The Laughing Lady

events pile up, and the thing that started the train wreck for fair was when we had to attend some mandatory work function. Who could have guessed that something that started off so well would end so badly?

  At a pleasant enough lunch, we sat at a table supplemented with one of those stylishly trendy kiosks that let you order from the table without need of a server, as if the passably fashionable sit-down restaurant we had walked into had somehow unluckily devolved into Jack in the Box before we even got settled. She asked me if I wanted to use it.

  “If I'm going to pay ten dollars for a hamburger,” I said, “I'm not going to order it from a clown's head.”

  And that, I guess, was the last smile I ever got out of her.

  After lunch we ended up sharing an elevator. It struck me again how tiny she was, standing there by the lighted panel. She told me she didn’t like elevators and when I asked her why, she said she was “afraid of the drop.” A peculiar thing, but not so curious that it should have made a sudden chill raise goose pimples on my arms.

  Which brings me to the first thing.

  I heard it last night, the woman screaming behind my house. I sat upstairs at my computer, finally contriving to let it all out, pecking out this very thing you're reading now, when I heard the scream drift through the open window above my back porch. I stopped abruptly, listening, my hackles raised, not quite believing what I had heard. A screaming woman is not a reassuring or usual sound and I was taken aback by the inconsistency of the thing. Such a sound didn't fit my world view, where women were at home or at work, being watched over and cared for by husbands or fathers, not beaten and raped and killed by predators. And it was that cognitive dissonance – that belief that what I was hearing was incompatible with what should be- that made me stop typing, move my chair back, and listen.

  The scream came again a few seconds later. It seemed to have moved a little from left to right, coming from somewhere in the one hundred-yard-deep woods that set apart my back yard from the fields of the next door neighbor. It was just loud enough to be upsetting -not so far away that it would be useless to try to render aid, and not so close that I could have seen what was happening and helped. It seemed to be… baiting me.

  I got up from my desk, chilled, and walked across the creaking boards of the next room to the open window above the back porch, looking out into the darkness of a moonless night. I could see nothing save the hulking trees in the woods, fat and lazy with summer growth, the stars pulsing dimly in the humid murk above their crowns. The scream came again as I leaned my palms against the window sill, straining to hear. The sound had moved again, now coming again from my left, but no closer. And this time I sensed something a little off key. Yes, it sounded like a woman screaming, but not exactly. And a screaming woman would likely not be moving back and forth and voicing those screams at precise, eight to ten second intervals. Still, it was a close enough thing that I grabbed my cell phone, walked downstairs and outside into my back yard, and called the police. I would never forgive myself if, after everything, it actually was a woman screaming for her life.

  I waited a harrowing ten minutes for the police to show up, listening to the screams track back and forth every few seconds, but unable to see anything. Sometimes the screams moved away, sometimes they came so close that I believed they were coming right from the edge of the woods that came up onto the cleared lawn of my back yard, the maker slyly hidden just inside the tree line. Then they would move off again.

  Finally, with no sign of the police after ten minutes, I could stand it no more. I waded into the woods, exhibiting as little good sense as I usually did. As a young man, when I normally wandered around like a gasoline-soaked scarecrow looking for a spark, fist fights and gun-play were a weekly feature and I wouldn't have thought twice about such a foolhardy effort. But I wasn't a young man anymore, and still I rushed blindly into what might have been real danger. I carried no flashlight, no arms, bumbling through the blackberry thorns and poison oak hither and thither, wearing nothing for protection but a pair of navy-blue sweat pants.

  I could have been no more than twenty yards into the woods when I heard the scream again, off to my left. I jerked my eyes that way and saw it for the first time. The summer-sweat streaming down my arms and bare back turned clammy and cold.

  Whatever it was was low to the ground, lissome and muscular, sable and blending with the black pastels of the night. A pair of green-brown eyes stared back at me from twenty-four inches above the ground, a tapetum reflecting back far more light than was available. I couldn't see it, but I had the impression of a stalking quadruped, crouched, its tail swishing back and forth. When the scream came again, there was no doubt it issued from this creature. I was looking right at it.

  I froze, still as a gravestone, fear speeding my heart like the jolt of a cattle prod. With what seemed synchronous thought, I began to slowly back away and the creature moved in the opposite direction, weaving sinuously through the undergrowth, shuffling aside dried leaves and slipping through low hanging vines, its passage plainly heard in the windless night. Neither of us, this night at least, wanted to push the confrontation.

  By the time I backed out of the woods, I was shaking and sweating uncontrollably, my legs as soft as hot taffy. I turned to hurry back into my house when the Deputy Sheriff's cruiser pulled into my driveway.

  The deputy was a big man and as I told him what had happened, the screams started up again. I felt foolishly relieved. At least there was some confirmation of what I had reported. We both stood there, listening as the screams moved back and forth with little pattern, the deputy's face betraying the same consternation mine had: it was impossible to believe it was a woman screaming, but equally impossible to just dismiss it out of hand. The deputy clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the woods, its critical beam picking out nothing but more shadow. Even with his badge and his gun, the big man reassured me very little.

  Some two hundred yards to the north of my house, a dirt road ran adjacent to the fields that curved around the woods behind my house. Probably in contravention to every police procedure known to man, the deputy had me ride with him down this dirt road to a spot where the cleared fields butted up against the woods on my property, but on the opposite side.

  We stood silent in the muggy night, the deputy's cruiser spotlight playing over the nodding heads of wheat. It happened to land on movement in the field. There it was, moving around in the field, its back below the tops of the wheat, just out of sight. We could see the wake it left as it began to move off. We stood there for twenty more minutes and heard no more screams. The deputy drove me back to my house and left. There seemed to be nothing else we could do.

  I didn't hear the screams anymore that night, but I didn't sleep, either. A more reasonable man would have closed his upstairs window, but I didn't. I didn't think I was meant to.

  Instead, I spent the next few minutes searching the interwebs for an animal sound that mimicked a screaming woman.

  And I found it.

  As I listened to the electronic file faithfully playing back the primeval sounds on the cool, digital circuits of my computer, I was possibly more chilled than when I had heard the actual screams. I played it over and over again, trying to make sure I wasn't injecting any bias into it. But it was unmistakable. I could have recorded the sound myself with a tape recorder out of my window that night.

  The most terrifying thing was knowing it had been only twenty feet away from me. And it was still out there.

  It was the sound of a Mountain Lion screaming.

  Now for the third thing. When I said before that she always reserved the best of herself for someone else, I didn't necessarily mean a different person, but perhaps a different incarnation. She never appeared to truly dislike me, but was always wary of me. It seemed a conundrum I would never riddle out. The puzzle began to fit together a little better when I finally admitted to myself that I had known her before. Not years ago, but lifetimes ago, and, when you think about it, why sh
ould that really be so odd? In a universe which is ninety-five percent dark matter and energy - things we can't even see much less explain- past lives are just a passing fancy, one of those inexpressible things that you really can't say out loud, like seeing a ghost or discerning Jesus in the butter. You could never tell anyone for fear of being labeled disturbed, but it is real enough.

  Never one to throw in much with the idea of kismet or past lives, I could no longer deceive myself about vague memories that had floated up from time to time over the years like spirits emerging from some blackened ruin in my brain. Ghosts that formed body and blood and wrote a dark story of early, seventeenth-century Wallachia, a place I've never seen. I recalled the place not from dreams, but from the first time I looked directly into her eyes. I knew instantly that she was that unformed spirit in my mind, now given substance by cordial flesh.

  I had met her in a tavern, a black-haired vixen with a smile that could light up the dark side of the world. Time had not touched her fairness with its withering hand. It had been only a few years prior that Wallachia had been completely under Ottoman rule, and a tavern, if one could be found, would have been a good place to get arrested. But the