Outside another gust of chill wind buffeted the house.  That’s usually a good reason for most people to stay inside, but it felt more like a calling to me.  As I stepped outside, the skeletal scraping of leaves blown across pavement created a dry music accompaniment to the sighing of the wind through those leaves too stubborn to let go of the tree.  I shivered a little bit, partly from the cold partly from who knows what.  As I pulled my jacket tighter and headed up the street, the taste of smoke and coming winter permeated the air all around, reminding me of campfires from my past.  It was one of those nights that help you remember how great it is to be alive, every sense full, active, almost overflowing.

There was no moon out, just a few faint stars and clouds whipping by as if they had somewhere better to be.  Maybe they did.  Across the street I could barely make out the other houses through the black, everything I saw was distorted and changed by the play of shadows.  When is a door not a door?  When it’s ajar.  Cheap joke, not really funny, but it felt about right.  In the brightness of the day the monotony of the walk I was taking now would press down on me: every house the same, differentiated only by who has a picket fence, who doesn’t, and where precisely you planted your roses.  Tonight?  That house over there looked distinctly like a skull, this one, a haughty old sentinel, still another one down the way, a clock.

Further up the street, something caught my eye.   It could’ve been anything, of course.  From where I was it was hard to even make out a shape, just a fast movement like something had come out of one of the many deep patches of darkness along a driveway and hurried away.   The sudden burst startled me, I never expected I was sharing the night with anyone or anything else.  It was probably just an animal, I told myself; but the thing was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had left its pool of shadow somehow darker after running off.  I’m sure it was nothing more than my eyes playing tricks on me, but what if?  It’s not like I had any particular destination in mind, I was just roaming like I usually do, so I figured I might as well try to follow it.

The dry leaves blowing about seemed to agree with my decision, I noted, all flying in the same direction I was headed.  Well, at least I had backup then, I thought with a wry smile as my pulse and step both quickened.  I was only half joking.  At the end of the street I thought I saw the thing again, but this time it didn’t look like it was running or walking, just sitting down there—was it waiting?  I got a sense of motion from it, though like with everything else it was vague and probably just my eyes playing tricks on me.  What was it, beckoning to me?  I chided myself.  Truth is, I was probably just suffering from an overactive imagination, and when I got to the end of the street I’d find I was only just staring at a mailbox.

That’s what the rational part of me was saying, anyways, but the decidedly irrational kept telling me that I didn’t want to go down the street; that I should really just turn around, go back home, and call it a night.  And yet a different irrational part of me told me to go for it full tilt—the air felt different now, charged, electric, and above all, alluring.  I overruled my nervous irrational part and compromised between the other two as I continued towards it.

After all, there’s no reason to be afraid of the dark, is there?