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Because my arm is finally healed enough to play computer games, and because I am an idiot, I played Thief: Deadly Shadows last night until I finished it... at 3.30am.


At around 3.45am, as I lay in bed wishing I had to power to instantly send myself to sleep instead of waiting for stupid nature to take its tedious course, I noticed a shadow move across my bedroom windows. It was human height, human shape, and it moved at human speed, first across the right window, and then across the left.


I lay in bed with my heart pounding, and listened hard. It was a fairly windy night, but above the sound of the fluttering leaves and creaking branches, I heard something lightly bang against the roof. There was a series of little grinding sqeaks from the roof tiles.


I got out of bed and walked out into the living room. The Flatmate is away at a conference, so I was alone in the house. I stood under the manhole cover in the ceiling and strained to hear anything that might be footsteps on the rafters. I heard a lot of tiny sounds - the exhaust fans creaking in a gust of wind, the occasional blown twig pinging off the roof tiles, the doors thudding gently in their frames with every change in air pressure - but nothing like a man moving about in my roof space.


Eventually, I just had to make sure that all the doors and windows were locked and go back to bed. When I woke up (late) this morning, the house was exactly the same as it had been.


The noises I heard could easily be explained away as a cat on the roof. I don't know what it is with cats and roofs, but they seem to like skulking around up there late at night. However I still can't work out what the shadow was that I saw passing by my windows. I know I didn't dream it because I was still wide awake. I know I didn't imagine it because it moved, deliberately, from one window to the next. All I know is that after five hours of gaming it twanged my nerves like a guitar string.


Maybe too much gaming bends the fabric of reality and brings the fictional to life. In which case it's a good thing I wasn't playing Endless Zombie Rampage.