It’s a late afternoon on an overcast October day. There’s a chill bite in the air, not cold but just enough to send a shiver up your spine. The leaves have been turning for weeks and gold and rust vastly outnumber the green now. They lie scattered in breeze-stirred piles across the rough pavement, and along the side of the road in drifts.

As you walk along that lonely road, everything so still and quiet, it feels as if you’re the only person around for miles. There’s an empty field on your right and its contours shift as you walk along -- low, then rising, before it levels out once more near your home. That thicket of gnarled elms and brush, so dark and secretive, is just up ahead. You never pass it without thinking there’s something lurking within. But you banish that thought and study the field as you walk along and try not to hurry your footsteps. The field isn’t truly empty. In the spring and summer, a scattering of wildflowers brightens it up but now, in autumn, the flowers are gone and it’s filled with dry and faded brush and weeds and grass. It’s strewn with rocks and boulders and there’s a slab of rock that makes you think of ancient sacrificial altars.  Anything could happen in that field, you think – but you don’t know where the thought comes from. You don’t even know what it means, but still you quicken your step now and hug yourself against the sudden, sharper knife-edge of the breeze – that breeze that makes the dry, scattered leaves rustle louder. They skitter along the road in miniature whirlwinds and crackle underfoot as you pass. Those are only your footsteps, aren’t they? That is just the wind dancing them noisily along the pavement? Of course it is. There’s no one close behind you. Nothing but a shadow that catches the corner of your eye for an instant before it disappears.  It’s so quiet, you would hear if anyone was near. It’s too quiet; that eerie silence is what has you jumpy in this gathering dusky. Maybe a sound will help, you think, and you start to hum an old favorite song from childhood as you walk faster now, past that dark grove of misshapen trees. The yellow warmth of light that spills from your windows is close now. You’re at the gate and fumble with the latch, and you still hear that song even though you’re silent now, a rusty whistle that transforms to words -- “Thou art lost and gone forever…” -- scratchy, almost a growl, like nothing human should ever sound, and it’s too late to look, to run, to scream, and the last words you ever hear is that voice, low and rumbling, “Dreadful sorry…” as you’re dragged away into the dark.

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This is a little something I whipped up for Hallowe’en a few years ago (originally posted to my LiveJournal blog in 2007, apparently, and then again October 2012, after a few tweaks). For reasons known only to my muse, it stuck in my head and has gradually been developing into what would be a contemporary gothic/mystery/romance, set here in the Colorado high country. It isn’t quite there yet, but I’m hopeful that the last few pieces will fall into place one of these days.

That’s what this attempt at a gif set is about --

 https://mariaslozak.tumblr.com/post/179176724647/riley1cannon-did-i-make-a-gifset-autumnal

-- and @mariaslozak was curious to see it. 

I was typing it out on my phone, and 5 pages in, my phone died.

I hope it saved somehow. It was beautiful.