know what is capable of making repeated scraping sounds on my roof.
Do you?
Does anyone?
Come on, give me your best Sherlock Holmes-inspired shot.
The TV aerial blowing in the wind.
Argh, damn these guessing games! I need closure!
It could be the sound of the trailing semi-severed limbs of an army (or at least a small squad) of rotting zombies dragging across the tiles on their nightly sortie to devour the unsuspecting patrons of your local supermarket.
Taking a shortcut.
Across your roof.
Inspired!
No. What actually happened was this: I got up there to a deserted and apparently intact roof. Nestles in the lap of a border between our property and the next there was a residual area of snow which had by now frozen into ice, and a cable, whether TV or otherwise, was underneath it, and as I approached, the cable swung in the wind and the ice creaked. I cleared all the ice away.
The next day the noises started again. I still have no idea what it is. Probably birds.
Evil Birds?
This is New York. The odds are in your favour, Dave.