Bremen-town Musicians From Hell

Has it happened to you? Is it still happening?

For almost 2 months now, the animals in my neighborhood cry out in what can only be described as fearful anguish. Not just a couple of dog or a cat in heat leading on the tom cats prowling in the bushes, but every single animal in the entire neighborhood.

The noise was jarring at first, enough to divert my attention from a movie I was watching or forget I was eating dinner or a snack. Always at 11 PM every night for weeks, a wind-up clockwork chorus of howls, screams, and haunted squawls that begins abruptly and ends without comment. Horses, dogs, cats, and every other animal in the area, even the deer and possibly a bear or two, scream in one ululating, tortured voice that last for a couple of minutes and then stops as if all the animals die at the same moment. Once was jarring, twice bordered on shock, and every night for weeks has been shocking and then interesting and now I am curious, bordering on fearful of what is coming.  

Something is definitely coming. Even I feel it. 

The hellish chorus of what can only be described as screaming souls trapped in fiery torment has moved on from 11 PM to 3 AM and 5 AM and 1 AM, the same time for days on end before the animals' torment finds another time. Something is happening, but what? It is ripping the souls of all the neighborhood animals from the roots at the same time and from all of them. No owner yells at the dogs or horses or cats or wild animals to stop. No gun is fired. No human voice joins the tormented chorus.

Nothing else is happening that blunted mortal senses can discover.

And no one talks about it . . . until now.

Have you heard it, these Bremen Town Musicians from Hell? Do your neighborhood animals cry out with tortured screams at the same time every night, screaming for a minute or two, and stopping as if they abruptly went mute or had their throats slashed at the same moment all at once? 

This is not the skittishness that comes over animals just before an earthquake as they respond to the sub-harmonics of the deep bowels of the earth as the ground beneath their feet rolls and twitches before turning over and opening deep gashes or thrusting upward as though disemboweled from within. This is not simply the restive pacing and pawing before a volcano rains fire and ash. This is something else, something profound, something coming that will rock everyone's world. This is something to fear, something to flee, something to beware and we will not be prepared. 

But what is it? How much longer do we have?