The creaking of the old timber as the house settled in the cool night thrilled me. Though I knew how heat made things expand, and coldness contract, how the changes from night to day made the wood sing, how it thrilled me. Yes, and I grew faint in fighting it. I wanted to enjoy, for a moment, that childish fear of ghosts that I really didn’t have anymore, and so I let my imagination run wild with the eerie noise.
How pleasant then grew the chills running up my spine. How alone I suddenly felt when I felt that I was not exactly alone in that old house. Whom did I expect? I had no history to play with. No tale of self-murder or any macabre nightmare confided to me by some twisted old crone warning me from my path.
No preamble. Just me and an old house in a cool summer’s night. And, I might add, there is also the weird, half plaintive howling of the wild dogs.
I shall sleep soon, and be stretched out on my bed. Shall noises proceed from my sleeping body as they do from this sleeping house? When dawn comes, shall I even remember the pleasantness of these phantoms I conjure?
I yawn and stretch and rise from this also creaking chair. The bedroom, upstairs—I suppose those steps will also sing to me as I, like Moses, go up into the darkness. Shall I find God in the rest I long for. I have had to become a child again to play with these ghosts of ghosts, and is it not said that one must be as a little child? I shall go to my father, then, and rest, peacefully, until dawn.
Tale Told 