The Midnight Creeper

The ¥1 coin is about the size of a penny.

A mukade is a disgustingly large poisonous centipede, and sometime after midnight on Thursday night (early Friday morning) I noticed one crawling on my leg as I lay in bed. The lights were off, and I wasn't quite sure what I was feeling move up my leg, but I put my hand on it and flung it off of me. I heard its heavy body thump against the cardboard-esque sliding door of our closet, and at that point I was pretty sure we'd just had our first mukade encounter. I sprang up and tugged at the string of our overhead lamp, and the light came on just in time for me to see the nasty little creature scurry under a bag of old clothes.

I kept my eye on that bag, and Morgan went for a can of bug spray. Once armed, I sprayed all around the base of the bag, and then picked it up to find nothing underneath. We searched for a while, but didn't find it. Desperate, we laid out an entire roll of tape face up around the edges of our bedroom hoping to trap it if it came back out. We moved onto the couch in the living room to be elevated off the floor. Morgan was up the rest of the night, terrified and unable to sleep.

It wasn't until the next day at work that I noticed I'd been bitten. It must have got me right when I put my hand on it to fling it off. It left two tiny little red dots on my hip. Fortunately, I must have some natural immunity--or maybe I just flung it off before it could really envenom me--because the bite didn't swell or anything. I did feel a little sick, and the area did ache a bit, it's entirely worn off now.

Morgan spent that entire Friday mortified and unable to sleep or really do anything in the house. She went out and amassed an arsenal for our fight against the creature, and when I came home we set out to destroy it. I sprayed a special liquid chalk mukade killer around the perimeter of every room, every window, and every door. I sprayed bug spray down every drain.

I guess we smoked it out, because Morgan spotted the thing crawling out from under the couch I had been lying on. It went right under my pillow. There are a whole lot of creepy stories about mukade out there, and some of them say that squashing them releases a sent that attracts more. I've also read that surviving segments can crawl away and survive. The recommended methods are burning and drowning.

We had a hammer and the bug spray handy, so I pinned the thing to the couch with the hammer and unloaded just about the whole can of spray onto it. It bucked and flailed for a long long time, and I just kept spraying. It lost a few legs, and finally grew still. I picked it up with a mismatched pair of chopsticks and dropped it into a tupperware. It was still moving even when I sealed it inside, so I filled the container with water and sealed it again.

It's dead now, and we can sleep again. I don't think I'll ever forget that thing crawling up my leg in the night though, so I don't think I'll sleep as soundly as before in this apartment ever again.

Yucko, right?