The Fog

Sammy Jane knew the beach was never safe after dark, but she still wanted to see it. Her mother only let her play there alone during the day because she was eight now, and too smart to cut herself on the glass or be carried out to sea by a rip current. Their house was just up the road, after all.

Every night a fog rolled in, and when asked her mother would say there was no fog and hadn’t been for decades. The last time she’d seen fog was when she was a little girl herself, back when there were still gulls on the beach, green grass lining the road to town, and a world full of people to visit them. Now, it was all grey and brown with no fog.

Sometimes Sammy would see the fog-that-was-not-there building on the horizon while she was gathering her dolls and swiping sand from her socks. There would be a white, puffy shape stretching as far as the eye could see, but it wasn’t a cloud. It was too dark, and something about it made her afraid the way she’d been when she was three and saw storm clouds on the horizon. Storm clouds meant thunder, lightning, and dark. She didn’t know hat this meant or why no one would admit they saw it, too.

If she stayed longer, she’d see tendrils of fog creeping onto the sandy beach. There were coils, and whisps, and strange shapes she couldn’t name reaching for her feet, darting forward angrily when she took a step back. There was a smell like something cooking, which made her think at first that someone–on some far away island–was having the biggest barbecue ever.

Sometimes if the wind was low and didn’t rustle the bare branches of the trees by her house, she could hear something. It sounded like a person, perhaps a child her size, with shuffling footsteps. The footfalls were heavy, as if they were dragging something and tired of the weight. The rhythm of them was wrong, but when her mother had asked what that meant Sammy hadn’t known how to describe it.

Tonight, she would know.

After she placed her shoes inside the house and noisily closed the front door, she waited for the sound of the table being set. Then she quietly opened the door again and crept back to her beach where the fog had been creeping, too. Everything was swallowed up.

Don’t be a baby, she told herself, and she stepped forward to be swallowed up by the fog, too. The first thing she felt was that she was lost. The lights of her house back up the road were gone, and she could barely see the sand beneath her bare toes.

Now, she heard the sound almost immediately. It was a slow, dreary whumpf, whumpf, whumpf.

The smell grew stronger. She recognized it now, that smell she associated with roasting meat and charcoal in the pit. It was thick, acrid smoke, tainted by something she couldn’t put her finger on.

The sound came towards her.

Whumpf. Whumpf. Whumpf.

“Hello?” she said warily. If it was a child, she could speak to them.

Whumpf. The noise stopped.

The fog–or was it smoke?–was making it hard to breathe, and Sammy started to cough.

Her father once told her that in a fire, it was the smoke that killed you. If you wanted to live, you had to get away from it. Sammy dropped to the ground and, clutching handfuls of sand, sucked in a great gasp of air. It wasn’t clear, fresh air but a foul reek that made her start coughing again.

She looked up and came face-to-face with the child. Their skin was peeling off their face, and they were too blackened for her to tell whether they had been a girl or a boy. In the sand next to hers the fingers were like charred, brittle sticks.

Sammy screamed, and inhaled lungfuls of smoke.