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This evening, I was working at my computer when I heard a curious jangling noise. It sounded vaguely like a small bell ringing outside my window. It kept at it, continuing for several minutes as I tried to ignore it, then to pause the video I had on while I worked to see if it was coming from my computer. The bell kept ringing. I found myself wondering if it might have been the windchimes that hang outside my mother's window. Then I realized that those windchimes are thick around as two of my fingers together and long as my arm, and that they had a much deeper tone.

And that this ringing noise had been slowly getting louder. I naturally looked out of my own window at this point, but could see nothing, given that it was past seven in October and the lights were on in the room, the window glass might as well have been a mirror. But the ringing persisted, and I was becoming more and more concerned that it was coming from my head. As the lengthy minutes wore on, I got quite distressed at the idea that my mind could have been providing the noise and decided that nothing would satisfy my curiosity but to go out and investigate it.

I reminded myself that if an adventure should happen, there was a pocketknife and a handkerchief in the pocket of my cardigan, and if it's not the sort of adventure that can be dealt with armed with only a pocketknife and a handkerchief, I wouldn't be doing terribly well anyway. It was twilight, and everything was faintly blue. Even the beautiful flame-colored foliage seemed desaturated in the dim light. The air was quite cold, and although I soon drew the hood on my cardigan up over my ears, cold mucus collected on the tip of my nose like condensation. I fully intended to deal with it when I stopped. I found myself alternately walking and running down the road outside my house, pausing to listen for the ringing.

As I reached the point in the road where I was aware that if I were to turn around my house would disappeared behind a cluster of familiar trees, I saw two figures in the road ahead. The light was so dim, and quite frankly, so are my eyes, and the distance so great, that they seemed to warp as they moved. Alternately, they would appear to be like a man and a woman dressed in dark clothes walking alongside each other, a two men of dissimilar heights and a man and a dog out for an evening walk. It being the country, most of my neighbors kept dogs so I assumed it to be a man with his dog. A collar with tags would account for the jangling, although it sounded a bit off. As I drew closer, the ringing grew louder and higher, and the figures kept moving along the road as if they did not notice me. I considered calling out to them, but couldn't think what to say. "I heard your dog's tags jangling and thought I was going insane, so I ran out into the night?" It sounded silly even to me, and I had gotten rather more cold than I liked. As the figures, warping as they moved, rounded a curve in the road and disappeared behind another copse of trees, I decided to turn back. The curious thing was, the moment I decided to turn about and return to the creamy light of my bedroom, the ringing stopped entirely.

Once again, life is just a "and then a faceless monster grabbed me from behind" from creepypasta. Life is good.

It turned out that the neighbors up the hill put bells on their dogs' collar. Didn't find that out for another two days, though.