They make a lot of noise, the ghosts here. I’d daresay I have grown to tolerate it, but t’is not true. Some nights it is the sound of laughter—a threatening laughter. Others, I hear grinding metallic squeals. Thus, I bolt awake and tremble, with an image of starved hogs imprisoned down a dried out well. The worst was the scraping. A distant scratching sound would gradually come at me and envelop my hearing until I was certain I would go deaf. With the last instance of this, I swear in God’s name to you now that I felt a hot breath on my ear.

It had been seventeen years since my uncle, an oil man of great triumphs, had vanished. He was not a typical enterprise head in terms of greed. A portion of his earnings had secured this hundred-year-old vineyard estate. With the majority of his oil company’s revenue, uncle Renald donated to the town development. Renald’s employees benefited from wages quadruple they would find elsewhere. Suffice to say, he was a man to be missed at his post.