While I sat at my desk upstairs and contemplated the tauntingly blank screen, trying to summon the gumption to write, the TV downstairs erupted into mad life.

"Johnny Damon!" it cried, then seemed to change its channel, or perhaps there was some other reason for the garbled non-sequitur that came, some obscure mishap in the DVR recorder or the cable box. I walked downstairs to shut the damn thing off but like sometimes, it didn't turn all the way off; the sound went out and the picture disappeared but the screen retained the faint luminescence of a moonlit night.

Now the wind's picked up and in the night behind me there's an insistent creak I've never heard before, a metal chirp, the complaint of some lifeless thing. It's a sound that belongs in a tiny town along the coast of Wales.