Another competition piece on Vocal was for a horror contest. It isn’t something that I have written much of, but I thought I’d give it a rip. This is the beginning of the result. You can see the whole piece over here on Vocal. Read More
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 walking 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 vices 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 of squirrels. And no bodies.
I hope you enjoyed this. You can catch the rest of it on Vocal, or check out my full profile to see everything I have over there. You can also hit up my Amazon Author page to see my novels… I should have a new one coming out in a few weeks.
