“Don’t go out there!” Carmody yelled. “It’s death! I feel that it’s death out there!” Bud and Ollie Weeks, who both knew her, just looked impatient and irritated, but any summer people around her stepped smartly away, never minding their places in line.
The bag-ladies in big cities seem to have the same effect on people, as if they were carriers of some contagious disease. Who knows? Maybe they are.
Things began to happen at an accelerating, confusing pace then. A man staggered into the market, shoving the IN door open. His nose was bleeding. “Something in the fog!” he screamed, and Billy shrank against me-whether because of the man’s bloody nose or what he was saying, I don’t know. “Something in the fog! Something in the fog took John Lee! Something—He staggered back against a display of lawn food stacked by the window and sat down there. “Something in the fog took John Lee and I heard him screaming! ” The situation changed. Made nervous by the storm, by the police siren and the fire whistle, by the subtle dislocation any power outage causes in the American psyche, and by the steadily mounting atmosphere of unease as things somehow… somehow changed (I don’t know how to put it any better than that), people began to move in a body.
They didn’t bolt. if I told you that, I would be giving you entirely the wrong impression. It wasn’t exactly a panic. They didn’t run-or at least, most of them didn’t. But they went. Some of them just went to the big show window on the far side of the checkout lanes to look out. Others went out the IN door, some still carrying their intended purchases. Bud Brown, harried and officious, began yelling: “Hey! You haven’t paid for that! Hey, you! Come back here with those hotdog rolls! ” Someone laughed at him, a crazy, yodeling sound that made other people smile.
Even as they smiled they looked bewildered, confused, and nervous. Then someone else laughed and Brown flushed. He grabbed a box of mushrooms away from a lady who was crowding past him to look out the window-the segments of glass were lined with people now, they were like the folks you see looking through loopholes into a building site-and the lady screamed, “Give me back my mushies!” This bizarre term of affection caused two men standing nearby to break into crazy laughter-and there was something of the old English Bedlam about all of it, now. Carmody trumpeted again not to go out there.
The fire whistle whooped breathlessly, a strong old woman who had scared up a prowler in the house. And Billy burst into tears.
“Daddy, what’s that bloody man? Why is that bloody man?”
“It’s okay, Big Bill, it’s his nose, he’s okay.”
“What did he mean, something in the fog?” Norton asked. He was frowning ponderously, which was probably Norton’s way of looking confused.
“Daddy, I’m scared,” Billy said through his tears. “Can we please go home?” Someone bumped past me roughly, jolting me off my feet, and I picked Billy up. I was getting scared, too. The confusion was mounting. Sally, the checker by Bud Brown, started away and he grabbed her back by the collar of her red smock. It ripped. She slapclawed out at him, her face twisting. “Get your fucking hands off me!” she screamed.
“Oh, shut up, you little bitch,” Brown said, but he sounded totally astounded.
He reached for her again and Ollie Weeks said sharply: “Bud! Cool it!” Someone else screamed. it hadn’t been a panic before-not quite-but it was getting to be one. People streamed out of both doors. There was a crash of breaking glass and Coke fizzed suddenly across the floor.
“What the Christ is this?” Norton exclaimed.
That was when it started getting dark… but no, that’s not exactly right. My thought at the time was not that it was getting dark but that the lights in the market had gone out. I looked up at the fluorescents in a quick reflex action, and I wasn’t alone. And at first, until I remembered the power failure, it seemed that was it, that was what had changed the quality of the light, Then I remembered they had been out all the time we had been in the market and things hadn’t seemed dark before. Then I knew, even before the people at the window started to yell and point.
The mist was coming.
It came from the Kansas Road entrance to the parking lot, and even this close it looked no different than it had when we first noticed it on the far side of the lake. it was white and bright but non-reflecting. It was moving fast, and it had blotted out most of the sun. Where the sun had been there was now a silver coin in the sky, like a full moon in winter seen through a thin scud of cloud.
It came with lazy speed. Watching it reminded me somehow of last evening’s waterspout. There are big forces in nature that you hardly ever see—earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes -I haven’t seen them all but I’ve seen enough to guess that they all move with that lazy, hypnotizing speed. They hold you spellbound, the way Billy and Steffy had been in front of the picture window last night.
It rolled impartially across the two-lane blacktop and erased it from view. The McKeons’ nice restored Dutch Colonial was swallowed whole. For a moment the second floor of the ramshackle apartment building next door jutted out of the whiteness, and then it went too. The KEEP RIGHT sign at the entrance and exit points to the Federal’s parking lot disappeared, the black letters on the sign seeming to float for a moment in limbo after the sign’s dirty-white background was gone. The cars in the parking lot began to disappear next.
“What the Christ is this?” Norton asked again, and there was a catch in his voice.
It came on, eating up the blue sky and the fresh black hottop with equal ease.
Even twenty feet away the line of demarcation was perfectly clear. I had the nutty feeling that I was watching some extra-good piece of visual effects, something dreamed up by Willys O’Brian or Douglas Trumbull. It happened so quickly. The blue sky disappeared to a wide swipe, then to a stripe, then to a pencil line. Then it was gone. Blank white pressed against the glass of the wide show window. I could see as far as the litter barrel that stood maybe four feet away, but not much farther. I could see the front bumper of my Scout, but that’ was all.
A woman screamed, very loud and long. Billy pressed himself more tightly against me. His body was trembling like a loose bundle of wires with high voltage running through them.
A man yelled and bolted through one of the deserted lanes toward the door. I think that was what finally started the stampede. People rushed pell-mell into the fog.
“Hey!” Brown roared. I don’t know if he was angry, scared, or both. His face was nearly purple. Veins stood out on his neck, looking almost as thick as battery cables.
“Hey you people, you can’t take that stuff! Get back here with that stuff, you’re shoplifting!” They kept going, but some of them tossed their stuff aside. Some were laughing and excited, but they were a minority. They poured out into the fog, and none of us who stayed ever saw them again. There was a faint, acrid smell drifting in through the open door. People began to jam up there. Some pushing and shoving started. I was getting an ache in my shoulders from holding Billy. He was good-sized; Steff sometimes called him her young heifer.
Norton started to wander off, his face preoccupied and rather bemused. He was heading for the door.
I switched Billy to the other arm so I could grab Norton’s arm before he drifted out of reach. “No, man, I wouldn’t,” I said.
He turned back. “What?”
“Better wait and see.”
“See what?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t think—” he began, and a shriek came out of the fog.
Norton shut up. The tight jam at the OUT door loosened and then reversed itself.
The babble of excited conversation, shouts and calls, subsided. The faces of the people by the door suddenly looked flat and pale and two dimensional.
The shriek went on and on, competing with the fire whistle. It seemed impossible that any human pair of lungs could have enough air in them to sustain such a shriek.
Norton muttered, “Oh my God,” and ran his hands through his hair.
The shriek ended abruptly. It did not dwindle; it was cut off. One more man went outside, a beefy guy in chino workpants. I think he was set on rescuing the shrieker. For a moment he was out there, visible through the glass and the mist, like a figure seen through a milkscum on a tumbler. Then (and as far as I know, I was the only one to see this) something beyond him appeared to move, a gray shadow in all that white. And it seemed to me that instead of running into the fog, the man in the chino pants was jerked into it, his hands flailing upward as if in surprise.