Nightcrawlers

3

The fog held.

Stirred up by the rain, it drifted in gaseous plumes and near-phosphorescent blankets of white, moving through the fields and forests, spreading and encompassing. An hour after it started, it was thick and almost suffocating and nobody could see ten feet in any direction.

“You gotta love this soup,” Deputy Riegan said, guiding the patrol car down a twisting, wooded lane, the headlights like glimmering white swords stabbing into the mist. “Can’t see a thing.”

In the passenger seat, Deputy Snow laughed. “Yeah, and we’re supposed to keep the newsies and the nosy out. That’s great.”

Riegan moved the cruiser slowly, the front wheels dipping into puddles and potholes that made the whole car rock on its springs. The road wasn’t much, just two dirt ruts with a barrier of unshorn grass between. So far, they had not seen a single newsie or nosy. They did, however, see three deer, several rabbits, and a large meandering porcupine. But that was the extent of it.

As Riegan drove, Snow stared out his rain-beaded window into the fog.

Below them was pastureland, mostly overgrown, the forest encroaching from all sides. Now and again, the fog would lessen and he could peer down the grassy hill edging the road and see flooded fields, heaps of rocks, and a broken section of fence or two. There was little else out there.

“When I was a kid,” Snow said, “we wouldn’t come within a mile of this place.”

Riegan, not a local, said, “Why?”

“I don’t know. Spooks, I guess.”

“Spooks?”

“Kids’ stories, Dave. That’s how it is out here. You get an abandoned farm and pretty soon kids are saying it’s haunted. You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

Snow wanted to elaborate on some of it, but he didn’t dare. He knew Riegan pretty well by this point, but there were some things you just didn’t talk about with outsiders. Not without looking damn foolish or damn backward in your thinking. Riegan was not from Haymarket and he would never think like someone from Haymarket.

“It was like that growing up in Cleveland,” Riegan said as if he didn’t care too much for the silence in the car. “Every neighborhood had a vacant house and every kid who lived nearby was sure it was haunted.” He laughed. “Kids. That’s all, kids.”

“Yeah,” Snow said.

He didn’t believe that for a minute because he was a local and he had been tit-fed the local gossip since he was a child. Very little of it had a place in his life anymore, and his cop’s hard-nosed practicality laughed it off, but it was still there clinging to the underside of his mind. And especially when he woke from nightmares at three in the morning.

Don’t you dare bring any of that up, he cautioned himself.

“Piss break,” Riegan said, pulling the cruiser over.

“I could handle that. Goddamn coffee goes right through me.”

They stepped out into the chill air and each found a bush to his liking and watered it. Snow had a hell of a time getting his flow to start because inside he was clenched tight as a fist. Though it was cool and damp, he felt warm. His scalp was prickling and his heart was pounding. It was all those childhood tales come back to haunt him. He knew they were all bullshit because they had to be bullshit, yet he couldn’t get them out of his mind for never, ever had he ever thought he would be out here… especially not after dark.

“Damn that fog,” he said. “Can barely see my dick.”

“You couldn’t see it anyway,” Riegan told him and they both laughed, nervously, but they laughed. It felt good. For Snow, it was like fingers massaging the kinks out of his neck.

Riegan lit a cigarette. “Christ, I can’t see doing this all night.”

“No.”

“Something bothering you, Rich?”

“No, I’m okay. Just tired.”

“I hear you.”

Snow watched the ground mist gathering around them. It was white and flowing like the steam from a pot, had completely swallowed his legs beneath the knees and was draped in the trees like garland. It made the dark forest beyond seem that much darker, that much more menacing.

Riegan chatted on about mundane subjects as he finished his cigarette—something that seemed to take forever—and Snow had the oddest sense that he was apprehensive, as if this place was somehow seeping into him, too.

“Hell was that?” he suddenly said.

“What?”

“Down there. Something moved down there.”

Snow grabbed a flashlight from the cruiser and joined him at the side of the road. He clicked on the light, almost afraid of what he might see, and it reflected back at him. He played it around, a white beam spoking in the whiter mist, but there was nothing really to see. The hillside and its attendant grasses and wild growth descended into the soup. It was like a fog sea down there. Now and again, they caught sight of the shadowy forms of trees, but not much else.

“Probably a deer or something,” Snow said.

“No. It was walking upright.”

Snow felt a chill creeping up his lower belly. The fog subsided gradually and he could see the field down there, still misty and obscure, but visible. Riegan grabbed another flashlight out of the car and started down the hillside.

“Hey!” Snow said. “Christ, if that fog closes back in, we won’t find our way back to the road.”

“So you stay there and call out to me.”

Shit and shit. Snow did not like this. Despite the obvious dangers, he just had a very bad feeling about it that made his stomach do the flip-flops. He watched Riegan go down the hillside, nearly slipping on the wet grass more than once and cussing under his breath. He made it to the bottom and waded out into the fog. He became indistinct and then disappeared completely.

Snow breathed in and out to calm himself.

After a few minutes of silence, he called out, “You okay down there?”

“Yes, mother!” came the reply.

Smartass. Now and again, he could see his light bobbing around down there, or he’d catch a quick glimpse of a shape moving behind it, but not much else. Shit. He took out his radio and let dispatch know that they were out of the car and what their general location was. In case they got to come looking for us. He waited, pensively, his hand feeling oily on the barrel of the flashlight. C’mon, c’mon, I’m about to have fucking kittens here. The waiting was killing him.

Then—

“Hey!” Riegan’s voice came floating out of the fog. “Get down here!”

“What?”

“Get down here!”

Shit, shit, shit.

Snow started down the hillside, watching his footing, his flashlight beam jumping about as he did so. The only good thing was that the fog appeared to be dissipating some and he had no trouble tracking Riegan down. He was standing on a little grassy mound between two ancient black stumps.

“Well?”

Riegan scanned his light around. “There’s somebody out here, Rich. Whoever it is is being real quiet.”

Snow put his light out there. He saw only the mist, the weird dark shapes of heavy undergrowth and the boles of dozens of trees that seemed to have fallen against one another in a good windstorm sometime in the past. For a second, he thought he saw a hazy shape duck behind one of them.

“There’s nothing. Let’s go. We should—”

“Shut up,” Riegan said.

He panned his light around, turning on his heel in a perfect circle, trying to get a look at something. He was clearly listening and Snow listened with him. For what, he did not know. He was all for calling this off and getting back up to the cruiser. Enough of this Hardy Boys shit. If there was anyone out here—and God, how he hoped there wasn’t—then there was no way in hell they were going to find them. They could have been hiding just about anywhere. And, hell, it was probably just a couple kids anyway.

You know better than that. Kids around here would not come out here after dark. They all know better.

Riegan stopped.

There was a splashing off to their left. It could have been a bullfrog leaping into a pond for all they knew and it could have been something far worse. Riegan had his light over there. Snow heard a stick break over near the trees. Then another farther off into the fog. Another splashing noise followed by something like the quick drag of a foot through the underbrush or leaves.

He wasn’t thinking it was kids now.

He was remembering all too well what was said about this place.

Riegan came over. “Somebody watching us over by those trees,” he whispered. “I’ll sneak around behind them and flush them out.”

“There’s more than one,” Snow said. “We better—”

“No, just wait. I’ll flush him.”

Before Snow could object, Riegan darted off into the fog behind them. He was going to circle around. This was fucking bullshit. This wasn’t deer season. This wasn’t flushing game on a crisp November afternoon. This was… this was…

God, he just didn’t know what this was.

Only that it was bad. So bad that it felt like his entire body was creeping, moving with the consistent hammering of his heart. Any moment now, Riegan was going to make contact with what was out there and he was either going to regret that or Snow himself would.

The fog seemed to be creeping in, moving in flowing white ghost sheets. Sticks cracked. There were splashing noises. Then something off to the left. The sound of someone walking through the muck in his direction with slopping, mucky sounds like a man walking in hip waders.

Snow pulled his gun, a Glock 9mm.

For godsake, don’t shoot Riegan, whatever you do.

No, he wasn’t going to do that. Whatever came out of the fog would not be Riegan. It would not even be human. It would be a dragging, hunched-over shape with a face like a rotten, blackening mushroom.

“Rich!” Riegan called out. “Do you see them? Jesus Christ, there’s three or four of them… hey, do you see ’em?”

Snow was scanning the fog with his gun and flashlight now, just waiting, shaking and scared and he didn’t know at what, but he was ready. He was ready to face whatever came out at him. He only hoped it would—

A scream tore through the night.

It was Riegan.

He began running toward the tree, and as the fog thickened around him he became disoriented. He wasn’t sure where the hell he was, where Riegan was and where the goddamn road was.

“DAVE!” he shouted. “DAVE!”

Riegan screamed again, only this time it was cut off like his throat had been slit or something had been stuffed in his mouth. Then there was silence. There wasn’t a single noise out there but the sound of raindrops falling from branches.

Nothing more.

Then splashing. Footsteps, slow and dragging, approaching from all directions. He saw an impossible, grotesque shape through the trees. Another darted off into the fog. He knew he should open up or call for help, but inside he seized up. Nothing made sense.

Nothing but running.

He ran, stumbling and fighting until he reached the hill and then he was scrambling up it into the car. Once inside, he floored the accelerator, barely making the twists and turns of the road. Cold sweat poured down his face and a choked whimpering came from deep in his throat.

He only knew one thing: Dave Riegan was dead.