Howl

Nighttime in Allantide is ever-changing.

In the summers, it lands lightly. It comes on late, leaves early, dusting over the town like flour over the counters at Spelt & Rye. It spreads but is easily and quickly removed.

Heading into winter, though, the night arrives suddenly, with an almost audible thump. The tendrils of dark linger well into the mornings. It can feel like a sickness, heavy and hanging. 

One year in recent memory, the signs were clear that the winter would be an immobilizing one. The town—indeed, the entire region—had skipped autumn, leaping straight from sticky-hot and sticky-long summer sunsets to the light-switch snap of sudden nights and too-slow mornings. 

Discussions were had about the historical precedents or the lack thereof. Allantide Paper Company, the town’s beloved indie bookstore, sold out of books on winter, wintering, hibernation, and quantum physics. None of the area grocery stores could keep oranges or orange juice in stock. 

It’s not to say that a depression fell over the town, but perhaps a pall. These were a resilient people, unimpressed by multi-foot snowfalls or weeks-long droughts, but there was a sense of feeling cheated, of missing out on the pleasures of the liminal as they were shunted from one extreme to another. People’s edges were being whetted.

Some time in early November, the howling began. 

“Howling” was perhaps less-than-accurate, but it was the term that stuck. Chris Fagan, the night-time DJ on 88.9, coined it on the second or third night. He made a crack about werewolves and played a run of themed classics, everything from Warren Zevon to Tracy Jordan. The radio station received a record number of complaints the next day, although Fagan retained his post. Mostly, his bosses were thrilled that so many people were listening late.

They were, of course, only listening because they had been awakened by the sound.

If you have ever lived in the country, perhaps you understand the uncanny sensation of waking to a strange noise. The crunch of hooves or claws across fallen leaves or frosted grass. The sudden hoot of an owl near your window. Even the slam of a car door several houses away can sound, in the unending middle of a dark night, like an axe murderer having just pulled into your driveway. Blessed are those who can sleep peacefully through such distractions.

But even those easy sleepers found themselves waking on those early, black November nights. 

The sound was not quite a scream, not quite a howl, not quite a yell. The first night, it was low enough to be mistaken for a fisher cat. Indeed, old man Corson ambled out onto his porch with his daddy’s rifle and took a few shots into the trees. That usually shut up the critters for the night, in his experience. And sure enough the sound dropped away, at least on that side of town, as the shots echoed off the mountains. 

But the next night, it came back—this time louder, this time more widespread. Corson went out with his gun once more but it had no effect, which sent him scrambling back inside trying to remember what his grandmother had told him about witches and doorways. 

And in the middle of town, Lettie Hempstock leaned out of her apartment window above the bookstore. She’d heard the howling the prior night and dismissed it, but now she found herself compelled to listen. More than that, actually. 

Gently, cautiously, out the open window, she joined in. 

It would take another two or three nights for a critical mass to acknowledge that the sound was human, that it was a choir of sorts, and that that choir was growing in number. Isn’t it strange, how people hide from themselves and each other? That it takes the cover of darkness to show yourself, to let yourself express what needs expression? 

As to who began the howling that first night, who could say? No one knew who started it every night, either, except presumably the soul responsible. But soon, it wasn’t something that ‘began’ so much as resumed. In the depths of the dark, people would slip out of their houses or open their windows or climb to their roofs and—howl.

In the days that followed those nights, people looked to one another with secret smiles at the corners of their mouths. At the grocery store, at the post office, at the music shop, at the diner; everywhere you went in Allantide, you’d see two tired someones acknowledge one another. Strangers, friends, neighbors who hadn’t spoken in years suddenly waving across the street—it was a sight to see. 

There were those who didn’t know what was going on, of course. Complaints about the decreased quality of sleep were certainly prevalent. The former town selectman, Michael Bernardi, ranted extensively on social media about the way that the “hooligans were going to ruin the town’s most profitable season” as though that was what mattered most. The night after he posted that, a howler or three took up specifically in the woods around his home and, for all his bluster and bravado, it was rumored that he kept the lights off and hid instead of confronting them. 

What was it about, asked those who didn’t participate, who weren’t innately drawn to the experience—but asking such a question was automatically disqualifying and no one would answer. “I don’t know,” those who howled would respond, “but it sure is keeping me up.”  A weak response, an obvious one, but it was enough to get away. 

The howling reached its apex after two weeks, give or take. One night, as the chorus swelled and the sound flew up, up towards the peak of the mountain and out towards the river—it suddenly stopped. 

The silence was a blanket, thick and heavy-knit. It wasn’t as though any of them wanted to stop, per se, but it seemed the obvious thing to do and so… they did. But they didn’t go away, not immediately.

Every single person who had howled, screamed, hollered, yelled, shouted, wailed stood under the light of the winking moon and let the silence settle over them. It was something like peace, although it would come to feel like grief too. For a moment, they were truly united—a community, surpassing the trite ways that that term got thrown around in those days. They had said, perhaps, what they needed to say. And although they were not done feeling, would never be done feeling, they held onto the reminder that they were not alone. That their neighbors, friends, and even strangers felt the same way they had, needed to express their feelings in the same way. 

And sometimes, when they were up late and unable to sleep, they might cross to the window or step out onto the porch and look up at the sky and softly, gently, let out a little croon. And somewhere else, someone would always hear them.