Eerie

The Moor’s Whisper

Not wind, but something older stirs the bracken low, Where mist clings like grave-cloth to the stones. A gate swings slow on rusted hinges— No hand has touched it since the snow.

Your breath comes short; the air feels queer, Thick with the rot of fallen leaf, And distant, past the churchyard yew, A single bell tolls wrong—too deep, too brief.

You quicken pace down tracks you know, Yet shadows pool where none should fall, Lengthening like fingers, thin and slow, To trace the damp stone of the ginnel wall.

A scent of peat and something sweet— Lilies, perhaps, from graves long crossed— Then vanishes. The path feels sullied, Each step a doubt, a soft, lost cost.

You swear you hear your name, half-sighed, Not from the heather, not the tree, But from the hollow where your heart should beat, A chill that isn’t you, yet is…
And all the world holds just this:
The eerie, watching, waiting still
For you to turn… and finally see
What walks beside you, walking still. — British spelling/terminology notes:

• "Queer" used in its traditional British sense of strange/unexplained (not modern colloquialism).
• "Ginnel" (Northern English dialect for a narrow passageway, widely understood in UK literature).
• "Sullied" (British preference over "soiled" for moral/spiritual taint).
• "Path" (not "trail" or "track" in this context; "tracks" implies informal rural way).
• "Heather," "peat," "churchyard yew" – quintessential British moorland imagery.
• Rhyme scheme subtle (ABAB CDCD etc.) to avoid sing-songiness, enhancing unease.
• Final line echoes the opening’s tension, leaving the threat ambiguous and internal – core to eerie dread.