It started two weeks ago, the noises. A gentle breeze I thought, exciting the loosely fitted wooden fencing at the far end of our back garden. Before, nothing. And then one night in bed, a hollow, heavy-handed knock of what sounded like wood-on-wood emanating from behind the back of our bedroom wall. “We” being my wife and I keyed in collectively, as if tuning into the right radio frequency, to locate and confirm the source of the noise; where the window behind our bed faces looking out onto the back garden is where our lead ran hot, noticing the all-too-familiar fencing in our back garden rocking, rigidly swaying back and forth.
And now for the past two weeks, without fail, a consistent four-hour-window of this knocking, over and over again. It always seemed to follow the same pattern I found at soon enough -I had no choice but to make a mental note of how it behaved; it kept me up for hours on end. So, I decided to study it in passing at the very least while attempting, in vain, to get a good nights rest. I was adamant to distracted myself to disrupt the channeled onslaught of noise that plagued me and my family nightly now. It didn’t start a second before the clock would strike midnight and it never made a peep past four o’clock, either; and it always went up and down in passing waves of loud and quiet.
By night two I couldn’t chalk up this strange happening anymore to the natural effects of a breeze in autumn, as it had turned very mild only a day after the first night’s blip of heavy wind and rainfall; and a dreary forecast on my phone notified me to bring in the kids’ toys from outside that day. That was when I noticed it, the faint aroma of death circulating the air around the green of grass and pale-bright-blue of cloudy skies above. The vibrant and scenic contrast of colours, and the putrid smell, only added to this jarring juxtaposition of danger hidden in plain, innocent site; the stench of the deathly smell only grew stronger the closer I got to the source of the beastly odor.
Despite its naturally weak effect all-round, it made my blood turn cold, muscles limpen and then reflexively tense up again, and my spine turn explosive with shock, like a live wire fit to burst. I was in awe of how awful it smelled. I kept following it closer all the way to the same loosely fitted fencing panel that I had known been the culprit of last night’s horrendous racket. By that point I was stunned and mesmerized, gripped by a strange sense of otherworldliness, and then I saw it… the three stripes carved into the side of the farthest panel: a claw mark evidently… it looked too big and was up too high to be the work of any animal I was familiar with.
I shook it off as the work of some crazed, manic bear passing through our neighborhood, and making a mess in its wake -you see, me and my family live up in the mountains, or just near enough to have become accustomed to the wildly diverse animal population all over the place: bears, cougars, foxes, and coyotes, etc. Inside… by the time I had thought to start preparing lunch for the kids and had made pace through into the kitchen, I had forgotten about the encounter for all of the rest of that day. I knew I wasn’t going to let the kids play outside anymore in the meantime with all this strange behaviour lurking around seemingly every corner…
Nothing now, just dry autumn nights. Nothing before twelve -not even the wind- and then, the knocking. Starting off small and modest, then growing violent and tumultuous, increasing the volume ten-fold, and then subsiding again, as if moving in the fashion of a gentle wave turned violent storm. But this was no natural effect of the weather at play here, it was too contrived; it was too purposeful and consistent: it was someone rather than something that was causing all this stress and grief on my family at these menacing, witching hours.
This was the only conclusion I could come to, after all, it had only been night three of this last two-week-nightmare and I was absolutely convinced something was out there, doing this… my suspicions only grew stronger thinking back to the damage that had been done: only to our fencing panel exclusively, not even a shred of mess anywhere else in the garden; and when my wife turned to me in bed that night, scarred, complaining the noise was frightening her, I knew something more sinister than a wildlife animal passing through was now our fate.
It was nothing short of an ominous ensemble; that symphony of noise out the window was a frenzied, fearful spell of malice at midnight. It got my mind racing as to what kind of a person would do this; and why us? The thought of being mocked and taunted by some idiot kid loitering around really irked me, so much so I fell into a deeply perpetuating rage. So, I decided I would take a stand and catch this “little psycho rugrat…” (was my best guess as to what kind of a threat I was dealing with here). And so, after me and the Mrs mulled it over that night, we came up with a strategy for our plan of attack: we were going to catch them in the act.
It seemed simple enough: stay up past twelve, turn the lights of so as to not arouse suspicion; stay quiet and impassive. And so, we did just that. It was quite an exciting prospect for the both of us as we had always wanted to break some long-enforced rules we had drilled into our boring-humdrum-adult lives; it would be nice again to stop in past alarm clocks and stay up late, not consciously reckoning with next days consequences, from late complaints from bosses to spilling rushed morning coffee on drives into work.
And we really were enjoying our late-night shenanigans, feeling like little kids again: movies downloaded in preparation that day, popcorn already loaded in the microwave by dinner time. I mean, it wasn’t too hard to put our two kids into bed and just watch some TV, but the unbridled joy of doing something we shouldn’t still kept us riding that unadulterated high well up past our usual bedtime.
And after nearly dosing of a-half-a-dozen times, our film had finished, and draining, flickering tv aside, the clock struck twelve; and right on cue just then, me and my wife’s ears perked up like bats and we exchanged a quick glance, turning on our sofa, face-to-face, looking unnerved and slightly distressed at the painfully recognizable sound of wood-on-wood clattering away -the banging was alive and kicking again once more, for the fifth night in a row….
The tele in our house was obscured by the fact it was tucked away neatly right at the very front of the house (as we made note of as not to arouse suspicion to our noisy culprit), so it wasn’t a problem for me and my wife to sneakily prance round the house in the pitch-black of dark at night. The house is an area we have charted and etched in a routinely circuit of a billion times over, dealing with getting the kids dressed and ready for school and making breakfast and so on, so we were quite adept enough to just graciously meander and careen around all the obstacles we had to pass through and avoid to get beyond the kitchen and into the conservatory without making a peep. With enough brazen and falsely pumped-up confidence,
I managed to get to the door of our conservatory leading outside and began to slowly open it. My heart was already in my throat by this point, everything feeling like it’s falling into place in slow motion: the wife stood small behind me, the looming fear of the unknown origin of the noise banging louder now in my ears, the prospect that I might have to fight some opportunist, thrill-seeking son-of-a-bitch kid.
The night-sky-atmosphere was weighing deep on my ability to think. It all came into my mind like a sweeping hurricane, and by the time I gave myself notice to take a second to breath, it happened… the screaming terror of a thousand knives personified; the screeching of a million bats; the wailing of a thousand blood-curdling screams of damsel-in-distress women. The hurricane had been and went.
Some kind of noise, no matter how small or inaudible, must’ve caught the attention of the that damned thing; I recognized the location this high-pitched bellow of a scream had come from as the same place the fence panel was scratched and where the stench had come from the day before.
All I was left with now was this terrible noise unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. I didn’t know what to think. I felt as though I had just stumbled into a horror beyond the depths of what the human mind was capable of perceiving physically or mentally… or even conceiving of something so beyond human for that matter. I sealed myself away from this nightmarish pandora’s box situation, quickly, closing and locking the conservatory door at a break-neck pace. There was a deep brooding feeling inside me that whatever had just screamed at us over that last one-minute window of insanity was innately inhuman…
It was a scream so triggering to the primordial part of my brain, that the ephemeral burst of horror bled into my world as a pattern I unconsciously recognized as a fight-or-flight response. I grabbed my wife by the hand and rushed us both upstairs. A second later, hearing the sound of slamming on glass (one, two hits, maybe?) coming from the conservatory we had just evacuated, only halfway up the stairs.
I hadn’t so quickly expected to hear my wife sobbing as the reality crashed down on me like a tsunami, shattering my once hopefully idyllic scenario of scolding off some ill-fitted, delinquent kid just mucking about (“maybe he needed the attention” I had conjured up, to justify the loose ends).
I had never felt so truly alone in those few moments of realization that whatever was out there targeting us had either done one of two things: a, found a way into the house, and was currently in position to kill us in our own home; or b, fled the tense encounter after, what seemed by its own standards, a whimpish attempt to break into our home. Pattern recognition is a strong suite of mine, and so when I heard for the first time in five days stark, plain-as-day silence, I went cold. Either way, I knew its intentions were to kill us now, and that information does not rest well on the soul.
Whatever is out there knocking on the fencing of our back garden every night between twelve, and never past four AM, is still out there. We’ve tried calling the police and had an extensive search of a surrounding five-mile radius from our house carried out. Nothing. The neighbors know nothing of this incident, except now they give us strange looks in passing on commutes when dropping the kids off at school or when going for a quick stop for some gas coming back home from work, or when going out for a coffee or for a bite to eat. We must look despondent to them somewhat: our eyes are sunken, dark circles forming around the edges. Sapped of moral and hope.
Me and my family look broken and lifeless, like zombies. Unkempt. We are on day fifteen now of this never-ending nightmare, wish us luck…