He leaned on the door with all his weight. Pushed hard, turning the lock. CLICK! He peeked through the windowpane. It was gone. His breathing slowed. He took deep breaths and tried to calm himself. He wasn’t sure what it had been. It had looked like a small child. Six, maybe seven years old. But it hadn’t moved like one.
At this hour the lantern boys should have fired the lampposts. But after the screaming, after the strange attacks of the last hour, he didn’t expect them out in the streets. No carriages had passed in a long while either. The streets were empty of people. Empty of everything, except a strange green mist that had come at sundown. And then the screams had started.
They’d spent the whole day getting ready. A little evening of mingling and drink with the high-class families, a sort of costumed ball for Halloween. Laureanna had made the dessert. Biscuits with a jelly centre, a three-tier vanilla cake, some crudités for the guests who preferred salt to sugar. The house still smelled like someone had washed the floors with vanilla. The party was set for eight. Time enough for the guests to come after their suppers, for dessert.
The mist had cancelled all of it. And he knew, though he would not let the thought finish, that the mist had not simply come. It had been opened. The way a door is opened. By a hand. His hand.
When the sun went down, a dark green cloud two or three feet high had spread across their street. Like it meant to swallow the whole town. He had seen mist before. Never anything like this. It had a life of its own. Every part of it reaching, spreading, faster than a man could shout “Look at the MIST!”
Screams followed.
Faint at first. Men, women, children. Then closer, and closer to his house, as if someone were dragging a wave of screaming along behind the mist. Who was screaming? Why?
Something pale caught the corner of his eye, low on the door he’d just bolted. He’d set the candelabrum on the floor. This glow was its own. A shape stood gouged deep in the wood, where no blade had touched it an hour ago. Two crossed strokes, ringed by linked circles. The cuts beaded with something black and wet that had no business shining in the dark, and shone anyway. His stomach dropped. He reached out. His fingers stopped an inch short of it. And the marks sank back into the grain like ink into a blotter. Gone. The wood smooth and ordinary again. He stood there breathing, telling himself he’d imagined it. He very nearly believed it.
He picked the candelabrum up off the floor and held it to the windowpane, to see if anything showed. Nothing. Just the green cloud, staring in from the front yard.
“LAUREANNA!!??” he yelled. His wife didn’t answer.
He had to lock the windows upstairs. And the back door. The child might come back. Whatever the thing was, it could move, and move fast. It wouldn’t take long to reach the second floor, or the yard.
BAM!
He spun and looked at the windowpane. Nothing.
“LAUREANNA? WHERE ARE YOU?” He screamed it again, looking up the stairs.
BAM!
He aimed the candelabrum at the front door. Still nothing. The candles barely lit the air around him. The rest of the house was pitch black. Then he remembered. When they worked in the kitchen, where the back door was, the echo carried all the way to the hallway and the living room. Reading in his chair, he could always hear Laureanna’s voice while she cooked.
BAAAAM!
The last hit sounded louder. Angrier. It wanted in.
He ran down the corridor to the kitchen and threw himself at the back door. Turned the lock.
“LAUREANNA, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, SHUT THE WINDOWS! ALL OF THEM!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs. No answer.
BAAAAM!
The whole house shook, like giant hands were beating on it. That wasn’t the back door. Or had it been, before? The thing could move.
The floorboards on the second level creaked. Someone was up there. He went for the stairs, careful, not so fast the candles would gutter out.
“LAUREANNA, PLEASE, ANSWER ME!” He took the stairs two and three at a time. He could smell burning. Like someone was burning hair. The hammering on the doors had stopped a while ago. That meant they were inside. Or they’d moved on to a neighbour.
The second floor was quiet. But he felt a breeze, more than there should be. The windows were open. A creak came from the master bedroom.
“Laureanna?” He moved toward the room.
Kuh-Kuh-Ku-Kuh…
The sound came from inside. Three figures stood by the window. One was his wife. He knew her nightgown. She was completely still. He couldn’t see her face; the dark swallowed everything but outlines. Beside her, two smaller shapes. Children, like the one outside. Still as furniture, one on each side of her, staring at her. Both windows stood wide open. Wider than anyone opens a window. Like something had wanted them that way.
“Honey?” He moved toward her, slow. The others didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound.
He blinked. Half a second. And a third child was standing between him and his wife. Whatever they were, they could outrun him without trying. They’d been at this for minutes now. Toying. Choosing not to do whatever else they could do. All three held their places. So did Laureanna. She hadn’t moved since he came in. The candlelight didn’t reach any of them. Just shapes in the dark.
“Laureanna. Come to me. Please.” He had to be sure. Had to see that it was her.
He lifted the candelabrum higher and stepped closer, so the light could reach the first child.
Its head was tipped to the right. It had no eyes. Only deep black sockets, leaking something black. Its mouth hung open, wider than a mouth can go. The same black inside, and no teeth. Kuh-kuh-kuh-kuh… A faint sound came out of it, and he felt a silent scream shove itself into his brain. He could feel it. Actually feel it.
And under the rasp the sound folded into shapes. Into words, pressed flat against the inside of his skull, patient, almost kind. Come and collect your treat. Low on the child’s breastbone, where the nightshirt had torn, the same mark wept down the skin. Two crossed strokes inside their rings of black.
He raised the light to his wife’s face. It was her. Fully dressed, her plain nightgown. Every feature hers, except the face. Her mouth open like the child’s. Her eyes empty of everything human. The same dark liquid running from every opening, and her head laid over on her shoulder like the others. They had done this to her.
The mark was on her too. Risen pale and wet in the hollow of her throat. Like it had been under her skin the whole time, waiting.
The screaming in his head was getting stronger. It made him dizzy. And now his own screaming was in there with it, after seeing her. If he stayed, would he end up like them? Like her? He didn’t want to find out.
He threw the candelabrum at the child in front of him and ran. Down the stairs, fast. Now and then he glanced back, making sure they weren’t behind him. Nothing. But it didn’t matter. They’d shown they could be anywhere they liked, in a blink. It was only a matter of time. They were toying with him. Like children. Children of the dead.
The carriage was right out front. That was all that mattered. His coachman had vanished when the mist came, but the horses were still there in their harnesses. He’d driven a carriage or two in another life. He might have a chance. He might outrun the little devils.
He came out of the house like a gazelle running from a lion. Down the front steps, his night robe flying in the cold October air. And there it was. The carriage. His way out. He looked left, right, behind, as he ran for the front seat. There’d been screaming up and down the street all night. He wasn’t the only one, then. As he reached the green mist, three feet high off the ground, he slowed. Anything could be hiding in there. It was everywhere.
He reached the carriage untouched, jumped up on the seat, and grabbed the reins. One more look at the house. No children. No wife. He looked up at the windows of his study on the second floor, facing the street. Nothing there either. Maybe he’d get out of this after all. And still his eyes kept going back to that study window. The thing he had carried home and pried open was up there in the dark. The lid thrown back on its stand. And some cold, certain part of him knew what the rest of him wouldn’t. A door like that doesn’t shut from out here in the street. Not with a fast horse. Not by running. He knew it the way he knew his own name. He took up the reins anyway.
“GIDDIUP!” he yelled, and cracked the reins, his breath a little white cloud. The cold didn’t matter now. The horses went to a slow trot. He wanted faster. He hit them again and they broke into a gallop. The freezing air poured over him. He could feel the buzzing of the screams starting to fade behind him. What was happening to him? What if he’d stayed? That was Laureanna’s answer, wasn’t it. The tears came, from the cold and from the rest of it. He’d left her behind. But it wasn’t over. He was still in the mist. And the mist was the whole of it. This had all started when the mist came. It had spread far into the city. No end in sight. He glanced back.
A child. Standing in the middle of the street, where the carriage had passed a second ago. He couldn’t tell if it was one of them. What else would it be? No child stays out on a night like this.
He snapped the reins again, driving the horses past what was safe. He glanced back. The child was gone. His mouth went dry. It was one of them. He couldn’t push the horses harder. They were already spent. It was only a matter of time before the things showed up beside him and did what they’d done to Laureanna. What had they done to her? To pull those screams out of a whole street. To leave his wife an empty thing, her face stretched past its limits. He didn’t want to know. “GIDDIUP!” he shouted again, and snapped the reins. They didn’t speed up. He could hear their heaving breath, the hooves coming down in hard, even thumps.
He looked back once more.
No child on the road. But there was a flapping of wood on wood, from the side of the carriage. He looked down. The side door was banging against the frame. Had it been open before? He’d run from the house to the seat without checking. It might have been latched. Or not. And now anything could be inside the carriage with him.
Get out of the mist now! His head was chanting it as he turned to look ahead. A tight ninety-degree curve was coming. At this speed he might not make it.
The buzzing was back in his head. One of them, or more, was close. In the carriage, probably. If I crash it, he thought. There was the curve, coming up fast, and no way he’d make it clean. The horses knew it too. He had to fight them, slapping the reins against their own good sense to keep them from slowing.
Soon he might not be able to fight them at all. The buzzing had turned to burning. Icy pain shot through his eyes. It felt like the lining of his brain was being shaken loose and pushed against the bone. A headache a thousand times over. His thoughts started to drift. Flashes of black. He was losing his hold on what was real.
He came back to himself for a moment. The curve was seconds away. Unless the horses slowed on their own, the house on the corner and the carriage were about to become one thing.
A knife went through the left side of his head. That was how it felt. He opened his mouth to scream and reached up for the pain, and there was nothing there.
And then the carriage exploded!
In a few seconds it was in the air. The horses tried for the curve, but the weight of the load dragged them sideways, and it was like a giant hand crushed the carriage and the man inside it into the house on the corner. Wood flew everywhere. One horse tore free and bolted in a panic. The other went down under a pile of splinters.
He hurt everywhere. Every fibre of him stinging, or warm with blood. The buzzing in his skull had faded. Sharp pain had taken its place, all over. His head clearing a little, he saw a length of wood had gone through his left thigh. Walking away from that would be a fight. He’d been thrown a few feet from the wreck, flipping twice, and landed on the plank that had saved him and run him through at once. He lay a couple of feet above the mist.
He gathered enough strength to look around. No child close by. And then he saw it.
A dozen feet off, the mist was thinning. There was an end to this. Before something else got hold of him, or got into his head, he had to reach it. Had to.
Against all reason, the pain screaming at him not to move, he worked himself off the plank and started to limp toward the edge of the mist. He glanced back. No child. His head was his own again, it seemed. Must make it out!
He limped on. And the buzzing came with him. Must make it!
He looked back. By the wreck he’d crawled from, the outline of a child stood in the dark. His good leg was burning from a hundred cuts, but he pushed harder. He could almost smell his freedom, a few feet off. His senses were starting to smear, the thing behind him working at his mind. Just a few feet.
One last effort. He threw everything he had left into that leg, and the last of his own hold on his body.
And dropped, just outside the mist. I made it!
And in the same breath, absurdly, a face came up through the pain. His daughter’s. Asleep three days’ ride north, at her grandmother’s. Safe. Knowing none of this. The line would go on. Whatever the mist took of him here, it would not have her. Not tonight.
He caught his breath and looked up. The child was gone. He was free. Out of the mist.
Then a sharp burning went across his whole skin. Like someone had poured lamppost oil over every inch of him and touched a match to it. He looked at his hands. His own skin was melting off, tearing away, the organs showing underneath. What he saw, he could feel, everywhere. The pain was so bad he could barely scream. His tongue was melting too. Every organ inside him. His whole body was leaking down into a puddle of colour. Red, brown, every colour he had in him, painted out across the ground.
With only some of his bones left, his muscle and tendon run to liquid, he dropped with one last gasp.
A few feet away, inside the mist, stood the shadow of a child.
It did not come closer. It had no need to.
The rasp drifted out over the wet ruin of him. Unhurried. Almost fond. Come and collect your treat. And where his blood pooled and steamed in the cold, the black began, very faintly, to draw itself into two crossed strokes inside their rings.
The mark. Waiting. Patient as the thing that made it.
