Screams in the Night

When I was nine, I stayed the summer with some friends of my parents.  The friends, who I will call Donna and Hank, had an 18 month old daughter, named Fawna.  They had recently moved into some quarters on Fort Irwin.  They told me that before they had moved in a husband and wife lived there.  He used to beat her a lot.  Rumor was that he would tie her long blond hair to doorknobs and beat her.  One night, he killed her.  Then, he walked out and killed himself.  He shot himself in the head in the yard.  When I went to stay with them, there was still traces of blood in the yard.  Once in a while we would find a blond hair on a door knob.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night we would hear screaming, and there was no one around.  I slept on the floor in the baby's room.  I was so scared, I huddled up in a ball n the corner of the room.  A couple of times, I even wet myself, because I was too afraid to get up and go to the bathroom.  Over the course of the summer, Hank seemed to become possessed.  He began to drink more and more.  He became increasingly violent.  Three days before I went home, Hank beat up his wife really badly, and went to the stockade.  My parents stopped talking to them after they came to get me, but I can still hear those shrill screams in the middle of the night sometimes.