Hello All:
It's a big month in November at the Literary World of Tom Raimbault. Just a little over a week ago, we featured the new short novella, The Convent of Quiet Solitude. It was released on the blog throughout Halloween week. Be sure to give it a read if you haven't already. Now, in early November, we are releasing a second short novella, The Nighthawk's Ledger. And let's not forget the annual November tradition of our winter sky forecast which will be released on Thanksgiving!
But back to the Nighthawk's Ledger: It was inspired by an actual Hello All introduction made in October of 2012. I wrote, "Last night I retired early and fell fast asleep--nearly immediately upon my head hitting the window. About a half hour into my sleep I must have pulled out of the initial REM and woke up to the most annoying sound of a nighthawk circling high above my house. In that moment, I felt the bird was a scout or a messenger who circled round and round the house with something important to tell me. I could even see the bird in dreams as I fell back to sleep. What did that bird want?" And so 14 years later, we have a nice short novella about that annoying nighthawk that haunted me!
The story is not only about a nighthawk, but also about a house that always wins. (I always seem obsessed with historic buildings, don't I?" As for the main character, Daniel, the phone call comes with a shrill ring cutting through the quiet like a blade. Daniel knew that ringtone—his sister’s voice, frayed and raw with grief. But when he answered, there was no comfort in her words, only a name: Grandma. And then, the will. The house. Him—named Executor of a legacy steeped in secrets.
Blackwood Creek’s Victorian monstrosity had always been more than wood and glass. It breathed. It watched. And now, with Eleanor gone, it had claimed its final heir. Daniel knew the stories—the mirror in the hallway, the shadow that lingered just out of sight, the way the house seemed to wait. But as he stepped into its decaying embrace, he realized the truth: the house wasn’t just a tomb for the dead. It was a prison. And they were all still inside.
The phone’s shrill ring sliced through the quiet hum of Daniel’s apartment, jarring him from a half-finished report on his screen. It was late, the city lights of Seattle blurring into streaks of neon rain against the window, but he knew that ringtone. It was his sister, Elena.
He picked up on the second ring, expecting a casual check-in or perhaps news about maybe a family gathering. Instead, he was met with the sound of ragged, wet breathing.
“Daniel,” she said. Her voice wasn’t just sad; it was frayed, pulled tight like a violin string about to snap. “It’s Grandma. She’s gone.”
Daniel sat back, the chair creaking under his weight. He didn’t gasp. He didn’t cry. He felt a strange, hollow coldness settle in his chest, a void that had been waiting for years to be filled. His parents were already dust; his father gone in a car accident when Daniel was ten, his mother lost to a cancer that had eaten her away over three agonizing years. That left Daniel, his older brother Marcus, and his younger sister Elena as the last living direct descendants of their lineage. And the matriarch of it all, Eleanor, had finally joined Mother and Father.
“I’m sorry, Elena,” Daniel said, his voice steady, though his hands were trembling slightly. “I’ll come out there tomorrow. We’ll handle the arrangements.”
“There’s… there’s more,” Elena whispered. “The will. It’s been read. Grandma left everything to us, but the house… the house is tied to the estate. And Daniel… she named you Executor.”
Daniel closed his eyes. Of course she did. Eleanor had always been a woman of peculiar tastes and deeper secrets. She had watched over them after their parents’ tragedies, a formidable force of nature who lived in that sprawling, Victorian monstrosity on the edge of Blackwood Creek. It was a house that seemed to breathe, shifting with the seasons and the mood of its inhabitants.
“Marcus won’t do it,” Elena continued, her voice dropping to a terrified hush. “He’s already made that clear. He’s staying in Portland. He said he doesn’t want to go near the house. He said he doesn’t want to be associated with what’s in there.”
“Marcus always was a coward.” Daniel muttered, though he remembered the look in his brother’s eyes last Christmas; a wide, unblinking stare, as if he were seeing something just behind Daniel’s left shoulder.
“He’s not wrong,” Elena said. “Remember the mirror? In the hallway? You saw it too.”
Daniel did. He remembered it so vividly it felt like a physical bruise.
Daniel was twenty, home for a weekend visit. The house was quiet, the kind of heavy, suffocating silence that only exists in places where time has stopped. He had been helping his grandmother organize her library. Eleanor had been frail then, her skin like parchment, her eyes sharp and dark as obsidian.
“Stay away from the east wing after dark, Daniel,” she had told him, her voice raspy. “The shadows stretch differently there.”
He hadn’t paid much attention. He was young, practical. He believed in electricity, in plumbing, in the logic of things. But that night, driven by a sudden urge to check the mail, he had walked past the grand mirror in the east hallway. It was an ornate thing, framed in tarnished gold, reflecting the dim gaslight of the hallway.
He had paused to tie his shoe. When he looked up, he saw his reflection. But as he rose, his reflection remained seated for a second longer than it should have. And then, behind his reflection, in the dark depths of the glass, another shape emerged.
It wasn’t a person. It was a silhouette, deep and black, taller than a man, with no distinct features save for two pinpricks of white light where eyes should be. It had been standing directly behind him, watching him. When Daniel spun around, the hallway was empty. But when he looked back at the mirror, the figure was gone.
“I saw it, Elena,” Daniel said now, breaking the silence on the phone. “Marcus saw it too. We both did.”
“Marcus thinks it’s connected to us,” Elena said. “He thinks it’s waiting for the last of us. He doesn’t want to be the one to inherit the house because he thinks the house will take him next.”
Daniel rubbed his temples. “I’ll come out. I’ll handle the estate. But I’m not staying in that house forever. I’m just settling the papers.”
“Be careful, Dan,” she said. “The house feels different...colder...”
***
The drive to Blackwood Creek took six hours. Daniel’s sedan was a blur of gray highway and pine trees. He thought about his siblings: Marcus, the pragmatic engineer who had fled to the city, now hiding in Portland, refusing to answer calls from the estate lawyer. There was his sister,Elena, who had inherited her grandmother’s intuition, sharp and anxious. And as for Daniel, himself, he was the middle child, the one who had always been tasked with fixing things.
When he arrived, the house loomed against the afternoon sky like a tombstone. The iron gates were rusted, the garden overgrown with weeds that seemed to twist in unnatural patterns. The front door was heavy oak, carved with vines that looked suspiciously like strangling vines.
“Elena?” he called out once inside.
She was in the parlor.
The interior of the house was exactly as he remembered, yet subtly wrong. The furniture was covered in white sheets, looking like ghosts in the dim light. The portraits on the walls seemed to follow him with their eyes. Eleanor’s portrait, painted in her final year, stared down at him with a knowing, cruel smile.
Elena was sitting in a high-backed chair, a notebook open on her lap. She looked pale, her eyes wide and dark.
“Dan,” she said, standing up. She hugged him. “I’m not going to be able to stay long. But let’s look at everything and see what needs to be done. Maybe a week or two from now, we’ll get everyone up here to clean up.”
They both walked in to the kitchen. There was a small mirror above the sink.
Daniel looked into the glass. He saw his own face, tired and worried. But as he leaned in, he he could have sworn he saw something else. Behind his shoulder, in the reflection of the window, the garden was visible. But in the reflection, the trees were moving. They were swaying in a wind that wasn’t blowing in the real world. And standing among the trees was a tall, black figure. He only saw it for a split second, just long enough to write it off as optical sampling that hadn’t been processed yet. Within a split second, the garden was still and the trees were motionless. And, of course, the black figure wasn’t there.
Daniel exhaled, rubbing his temples. "Right. Let’s start with the kitchen. It’s the most urgent. The pipes were acting up last time I was here."
Elena nodded, though her fingers tightened around the notebook. "I left a list on the fridge. Mostly structural stuff, but the fridge itself is making a noise like it’s about to die."
They moved through the house methodically, checking off items on her list. The creaking floorboards and the occasional groan of the old house made the silence between them heavier. Returning to the kitchen after their tour, Daniel tested the faucet in the kitchen, again, wincing at the rust-colored water that sputtered out before clearing. Elena filled the kettle while he jotted down notes.
"You remember how Grandmother used to make tea here?" she asked, setting two chipped mugs on the counter. "She’d always say the house had its own rhythm. Like it was breathing."
Daniel glanced at the window above the sink. The garden remained still with no mysterious black figure. "Yeah. I remember."
Elena’s gaze flicked to the mirror, then away. "You saw it too, didn’t you?"
He hesitated. "Saw what?"
"The figure. In the reflection." She turned the kettle on, the gas flame hissing to life. "I’ve seen it a few times. Always when I’m alone.
Daniel forced a laugh. "Probably just the light playing tricks. Or a trick of the eyes after driving so long." But there was that one time when visiting Grandma that involved the mirror in the hallway with the black figure that had watched him. He couldn’t help but think of his parents’ deaths, which had seemed so sudden, so isolated. Had they been taken by the house? Or by whatever lived in it?
Elena poured the tea, the steam curling into the dim light. The house settled around them, the weight of its age pressing in.
“Marcus was right,” Daniel whispered. “It’s here.”
“It’s not just here, Dan,” Elena said, her voice trembling. “It’s in the walls. You can almost hear it scratching.”
“We need to burn the house down,” Daniel said abruptly.
Elena laughed, a brittle, hysterical sound. “The lawyers and Realtor will say that’s unwise . They think we should sell it.”
“To whom?” challenged Daniel. “To someone else? Someone who will become the next victim?. Alright, we’ll do it. But I’m not staying in this house for long, just long enough to handle the paperwork.”
Elena nodded, “And, again, I’m sorry I can’t stay. The kids have activities and Mark can’t take care of things alone at home.”
“No problem…” reassured Daniel.
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