The Fog

by Dennis Etchison

  There was a louder sound of some . . . liquid . . . slopping over something at the lonely weather station. And over it all, a long horrible scream.

  “Dan!”

  But there was only the throb of labored breathing on the line. A heavy, terrible breathing and now a dredging noise that seemed to be sliding . . . sliding toward her.

  “Dan! Oh Dan, you stupid fool! You didn’t have to prove anything, you crazy, crazy . . .”

  The earpiece dropped from her hand just as the muffled crash of breaking glass filled her ears, lingering like wind chimes gone mad in a wind that would not stop.

  “. . . And all of us need to redouble our efforts and work together as a family. For we have a vital, thriving community here, and I say we’ve got to make every effort to keep it that way!”

  Inside the tavern, the bartender racked a row of clean beer mugs, wiped his hands on his apron and hiked up the volume on the radio in order to hear KAB above the amplified voice of Kathy Williams. It was not Stevie’s usual rap. It was some sort of news-break.

  “Sorry to interrupt the good music,” said Stevie, “but I have an urgent bulletin here.” Her voice broke but continued. “Will Sheriff David Simms please contact KAB immediately. The number is 555-2131. This is an emergency.”

  The music resumed. The bartender lowered the volume.

  Outside, Kathy Williams was leafing through her notes, scraping the microphone, which sent a thud and then a sustained whine of feedback through the PA system. The crowd stirred restlessly.

  The bartender unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket and made a note on a napkin. He let himself out from behind the bar and walked slowly to the door, reluctant to intercede.

  Sheriff Simms was standing next to Kathy, a glazed impersonation of concern on his jowled face.

  The bartender made up his mind. He untied his apron, tossed it over the bar, and strode across the park. He slipped around to the side, climbed up the rear of the platform and tapped Simms’ shoulder. The Sheriff leaned over, nodded once and climbed down.

  Behind him, the crowd broke into applause.

  “Most of you have taken candles already, Well, I don’t blame you. We’re here tonight to dedicate this fine piece of sculpture commissioned by the Antonio Bay City Council, and you’re impatient. Bless you all for your civic spirit. In a moment I’ll ask my monitors to pass among you to see that your candles are relighted, and then we’ll line up . . .”

  The sheriff hitched up his pants and followed the bartender inside, leaving a dotted line of footprints in the wet grass.

  “God almighty,” he said at the door. “Look at that fog, will you? I couldn’t see it from where I was.”

  “That might have something to do with it,” said the bartender. “An accident, maybe. You never know in weather like this. I wrote out the number for you.”

  Simms stopped off at the men’s room—it was labeled CREW—and then dropped a dime into the pay phone.

  “Hello, KAB,” said Stevie Wayne breathlessly.

  “Hello, Miss Wayne? This is . . .”

  Across the park, Kathy’s voice was receding like a ship in the night. The bartender remained outside on the porch, trying to watch the relighting of the candles, but fog was flowing in so fast now that all that was to be seen anywhere in the park were the pinpricks of a few sputtering wicks through the thickening mist. The platform was obscured, Kathy only a disembodied voice from the loudspeakers, which were impeded by static. There were no longer trees or audience, not even a visible demarcation between land and sky but only a polar landscape, a snowy expanse covered by the turbulent moire of fog.

  It was impossible for anyone to see the way the mass of fog had wound its way uphill from the base of the poles at the other end of Main Street, the way it now sheathed their crosslike tops, coating the ceramic insulators with ice crystals, contracting over the connections, freezing the wires brittle and finally snapping them off hard and clean, breaking every telephone link to the Square, the Inn and the homes and businesses of Antonio Bay within a half-mile radius.

  Interrupted in mid-sentence, Sheriff David Simms pumped the pay phone cradle, trying to get a response from the operator, a dial tone or even a recording. But the phone was cold and quite dead in his hand, and there was nothing he nor anyone else in the town could have done about it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As Nick cleared the last of the trees and aimed the truck for the squat bungalow at the end of the road, the few feelers of fog that remained in the area deserted the weather station and stole away into the night.

  Elizabeth gasped when she saw what was ahead. Nick scowled at her and she covered her mouth.

  The headlights bobbed over the unmoving radar dish, the open windows, and the yawning doorway at the front of the building. Pebbles rained up under the truck and then clicked to a stop as he set the hand brake and jumped out. He left the motor running and the high beams angled at the doorway, where a final clump of mist was dematerializing before his eyes.

  “It doesn’t look good, does it?” said Elizabeth.

  He ignored her. He paused by the demolished front window, then crunched over blades of glass and stood in the middle of the single room, surrounded by charred machines. He could smell melted insulation and the sharp, acrid whiff of short-circuited wiring. A final flourish of smoke emerged like an apparition from the fuse box and rose along one wall to the blackened overhang of the ceiling.

  Elizabeth came up behind him.

  “The windows,” she said. “They’re all broken!”

  Some people have a talent for stating the obvious, he thought. Maybe it will stand her in good stead some day, though I can’t imagine where.

  “Where’s the phone?” he said. “See if you can find it.”

  He searched the floor in the stab of the headlights, waiting for the worst. But there was no body, no wet, mangled victim, no blind staring eyes, not this time. Only the fried machinery and the glass-strewn, twinkling floor.

  “The light switch doesn’t work,” she said.

  “Look at these gauges,” he said, half to himself.

  “And the thermometers. They’re all broken, too.”

  Nick struck his cigarette lighter. “Twenty degrees,” he said.

  His knee made contact with something soft and viny.

  It was the phone cord. It was stretched to the floor. He stopped it from moving and fished it up. “Hello?” he said. He tapped the button.

  “It can’t be working. Can we go now? Nick, I don’t think I could take another corpse falling on top of me right now.”

  “The phone’s powered from a separate source. I think there’s someone on the line. Or there was. Sounds like the connection’s still open.”

  She sat down in the desk chair.

  He broke the connection again and again. Finally a weak dial tone began to buzz.

  “Nick,” said Elizabeth.

  He dialed 555-2131. After what seemed like a very long time, it purred on the other end. And purred. And purred.

  Elizabeth was rising slowly, mechanically. “Nick,” she said again, a bizarre, flat tone in her voice.

  “She must be on the air,” he said. “I’ll try the tavern.” He ripped the telephone dial around and around. “Come on, come on.” It did not even ring. “Someone should have gotten to Simms by now. I hope to God he heard the message.”

  “Nick. The chair. It’s wet.”

  He held the phone away from his face and looked at her.

  Behind her, the top of the desk was sodden with water. The blotter was buckling in a slippery pool. There was a ruined copy of the Christmas edition of Playboy, a plastic strip from the top of a six-pack, a stained pack of Marlboros, a waterlogged pocket calculator, and two flattened Coors cans. Last remains of the missing, he thought. Hell of a note.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We can’t waste any more time here,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night. Something tells me this may be only the beginn
ing.”

  Two miles inland, a broad sign fronted a concrete bunker that had been erected during World War II to withstand sneak attacks by Japanese bombers, as well as seismic activity within the region, though the facility was wisely located far from the San Andreas fault. The sign was illuminated by two sealed beams. It read:

  ANTONIO BAY POWER STATION

  #2

  California Edison

  DANGER — HIGH VOLTAGE

  Suddenly the lights trembled as a pendant of fog overran the sign from behind, licking over the frame and dripping to the ground.

  Within the concrete bunker, a glowing light shone under the crack at the bottom of a reinforced steel door. The light extended across the blockhouse floor, painting tall shadows around the whining series generators that powered the entire Tri-County area. The light became viscous. It flowed under the door and covered the floor. It formed a cloven base around the bolts in the concrete and beetled upward over the enameled steel and iron, embracing turbines and storage capacitors and voltage regulators, crippling pressurized switchovers and relays as it went, penetrating to the cores and the delicate copper windings within, reversing magnetic poles, drenching each individual strand of the brushes and adhering to the riveted walls of the casings like thick, milky slime. And then one by one the generators faltered, shorted, and seized to a grinding halt, a thin layer of ice clinging to the metal and eating it away.

  While outside the sealed beams wavered, dimmed and finally washed out, leaving the restricted area dark and silent except for the spitting and wheezing from within the power plant itself, the blue-white glint of the earth where the fog had passed, and the reptilian swishing of the cloud as it withdrew, leaving the premises gutted.

  “. . . And as we make our way across the park for the viewing of the statue, I think we should all keep in mind the significance of this night for every citizen of Antonio Bay . . .”

  As Kathy neared the end of her prepared speech, the mayor, the head of the City Council, the vice-president of the Women’s Auxiliary and the other dignitaries on the platform stole surreptitious glances at their wrist-watches and breathed a unanimous sigh of relief. Before them, in eldritch resolution, townspeople relit their candles and murmured expectantly behind a lacework of fog. Only their eyes shone through the haze, kindled by the wan tulips of flame they held in their hands. The stands radiated a golden aura as the last candle was restored.

  “We should all proceed . . .”

  Abruptly Kathy’s voice was cut off. The rows drooped as the first participants climbed down for the procession, but the bulk of the audience remained where they were, their candles jiggling uncertainly as they awaited further instructions. Obediently they leaned forward to catch her next word.

  Kathy tapped her microphone, but nothing happened. She went to the end of the stage and continued in her loudest voice:

  “We should all proceed to the statue now. Single files. Please don’t push. Take your time.”

  She found the mayor.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Then she gazed with him beyond the park to the vague outlines of streets and storefronts, or at least to where she remembered they should be. Every street-lamp had gone out, every sign and every light on every porch. The Elizabeth Dane Inn was now dark and foreboding, the contour of its ship’s anchor emblem hanging forlorn in the moist, blowing air.

  “An auspicious moment for a power failure, I would say,” said the mayor.

  The motor gave out a rasping, grinding sound. Actually it was something much worse, Nick thought. He had heard it years ago in his Chevy’s last miles, and it was a sound that was hard to forget.

  He turned off the ignition, pumped the gas, and twisted the key again. A miserable cloud of smoke coughed out of the tailpipe, distinguishable from the the fog by its gunmetal color. This baby, thought Nick, is ready for the Iron Orchard. He struck the wheel with both fists so hard it almost broke.

  He got out and threw open the hood. The engine was readable only as a maze of rust and oil stains, even with the headlights on. He reached in through the broken window and found his five-cell flashlight. He stood on the bumper and leaned over the radiator, the front of the truck wobbling under him. He stepped off and watched it bounce up and down, up and down. He spat.

  Elizabeth climbed out. “What is it, Nick?”

  “The damn shocks are shot, for openers. And it feels like one of the leaf springs is busted. Must’ve happened when we hit that last bump coming down.”

  “Is that why it won’t start?”

  He didn’t answer. He got down on his knees and directed the flashlight under the chassis. He reached underneath, touched the crankcase, and brought his fingers close to his face. They were covered with warm, black oil.

  “Great,” he said glumly. “Oil pan’s got a nice, big, fat hole in it. She’s lost every last drop of oil by now.” He walked around the truck. There in his beam was a long, glistening trail that led from the transmission back up the access road and into the woods. “Shit!” he said.

  “Do you want me to try to start it while you—while you do whatever it is you’re going to do?”

  “Not unless you want to freeze up the bearings. Without oil, she’ll tear her guts out inside of a half mile. We can’t even make it back to town.”

  “Oh no,” she said. She went to the weather station porch and sat, rubbing her arms through the leather jacket. “The phone doesn’t work, right?”

  “Try it again if you want. But it sounds to me like a telephone pole fell off into the ocean somewhere.” He kicked the tire with all his might.

  “Will he come back, do you think?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever—or whatever—did this.” She glanced around warily, the whites of her eyes bulging.

  “Don’t hold your breath. It got what it wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “If I could figure that out,” he said, “I’d know where it’s heading next. I could try to do something that would be worth a damn. If I could get there in time. If you’ve got any bright ideas, now’s the time, kid. Sheriff Simms’ll take a while. If he even heard her message. And it’ll take me an hour to walk—”

  “You mean ‘we,’ don’t you? You’re not leaving me here. We could hitch.”

  “With who? The Great Pumpkin? See that? That’s Russell Road over there. Nobody uses it except campers. Did you see any campers tonight? The other road, if you can call it that, the devil’s hairpin we just came charging down, it’s all uphill from here, remember?”

  “Nick.”

  “But not to worry. We’ll build a fire, send up smoke signals, raise the dead, and ask them for a new oil pan.” He threw a stone. It tore through the trees and ricocheted like a bullet. “Give me a minute here. It’ll take me that long to—”

  “Nick.”

  There was a tight edge to her voice. It was the way she had sounded back on the Sea Grass. It was not that she was close to tears; that would be a relief for her. No, it was a riskier sound, more dangerous. He gave up and went over to her.

  She held up one hand.

  Something dark hung from her fingers. She held it by thumb and forefinger, as if afraid of it. No, not afraid; she did not seem to have any real fear inside her. It was as though she had learned a long time ago that it didn’t do any good. But what she was holding was thoroughly distasteful and repulsive to her, that was obvious.

  “What you got?” He hit it with the flashlight. “So? It’s a piece of kelp—seaweed. I see a ton of it every—”

  “It was here, on the porch. Nick, can I ask you one question? How far is it to the beach from here?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Stevie almost got through it before the darkness overtook her.

  “There’s an emergency situation in Antonio Bay. Will someone from the Sheriff’s Department please get to the Coast Guard Weather Station out on Russell Road immediately? There is a possibility that someone is injured or dead . . .
”

  The windows around her were spotting with her breath and the heat of the machines. The turntables no longer spun; the last record was still on the platter. Under the lights of the signal meters on the control console, a thin shimmer of color squeezed from the microgrooves. No lights at all blinked on her telephone.

  “And there’s a problem with the telephones here, so I’m going to stay on the air and hope someone’s listening . . .”

  She poured herself another cup of coffee and glanced out the window.

  On this side of the fog line the town to the foot of the hills, was sectioned neatly by streetlights strung like pearls. A portrait of a perfectly secure American town, Stevie thought. Now she noticed a mane of menacing clouds suspended over the tops of those hills. As she watched, the clouds began to flow down toward the sea, blotting out the net of lights, progressing steadily through the streets and encroaching on the highway.

  Clouds?

  It was fog.

  “By the way, that fog bank I told you about earlier has looped inland around much of the Tri-County area. Looks like it could cause a few pileups on the Interstate if we’re not on our toes. So to all you good buddies driving out there . . .”

  Before the fog could touch it, the first lighted division of the town went blank.

  Her eyes widened.

  Another section, then another, like arcade attractions at closing time, blinked out of visible reality. The blackout hopped across the basin, extinguishing the town square, snuffing out the housing development, eliminating boulevards and roads through the town, to the wharf, right up to the dockyard and the dunes. Then it sidestepped in squares to the southwest expansion, ruthlessly dousing every subdivision as it went. She watched in disbelief as the power failed in a widening patchwork quilt, the lights along the beach shrinking, pulling back to Spivey Point until—

  A palpable blackness passed over the lighthouse like giant wings across the moon, plunging her into darkness.

  The switchboard blipped out, diodes and meters and light leaks from the vented heat sinks; her electric heater glowed brightly one last time behind its tilted grille before the wires cooled; fans whirred and hummed to a stop with the sound of trapped insects; the clock froze its scythelike hands in midstroke; transformers shut down, the music stopped. The hot water in her coffee pot boiled its last and began to steam silently, leaving only the subaudible ticking down of electronic components in the closed tower.