Preying In The Dark

Ok, I've been asked to recount this story from the dark days of sharing a basement bedroom with Brian.

Brian used to have very bizarre nightmares, or I guess you could call them night visions. This was possibly the result of us sleeping in a dank dungeon of a basement, or perhaps it was due to our late-night habit of watching The Three Stooges, The Young Ones and Benny Hill for hours just before we drifted off to sleep.

Anyhow, one especially restless night, my sleep was shattered by Brian yelling and screaming that there was a panther in the room. Being sleepy as I was, the ludicrous suggestion actually slipped right past the plausibility sensors in my cerebral cortex and made it down to my brain stem, where it caused a general alarm. No matter that the only panther either one of us had ever seen was pink, and on TV. This was not a drill.

I sat up like a dart, and silently waited in the darkness like a statue, senses bristling, probing the room for some sign of a large stalking cat about to pounce on us. My heart was beating like a West-African kpanlogo drum.

Then, suddenly and without warning, out of the darkness sprang, not a cat, but Brian, grappling my neck with his hands and trying for all he was worth to snuff my life out.

In his version of the story, he says he thought I was a bear, and he was simply "raining blows down upon me" to subdue me, but I think I felt icy fingers around my neck.