A STRANGE ENCOUNTER
Startled by a murder of crows rushing away, Leslie hid himself in a rick stacked higgledy-piggledy alongside the gully, and the next thing he knew, a bevy of women appeared in the half-light, marching deliberately in two rows, all robed in white and with an expressionless sallow countenance, ghastly sallow as if they were long dead. This procession emanated a queer scent where it passed, accompanied by a distant sound evocative of now rustling dead leaves on the cemetery floor, now rusting wind chimes in an abandoned monastery. Peeking through the chinks in hay, Leslie realized it was a funeral cortège, but whose cortège it was that it had to be held as early as this, before the crack of dawn. Leslie was thinking about it when, with a chill, he remarked something horrible—these women had no feet on the solid ground; they were simply floating in the air.
