Theme 646: Signs
On
the first night, at 1:17 AM, a high screaming whistle blared across the town of
Ipswich in four distinct intervals of increasing length, followed by a deep but
rapid series of knocks that shook window panes and set off three car alarms.
The old widower Elton Dunne’s sheepdog began howling incessantly as a result,
while the McCullers’ dobermans barked and yapped themselves into a frenzy. The
light on Judge Lear’s porch went on, as did the light on Maggie Carroll of Maggie’s
Sweet Treats’ porch across the street, and both Maggie and the Judge emerged
from their front doors wearing nightgowns and bearing shotguns. Sheriff
Calvino, in response to a deluge of calls from familiar voices, spent the next
two hours roaming the perimeter of the roughly four square mile town of 1,717
residents with her fourteen inch Maglite throwing its beam across trim lawns,
unlit neon signs, empty lots, and open fields. She found no indication of
what had made the noise.
On
the second night, at exactly 1:17 AM again, the high screaming whistle returned,
in the same four intervals, followed by the same resounding series of low
knocks, which resembled the cachinnation of a malevolent gibborim. This time, a
number of Ipswichians were awake and ready to test out their theories about
what the mystery sounds might be. Kenneth Virgil, a journalist and local radio
personality, had recording equipment slung around his neck and was holding out
a pair of cardioid condenser mics attached to a boom to capture the aural visitation
in richer detail; he believed the sounds were caused by low flying secret
experimental aircraft, and he wondered if the government could be held accountable
for these disruptions. Victoria Ballard, the proprietor of both the Ipswich
Cineplex and the Ipswich Pup & Grill on Main Street, had convinced herself,
and had half-convinced the circle of friends and neighbors she had invited to
listen on the Pup & Grill’s deck, that the phenomenon was a deliberate
message of extraterrestrial origin, sent to Ipswich by beings from a distant
star, and that it only needed to be properly decoded to be understood. She had
even put in a call to an observatory at a university in a neighboring town. The graduate student there assured her that they
would look into it. The two longtime friends Dr. Allen Ibsen, a general
practitioner at Ipswich Clinic, and Walter Poe, the science teacher at Ipswich
High, both believed that the sounds were of much more mundane, terrestrial
origin, but they differed vigorously over the exact nature of this origin. Dr.
Ibsen believed that the whistles and knocks were coming from malfunctioning equipment
at a lumber mill up on a nearby mountain and were carried down through an acoustic
resonance effect—whereas Walter Poe reasoned that since the water table had
been unusually high that year, the sounds must have been caused by air escaping
from previously dry rock formations around Eemian Lake as the water cooled. Walter won the coin toss the friends
staged, and so the two spent the night on lawn chairs next to a cooler full of
beer on the bank of Eemian Lake to see if Walter’s theory was correct. None of
these theories, however, could either be confirmed or discounted definitively by the
evidence gathered by the Ipswichians that night.
On the third night, more
than half of the town was awake at 1:17 AM, waiting for the return of the
whistles and knocks, grouping in their back yards or in the cement lot outside the Pup & Grill or on quilts laid out in Cold
Creek Park. One national news
outlet had even run a short piece on the event, fueling further speculation.
This time, however, 1:17 AM came and went in silence. Nor did the phenomenon
return on subsequent nights. And neither the meaning nor the origin of the
signals (if that is indeed what they were) has since been discovered.
Explanatory Postscript:
When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve
compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the
following sources: 501
Writing Prompts; 25
Creative Writing Prompts; Examples
of Themes; List
of Themes; 365
Creative Writing Prompts; 100
Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List
of Journal Ideas; and Top
10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three
ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the
tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have
rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever
roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.
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