It Comes In the Fog

The fog has rolled back in from the sea and my time is short. I hear the call again as the lights of the village are being choked out by the supernatural mist. The voices cry out for me to join them, and the pain of not going is too much to bear.

It was twenty years ago that our only son disappeared into the fog. He had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday and was going fishing with his friends. He left for the docks, walking from our door into the thick morning mist. Three of his friends were to join him, but none made it to the boat. Their plan was to meet at the boat and get everything ready so they could leave as soon as the fog burned off and the visibility improved.

Their phones were neatly lined up on a picnic table across from the marina. Two other phones were there, two other people missing. No bodies were found but the police quickly ruled the disappearances as accidental deaths.

My wife succumbed to the fog ten years ago. She was to meet me at the beach house. She’d had a meeting at her firm that ran late, so I came ahead. Soon after sunset, the fog rolled in, thick and cloying. I sat in the living room watching through the picture window, seeing shadows dancing behind the veil that night.

In the morning I found her car parked in the driveway. Her purse on the seat, her phone on the dash. Her keys were still hanging in the ignition, the car running.

“Didn’t you hear her pull up?” the Sheriff asked me as he investigated her disappearance.

“No… I heard nothing. The fog was so thick.”

I expected to be named a suspect… it’s always the spouse… but instead, he closed the investigation, burying her unexplained disappearance. He said she probably was disoriented and walked into the bay. He wouldn’t look me in the eye when he told me.

Last year I was sitting in the living room watching as the thick cloud rolled across the bay into the village. I’d walked out to the deck to see it better. A couple of blocks away I saw a stray dog running from the roiling cloud. His tail was tucked under, and the panic was evidenced in the way he scurried from the evil vapor.

Then, tendrils of it touched his feet as they crept silently across the ground. He stopped and lowered his heard. He raised it in one lonely howl, the anguish pouring from him. As it swirled around his chest, he turned and slowly walked into it, disappearing in a blink.

I shuffled back into my house and slammed shut the sliding door. Before the door closed all the way, I thought I could hear the voices of my wife and my son beckoning me to join them. I quickly turned on all the exterior lights and closed the shades.

***

The Sheriff wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Over and over, I asked about the fog, but he deflected me each time. I started my own investigation, looking for the origins.

It was older than I thought.

I quickly moved through the twenty-first and twentieth centuries. The news items were sparse, but I had learned where to look. I found the obituaries. Never was a cause listed, and the ages varied. But they were all premature. When Chad MacFarland died in his sleep at the nursing home, he got a quarter page. Every day was a slow news day. But when six youngsters disappeared without explanation, there was not even a blip… just the announcement of memorial services.

It took months for me to figure out the patterns. Then, with almanacs I gained the ability to track it back and find hundreds of cases spread across five centuries. Sometimes there would be three of the deadly fogs in one year, while other times it would abate for a decade, as it had done between the disappearances of my son and my wife.

Over the last year, I found myself travelling to Iceland and Greenland. I found written accounts of Viking legends. They had explored these lands and seas before Columbus was even born. Viking expeditions had arrived a thousand years ago. But then, their attempts at colonizing this rich area ceased.

Historians wrote it off as conflict with the local native populations. But I found an account that had been passed down of a man named Aric the Mason. He wrote of a fog and having watched his fellow explorers walk into the fog one by one, never to be seen again. He took refuge in the smithy. He stoked the fires hot enough to keep the mist at bay, sweating through the night. Aric wrote of hearing the voices of his friends calling to him as he waited until morning.

He walked three hundred miles to another Viking outpost in the new world. He told his story, and then turned and walked away. The account I found said that they thought he went looking for the fog. Whether it was to try to rescue his friends or to let himself be taken, they didn’t know.

But I knew.

The accounts didn’t stop there, though. I found Native American legends. Local tribes had recorded the fog for as long as they had history. When the moon and the conditions were right, whole villages would leave. They would walk away from everything, leaving their entire world to sit and wait for their return. Some tribes would leave a sacrifice to appease the angry gods that sent the mist.

When the fog receded, nothing else would be touched. Flowers would bloom, trees would bear fruit. Tools would sit as they were left. But nothing that walked remained, nor a trace. No people or dogs or cats or squirrels. And no bodies.

***

During the last fog I set up recorders. I had one in the marina, another on my deck. The final one sat in my living room. All through the night, I sat next to the recorder and watched the shadows dance outside in the fog. When I would walk near the glass, I could near the voices. Some were muffled, others seemed plain as day.

None were on my recordings.

They called out to me. I recognized the voices of my dear Clara and young Everett. They asked me to join them. To be one with them in the eternal mist. Each time they made a sound, it pierced my very brain, the pain becoming more intense.

In the morning, I played back the recordings. I played them each back, listening for hours. Not a sound was heard. Even the sounds that should have been present… the clang of rigging on the masts of the sailboats in the marina, the lap of the water against the hulls, the night sounds of animals, or the striking of the church bells marking the hours.

But, as the tape played, the same pain that struck me the night of the fog returned. I ran a timer, and at the moment on the recording I’d heard sounds that night, the pain shot into me. If I stopped the tape, the pain would subside. I knew they were connected.

I played the tape for the Sheriff and the Minister. I watched them, fighting through my own pain. They soon each begged me to stop. I could see that both men felt a similar pain, but not at the time of mine, or each other’s. Despite there being no sound, there was something.

Everyone in the village had lost someone to the fog. None talked about it. Parents, children, spouses, and lovers. At some point, everyone’s lives had been touched by the cloud that would roll off the bay on a full moon. Nobody else would listen to the tape, the word of it having spread quickly after being played for the Minister and Sheriff.

“Claude, I beg of you to stop this madness,” the Minister said to me this afternoon. “Only evil will come of it. Move away, go inland or across the country. Forget this place.”

“I can’t. Maybe a decade ago, but now it haunts me.”

“It will be the death of you, and the condemnation of your very soul. There is something demonic in the fog, Claude. If you poke it, it will destroy you.”

He told me the story of the only person ever to escape the mist. It should have dissuaded me, but it didn’t. I was too deep.

Cole Astrid walked out of the fog one morning. His eyes were sunken and vacant and his skin pale. He looked like a walking corpse, a man that had aged a hundred years in a single night. The Minister had ben the first to find him as the tendril retreated to the bay. He walked toward the church and then collapsed outside the heavy wooden doors.

After being found, he was rushed to the hospital. There were no physical problems beyond dehydration and exhaustion. But he refused to sleep and would tear his IV out the moment he was left alone. The following day he tried to cut out his eyes.

After a week of sedation, Astrid escaped the hospital. He was found when his house exploded into a ball of flame rising into the sky. As horrified villagers looked on, he limped into the center of the hellish maelstrom and stood, his arms raised as the flames licked around him. His skin melted off as he smiled before collapsing into the wreckage of the home.

***

The Sheriff walked into the open door of Claude Smith’s home. It was the morning after a fog, and he was looking for signs of those that may have disappeared. He shouted for Claude as he walked into the main room of the small cottage. There was no answer, so he kept checking.

After making sure there was nobody in the house, he noticed the tape recorder running in the living room. He stopped it and sat down on the couch next to where the tape machine had been running on the coffee table. He started the tape rewinding and looked over the papers on the table.

As the tape continued to rewind, he picked up the short, handwritten note. The script was shaky and uncertain, and difficult to read.

Sheriff,

You will no doubt find this. I wanted you to know that I couldn’t take the voices or the pain anymore. I will submit to the fog. I will leave the tape running as I let go of this world and step into the next. Perhaps there will be an answer revealed that you can use to stop the deaths. Or I may pass in vain.

Respectfully,

Claude

The machine stopped rewinding and started playing, the sounds of Claude moving around in the house the only audio from the machine. As he continued to listen, he heard what sounded like Claude opening the door. The Sheriff leaned forward trying to hear more.

Sharp pain stabbed into his head for a moment, but there were no sounds on the tape beyond those of Claude’s footfalls as he walked back to the sofa from the door. Claude cried out on the tape, then fell silent again.

“Yes, I can see you now, my love,” Claude said on the tape, his voice becoming scratchy and muted. “You are as beautiful as the day we met. Is Everett here?”

Again, sharp pains stabbed into the Sheriff’s skull, but he couldn’t turn off the machine. He needed to know.

Claude’s speech became faster and faster until it was a screech. “Noooo,” echoed in the living room, followed by the thump of the Sheriff collapsing.

The Sheriff awoke in the local hospital. It was dark outside, but he could see the fog through the windows. It called to him.