The Sound

How it has tried, but my tortured, everlasting soul cannot forget that sound.

I had been living in the house for almost two years without any issue more dire than the shower water running cold just a little bit too quickly for my comfort. I loved the house. I felt entirely comfortable residing there. Then there was the sound, and in one moment my whole life, and everything I believed about death, suddenly changed for all time.

It began as a nearly inaudible tapping, easily confused with, say, the baseboard heat igniting on a frigid New England winter’s evening. Tick tick tick… fwoosh. It was in late December, as I recall, that this rapping caught my attention. That night I had retired to bed after struggling hours over a notepad, despondently attempting to begin the second chapter of my first book. The plot I was working on was one I had fancied, and ideas had finally been leeching into my head - as if my muse had at last groggily awaken from her hibernation – and I gave it my finest effort to capture them on paper. The writing, however, did not cooperate. While the images were strong, the words did not cooperate. Those few scribblings that materialized on the pale blue lines before me were not of the caliber that sells first novels to publishers. Frustrated, I stole a deep breath and dragged myself to bed.

Since the death of my wife, I had not slept well. It had been nearly four months, and anxiety gnawed at me more than my depression did. The bills were beginning to take up more space on my desk than my compositions, and my savings account had nearly evaporated. I felt that if I did not write effectively soon, I would be forced to sell the house in favor of an apartment that a nine-to-five job could support. These issues spider-webbed my mind as I struggled for words as well as rest. I could do neither. So, on that night, I reclined in bed and stared into the darkness above me.

Unconsciously, somehow, I remember my first hint of the noise. I was tenderly finger-tipping the linen sheets beside me – where upon my wife used to sleep – when the oil burner in the basement kicked on far below me in the basement. Even though the sepulchral drone was muffled by two floors of hardwood and carpeting, it gave me such a jolt, snapping my mind from its empty wanderings into the cold reality of my darkened chamber. The soft hiss of forced hot water slithered through copper piping and into my room, evoking that tapping noise, that tapping noise that happens when bubbles are trapped or when pipes expand. My heart calmed from the brief rush of adrenaline, and thus I began to listen.

I listened for about a half an hour before dozing. It was a reassuring lulling sound that allowed my soul to rest at ease, analogous to the quieting properties of confidently chirping crickets in the summer months, or the repeating wash of the tide over the breakers at Destiny Beach, where I had met my Sarah. Over the next several nights, I even turned the heat up to near sub-tropical proportions so that the intoxicating effect of the tapping pipes could be heightened. So that I might be soothed. For the first time in months, I began to dream.

They were – yes, cliché – sweet dreams at first. One morning I awoke with my mortal soul fully believing that Sarah would be there by my side, and even when I discovered that she was not, the wondrous dream deceived me into feeling as though she had been. The dream found me embracing my Sarah, on a brilliantly sunny summer day, standing on the deck just off the living room in the back of the house. I stood behind her, my arms around her sides, my hands covering her lower abdomen, my body pressing against her back. I had variations of that dream several times that week, and unsurprisingly, my writing began to make progress.

Then, one night in the middle of January, I reclined in bed, once again listening to the tapping, and noticed that it had somehow changed. Perhaps it was louder, or deeper, or more frequent, but it had definitely changed, perhaps gradually that, like the changing of the seasons, only after some time did I actually perceive it. That night the dreams began to change as well. I continued to dream about my Sarah, and, alas, I should be more specific: it was actually Sarah, in my dreams, that was changing.

When I saw her that night, it was later in the year, no longer the summer that my dreams had previously illustrated. It was an autumn evening. She smiled glancingly at me from the living room as she peered out onto the deck, and I could not get close enough to her to touch her. I observed her reflection in the glass of the sliding door, gazing dejectedly off into the pallid, overcast sky.

A week later, I had to snap myself back into logic. I realized that I had been fooling myself into a kind of hypnosis that had begun with the tapping of the pipes, an enchanting effect that had soothed me for a while, but now was most disturbing. The night I noticed this I was reviewing how the feeling was mutating, when suddenly the tapping of the pipes let off a solitary knock – a BANG - just one- and like the first night when the oil burner kicked in, I was thrust into a shock of adrenaline-fright that made my body seize and gasp.

I turned the heat down. I was becoming paranoid, and, on that night, my dream was one that made me cower.

The house was illuminated only by shadows, as if the only light was originating from black candles spread randomly throughout its corridors. Sarah was nowhere to be found, not on the deck, nor in the living room, and, turning, I noticed the basement door had been left ajar. I seemed to be pulled by a dark gravity to the door, then slowly climbed down the stairs. I fearfully gripped the railing, fighting the sensation that I would assuredly fall.

When I arrived at the concrete floor of the basement, a cold shudder chilled me from my heels to the base of my skull, so strongly that my conscious mind attempted to intercede, and from my dreaming state felt certain that my body had spasmed on my bed. I turned to see Sarah standing near the furnace, a behemoth iron monstrosity like those on ancient coal-burning locomotives. The furnace door was wide open, the flames within angrily roaring, yet the room itself was frigid. Sarah glared back at me, unblinking, with a disappointed face that appeared to be an ashen blue-gray. The ticking, tapping of the burner was now a throbbing hollow pulse, as if a hateful vagrant were thrusting his fist into a giant steel trash can again and again and again. Then Sarah said my name, a whisper that emerged as a yell, and with my name spoken – how can I bear to explain? – a figure, a shadow, arose from the cold corners of the basement floor and seeped up behind her.

What had been a tapping had turned into a thrashing, violent metallic breathing, and then the sound added another instrument – a groan – as the shadow congealed into a humanoid, gnarled image. It took the shape of a repellent, violently deformed goliath man standing behind her, and my heart rose into my throat, choking me, frozen, helpless to warn her or to even get nearer to her. The dark visage wrapped one hand of tangled, scaly fingers around Sarah's face and throat and pulled her head under its festering chin. She looked at me, her expression unchanging, continuing to glare. She said my name yet again, that same whispering scream! I begged my body to wake, please, hot with disgust and rage, please just wake up!

The hulking shadow towered over her, blood-matted fur on a jutting, scab-festered muzzle, drooling from scaly infections in its maw. Between the burnt crust of skin of its fingers, Sarah’s eyes glared beggingly into mine, and the thing slowly pressed her against itself, possessively, taunting me. I was locked in place, unable to do more than shiver, paralyzed. Sarah whispered a scream -- my name -- continuing to glare helplessly at me, and the wraith tightened its grip on her face. I could actually feel it – what she felt – the air being forced from her lungs, the muscles in her face being squeezed aside, compressed against bone. The air filled with the sticky stench of stale vomit, and in that sickening moment before I awoke, I heard its shrill, echoing cackle. The slow-moving cackle became faster and its pitch increased – it was laughing the cackle of a devil in claiming a soul – and it took Sarah and thrust her into the open door of the furnace, into the raging flames, and from the flames, her eyes continued to peer out at me, helplessly, endlessly. Hopelessly.

I gasped as if I was trying to suck my soul back into my body as I awoke, that night, that dreaded night I was fated to hear the noise. I awoke, and for those first moments was paralyzed, barely able to breathe... until I commanded my body to rise. I stumbled like a zombie outside of my room, down the stairs, and switched the lights on in the living room. I shivered with fear, a sour lump lodged in my throat, and at the top of the cellar stairs, forced myself to click on the lights down in the basement. I glared down from the apex of those thirteen steps at the frigid concrete floor. I was awake this time, no doubt, and the wind bellowed outside, whistling, scraping the branches of barren trees against the roof, and I began to trudge downward, my feet heavy as anvils. I could hear the ticking, throbbing of the pipes... I inched my way, clutching the handrails as if everything would be lost if I let go. I was half-way down those stairs... when the noise came.

I heard a transformer explode outside in the distance, and the house shook, and then the horrible, whistling electric heckle that follows. The lights in the house all went dark. I stood deathly still for a moment, arms spread blindly before me, crucified in the void as a vile wave of goosebumps rippled coldly up my legs to my back, to my neck, and to my face, and then, a lone, deep, reverberating thud enveloped me, as if I were enclosed within a monstrous bass drum...

...and then, from somewhere underneath the stairs where my body hunched, gripped in paralysis, my gaze locked with the sooty nothingness, then there came the laughter. The cackling. The echoing cackle. From this abyss I assure you, oh, how it has tried, but my tortured, everlasting soul cannot forget, cannot escape, that hateful, that inhuman, that unending sound.