To all my friends and family who have written to ask about me: I am alive and well and the house came through unscathed. To pat and Ann, who sent the police over to check on me when my phone wasn't working for days, than you for caring so much. As all of you must have read or seen on the news, a massive tornado came right through Greenville and smashed a path through the residential area. It looks like King Kong made a rampage, pulling up trees and lifting roofs and snapping power lines. It jumped over my house and landed in the grove out in the back of the property, knocking over many of the ancient trees planted by my ancestors. i haven't counted them yet because it is impossible to walk back there. I can see their huge roots exposed and the big empty spaces under them like caves. I will have to wait my turn for the tree men to come cut them up and haul them away, which is fine with me since so many other people are living with trees on top of their houses and they take precedence. No power (which means no heat or cooking) and no phone, but I have a gas water heater and am able to bathe. This small luxury is wonderful in the face of all this cold and dark and quiet. But - and here I am going to tell you something I perhaps should keep to myself since it sounds like I am imaging things - it is not quiet here in the house at night.
I note that my last entry ended with my deciding to go downstairs to see if the back door was locked, how I had neglected to turn on the lights down there and would have to move through the dark, which I hate. I remember that I left the manroom and entered the upstairs hall to get to the stairwell. It was unseasonably warm that night which usually presages a bad weather event of some sort, so I was surprised once again that the hall was cold, much colder than the manroom. I cursed Mr. Cook for his incompetence, jumping to the conclusion that in his tinkering with the air conditioners he had somehow set the hall on "cold", which is impossible, but the eerie cold of that one place didn't make sense to me. I stood there for a moment and tried to think this thing through. Logically, the hall should not be cold. It is part of the house and the rest of the house is not cold. Therefore the hall is unique for some reason. The phrase "subterranean waters" leapt to mind since that is the way incongruities are often explained in haunted house books. But that couldn't be the reason because, for one, the house is built up on brick pilings as all old houses are around here. You can crawl under this house and get into a good squatting stance, it is so high off the ground. And, for another, I don't believe in ghosts or haunted houses. Usually I ran through the hall, but that night I stood and waited, hugging myself for warmth. I waited and waited, shivering and trying to keep my teeth from chattering, attempting to figure out what in the hell was going on out there.
Just then the wind picked up a bit and I heard the unmistakeable sound of the power transformer blowing out up the street. Every light went out so even the dim light from the manroom disappeared and I was standing in the blackest, deepest dark. I heard a moan start up through the sound of the wind but realized immediately that is was the sound of the city weather siren. This could only mean a tornado was coming - any daughter of the South knows this as we are plagued with tornadoes down here - and I knew I should take some kind of cover. Where should I go? My mind drew an absolute blank. No basement, no shelter. I suppose the bathtub should have occurred to me but I ended up going to the place I would have chosen as a child: under the big canopy bed in what had been my grandmother's bedroom.
It is so huge and sturdy it drew me as the only really safe place in the house. Still shivering, I stumbled to her room in the dark and climbed through the dust ruffle and under the bed, pulling the quilt off and taking it down there with me. I bundled up as best I could and prayed for safety. It seemed that we then entered a kind of quiet period where the wind softened and the trees stilled. Perhaps it was the "eye", if tornadoes have eyes. I knew it was only a lull because the siren began to sound again. It was then that I began to feel the cold creep under the bed. I pulled the quilt up tight and opened my eyes wide, being as still as I could be. I'm not sure why, perhaps it was just instinct. I wasn't especially afraid at that point, as I recall. I guess I thought it was just getting cold outside, but then I thought, no, it's that same kind of creepy cold I feel in the hall. A cold that goes through you, that holds you close. As I lat there I began to hear a sound, a sound like someone whispering.