1
Harriet Morris enjoyed watching the fog in the fall and spring. On her back stoop out in the country, she could drink her coffee and watch her shepherd dog, Ramsey, run in large looping circles through her yard and out to the chicken coop, where he surely woke up the chickens who were laying in warmth. As of late, she noticed a change in the morning fog. It was thicker than usual and began earlier and lingered later. She didn’t like the ominous look of it, and being bordered by two large farm fields, she could barely make out the tree line far off in the distance.
Gary’s Market, not but a mile from her house, was a place of congregation for the town of Meadowview, and recently the residents had been unintentionally (or subconsciously) meeting at the market on Saturdays to discuss the strange gray blanket that was willfully consuming the town.
Ethan Dawson didn’t think much of it and referenced his Farmer’s Almanac. “It said it’s supposed to be foggy this year.”
“The almanac doesn’t say that,” Jordan Morgan, another farmer, said. “It said the weather might be unusual.”
“I hardly think you can call this the weather,” Taylor Reynolds retorted. “It’s like a warning from somewhere else. Like God is trying to tell us something.”
“Pish-posh,” Jordan said.
“Silly business,” Ethan retorted.
But Harriet had been watching, and it didn’t seem like a “pish-posh” situation, or one that was “silly business” at all. It was portentous. It told her something was going on in Meadowview that everyone seemed to disagree on as a whole.
Quinn Sullivan, a city reporter who only showed up when there was drama, was in the area taking pictures. No story had been published yet, but he was interviewing as many people as he could—adults, parents, and children.
“It’s a little odd,” Harriet overheard him saying to Gary Hedgewig, who ran Gary’s Market. “The city doesn’t see that much fog—maybe that’s the pollution—but then you come clear out here and boom—there it is—like some kind of wall to keep everybody inside.”
One evening, as the light died down on the horizon, Ethan, Jordan, and Quinn decided they would venture out into the mist, and Harriet knew this because they used her house—one of the farthest on the edge of Meadowview—as a hub of sorts. Quinn had his camera, and Ethan and Jordan brought along their German pointer pups, each dog being only a few years old, and left off across the field toward the woods. Harriet went with them but cooped Ramsey up in the house to watch over things.
They ventured into the woods, the sun still in the sky, but as they came closer to the trees, the mist seemed to thicken. It was different tonight, Harriet thought, like it was anticipating us. Quinn took some pictures, but what few he gathered didn’t turn out as well as he wanted.
“You have to take one hundred to get just one good one,” he said, and he took a few more.
Ethan and Jordan said little and followed their dogs by a leash into the trees. The woods could get deep and dangerous, but both farmers knew them well, having spent their entire lives in Meadowview. The dogs grew impatient, though, as the men walked through the trees and the graying mists around them. Quinn stopped taking pictures for a while, until they saw the first figure in the mist.
It was tall, and its arms were long. It did not move, and even though the light from the evening sun was behind it, illuminating the fog like a flashlight behind a drape, they couldn’t make out the figure.
“Are you lost?” Ethan asked, and he spat some tobacco from his mouth, which made Jordan wretch.
The figure did not respond. Quinn took a picture. For a long time, the group did nothing, waiting for a reply, and then the figure stepped back amidst laughter. Harriet, who had been stoic and pleasantly adventuring through the wood, felt the hair on her neck stand up. It was not fitting laughter for the size of the shape. But a child’s laughter.
The group began to back away from the laughter, but the dogs fought against them, barking and yelping until it turned to frightened howls.
“Damn you!” Ethan said as he pulled on his leash hard. That was enough to get the dogs to move back toward Harriet’s home. But the laughter came again, and then more shapes emerged, and more laughter—different pitches and tenors. A horrendous melody of noise erupted from the woods, and then the group turned and ran at full speed away as the dying light turned to darkness.
They ran all the way back to Harriet’s house, across the field and panting. Quinn had lost his cap to his camera and had dropped his little notepad somewhere in the woods. They all said little, and their eyes bounced back and forth from one another.
“What had that been in the woods?” Jordan whispered.
But they could make neither heads nor tails of it.
2
Harriet had always loved the library, and so she took to researching the town’s history, even as the residents continued meeting at Gary’s Market, now almost every day of the week.
Ghosts. Spirits. Demons. The Devil Himself.
According to the residents, a terrible curse had come for them all, and without their knowing.
Harriet wasn’t sure entirely, but she spent her mornings plumbing the depths of the town’s history.
There were deaths and acquisitions, fires and burials, tragedies and sickness, and happy times, too. The town was replete with the history of a small village that had been around since the 1700s as a rural farming community. She searched old newspapers, journals, testimonials, and microfiche. Little clues of tragedy emerged, but none so pressing as the appearance of spectral shapes in the woods.
And yet she continued to search every morning for months.
The fog continued to appear each morning and every night.
Quinn’s story, “The Haunting of Meadowview,” was published and some people from the city started to come out, but not as many as Harriet expected. There was something about the supernatural that attracted a specific section of the populace. However unhinged she felt of these particular few. But then they would come in their cars, take pictures with their phones, and live chat their followers near her home, and then they would leave.
Harriet couldn’t make much sense of the fog, but she needed neither followers nor pictures to digest the reality. Something awful was happening—and it had laughter like a child.
One evening, as she battened down for rest, she looked up to see a shadowy face in her window, and her blood ran cold. She couldn’t scream or run, but she could see with absolute clarity the outline of a shadowed face. And she thought she recognized it from somewhere.
And after the face disappeared, she called Ms. Reynolds over to calm her down and keep her company for the night. The face did not return to her window.
3
“What did you uncover?” Quinn asked her one day following a brief interview and a photoshoot with the fog.
“I haven’t found much yet,” she said. “There seems to be a great deal of tragedy in our community, but that also seems normal considering how long we’ve been around.”
“Towns with long histories suffer eternally, don’t you know?” Quinn replied and gave a faux chuckle.
Harriet hadn’t felt like laughing much ever since she saw the face in her window. She knew she recognized it, but from where?
“I found a book that is taking me ages to comb through,” she said. “The language is abstruse archaic. I can only make out a little here and there. I think it was written by a lawyer—a ye olde lawyer—because it feels written in legalese.”
The book was on her end table next to her sofa, and the title, Legal Proceedings in the Wake of Tragedy, struck her as ceremoniously odd. Much of its contents struggled with describing facts of horrific incidents. One of which was nearly unintelligible as it described a family’s complete destruction and murder at the hands of a traveling vagabond. No closure on that one.
Quinn poked through the photos on his camera. “It’s difficult to make fog interesting in black and white print,” he said, and then as though he was struck by an idea, he looked up. “You know, we have heck of a court reporter at the Gazette. Why don’t I take the book to her and see if she can’t make sense of it?”
Harriet thought that was a great idea and turned it over to him.
Meadowview met on the 31st of the month and discussed a plan of action. The fog held tight around the town, and now more occurrences were reported. Harriet’s nighttime visitor was not the only one, as it appeared that more than half the town had been assailed by faceless intruders in windows, backyards, and even some while they were out driving. The figures stood by the wayside and watched the cars drive by, still shrouded in fog and darkness.
The meeting was interrupted as Gary, who had been posted up by the window watching, suddenly shouted. The community met at each window of the community house, staring out on all sides, faces plastered to the glass. Figures surrounded the building. The childish laughter echoed, and the group shuddered together waiting for a fissure of attack that never came.
“They are restless,” a voice in the crowd said.
Another voice said, “Vengeance. They must want vengeance.”
“We are good souls,” said yet another. “We are good people.”
Harriet could only watch as the figures stood and stared.
The figures stayed for hours, laughter peeling at random, some shrill, some excited, but all childish. When escape seemed far from their minds, the figures stepped back into the fog, and the silence that followed them provided only a modicum of relief. Fear prevailed in their hearts as the village-goers, and Harriet, loaded up into their cars and headed home.
No one, it seemed, was safe from the fog.
4
The next morning, Quinn visited Harriet, and though she was shaken tired as sleep had not reached her, Quinn was smiling.
“We have a crack legal assistant at our paper, I tell you,” he said. “She was able to decipher much of your little library book, and boy she found a volume.”
Harriet smiled at him through a drowsy expression and shakily drank her coffee, which had run cold.
“Well, it turns out there were a great deal of accidents, murders, and tragedies that befell this little town throughout the years, but one really stuck out to me,” Quinn said. “I knew I heard the laughter of children—just like you had—and so I thought I would rule out all of those horrible murders and blanket accidents that wrecked homes or a few people here and there. That’s when I asked our lil’ legal secretary if there were any accidents involving children, and, of course, there was…”
Harriet sat up more alert now, sleeping wearing away in the way of interest.
“It turns out,” Quinn said, “that there was a schoolhouse fire in 1831 in the woods behind your home. It killed every single person in the building, some 31 children and one teacher. A brave parent ran in to save the day—perished, too.”
Harriet, dismayed, set her coffee down and looked through her window toward the woods.
“It’s all worn over now by trees and roots, I’d imagine, and I would also doubt that there was a single commemorative plaque to say it was there. If you were feeling brave, we could go look.”
“It’s noontime,” Harriet said. “The fog isn’t as strong. We should go now if we can, and I will bring Ramsey.”
Quinn liked that idea.
They ventured long into the woods, and Ramsey stayed with them. While there was no fog, there was the material element of it lacing the woods, like resting mist, or steam from a hot bath. The duo and the dog ventured toward the remains of the schoolhouse, of which Quinn knew the location from a carefully studied map. As they came near the location, a peel of laughter let out and shook them to their core. And then it was followed by a giddy and happy laugh.
Ramsey’s hair stood up on his large coat and he gave a weak sort of bark.
“I feel the same way,” Harriet said, and patted the big dog.
They found an odd sort of pattern at the location of the schoolhouse. Fallen logs and trees and dark earth, blackened by soot, though the possibility of its existence was unusual. Nearly 200 years had gone by, and still, the earth looked blanketed by tragedy.
“Best I can figure is the town wanted to forget it,” Quinn said as he stepped through some of the fallen trees near the blackened outline of the school. “We don’t commemorate what we don’t want to remember, and I can assume there was a great deal of shame at the death of so many children in the community. Who could live with that?”
Harriet didn’t know, and as she found her way through as Quinn had, a great deal of sadness crept inside of her as she imagined the children attending the cramped schoolhouse ready to learn, ready to speak to their friends, ready to go home…but their fate would see it all cut short.
Quinn stopped and looked up above the blacked-out spot, and there standing high above them was the largest weeping willow either of them had ever seen. A strange spot for the tree maybe, but it began to sing a sweet song to them as the wind fluted through the branches.
“Its roots are deep,” Harriet said. “It’s been here a long time.”
“Do you think this is it?” Quinn said.
Before Harriet could respond, the fog began to appear, heavier than it had ever been, and it covered every square acre of wood and creek and limb. The three of them stood in the center of the schoolhouse, where it used to be, and watched the fog fill in their surroundings. Quinn grabbed Harriet’s hand, and she held onto Ramsey’s leash tighter. Then, the schoolhouse filled in, first lumber by lumber, and then the walls were up and the roof was over them.
Children, voices dancing brightly, voices laughing louder and louder poured into the room and sat. The teacher was there—had been for hours probably—and the room was warm. The light from the fire was bright, and she spoke softly to them, and the children listened, and Harriet, Quinn, and Ramsey watched as the day unfolded. Then, darkness fell, and there were screams, there was fire, the roof came down, and the children fell, too. The teacher ran to save them, flames jumping higher and higher, and as the emotional toll began to weigh on Harriet and Quinn, the scene was gone.
The figures were there in the fog. Twenty feet away, but it was already receding.
Quinn, acting bravely, let go of Harriet’s hand and stepped forward. “We can remember you,” he said. “I can make sure of it!”
The figures said nothing.
“I can try—we can try! You are not forgotten! You are not forgotten!”
Though the figures said nothing, the fog responded by growing lighter, dematerializing before them, and the figures, though tall, laughed little childish laughs and stepped back into the fog as it left their plane of existence.
Harriet woke a week later, having told her story to the town repeatedly, having gone to the mayor, having voiced her concerns for the tragedy that was wiped away from the town’s memory, and held the local paper in her hands.
“Embers of Memory” by Quinn Sullivan
A good article, but the conclusion made Harriet smile.
In recognition of this tragedy, the city council of Meadowview will raise donations and funds for a remembrance statue to honor the lives lost at the Meadowview Schoolhouse some 200 years ago. May their spirits rest in peace, and may the residents of our town realize closure for those lost souls.
