unnerved, therefore, when last night he had felt his heart thudding
furiously and his gut clenching with dread merely because of a queer
sound.
Unlike many seventy-year-old men, Eduardo rarely had difficulty
attaining plumbless sleep for a full eight hours. His days were filled
with physical activity, his evenings with the solace of good books, a
lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old
age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse
of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those
infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a
dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep.
The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that
swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the
throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie
electronic oscillation. He’d not only heard it but felt it, vibrating
in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it.
When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could
feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the
slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster.
sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically
straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or
through a barrier.
But who?
Or what?
Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he
had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the
woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn’t been
merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that.
He wasn’t superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on
his levelheadedness, common sense, and unsentimental grasp of the
realities of life. The writers whose books lined his study were those
with a crisp, simple style and with no patience for fantasy, men with a
cold clear vision, who saw the world for what it was and not for what
it might be: men like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ford Madox Ford.
The phenomenon in the lower woods was nothing that his favorite
writers–every last one of them a realist–could have incorporated into
their stories. The light had not been from an object within the
forest, against which the pines had been silhouetted, rather, it had
come from the pines themselves, mottled amber radiance that appeared to
originate within the bark, within the boughs, as if the tree roots had
siphoned water from a subterranean pool contaminated by a greater
percentage of radium than the paint with which watch dials had once
been coated to allow time to be told in the dark.
Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of presi A cluster of ten to
twenty pines had been involved.
Like a glowing shrine in the otherwise night-black fastness of
timber.
Unquestionably, the mysterious source of the light was also the source
of the sound. When the former had begun to fade, so had the latter.
Quieter and dimmer, quieter and dimmer. The March night had become
silent and dark again in the same instant, marked only by the sound of
his own breathing and illuminated by nothing stranger than the silver
crescent of a quarter moon and the pearly phosphorescence of the
snow-shrouded fields.
The event had lasted about seven minutes.
It had seemed much longer.
Back inside the house, he had stood at the windows, waiting to see what
would happen next. Eventually, when that seemed to have been the sum
of it, he returned to bed.
He had not been able to get back to sleep. He had lain awake …
wondering.
Every morning he sat down to breakfast at six-thirty, with his big
shortwave radio tuned to a station in Chicago that provided
international news twenty-four hours a day. The peculiar experience
during the previous night hadn’t been a sufficient interruption of the
rhythms of his life to make him alter his schedule. This morning he’d
eaten the entire contents of a large can of grapefruit sections,
followed by two eggs over easy, home fries, a quarter pound of bacon,