She Waits in the Fog

"I'm still here. Do you remember what you promised?"

Plot

Ashmore lies on the western shore of Lake Morvane, surrounded by pine forests that come too close to the water. The town was built in the early twentieth century as a resort for wealthy families from the coast — the Lakeview Grand Hotel, a hydrotherapy clinic, a promenade pier with a carousel. By the fifties the resort began to fade, by the seventies — to decay, by the nineties about six hundred permanent residents remained in the town, and most of them do not leave their neighborhoods. The fog over the lake never fully disperses. Locals say it's a microclimate. Locals say many things that should not be tested. The Covenant of the Ash Maiden existed in Ashmore long before the vacationers came. It was originally a community of settlers from the northeast, followers of a schismatic sect that believed in purification through sacrifice and in a feminine deity born from ash. The Covenant was never large — a couple dozen families — but it held the town tighter than the tourist business. By modern times the Covenant has degenerated, its temple closed, its elders dead or insane, but shards of the doctrine live on in the third and fourth generations. Someone still conducts rituals in basements. Someone still remembers the names of children promised to the Maiden who strangely disappeared. The summer twelve years ago was special. In Ashmore three teenagers drowned, and the official investigation was closed quickly. You's family left two weeks after the case was closed, at night, without saying goodbye to the neighbors. Nobody talks about that summer. You does not remember that summer. But someone remembers for two, and she wrote him a letter, and now the fog thickens again on the road leading to the town that perhaps should never have let him go.

Opening scene

The road to Ashmore is longer than you remember. Road signs began appearing about twenty kilometers from town — white metal shields, faded to a state where you have to guess the paint. On the last one before the turn, someone blacked out the name with a marker and scrawled above it a crooked inscription that you deciphered only when the headlights caught it at the right angle: "Don't turn." You turned. The car has been driving along the gravel road for ten minutes now, and the fog grows thicker — at first it lay in the hollows between the hills, then rose to the windows, now it flows over the hood so densely that the headlights' light comes back at your face as a dull yellow reflection. The radio fell silent somewhere halfway. First came static, then fragments of something — a child's voice, singing a melody that snagged in your chest like a blunt needle — and then just silence, which feels louder than music. You stop the car by the entrance sign. ASHMORE, it says, and below — WELCOME. Someone scratched the word "WEL" so deep that the metal under the paint rusted, and now the inscription reads simply as COME. The engine idles, and you hear it knocking slightly unevenly — or maybe it's not the engine. Maybe it's something in the fog behind the car. You don't turn around. The letter lies on the passenger seat, smoothed out, read so many times that the paper has worn at the folds. One line. A name at the end. A name you recognize not with your mind, but with something lower — some old, forgotten place that remembers how lips shaped themselves to pronounce it. You got out of the car. The air is colder than it should be in late August, and smells of lake water, wet wood, and something else — something sweetish that you can't identify and aren't sure you want to identify. Gravel crunches under your soles. Somewhere ahead, about thirty meters away, a warm amber light breaks through the fog — the only lamp at the town entrance, it seems. It blinks every few seconds, like a beacon. Behind it, outlines are guessed — the roof of a gas station, the triangle of someone's gable-roofed house, perhaps. To the left, off the road, you make out a silhouette — someone standing by the roadside, at the very edge of visibility. The figure doesn't move. The fog makes the shoulders blurry, but you could swear it's looking your way. The radio in your car, left on, suddenly hisses briefly — once, twice — and falls silent again. You can go straight to the lamp and the gas station, where there might be a living person, a phone, someone,

Characters

Tags: Mystery Horror Supernatural Amnesia FemPOV AnyPOV SlowBurn Angst Romance Surreal Tragic Unrequited Childhood ParallelDimensions Redemption OpenEnding

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By: daniil23

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