You're out on your way home on a drizzly autumn evening. The last embers of the day glow and then fizzle out quickly.
Somehow, that turn that you always take every day in that little copse between the highway and your house doesn't lead you home tonight. Instead the trees stretch endlessly in every direction. A billowing fog starts creeping along the forest floor and your spine starts tingling. You try and dodge the shadows that now seem threateningly solid. You stumble further and further as the sounds around you are less and less those of a wet forest at night and more and more that of another realm entirely. You burst into a clearing and find yourself confronted with a hole in reality, a portal to the Otherworld. You are helplessly frozen in place as a hundred pairs of terrifying eyes in indescribable alien faces turn towards you. In your last clear-minded moments, you oscillate between despair and incomprehension. Surely this is it. Whatever this is, you're not coming back from it.
But the thing about horror is, it needs someone to tell the tale. And that someone will be you.
You wake up in your bed at home. You faintly hear the sounds of plates being cleared away in the kitchen. Through your window you look at a drizzly morning. You made it. You crossed the threshold of fall and will live to see another winter.
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