Satan's Campfire (eBook)

THE INEXPLICABLE SOUND

The search for the source of “the sound” began in earnest about three months after we moved into the old Chanooga Springs cabin, our dream refuge. We put just about everything we had into this house—we loved it that much. We paid cash for it. All we had after buying it was my modest pension and two college savings funds. Upon our initial arrival at the place there was no hint of any problem at all. Everything was fine. But it was about three months after we got settled that the diabolical screech emerged in my upstairs study. It was annoying as hell from the beginning. It was unnerving. We had to find the source of it. But that task was made difficult by the fact that we couldn’t tell from exactly where the sound was emanating.

I began my attempts at solving the riddle by excavating through all my electronic devices. The sound had an unmistakable high-pitched electronic quality. In fact, my first efforts involved replacing batteries in every alarm device in the cabin. I was all but certain the sound was a low-battery indicator from one of those devices. So, starting with the smoke detectors, I replaced the batteries in each of the alarm units. Then, after I realized there had not been a resolution, I replaced the fire alarms themselves, as well as a few other monitoring devices that were placed around the second floor. Still the high-pitched squeal continued.

I should clarify: It was not a continuous sound. It was randomly intermittent. And it was not really that loud—but it was so high-pitched it was instantly irritating. The spring-time singing and warbling of the birds would be spontaneously shattered by this insidious, metallic intrusion. I would be sitting there at my desk in my study, and it would begin. I sensed malevolence in this intrusion. I would cringe and cuss. “Fuck no, here it comes again…” I would get up and slowly walk around the room, trying to ascertain from where the sound was coming. But it was amazingly elusive—I could not determine the source. When at my desk, it sounded like it was coming from the fireplace; when at the fireplace, it sounded like it was coming from the credenza on the opposite side of the room. It was like chasing the arc of a rainbow: I’d get there and it would have moved.

Narrowing the scope of the mystery somewhat was the fact that this phenomenon originated exclusively in my upstairs “library/study.” (I call it the former; Becca calls it the latter; she says if you can’t check-out books, it is not a library. I may alternate between the terms as I make an effort to defer to my wife’s linguistic preference.) We could step one foot outside of the study and not hear a thing from the hallway, even though there was a strong resonation of all other sounds, even to the point of echo. But some acoustic characteristic of this screech kept it captive with me in my study, where it was slowly driving me insane.

My daughters and wife did not take my complaints too seriously at first. They had heard the sound, but only fleetingly. The neurosis-inducing effects of this insidious sound took a little while to accumulate. It was like death by a thousand paper cuts—each hour of that staccato squeal wore on my soul and fueled my ire. In short, I was really getting pissed. But the thought of abandoning my study was never contemplated—that room was my sole sanctuary in the old cabin. My books, clocks, art, and travel artifacts were all proudly on display. The room was mine—and it reflected me. It reminded me of who I am and where I came from. This self-indulged atmosphere, I thought, was good for my writing. As a man enters his fifties, he needs to be reminded of where he came from, and his core values—so he can remember where he’s trying to go. And, just like a twelve-year-old should have her own room to help establish her identity, so too should an older person—to maintain that identity.

My reclusive arrangement was temporarily shattered when the downstairs television and computer both went on the blink in the same week. Then, Daddy’s Study was instantly transmogrified into The Family Room. The sanctity of my private place was put on hold, and in came the full crew, with all their friends and associated pets and personal effects, for ample upstairs doses of television and computing. Replacing the downstairs electronics became a priority, but we were unable to replace them immediately. Thus, for about two months I had an incessant slate of visitors in my study.

The girls knew, though, that Dad’s Study was a somewhat more formal place than all the others in the rustic refuge we called home. They tended to be on better behavior when in that place. They truly were laudable in their respect for the things there, and the intellectual and spiritual ambience I tried to maintain. Thus, it was with great shock that I came back from work one day to find my desk moved from its normal place of situation, table lamps on the floor (upright and unbroken), the sofa moved to the side of the room, and many of the items from the walls removed and down on the floor. In short, the place had been virtually ransacked.

I called downstairs to my wife, Becca. “What the hell happened in here?” My thirteen-year-old daughter, Myre, normally so soft-spoken and respectful, pulled open her heavy bedroom door and shouted into the hallway: “We’ve got to find the source of that f-ing squeak. It is driving me insane. Insane!” Her door then slammed shut with a violence which I had never before experienced coming from her. Mariah (age seven) then opened her door and shrieked: “Yeah, I’m insane also!”

A conciliatory conversation later that evening revealed the following account from Myre:

“I went in to your study to catch up on some emails and to check-in on Instagram. I was there for just a few minutes before that squeak started up. After a few moments of hearing it, I made a resolution: I’m going to solve this mystery and win accolades from my dad. Doctor Who would expect this from me, as well as Sherlock, and Dean and Sam from Supernatural. So, I focused on the sound…I deduced it was coming from the chair...every time I moved it just ever-so-slightly, there was the squeak. So readily resolved! I clearly envisioned the problem: The chair is made from old pieces of reclaimed teak wood—it looks like it had been an old wagon wheel, or some type of a rustic cart. It has been screwed together, and there are vestiges of metal from the original construction of whatever it had been. Those metal parts are stress bearing. Either one of the newer screws, or one of the original metal components, has fractured. As we sit in the chair, the metal piece is connecting with its fractured counter-part, and friction from the stress between the two adjacent metal pieces generates the god-awful sound.”

I responded: “That’s a solid analysis. I applaud you. But why did you move everything else in the room around? And couldn’t you have moved the furniture back afterward?”

“I needed to test my hypothesis, of course,” Myre responded. “So, I moved your old teak desk chair to the other side of the room and sat down in it. I wiggled and twisted in it for ten minutes. There was no sound at all. I could not re-create that squeak from the chair at all at that location. So, I deduced, maybe there is something about the floor at the location of the desk which stresses the legs in a particular way. I moved the chair to twenty different locations to see if I could get just one little squeak. No such luck. There was no squeak whatsoever from that chair at any of the alternative locations.

“But then I realized the obvious explanation: the squeak wasn’t coming from the chair at all. The squeak was coming from the floor. This explanation was even more compelling and obvious. The thick oak planks have been nailed down. A fractured nail is grating against itself in the floor, and the vibration is magnified and transmitted around the room—thus explaining our difficulty in identifying the precise source location for the sound—the sound is coming from the entire floor board.

“So, to test this hypothesis—as if it needed testing, it seemed so conclusive—I put another chair at your desk. I used that old Ethan Allen chair because its legs are spaced in about the same configuration as the teak chair, albeit the legs are narrower. I put the Ethan Allen there and sat down on it. More wiggling—nothing. More wiggling—nothing. I then tried all four of your various chairs, and the bar stool—nothing. I jumped up and down on the spot—not a single squeak. Nothing.”

Her analytical method was unassailable. (I think she might make a good Government Sleuth someday!) But the mystery of the vast disarray of my study remained: “Darling, why did you feel the need to move everything else in the room around? So far, you’ve only confessed to moving four chairs. What the hell happened in there?”

She paused for a moment and then slowly responded as if she knew I would not believe or fathom her testimony. “I did put all four chairs back. But as I put the teak chair back in front of the desk, a really weird thing happened. I wasn’t even sitting in the chair; I was standing behind it—but the minute I put it back at that location it was like a thousand squeaks were unleashed—the way they came out was like I...