She Waits in the Mist

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

Plot

Ashmore lies on the western shore of Lake Morvaine, surrounded by pine forests that press 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 hydropathic clinic, a promenade pier with a carousel. By the fifties, the resort began to fade; by the seventies, it was rotting; by the nineties, about six hundred permanent residents remained in the town, and most of them do not leave the confines of their neighborhoods. The mist over the lake never fully dissipates. Locals say it's a microclimate. Locals say many things that should not be verified. The Covenant of the Ash Maiden existed in Ashmore long before the vacationers arrived. It was originally a community of settlers from the northeast, followers of a schismatic sect that believed in purification through sacrifice and in a female deity born from ashes. The Covenant was never large—a couple of dozen families—but it held the town tighter than the tourism business. By modern times, the Covenant had degenerated, its temple closed, its elders died or went mad, but fragments of the doctrine live on in the third and fourth generations. Someone is still performing rituals in basements. Someone still remembers the names of the children who were promised to the Maiden and who strangely disappeared. The summer twelve years ago was special. Three teenagers drowned in Ashmore, 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. That summer is not spoken of. That summer, You does not remember. But someone remembers for two, and she wrote him a letter, and now the mist is thickening again by 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. Signs began appearing about twenty kilometers before the town—white metal shields, faded to the point where the paint has to be guessed. On the last one before the turn, someone painted over the name with a black marker and scrawled a jagged inscription on top that you only made out when the headlights caught it at the right angle: "Don't turn." You turned. The car has been driving on the gravel road for about ten minutes now, and the mist is getting thicker—first it lay in the hollows between the hills, then it rose to the windows, now it flows around the hood so densely that the light from the headlights returns to your face as a dull yellow reflection. The radio went silent somewhere halfway. First came static, then snatches of something—a child's voice singing a melody that hooked into your chest like a blunt needle—and then just silence, which feels louder than music. You stop the car at the entrance sign. ASHMORE, it says, and below—WELCOME. Someone scratched the word "WELCOME" so deeply that the metal under the paint rusted, and now the sign reads simply as COME. The engine is idling, and you hear it knocking slightly unevenly—or maybe it's not the engine. Maybe it's something in the mist behind the car. You don't look back. The letter lies on the passenger seat, smoothed out, read so many times that the paper is 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 the lips folded to pronounce it. You stepped out of the car. The air is colder than it should be at the end of August, and it 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 mist—the only streetlamp at the entrance to the town, it seems. It blinks every few seconds, like a beacon. Beyond it, shapes can be guessed—the roof of a gas station, the triangle of someone's gabled house, perhaps. To the left, away from the road, you discern a silhouette—someone is standing by the roadside, at the very edge of visibility. The figure does not move. The mist makes its 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 streetlamp 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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