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been awakened by a strange sound. The longer he had listened, the stranger it had seemed. As he had gotten out of bed to seek the source, he had been surprised to find he was afraid. After seven decades of taking what life threw at him, having attained spiritual peace and an acceptance of the inevitability of death, he’d not been frightened of anything in a long time. He was 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 Margarite 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.
    Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of pressure, 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.
    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