Halloween Ghost Story Challenge

[caddyman]

I thought I'd get the ball rolling by way of an example as we are only about a fortnight away from Halloween. I hope you enjoy it and let me know if you can guess the song that provided the inspiration...

People scurry about their business and hide indoors when the nights draw in and the temperature falls. They bustle through the crowds, avoiding the rain and each other’s eyes, politely distancing themselves from the rest of humanity. As dusk falls they steal occasional anxious glances at each other, the streets and particularly the dark corners and alleyways in which shadows lurk and the gas lamps are absent.

When the fog rolls in it’s worse; the world greys and the shadows step out, insubstantial and enveloping. The yellowy smoke mingles down from above and soon the air stings eyes and burns lungs. Pedestrians hunch in on themselves, bend forward, huddling behind scarves and overcoats and stumble along half blind, hoping to avoid the terrors of the dark, real and imagined.

Corrosive tendrils of smog: banks here, wisps there furl, billow and dance around the street lamps whose glow retreats to sputter uncertainly around the mantles.

From the roof tops where the smoke billows, curls and winds, between the pavement and the stars, where day and night intermingle in the murk, few venture into the half-shadow, half-light above. There, secure in their anonymity, other eyes look down knowing few will look up and those that do will not see.

Clever it may be, but humanity is by nature and design a terrestrial species. It looks up only when something attracts its attention. In the roof tops nothing does. The worries, concerns, the fear that haunts people comes from the ground and lower, but that is imagination and superstition. For most, anything there that may harm, or do more than send a frisson of excitement, (unless it be one of their own number) has long since been overwhelmed, tamed or otherwise conquered. There is nothing there that should not be there, except in their minds.

But above, black and unblinking, unheeded by all, the eyes look down. Not intelligent eyes, but older eyes, the eyes of survivors, eyes with cunning, eyes that have adapted to their man-made milieu. Unblinking eyes that stare; eyes of things long forgotten.

And when the fog comes and the smoke descends and the smog mixes, when the twilight of the rooftops meets the gloom of the streets, then the eyes hunger; then is their time.

People may be lost in a crowd, they may be lost in plain sight, but people are lost in the smog.

When you are home at night, safe and warm, snug under your blankets in the dark, think of the noises outside your bedroom window, the clattering of roof tiles, the skittering of branches, the clatter of scratches against the window. Outside and away. Shiver in delicious, unsettling imaginings, then dismiss them with a smile. You are safe in your bed.
But outside in the dark, the fog rolls in and the smoke slides down and the yellowy smog rises. Muffled yet audible, the noises of the street continue, but one by one, the voices fall silent.

People are lost in the smog.

© Bryan Lea 2009

500 words exactly.