Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

There was a woman standing in the street, standing in the mist, just at the very end of the driveway. The first human being he had seen all morning. She was a small woman, thirty or forty years old. Pale and thin. She was dressed in light colors—a white blouse, a tan skirt—so that she almost blended into the swirling white atmosphere. She didn’t move. She didn’t do anything. She just stood there, staring. Her face was expressionless—weirdly blank—almost completely empty of any feeling, as if she were sleepwalking or as if… as if she weren’t alive at all.

Moment after moment, she didn’t move. She just went on standing there, standing very still, her arms down by her sides. Standing and staring at the house. Staring straight at the sidelight. Staring straight at Tom.

Tom felt as if his heart had stopped beating. He gaped out at the woman, his phone forgotten in his hand. The woman didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change. But now the fog began to blow and roll across her. The swirling white mist began to thicken around her. It began to cover her over. She began to fade into it, her features becoming dim, her figure becoming more shadowy, harder to see. As Tom watched, dumbstruck, she began to disappear from view.

No! thought Tom.

He grabbed the door, pulled it open, and rushed outside.

Tom felt the cold and damp of the day on his face as he broke from the house. He moved quickly to the driveway, quickly down the driveway toward the street where the woman in the white blouse was standing. Even as he hurried toward her, she seemed to fade away from him, to fade back into the swirling fog.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted, waving his hand.

But the woman didn’t answer him. With that same eerily dead look on her face, she slowly began to turn to one side.

“Hey!” Tom called, jogging faster down the driveway toward her. “Hey, hold on a second, would you?!”

No answer—and the woman started walking away.

Tom felt another sickening thrill of fear. Something was really wrong with this. Something about this woman was really wrong. The emptiness of her expression. The way she didn’t answer him, didn’t respond to his shouts at all. The slow, deliberate way in which she stepped now into the turning, moving mist.

Tom ran faster. As he neared the end of the drive, the fog began to close around him. He felt it, clammy on his face and his arms.

“Hold on!” he cried out to the woman again.

She seemed not to hear him. She took another step down the road, into the fog, away from him. Her figure grew dimmer as the whiteness closed over her. But then, suddenly, as Tom kept running toward her, she turned her head. She looked directly at him! The fog thinned for just a moment, and he got a good look at her face.

Tom gasped out loud. He had that feeling he got when an elevator went down too fast—as if he were falling but his stomach was staying in one place.

Because he knew her! He recognized her! He couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered her voice, all right. He had just heard her voice a little while ago.

I need to talk to you. It’s very important…

It was the woman who had called him just this morning. The woman whose call had woken him from his dream. He remembered her insistent voice over the phone…

Please!

… her voice reaching out to him through that strange static, reaching out urgently as if from someplace very far away.

But what was her name? He knew it. Why couldn’t he remember?

“Wait, please!” he shouted.

But the woman only stared at him one instant more. Then she turned and walked into the fog and the fog gathered thickly around her. Tom had one last glimpse of her. Then she faded to a misty figure. Then the fog swallowed her, and she was gone.

Tom didn’t hesitate. He ran after her. He plunged after her into the fog.

A moment—a step—and the murk of white surrounded him. The slimy damp chilled his skin. The thick mist cut off his vision almost entirely. For another second or two as he ran, he could see the curb beside the Colliers’ lawn—then even that, barely a few yards away, disappeared under the churning marine layer.

All the same, at first, Tom didn’t think about it. All he thought about was catching up to the woman, finding out who she was, what she wanted. Over and above his fears, that pulse of curiosity—that need to get the answers—was pounding in him now. He was desperate just to talk to someone, just to ask some living person what on earth was going on.

He kept running. The woman had been moving so slowly, she couldn’t have gotten far away. Even stumbling blindly through the mist as he was, Tom was sure to catch up to her if he stayed on the road.

But he didn’t catch up to her. It was strange. More than strange. He ran for several more seconds, his sneakers slapping the macadam as he charged deeper and deeper into the ever-thickening mist. But there was no sign of her, no sign of anyone, no sign—he finally noticed—of anything at all.

He stopped, breathless. He stood, panting. He looked around him. Even in the cold damp of the fog, he felt himself begin to sweat.

He couldn’t see anything now—nothing but the fog. He turned around in a full circle. The white mist was so thick it erased every detail from sight. He could make out a few inches of pavement around his feet and that was it. Still, he insisted to himself, still—how could that woman have gotten away from him? How could she have vanished like that, walking so slowly when he was running so fast?

“Hello?” he shouted—really loudly this time. “Hello? Where’d you go? Where are you?”

He listened, and finally—finally!—a noise answered him: a shuffling footstep.

He spun round to face the sound. There she was!

He could see her figure in the mist, not far away, just a shadow of a shadow really. But now, instead of fading from him, she seemed to be getting closer, the outline of her growing darker, more distinct.

“I’m over here…,” he began to shout to her, but even as the words passed his lips, his voice faded away to nothing.

Because now he realized: it wasn’t her. That figure moving toward him. It wasn’t the woman in the white blouse at all. It was someone else.

It was something else.

Tom narrowed his eyes and strained to see through the murk. The figure came toward him slowly, slowly growing clearer with every step. He could tell it wasn’t the woman in the white blouse by the way it was moving. Instead of her slow but certain and steady pace, this figure had a sort of shambling limp. Its shoulders seemed hunched. Its arms hung and swung.

Tom almost called out again, but some instinct stopped him. He licked his lips. They were suddenly dry as dust.

He heard another sound and turned to his left. There was another figure moving toward him from where the Staffords’ hedges were supposed to be. Another shambling, limping shadow coming slowly toward him out of the fog.

And then another footstep to his right. And Tom turned and saw yet another shadow limping its way out of the mist from where the Colliers’ lawn must’ve been.

Whatever they were, they were all around him.

Tom began to feel as clammy inside as the fog on his skin. The fear that swirled up out of the core of him was, in fact, like an inner fog. It filled his brain. It clouded his mind. He remembered that moment earlier in the day when he had come down the drive to get the newspaper, when he had looked into the swirling mist and had the bizarre thought that something was moving in there, that something was coming slowly toward him, shuffling slowly toward him. And now it was true. The figure he saw in front of him right now—the figures he saw to his left and right—they were shuffling toward him: slowly, relentlessly, and with that strange, hobbled, inhuman gait.