This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry's Soap Company, Design Butter, New Dominion Design, gray-toed tallow, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, and our monthly supporters.

Every week here at Haunted Cosmos, we release a special story-driven show called The Dusty Tome just for our monthly supporters over at Supercast.

But while we prepare a brand new season of the main show

in the Haunted Cosmos Laboratory,

we decided to give all of you a peek behind the paywall.

So welcome to a special release of the Dusty Tome.

Yeah. Welcome to a special release of the bleeding heart of autumn.

The sun was bright and gold, but was not too harsh or hot.

The breeze that blew out of the east was cool, and wicking and filled with all the smells of Appalach's best things, and the leaves, all the leaves.

The leaves looked like they were burning, like they had suffered some glorious metamorphosis

for all the summer, and were now finally showing their true colors.

From where I stood, propped up on my mountain bike with one leg standing in the dirt, this was

what the whole world looked like.

Or perhaps I thought more how this is what the world should look like.

On days like that, the memory of the horrible heat and humidity of summer grows scant in the

mind, like a Steinbeckian amnesia in the Salina Valley.

All that seems to have ever been is that perfectly sunny, perfectly cool fall day.

The kind with the bluest and most cloudless sky you've ever seen that you can only

find in the American Southeast. On that day, but the date escapes me, my dad and I were about halfway

through one of our regular trips up to a lakehouse my stepmother's family owned in the

rolling blue mountains of Southern North Carolina. It had already been one of the

best trips I could ever remember. Spirits had been high since our arrival. The nightly card games

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