It’s been almost a year since I moved into this house. It’s not exactly in the middle of nowhere but it’s out there some distance from town in an area made from an odd mixture of dairy farms and large suburban homes with land. I myself was searching for peace and quiet and thought I had found it in the surrounding pastures, woods, and nearly-empty roads. It was sometime in the summer that I jolted awake to some kind of noise outside. Coyotes were nothing unusual for the area, often making a racket at night with their unsettling half-crying-dog half-wolf-howl noises. Unfortunately, this was something different.
Now that I was awake, I needed a drink of water. I plodded to the kitchen with some annoyance and had just put my used glass in the sink when I heard the sound again. This time it made the hair in my neck stand on end. It was long and low like the moo of a cow but crackled like a human scream.