The breaking glass woke me up, though at first I wasn't sure if I was awake or not. Barbara convinced me of my consciousness with a long, sustained scream of sheer terror.

After about five seconds at full throat, Barbara then shouted "Get out! Get out of my house!" I followed suit, liberally adding profane variations on her theme.

Steps in the glass. Whoever had entered our house was moving around and not leaving. We delivered our aural barrage until we heard no more movement. It's amazing how silent a house can be in the middle of the night. Between the shouts and the glass crunching was nothing. We could hear him, and he could hear us.

I had the feeling that the idiot in our house wouldn't leave unless I confronted him. I hopped out of bed and walked slowly but assuredly into the hallway, hollering commands to our unbidden guest every few seconds. About halfway down the hall I realized I wasn't wearing my glasses, so I went back into the bedroom and put them on. Barbara handed me her Indiglo alarm clock (it glows blue when you punch a button on top) to use as a flashlight. I decided to go for the real thing and grabbed this monster City of Columbia flashlight a city worker accidentally left near one of my apartment when I was in college. It's big (more than a foot long) and its light is bright, and it serves equally well as a torch and weapon.

I checked out our other two bedrooms, turning on lights as I went. I didn't see anyone or anything. Not particularly surprising, as the noise came from up front, which is where I assumed where the intruder was. But I had to make sure he (a drugged up fool breaking into a house in the middle of the night has to be a he, right?) hadn't slipped back further into the house. He hadn't. Barbara went into one of the lit rooms and waited by the phone, poised to call 911 if necessary.

This might be a good time to mention that Barbara spent the better part of the week covering a quintuple murder trial in western North Carolina. Two drifters, high in inhalants, pot and beer (and whatever else they could find, one assumes) broke into a house, shot two people and then returned 30 minutes later to finish off the other three. The motive? None. Just random idiocy. A crack in the universe.

Random idiocy. That's what this had to be. I knew it was sometime after 4:30 in the morning, because I'd woken up then and checked my clock. Sunrise was probably about an hour away. To my way of thinking, no pro would break into a house at five in the morning, particularly with two cars parked directly in front. In fact, no pro would break into our house at all, because if he'd cased it at all he'd have seen through the front windows and noticed that all we had was books and beer bottles. Conversely, if the person (there wasn't enough noise for two people) had simply wanted to kill us, he would have done so already. So we were left the likely scenario of some drugged-up jerk wanting to score some cash. An utterly unpredictable situation.

I strode into the living room, my walk more confident than my stomach I swung the light around and didn't see any movement. I ducked back into the kitchen and turned on the light. Nothing. I edged into the dining room and saw broken glass everywhere. I yelled at Barbara, telling her to call 911. Then I turned on the dining room light.

Barbara spoke to the 911 operator in big gulps of air. "Thirteenoheightshawnee. Thatheshawneerightoffoftrinity. No--rightoffoftrinity. Wemighthavesomeoneinourhouse."

I looked around the dining room. The glass and beer covered everything. At first, I thought the intruder used the beer bottle to break out one of our front windows. But there was no clear glass on the floor. Just brown glass. I looked at my beer shelves (which showed off full bottles of beer I'd brewed--complete with custom labels) and realized one was missing. The one that could now be found all over the walls and floor. The steps I'd heard were simply pieces of glass and drips of beer falling to the floor. The crunching was the settling of glass in pools of beer.

I told Barbara that there was no intruder, to call off the 911 emergency, that it was just an exploding beer bottle. She told the operator exactly that, and the operator simply said "okay" before hanging up.

We were safe. And our dining room was a complete mess.

All hyper and adrenaline-filled from the two minutes of action, Barbara and I spent the next hour picking up glass, wiping down walls and baseboards and mopping the floor. The beer that exploded? A "Dr. Thompson's Gonzo Porter," of course. HST strikes again. I'm sure he'd be most amused that a beer created in his honor could cause such mayhem.

How could the beer explode? Simple. I added too much priming sugar when I bottled the beer more than a year ago. This particular batch was one of the first that I kegged and bottled, and I put too much sugar (which helps to spawn natural carbonation) in the part of the batch that I bottled. I remember those beers as being dreadfully fizzy, and this display bottle apparently had had enough. Lots of pressure. Possibly pushing against a weak spot in the glass. Time to blow. And it did.

Despite the general perception of Durham in general and our neighborhood in particular as being "high crime," we've never had any problems. I've always felt that Durham is the safest city we've lived in, period, and crime statistics back that notion up. I'm a wary individual, but there's nothing about our city or our neighborhood that has caused me any nagging worries. We've taken many lengthy vacations without experiencing a break-in. Neither of us has been mugged or assaulted despite the late hours we're sometimes on the street.

As for the immediate neighborhood, the only "serious" crime we've had in the year and a half we've lived in our house was one car break-in across the street. There's no reason to expect anything different in the future. Even so, I didn't exactly get to sleep quickly. The excitement and the continual noise of our neighbor's cat jumping on and off our front porch (for strange acoustic reasons, this tends to echo throughout the basement and the rest of the house) kept me awake. At about 6:30, just when I was tailing off, the Methodist church three doors down rang the carillon for a sunrise Easter service. "Morning Has Broken." Indeed. Once the bells quit their pealing, I finally got me some peace.

Jon Worley has nightmares of roving beer bottle gangs roaming the countryside terrorizing silly gits everywhere.