Chapter One
There it was again! The spine-chilling, dissonant wail, pitched at an octave that effortlessly penetrated the other storm sounds. How could she describe it? Was it a ghostly screech or the howling of a wounded animal? If so, what species made such an awful noise? Neither description quite fit. Identifying an intermittent scraping, raspy sound in the background was just as elusive.
Atmospheric conditions enveloped the house and created an eerie mood. They could have been plagiarized from a horror film. It was the first night of a new moon, with a palpable darkness, black and velvety, interrupted by flashing zippers of lightning and crescendos of thunder. A steady downpour of icy raindrops, with an occasional outburst of sleet pelted the windows with a strong, staccato force that made Joanne Cavenaugh, the house’s sole occupant, fear the aged panes might shatter. She burrowed deeper into her warm cocoon of bedding, pulling the soft, down coverlet over her head.
She craved sleep. She had spent countless nights at her mother’s hospital bedside, watching helplessly as the elderly matriarch fought a losing battle with the cancer. The battle had left Joanne emotionally, physically and mentally depleted.
A petite woman, stretching to reach 5 feet tall, and weighing barely 95 pounds, she had shouldered burdens that would exhaust a more robust, younger person. She could not remember the last time her body was free from aches, or when she had slept through the night. She assumed the role of caregiver, refusing to hire a professional with more training and stamina. The chores had not lessened when her mother was admitted to the hospital. Joanne had continued her private care duties there.
Now, she desired only to close her eyes and sink into oblivion of uninterrupted slumber, to replenish stores of energy and optimism long ago depleted. The onslaught of worries, anticipatory grief and sheer physical exertion of trying to meet the obligations of her job as Sheriff’s dispatcher, while providing her widowed mother with the care she needed to carry on her war against death, had taken their toll.
For the past eight weeks Joanne had taken unpaid leave from work, devoting herself to her mother, as the enemy marched relentlessly forward, robbing the elder woman of her strength, her will to live, her independence and her dignity. Although she clung to life, lying quietly in a hospital bed in a twilight state induced by the morphine drip which coursed through her veins, life as she knew it, and as she had lived it for seven decades, had abandoned her.
Father Peter O’Brian, her parish priest, and Kaye Guinn, a kindly nurse who had been her mother’s caregiver during most of her hospital stay, had convinced Joanne to retreat to her mother’s house to sleep in a real bed for the night. Her muscles, repeatedly cramped by the lumpy, short hospital cot, now stretched and relaxed. She languished in the warmth and uncrowded space of her bed.
Under other circumstances, Joanne would have welcomed a rainy night, and would have found it relaxing. Tonight, however, the rain created an inexplicable uneasiness and fear which induced insomnia instead. The wind, while not excessive in velocity, attacked the icy precipitation with intermittent gusts, spinning it into mini torrents, which whipped against the house with an eerie staccato rhythm. It ripped at the forlorn branches of the ancient oak tree outside her bedroom window.
The high-pitched grating sound, like fingernails scraping against a chalkboard, interspersed the symphony of eerie storm sounds with increasing frequency. As the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, she hypothesized about its origin. It was unlike any natural sound she had ever heard. To call it supernatural, however, would be exaggerating. Perhaps the wind had fractured a branch, and that was what scraped against the house. She willed herself to ignore the sound, but it defied all of her attempts to shut it out. The pitch isolated it from the other storm sounds, and magnified it to an unbearable level. Her keen sense of hearing became her enemy, interfering with her body’s intense need for rest, and her mind’s quest for temporary oblivion.
Reluctantly Joanne emerged from her soft, warm haven of bedding. She slid her feet into quilted slippers, then shrugged her arms into a flannel robe. She thought, perhaps if she warmed a cup of milk and sat in the kitchen for a while, the storm would abate, taking the unbearable, raspy- scraping- wailing with it.
Hannah, her mother, would have marched outside and stripped the offending branch from the tree, rendering it incapable of continuing its irritating concerto. But Joanne possessed neither her mother’s courage nor decisiveness.
Joanne’s father had died before she was born. Hannah had raised Joanne alone, never once complaining that life as a single mother was difficult and lonely. Joanne was often puzzled that her mother had never remarried or seriously dated another man. Hannah had been attractive, witty and warm hearted. Many men would have welcomed such a woman into their life. Joanne admired her mother’s loyalty to her father’s memory, but often wished that she had a father substitute, and her mother had found romantic companionship. Father O’Brian had remained a loyal friend to both mother and daughter, and had provided male guidance in his gentle, caring manner. But, Joanne was sure that a celibate companion, while better than loneliness, hardly compared to the fulfillment her mother could have enjoyed had she remarried.
Now, as Joanne waited for her milk to warm, she mused about the irony of her life. Her mother, never one to be daunted by a challenge, had met hers head-on, without reservation. She had never let widowhood slow her down. A well-educated woman for her generation, she had worked as a bookkeeper at a local construction firm for Joanne’s entire life. Joanne, however, was an introvert, and despite her mother’s attempts to instill assertiveness and self-confidence in her, had matured into a shy adult, who shunned social contact. Her coworkers at the sheriff’s office were her friends, but she confined her contacts with them to working hours and obligatory social events.
Now in her fifties, with the death of her only relative and companion imminent, she resigned herself to living a solitary life. Yet she did not find this prospect disturbing. She enjoyed her own company. While her mother had flourished in the business world once thought to be a man’s domain, Joanne had excelled in the domestic realm. The exquisite crafts and needlework projects which adorned their home were the fruits of many hours of happy solitude spent creating beauty, while shutting out a world which she found overwhelming. Her work as a law enforcement dispatcher only reinforced her belief that the world was an ugly, frightening place, and one which she chose to avoid.
The screeching of the persistent sound, much like the noxious beating of the heart in Edgar Allen Poe’s fiction, now amplified and seemed to shift its location, following her from room to room. It agitated Joanne as she sat in the cozy kitchen, sipping her mug of hot milk. Was it her imagination that made its volume and frequency seem to increase? Was her sleep-deprived mind distorting reality? She hoped that it was her imagination, but the sound seemed to follow her to the kitchen, on the opposite side of the house from her bedroom, where she had first heard it. No trees grew near the kitchen. Perhaps her theory about its origin was wrong. But if it was not caused by a broken limb scraping the house, what could it be? She was sure her exhaustion both created and exacerbated the irritation. But she was equally sure that she would not achieve the sleep she coveted until the sound stopped.
She shivered. With trepidation and fear tagging along as unwelcome companions, she donned an overcoat, slipped her mother’s overshoes over her slippers as she unlocked the kitchen door. She stepped outside into the piercing cold of the wet, windy night. She grabbed the emergency flashlight from its place on the windowsill before closing the door. Stepping gingerly through the yard, attempting to avoid the pools of slippery mud and puddles of rain water, Joanne flicked the flashlight on and waited for its light to pierce a narrow pathway through the intense darkness. She uttered an expletive as she realized the batteries had died. Frustrated and frightened by the darkness, with nothing to illuminate it, she trudged on, attempting to navigate by groping the house’s external surface. She nearly lost her footing more than once, but dug her fingers into the siding to regain her balance.
She rounded the corner, arriving at the location outside her bedroom where she was certain the sound had originated. She stopped in her tracks and gasped. The massive old tree whose branches she suspected of causing the sound, stood stalwart against the onslaught of the wind, its branches intact. No fractured or loose branches brushed the house or bobbed in the wind. They had been neatly trimmed months earlier by the yard crew her mother hired to manicure the lawn and tree. Branches near the house had been pruned to avoid contact with it.
Puzzled and annoyed, Joanne paused, and then turned to retrace her steps. But her breath was suddenly stolen by an unseen band which coiled around her neck. Gasping for breath, she flailed her hands in midair, and then lifted one hand to claw at the band, desperate to remove it from her throat. Her strength and control of bodily functions deteriorated rapidly as oxygen deprivation closed in. Unable to move, she dropped the useless flashlight in the mud. The smell of wet leather from the gloved hand which batted her hand away barely registered in her panicked mind. Thoughts tumbled on top of each other, with past memories and present sensations merging into a confusing, terrifying kaleidoscope of images.
Then all images ceased, and thoughts were replaced by blackness. Stillness prevailed, as Joanne slipped into the realm of afterlife which Father O’Brian had often addressed in his Sunday sermons. Her limp, lifeless body, suspended only by the band around her throat and the brutal hands which held it, swayed slightly in midair. Rubber bands replaced the muscles in her legs. She was transformed into a human rag doll, arms drooping at her sides, neck and head falling forward onto her chest. Life, as a fleeting mist, escaped, vaporizing into a mysterious realm from which no one ever returned. Obeying Nature’s command, her body slipped to the ground.
