Saundra Mitchell - Mistwalker

Dropping to my knees, I wrap my arms around myself to hold in the rising agony. I burst from the mist shell that’s held me all these years. It’s nothing but pain at first. I gasp and fall to my side. Music boxes jangle; they jab my flesh. They pierce me and I gasp. Breath hurts; the light hurts my eyes. My heart lurches into a pounding rage as sweat freshens me.

Writhing, I shudder and collapse again. I gape like a fish and gasp at air, real air, for the first time in a century.

And above me, Willa stands, washed in fog. Though I saw her in all her colors, she’s grey now. White hair, grey lips, black eyes. She’s a fearsome kind of beautiful, her edges trailing away as haze. Susannah was a delicate, fragile ghost. Willa is an avenging wraith—prepossessed and mighty.

She steps over my body, and a staircase appears as she raises her foot. The dregs of my reign melt like wet sugar. The music boxes, the shelves, all the disaster I wrought, fade with each step she takes. And when she disappears, I realize the silence in my head.

The cold on my skin.

The twist of hunger in my belly.

I could no more call the mist than I could fly. There’s a Grey Lady in this tower now, a new mistress on Jackson’s Rock. Though I’ve walked its shore a thousand times, my head aches imagining the borders of the island.

Struggling to my feet, I realize I’m no longer bare. Denim dungarees, a blue cotton shirt that clings to me. Shoes with laces, a curious jacket with a hood and zipper. Hunching into myself, I creep to the door. I close my eyes and say a soft prayer before I open it. Please let this be real, I murmur.

Then I step into the real world, a rocky shore that leads to the water—a boat waits for me there. It turns its bow to the distant shore. In the haze, its name wavers and changes. When the letters reshape themselves, it’s then that I know I am free. They read

Charlie

It all makes sense now.

When the cold came on me, Grey faded to a ball of light and drifted away. The lighthouse became mine . Its walls shifted for me; the stairs spiraled down to meet my feet. The weight of the fog presses from every direction. It’s like I’m part of it, and it’s part of me.

Every single thing Grey told me swirls in my head—he wasn’t wrong. This does feel primal. Old as the earth, old as time. Old as the sea and all its slumbering gods and goddesses, all its unknown and unnamed monsters and miracles.

As I hurry to the lantern gallery, I see flickers of rooms to be. The library is there, but now with more maps of the ocean. Globes and telescopes, star charts and barometers—and gleaming in the middle of the room, a beautiful brass sextant. The stairs rattle under my feet; I keep going.

The room I woke in before is here too, and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub and a harbor view. It’s all crazy pretty, and I’ll explore it later. Part of me wonders what the kitchen will look like when I walk into it. Do I have a microwave? Can I watch TV?

Petty, unimportant thoughts. And I’ll have forever to figure stuff like that out. Right now, I have to save what’s left of my family.

Throwing open the gallery door, I don’t catch my breath. I don’t feel the slightest waver of mortal fear when I look down at the rocks. Already the tides in my body have turned. I’m not Willa Dixon anymore. I won’t bleed. I can’t leave. I’m the Grey Lady, and I’m all right with that.

Since it seems like I should, I raise my hands. Inside me, the push and the pull struggle for control. I choose pull. I yearn for it, thick blankets of white to spread over the water. Throughout Broken Tooth. Past my house and the church steeple. Between the stones in the graveyard. Beyond the Vandenbrook School and Jackie Ouelette’s house on the hill.

On the far shore, there are so many lights. I understand that now too. All those lives, bobbing and dancing. Can’t tell one from the other; all I know is that some are bright. Some are dim. But slowly, all of them are consumed by the wave of mist that I spill on them.

I reach until I feel my edges thinning. I pull; it’s like a song. Like I have a new pulse—one that answers to the elements instead of my heart. Mist twines around my wrists and ankles; my hair is braided with it, my clothes woven from it. I master it, and it enslaves me. The push. The pull.

When I was lost in the fog, it took me only a few steps to realize I couldn’t keep going. When I heard water, I knew I’d gone the wrong way. That’s the kind of mist I call tonight. Thick and physical. The kind that leaves beads in your hair and a damp kiss on your skin. I’ll hold it ’til dawn, though I’m not sure my dawn will be the same as the village’s. Time passes differently here.

Still, I pull. More mist. More haze. In my veins and on the streets of Broken Tooth. I murmur with the song. I twist with it. As the beam cuts on behind me, the horn starts to call. I feel the waves pass through me, both light and sound.

Somewhere, Daddy’s Girlfriend is theorizing why a day so clear turned so foggy all at once. Somewhere, I’m hoping—I bet my life—that my father pulled to the side of the road. It’s not fit for ships or F-150s now. People are closing up their windows and doors, locking them tight. They know it isn’t natural, this much fog, rolling in the wrong direction. This is everywhere, thick as flesh. It feels wrong, I know. But they don’t have to worry.

I don’t want to collect their souls. I don’t want them to suffer. I don’t want anyone to die tonight. Not even Terry Coyne.

My father knows what it’s like to live by the sea. He’s been in bar fights and regular fights; he’s ridden out hurricanes and nor’easters. All these years, he’s survived. No matter the hardship, he’s survived and kept going, and kept our family going. And he’s going to survive tonight, whether he wants to or not.

He doesn’t realize it yet. It’s a hard thing to truly understand. It doesn’t matter if someone stands right in front of you and shouts it in your face. There are some things you have to realize. Internalize. More than understand—comprehend. Now that I have, I hope I’m giving my father the chance to understand it too.

It’s not July twenty-third anymore.

I didn’t excel in my grammar studies, so I couldn’t say it was ironic. But it did seem apt that the boat bearing my name cut through the mist to the other shore and left me stranded in the fog.

On hands and knees, I felt my way up to the boardwalk. Stones cut my palms. Rubbing the bright pain against my knees, I managed to warm myself as well. The hooded coat I woke with barely held the October cold at bay.

Anxious to run, I bounded a few steps, then stopped. Though I had mastered the fog for a century, it ignored my will now. At an arm’s length, my fingertips were obscured by it. In me, there was an awareness of the village, that there were buildings quite close, but I couldn’t see them.

As much as I longed to flee this coast, I sat instead. There was no use in escaping if the first thing I did was walk off a cliff. Besides, I had plenty to experience even without my eyes for the moment.

The air smelled different on this side of the water. Rotting bait, raw wood, salt water. There were other scents I couldn’t place. Heavy, oily, greasy—and one I sensed not at all. With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and inhaled—but no, it wasn’t there. The sweet tang of wood smoke eluded me entirely.