Mist

Sylvie pulls open the curtains and stares. There’s nothing out there. No sky, no buildings or traffic, just white. It’s like waking up to find the world ended while you were asleep. The jolt reminds her of another time her world shifted unexpectedly on its axis, another devouring absence.

Less of the negativity, she tells herself sternly. You came here for a fresh start, so take it. She focuses on the warm scarf pulled around her shoulders, the steaming coffee poured from the bright new pot. Outside the windows, the mist prowls like a predator trying to find a way in, but she keeps it at bay with the TV on loud, lights blazing in every room. When she can’t put the moment off any longer, she heads out to work.

Even the hallway feels tense, like it’s holding its breath, trying not to smother in the thick white tendrils rolling around the apartment building. The corridor ends in a wall of glass that the mist rubs up against like thick fur. There’s an open doorway halfway down, and an old lady she half-recognises peers out at her, her eyes intense through their milky sheen.

“Mist’s hungry today,” she murmurs urgently, and something about the way she says it makes Sylvie shiver in her thick winter coat.

A woman comes out and gently takes the old lady by the shoulders, flashing an apologetic smile. “Come on Mom, time to eat breakfast.” The door closes quietly on them both, leaving Sylvie alone with only thin glass between her and the eerie white nothingness outside. For a disconcerting moment, her reflection stares back at her from the midst of the whiteness, a mute ghost imprisoned by the glass wall, its edges dissolved in white.

At the bottom of the stairs, she hesitates before plunging into the street, like a swimmer dithering on a chilly beach. The apartment block’s lights bleed orange in the thick, white air, iodine on a bandage. Stepping into it, she almost holds her breath. Stupid, she chides herself. It’s only weather.

And after all, it’s not so bad, once she starts walking. It even starts to thin out in places here and there, until it’s just scrappy patches. They drift on a listless breeze thick with traffic fumes, pausing to obscure a shop front, a crosswalk. At the bus stop it’s clear enough to see the bus coming from the end of the street, but it sails past her, full. Cursing, she pulls her collar tighter around her throat and walks on.

The exercise, the discipline of putting one foot in front of the other, soothes her. Her mind unclenches, starts to wander back to the reason she’s here, in this strange city with its unsettling weather. She tries to pull it back, but her feet fall into a rhythm like syllables of a name: Myra. Her sister.

If Myra were dead, it’d be easier, she thinks, then curses the thought away. It’s true though, insists a little voice inside. If Myra were really gone, not lying in a hospital bed, there and not there; her face at once familiar and utterly strange. It eats away at her: absence and presence, a puzzle with no solution.

A screech of brakes makes Sylvie look up as a car almost rear ends the one it’s following, the first driver’s speed erratic in the drifting visibility that makes buildings and landmarks strange. That’s when she realises she’s lost.

Of course she doesn’t panic, not at first. Why would she? Pulling her phone from her pocket, she brings up the maps app, types in the address of her new job. The screen buffers, and buffers. The little grey wheel churns the white screen uselessly. Swearing, she pockets the phone. She’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.

After the chill outside, the shop’s warm and bright.

“Can I help you?”

“Er, yeah,” Sylvie grabs a chocolate bar from the shelf under the cash register and forks over a few coins as she asks, “the Metro building – which way is it from here? I’ve sort of lost my bearings.”

If she was hoping for a rueful smile, a trace of friendliness from the shop assistant, she doesn’t get it. The woman, her dyed hair fading to grey at the scalp, takes the money without meeting her eyes.

“Left at the corner, go two more blocks.”

“Ok, thanks.”

As she leaves the shop, the woman’s voice follows her. “Best hurry, before the mist closes in again.” There’s something in the deadened tone that chills her more than the clammy cold on the street.

The woman’s right though. The air’s thickening, imperceptibly at first, but by the time she reaches the corner, she can barely see her hand in front of her face.  She has to fetch out her phone again and switch on the light to make out the street sign. Even then the letters fade and blur so badly she’s mostly guessing what they say, hoping she’s on the right track. Left at the corner. And she’ll need to keep a sharp eye not to miss the number of blocks.

It's a long way to walk blind, and it does feel like blindness, the white crowding in, dissolving everything. The further she goes, the thicker it gets, until her eyes feel stretched, and her skin tingles, then numbs, the mist licking at it, hungrily. Her footsteps are muffled, and she can’t see her feet. It’s like she’s been eaten away to the waist.

She stumbles on something and has to crouch down to see what it is. Peering close, she starts back with a cry– a dead rat, its fur and eyes decayed to pitted skin and bare bone. Nauseous, she stumbles back into a wall and pats its surface almost gratefully, the moist brickwork slick and cold under her palm, solid and slippery at once. Squinting, she tries to place the texture, remember where on the street she is, but there’s a nagging unease in her mind; this part of town doesn’t have rats, at least not in the open. Is she lost again? But how?

Mentally, she runs over the route, wondering if she overshot somehow, took a slant road where she should have gone straight. Missed a sign. Things just look so different, the mist eating up familiar landmarks, making unfamiliar things loom startlingly at her, things she’s never noticed before. Methodically, she pats her way down the street, her hand on the wall of each building, tracing their surfaces like a map; cinder block, shiny metal, glass, painted brick. It’s comforting when one leads onto the next, seamless, but in some places there are gaps, alleyways. The mist is so thick now, even a doorway can seem like a chasm deep enough to lose herself forever.

And now the gaps start to multiply and lengthen, the spaces between those comforting walls stretching, so that she seems to stumble on faith through a void. Time gets lost in the breaks, seeps away into the clammy air. She could have been walking for ten minutes or an hour. The display on her phone says somewhere between the two. She calls work, leaves a message to say she’s going to be late. The recorded voice tells her to press pound to re-record, or hang up, and she tries to picture the face attached to it, but it’s nobody she knows, an intimate stranger at her ear, there and not there.

Her ankle twists on something, and she goes down, hits the kerb hard, swearing. Clutching at the hurt, she watches, fascinated, as her toes vanish in the devouring mist, mere inches in front of her eyes. The illusion’s so vivid it’s like she can’t feel them anymore, like they truly have been eaten by the swirling whiteness. Her face stings and she realises her cheeks are damp, with moisture from the air, or tears, she doesn’t know.

It was that voice, that recorded message. Strange how it could take her feet from under her, and yet it makes perfect sense. The likeness of it tears her with sharp teeth, the memory of her own voice, bouncing back at her as she replayed the message, again and again, trying to make sense of it. The voicemail she didn’t check in time, the cry for help that came too late. Myra’s.

And now the mist comes in and she knows it’s here for her, has known it all along. Mist’s hungry today.An old woman’s eyes that saw more than they seemed to. Sylvie can’t move, she doesn’t want to. It doesn’t matter. There is nothing beyond the whiteness that’s swallowing her, nothing beyond this small patch of pavement.

With the sick certainty that somehow she always knew it would happen, she watches the mist nibble away the ends of her fingers. She rubs the nubby stumps against her face and finds, as she knew she would, bare bone; her skin, her features, eaten away. There’s no pain, only the sense of vanishing, mouthful by white mouthful.

Before her fingers are quite consumed, she dials a number from memory. The familiar voice wraps her around, equal parts comfort and pain. There and gone.

“Hi, it’s Myra. I’m not here right now…”.