After a few dozes, I eventually went off but was woken by a sudden and devastating cry of what I thought must have been pain. It was not from inside the house, but right outside my bedroom. I went to the window and peered out. The moon had risen and the whole common was visible in the silver light, like a scene from a film through a heat-sensitive camera. It all seemed still and I scanned the view, trying to work out where the sound issued from. It came again, no fade-in - just an immediate scream which I was sure was human. It was in the bushes about twenty feet from the house, and continued without variation as if being produced by some sort of tone generator. And then it stopped dead, cut off and echoeless, swallowed completely by the acres of night stretching away to the distance. The first scream did not frighten me, my mind thick from sticky sleep made no judgement of the danger I should attach to such a sound and I went to the window merely to ascertain the source. However, that second ululation, with its sudden commencement and just as abrupt ending seemed ghostly and I thought must surely have been attached to something if not evil then at least a threat to me and the rest of the household. The standard reaction of fear overtook me in the silence, the magnification of my own heartbeat, the rasp of my breath and the attempt to slow it all in an attempt to help determine the source and threat of that horrible sound. And it came again, not closer or further away but from the same place, a person it must be I decided, someone in what I gathered must be mental pain by the lack of any disturbance in the bushes to betray an assault by one human on another. But this time it lasted longer. I began to imagine that it was increasing its duration based on some mathematical formula, a calculation by way of some sort of hellish music. And then the silence came again,
I fell back from the window, myself in anguish only somewhat less than I imagined in the poor soul in my garden. I had to make decisions. Should I call out to inform the tortured wretch that I was here or maybe risk my own sanity and venture out to try and give aid? And then I realised that whoever it was might have their own nefarious reasons for being in my garden, to steal or to overcome me and the other occupants to make off with our possessions. The worst possible outcome to any intervention I might effect presented itself in my mind and I circled the possible solution in a fug, with no possible chance of decision.
I might have been there till morning, letting the dawn bring clarity and resolution but the fourth terrible outcry brought me out of this woeful state and I resolved to dress and venture outside. I located my clothes and pulling them on in the haphazard fashion of one compelled to compose his vestments in the dark, for such I was, I opened the door to my bedroom and, avoiding the creaky boards that plague all such houses as ancient as ours, I made my way to the front door. Standing behind it, I looked around in the dim light provided by the moon through the door light for some weapon and immediately found an umbrella standing in the elephant's foot by the hall table. I picked it up and brandishing it like a rifle I opened the door and stepped out. The click of the latch coincided with another screaming lament from the bushes, but this time the angle of proximity gave it a different quality; the sound was clearer, I heard tiny variations, that before were lost to me by virtue of the thickness of the house walls. This new and subtle information reversed my categorisation of the sound's owner as human - it was like nothing I had heard before.
The word "banshee" came unbidden into my mind and I feared at that instant that this creature was the herald of my own death. I shook the notion away for I am a scientist, not a man given to belief in the supernatural and yet felt riven with fear at what I might confront in the bushes that in summer daylight seem so pretty and welcoming to this house. I stole myself with the thought of being a rational man and walked slowly out holding the umbrella ludicrously before me, trying to work out how to address what ever lay in wait. I was a few feet away from the door when I perceived a shaking in the shrubs in front of me. And then the sound came again, gurgling and reminiscent of one affected by influenza, an annoying cough somewhere in the back of the higher-pitch that had woken me. Again, my resolution failed me and I hung on the cusp of flight, the rational man at odds with the homunculus of self-preservation that nagged at my ear. I shook him off and continued again occupying my mind with how to speak to this monster. It was silent again and the bushes were still.
The tip of the umbrella touched the outermost leaves and the creature within sensed I was there - it did not scream again - I just sensed a fellow animal, not unearthly but not within my understanding either. I could tell it had a heart like mine and that it beat in mode of flight or fight like mine and that it breathed shallow and afraid like me. I moved further, trying to find a window through the bushes to see without having to crouch and put myself at a defensive disadvantage. It flew at me, a bristling, hissing mass of pure white, the white of the moon above, a fox, pure white, an albino, as frightened of me as I was of it. Within a second it was away across the grass of the garden and out onto the scrub of the common, flowing like mercury down a slope and was gone.
I stood in relief for a few seconds, a manic smile on my face, and then a wave of contentment flew over me. I had heard stories in the village of black foxes - evil omens only one step down from banshees as portents. But in the same breath some oldsters talked of the albino fox - one that has lasted for centuries since the first reports when Kings fought for their thrones. I laughed and screamed in joy at having seen something so rare and it was at this merriment that the rest of the house stirred, the window above the porch opened and a shadow stared out in a stance of fear until my presence was ascertained. I promised that nothing was amiss, that I would be in shortly and wasn't it a wonderful night to be outside.
Of course I know that the white fox is an explainable phenomenon, a passing on of characteristics through generations and in this one witnessing, my science has verified those hundreds of years of fable. If you had asked me yesterday in the tavern if I believed in such a tale I would have laughed and talked you down with gentle respect and bought you a beer. Tomorrow, I will be with you in your belief.
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