Atmosphere.

I’m quoting below a small section from my novel, simply because I had this very experience for real tonight.

'He walked back down the garden path and tried to apply the light of reason to a situation in which there appeared to be none. He looked around and realised that things were not as they should be. It was early August when he’d walked up the hill, but the garden had the look of October about it. The summer flowers were gone, their heads reduced to dark husks and their stems drooping into decay. The light seemed eerie in the gathering gloom of dusk. It had more of lurid luminescence than of honest light about it, and the garden looked brighter than the deep grey sky could seem to account for. It was an unwelcome brightness, a wrong, unnatural sort: unwholesome and disturbing. He began to believe that it was only there to enable him to be watched.

He looked southward to the river valley, where the view of trees, fields and hedgerows was washed into a range of depleting half tones. Nothing moved there; the familiar lights of traffic running along the road beyond the river were conspicuous by their absence. Neither was there any other sign of life; the specks of brightness that usually betrayed the location of the many scattered buildings were absent too. And there was no sign of moon or stars in the saturated gloom above his head. This was an abandoned place.

He reached the bottom of the garden and became aware of one or two small shapes falling around him. They were decaying leaves, and confirmed that he had somehow woken in an autumnal world. The rain had stopped but everything dripped mindlessly and mockingly. The still, misty air felt cool, and the occasional clatter of a dead leaf was the only sound breaking the mortified silence.'

It’s been a wet day today, and by twilight the low cloud had descended to shroud the world in a wet mist traditionally associated with an English November.

The rest of that chapter sees the protagonist menaced by dark slithery demons until Annie can bring him back to her presence. At least I was able to go back to the house, close the curtains and make my dinner.