By 
IT’S actually more like a screaming – a child or young woman screaming – and it’s the sort of sound you don’t enjoying hearing in the dead of night.
It carries a distinct timbre of dread and if you aren’t having a nightmare, it’s sure to give you one.
For some weeks now, I’ve been hearing it, most often around midnight after the last light in the house has been switched off and everyone is tucked up in bed. Always, it is pre-empted by a low moan from Waffle, like a warning of what is to come and whilst I would earlier have dismissed such moans, I now know them to a precursor to something more chilling.
Usually I sleep with the window cracked open, even in colder weather. But since this screaming started, I habitually close the latch. It’s strange how a person becomes accustomed to preparing for the worst even when hoping for the best.
And yet, even with the windows closed fast and even with the vents shut, these howling screams tear through a bedroom’s silence; they pierce sleep and they have the tendency to make the listener feel small and vulnerable and alone.
Had I not witnessed with my own eyes the beast making the sound, I wouldn’t have believed it possible. Of course, I have Waffle to thank for that encounter.
A few nights after the first screams and after discussing at length the perpetrator during the cold light of day, I had taken Waffle outside late one evening to attend to his toilet. One second he was at my side, the next he was bounding over the ditch and into the field. Fully dark already, I scanned the field with the torch until I spotted him in the long grass. He had stopped and seemed to be staring at something in the darkness, far enough away that the torch couldn’t reach. One second he was within the beam of the torch, the next he was gone. I called for him to come back and then I whistled. I scanned the field as far as the torch would allow but I couldn’t find him.
Suddenly he was at my side again panting and wet from the grass.
On the way back to the house I continued to scan the field, wondering as I did what had caught Waffle’s attention. He was whining by now, a soft almost imperceptible thrill, the kind he makes when he’s anxious. Then I saw them, the yellow flash of eyes peering back at me from the darkness. It was one of the local Sika deer, some of whom we regularly see around the house, usually first thing in the morning or late at night. And then it screamed.
“Come on, Waffle, let’s get out of here!”
Although I knew what I was seeing and consequently, what I was hearing, the sound lost none of its chill. It carried the same timbre of dread, the same hopeless lament, the same terrible loneliness.
Now at night as I close the window and I climb into bed and I hear Waffle’s low moan, I know what’s coming. Despite also knowing what stands in the dark with its maw turned to the sky, I can’t stop the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with chill.
What does it want? My imagination asks. And then I have to tell myself not to squirm.
Who knows what it wants or needs. At least I know that it isn’t anything worse than a deer.
Or was it the spectre of a deer that I saw in the torch’s beam? Or something worse as an incarnation of a familiar animal?
After that last light in the house is switched off and the room becomes night, knowing – believing – that it’s a deer braying outside the window… Somehow that doesn’t help.
