[TALE] Land of Mist
The only sound that could be heard over the cold wasteland was the sound of distant crows. Patches of snow covered the gray-brown earth, keeping tallies on the rabbits by the tracks left on them. The air was still and oppressive, undecided as to whether it should melt the snow or freeze it into ice. Thick wisps of mist rose from the empty fields like writhing serpents until the copses of pine trees were mere shadows in the white-gray haze. A veil had been thrown on the world, the shadows of hidden things whispering underneath.
I had left the village on a rural dirt road that I had never travelled before, but there was little in the way of sights as the mists swallowed the world around me. I had wandered far, feeling strangely like a boat bobbing through the eerie quiet of a still lake. But though I occasionally glanced back from whence I had come, I felt irresistibly drawn into the mist. It was as if the prospect of seeing nothing somehow promised greater sights than anything the cold wastes could offer.
The last glimpse of the world around me receded into the gray-and-white as I entered into my own personal void. All around me there was only fog, and it seemed to take on an eerie life of its own. In this white abyss, I felt as if I were floating in place. Rather than move deeper into the void, the void came to meet me with a world of mirages that rose and sank beneath the ever-present haze. I was merely a watching visitor who had left his substance behind, a disembodied shade that mixed and blended with the mists, seeing echoes of waking life in the mirages.
Suddenly, the shadowy image of a small bridge reached out from the void, and I felt as if I had crashed on foreign shores. Underneath it I could see a small stream stretch either way into the fog. The wet wood creaked as it crawled underneath me, a sound thrown feebly into the nothingness. Then all was silent except for the rushing of water, a sound which rose from the mist itself like a ghostly voice.
The crawling mirage paused as I was floating above the crest of the bridge, and I listened to the void speak for some time. Its words were in a curling primordial tongue, a dialect of that spoken by the oceans and the rain. Shadows danced to the commands of the voice, and I saw the outline of a small cottage peer from the fog. The lights from its windows looked like orange stars barely piercing the white night. It was like an island held afloat in the mists by the chanting of the stream.
*
The mist tired of the world weaved by the voice of the waters, and the bridge began to slowly crawl away behind me. The cottage and the river crawled with it into the nothingness until the curling words were drowned by the fog. Patches of snow came out to meet me and passed under me with a crunching sound, the mists seemingly chewing what it had spit out. Then a great shadow crept up beside me – a vast ridge that lay in the dreaming mists like a resting giant. From its great back rose leafless trees that clacked and waved feebly in the wind, clawing towards my personal abyss like half-formed thoughts reaching into consciousness.
The mist then drew back to reveal more shadows crowding the giant’s crest, standing stones with contours like tombstones. Here, I thought, lay all the memories that never reached past the veil and into waking life – things seen that would never be remembered again. Perhaps the giant itself had been one such memory, left to die in the silence of voices that never spoke its name.
The mist lingered by the forgotten giant as if in a pensive mood. Though it obscured everything around me save for my personal island, I had the curious feeling that nothing was lost in its hazy forgetfulness. All that was thrown aside in waking life found itself pulled along by the misty streams until washed up on the shore by the threshold between worlds. In its own strange way, the mist remembered.
The shadow of the great tree-crested ridge stood half-formed in the dim fog as a facsimile of a memory, kept in eternity by the remembering mist. Perhaps there was a whole world of shades beyond my personal island, ready to be revealed in the course of the mist’s melancholy crawling.
The fog began to flow again with a start as a carelessly remembered crow fluttered out from among the trees. The ridge seemed to smear its shadowy form along the side of the impenetrable gray-and-white, stretching both before and behind me. But soon it had receded below me as the patch of dirt which crawled under me began to ascend. It was no steep climb, but enough for the giant to return to the mists which had remembered it.
A new sight soon met me as the patch of dirt became level again. Three heads rose by the wayside, connected by wires to tall pillars of wood that stretched into the void above. One spoke with a voice like swarming bees. The other clicked its tongue off-beat to the droning of the first. The third was silent. There was a strange menace to these senseless figures, and I drew away from them as the mist presented them to me. I sensed dangerous elemental tensions in them, as if their incessant chatter fed the cables around their necks with great power.
I was glad that the mist did not tarry at the three heads, for they filled me with unease. They seemed utterly oblivious to their foggy existence, caught in meaningless chatter heard by no one save themselves.
*
What next formed within the mist was a dreadful sight. It was only a shadow image, but this was more than enough to unnerve me, for the image displayed was one of death. A tangle of branches like wrestling serpents emerged from the sky, connected to a great shadowy pillar. From this pillar extended a skeletal arm, from which dangled the noose.
This apparition stalked out of the mists like the marching approach of death, like drops of mortal life trickling away into foggy nothingness. The numb gray void formed by the mist seemed now a thing most sinister. I thrashed against it, desperate to get away from the horrific apparition of death that was being revealed to me. I twisted about like a wild animal; I tried to dig my heels into the gray dirt; I clawed furiously at the ghostly mist. But it was to no avail. I had traded my body for that of the mist when I had entered into this realm, and I could not escape its iron grip.
I had neither feet nor arms, nor was there any solid object for me to grab, to claw at, to feebly strike. All was gray, endless void – space unending! – robbing more and more of my failing youth with every moment, robbing me of color and of fire. It was cold and numb, a relentless nothingness framed in the circle of the noose.
Then suddenly my animal fear of the deathly apparition shattered, and the tree stood before me in waking clarity. Standing under the shadow of this image of death, it no longer commanded the same terrible power. My fear gone, it was instead replaced by a sense of forlorn wonder. What stood before me was no longer a harbinger of doom, but a sleeping memory of youth.
What had seemed a noose in the image of the gallows was now revealed to be a knotted rope tied to a thick branch, worn by weather and the hands of children. It swung lightly back and forth, moved by a wind I could not feel. The tangle of serpents that rose above me were half-cloaked by the mist, mere shades slowly writhing in and out of my island of clarity. The bark was worn in patches all along the twisting limbs, evidence of forgotten excursions into the dreamy mist above. By the side of the tree was a small postbox, the name of the family it belonged to having long been worn away by the forgetfulness of passing time.
The way the tree moved in the mists, passing to and fro into clarity, had an almost hypnotic effect on me. Even the mist itself seemed to fade away as the knotted rope swung back and forth in the unfelt wind. I could sense my wakefulness drain into the void, and it became harder to distinguish the mist from the apparitions that emerged from it. All became a haze in my mind, a slowly crawling procession of images and afterimages. I had not even noticed the moment when the fog had carried me away again, the patch of dirt road beneath me exchanged for a snowy void as white as the abyss that surrounded me.
All was silent as I drifted further away from all sense of solidity or direction, until not even my mind remained. I had been subsumed by the mist, crawling with it deeper into forgetfulness. All was a haze, with no trace of memory.
*
It was a jarring sensation when I suddenly emerged like yet another apparition from the void. The mist had spit me out onto my two feet a few paces away from a thicket of pine trees, and for the first time since entering this strange land my body was my own again. I stretched my limbs, got used to visceral movement again – to the straining of muscles, to flesh propelled by will. The thicket extended to either side of me into the mist, a small opening among the spire-like pines yawning before me. It gaped like a dark doorway, a stark contrast to the numb white that stretched all around me. I took a few unsteady steps toward the opening, feeling compelled to see what the mists had decided to show me.
I was stopped in my stride by a sudden apparition in the opening. I hesitate to say that it had startled me, for though I thought it uncanny to see another person here the apparition filled me with forgotten longing more so than with fright. The woman that stood in the opening was a mere shade of what she had been when I had known her, far back in my teenage years. Though she still had her curves, they were hazy and uncertain; her hair was now jet black and seeming to fade into the darkness of the opening. Her face had no features – I knew her only from my pang of longing – and her clothes were a disheveled mess of mist and memory.
Seeing her, I remembered distantly her lush smile, the way she had looked at me so long ago when my longing for her had been stirred. I felt myself drawn nearer, drawn near the way old memories seize us and pull us closer. There was tension in the air, a distant heat that made me feel more clearly the numbness in my flesh, and I reached out to touch the object of my desire. But like a kiss in a dream, I grasped only smoke. She had returned to the mist.
There was stillness for a moment, and my hand lingered in the darkness of the now empty opening.
Then, in a moment of sudden violence, I saw how the dark opening rushed at me. I saw it close around me; saw, also, the horned skull that stared menacingly as it towered above me; saw its bone-whiteness shine above a cloak of darkness. The horrid creature was like a forgotten nightmare, oozing evil and malevolence long hidden away. It drew closer, eyes boring into me, freezing my heart like a winter wasteland. The howling crows pounded in my breast and the darkness snapped at me. I drew back in yelping terror.
But the forest closed around my hand, wooden teeth tearing into my flesh. I tore myself loose with the ferocity of an animal and scrambled away from the evil branches. Then there was the mad rush of flight; the sounds of crunching snow and crowing birds. The mist whirled around me like a storm, spitting out stones and the twisted shades of deer and rabbits that thundered among the foggy shadows.
Thought was a mere memory under the pounding of my heartbeat and the rasping of my breath. I flew over muddy fields and down the rolling hills, passed distant secrets hidden in the body of the haze, and before I could catch my breath I stood once more at the threshold between worlds, on a patch of dirt just beyond the curling tongue of a chanting river.
*
The mist did not abate for days. All was a haze that alternated between white and black, the only evidence of the passing day. Nothing seemed to move in those days, and there was a melancholy in the air that left all life forgetful and lost. The violent forest had not injured my hand, but it had taken my glove – a fact I had not noticed until I returned home.
When the sun finally appeared and the ground froze anew, I went to look for my lost glove. I was not content with letting the mist have any lost memory of me. I walked once again on the road that had led to the river. I passed over the bridge, but could hear no primordial tongue. I passed by the forgotten giant, but saw no standing stones on its back. I passed by the transformer station, but the talking heads were not there. When I came to the gallows tree, no rope hung from its great branch. I ducked under it as I went out into the fields, heading in the rough direction of where the thicket should be.
But before I had even seen it, I found my glove in the middle of the field. No trees were around me, no dark openings, no shade from my memories and no horned skull.
Only frozen fields and the sound of crows.