MicroHorror

An October night on the highway. Ten PM and the lanes were quiet. I passed a wagon parked up on the hard shoulder, its outline plotted by orange lights. That was the last thing I saw before I drove into the fog.

A wispy mist at ground level moved deftly as magicians’ fingers, obscuring the line of lights that defined the lanes, vanishing them into a band of grey. Steadily rising and thickening, it cloaked the bonnet and reflected all light from the headlamps back, with a most ghostly pallor that dazzled, yet illuminated nothing. It crept over my car like a cowl.

Overhead, beacons flashed their livid warnings. I switched to side lights and slowed down. Soon, I knew, I would come to a long stretch of unlit road and visibility was diminishing all the time. The modern down-lighting was behind me now and the glare of fuzzy, orange lamps in the central divide was coming to an end too. They fizzled out and receded. I glanced back but no hint of their presence pierced the fog.

No other vehicle was ahead or behind. The engine seemed hushed in a silence that had overtaken the outside world and began to insinuate itself into my soul, so that the cold dankness of the fog took on a grievous aspect. It thickened and thinned before my eyes, stretched out and gathered the darkness to it. I saw it shifting in swirls all around, fingers of fog beckoning, limbs, twisted in a diaphanous dance before my eyes.

With knuckles rigid, white as bone on the wheel, I had slowed, almost to the pace of a walk. I could discern no exit signs from this hellish highway. I had no clear idea of whether I was straddling the lanes. A strand of white passed in through an air vent, clawing its way towards me. Quickly I closed the vents and waved at the airy talon to disperse it. It burned my skin like it had been dry ice, choked the breath from me, like an exhalation of death. Hands, for I now perceived that they were hands, clamored over the windscreen. And faces–gaunt faces elongated and white, with gaping mouths and hollow eyes, hungrily besieged me. Ever changing distortions of form, execrable and harrowed, clung on as if to slow me further, make me stop. And if I stopped, what then?

I kept moving forward though I could not see the way. Had I seen myself at that moment, I do not doubt that I looked almost like one of them, my eyeballs staring, my mouth agape with horror. But I did not look in any mirror for fear. I prayed. You may depend upon it, I prayed, out loud and by everything I held most sacred, and unashamed tears trickled salt onto my lips.

At that moment the wagon I’d seen miles back thundered past at reckless speed. Incomprehensible that he should career through this opaque mass with such tremendous haste, though I guessed at what chased him. Whatever impelled him, it made his situation worse, for they were sucked away from me in his wake, those embodiments of evil, ripped away, and all that remained was a thin cold mist that lost cohesion as I approached.

I composed myself and drove on, trembling still. Within the space of a few hundred yards, I saw the wreckage. The wagon had left the carriageway and plunged down an embankment. It was embedded in a deep cut and a thick, malevolent fog encompassed it, writhing and bubbling like demons in some pit of hell. Need I say I did not stop? But I prayed again, this time, a prayer of guilty gratitude that this was his fate, not mine.

Some would say that it was a tragic accident, others, that the driver had been speeding and should have heeded the warning signs. I alone would live with the knowledge that he was the victim of the Creatures of Fog.