Seeing Spectres in a Wet Twilight.

Darkness fell early this dreary twilight. When I went out to manage the bird feeders before retiring and locking up, the western sky which should have been red from the setting sun was but a mass of dark mist rendering the skyline invisible. And the rain which had been falling relentlessly since early afternoon continued its mindless pattering on the hood of my raincoat.

It took my mind back to one of my more favoured short stories, The Passenger, in which the protagonist sets off in just such conditions to drive through the wilder parts of northern Scotland en route to Ullapool. On the way he encounters the mysterious young woman dressed only in a white shift, at which point his paranormal adventure begins.

Fortunately, there were no young women in white shifts walking up my lane in need of rescue. I think I would have noticed, gloom or no gloom. And hopefully I shall be spared the experience of having a sopping wet wraith appear in my bed at dead of night.

It could just as easily have taken me back to the old comedy classic, Oh Mr Porter, and the eponymous gentleman’s similarly rain-sodden arrival at the remote rural railway station at Buggleskelly in Ireland having just been told the legend of the phantom miller who haunts the station and haunts the hill and the land that lies between.

Imagination can be such fun when the dull air drips and the dark sky drops and the day goes glooming down in wet and weariness.