The bats are finally gone from my house. I think.

My wife couldn’t sleep.

That wasn’t unusual since COVID-19 started, but Andrea was more unsettled than normal that night last June.

A fluttery, scraping noise had invaded her dreams around 4 a.m.

After popping out of bed, Andrea walked downstairs and saw it: a bat — spawn of Dracula, the official mammal of the American nightmare, the unholy chiropteran beast whose cousins likely imparted the very virus that’s framed and fogged our existence for 13 months.

The bat emitted no sound. But Andrea did.

It was a singularly aberrant, twisted note of terror, high-pitched and strangled, like nothing she’d ever uttered.

“Oh, God!” she finally found the breath to tell me after vaulting back up the stairs. “We have a bat.” She said she saw it fly up into the bathroom, and that she’d shut the door behind it.

Andrea looked at me, gestured toward the room, then scrambled back downstairs.

I thought she’d said we had a bat.

It is a wildly unsettling feeling to stand outside a door in your bathrobe and bare feet, compelled by familial obligation to enter a tiny space containing what scares you most in life.

Winged things have spooked me ever since a duck went ape and attacked me at age 4 at the Bronx Zoo.

Once, I had a shotgun pointed at me in Burlington County; years before, a gang tried to beat me down in a Brooklyn subway car. Those were picnics compared to the Day of the Duck.

Proximate flapping freaks me out.

I creaked open the door, expecting fangs and fury. But the bat was hiding, likely as scared as I was.

I grabbed a towel to shoo the animal away, should we meet. Of course, that’s where the bat had folded itself.

Out it flew, widening instantly like a not-so decorative paper fan on a bamboo frame, wheeling and swooping. I could swear an edge of its wing skimmed my hair in a menacing flyby.

A friend later said that was impossible because bats have sonar, or radar, or ESP, or something, and that a creature with such a highly developed sense of echolocation would never be so clumsy as to slap me on the head. I smiled, and silently wished him clouds of squealing bats in his first-floor powder room some dark day.

The thing about a fight with a bat is that you can’t have one. What I mean is, when a person is going mano a bat, he must remember that it’s illegal to hurt such a creature.

If I’d been alone with a mouse or a rat, or anything else that shouldn’t be in the home, people would have encouraged me to deploy spring-mechanized metal snapping things, poisons, harsh words, whatever. But bats eat insects and are Our Friends, and must be treated as such.

So, at the very moment I was being spurred on by evolutionarily coded brain sparkings instructing me to kill or be killed — to use the advantage of my 6-foot-3, 200-pound mass to smash an animal that weighs about 0.3 ounces but nevertheless frightens me beyond reason — I had to take the Ranger Rick approach of unconditional restraint.

For me, it was the equivalent of organizing a tea party for a bunch of roaches who happened by. But I didn’t want the bat police hauling me off to wildlife-protection jail.

I opened the bathroom window, weakly whooshed the towel beneath the bat, which then flew out into the darkness.

When I crawled back to bed after my encounter, Andrea, suddenly a spokesperson for the Humane Society, said worriedly, “I hope you didn’t hurt the bat.”

“No,” I answered, “it’ll be terrorizing other aging Italian men in no time.”

The next morning I sent out the bat signal and got in touch with Batman.

That’s not his real name, of course, but we call him that and he doesn’t correct us. He came over in a truck with a caged opossum in the back, which looked confused. Batman squinted at the easy in-and-out cracks, holes, and vents on the outside of our 141-year-old house in a small town in the Salem County countryside; he noticed some dark streaks on the roof line indicative of bat commuting; he climbed into the attic and sniffed around, screwing up his nose at the aroma. Then he declared:

“You have a colony of maybe 25 female bats with their pups living above your attic ceiling, just below your roof.” Males apparently don’t enter houses, preferring the bachelor life in the great outdoors.

“OK, Batman,” I said. “We will bust open the piggy bank. Just please get ‘em out.”

He laughed the benevolently tolerant laugh of a dad whose daughter just asked for a pony and a Camaro.

“It’s June 12,” he said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So, you can’t exclude bats between June 1 and Aug. 15. They’re protected.”

During that time period, the mom bats leave your house in the evening to collect food to bring back to their pups who cannot fly (but can still poop, apparently). If the adults were to be evicted, the offspring would be orphaned and die.

So, you must wait.

Batman said he’d be back, but not before reminding us that bats can squeeze into spaces no bigger than a quarter and will sometimes enter your walls from which they occasionally escape and fly through the rest of your home.

“Enjoy your summer!” he said.

Aug. 15 came and went. Batman was busy, it was too rainy to go on our roof, stuff like that. Time passed. A buddy sent me a Batman T-shirt, because potentially rabid animals are fun.

Meanwhile, we were living with the knowledge that wild things were clustered upside down in hairy bunches a few feet above where my daughter sleeps. A certain smell started permeating the attic. And we’d occasionally hear ruffling, scuffling noises in the walls, just around bedtime.

Finally, Batman returned, right before spring. He placed exclusion devices — netted tubes at entry and exit points in the house. This allows bats to leave to look for food, but thwarts their return. After that, he patched up the known holes, and we started praying new ones don’t open up.

Bats, faced with the $2,000 evidence you’ve just paid to evict them, look for somebody else’s house to haunt. That seems to be how it works: You foist your bats on your neighbors. My theory is that all the people on a block of old homes share the same colonies for years.

With luck, things will be quiet for a while. That is, until the fall, when, Andrea reminds me, all the mice will return.