White Things

On one dark, foggy morning a news station began the daily evening broadcast to Sevier County, a low-population area in the middle of nowhere. It began with a poppy intro song, canned footage of various county locales, and fast-forwarded time lapses of the weather. When the intro wrapped up, the station’s logo appeared briefly on the screen before taking position at the lower left corner.

The screen showed footage of the Childs’s home. A wide panning shot of a well-kept front yard covered in yellow caution tape and strobing with red and blue police lights.

One small boy, who lived in a very poor home and had nothing better to do besides play with legos in front of the living room TV, noticed something.

“What’s that?” The boy asked his mother, who sat in a recliner behind him reading a novel.
The mother marked her place in the book and looked around for her glasses (that were nowhere nearby) before giving up and squinting at what her son was pointing to on the TV.

“What’s what?” She asked.

“That,” the boy said, pointing to the field beyond the Childs’s yard. “What is that?”

“A horse field,” the mother said simply. The field is a flat stretch of land next to the Childs’s house with only a few salt blocks and troughs spotted around. Even through the static of the TV, wisps of fog and frosted grass are easily visible. “Their neighbors had a few horses that walked around that field all day.”

“Not thaaaat,” the boy said, then pointed to a specific spot in the field. “That!”

The mother shrugged, took another doomed look for her glasses, and searched the screen again. For one second, she thought she could see a rough shape in the mist at the far end of the yard. Before she can get a closer look, the screen goes back to the newscasters.
“I’m sorry bud, I didn’t see anything.”

The next morning, the Sevier County news intro kicked off at 7 AM with the same canned footage of rolling clouds and cheaply animated logo. The newscasters wear inexpensive clothing and shuffle empty papers on their table.

“Good morning Sevier County, this is James Bergeron and-”

“Audrey Rasmussen here to give you a quick morning update before the day’s scheduled programming.”

“Kicking things off,” Audrey continued, “and as you’ve probably noticed, a heavy fall-time fog has set in around the Sevier County area. Though fog is common this time of year, in some areas it’s thick enough to stop traffic.”

“Local meteorologist Jason Whitman,” says James, “has informed us that due to the cold weather and thickness of the fog, it may not dissipate until later in the week. All residents should travel with caution, including using your headlight brights and walking with reflective material.”

“For a brief update on the ongoing investigation into the suicide of Madeleine Childs, we have Kenna Spears down for a brief interview with Richard and Evelynn Childs at Maileen Elementary.”

The image cuts to a young lady in a PBS Channel 3 sweater standing in front of Maileen Elementary. Behind her is a thin, tired-looking man with unkempt hair, a five-o-clock shadow, and heavy shadows under his eyes. He lightly holds a little girl by the shoulders. The girl is the spitting image of her father, the only difference being even more pronounced shadows under her eyes. While the reporter is very well lit by the news camera’s huge lights, the two behind her are almost shapes in the darkness until the light is swung towards them.
Only one child in the county is watching the live report: A young girl home with a bad cold.
Why are they doing this? She thinks as she bundles into her blankets and pillows and watches the TV in her room. That girl looks so sad.

Kenna Spears, on her fourth day of what she thought was going to be a fun and exciting internship, starts her report.

“Good morning Sevier County,” Kenna Spears says, smiling a wide smile that looks extremely out of place. The fog is so thick that the world outside of the intensely bright camera light seems to be entirely an inky purple. The only outlier is a row of classroom windows behind Richard and Evelynn filled with dim light, but even those are so distant and non-penetrating to the fog that they look like phantom gaslights.

“I’m here with Richard and Evelynn Childs,” Kenna says before slowly walking with the camera towards the two. “Husband and daughter of Madeleine Childs.”

Richard winces. Evelynn frowns. Kenna either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Dropping to one knee, she speaks to Evelynn while holding a large microphone close to the child’s face.
“Evelynn, how are you doing?” She asks with a wide smile still on her face from what could only be a very warped sense of professionalism. “All this fog is pretty creepy, right? What a day to come back to school.”

Evelynn smiles a little and nods. Richard rubs her shoulder lightly.

“We just wanted to say that we’re glad to see you doing well,” Kenna says after an awkward pause. She’s about to say more before Evelynn abruptly turns to her father, hugs him, and runs towards the school. The sick girl bundled in blankets at home smiles, happy that the girl got away.

Kenna Spears frowns, resets her faux broadcast smile, and approaches Richard for an interview that the county sheriff had been very adamant to him that he make.

Kenna is about to speak when a loud, shrill scream cuts her off.

In the footage, those few who happened to be watching see Evelynn running back to her father. The sick girl at home begins to scream as she sees what Evelynn is running from.
“It’s her!” Evelynn screams, over and over. “It’s her! It’s her! It’s heeeerrrr!”

Richard picks up Evelynn and moves toward the camera’s light; it’s the only thing even moderately bright and easily visible around. Kenna Spears freezes, too confused and inexperienced to do anything more than stand and stare at where Evelynn had run from.
All she, the cameraman, and Richard can see is a vague outline of the school. Except…
A silhouette in the fog?

The adults stare dumbfounded while Evelynn and the sick girl at home scream.
“What is…?” The reporter asks.

She approached the silhouette. Before she could get close, the form in the fog abruptly moved, the mist quickly billowing towards Kenna, before the reporter was lifted off of the ground.

Kenna’s thoughts were not coherent; all she could be aware of were what felt like fingers as cold as ice around her throat.

The pressure tightened, harder and harder, until she could feel an explosion of pain, blood, and collapsing trachea in her throat. There’s a flash of unbearably intense pain, then Kenna is on the ground. People are screaming and running.

The one light in the fog topples over and the camera crumples. Both the footage and the light cut off and everything is dark. Kenna barely notices; she’s trying desperately to take breaths through a shattered throat. She feels her chest soak in a warm liquid and wonders what it could be.

The cameraman appears, yelling, trying to tell her something as he hovers over her, looking terrified into their surroundings.

Something was surrounding them, but all Kenna could see was fog.

Before she can see what the cameraman is looking for, Kenna Spears loses consciousness and dies on the fourth day of her exciting new internship. The cameraman does not notice. At the moment of her death, the same icy cold fingers wrap around his throat and drag him, kicking but unable to scream, deeper into the fog.

In the next few hours, the entire town of Maileen went into lockdown. A few bodies belonging to those unlucky enough to be outside of their homes and around the school that morning, including the Sheriff of Maileen and his two deputies who had been keeping a close eye on Richard, are unseen in the dense fog.

The attack had taken place early enough in the morning so that only twenty or so children were at Maileen Elementary. They had all been quickly evacuated to the library.

They’d all waited, but help didn’t come.

Richard Childs was alone in an empty classroom while Evelynn waited in the library. The room offered no comfort; the miniscule desks and chairs looked odd with the brightness of the lights and the darkness outside. Colorful stickers of various objects with cartoonish eyes seemed to glare at him. Sitting in the teacher’s chair and putting his head on the desk, he did his best to ignore everything else and draw five pointed stars on a blank piece of paper.
Except all that he saw was Madeleine.

He wanted to be in the library, wanted to be with his daughter, but it was better this way. Better to be here alone than to stress out the kids old enough to recognize the man on the news who had abused his now-deceased wife.

Or was she?

The thought kept coming back to him. That’s what Evelynn had said. It had been her.

His mind had already been strained for years. He thought it had snapped after he found Madeleine’s body sitting against the tree in the front yard, smiling spitefully even in death.
“Everything’s gonna be okay,” he’d told Evelynn as they both sat in their house waiting for the cops to arrive. It was a paper-thin platitude and they’d both known it. He said it again when the sheriff led him to the squad car. The pitying look Evelynn had given him as he was handcuffed made him want to rip his hair out and scream, to hell with the news cameras and reporters watching.

Those promises, the lies, had caught up to him. As he stared into the shifting darkness outside of the classroom window, it made a sort of karmic sense. The lies had replayed in his head since he’d been “interviewed” by the sheriff.

“I love you,” had been the first. He’d said it after his and Madeleine’s first kiss. She’d been expecting it, after all, wouldn’t want to disappoint his first love. She’d told the same lie to him every time the fighting had died down, and they lay on the bed or couch. Sometimes she’d even cry to show him how remorseful she felt after treating him the way she did, promising she’d get help and start treating him better.

But after Evelynn had been born, Madeleine had gotten physical.

Richard picked himself up, wiping his puffy eyes with the back of one hand and putting the pencil he’d been doodling with in the other, and left the classroom, deciding that he didn’t care how others thought of him, he wanted to be near Evelynn.

The stepping of his shoes echoed around him as he walked towards the library. The lights were off, the dark brick hallways seeming out of a nightmare.

What if those things, her, made it into the school?

But that was impossible, he and the teachers had made sure there was no getting into the building.

Right?

Even that much was assuming anything about this situation was logical.

At the library door window he could see that most of the children were collected on a large rug that displayed Earth’s continents. A few teachers sat on chairs around the kids, forming a protective circle. Kids and adults watched a tape of Schoolhouse Rock. There were stickers everywhere of flowers, rainbows, and books with large cartoonish eyes that looked haunting in the dim TV glow.

Evelynn was at the back with the older kids, and she was the first to see him.

“Dad!” She said, so loud and abruptly that everyone in the room jumped. She was up and running across the room, everyone watching her in stunned silence.

She threw open the door and hugged his waist.

“Are you doing okay?” He asked, kneeling down to be eye-to-eye with his daughter.

“Not really,” she said with heartbreaking exhaustion. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” He said, hoping it was true.

“Miss Clawson wants to talk to you,” Evelynn said, pointing to the teachers sitting at a table in the corner of the room.

“Okay sweetie, sit tight.”

He wasn’t sure which one was Clawson at first, until he saw the oldest woman sitting at the far end of a long rectangular table with a particularly harsh glare aimed right at him. She motioned for him to join the teachers at the table.

Each of the teachers gave him varying degrees of caution as he found a seat. Some just seemed cautious; most looked outright hostile. Doing his best to ignore them, he sat down and stared at the table, not knowing what to do with himself. He felt all of their eyes boring into him.

“Mr. Childs?” Asked Ms. Clawson quietly, easily the oldest teacher at the table. She was a beady-eyed and permanently scowling woman that Richard could tell kept as tight a grip on her classroom as she could.

“Yes?” He did his best to smile, but only barely managed to soften his frown.

“Did you kill your wife?”

For an instant he was back in the sheriff’s tiny interrogation room, the deputies crammed uncomfortably behind the sheriff’s desk, all three looking like they’d pulled in a psycho murderer after a rampage. They’d put him in a small chair against the far wall and made sure to constantly let him know that, no matter what it looked like, he had been free to leave at any time.

“No,”

The teachers all glanced at each other, as if a bit surprised the homicidal maniac they’d built in their heads could speak. He supposed this was fair; he hadn’t spoken to any of them when they’d been making sure the school’s doors were locked.

“Did you beat her?” Another teacher, this one a man in his late thirties, asked very timidly before remembering that he was supposed to be acting as an adult parental figure before less timidly adding: “The news said there were bruises-”

“Bruises on her wrists and shins,” Richard finished. “She left a lot more bruises on my gut and back from the effort, I promise.”

“Why was that?” Clawson asked.

He could feel the tendons on his neck stretch as he bit his tongue, anger flooding into his veins as he remembered everything Madeleine had done. The anger wasn’t even towards the teachers or the sheriff and his deputies when they had asked, it was towards himself.
“She liked to fight,” he said when he’d relaxed himself.

Clawson held her gaze.

“Care to explain what you mean, Mr. Childs?”

“No.”

The teachers all shared shocked glances. This whole thing was starting to prickle his nerves.
“Look,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure everyone was alright. I sure as hell didn’t come here to get interrogated again.”

“Mr. Childs,” Clawson said, her face softening just enough to show Richard that behind the gruff, stern exterior was an old woman who was desperately tired and scared for the children in the room. “We just want to make sure you aren’t a risk to the children.”

It was clear that some of the teachers, specifically the prissy young man who’d spoken up earlier, still weren’t convinced that he wasn’t a threat. That was fine with Richard, he didn’t give a shit what they thought.

“That only leaves me with one question Mr. Childs,” Noreen said, rubbing her eyes. “Do you have any idea what in the Sam Hill is going on?”

“No,” he answered honestly. It was still hard to believe anything that had happened was real, but he’d seen the reporter’s throat bulge as something lifted her from the ground. And what Evelynn had said…

It’s her!

“My daughter says she saw it,” he said. “Whatever did that to the reporter. She said the thing looked like her mother. I believe her.”

Stunned silence.

“That’s insane,” the young male teacher said, “you’re insane-”

“Mr. Benson,” whispered Mrs. Clawson, so sharp and so loud that most of the kids glanced toward the adults at the table.

Mr. Benson squirmed into his chair. Richard had thought Clawson’s eyes had been beady and penetrating before, now they were sharp enough to make the most behaved college senior wither.

“You forget,” she continued, much more quietly, “that I saw the murder happen myself. That before the murder happened some of the kids were talking about adults walking around the school that none of the teachers could see. Do you doubt me?”

“No, Noreen,” Benson stammered, “I just don’t think it’s logical to-”

“Benson.” Clawson said. “You said you were the only one to see what happened to the cameraman. Is that still true?”

Benson went pale, so pale that Richard thought that all of the blood might have drained out of his face.

“Putting that aside,” Clawson said very pointedly towards Benson, who shrank even farther back into his chair, “We need to find a way to contact the authorities. It’s clear they-”

Richard felt something at the very edge of his senses. A feeling. The others at the table must have heard it as well; they’d all gone quiet and pale with quizzical looks on their faces.
Richard turned in his seat to get eyes on Evelynn. She was looking towards the windows. All of the children were. The light of the TV cast shadows around their faces as they looked, as if wearing dark masks to hide their terrified expressions.

“Ghosts,” an older child near Richard whispered. “Like white statues.”

The younger children began to cry.

Outside, several shapes had begun to move through the fog towards the windows. The mist clung so tightly as they moved that a myriad of human silhouettes could be intuited. At the front, moving very fast and energetically between the windows and foggy figures, was Madeleine.

Richard didn’t know how he was sure, maybe the wisps trailing her figure in the fog was just distinct enough for him to tell the shape of her. Regardless, he was sure. That was her.
“Mom?”

Evelynn. She stood next to him, looking at the figures. The animated figure stopped, and Richard thought he could see its head move toward the sound of Evelynn’s voice.

“Why?” Evelynn asked.

A puzzled look. Not only from Evelynn, but also from some of the kids nearer to the windows.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Evelynn said, “I thought you said-”

Evelynn reached towards the glass as she spoke. Richard was about to stop her when the windows exploded.

Everyone in the room screamed. Richard threw himself in front of Evelynn, tried to tell her to run.

Warm fingers closed around his throat, cutting off his words.

The teachers rushed to push the kids against the furthest wall in the library. The kids were still screaming, screaming so loud that Richard couldn’t hear himself think.

From his right, Clawson and Benson ran to him, throwing their weight into whatever held Richard. Both crashed into the invisible figure like a wall, the grip around Richard only getting tighter. At one point he saw Benson jab at the thing with a very sharp pencil. It exploded uselessly. A few of the other teachers fell onto the invisible thing choking him, but each of their blows bounced off.

Richard remembered his own pencil that he’d put in his pocket earlier from his time in the other room, collecting himself.

To hell with it, he thought. Even if it was a useless effort, he wasn’t going down without a fight. Not anymore. He gripped the pencil so hard it almost snapped and stabbed it towards the fingers on his throat.

The pencil hit its mark and went deep. Cold, unseeable liquid spilled over his hands
Before he could go for another hit, his vision went crazy and his body went weightless. The back half of his body slammed into something, hard, knocking what little air was in him out of his lungs.

“MOM! NO!”

When his vision had just barely begun to refocus, he saw something fly out of the windows that had just been broken into. Evelynn screamed as she was pulled into the fog and out of sight. The other figures in the fog followed, all floating silently while the sound of Evelynn’s scream faded.

The shortest walk to where Evelynn’s screaming had trailed off, the teacher’s parking lot, was through the combination auditorium/gymnasium. The exit was one he’d locked himself when they’d been sweeping the school when this all started.

Why didn’t Madeleine come through, then? She easily could have if she was powerful enough to shatter the library windows. Was this all a part of her game? Her amusement? Had she purposefully given time for him and everyone else to be terrified and at her mercy before she took him to hell with her?

It was likely, he realized as he found the exit and took his first step out into the fog. Even when they’d been kids, she’d lauded any sort of victory she could over him. Back then it had all been in good fun. Hadn’t it?

The mist crawled through the dark doorway behind him. The air was cool, damp, and had an odd metallic taste to it. The drizzle that had been over the town for days was gone, but it had left a very wide, very thin pool of water that covered the entire lot. He couldn’t see all of it, but what he could reflected the mist into a gray mirror that lay flat across the lot. His feet almost seemed to be stepping into a void of mist that rippled at his every move.

Richard felt he should be scared, but he wasn’t. Not at first. His instinct to get his daughter back overwrote everything else. It only waived when he saw feet-shaped holes in the water at the very edge of his limited vision. There was a quick motion, more ripples on the water, and then the feet were facing away from him. He could see the black tar-like surface of the lot under the feet-shaped holes.

Fear was in him then, rushing back into him as he encountered more and more foot shapes in the water. Whenever any came even slightly into his limited visibility, there would be a quick motion that sent cascades of ripples across the mirror he seemed to stand on, and then the feet would be pointing away from him.

There was Evelynn, standing rigid and silent as far off in the fog as he could see.
Splash. Splash-splash-SPLASH-

Something slammed into his back. His vision blurred as his body fell forward and slammed into the ground, his head and stomach slamming hard into the pavement. The air in his lungs was squeezed out of him. Instinctively he tried to pull air back in, and his throat was met with gravelly rainwater.

In a daze, choking and spitting, he raised himself onto his knees. The fog around him was all at once nauseating and hard to get a grip on. It felt like he was in hell.

Playing with your toys, huh Maddy?

He stood, straining his ears for the same splashes she’d caused before. It was almost impossible; every time he turned his head, the other invisible things turned away, causing ripples and splashes that overtook any of Madeleine’s, if she was even making any.

Splash-SPLASH.

Something slammed into his shoulder-

She was in front of him now, and easy to track, but what now? She could bleed, even if it was impossible to know what she bled, but how could he get to her and Evelynn without putting his daughter in danger?

A shame that our last fight would be to the death. It was probably what she’d wanted, why she’d done whatever she had done to get an army of figures in the mist to do her bidding. Even if he was going to die, he’d hoped there was a way to be sent off flipping that bitch a middle finger. There was a humor in that he was still playing into her game.

Humor…

That’s it.

It was so simple.

He laughed.

It started slow, forced and horrifying in its own right. He forced a laugh anyway, all of his chuckles almost sounding like sobs.

A memory came to him: The looks Madeleine had given whenever he went out with coworkers without her permission. The annoyed glances when Evelynn had chosen to be with her father instead of her mother. Even the frown he would see on Maddy’s face whenever he found good company, away from her, at family parties.

The fake, horrible chuckles started to come out easier.

“Boy, I tell you,” Richard said to himself, “If I took my wife to a dog show, I think she’d win first prize.”

Now he was really laughing. So hard that he thought he wouldn’t be able to get air back into his lungs if he tried. There was nothing to laugh at before, but now there was: Whatever the white things were, whatever Madeleine had done to bring her and them here, was a fickle, easily manipulated thing that was not only beyond Richard and Evelynn’s understanding, but of Madeleine’s as well.

“Dad?” Evelynn asked, her fear entirely overshadowed by her shock. She was about to say something else when her eyes went wide. She looked around where the ghosts stood in the water.

On the other side of the school, Noreen Clawson was finally getting a connection to the police station on her cell phone. Benson was nearby standing with the other teachers in front of the kids, all of whom had been packed into the corner like it was a standard school lockdown.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a few of the kids look towards the windows. None of the figures in the mist had followed them to the room, but Benson’s nerves still froze.

“What is it!?” He asked.

“People… laughing?” One of them said.

Benson strained his ears. He heard nothing, but at the very end of his senses, for just a second, he thought he could feel something…

Richard couldn’t hear laughter besides his own, but like Benson had, he felt them. All of the other white things that had come for him with Maddy, they were laughing with him.

Straight ahead of him, two of the foot holes turned towards him. Madeleine. He watched her take a few steps around the other invisible things, all of who were still facing away from Richard as they laughed. He could picture her looking at what she thought had been her allies, or even just her temporary companions, with bewildered rage.

In one last deliciously petty move, he put one hand to his straining stomach and the other pointed at her. By then, he was laughing harder than he ever had in his life.

Suddenly the footsteps were thundering towards him. Every step was heavy and clumsy, spraying water all over the place. A lot of the water hit the invisible white things, and rivulets of water ran down them, giving them shape.

His laughter stopped. Richard’s hand went to his pocket and back out just in time for his late wife to make contact. The choice for weapons in a school library had been almost non-existent, and why his attack had hurt her when nothing else would remain a mystery to him forever, but it was all he had. Three sharpened pencils. Again the pencil sank in and he felt the cold liquid run down his fingers again for an instant before the full weight of her crashed into him, sending them both crashing into the ground.

He tried to breathe in, and almost did, before a force that could only have been Madeleine constricted and pushed on his entire body.

I’m going to die.

A part of him was ready to die. That part of him wanted nothing more than to let something that he’d continued to ignore and, in a way, foster, just let him rest. Let him finally be done with everything.

“DAD!”

Seeing black spots in his vision, he brought his hands from their awkward angle underneath his back and wrapped them around Madeleine’s invisible form.

“Get,” he said, his hands gripping her head.

“The hell,” he stood, lifting both of their weights off of the ground, slowly and struggling but surely.

“Out,” he took the second pencil from his pocket and hammered it into the invisible form’s throat. It disappeared into her, all the way up to the eraser.

“Of my life.”

With one last effort, he threw her away. Madeleine’s body hit the ground hard, making a crater the shape of her body in the water. The other foot-shaped craters in the water turned towards Madeleine.

Madeleine raised her arm, the water instantly pooling into the empty space as she lifted it. It fell back in with one last pathetic splash.

Evelynn ran into him then, wrapping her arms around and burying her face in his jacket. She was crying too, but quietly, keeping her eyes just dry enough to watch her mother leave for the final time.

It happened very quickly. One moment the body-shaped crater was there, then it wasn’t, filled with the reflective rainwater that still covered the lot and still filled with dozens of “white things,” all pointed towards Richard and Evelynn.

Then, without a word or sign of any kind, the figures in the water turned away from them and the school, and left. Their steps were silent, and their ripples were many. The image of their craters forming in the water as they walked away and into the fog was one that never left Richard or Evelynn.

Credit: Jacob Crane

Ko-Fi