October Wind

I…
Am…
Here…

Three words separated by a silent heartbeat. 
Words isolate in the Wind.

Music: Garden of Delete, Oneohtrix Point Never

The gales had been forecast for days to be at their worst over the weekend. He prepared, not in a survivalist sense but to be comfortable with warm food and a long list of content to stream and logs for the fire. He had not forgotten the cat and had doubled the boxes of hard soft nuggets he preferred.

Through the Saturday afternoon he cleaned house, emptied and cleaned the kitchen bin, the wastepaper basket and even the small bin in the bathroom. he washed all the dishes, the towels and then the laundry, all dried in the drier. He polished, or at least he wiped vigorously at the dining table. It was if he was preparing for a visitor.

The wind rose during the early evening on the same day and the trees, still mostly in green leaf though bronzing, roiled with the waves of invisible air. He stood outside for a while watching the wind rise and fall in vigorous gusts then dropping to quiet as if the storm had passed but then taking up the branches and leaves, the pine needles whirling them, playing catch from one gust to the next. It began to rain, wet bullets fired from the wind catching him randomly, sparse shots, inaccurately rifling around him bursting into full machine gun torrents forcing him back into the house.

He retreated to watch the storm, with the cat on the window sill. It was a storm like any other in October but the air was so warm and soft, even the rain had been warm as it hit him. And there was a smell to it which he couldn’t place.

He fed the cat. He built a fire in the grate. He prepared food, thick soft toasted cheese, he opened wine and poured a deep purple glass. He ate and drank watching a film streamed at some incongruous rate of bits through the phone line and radiated inside his home. The cat had gone out of the cat flap and came in again as he was drowsing on the couch. The cat called for attention and he answered and they had an approximated conversation about the weather and how wet he, the cat, was and whether some more food would help. He stood and watched the cat eat food that was already in his bowl and he added a few treats. Looking around the room he resolved to clear it in the morning and he retired to bed with the wind howling louder than ever.

He could have not said he slept badly but he had woken in the night and the wind was whistling at the far corner of his bedroom window frame a keening, breathing banshee and it had taken him some time to fall back asleep. As he fell asleep again he thought he heard a voice and words but on waking he couldn’t remember what was said just the feeling of something he should remember. The cat jumped on the bed, complained loudly to him and he got up to feed him.

During the Sunday morning the sky was steel, the wind was harsher twisting the branches harder but the air was still warm and heavy and though not raining damp. You could prove bread in this, he thought. Until the afternoon the sun was behind thick cloud but the cloud smeared thinly in places and the sun flashed through it and the flash of yellow light gilded the trees and almost scorched the exposed skin.

He stood on the porch as the wind dropped and the heat rose along with that smell that he couldn’t distinguish the previous day. The air enveloped his mouth and nose like a warm, damp flannel and it stank of rotten potatoes, of stagnant water, of steeped rotting nettles, of mud, of age and rotting. He held his breath and went back inside.

He prepared again for a similar night but after he had fed the cat and sorted what he was going to make himself the power cut, and house was in gloom with the wind even higher. ‘The substation is down I guess’, he thought. He checked his phone, no signal, no internet, ‘the mast too’.

He foraged under the sink and in cupboards and gleaned an assortment of candles. He went from room to room setting candles in dishes and odd candlesticks and the rooms flickered as he moved about and the draughts hissed and whistled through the window frames. He went back to making the dinner on the gas stove.

In stirring the pot, vegetables, tomatoes, tomato puree, wine the cutting and stirring, the silence, except for the wind, he found himself listening to all the sounds of the wind and its interaction with the house and the outside. The deep background rumble that could be the storm, the sibilance of the branches and leaves whipped, the whistled notes and breathing against the front door sucked out and back against the frame, so many rhythms and cadences, moaning chords and crashes. There…a slate crashing, tumbling. He felt himself inside an enormous discordant symphony.

Then he heard a cry, a recogniseable cry, of the cat. He went to the door thinking the cat was just being lazy as he went to open it he plainly heard words whispered through the wind.

“I am here”.
“I am here”.
“I am here”.
 
Repeated, each word distinct and separated by a pause.

He hesitated then opened the front door. The wind fell to nothing as he did and he felt the humid air retreat like a tide with something like cool air replacing it. He walked into the dark, he could still smell the foetid air, he could feel it getting warmer again as he walked to the edge of the garden calling the cat. He thought he heard it again in front of him to the right, no the left. The clouds were heavy it was pitch black and he walked, half crouched hands outstretched in front of him. His foot twisted and gave way and he fell full length on the ground which was wet, soft soil.

His face was in the soil, he could taste the earth and grit and smell the same tainted air. As he began to move he felt a weight on his back pushing him down and then pressure on his head holding him in the soil. He shivered and tried again to move the weight held him down at head, shoulders and calves but he could not tell by what or how. He writhed and found his arms pinned with weight, with mass and then a breathing in his ear. The voice repeated the same three words. He shrank in disgust at the voice, the air the wet earth clogging his nose and mouth and the helplessness.

The weight moved across him, but he could feel nothing though the hairs on his skin, his neck, the back of his hands rose and followed the motion as if caressed but the weight increased then lessened and increased again. The weight breathed against him and the voice whispered harshly against his ear, he imagined the lips, the tongue almost touching his skin and each word had a warmer foul smell with it of decay.

And then as it had come the weight vanished, the air cleared and he lifted his head, the cat called somewhere behind him near the house. He pressed hands and knees into the earth and stood. He was still confused. He turned and walked out of the flower bed, down the path and into the house. The cat sat in front of his bowl, waiting.

“Was it you then, cat?”, the cat waved its tail slightly, sweeping the floor.

He fed him. He could not get rid of the the feeling of helplessness and somewhat mechanically he showered the earth from him and got into bed. He lay staring into the dark.

He woke in the morning with no feeling of having slept and the same mood almost he supposed of depression. After half of the day like this he became tired of it and went into town and in the ordinary course of tiny transactions for food, papers, books he gradually shook it off. Over the next few months the entire episode faded and he had decided that though he could not explain how that it must have been the cat standing on him and he just panicked. He did not tell anyone he could not think how to start it.

It was coming near to Spring, almost April and he had not thought of that night for weeks and his mood was good and sunny. The weather was blustery but not violent, the rain wet but nothing in that. On the last Sunday in March the clouds compacted across the sky and shimmered like fine steel, they descended slowly through the day and became mist and then fog. The fog deadened all noise, all sounds and in opening the front door for the cat, lazy again, a slow breeze came into the house, a warmth and a choking smell of foul decay and behind him sounded a voice.

“I am here”.
“I am here”.
“I am here”.