But by evening everything changed.
The forest grew dark far too quickly. In the city, darkness arrives gradually—the sky dims, the streetlights come on, the lit windows of neighboring buildings provide a constant background of human habitation. Here, the darkness came down like a lid. One moment the trees were visible, their shapes distinct against the fading sky. Then the sky was gone and the trees were gone and there was simply a darkness that began at the edge of the yard and extended without boundary or interruption until morning.
The wind came straight across the fields and slammed into the walls as if testing the house’s strength—looking for the weak point, the gap in the mortar, the board that had loosened over years of neglect. The house answered with sounds of its own: groaning, settling, the particular language of old wood in cold weather. At night I heard sounds I could not get used to, and could not always identify: cracking branches, long drawn-out howls, sharp cries that could have been animals or the wind through gaps I hadn’t found yet.
More than once I caught myself simply sitting and listening, as if waiting for something. As if the house itself was waiting.
I told myself it was grief, and the adjustment that follows grief. The particular rawness of having dismantled one life and not yet assembled another. I told myself that the sounds were ordinary—they had always been ordinary; I had simply forgotten what ordinary sounded like outside a city. I told myself that my mother had lived here alone for twenty years after my father left, and she had been perfectly fine.
I did not think too carefully about the curtains she had always kept drawn on the forest side of the house.
I had been there three weeks when the storm came.
I had watched it build over two days—a deepening of the cold, a change in the quality of the light, clouds coming in from the northeast in layers, each one darker and lower than the last. The village shop owner told me to stock up on wood and candles and to check that the roof was clear of debris. The old man next door, who I had known as a child and who was still there, astonishingly, looked at the sky and said only: not good. I bought the candles and brought in more wood and checked the phone line. The fire I had been keeping going I now fed until it was running hot, the stove ticking and sighing with the effort.
By the second evening the storm had arrived in full. The wind was different from the previous nights—not testing the walls but attacking them, sustained and relentless. The sound was immense. Branches came down in the yard with sounds like gunshots. The lights flickered twice and steadied. The temperature dropped so sharply and quickly that I could feel it through the walls, the cold pressing in from all sides simultaneously, the stove working harder than it had since I arrived.
I moved my chair close to the stove and tried to read. The wind kept changing pitch—rising to something like a scream, then dropping to a low sustained moan that seemed to come from inside the walls rather than outside them, then rising again. After a while I gave up on reading and simply sat. The book closed in my lap.
