The Light in the Fog
There had been a torrential downpour that chilly autumn afternoon, and many low-lying neighborhoods experienced flash flooding. Yet while nearly all of the employees of Cole and Stewart, CPAs, left early, Lindsay Murphy kept working diligently right up until eight o'clock. Only after she completed her quarterly reports did she shut down her computer, turn off the lights and leave the office.
It had been a long, exhausting day, and the nagging headache Lindsay had been keeping at bay with Advil most of the afternoon was threatening to blossom into a full-blown migraine. All she wanted to do was go home, eat a light dinner, take a relaxing hot bath and go to bed early. There was no impediment to this plan since she had neither husband nor children to lay claim to her time. Not even a cat or dog had to be fed since she had no pets. Her life revolved solely around her job.
Even as a child and teenager, Lindsay had a deep love and respect for mathematics. Numbers were easy to understand; they behaved logically. Some rules were always followed. A times B would invariably equal B times A. The sciences and language arts, on the other hand, were often open to debate, subject to interpretation and full of contradictions and exceptions. Lindsay lacked both the curiosity and the imagination to appreciate them and, therefore, focused her mind on the study of equations, formulas, theorems and, later, investments, trust funds and tax shelters.
Because of the inclement weather, traffic was light, especially for a Friday night. Darkness had fallen, and with it came scattered patches of fog. Halfway home Lindsay spotted flares in the road up ahead. Old Bridge Road was flooded, and traffic was being detoured to an alternate route. That meant she would have to drive a good five miles out of her way. She didn't like the idea, but what choice did she have? An hour later, she was in despair of getting home at all. After encountering three more detours, she was hopelessly lost on Naumkeag Mountain. To make matters worse, the fog had grown thicker, and she could see only a few feet ahead.
Suddenly, Lindsay spotted a huge pothole in the road and had to swerve to avoid hitting it. Although she had been traveling at a safe rate of speed, the roads were wet and slick. Her Mustang skidded into a ditch, where her two front wheels became helplessly mired in the mud.
"Why didn't I get a car with four-wheel drive?" she cried, trying unsuccessfully to get her car back onto the road. "It's no use!" she moaned and turned the engine off.
She reached into her purse and took out her cell phone. The Fates must have been conspiring against her, she thought, when she discovered that the battery was dead.
"That's just great!"
Lindsay was faced with two choices: she could wait in her car, hoping that a passing motorist—if there were any out on such a foggy night—would stop and offer to play the Good Samaritan, or she could take to the road on foot, look for a nearby house and hope its owners would let her use their phone to call a tow truck. She waited fifteen minutes, and when no other vehicles passed by, she got out of the Mustang, locked its doors and began walking down the street, hoping that she would not be struck down should a car finally come down the road.
Nearly an hour after leaving the safety of her Mustang, she spotted a lighted window ahead. The lamp's yellowish beam bounced off the water vapor in the air and created an eerie glow. Hoping the owner would let her inside to use the phone, she left the road and walked along a narrow gravel path that led to an arc-shaped stone footbridge over a small brook. Despite the day's heavy rain having caused the water level to rise considerably and the current to become much stronger, there was no imminent danger of the brook overflowing its banks. Lindsay was able to safely cross the bridge and continue along the path toward the light.
As she drew nearer to the source of illumination, she could distinguish the outlines of a house—a cottage actually. It looked like one you would expect to find in the British countryside or even in a fairy tale. It was a small building made of wood and stone, and the roof looked like thatch, although Lindsay realized that her vision was greatly impaired by the darkness and dense fog.
She approached the cottage, and the lamplight glowing out of the windows seemed less eerie. Indeed, it presented a warm, cozy and secure image; and as the tired accountant drew nearer to the entrance, she felt as though she was stepping into a Thomas Kinkade painting.
In the absence of a doorbell, Lindsay formed a fist and knocked on the front door, but there was no response. She knocked again, more forcefully, and the door quietly opened to reveal a quaint and welcoming interior. Oddly enough, there was no one standing on the other side of the threshold.
"Hello?" she called from the doorway, half expecting to see one of Tolkien's hobbits traipsing across the hardwood floor.
Although the lamp was turned on and flames flickered in the fireplace, there were no signs of life—human or hobbit.
"Is anyone here? Hello?"
Cautiously, Lindsay stepped inside.
"My car is stuck in the mud. I was wondering if I might use your phone," she called into the still, silent house.
She walked further into the room, praying she would not be arrested for breaking and entering, or at least entering since technically there had been no breaking.
Lindsay's eyes scanned the small, neat living room for a telephone. There was none. She crossed a doorway into a small kitchen, but she could not find a phone there either. In fact, there were no modern conveniences at all—no microwave oven, refrigerator, stove or dishwasher—not so much as a toaster. Meals were no doubt prepared in the beehive oven built into the kitchen's brick fireplace, which was flanked with heavy iron pots, kettles and utensils.
"This can't be someone's home," she decided. "It must be some sort of museum or perhaps a restored historic site."
That seemed plausible since eastern Massachusetts was liberally dotted with old buildings. Throughout the area, dedicated historians and preservation groups lovingly maintained antique homes in places such as Salem, Danvers, Ipswich, Beverly and Peabody. They took great pride in perpetuating their heritage and were not averse to collecting a few tourist dollars in the process. Lindsay's unimaginative accountant's mind liked that explanation. It made her feel more comfortable about having entered the small cottage without an invitation. If it was indeed a public building, she would not likely be in any serious trouble for going inside.
After calling out one more time and receiving no reply, Lindsay returned to the living room. For the first time, she noticed a narrow staircase leading to the upper floor. Eight steps led to a small landing and then—she assumed—eight more stairs led to the second story, but there was a wall blocking her view of them.
Lindsay was loath to ascend the staircase. She had always believed that the upper floors of houses held bedrooms and personal belongings and, as such, were off-limits to casual guests. It was bad enough that she was in the cottage at all; she did not want to intrude even further.
For the second time that night, Lindsay was forced to make a decision. As she saw it, she had three options. One, she could walk further down the road, hoping to find another house. Two, return to her car. Or, three, remain in the cottage and hope that whoever had turned on the lights and lit the fire in the fireplace would return. Before making her decision, she went to the front door and looked outside. Not only had the fog gotten thicker, but the temperature had gone down, too. Lindsay did not want to blindly wander around outside on such a chilly, damp night. She shivered slightly, and then closed the door, preferring the warmth and light of the cottage to the cold, wet darkness outside.
* * *
Lindsay sat down in a Queen Anne period wing chair near the fireplace. She had no idea how long she would have to wait, but she was fairly certain no one would leave a house for long with the light on and a fire burning. As the young woman waited, she wished she had a book or magazine to read. Normally, she was not much of a reader, but it would have helped pass the time.
In the absence of something to occupy her mind, Lindsay sat back and watched the fire. Soon she began to feel drowsy. Weary from her day's exertions, there was nothing more she wanted to do than curl her feet up beneath her and go to sleep. Against her will, her heavy eyelids began to flutter, and she had the sudden urge to go upstairs and find a bedroom. This, however, was out of the question. Instead, content to doze off while waiting for the homeowner or caretaker to return, she closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the chair. Once she did, she drifted off to sleep and dreamt of a small upstairs bedroom with a full-size canopy bed. Its mattress was thick and soft, and the pillows were made of down. Draped over the bed was a warm, soft, hand-sewn quilt. Lindsay could clearly see every detail in the room even though she had never been in the house before.
A noise from the floor above woke her. She got up and walked to the staircase.
"Hello? Is anybody up there?"
As before, there was no answer.
The desire to climb up those stairs and crawl under the warm quilt of the canopy bed was strong, almost overpowering. It overwhelmed her like a narcotic addiction. It was a feeling the level-headed accountant was not accustomed to and did not like one bit. Lindsay put her hand on the banister and raised her foot. The pull intensified.
"I feel like Goldilocks," she said, trying to break the strange spell the house seemed to have cast on her. "If I go upstairs and fall asleep, the three bears are likely to come home and wonder who is sleeping in Baby Bear's bed."
With great effort, Lindsay forced herself to turn away from the staircase, but she could not walk back toward the living room. Her feet seemed to be glued to the spot.
Raindrops pattered against the windows, and a gusty wind rattled the wooden shudders. The stormy weather of that afternoon had returned without warning. Beneath the sound of the wind and rain, Lindsay thought she heard a voice from above call her name.
"Who's there?" she cried, fighting the desire to climb the stairs and see for herself.
The only reply was the rumble of thunder.
Lindsay, being an extremely commonsensical young woman, had never experienced a premonition, a feeling of déjà vu or even a strong intuition, and she was not one given to strange imaginings. So the idea that the house was haunted or that a deranged killer might be hiding in an upstairs bedroom never occurred to her.
As she stood looking up at the landing, a cold chill drifted down the stairs. It felt as though an icy hand had grabbed her upper arm and was urging her forward. The frightened young woman screamed and was at last able to break free from the paralysis that had held her at the foot of the staircase. She turned, ran toward the front door and tried to open it; but it would not budge. She looked at the handle. There was no lock, so why couldn't she get it to open? Lindsay pulled harder but to no avail. The bone-chilling coldness touched her a second time, and she screamed again. The tiny cottage that had been so warm and cozy when she first entered it now seemed menacing and somehow alive!
"Let me out of here," she shouted, pounding on the door with both fists.
The coldness settled around her feet and began its slow ascent up her legs. With enormous effort, Lindsay broke free and ran to the window. There was no latch, no way to open it.
The fog began to seep under the door and into the cottage like a malevolent cloud, and it was moving directly toward her. What if it got too close? What if it touched her? This was no mathematical problem to which she had a ready answer.
She ran back to the living room, picked up the ottoman beside the wing chair and with all her strength threw it toward the picture window. The glass shattered, and Lindsay had no difficulty pushing out the broken shards that remained. At last, she escaped the cottage.
Outside, the fog was even thicker than before. It took Lindsay several minutes to find the gravel path in the soupy darkness, but once she did, she ran as fast as she could, trying frantically to shake off the cold, invisible hands that tried to embrace her like a frosty lover.
Despite her headlong flight in the dark, she made it as far as the stone footbridge without falling but stopped short when she realized that the brook had risen and finally spilled over its banks. Lindsay hesitated only briefly and then proceeded to run through the cold water, oblivious to its near-freezing temperature.
The voice from the upstairs bedroom called to her again.
"Lindsay!"
The terrified woman fought the inexplicable urge to turn around and race back to the warm, inviting, comfortable cottage, to the deadly trap that resembled an innocuous Thomas Kinkade painting.
"The sum of the interior angles of a triangle equals one hundred and eighty degrees," she cried aloud, forcing her brain to concentrate on the mathematical formulas, principles and laws that had anchored her to reality for so many years. "According to the Pythagorean Theorem, the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs. According to the multiplicative property of zero, any number times zero equals zero as does zero times any number."
Suddenly, the fog through which the frightened woman ran began to dissipate. Lindsay could now see the road ahead. When she reached the safety of the macadam surface, the world around her changed with a suddenness that left her disoriented. With a single step, she crossed from darkness into light. The fog was gone, and the sky was clear.
Lindsay could see her Mustang sitting in a ditch only a few yards away. She could have sworn she'd walked a considerable distance before finding the mysterious cottage.
Breathing deeply, she turned around, anxious to see what the house looked like in daylight. The sight made Lindsay's knees go weak, and she nearly stumbled and fell. There was no cottage nor was there a stone footbridge. There wasn't even a gravel path or a brook. Behind her, there was nothing but woods: tall pines, pin oaks and acres of underbrush.
Lindsay walked back to her car and tried not to wonder where she had spent the previous night. She did not want to know why the cottage had seemed so menacing, so alive, yet all the while maintaining its warm, cozy and inviting façade. She did not wonder about the faces of missing people she had seen on milk cartons and flyers tacked to telephone poles. She did not consider the fact that some of them might have seen the lighted window in the darkness and gone inside, might have grown sleepy beside the stone fireplace and actually walked up those stairs to crawl beneath the warm quilt on the canopy bed. Lindsay did not speculate about any of these things because she only dealt with equations where she could find the value of "x." Thus, she never knew how lucky she was to be alive or how close she had come to vanishing in the night along with the warm, inviting cottage and the dense fog.
The picture in the upper left corner is from Thomas Kinkade's Brookside Hideaway.
Watch out, Salem. The fog is so thick that you can't see past the end of your whiskers.
