Chapter Eight
Getting back onto my own property was not as easy as we had imagined. It was two days before the police said we could go back out to the property. I called twice each day and talked with Detective Mercer myself. He never had any information to share with me and always wanted to know if I had thought about anything else that might help them. Then on the third morning, he told me that they were releasing the property back to me that afternoon, unless something significant turned up.
We showered, dressed and visited Tammy's again for a quiet, casual breakfast together. Something for the townsfolk to talk about. Breakfast, three days in a row. By eleven thirty we were back in the campground. It felt strange. Almost like I had disconnected myself from it. I guess I had in a way. There were dead bodies buried on my property. I did not want to be connected to them in any way.
Detective Mercer and Special Agent in Charge Hunter were both there. I thought they might be. When I asked about progress they both clammed up. I thought they were holding back some significant part of the evidence. Kathy thought they were just being jerks.
They admitted they had found no additional bodies and were wrapping up that part of the investigation. Now they were concentrating on combing the woods for anything else that might help them put it all together. That admission caused them both to look at each other.
“What is it?” I asked. “What are you trying so hard not to tell us?” I liked saying us.
They looked at each other again and Detective Mercer shrugged. Agent Hunter nodded.
“Do you know about the area of mist on your property?” Detective Mercer asked me.
I shook my head.
“We get a heavy morning fog every now and then but it's gone by mid morning.”
“No, this is definitely a heavy mist and it does not go away all day.”
“Huh?” It was Kathy's turn to make with the educated questioning.
“We have found an area of about ten acres that has a thick, sight obscuring mist on it. And it stays misty all day long no matter how high the sun gets or how hot.”
“Mist?” I was still having trouble following them.
“Yeah, we send guys in there to look around but they can not see anything and after a couple hours of wandering around they come back out with nothing to report.”
“And that's strange?” Kathy asked.
“Well, reporting that they found nothing is not so strange. We are finding nothing all over these woods. What is strange is that they swear they were only gone for a few minutes and came back out because they could not see anything.”
“They are gone a couple hours and think they are gone only a few minutes? That is strange,” I agreed.
“Yeah, that and I think the mist is scaring them so they don't think too straight, either, if you know what I mean?” Agent Hunter added.
Kathy gave him her 'why-don't-you-shut-up' glare but I'm pretty sure he missed it.
“Anyway,” Detective Mercer continued. “We're wrapping things up and should be out of here by lunch time.”
“That quick?” I asked. I was prepared for maybe a week's worth of downtime while they figured this thing out. I was also counting on them being around while we poked around looking for a way to roust this ghost problem we had.
“Yeah. We've collected everything we think is pertinent and sent it to the labs. We don't really know anything new that we didn't know coming in. Lots of unexplained, unconnected cases all mashed together in one place with absolutely nothing in common. We're officially stumped as of now. But we'll keep plugging away until something breaks.” He added his quick advertisement for official public consumption.
I had been wondering how we were going to get the police to let us traipse around my woods during an investigation, so this turn of events answered that. Now I was curious about the mist. I had not walked the entire of my property even once since buying it. I had relied on the realtor and the deed to tell me what I had. I had actually only explored about a third of it. Just that area where I was planning on putting the campground to start.
“So, where's this mist?” I asked.
An hour later, evidence collection completed and most of the police and lab personnel gone, Detective Mercer led Kathy and I to the place where the mist began. It was incredible.
The sun was high overhead and warm. Not summertime warm, to be sure, but warm for a winter day here, and hot for a winter day anywhere else. Still, there before us was a solid mass of swirling, hovering, thick mist. It's whitish grayness a stark contrast against the evergreens it seemed to swallow up.
As far as I could see to my right and left was mist covered. Where we stood was perfectly clear. Ten feet away a white wall of moving, glistening water particles obscured any observation ahead. I was amazed. I had never heard of anything like this. A mist that stayed during the day and did not burn off? Seemed impossible. Incredible. My mind kept coming back to incredible. And lately the incredible had been accompanied by the wrong.
That's where my mind was stuck. Something was wrong. A mist did not exist in the light and comparable heat of the day. It diffused and disappeared. But here it was. Right in front of me.
“I guess we should explore it.” Kathy's voice did not sound any more sure of that than I felt. That did not do much to lift up the coward in me.
Detective Mercer nodded.
“Five people have tried to go in there but none of them could see past their arm.” He told us.
“You?” Kathy asked.
Mercer shook his head, no.
“How come?”
“No reason. Got the report that the others were having trouble searching this area. Came out. Looked around. Saw the problem and went to ask the techs about it.”
“Did you look inside the mist?” Kathy asked him. She was pressing him for some reason.
“No.”
“Why not?” She asked.
“It doesn't feel right. Like an electric shock or something.” Mercer was looking around like he wanted to be somewhere else.
“Doesn't seem like a mist should be able to stay together in this sunlight.” I said.
“Unless there's some kind of...something or other...going on out there.” Kathy pointed to the mist.
“Like what?” Mercer was interested in ideas. I got the feeling he did not like unexplained things around his cases. And this mist was unexplained.
“Maybe some kind of swamp phenomenon or gases underground...I don't know.” Kathy was fishing. She was also trying not to tell the detective what we were really looking for.
“Yeah, well, maybe.”
Detective Mercer wasn't buying into any swamp phenomenon, though. He'd heard all the usual UFO explanations when he was a kid, too. He wanted better answers than that. So did I. My fear was that the real answers were more than we could understand, or possibly more than what we wanted to understand.
I watched Kathy watching Mercer. She was waiting for something. I didn't know what. But it raised a feeling in me I had never had before. Jealousy. I saw her looking to him for answers and I wanted her looking to me for them. Plain and simple.
“I'm going in,” I announced as much to my surprise as theirs.
“In?” Kathy sounded perplexed.
Mercer just looked at me.
“Watch her, will you?” I was trying to sound like I was in control of my sense of self worth, which I wasn't, as I watched Kathy look to another man for answers, and seem the not-jealous type at all, which I was feeling I must now be. I headed towards the mist at a pace that said I meant business but really just kept me from turning back.
“Careful,” I heard Kathy call from behind me.
Then I was enveloped by the mist. Twenty feet inside. Maybe Twenty five. Whiteness closed in all around me. It felt wet like that night in the woods. There was that electrical tingle the cops had spoken about too. That was truly unnerving. Again I smelled the saltiness of the mist and almost tasted of the metallic flavoring that hung in the air all around me. I
remembered a similar sensation of touch and taste that night I saw the figure on the hill.
I looked back the way I had come into the mist. Nothing. Or maybe it is more correct to say, nothingness. That's what it felt like. I had stepped into an entire realm of nothingness. It was not dark this time, though. I could see swirling shadows in the mist. The sunlight forced its way inside but could do little to enlighten anything but the molecules of water hanging in the air. I was walking through sunlit vapors of water totally cut off from the others.
I started to turn around and remembered how Kathy was looking to Mercer for answers. I pushed on. I could not see the ground clearly but I could feel the pine needles and roots at my feet. I shuffled ahead more than walked. Inching my self forward a few feet at a time. Slowly. No hurry. I had no idea where I was going so I had no interest in making good time. Time for what?
I had gone about fifty more shuffling steps when I stopped to look around and really peer into the whiteness of the mist. Still nothingness. I could see no better here than when I first entered. I took another step and noticed something. The air around me sparkled. I stopped. I took another step. More sparkles. I stopped. Nothing. I took another step. Sparkles. I stopped. Nothing.
Strange.
I waved my arm through the air in front of me and watched as a myriad of sparkling, almost static shock looking, explosions of light traced a path behind my swinging arm. I did it again. Same effect. Little ignitions of electrical sparks tingled against my bare hand as I waved it back and forth very slowly in front of me. I felt like I was caressing the mist or massaging the phenomenon to make the sparks burst into being. For maybe three minutes I experimented with moving my arms and watching the sparks the movement created. I was intrigued. Never saw that in a misty fog before.
Maybe there was some sort of electrical source causing this phenomenon. I had no idea what it could be. I didn't know about such things. But if there was a logical, physical reasoning for this mist, I would be much happier.
Now as I shuffled my feet slowly forward, I noticed the sparks around me. Like my presence was setting off some kind of huge static electricity charge. It corresponded to the tingling I felt on my face and hands as I moved. It actually felt invigorating. A small scale, slightly, stinging attack on the skin that excited it to respond with defensive elements of the body. The blood flowed faster. The heart rate increased. The senses stood at full alert which triggered no small number of glands and other bodily organs to do all those protective things they do. I felt very much alive inside the mist. It struck me that except for sex with Kathy, nothing equated to the sensation of walking through the mist. And that thought caused me to notice my own involuntary erection. I was immediately embarrassed by my own lack of control.
Putting aside my embarrassment, I wandered ahead for a few more minutes and felt I had done nothing to get the answers we sought. I turned and headed back the way I had come. At least I felt I had turned and thought I was going back the way I had come in. I say that because five steps later, I was standing in the clear again. Twenty feet to my right, I could see Detective Mercer. Kathy was no where around. I turned to look in the other direction, like I was hunting Kathy, adjusting myself in my involuntary discomfort.
“Where's Kathy?” I think I was shouting. It was too loud for a few feet away anyway.
“She went in after you when you did not come out.”
“When I didn't come out?” I was incredulous. “I've only been gone a few minutes.”
He looked at me with a strange glare, like I had called him stupid.
“You've been gone for almost three hours, John.”
“Three hours?”
I looked up. The sun couldn't lie. It didn't. Sure enough, the bright orb in the sky was decidedly closer to the horizon. Too close for a little after lunch time, that's for sure. Maybe three hours had passed. I could not tell from the position of the sun. But it was definitely a lot later than it should have been.
“She got worried and told me to wait here for you. We shouted for a while but she figured you were too far inside. She said I should wait a few minutes and begin yelling to help guide the both of you out.”
“How long ago?”
“About five minutes, maybe.” He checked his watch. “Four.”
I started yelling out Kathy's name. He joined me. For the next ten minutes we roamed back and forth in front of that wall of mist yelling for her to hear us. Nothing. Silence. Whiteness and more whiteness. Silence and more silence.
For the next hour I walked back and forth across the front of the mist yelling her name into the wall of whiteness. The sun was approaching the horizon now and I felt a fear rise up in me. The ghost. The fact the ghost had been to Kathy's house before I saw him. The strange wall of mist. The approaching darkness. And now, the disappearance of Kathy. All these things were playing on my mind and causing a dread to fill up my throat. Everything for the past two weeks had been building to this. That strange figure was somehow involved. I sensed it more than knew it.
I was walking back and forth and trying to reason out my life and what it had become. Only one thing mattered now. Kathy. She was what made my life worth while and I was not going to lose her. Everything else came in second place. There was no fear to stop me from confronting this figure or ghost or whatever he was. Kathy was in there. Darkness was coming. I had to do something. We could search for the answers later. First, I had to find Kathy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
I wondered if that was what love felt like. Nothing else mattering. Only her. Only her. I could not erase her smile from my mind. It was like a beacon that screamed for me to come find her. Not a distress call. A light that lit my path to her. Keep smiling, Kathy. I'm coming.
I headed back over to join Detective Mercer who was still wandering around at the edge of the mist occasionally calling out her name, too.
“I'm going back in,” I told him.
He nodded his head.
“I was thinking of calling out a search party for her,” he said. “If you go in there, I may be hunting both of you.”
“Impossible to look around in there.” I reminded him. “The only way anyone could find someone would be to trip over them.”
My words had recalled my experience a few days before of falling onto the dead little boy and getting his blood and body fluids on me. It was a startling moment for my mind. I tried to push it away. Kathy was fine. I would find her and return with her. We had a life to get on with.
“Maybe more people would make it faster but not necessarily. I'll find her and bring her out.” I reasoned.
“We should get a flashlight. Maybe not great for this work but better than nothing.” He suggested.
Though I hated the thought of leaving Kathy alone in there for even another minute, I wanted to allow the cop to contribute something to this so he would just let me get on with my search. I stayed and kept watch for her while he headed back to his car to get his flashlight. He said he had a real good one. I waited.
By the time he returned the sun was sinking low over the trees. Shadows were fast taking back the woods around us. Like a plague of locust hungry for sustenance, the shadows claimed the crevasses of the terrain and the trees back to the darkness it had only released them from a few hours before. The cycle of life in the woods.
Mercer had a lantern with him, too. He held it up. He said he would light it after it got dark, if it took me that long. That way I would have something to see when I came back out. He said that maybe a light after dark might shine in a way we could not see through the mist. So, he knew that visibility inside the mist stopped any view of the outside, too.
I know he saw me look at him kind of funny. He just looked away. I believed he had gone inside the mist and got scared by the nothingness like the rest of us and was afraid to say so. It reminded me of the look Kathy had given him earlier. She was looking for answers from him all right. She wanted him to admit that he had gone inside and been scared by the exp
erience. I saw things more clearly now without the veil of jealousy. If I'd seen this before maybe Kathy would not be in there now. I wanted to blame myself. Like when she was lost as a little girl. That was not her fault any more than this was. She was wandering around in there somewhere. I would find her. I would rescue her this time.
“I'll be here.” Mercer said with a tone that said I could depend on him. I believed I could, too.
“I'll be right back,” I said. They sounded like famous last words to me. I hoped they weren't. Last, that is.
Inside the mist I immediately noticed the effect of the setting sun. Although my vision could not penetrate the whiteness of the mist before, the light had made it seem less foreboding than now. It was not dark yet, but darkness was well on the way. And the swirling, shadowy patterns in the mist were more disconcerting now that they had contrast and were easier to see amidst all that vapor. Combined with the events of the past weeks and Kathy missing, my entrance into the mist was anything but a happy occasion. I fought to keep my fear from getting the better of me. Kathy needed me. I would not fail.
Several steps into the mist and the light was progressively growing dimmer. The sparks around my movement seemed to be increasing with the fading light. That seemed normal. The increasing visibility of the sparks. Not the sparks themselves. I was sure I would never be able to think of any of this as normal.
Ten minutes. That's what I reasoned I had left of the light. I didn't have a watch but I knew what time it was because I had asked Mercer when he had returned. Ten minutes to play the hero and get the hell out of here.
“Kathy!” I yelled into the swirling mist.
Nothing. Silence. No sounds of anything. I had not noticed that before. There was no wind in the trees sound. There was no shuffling through the pine needles sounds from my feet. I scratched at the material of my jacket. No sound. I could feel the scratching pressure on my arm and fingers. No sound. I spoke Kathy's name again. My voice made a sound. Nothing else made noise.
A few more steps inside and the sun was going down. Moving my arm in front of me made an almost continual arc of static electrical discharge. It was like a science show for the outdoorsman. See the man walking through the strange mist making electricity. Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, says the audience.
I was redirecting my thoughts while looking around. Darkness was coming and I was still not sure I wanted to be out here. I wanted to find Kathy. I was sure of that. But the darkness had not been my friend of late. Neither had being alone. And I was facing both right now.
“Kathy!” I yelled again.
I squinted into the fading light of the mist and searched for any sign of movement that represented something other than swirling patterns of water vapors. Nothing. The harder I peered into the gloom, the more nothing I saw.
A few more steps and the final wisps of light gave up the ghost. Ghost. Funny thought for me right then. The mind has a strange sense of humor sometimes.
Darkness settled around me, covering me as surely as the mist. My only companions as I moved forward were the sparks following my every move. In all my life I had never felt so alone as right then. For the past few days, I had felt so much a part of coupled life that to be facing anything without Kathy at my side was something of a newly framed foreign experience. It was like there never was a life before Kathy. I could not remember what it felt like to not have her around. Inside my chest, my heart was swelling and I could feel the sting of the tears at the corners of my eyes. I just could not lose her now. I had to keep going. I was sensing the worst or imagining it, one.
I wiped at the dampness in my eyes with a sleeve and stepped forward into the now full on darkness of the mist. I could not see. I could barely sense my whereabouts. I could not hear myself moving. Maybe I wasn't. Maybe I was only thinking I was moving. That thought scared me. Not because I was incapacitated. I was scared because I needed to move. Unless I moved, I could not find Kathy. That was my focus. Find her. I needed to move to do that.
My movements took on a more desperate action. I forced myself onward at a greater pace. Not fast. Not even a good walking pace, but faster than the slow shuffle I had been using.
Another step and then I felt the mist recede. It moved away from me in all directions. I hadn't walked out of it. It just pulled back from me. I could not see it but I felt it. The smell was still there. The mist was close. But I was no longer surrounded by it. Well, maybe surrounded by it but it was not touching me right then.
I moved my arm through the air and the sparks were gone. Nothing. Blackness. No sparks. Just me standing there in the darkness. I took a step and then another. Tentative. Unsure. I could smell the mist. It was not gone. I could sense something moving around me but not feel it. The mist had not dispersed. It was still there but no longer touching me for some reason.
I realized I had given the mist a personality. It had provided me with the sparks and had swirled around me and kept me from seeing very far. It had become something of a known quantity in my strangely turning life. Now the known had become the unknown. What had caused me to come to a pocket in the mist? What created the pocket?
I tried the flashlight. The beam played out as far as the edge of the wall of the mist only about ten feet away. I spun slowly around and discovered the pocket in the mist was equally as far away behind me as in front or on the side. I had only stepped into the pocket and stopped. I had not advanced to the middle of it so, I should have been closer to the mist behind me if it was indeed a pocket I had walked into. It was not. Something had happened and a pocket had formed around me with about ten feet of clear space in all directions.
Peering into the darkness, I strained to see anything that might explain this phenomenon. It was not lost on me that I could not explain the mist in the first place so, explaining the pocket in the mist was a mystery of frustrating proportions on top of my already full load of things to be frustrated at.