Country Nights

Denise B. Dailey

Nate came up on week-ends, but otherwise, Emma was alone. She used the time to catalogue the flora and fauna on the farm, a dot on 230 wooded acres she and Nate had bought the month before. The June daylight hours were long, the weather held, and she was happy until night fell.

The City had been full of lights, sirens, a cacophony of music borrowed from neighbors. In the country, a moonless night created such an opaque density, Emma could not see her hand at arm’s length. Once the birds had nested, the silence made her feel claustrophobic, as if her head were muffled in felt. The doors hardly shut, never mind locked, and there had been rumors of hauntings. “Silly stuff,” Nate scoffed, but Emma listened to other worlds. She had taken to putting on the radio to Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz that played until dawn.

Emma didn’t want to spend her nights in the country scared of the dark. She would test herself, leave no light in the house, take no flashlight, go out-of-doors. She knew she could feel her way from the bedroom to the front door, then reach the driveway. Once she felt the gravel under her feet, she’d be fine, and if she strayed onto grass, she would sense it. Why not try?

She picked her way carefully to the front door, cringed at its rusted shriek, heard it slam, stepped out, and followed one foot in front of another to the driveway. The ever-present fog had rolled in, accordioning its own scentless density, filming her face like cobwebs. Slowly she progressed. It didn’t occur to her to fear animals, but she did not want to bump into a person. People raped, kidnapped, killed for the hell of it; animals didn’t. “That’s one hundred feet,” she guessed, as she felt the unlit house recede. Five hundred. She went on blindly. And then she heard a cough.

Emma stopped, held her breath, cursed her lack of caution and her need to prove herself brave. Someone was out there. Perhaps he was tracing her with an infrared camera. A louder cough followed. Was he teasing her? Was he coming closer? She held her breath. With steps as quiet as she could make them, Emma started to walk backwards. Ten steps. Stop. Twenty. Would he follow her to the house? Fifty. Another cough. Did it sound fainter? Was she going to get away? She turned to walk forward, stumbled onto grass, re-sought the gravel, zigzagged, her hand pressed against her mouth to stifle her own breath, until she stumbled against the unyielding door.

The door wouldn’t open. How was that possible? An ancient key was in the garage, but she couldn’t possibly go there now. She sank to the ground, rested her back against the front door, her head on her knees, afraid to look up. She heard the cough a few more times, heard it grow fainter, fall silent. At some point the sky began to lighten.

Later she learned deer coughed to warn of danger, learned she had been the transgressor on that night of experiment, but by then, there were new sounds she heard: a crash from an empty unlit room; the violent swoosh of a ceiling fan that started on its own one windless night; the capricious clicking on and off of the lock that had left her that once in the deep dark.