“Andy, did you leave that chair in the middle of the floor? I could have broken my neck. What are you doing? What happened to the candles?”
“Mrs. Kobritz, look.”
He saw her shape pass him, silhouetted against the curtains.
“Why, what is this?” she said.
“What is it really, do you think?”
“My, my. It would appear that a great deal more fog has moved right past Mrs. Oliver’s house and is coming this way.”
“It’s already here. At least, by my room.”
“Is it? It was blowing across the back porch. There seems to be even more now, closing in on this side. I think perhaps we’d better close all the windows, Andy. Is your bedroom window closed?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better check again to be sure it’s down tight.” Her voice was constricted.
“Why?”
“Andrew, do as you’re told.”
“Okay.” He started to leave. “Wow, lookit that!”
“What is it?”
“Look at the way it’s turning to water on the glass!”
“Are you sure your window is closed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Kobritz turned from the window. “I wonder about your mother’s bedroom.”
A tall, black shape walked across the front window.
“Mrs. Kobritz . . .”
“I’m positive I closed them, but I’d better make sure.”
“There’s somebody outside. I just saw him. Maybe he’s coming to help.”
Mrs. Kobritz stopped short. “What did you say?”
“I said—”
Andy’s voice was overpowered by the sound of a knocking at the front door. It repeated until it was a pounding that shook the walls and rattled the pictures on the mantle.
“I can’t believe that’s Stevie,” said Kathy. “I’ve never heard her this way before.”
“She’s scared, Mrs. Williams. That’s what I’d say.”
“I wonder why? It’s only fog. A rather heavy influx, I’ll grant you, but bad weather is no reason to lose control.”
“No, ma’am. Mrs. Williams, look at that.”
At the end of Regent Avenue a white fin of fog encircled the old eucalyptus trees, growing in the headlights until it was a waiting roadblock.
“It’s moving faster now,” said Stevie on the car radio. “Up Smallhouse Road to Regent Avenue . . .”
“What street is this?” Sandy clocked her hands around the steering wheel. “It’s so dark.”
“Try to hurry, won’t you?”
“. . . Now it’s spreading out. Up to the end of Regent . . .”
Sandy made a U-turn.
“. . . Up to Tenth Avenue . . .”
“Mrs. Williams, there’s no place left to go.”
“Are you trying to frighten me, Sandy?”
“No, ma’am. Do you have a map?”
“I don’t need a map. I’ve lived here all my life. Keep going, dear.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m not going to drive through it. Mrs. Williams, it’s not safe. Can’t you see? Can’t you hear what she’s saying?”
“. . . Moving down Tenth Avenue . . .”
“Make a right, Sandy.”
“Right here? I never saw this street before.”
“Sandy, I want to be home! If you can’t handle it, move over and I’ll take charge.”
They passed a street sign.
“Oh-oh,” said Sandy. “This is Tenth. It says so right there, see?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
Sandy drove cautiously to the end of the block. The traffic light at the residential intersection was out. The Cadillac listed as they rolled over a mound on the pavement.
“God,” said Sandy, “did you see that?”
“Did I see what?”
“A dead cat. It looked like it had been run over so many times—”
“Sandy, stop that!”
The car screeched to a halt, fishtailing into the curb.
“Not here. I didn’t mean—”
“Mrs. Williams. Look.”
A white talon was hooked over the trees at the end of the block. It was clawing its way over the parked cars. It blew out the windows of each car it touched as if they were bottles lined up in a shooting gallery. It was undeniably coming their way.
Sandy stomped the pedal to the floorboard, raked the wheel, and reversed direction in a tight swerve that pinned them to their seats. She bounded back through the intersection without slowing and sat forward, feeding the gas like a drag racer.
“Where did you learn to drive like this? Are you determined to kill us both?”
Sandy did not answer. She eyed the darkened storefronts of the Bayside Shopping Center as the headlights clipped their façades one by one.
“If you’re on the south side of town,” said Stevie Wayne, “go north! Stay away from it, whatever you do. Stay away from the fog . . . !”
Kathy raised her forearm automatically as another white, swirling roadblock appeared beyond the Savings & Loan building, closing the distance rapidly.
Sandy strong-armed the wheel in reflex. The tires lost traction momentarily as the sidewalls scraped the curb, and then they were rocketing over the sidewalk and into the parking lot. A red sign flicked past the windshield. DANGER, it read. DO NOT ENTER.
There was an explosion, and the car reeled to a stop at the exit lane of the lot.
Something was hissing outside. Sandy flung the door open and surveyed the damage.
“It’s the left front tire,” she said. “The spikes, road hazards, whatever you call them. I’m sorry, Mrs. Williams. They got us.”
Kathy did not answer. Her elbow had struck the padded dash. When she tried to move her wrist, a bone slipped in and out of place.
She clamped her teeth together and closed her eyes. Then she said, “Can you fix it, Sandy?” She winced at her own voice. It sounded like a child’s.
“You mean can I change the tire? I never have before. Well, I guess I’d better learn how,” she said despairingly. “Now is as good a time as any. Do we have a spare and one of those jacks?”
“I don’t know, Sandy. Al always took care of those things.” She tried to open her door, but her arm was a problem. “In the trunk, I imagine. Here, you’ll need the keys.”
Sandy leaned in.
Behind her, extruding between the chain posts on this side of the lot, not thirty feet away, was a waist-high counter of fog.
“Look out!” said Kathy. “Get in and lock the doors, quickly. It’s already here!”
“. . . Andy,” said Stevie Wayne, “run! Get out of the house! Mrs. Kobritz, get him out of there before it’s too late . . . !”
Stevie tugged on the microphone cord, opened the glass door, and stepped out onto the upper landing. The air was humid and putrefied but still bearable. It was the only way she could manage to see the whole town. She decided to go back on the air and give it one more try.
“It’s over by the armory,” she said with precise, broadcasting school enunciation, hoping that someone would hear and understand. “I can’t recall the street. Highland. No, I think it’s Chestnut. Now it’s turned again. It’s sweeping inland again, almost like a wall across the east side. And it’s slowing, not moving as fast. Settling in for the night.”
She stretched the cord as far as she could. Her car was still up on the road. I could go for it, after all, she thought. I could make a break before it gets any farther.
The fog blew aside for an instant. She saw the frost that now enveloped the convertible top and body, no longer orange but flecked with ice. It was already too late. She knew it even before the first runners of fog appeared on the walkway and began to slough down the one-hundred-and-thirty-nine steps.
“Please,” she said, a strange, tragic calm overtaking her. She slowed her lips, pacing her words so that they would be e
xtremely clear. “I know someone is out there. My son. Listen to me. My son needs help. The address is 887 White Beach Lane. Please help him, someone. Anyone. My son . . . is . . . trapped.”
The bottoms of her feet were chilled numb through her shoes. She glanced down over the railing.
The fog was precipitating around the rocks at the base of the lighthouse, the first tentative antennae of vapor already beginning to scale the whitewashed stones.
She closed the glass door, lowered the microphone, and leaned her back to the glass. She resumed breathing with great effort, striving to separate herself from the failed struggle.
She raised the microphone once more and spoke from within the unexpectedly quiet eye of the storm.
“Andy?” she said. “I don’t even know if you can hear me. I want you to know something while there’s still time. I’m sorry I didn’t come for you, that I wasn’t there when you needed me. But, you see, I thought I had to stay here. I tried to reach someone who could get to you. I don’t know if they heard me.”
She fought down a surging in her chest.
“I’m going to stay here now, Andy. I have to. If you’re safe, then it doesn’t matter. It’s all right. I may be the only one who can see everything now, and I may possibly be able to help someone else. I hope you understand. Please, my darling, try. I’ve got to stay here now. I love you . . .”
“Who’s that at the door?”
“Andy,” said Mrs. Kobritz, “I want you to go to your room.
“I think I should stay.”
Mrs. Kobritz stepped between Andy and the door, beneath which an illuminated worm of fog had slipped past the weather stripping.
“But—”
“Right now,” she said with quiet authority. He could tell there was no use arguing.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He slouched dejectedly from the living room. He paused at his doorway. “Mrs.—”
“Andy, go to your room!”
He navigated between chair and dresser, leaving his bedroom door ajar.
“But I want to see who it is,” he complained hopelessly.
He heard the pounding cease abruptly as she unlocked the front door. He turned back in time to see it opening on a whitefall.
No one there.
But he had seen someone pass the window, he was sure. That couldn’t have been his imagination. Could it?
Mrs. Kobritz went out onto the front porch. The fog flowed around her, so that her dress smoked like hot clothes out of the wash.
“Can’t I just stay for two seconds, Mrs. Kobritz? One second? Please?”
She must have heard him this time because she started back inside. He could not see her features in the backlight, but he knew what her eyes would be like, stern and ready to punish.
He gave up and withdrew to his room. He kneed his door almost shut.
He did not hear the sudden dripping and sliding on the front porch.
Had he looked back over his shoulder one last time to argue, he would have seen a tall shape solidifying behind Mrs. Kobritz, a stringy black hand reaching around her head from the outside, closing at her chin, covering her mouth so that she could not scream, and lifting her as if she were a rag doll straight up into the air, leaving her empty shoes toppling on the welcome mat.
“Okay, okay,” he said with a shrug when she did not answer, “I’m going,” and pushed his door the rest of the way closed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sky was disappearing.
“That way looks clear,” said Elizabeth.
“No, that’s Broad Street. It turns into a bottleneck anyway.”
“What other way is there to get there? Every street we try is—Nick, look out!”
The center line began to shimmer alongside the tires, and then the full width of the pavement was sparkling with glitter that led into a glowing white barricade at the corner. Nick hit the brakes, burning rubber. He bulldozed the Vega across a lawn and sped back the other way.
“There’s got to be a way,” he said to himself. “Think, dammit!”
“How far are we from White Beach Lane?”
“Not far, the way I remember it. The ocean’s on the other side of that housing tract, so it can’t be far. Hit that flashlight out the window again.”
She read the signs. “Buccaneer. Via del Sol. Costa Verde. White . . . Nick, slow down.”
“There used to be a lumber yard around here. If I can—”
“Nick, this is it! White Beach Lane.”
He rounded the corner, slowed, kicked on his brights, and scanned the road ahead. It descended to the beach in a dogleg. Patchy fog had accumulated around the first of the widely-spaced houses, leaving the road clear. Then there was a continuous reef of fog still low to the beach and undisturbed between the road and the sand. As they passed, a rectangle appeared in the fog, then was swallowed again almost immediately.
“Is that a window?” she said.
“What’s the number?”
“The last one I saw was nine-hundred-and-something. What did she say? Eight eighty-seven?”
“That’s got to be it ahead,” he said. “I’m betting on it.” He wrenched into high gear and roared down the dogleg. He missed the driveway and bumped down to the yard at the rear of the house. He cut the lights.
The fog was a dozen yards away, pulsing around three sides.
“Get behind the wheel. Keep your foot on the gas and don’t let it die, no matter what.”
“Nick, it’s too close!”
He left her and ran doubled over. His shoes filled with sand. He reached the back door.
The screen was torn. He pushed the flashlight through. Washing machine, broom, an open fuse box. Beyond, an empty kitchen.
He started forward along the side. The fog was creeping around from the front and gathering under the supports. He checked the ground by his feet. There was no sign that it had come all the way through yet. Or perhaps it had already passed this side.
He rubbed out a spot on the next window and put his light to it. An empty bedroom. Hanging plants, pictures on the dresser.
And a glow under the door.
One other window on this side. He ran to it and caromed off the north edge, almost touching the fog.
He pounded on the glass with his fist. The window frame rattled, shaking putty loose.
“No! You get away from here! I’m not scared of you!”
A boy’s voice. Nick took the flashlight in his left hand, protected his face, and struck the window. It didn’t break. He faced it squarely and thrust the flashlight out from his chest, poleaxing the glass. This time it shattered into transparent swords.
The boy was seated on a bed. He turned away from the door and saw Nick. The flashlight caught his eyes. They were round as saucers. Behind the boy, a bright taper of fog was oozing under the bedroom door.
Nick pounded on the window frame, knocking glass aside.
“Come on!”
The boy’s confused eyes shot between the door and the window. Nick heard another pounding, louder and deeper, coming from the next room. He reached his hand in.
“Andy,” he said. “Is that your name?”
Andy got off the bed and stared, hypnotized, at the light under the door. “Mrs. Kobritz!” he said. “I need you!”
Nick tried to haul himself up and in to grab the boy, but the window sill was barely too high. He stepped up onto the edge of the sun deck and swung over. He kicked more glass away.
“Come on, grab my hand, son!”
The boy backed to the window. Nick took off his jacket and flung it over the sill. The boy felt its sleeve brush his back and turned, startled. Nick collared him and dragged him over the ledge.
“Wait, there’s a piece of glass right over your head. Don’t move.”
Inside the bedroom, the doorknob started to glow.
Nick worked to remove the half-pane, but it remained embedded in the frame like a guillotine blade.
The doorknob began to turn.
The boy was halfway out, his neck in the clear, when he looked up, past Nick.
“No!” he cried.
Nick heard a hissing. He held Andy with one hand and bobbed the flashlight beam along the house.
An extension of fog was writhing along the boards, about to touch him.
“We’ve got to get you out of here! When I tell you, you’re going to move faster than you’ve ever moved before. Right, son?”
“All right.”
He pulled the boy nearly free of the window. The boy screamed. His feet were caught. Or they were being held.
Nick dropped the flashlight, wrapped both arms around the boy, and let himself fall from the sun deck, hitting the beach on his back and cushioning the boy.
A black hand reached down from the window.
Andy got up shakily.
Nick held his face. “Look only at me,” he said. “When I say so, start running. There’s a car over there. No matter what you see or hear, don’t stop.”
“Okay.”
The black hand dangled closer to Andy’s head.
“GO!”
He pushed Andy away, waited for him to run clear and then rolled over and crawled from the house on his elbows. Sand worked its way into his eyes.
The car horn bleated.
He got up, stumbled forward.
“Nick, this way! I have him. Here! Hurry!”
“Can’t see! Put on the lights!”
She opened the door for him. The boy was tumbling into the back seat. Nick slammed the door. He shook his head violently and wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
“What are you waiting for? Go, GO!”
The motor raced. The car rocked forward a foot, then fell back. He heard wheels spinning in sand.
“Reverse!” he yelled.
He looked out the back window. Sand was raining up. The car rocked back, then sank deeper, digging itself in.
The fog poured down the driveway.
“Forward,” said Nick.
The car rocked forward, touching the fog.
“Now reverse again.”
From out of the fog came a tall, dark shape in the form of a tattered man, walking toward them.
“Keep it rocking,” he said. “First and reverse. You can do it. Come on, come on!”
The Fog Page 13