Loons

Loons are among the most persistent sounds of Dark Score Lake, accompanying both the narrator’s intimate memories and the book’s visions of violence. Their cries begin as a mark of the lake’s beauty, acquire the weight of grief in dreams of Johanna, and become part of the lamenting, living landscape in a vision of a child’s death by drowning. Across these scenes, the birds are not merely scenery: their recurring voices bind remembered happiness to fear and historical suffering.

Presence at Dark Score Lake

During the second-book completion ritual at Sara Laughs, the narrator remembers pushing away from his IBM Selectric in mid-September and going to the kitchen. Summer visitors had mostly left; the loons’ calls across the lake sounded inexpressibly lovely, while the setting sun made the water resemble a still plate of fire. The scene’s clarity remains powerful in retrospect: the birds belong to a memory the narrator feels he could step back into, even as he wonders whether he would change anything.

The loons return as the evening deepens. After champagne, the narrator takes Johanna into his office to let her type the last line of the book dedicated to her. One final loon cries over the dark lake, its call sounding to him like something rusty turning slowly in the wind. The same birdsong thus accompanies a shared, affectionate ritual, but its roughness also gives the moment a note of passing time and vulnerability.

Calls within the Sara Laughs dreams

In the recurring dreams of that fall and winter, the narrator walks the unnamed lane toward the lodge rather than driving. The narrow track runs through woods and opens onto Route 68; timothy and witchgrass brush beneath a vehicle, while the trees close around the walker beneath a strip of darkening sky. As sunset passes, the loons call from the lake alongside crickets and rustling animals. Their presence helps establish the dream’s familiar landscape before it turns threatening.

At the driveway, the narrator sees Sara Laughs below him, its fourteen rooms assembled from additions dating across several decades. He wishes for Johanna beneath the newly visible stars. The loons’ calls are now “like loss”: the lake’s familiar sound has become inseparable from longing for his dead wife. He tries to descend toward his house, but cannot make his legs move, sensing that the place below contains something his conscious mind does not know.

The dream eventually reveals the threat waiting at the lodge: a shrouded, inhuman figure that the narrator identifies as Johanna escaping her coffin. It rushes toward him with a loonlike shriek. In the nightmare’s culminating image, the birds are the only witnesses who will hear him scream, and the return to the house becomes an imagined return to Manderley from which he will never leave. The loonlike voice does not make the creature a loon; instead, it draws the animal’s familiar call into the nightmare’s transformation of home, bereavement, and fear.

From nightmare to waking place

When the narrator later approaches Sara Laughs while awake, the nightmare’s force still governs what he expects to find. He reaches the point where the door should burst open and the white shape should appear, holds his breath, and listens instead to the lake’s soft wash and the breeze in the bushes. A loon calls, moths strike the porch light, and no shroud-monster emerges. Only then does he walk down the driveway. The bird’s call marks a small but consequential contrast: the real place retains its familiar sounds without confirming the nightmare’s anticipated apparition.

The fire vision and the past

The loons take on a different force in the narrator’s vision of the historical fire. As he reads beneath Johanna’s studio, the smell of fire intensifies and he experiences the sensation of drowning. The vision opens onto Dark Score Lake: loons scream across its hazy surface and beat their wings toward him in a line, while the sky is blotted out, ash falls, and the eastern shore burns. Their movement makes the lake’s wildlife part of the scene’s action rather than a distant background to it.

The narrator then sees a young girl in a white dress and red stockings, crying out for her father. Fred Dean runs through the narrator’s ghostly presence and takes the child into his arms. As he carries her into the lake, the loons flee toward shore; their powerful wings churn the water, and their red eyes stare at the man and girl. The birds’ retreat parallels the child’s helplessness, while their shrill cries mingle with her screams as Fred holds her beneath the surface.

The drowning unfolds under a burning crescent of shoreline. Fred tells himself he is saving his daughter, but the narrator sees that the child is struggling beneath his hands and that he does not let her rise. The birds’ cries become a lament over an act the father will later remember otherwise. In this scene, the loons’ recurring association with loss reaches its starkest form: they accompany not only the narrator’s grief for Johanna, but the return of buried violence from the Land of Ago.

Narrative significance

The loons’ calls recur across sharply different narrative moments: an affectionate domestic ritual, a repeated dream, a waking encounter with the lodge, and a vision that enters the past. Their changing sound—lovely, rusty, grief-stricken, and shrill—provides continuity without fixing the birds to one simple meaning. The lake remains recognizably alive while the narrator’s relation to it shifts from remembered happiness to mourning and terror.

That continuity also makes the loons witnesses across narrative time. In the dream, they are the only listeners available to an imagined scream; in the fire vision, they flee and cry out as a child is drowned. The novel places their calls beside human suffering without suggesting that the birds can explain or prevent it. Their presence instead keeps the natural world audible through the narrator’s return to painful memory, making the lake’s beauty and its history impossible to separate.