Vixen's Screams

I had always hated the cries of red foxes. Now, I’m afraid of them. 
You know the sound, right? It’s the one you hear in the dead of night, stirring you from slumber or making your head swivel. It makes you stop whatever you were doing, turn on the outdoor lights in a bid to scare it off, and check to make sure your cat is inside. If they aren’t inside, you open the front door and call out for them, and hope that the fox didn’t get to them. They always come back though, and every time you sigh with relief, scoop them up, and give them lots of love and baby talk. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go. 
Unable to sleep, I was snacking on a sleeve of rice cakes, when I heard a familiar-sounding cry. To call it a cry doesn’t quite do it justice. It sounds more like a short, shrill shriek, as wrenched from a woman’s throat. I knew the drill: switch on the outdoor lights and check on the cat. I remembered Hoagie didn’t come in before dark, so I went out to the front room and was making for the back porch, when I noticed the motion-activated light on the back porch (it’s solar powered) was on. I was relieved, because surely Hoagie tripped it. I looked out the full panel window of the back door, expecting his sweet little face looking back up at me through the window, but he wasn’t there. I opened the back door and called for him. “Hoag. C’mere Hoag.” The night was still: no breeze, and not even the crickets were chirping. Maybe he was just playing hard to get; sometimes he’ll coax me to follow him out into the yard a ways before I can grab him. I wasn’t in the mood for that game, I being as naked as I was and it being as dark as it was. I closed the back door and called out the front door. “C’mere Hoagie.” He never uses the front door; it’s just so he can hear my call. The streetlight across the street had gone out again too, leaving a lot in the dark. “C’mere Ho-” I was cut off and startled by another scream. I thought it was odd that it didn’t shut up while I called. It sounded close. Well, Hoagie was bound to come running. Sometimes he doesn’t, but he always turns up sooner or later. He’s a Maine Coon, after all, and a big one; that big bastard could make a bear swerve. 
I returned to my rice cakes, waiting on Hoagie, and grabbed myself some strawberry seltzer water. As I brought the cracked-open can to my lips, something tripped the light again, rustled the cucumbers on the back porch and thumped off, causing me to almost drop my can and splash myself with it. I don’t recall anything so large moving on the back porch before; I live in a suburb, so anything bigger than a dog is rare. My eyes also caught something wormlike darting out of view. Maybe that had just been an opossum’s tail, but I don’t remember opossums being so…swift. I slid past the kitchen table to the back window to see if I could catch another glimpse of whatever it was, but I missed it. 
Again, I heard that hideous screaming, and the more I listened to it, the more it sounded wrong. Yes, it sounded like a vixen’s call, albeit a little deeper than others I’ve heard on the Discovery Channel, but vixen’s calls are mating calls. Red foxes, such as live here, mate in December at the earliest, and March at the latest. 
It was late July. 
Something wasn’t right; I could gather that much. I steeled my nerves, and called out the back door twice more: “Hoagie!” I called out more loudly than before, almost desperately. “Hoagie!” Still Hoagie didn’t come. One more time I slowly opened the front door. I began to call, but as I looked to my left from the front step, I saw what was making those screams, and my blood congealed and my throat seized up. It wasn’t a fox. I don’t know what it was. It was furless and pale. It was a mess of long, crooked limbs. I couldn’t tell where they began or ended. I couldn’t tell if it had feet or hands or even a body, but it definitely had a head, with long, black strands of hair, without a forehead, without a nose, without lips, and with bulging eyes that were almost all pupil. If eyes are the windows to the soul, no one had been home to close those for decades. I couldn’t look away. I could hardly move. Its jaws opened and out from that maw of black teeth sounded that repugnant scream, that was now all the more hideous for the thing that created it. Movement came back, but every movement was slow and tremulous. It could have been an hour or it could have been a second. As soon as I was back behind the threshold, as soon as I broke eye contact, I acted on autopilot: I slammed the door shut, locked it, sprinted to the back door, locked that, locked the windows and drew all the shades. 
By morning I was still curled up on the floor. I didn’t get any sleep that night. And Hoagie never came home.
Category:Animals
Category:Monsters