They stood above the cornfields, propped on their wooden crosses, and from a distance their faces were blank and terrifying.

The cornstalks grew high, marching toward the horizon in their neat rows seeming to stretch on forever.

And then, like sentinels, rising in a line and towering over the tall stalks that bent and waved in the cool breeze, stood the scarecrows.

She felt as if she were drifting through the corn, borne on the breeze, as the mist settled down over the cornfield, a dark blanket against the burst of beauty and light. She was looking down from above, almost as if she were a camera, coming into focus.

She dreamed, but she fought it and came so near to waking, struggling against the nightmare, against the threatening whisper in her mind.

Light… She needed light. Needed the spectacular beauty of the autumn colors to drive away the creeping darkness.

She was going home, so maybe it was natural to dream of the place where she had grown up, where the colors of fall were so beautiful that they belonged not in the real world of the unreal, but in a land of dreams.

Golds, oranges, crimsons, deeper reds, softer yellows, all dazzled from the trees stretching from the great granite rises to the windswept seas and calmer harbors, where the whitecaps of the waves warned that winter was on its way.

But before the ice and cold of a New England winter arrived, there was the fall. The glorious fall with its brilliant display. The gentle sweep of the breeze came first, a touch of sweet cool breath on the cheeks. And before that touch became the chilling grip of icicle fingers, there was the reaping, the bonfires of fall, the harvest brought home.

And so, in her dream, they