My Father's Warning

I remember the laughter first. Not mine - the children’s. It was a Saturday, and the sky was shiny as a new nickel. That was the afternoon I brought my father his cigarettes and he told me not to go up to the mine anymore. His lungs were shot, but he still smoked, stubborn as the men of that time were. Back then his beard was more pepper than salt, his eyes still sharp beneath skin that hadn’t begun to sag. He carried that quiet authority children know to fear even though he never raised his voice. He was a scion of miners, proud of it, and he’d given his good years, as he called them, to the pit.

The mine had closed before I was born, after the cave-in, after the men who weren’t entombed, begged the company to seal the whole crooked mouth for good. They did as they were told, but they did it wrong, as sometimes happens when covering up bad things in a hurry.

We grew up with the miner’s ghost stories. Canaries that kept singing after they’d stopped breathing, a seam of sulphuric rock that would strike a match all by itself if you stared at it too long, and a foreman who swore the mountain was evil and would devour a man whole if he strayed too close.

They fenced it off and slapped a couple of warning signs around, but time weathers everything and signs lose their authority. Once that happens, children take the worn “No Entry” signs to mean something else entirely like “Welcome In”.

“Don’t like that,” Dad said.

“It’s just the kids,” I told him. “That boy Henderson and the girls, what’s their names, Della and Prunella.”

He didn’t comment right off. He lifted his chin and sniffed the air. He’d done that my whole life, and when I was little, I honestly believed he could smell what other people couldn’t, like a bird-dog pointing.

“Sound doesn’t travel like that,” he said finally. “It’s too clear.” He brought his cigarette up to his mouth, took a deep draw, and pushed the smoke away with his hand.

But it did travel. It came off the shale like water sliding off a bird’s feathers. You could make out names as plain as if the kids were standing right beside you.

“Della! Prunella! Come here!”

Then a sharp, heavy pop reverberated through the hills. Even the trees swayed with the force of it.

It sounded like a bolt snapping loose, followed by the wild cheers of children who didn’t yet know what they’d done.

“You want me to go look? I said, already half-turning.

“No.” Dad’s hand shot out and caught my arm. His grip was iron. “You want to watch them. That’s different.”

He had me there. I turned back. There was something in his voice I hadn’t heard before, not fear, but a kind of tense knowing. He wasn’t a man who rattled easy. His hands were the size of dinner plates, skin like tanned leather, and a face carved from weather and a lifetime of hard work. But that day, his eyes looked up toward the ridge and didn’t like what they saw.

By late afternoon, it started sliding down the ridge. It came in shudders and jolts like a baby learning to walk. Rolling, then braking. It congealed in corners and doorways, coiled around fence posts and ascended the porch steps. It smelled of sulphur and tarnish, a metallic tang beneath a damp, miasmic reek that stole the air from your lungs.

“Shut the door,” dad said.

“It’s just fog,” I told him, trying to sound casual, wondering if he was losing his grip.

“Shut the door, son,” dad said.

He stood there watching, shoulders squared, every muscle tight. I could sense his unease. He had the look of a man worried about a cave-in; an old miner always watching the exit and checking for a second one, just in case. I locked the door and checked the latch twice. “Done. It is just fog though, dad.” I said again.

“Fog doesn’t hum,” he said.

He was right. There was a sound trapped inside it. Not loud or mechanical but like a bell moments after it has been rung.

Then the barking started. The deep, chesty alarm that says strangers are nearby. You can tell the nerves of a town by the sound of their dogs. Ours lost theirs in seconds. Our phone rang. Dad picked it up. I could tell by the way he went quiet that it wasn’t good. He only listened, then said one thing:

“It’s started again,” he said then replaced the receiver.

My father didn’t spend words wastefully. When he pointed at the snake, it was because he wanted to make sure you knew where not to step.

The laughter came next. Faint at first. High, happy, but wrong.

“Downstairs,” dad said.

“We don’t use the cellar,” I said.

“We do now.”

We took the camping lamp and two blankets. He locked the door, jammed a chair under the knob, and motioned me down the steps. The air was old, cold, and constricted, steeped in the ferrous scent of rust and the sweetness of fruit long gone to decay.

He sat beside me on the stairs, hands clenched, keeping one eye on the door. He didn’t touch it though. I didn’t ask why.

You could feel the fog at the jamb, like it could sense our presence. Every now and then we heard a child giggle, short and high pitched, like it was trying not to get caught.

“It’s not the chemicals you’re worried about, is it?” I whispered.

“No,” he said. His voice was low and steady. “There’s something wrong with that mine.”

We listened and waited.

It snuck up to our door with a sound like kids trying not to laugh in church. It tested the edges of the door. Then nothing. After a long while, I heard my name.

“Evan.” A child’s voice. Not any child I knew. I clenched my jaw so hard my teeth ached as the fear crawled down my spine like a cold finger.

Outside in the street, someone screamed, then burst into hysterical laughter. We heard the sheriff on the loudspeaker. “Everyone inside. Close your windows and barricade your doors. Do not go out into the fog.”

He said it again. Then again. Then it turned into static and the static laughed once before going quiet.

We heard footsteps on our porch. Our mailbox creaked open, then shut, then open again. Dad held my arm and shook his head. He meant don’t answer it.

Upstairs, our TV flicked on by itself to one of those comedy sitcoms with canned laughter. The fog liked it. It began to mimic the sounds, throwing the laughter around the house until it bounced off the walls and rattled the windowpanes. Even the crockery in the cupboards vibrated.

Someone knocked on the cellar door. Three times. Followed by small footsteps scurrying away like children playing ding, dong, ditch inside our house. The baby next door started to cry, then stopped.

“This is not something we can fight,” dad said. “It’s something we need to outwait.”

So, we waited. For hours. I lost track of time. The cellar had a damp smell, and my chest tightened every time I breathed too deeply. Every so often a voice would call my name. Sometimes, it called his.

The second time it happened, he froze. His eyes went distant, unfocused, and glossy like he was recalling a memory as it crawled out of the darkness of his mind. One of the miners who never made it out. I never asked him, afterwards, and he never volunteered. But I knew.

He dozed off in bursts, six, maybe seven minutes at a time, then jerked awake like someone had hit him. The lamp hissed. I counted the nails in the stair tread. Fourteen. Then started counting the bricks. The hours dragged. My eyes went dry and got blurry.

After a while, it got quiet. There were no more patrols outside the cellar door. The dogs had long since stopped barking. We waited a bit longer, just to be sure. Then Dad gave a small nod, and I cracked the door.

We crept through the house, carefully checking every corner. The fog lay low on the floor, thin now. Outside, it slid over fences, brushed against walls, and moved like it knew its way home. Streetlights turned their circles from white to dull gray and the swings at the school moved by themselves.

The sheriff’s hat sat on a fire hydrant.

We stayed put. More people should have. We didn’t sleep that night and I think it took me weeks before I slept at all.

When morning finally slid into our town, it came alone. The fog melted away into the valley, but nothing replaced it. No birds, no dogs, no trucks. No clatter from the diner. Just a vacant Sunday silence, the holiness wrung out of it.

We stepped outside. The street looked paused mid-life. Doors hung open. A curtain swayed.

“Gus,” I called. That’s our dog. Nothing.

I followed my father through the houses along the street. Nothing. Nobody. A pot boiled dry on a stove. Chairs knocked over. A table set for dinner that never got eaten.

Every house was empty except every TV was on. Each one flickering, playing snow or half-caught signals. A laugh caught mid-way here, a news anchor frozen mid-word there. It was like the whole town had stepped out of their houses in the middle of a sentence.

We walked to the fence around the mine. It had slumped and splintered, half eaten by rust. The boards over the main mouth had cracked down the centre and then resealed itself. The last wisps of fog that remained on the ground poured itself through the gaps and down into the dark. That’s exactly how it looked. Poured.

And inside? This is important so don’t tell it wrong. We heard a child’s laugh. Faint and satisfied.

Dad took my arm and steered me away. “We’re done here.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait,” Dad said. “We don’t feed it. Not with curiosity. Not with stories.”

So, we went home. We ate crackers and sat with the lamp lit at noon, because even the sun seemed dimmer. And that’s when he told me. He told me the truth about the mine cave-in and why he sniffed the air.

We waited for the rescue teams that never came. No police arrived. No reporters descended on our ghost town.

We ate what we had in the pantry and pulled water from the old cistern. On day three, we put up a new fence around the mine with a hand-painted sign – KEEP OUT. This was to keep the boys with cameras away. Ghost hunters. They arrived months later. One of them squealed when a board at the mine flexed. They laughed at themselves, posted their videos and left. The town stayed quiet.

Years later, dad started to thin out the way old folks do. His hands got shaky and his words slipped out of order when he was tired. He could still light a cigarette blindfolded though.

We kept the lamp on the kitchen table, always full of fuel. We didn’t talk about it anymore. Every now and then, he’d pause, lift his head and sniff the air and say, “Not today.”

When his time came, I held his hand. He squeezed it gently.

“I thought I had longer,” he whispered. “Seems I don’t. So, listen son. You’ll hear it again. Laughter on a day bright and burnished as a newly minted coin. Don’t go to it. You don’t want to become a part of the story. Close the door. Go downstairs. Outwait it.”

“I will, dad,” I said.

Those were his last words. I buried him on the hill because no one else was around to say I couldn’t. Time passed. I planted vegetables that barely grew and painted the water tower to stop the rust. Once a year, a journalist would drive through, take a few pictures, shake their head at the emptiness, and leave with nothing to sell except a sentence about a ghost town.

And then the sound came back.

It was a Tuesday. A clear and shiny day. I was fixing a hinge on the screen door when I heard it. A laugh, then another, drift down from the mine road. I stood. I could see it in my mind: hands on the boards, prying the wood until it creaked open.

I went inside, latched the door and walked downstairs with my lamp and a blanket. I sat on the steps and put my foot on the chair I’d wedged under the handle. I did the thing dad told me to do. I outwaited.

The fog came. The laughter searched the empty town. I heard a man, then a woman, then a child. Maybe campers. Maybe wanderers who found the fence and thought ghost stories were just stories.

It was quieter this time and it only lasted an hour. Then it moved on.

I waited a bit longer, then went upstairs.

You want a fix, I can tell. You want me to say I sealed the mine, burned the boards, prayed a special prayer. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’m not in that kind of story. I did the part a person can do. I learned, I remembered, I survived and I told someone.

That someone is you.

Today I will listen for the hum or the laughter. If there’s nothing, I’ll eat what’s left of the stew and lock the cellar door from the inside and leave the chair just so. I’ll read a little. If laughter comes down the ridge, I’ll wedge the chair and I’ll keep my mouth shut. When the fog presses its ear to the door, I’ll give it nothing, not even a curse.

And if it passes me by and finds you instead, you’ll know what to do. Don’t be clever or brave. Close the door and outwait it. Because it will return. It always does. Not from malice, but because we leave it apertures; fissures in fences; fractures in our good sense; little rifts in that soft, credulous part of us that longs to see the dark perform its tricks. Close those gaps, and you’ll live.