Beware of the Fog

Abigail Chapman had been told the fog was normal.

"About a hundred and sixty-five days a year," the real estate agent said, handing her the keys on the front porch of the Old Dickerson House. "You stop noticing."

Abigail, twenty-seven, newly hired to teach English at Ilwaco High School, and desperate for a fresh start, nodded as though she believed it. Behind the agent, the Pacific Northwest rolled out like a painting someone had left in the rain. Evergreens climbed the hillside in dark ranks. Beyond the trees, the ocean threw itself against the rocks of Cape Disappointment, and somewhere out in the gray a foghorn gave its long, mournful note, then waited, then gave it again.

The house was a tall, tired Victorian with a sagging porch and windows that caught the light like half-closed eyes. Two stories, wide rooms, a view of the water from the upstairs bedroom that would have cost a fortune anywhere else. The rent was almost laughable.

"I should mention," the agent said, studying her clipboard rather than Abigail's face, "that some people around here think the place is haunted."

"Haunted," Abigail repeated.

"The last owner, Mr. Dickerson. He passed in the fifties, on a foggy night. It wasn't, well." She cleared her throat, "People talk."

Abigail gave the polite smile of a woman who taught teenagers for a living and had heard every kind of story. "Small towns need their ghosts," she said, and signed the lease on the hood of the agent's car.

By late afternoon she was carrying the last box up the porch steps, the sky already dimming. She paused at the top and looked back at the tree line.

A figure stood among the trunks.

It was tall and narrow, motionless, a darker shape against the dark. Abigail's breath caught. She blinked, and the fog slid between the trees like a curtain being drawn, and when it passed there was nothing there but evergreens.

A stump, she told herself. A trick of the light.

She carried the box inside and locked the door behind her, something she had never once bothered to do in her last apartment.

***

She fell asleep a little after ten, the unfamiliar house ticking and settling around her like a ship at anchor.

At 3:13 a.m. something woke her.

She knew the time because the red numbers on the bedside clock were the only light in the room. She lay still, trying to understand what had pulled her out of sleep. Then she heard it: a slow, dragging scrape in the hallway outside her door.

The room was cold. Not cool, cold, the kind that settles into the teeth. Her breath ghosted in front of her face. The windows began to rattle in their frames, though the night outside was perfectly windless. Then came footsteps, heavy and deliberate, crossing the hallway one board at a time. They stopped just outside her door.

"Beware of the fog."

The whisper came from beside the bed, faint and raspy, the voice of a man who had forgotten how to use his throat. "It's coming to kill you."

She slapped at the lamp. Yellow light flooded the room. Nobody was there.

"Beware of the fog."

Closer now, right against her ear. She scrambled out of bed, yanked open the door and checked every room upstairs. Nothing. Through the window at the end of the hall she saw the fog, gathered among the trees, and it was moving in a way fog had no business moving, not drifting but flowing, slowly and deliberately, as though it were searching.

The whisper followed her through the night, always the same words and always more urgent, until she sat on the bed with every light on and her hands over her ears. Just before sunrise, it spoke one last time, so softly she almost missed it.

"Beware of the fog…"

Then the first gold light cut through the windows, and the whispering stopped as if a door had been closed.

A dream, she decided. Too much stress, too much driving, a strange house. She almost had herself convinced.

Then she opened the bedroom door and saw the footprints.

They were muddy and bare, running from the top of the stairs to her threshold, where they stopped, as if whoever made them had stood there, listening, all night long. Most were ordinary enough. But one was wrong. The toes were far too long, stretched and tapered, the mark of something that had borrowed the shape of a foot without understanding it.

***

It happened again the next night, and the night after that.

Every night at 3:13 a.m., the cold came, then the scraping, then the voice. Beware of the fog. It's coming to kill you. Abigail began to dread the dark the way a child does.

The house grew bolder. Doors she had closed stood open in the morning. The lights flickered whenever fog drifted close to the windows. In the living room, the rocking chair began to move by itself, creaking back and forth in the corner. Over the fireplace, a framed photograph of a stern, gray-haired man kept falling from its nail. She hung it back up three times. Each morning it lay on the floor, face up, the glass unbroken.

At school she dragged through her classes. Her students began to whisper about the dark circles under her eyes, and twice she lost her place in the middle of a lesson, staring at the classroom windows and the pale smear of mist pressed against them. A colleague asked kindly if she was sleeping.

"Not much," Abigail said, and laughed, and it sounded like a cough.

On Saturday she drove to the Ilwaco library and asked the librarian about Dickerson. The woman went pale, then led her to a microfilm reader without a word. Abigail scrolled until she found it, dated October 1954.

LOCAL MAN FOUND DEAD IN LOCKED HOME.

Walter Dickerson, seventy-one, had been discovered inside a house locked from within. His face was frozen in an expression of "unimaginable terror." Strange black marks covered his arms and chest, like burns, or like handprints. An unnatural fog had surrounded the house all night. And near the end, one line stopped her cold: Neighbors reported that in the weeks before his death, Mr. Dickerson had warned anyone who would listen that something was living in the fog. Authorities dismissed his claims as the delusions of an elderly man.

Something living in the fog.

That night she did not hide.

At 3:13 she was sitting up in bed, fully dressed, her phone's flashlight in her fist. When the cold came, she did not pull the blankets over her head. When the whisper came, she stood, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway.

An old man stood at the top of the stairs.

He was translucent, a figure of pale light and shadow, so faint she could see the banister through his chest. His clothes were soaked and dripping, though no water fell, and his gaunt face was wide-eyed with fear. It was the face from the photograph.

"Beware of the fog," he whispered. "It's coming to kill you."

Her heart hammered. But she was a teacher, and teachers learned to hold their ground. "What," she said, her voice shaking, "is coming?"

The ghost raised one trembling finger toward the window at the end of the hall.

"It."

Then he was gone.

Abigail turned toward the window, and a hand pressed against the outside of the glass.

It was long and black and skeletal, its fingers far too many-jointed, spread wide against the pane. It stayed there for one heartbeat. Then it slid away, and the fog swallowed it.

***

She searched the house the next day with the desperation of someone who had no other choice. In the old man's bedroom, now hers, she found a loose floorboard, and beneath it a leather-bound journal wrapped in oilcloth.

Walter Dickerson, 1954, the first page read, in a shaky hand.

She read until the light in the window turned gray.

He wrote of a thing that came in the heaviest fogs. He never named it, only called it It. A figure unnaturally tall, a man-shape built of darkness that swallowed the light around it. Arms too long, ending in claws. A face blank except for two faint, glowing eyes. It moved through the fog as though the fog were part of its body.

It can use voices, he wrote. It learns them. It calls from the porch in the voice of a neighbor, a brother, a wife, and when you open the door, it is already inside.

It chose those who could perceive it. Once a person had seen it, it hunted them, waiting for fog thick enough to hide in. It fed on fear first. Only afterward did it destroy.

I keep the lamps burning, the old man wrote. Every lamp I own. It does not like the light. As long as the house is bright, I am safe.

The last entry was short, the handwriting ragged.

The fog is coming tonight. I can hear it breathing beyond the trees. If the lights go out, God help me.

The remaining pages were stained with dark, smeared marks that Abigail did not want to identify.

She set the journal down with trembling hands. A second realization rose behind the first. The figure she had seen among the trees on moving day had not been a ghost. Dickerson's ghost had never so much as touched her. He had only whispered, night after night, the same four words.

The haunting wasn't the danger. It was the warning.

***

The forecast came on Thursday. An unusually dense fog bank was rolling in from the Pacific, the thickest in decades. Authorities urged everyone to stay home.

By dusk Abigail could not see the trees beyond her windows. By nine o'clock she could not see the porch rail. The fog pressed against the glass like a living thing, and the world went quiet. The foghorns stopped. The waves stopped.

She turned on every lamp in the house, set flashlights on the nightstand, and lay awake with her eyes on the clock.

At 3:13, something scratched at her bedroom window.

Old Man Dickerson stood beside her bed, closer than he had ever been, and his face was not the sad, pleading face she knew. It was naked terror.

"It's here for you, Abigail," he whispered.

Downstairs, three slow knocks rolled through the house.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

"Abby?" Through the floor came a voice she recognized: Margaret, the geometry teacher who had been so kind on her first day. "My car broke down in the fog. Please, I'm freezing. Let me in."

Abigail started to rise. Dickerson shook his head violently, his gray hands raised. "Don't open it."

The knocking became pounding, violent and relentless, shaking the front door in its frame.

She crept to the window and parted the curtains an inch.

On the porch stood a towering figure, black and impossibly tall, its limbs stretched and wrong, its body rippling like smoke held in the shape of a man. Two pale eyes glowed in its smooth, empty face. They found hers through the gap in the curtain and held her there.

The thing opened its mouth, far wider than any mouth should open, a black seam splitting its face.

"Let me in, Abigail," it said, in Abigail's own voice.

Every light in the house went out.

In the darkness, from the bottom of the stairs, came the soft creak of the front door swinging open. She had locked it. She knew she had locked it.

***

She ran.

The back door was a few strides from the kitchen, and she threw it wide, and the fog was already there, a solid white wall pressed against the threshold. Behind her, the hallway filled with the scrape of long claws drawing slowly along plaster.

"Abby?" It was Margaret's voice again, sweet and worried. Then her mother's. Then the principal's. Then her own, over and over, calling from every room at once.

Cold mist curled through the floor vents and drifted across the kitchen tiles. It could go anywhere the fog could. And the fog could go everywhere.

A pale shape rose between her and the dark. Old Man Dickerson stood in the hallway with his arms spread, a wall of failing light.

"It took my life," he said, and for the first time his voice formed full sentences, trembling but strong. "I won't let it take yours. The basement, girl. Go."

The creature surged forward, and the ghost met it with a cry. Abigail fled. She tore open the basement door and stumbled down the steps, and found, in the beam of her phone, what Dickerson had left behind: an old emergency generator, and beside it a row of large floodlights on tripods, thick with cobwebs.

As long as the house is bright.

Her hands shook as she pulled the generator's cord. Nothing. Above her, the ceiling groaned as something heavy crossed the kitchen. The basement door slammed against the wall.

Slow, soft steps began to descend.

"Abigail," her own voice said from the dark. "Let me in."

She pulled the cord a third time, and the generator coughed, caught and roared.

Light exploded through the basement. The floodlights flared white and merciless, and the creature, halfway down the stairs, reared back. It shrieked, and the sound was not one voice but dozens, men and women and children screaming at once, every voice it had ever stolen. Its body twisted and smoked at the edges, curling away from the glare.

But the generator began to sputter. The lights dimmed, flickering, and the creature's burning eyes narrowed. It started to come forward.

Dickerson's ghost flung himself down the stairs and threw both arms around the thing. It howled and tore at him, but he held on, a pale old man clinging to the dark with everything he had left. "Now," he gasped. "Now, Abigail!"

She seized the nearest floodlight and swung it around, pouring the glare directly into the creature's face. The black body began to dissolve, unraveling into ribbons of smoke.

"Go back," Abigail screamed, "to whatever hell you came from!"

The thing tore itself free in a cloud of black vapor, poured through the narrow basement window and was gone, sucked back into the fog. Outside, a thin gray line of dawn crept up over the trees.

The generator coughed and died. In the silence, Abigail slid down against the wall, shaking.

Old Man Dickerson stood in front of her. His face was no longer twisted with fear. It was calm, and faintly, impossibly, he was smiling.

"You listened," he whispered.

Then the first sunlight slid through the window and into his silvery form, and he faded into it like frost in morning. The cold faded with him. For the first time since she had moved in, the house felt empty of everything but its own quiet, and Abigail understood that he had finally been allowed to rest.

***

The fog lifted by noon.

She stood on the porch and looked at what the night had left. Deep claw marks scored the front door, and black stains scarred the basement walls. She thought seriously about packing her car and driving until the coast was a memory. The neighbors' lights were coming on down the road, ordinary and yellow, and she wondered how many of them had ever known what lived in the mist beyond their windows.

But the creature had been driven back, and Dickerson had been freed. When she sat in her kitchen with the sun in her eyes, she found she wasn't afraid of the house anymore.

She stayed. The weeks passed. The whispering stopped, the rocking chair stayed still, and the photograph of Walter Dickerson hung on its nail through every storm. She went back to Ilwaco High School and taught Jane Eyre to sleepy teenagers. She slept through the night.

She began to believe it was over. She even bought a lamp for the porch, though she told herself it was only for the look of the thing, and she never quite admitted why she left it burning every night.

Then, one night in the spring, Abigail woke in the dark.

The window was white. Fog pressed against the glass, thick and silent. The bedside clock glowed red.

3:13 a.m.

Something scratched softly against the windowpane.

She lay frozen. Then a sound drifted out of the dark: a faint, raspy whisper, achingly familiar.

"Beware of the fog…"

Relief broke over her like a wave. She sat up, tears stinging her eyes. "Mr. Dickerson?" she whispered. "Is that you?"

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then a deep, inhuman voice answered, rolling through the glass like thunder under water.

"Dickerson can't help you anymore."

Two glowing eyes opened outside her window.

And somewhere deep within the fog, something began to laugh.