Calum keeps walking and holds up his hand to gauge perspective: the shape has curled into a comma half the length of his thumbnail. Some indefinite amount of time later it has fractured into a top and bottom, a semicolon, twice as big. Calum seems to be closing the distance at a rate incommensurate with the speed he’s walking. He squints but doesn’t pause. The shape bobs on the horizon. It is moving. It is growing. It is, he realizes, approaching.
He squints again. This thing seems to be human, or at least human-shaped, and coming at him very, very quickly, now the length of a knuckle. And though the shape of this thing is human there is something inhuman about it, about the way it moves and its spectral presence and the shimmer of air between it and Calum, a dream’s air that thickens into tendrils that slip and tighten around his neck.
Also as this person approaches, the bridge behind it, in fact everything behind it, even the sky, seems to be disappearing. It isn’t going dark. What was there a second before vanishes. And for a sky that was already an absence to cease to be even that — it becomes nothing, there’s just nothing there. As this person moves the horizon recedes, closing in, a hand curling around a camera’s lens, shrinking the image, choking what can be seen until, eventually, it will be just Calum and this person, alone, and everything else a void.
Calum backs away from the yellow line. His first step is deliberate, but then he staggers, legs twisting, and everything goes slow and soupy, this can’t be a movie, it has to be a dream. The encroaching figure nears, the emptiness swells behind it — and Calum stops walking. He steps off the yellow line. He backs up against the bridge’s railing. There is nowhere to go. He looks down into the mist and what is maybe a river’s shadow beneath and above at what remains of the colourless sky, swiftly vanishing.
And the figure comes closer still, swallowing everything in its wake.
AT BLACKACRES STATION train 2306 sat on the southbound tracks, doors open. The platform was empty, the movators motionless. Debbie boarded the lead car. Two passengers sat down at the far end: a kid, maybe eight years old, and his fatigued-looking mother with a handbag in her lap.
Standing over her, the kid kicked his mom’s feet, she told him to sit down. He crawled up on the seat opposite and from his knees looked out the window and said, We aren’t going anywhere, we’ve been here forever, what are we doing. Sit down, Rupe, his mother said again, and he said, I am sitting down, and pulled himself up as tall as he could on his knees and stared at her stonefaced. She had nothing to say about that.
Normally the neighbourhood’s tinny din would drift up from the streets into the station. Instead the car filled with a silence that came thudding into the ears, at once thick and hollow, everywhere and empty. Outside the mist swirled past the windows of the train and over the roofs of Blackacres, between watertanks resembling the hulls of fogged-in ships, grabbing and releasing the phonelines and electric cables that lolled between rooftops. They were dead: the power was out, of course the train wasn’t moving.
Yet Debbie didn’t leave. Stray bits of mist nudged through the open doors. At the far end of the car the kid got down and went back to kicking his mother’s feet. I said stop it, she said, and he kicked her once more, and she said, I’m warning you, and he kicked her again, giggling — and at this she sprung forward and smacked his face. The kid held his cheek. He looked stunned. She shrunk away, seemed to reconsider, grabbed him roughly by the arm, and shook him. Are we supposed to walk to find your brother? she screamed. All the way all across the city, are we supposed to walk? The boy started crying. Rupe, no, said the woman and hauled him into her arms. I’m sorry, she whispered, kissing his face, his mouth.
Stiffly, Debbie watched. Sometimes at the Room she was privy to corporal parenting, almost always interrupted by a realization of witnesses. Then came excuses and embarrassment, the family slunk out the door in shame. But to this mother, now coddling her boy, Debbie seemed invisible, their world didn’t include her or her judgments. What was wrong with these people, didn’t they know they were in public? Had they no shame?
But what bothered Debbie most was feeling excluded and ignored. With nothing to say and no way to help, she slipped back onto the platform and down to the street. A Citywagon idled in the depot opposite. Debbie approached, waved. The driver, bundled in furs, face taut as a canvas and primed with powder and rouge, rolled down her window. Yes?
Hi, said Debbie. Sorry, could you help me?
Help you what? I can’t drive you anywhere. I have to get home.
In a rush Debbie explained her predicament, that her phone was out, that someone was missing and —
And so?
And she’s blind, said Debbie — which, really, might not have been untrue.
Oh, said the woman. Blind?
Yeah. All I need’s a ride to Canal Station, maybe the Redline’s running. . Listen, I can pay you, she said, producing her wallet as proof — the woman snickered — and shamefully pocketed it again.
Can’t you get your own car? said the woman.
I don’t have a Citycard. I don’t know anyone in the um, men’s league.
Yeah, see, my husband. . The woman trailed off.
The engine idled, chugging exhaust.
Debbie felt cornered. She sighed, could hear the self-disgust in her voice as she said, Listen, I write for Isa Lanyess —
Oh? said the woman. Sudden interest glinted in her eyes.
Debbie felt filthy, but blundered on: Yeah, and if you give me your information I bet this is just the kind of feel-good story she’d love. You know, power out in the Zone, kind benevolent citizen makes generous act. .
Benevolent, murmured the woman. I like it!
She was already out of the car, handing Debbie a business card, eyes glazed with fantasy, projecting herself onto her friends’ TV screens, basking in their awe and envy. She spoke in a rush, every moment here delayed her taste of fame: Keep the engine running, you won’t need to log in. There’s a lot by Canal Station, park it there. Or I’m going to have to pay for it, understand?
Of course, said Debbie, sliding behind the wheel. I appreciate this so much.
And I’ll hear from you soon? About the show?
Debbie nodded. You bet.
Gosh, little old me on In the Know, cooed the woman, who would have guessed?
V
EARL STOOD at the top of a staircase that vanished into People Park as a swimming ladder into a frozen pond. The fog collecting on the common didn’t shift or swirl or embody any of the vaporous properties it did elsewhere in the city, but seemed instead a solid stagnant mass. Down there somewhere was the gazebo — and, with luck, Gip’s knapsack and his meds. The air was icy, the light a sort of non-light. It had stopped snowing, what had fallen layered the ground, pebbly and granular, half an inch thick.
Pearl imagined herself heading down into the misty park, swallowed up, never coming out. But that was ridiculous. She dangled a toe until a snowy stair responded with a squeak and crunch. And down she went, tentatively, by feel and sound, imagining Gip and Kellogg and Elsie-Anne browsing the Museum’s exhibits, her husband flapping his guidebook and raving about the place as if it hosted miracles.
A dozen careful steps later the stairs flattened into a Scenic Vista, the fog so thick she crossed the platform at a crouch, feeling ahead with her hands. In the snow her fingers quickly went cold and stiff, she brought them to her mouth to blow on them, reached out again — but what if she encountered something cold and wet and fleshy lying on the deck. . Pearl recoiled. A chill passed through her, deeper than the cold, it iced her heart.