The Fog (13 page)

But if you had worked the night shift at the weather station for years, if you lived alone and had no one to nag you into worrying, if you knew the way well enough to handle it in your sleep, especially with half a six pack under your belt, then you would not hesitate to take the shortcut by day or night. If you were already ten minutes late and running low on gas on a Saturday night, you might even thank your lucky stars that the road was there. The way to take it was to wedge the can of beer in your crotch, goose the radio up to distortion level, and maybe time yourself, if you remembered to check your watch at the turn-off—a contest with nothing except you and the road; no trees, no signs, no dropoffs into the gully, no cops, no weather that you wouldn’t know about already, and certainly no fear. You and your car one, your nerve versus the road. It was to laugh about, if it was to think about at all.

“. . . And before you know it,” said Stevie Wayne, her amplified voice almost keeping pace with the pair of misaligned headlights knifing through the dark, “I’ll be ready to check in with the weatherman . . .”

“And the weatherman,” said O’Bannon, negotiating a particularly hairy turn, “will be fuckin’ ready to check in with
you!”

His words and the shout that followed trailed after the car, deflecting off the trees and ringing in the hollows of the dank glade before being lost to the landscape, along with the machine-gunning of his tappets and the noxious puttering of a muffler full of holes and hanging now by a bent coat hanger, ready to drop at the next mound of leaves in the road or the first deep chuckhole of the night.

“Ho
o-whee!”
he shouted out the window, downshifting and spinning out around an S-curve. He tossed an empty Coors can to the wind and was gone.

The can bounced on the uneven pavement, skipped like a stone over water and lodged at the base of a sign that read SLIPPERY WHEN WET. Moisture condensed on the aluminum and dripped into it, followed by a steady stream from down the splintered post, sliding in sheets from the rusting steel sign, funneling from the branches that touched it, which were already growing furry sleeves of nearly crystalline fog.

More fog blew into the trees and transformed them into puffballs at the skyline, hanging in a cloud that stretched and shrank, as if breathing. It slithered in serpentines down the bark, leaving a blue-white sparkle like diamond dust on whatever it touched. It gathered in a cold boiling on the ground and grew amoebalike pseudopodia in glutinous chains across the now shimmering blacktop. It turned and flowed back up the center line, toward the sea, but too late; the car was already past and heading for the end of the run. The fog contracted, strengthening its substance, and expanded again, solidifying an ectoplasmic net across the lane through the forest, waiting for the next car to pass this way, a mile and a half outside Antonio Bay proper, on the route that led to the sea.

Andy had to see for himself.

He helped Mrs. Kobritz with the dishes, dodged her invitation to watch
Narky,
the new police dog series and retired to his room for the time being “to play with my cars.”

He did in fact line up his Matchbox miniatures on the quilt, arranging them in a long, convoluted procession, and waited, humming one of the new KAB jingles to himself. After twenty minutes or so Mrs. Kobritz’s calls of “Andy, look at this” and “Andy, you really ought to see it” gave way to her usual disapproving conversation with the TV set, to clucks of criticism and finally to a heavy, regular breathing that told him she was lost again to her after-dinner nap.

“It’s one hundred years ago today,” he sang to himself.

He slipped into his fur-lined jacket, pocketed his flashlight and the Pronto camera he had gotten in the mail as a Christmas present from his uncle in Chicago, and pried up the window to the sun deck.

He had heard no unusual sounds from outside, only the familiar tonguing of the water under the house during high tide. But he knew they would be there. And this time he was determined to catch them in the act, whoever they were.

He dropped to the sand and listened intently. No footsteps from the living room, no “Andy, what are you doing?” Only the old rush and slap of the sea, and the crackling of the high-voltage power lines up on the road.

They never made that much noise before, he thought, and peeked over his shoulder. He could not find the telephone poles, however, in the new fog. It was everywhere now.

It had invaded his beach all the way to the rocks, white and stiff as cumulous clouds; but Mrs. Kobritz had said it was not clouds. It was fog, it was. But it was not like any fog he had seen before. It surged forward like an occupying navy, enfolding whole houses in its wake, establishing a beachhead and advancing toward the road and the trees, moving inland.

Wonder if I could take a picture of it? It wouldn’t look like anything. Probably wouldn’t even come out on the film. He ignored it and set to work.

The beach was relatively dry under the bedrooms. He counted the pilings, dug in his knees, and lit the flashlight.

The same starfish still hung prickly on the tarred posts, arrested by the driven cleats and drying twisted and deformed in the yellow circle of his Scout flashlight. They had not moved, he was sure.

It might be nice to have one for a trophy.

But why bother? They sure weren’t going anywhere.

Unless they could be revived by water. The tide would be higher again in a few weeks.

He had read of such things in the Time-Life picture books: an African mudfish, he forgot the exact name, which buried itself in a sort of cocoon in empty riverbeds and hibernated, waiting for the first rains of the year, or the next year or the year after.

But they didn’t have nails hammered through them.

What if he pulled the nails out?

He probed his pale beam at the darkness under the house, hoping to surprise new ones in the process of climbing, or at least to discover some clue as to what they were doing there. The stilts were solid, but some of the high beams were being eaten away by dry rot. Strands and bulbs of blistering kelp had collected about the timbers in an arcane pattern, surrounded by soft terraces and drainage canals that connected back to the sea. Here the sand was crosshatched with a maze of punctures, tiny bubble holes drilled when it was wet by sand crabs buried under an unusually high tide; there bunches of mossy sea wort spread in wiry scalp locks to dry among the blanched shells; and there, a continuous line of craterlike impressions, footprints that led under the house. The footprints were rough and frenzied, as if chopped out by the hooves of a wild animal on the run. There was not enough light to be sure, but they had probably been made by an unleashed dog. He hoped it had been a dog.

He propped the flashlight on his knee, trained his camera on the starfish, and tripped an exposure.

The stark throw of the flashbulb froze spiders under boards, bits of jellied sand dangling from their webs, a hermit crab in the act of feeding, torn paper wrappers and the feathered pages of an old TV Guide, a rotting rubber balloon, a broken oar, the filigreed bones of a poisoned fish. He thought of the long-dead and rotting mussels, clams, oysters, lobster, squid, puffers, eel, sea snakes, sharks, barracuda, trilobites, spiny horrors that were once sentinels of the deep, abandoned here on the changing shoreline and layered beneath his knees and the house in which he lived. And then the Polaroid photo ejected from the front of the camera. He turned his flashlight to it, impatient.

All that there was so far, of course, was a greenish cloud of developing chemicals. He lowered the beam and decided to try another shot, in case the first one did not take.

The outline of the climbing starfish remained before his eyes so that he only had to raise the camera and point, lining it up with the afterimages he already saw. He released the button and another searing flash illuminated the underside of the building.

He had several more shots left on the flashbar. He scuffled around for another angle, and noticed then that the starfish had become misty, almost transparent, threatening to fade out and disappear even as he watched.

He crawled closer, leading with his scout light.

It was the air. It was diffused now, scattering and diffracting the once-sharp lines in front of him. He wiped the lens clean on his shirt and removed the previous print. A fall of dustlike moisture particles settled on the glossy square and on the plastic of the camera and on his hands, making them sparkle. As if they were glowing in the dark. It was beginning to give him the creeps.

He turned around quickly and checked the beach.

A veil had descended over the whole coast, erasing even the details of the life raft and his pail and shovel. It wrapped itself around the sand dunes and braided through the telephone wires up on the road, sneaking over the landscape and cloaking the sea. The fog, if that was what it was, was white as vanilla ice cream.

Whatever it was, however it made him feel, he knew it was special. It may not happen again. He repositioned his camera toward the beach and fired.

The flash hit the wall of fog and bounced back at his eyes, blinding him temporarily. He dropped the camera. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands but it did no good. All he could see was the great white reflector before him, mapped with the red lightning bolts of blood vessels in his retinas. He moved his hand through the stuff and patted the beach for the camera. He could not find it.

And then he heard a pounding.

It was so close it might have been only Inches over his head, or behind him or beside him. It was like the slamming of storm waves against the cliffs, or a mighty fist on the window by his bed.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
It was like his own heart hammering in his chest and in his head, clamoring to be let out.

He compressed his body into a ball, praying that he would not be noticed.

The pounding feet came closer.

He raked the sand for a stick or a rock, something with which to defend himself, but could find only the camera.

Then the pounding stopped.

He waited, counting his heartbeats. This wasn’t fun anymore. He had reached a level of uncontrollable fear, the terror of falling like a shot into the bottomless pit of a fever nightmare, and it was more than he could handle.
I’m sorry,
he thought,
I didn’t mean to do it, whatever it was, I’ll be good from now on, I promise! I swear!

He heard the ocean rustling to the right and left of him, drawing closer.

Except that there was no ocean to his left, he was sure. There couldn’t be. He held his breath.

Sand rained over him in the path of a terrible approach that could not be stopped, bearing down on him. In another minute it would be here. In another second. In—

He heard a breathing in front of him.

He fumbled the camera up and tripped the button. It was a chance, only a chance, but it might blind whatever was standing over him, just as it had seared his own eyeballs, and give him enough time to get away. He jammed the button again and again till the flasher was used up. The light burst into the fog bank in front of him.

“Andrew,” said a voice. “I’ve come to take you back. What’s the matter with you, boy?”

Dazed, he stared at the tall figure against the backdrop of fog.

“What do you think you’re doing? Get inside this minute, do you hear? Scamper!”

“Oh, Mrs. Kobritz!” he cried. “I’m so glad! Was it you all the time? Was that you walking up on the floor? Oh, thank you, thank you . . . !”

“Right now, young man. Your mother telephoned. I didn’t have the heart to tell her you weren’t in your room. You’ll catch your death out here.”

He picked up his pictures and followed her inside, into the warmth of the house, not bothering to look at what had been developing there on each frosted square of the SX-70 prints. He scampered. The first thing he did was to lock the door. The second was to make for his mother’s radio, filling the rooms of the house with music, waiting impatiently for the sound of her voice.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mel Sloane was double-checking the printouts when O’Bannon’s car hit the gravel in front of the Tri-County Weather Station. He lost his place in the row of numbers, recalibrated the dials, and started a new column at the top of his graph. Outside, O’Bannon popped a can of beer and pounded on the door.

Sloane gave up, folded the readout back into the basket, and sauntered to the front of the building. O’Bannon was standing there with his belly out, a dopey grin on his red face.

“How’s it going, Mel?”

“What’s the matter?” said Sloane. “Forget your keys again?”

“Nope. I just wanted to let you know you’ve got company, so you’d have time to zip up your pants.”

“You took the mountain road again, didn’t you?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not even going to ask you if you set a new world record tonight. I don’t want to know. I swear, Danny, you better get that junkheap of yours fixed one of these days, or you’re going to wake up and find yourself shoes-up at the bottom of some gorge. Either that or save the brewskies till you get here. I heard you drive up. Like a diesel pumpin’ oil. Jesus. Anybody get hurt in that wreck?”