Haunted Autumn
Armand Hilmansyah ’23
A cold breeze signaled the coming of autumn. Plants teeming with life transformed into a bleak brown color. The garden was a thicket of waist-length grass run amok, infected with gloomy brown and haggard yellow leaves. Bulky boulders strained across the sodden earth like savage beasts poised on hooks, preparing to lunge; these humongous leviathans stood unbelievably still, their harsh sides cloaked by patchy streaks of snaking, zig-zagging creepers. A tree stood alone and naked in the sky. It had an odd resemblance to a beggar, with scraggly boughs and arching trunk. Its sharp twigs trembled in spells of sentimental sadness, like fingers. At its feet grew dense orange vegetation, with brambles and spiky nettles thrown in for good measure. An aged piece of marble with lichen teeming protruded from the gloomy undergrowth. As I pushed the wrought iron gates open, they yelled and moaned a grief-stricken lament, leaving a freezing shiver that climbed up my spine, first from my palms, then up to my back. The metal’s rough biting contact sliced into my skin, staying, leaving a chilly trace. There was a cobble-laid garden trail in plain sight, with tufted borders and hedgerows on both sides. Everything had an uncanny allure; everything exuded a strangeness, an unfamiliarity; everything exuded a baleful bleakness, terrible wretchedness. I took a step forward, reluctant at first. An ominous block of construction, a single-story home with one door and a haggard facade, loomed over the yard. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the veranda’s eaves, where dead clusters of ivy hung; the windows were stained, their mottled, opaque glass panes like cataracts; and the coarsely plastered brickwork on the mildewed walls, caked in dust, peeled off in hideous flakes. The house appeared to sag beneath the weight of the fragile tiles that covered the roof from every angle. I came to a modest front porch where a broken rocker swayed ever so slightly as I walked along the garden route. A door stood ajar to the far left, without a bell or knocker, its oaken panels engraved with senile rot, where splinters of wood flaked off and the veneer cracked and grooved. The wind whispered the faint croons of weird lullabies. The sway of nature reduced to a mournful calm with each passing second. From the gunmetal sky, a gentle drizzle began to fall. My pulse skipped a beat when the door flew open with the touch of a fingertip, the rusted hinges screeching. Suspicious, I gazed into the darkness: the inky blackness was an invitation, a crooking finger, inviting me to venture past the cracked door beyond the front steps. It felt like time was moving at a snail’s pace.
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