There are lots of things to be afraid of these days. An unstable economy where company profits are based more on wishful thinking than facts; global unrest exacerbated by our feckless leader's exploits abroad; a powder-keg environment that can't wait to spring its next catastrophic hurricane/wildfire/earthquake on us; and countless other things.

Then of course there are the smaller fears and questions tearing away at the fabric of our lives; what exactly is that weird spot on my arm/leg/sandwich meat?

Will I still be employed come this time next year/month/week? What will my parents think when I introduce my girlfriend from Rochester who is out here visiting me for the weekend?

Yet, despite all of this, I'm more scared of my apartment than anything. Let me explain.

Tuesday began much like any other weekday, with an alarm, an expletive and a burning desire to turn off the world and go back to sleep. Instead, I got up and started on the typical morning routine.

But as I poured a bowl of Raisin Bran, something caught my eye - a single mousetrap in the corner of my kitchen was upside down, triggered in the night apparently.

Having snagged two of the furry invaders early in the winter season, I wouldn't have been too surprised to see the jaws of death clamped down once more on another rodent spine.

Instead I found an empty trap, a false alarm. I had recently set up one of the newer-style mouse traps - the plastic, one-click traps that are armed simply by pressing two handles together - and had witnessed it randomly snap shut without provocation at least once before. Nothing unusual about this situation, right?

Well, sort of.

I had set this new trap up right next to one of the older models of mouse murderers - an old-school contraption made of metal and wood featuring a huge, violent spring held precariously in check by a delicately-placed pin - and had left them both ready and waiting to kill. Not seeing the old-style trap next to the spent plastic model, I began looking around.

My search was based on the assumption that the plastic model had gone awry and sprung prematurely, knocking into the older trap and sending it into the cosmos. Mouse traps not weighed down by dead mice or curious kid fingers tend to jump when they go off, so it seemed logical enough.

As I looked, however, I found nothing. The traps - located in a corner of my kitchen near the stove - had few places where they could have bounced to and none of those nooks held any answers. I searched for a while, but then gave up, armed the lone remaining trap and headed into work.

When I returned that afternoon, the mousy mystery deepened. The plastic trap was un-sprung and the wooden trap was still nowhere to be seen. But my internet connection wasn't working and a quick investigation revealed that the Ethernet cable had been jarred loose.

All of these cables and cords sit on the floor of my living room right next to the couch, about 10 feet in a direct line away from where the traps were set.

Or, put in the context of the conspiracy my brain was quickly forming, right next to the perfect hiding spot for a mouse (or rat, or monster) which had bolted out of my kitchen with a mouse trap flailing, attached to its tail.

At the moment, it's the best explanation I've got, crazy as it might be. How else could a mouse trap simply disappear and an internet cord - which had worked fine the night before - get knocked loose?

This of course is why I'm afraid. If that mouse, beast, or whatever hell spawn it ends up being is still alive, will it come after me next? It's already proven it can disarm or survive my only effective weapons against and has once cut off my primary means of communication with the outside world. What evil plans are in store for this dastardly fiend?

I don't know, but I'm sure glad this column won't be online until after my girlfriend has already made the 200-mile drive out here. If she heard about this before making the trek, I can't say I'd blame her if something came up and she couldn't make it out here, leaving me alone for the long Easter weekend.

Alone with a beast bent on my destruction. Yikes.