What I heard last night

They may as well have been playing basketball upstairs with as much thumping and thudding, heavy footfalls running here and there, shouts and collisions. The couple (are they a couple) that live upstairs are in their early 20's, with all the lifestyle up-late's of that age, and we've become used to a general awareness. But this was something else. This was a hurricane of pounding and wrenching and leaping around. "I'm going to have to go up there," I said to myself, remote in hand. The rest of the family was in bed, whereas I'd stayed up to watch some of the "real Jesus" oxymoronic pseudo-science a-news-ualities on the National Geographic Channel. "I'm going to have to go up there and ask them to stop before they wake the kids." I grumbled and they tramped.

Then it went up a notch. A dog started howling. "I didn't know they had a dog upstairs?" I chafed. They were a symphony. Their instruments, by wind and strike, the percussive membrane of ceiling and floor, wall and window. "Woof! Woof! Woo-oof!" went the dog. "Thump, bam, bada-da-da-da-d-ad-ad-a-da-daadaaa, thud!" went the neighbors.

Then it got bad. Suddenly, for no reason, the barking dog suddenly began screaming. Its howl was one of terrible agony. Primal, bloody, almost a woman's scream, it writhed vocally so loud the room itself seemed to take it up. It was everywhere, even in my head. I stood straight up in socked feet. "What is that?" I asked it the way a man asks when he doesn't want to know. 10 seconds. 20 seconds, screaming, screaming, screaming. I stumbled into the hallway and out the door, turning in the open hallway and rushing out under the sky to look up at the windows of the apartment above. The screaming came from everywhere, an open, terrible scream. I struggled to stay, to go up and nock, and could I even tell--did the scream come from upstairs? It seemed to bleed from every window, every car, every tree. "Maybe I'm an idiot for even going up there?" I said. I went back inside. L. was awake. "It woke me up," she said. "What is it?" "A dog, I think--from upstairs." "The people on the other corner have a dog," she said. "I'm going to go back outside" I started, "I should probably call the police." Images of police vehicles, burly men and women asking questions, knocking on doors, wheeling lights biting into every cornea, every window.

And then it stopped. The screaming stopped. The noise upstairs--the gallop of an hour--stopped. Nothing.

Now, I did nothing about this. For all I know, there are bodies upstairs right now. For all I know, there had been plans to murder that dog, if it had been a dog. Would I have interrupted some scene of nightmares if I'd gone upstairs? Perhaps pulled into a struggle for life? All I can say is the scream--that scream--no living thing should ever make a sound like that.