Innocence

As the man sat down, the Fog attacked. I had never witnessed such a thing before, nor had Father or his father, as far as I know. If what transpired next was common, the Fogs took great trouble to conduct their assaults only where there were no witnesses, where their prey was alone and vulnerable. Though only Father, his father, and I could see these creatures, the response of the prey would have alerted anyone present to the fact that something extraordinary was occurring. As the serpentine form abruptly lashed the man and wound around him, he reacted as if he’d taken an electric shock, his entire body stiffening. He tried to move his encircled arms but could not, tried to thrash up from the sofa, without success, and opened his mouth as though to scream, but no thinnest cry escaped him. His face flushed red, features contorting in what appeared to be agony one moment and ecstasy the next, eyes rolling and protuberant with fear, but jaws slackening in surrender, the cords of his neck as taut as cables. Although the predator apparently had no mouth, I thought that it would somehow devour him, but instead he devoured it

against his will. The Fog inserted itself into his silent scream, pressed into his mouth. The beast no longer seemed to be merely coherent mist. Now it looked as muscular, as torsional, as powerful as a python, and it fed itself to him insistently, relentlessly. His cheeks bulged with the mass of it, and his throat swelled grotesquely as the Fog forced itself down his esophagus. As it had wound around him, now it unwound while he swallowed more and more of it, although when his arms were free, he made no meaningful use of his hands, only clenched them into fists to beat on the sofa and upon himself.

I thought that I should smash through the window, go to the aid of the victim, but intuition restrained me. I was not afraid for my life, but somehow I knew that I could not grapple with the Fog any more than I could wrestle into submission a cloud of smoke. This was more than an encounter between predator and prey, more and different. Although I saw no evidence that the man had invited the assault or that he’d even been aware of his peril prior to the attack, every moment of his struggle was characterized not merely by fright and horror but equally by what seemed to be a carnal acquiescence, as if he received the Fog with almost as much pleasure as terror.

The tail of the thing slithered out of sight between the man’s lips, his throat swelled obscenely one last time, and he slumped back against the sofa, gray-faced and exhausted. After less than a minute, color began to seep into his skin once more. His breathing returned to normal. He sat up straight and looked around as though bewildered, as if not quite sure what, if anything, had just happened.

Although I had witnessed the event complete, I couldn’t say with certitude what it meant. I felt reasonably sure, however, that the Fog still lived, that now it thrived like a parasite within the man, and that the silk-robed host, having been somehow induced to forget the hideous penetration, was unaware of what had taken residence within him.

The man reached for the mimosa on the end table, swallowed a third of it, and returned it to the coaster. He picked up the remote control from the coffee table, switched on the big-screen TV, and put the DVD into play.

Although the window was at an angle to the TV, I had a good enough view to allow me to see what appeared on the screen: a pretty girl of ten or eleven and a grown man. As he began to undress her, I realized that the horror of the recent assault was nothing as compared to the abomination that was about to play out on the big-screen TV.

The man on the sofa leaned forward. The collection of obscene DVDs had belonged to him before the Fog had combined itself with him, and it was he, only he, who smiled now and licked his lips, savoring the atrocity on the video as surely he had enjoyed it often before.

With the stealth that is at all times essential to my survival, I fled down to the alleyway, shaking with disgust, my eyes hot with tears.

I halted and peered up, not at the second-floor window but at the fourth. With such a man living two floors below her, was Gwyneth safe even behind locked doors and latched windows? I considered going back and warning her, but the quiet metropolis began to resonate with the sounds of its earliest-rising citizens. I realized that Gwyneth knew more about the city’s residents than I would ever know, and she understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore.

Faint color had faded the night along the eastern horizon, and soon it would saturate the sky. With gloved hands, I wiped at my eyes, and the blurred surroundings clarified.