It was after midnight. Prime time for watering my balcony garden plants. Or so I thought…

Little did I know that horror lurked under the normally comforting indigo sky. (Fade up the really chilling scary movie soundtrack.)

I turned on the connected strands of the net lights that wrap my small space in a starry blanket. I grabbed my watering can and made my first trip inside to fill it and then returned to commence my daily ritual.

I started on the right side of the balcony with small pots of morning glory tucked in at intervals around the perimeter.

By the time I made it around to the left side and a large heirloom tomato plant, the moonlight glinted on something I couldn’t quite make out…

It looked to me like a huge mutant pea pod, and I instinctively reached out and touched it… Terror among terrors, I realized: “IT’S ALIVE!!!”

(Crank the really chilling scary movie soundtrack!)

I  shrieked: “SHRIEK!”

And unlike the stalker movie cliches I seem to be throwing about so recklessly here, no one had to yell “RUN!”

I turned and hightailed it back inside.

I fired up the search engine and started inputting terms: GIANT… GREEN… SUCCUBUS… CATERPILLAR…

And I got results. Info and videos… Tales of woe and devastation from a creature known as a “hornworm” caterpillar.

Luckily, I discovered it before it had a chance to wreak the kind of destruction one man’s YouTube presentation depicted. It mowed down the entire plant and left droppings behind.

Don’t ask how it got up here, 10 stories above the city. And don’t inquire about its fate. Let’s just say I — in the words of Niecy Nash — “took a big girl pill” and went back out and did what had to be done.

Sorry there are no photos of the hornworm, but all I could think about was getting rid of it before my tomato plant was ruined. But check out the little critter’s doppelganger in the aforementioned video, embedded below:

Anyone else had problems with this caterpillar? I’d love to hear about it…