Charlie is a teacher and his wife, Maria is an artist. The night before last, just before the longest day of the year, Charlie was sitting in a deckchair enjoying the warm summer air when Maria touched his shoulder and he could tell immediately she was a little worried about something. He asked her what the matter was and she replied that there was a strange thing on the jacket that was hanging in the bedroom. They had both lived in the West Indies (西印度群岛) and had seen a lot of strange creatures in their house before. But now they were living in England and so Charlie just laughed and said he would have a look at the "thing".
He walked to the bedroom. He saw a jacket hanging in the bedroom and went up to it to have a closer look at the "thing". The moment he touched it, the thing sprang into life. Now Charlie experiences fear like the rest of us but when this creature opened its wings, he jumped out of his skin and ran screaming from the room like a small child doing about 100 miles an hour.
For a moment the next-door neighbours thought that Charlie was murdering his wife because of the noise they could hear. In fact, it was a bat that frightened Charlie.
Eventually Charlie managed to trap the bat in a box and took it to the garden to let the bat fly. Maria, who had been playing the guitar while Charlie was upstairs, asked Charlie if he had found out what the thing was. "Oh, nothing to worry about", he said casually hoping that the terror could not be seen in his eyes, "it was just a bat."
