Right off the bat let me say that
usually our Portland Octobers are pretty nice. The rains don't usually start until toward the end of the month, after
which they don't stop until along about April. I italicized rains because rain is a constant fact of
life around here for six months of the year, so much so that when the sun comes
out people run around in shorts and sit on sidewalks drinking coffee and
sunbathe wherever they can find a non-soggy piece of lawn—even if the temps
are below freezing.
This October is not nice. We've
had enough rain that the leaves on
the sidewalks and trails are soggy. No taking a walk in order to kick your way
through drifts of crisp, rustling leaves, which I remember as one of the best
things about autumn.
Except for once.
I was fifteen and we had recently
moved to a middle-sized town in southern Idaho. The library was only a half
mile or so from our house, and I made frequent use of it. Even better, it had a
good collection of science fiction books, my then-favorite genre.
It was the middle of October and
I was taking the long way home from the library because the temperature was mild,
the wind was blowing fallen leaves across the streets and sidewalks, and the
nearly full moon was playing peek-a-boo behind fast-moving clouds. Although
there were streetlights at the intersections, the blocks were long and mostly
dark. Deserted. I might have been the only person alive that night.
I am not one who jumps at
shadows. I'm more likely to try to discover its source than to be afraid of a
strange noise in the night, and ghost stories do not frighten me. About the
only things that really scare me are lightning storms and having a tree fall on
my house—that's happened twice and folk wisdom says events happen in threes...
One of the books I'd returned to
the library that night was John Wyndham's The
Day of the Triffids. For some reason it had scared me, way more than any of
Lovecraft's stories or Poe's or Shirley Jackson's. The triffids were plant
creatures that ingested meat. Any kind of meat. And they were prone to making
the source of the meat dead before they ate it. When they moved they made a
clicking, rustling noise.
Just like those dry leaves
rattling across the sidewalk.
I was terrified.
I did not run screaming, but I
certainly walked very fast, flinching at every click, knock, bump, thud,
rustle, and creak. I was never so glad to see our porch light as I was that
night. For weeks afterward, I woke in the night, sure I'd heard a triffid
outside my window.
In the many years since then,
I've reread that book a couple of times and seen the movies (one true to the
story, one not). And I have to admit, triffids still scare me. So maybe it's a
good thing our sidewalk leaves here in Portland are soggy.
