True Story | Memory | Writing Prompt Response

The Time I Was Swallowed by Fog

It was like something out of Silent Hill.

Have you ever seen The Mist? That movie based on the novella by Stephen King?

The movie begins with a small family watching a deep, foreboding mist roll over their town. Without too many spoilers, I’ll just say that the atmosphere of the movie is terrifying. Monsters coming out of nowhere, dampened sound, the people can barely see their hands in front of their faces. Hair-raising.

Imagine lonesome buildings, abandoned cars, people either dead or fled. An empty city, as if everyone had simply disappeared into the fog, never to be seen again.

Now, imagine walking through a mist like that in real life. I have. Without the monsters, of course- at least as far as I know.

I was a kid at the time, maybe thirteen or fourteen. I was going to visit my best friend; he lived just a couple of blocks away from where my family and I were staying so my mother didn’t mind me making the walk alone.

It was a long time ago, but I’m never going to forget that walk, even as short as it was.

It was the middle of the day, but you would never know it from how dark out it was. There was a thick, oppressive fog covering the whole town. A chilly morning after a warm night had brought down all of the vapor off of the river and spread it like a blanket over the rooftops.

By the time I set out, it was starting to settle amongst the houses. I could see maybe five, six feet in front of me as I went.

As far as I could tell, I was the only person moving in the entire town. There were cars sitting along the road, all of them empty. Nobody was driving. At the time when people ought to have been out walking their dogs, enjoying a brisk weekend day, there wasn’t a soul. Not even the birds were flying.

My town is full of trees and plants; houses built between towering elms and stands of birch. My path was lined with skeletal reaching fingers, the twigs of low-reaching branches. Dry leaves crackled underfoot and skittered softly with the breeze. Like claws on stone.

I could hear my footsteps, but they were muffled. The slight scuff of rubber on the sidewalk, the scrape of my sneakers brushing against the uneven pavement was barely audible to me. I could hear my unsteady breathing, though. That was loud in my ears.

I could see my breath, too; wisps of steam like the smoke from a dragon’s maw. It filtered out of me with every nervous gasp, melding with the creeping tendrils that ambled through the town. I could barely see where I was going. Something could have been standing just ahead of me, I would never have known until it grabbed for my arm.

I was a block away from my friend’s house, picking my way along empty roads with no signs of life. Straight ahead of me was one of the busiest streets in town, but I heard nothing. No car engines, no tires. I couldn’t see any headlights. Matter of fact, I couldn’t even see window lights on either side of me.

I felt like I was alone in a hidden city. Just a ghost, meandering where I wasn’t supposed to be. Like I had stepped through a gateway into another world, a lonely shadow of the one I’d left. A world of nothing.

But I could hear one sound. One distorted, faint sound out of the shadows.

One single windchime, clinking and shimmering with the faintest breath of the breeze. With the shroud as deep as it was, I couldn’t even guess where the chime was coming from. It seemed to echo oddly between the alleyways. Somebody’s back yard, I guess, but it sounded so far away.

I made it to my friend’s house, and he was home with his family. He’d been in the kitchen with his mother, preparing tomato soup with vegetables from their back garden.

I told them about the mist and they shrugged. They hadn’t been out in it; I guess I seemed a bit silly with how rattled I was at the time.

By the time I went home a few hours later, the sun had reclaimed its place in the sky. The last trailing feelers of the mist were crawling back between the alleyways, crouching under patios and slinking out of sight.

People were out, the breeze was up, and the world was coming back to life. It was like my nightmare walk had never happened.