Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew

Peter Crowther

PETER CROWTHER is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS Publishing imprint.

As well as being widely translated, his short stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines, The Land at the End of the Working Day and the upcoming Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew.

He is the co-author (with James Lovegrove) of the novel Escardy Gap and author of the Forever Twilight science-fiction/horror cycle (Darkness, Darkness and Windows to the Soul are already available, with Darkness Rising forthcoming). His short Halloween novel, By Wizard Oak and Fairy Stream, is published by Earthling.

Crowther lives and works with his wife and business partner, Nicky, on Britain’s scenic Yorkshire coast.

“I confess I’ve never understood when genre writers say they don’t believe in the stuff they’re writing,” reveals the author. “Me, I believe it all—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, aliens, Santa, monsters frozen in the ice, fairies, the perfect pint of Guinness … the whole schtick. And I’m particularly strong on the belief that, one day, I’ll see my parents again.

“So, impatient as ever about waiting to find out first-hand, I indulge myself every once in a while and I write something that’ll enable me to spend some time with them … at least on paper.

“‘Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew’ is the product of one of these selfish little jaunts, written at a time when I desperately wanted to see my dad again and give him a big hug. Needless to say, it’s dedicated to him and to all fathers taken prematurely from their kids. Plus it’s for the kids who, although maybe grown up a little, still miss ‘em like crazy.

“Love ya, Dad!”

If there is an afterlife, let it be a small town

gentle as this spot at just this instant.

—”In Cheever Country” by Dana Gioia

SOMETHING WAS DIFFERENT.

Bennett Differing opened his eyes and listened, and tried to pinpoint what was wrong. Then he realized. He couldn’t hear his wife’s breathing.

He shuffled over, pulling the bedclothes with him, and stared at the empty space beside him on the bed. Shelley wasn’t there. He looked across at the clock and frowned. It was too early for her to get up. She always stayed in bed until he was out of the shower. Why would she be getting up at this time?

Then he remembered. She was meeting her sister, going to the mall for their annual shop-till-you-drop spree.

As if on cue, Shelley’s voice rang out. “Honey?”

“Yeah, I’m up,” Bennett shouted to the ceiling.

“Well, I’m on my way. Lisa gets in at 8:15.”

Bennett nodded to the empty room. Around a yawn, he said, “Have fun.”

“Will do,” she shouted.

“Take care.”

He could hear her feet on the polished wooden floor of the hallway downstairs, going first one way and then another—Shelley suddenly remembering things, like car keys, house keys, purse.

“Will do,” she shouted. “It’s a lovely morning.”

Bennett flopped back onto the bed. “Good.” The word came out as a mutter wrapped up in another yawn.

“What?”

“I said, good. I’m thrilled for you.”

The feet downstairs clumped back into the kitchen. “I’ll be home around eight. Lisa’s getting her bus at seven.”

“Okay.”

The sound of feet stopped and then he heard them coming quickly up the stairs. “Can’t go without giving you a kiss,” Shelley said as she ran into the bedroom. Now that the door had been opened he could hear the radio downstairs.

She leaned across him and kissed him on the forehead, making a smacking sound. He knew she had made a lipstick mark, could see the mischievous glint in her eyes as she surveyed her work with a satisfied smile.

She ruffled his hair lovingly. “What are you going to be doing today?”

Bennett shrugged, yawned and turned his face away from her. He could taste the staleness of sleep still in his mouth.

“Oh, this and that.”

“Words!” Shelley snapped at him, jabbing a finger in his stomach. “Make sure you do your words before you deal with e-mails.” She smiled and rubbed his stomach—another sign of affection. “Will you be okay?” The question came complete with inflection and frown.

“Sure,” Bennett said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get lots done.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” He raised his clenched fist to his head and tapped two fingers against his temple. “Scouts’ honor, ma’am. I’ll do my words.”

She stood up and picked up her watch from the table by her side of the bed. Strapping it onto her wrist, she said, “Well, have a good day. There’s a sandwich in the refrigerator.”

“Great.”

She stopped at the bedroom door and scrunched herself up excitedly. “You know … ,” she said, rubbing her hands together, “… you can smell it.”

Bennett shuffled up and rested his head on his hand. “Smell what?”

Shelley frowned. “Christmas, of course.” She straightened her sweater where she had rucked it out of her skirt. “You can smell it everywhere: the cold … and the presents, eggnog, warm biscuits. The skies are clear and the air is crisp …” Bennett half-imagined he could hear sleigh bells and his wife nodded as though in response to his thoughts. “And I think we’re going to have some snow,” she added with a devilish smile—she knew Bennett hated snow.

Bennett groaned. “Oh goody.”

She waved a hand at him. “You know, you’re turning into Scrooge.”

He flopped his head onto the pillow. “Bah, humbug!”

Shelley smiled. “Okay, I’m on my way. See you tonight.”

“Yeah, see you,” he said to the slowly closing door.

It seemed like no time at all before the front door slammed and he heard the Buick’s engine fire into life. Then three soft pips on the horn as Shelley pulled out of the driveway.

Suddenly the house was quiet, the only sound the sound of the car moving off along the street. Then, around the silence, drifting through it like a boat across a still lake, the sound of the radio gave a sense of life, albeit muffled.

Bennett could hear a funky jingle and the weatherman distantly telling anyone in Forest Plains who was bothering to listen at this time in the morning just what the weather was doing. Rain coming in from the west, heat coming in from the east… all elemental life was there: winds, twisters, cold fronts circling, warm fronts sneaking up for the kill, maybe even a tremor or two.

“Maybe even snow!” he said to the pillow.

But there was something else, too. Even he could smell it. Smell it in the air. Was it Christmas? Did Christmas have a smell … a smell all of its own, not just the associated things that society had tacked onto it?

Bennett sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was a little before seven, two minutes to his alarm ringing, the clock dancing side to side like on the cartoon shows, demanding attention like a family pet, craving a human touch to let it know its job was done for another night. He leaned over and hit the switch.

The clock seemed to settle on its curlicued haunches and Bennett half-imagined it pouting because he had robbed it of its daily chore.

He yawned, scratched places that itched, and threw back the sheets.

It was cool. Cool but not cold.

Bennett slid his legs out of bed and rested his feet on the floor. It was part of the getting-up process, a kind of airlock sandwiched between sleep and wakefulness. The first ritual of the day.

He sniffed a bear-sized sniff and drew in everything and anything.

Somewhere in that sniff, alongside the fresh coffee and toasted bread smells that Shelley had left behind in the kitchen and which were now threading their way through the house, were the smells of his bedroom and his clothes, the wood grains and varnish of the furniture, the oily odors imbued by the machines that had stitched the mosaic linen of the curtains and stamped the twists and whorls on the bedside lampshades; old smells, new smells. Unknown smells. Smells from near and faraway … smells of other people, other places, other times.

And small-town smells. Plenty of those … so different to the smells of the city, New York City, where Bennett had worked as an insurance adjuster for twenty years before turning to writing full-time and hiding himself and Shelley away in Forest Plains … a town as close to all the picket-fenced and town-squared small towns as could possibly exist outside the pages of an old well-thumbed Post, particularly in these dog days of the second millennium.

He sniffed again and glanced at the window.

Outside, over the street, gulls were circling. On the wires running across the posts that stood sentry-like alongside the grassy lawns, the neighborhood regulars—sparrows, chaffinches and thrushes—were perched…like hick locals lazing on a front porch watching an invasion of bike riders crazy-wheeling and whooping around the square.

Bennett frowned and got to his feet, finding new places to scratch as he staggered to the window. Now he could see what was happening.

“Huh!” was all he could think of to say. Someone had taken the world while he had been dragging himself from his bed. Someone had stolen everything that was familiar and had covered it with gauze. But this was a moving gauze, a diaphanous graveyard mist that, even as he watched, was drifting along Sycamore Street, swirling around the tree trunks, twisting itself like ribbons through the leafless branches, washing up the sidewalks to the polished lawns and onwards, stealthily, reaching, conquering and owning, pausing every now and again to check out a crumpled brown leaf before moving on.

He leaned on the sill and yawned again.

It was the mist he could smell. He wondered why Shelley hadn’t mentioned it. He’d have told her to take special care. In fact, if he had known it was this bad—because it was getting bad … thickening by the second, it seemed—he’d have driven her over to the train station at Walton Flats. And anyway, hadn’t she said that the skies were clear? He looked both ways along the street. Maybe it had been clear when she looked out, but that must have been some time ago.

Bennett frowned. Well, whatever it had been … it was foggy now.

Now the mist was pooling all around, settling itself onto the trees and the pavement, resting on the sidewalks and the dew-covered lawns, investigating the promise of warmth offered by his partly open window.

The mist had a clean, sharp smell, snaking across the sill and around him into the room, sliding beneath the bed and inside the louvered wardrobe doors, checking out the threads, evaluating the labels. Evaluating him.

Bennett watched it.

Soon it would make its way out of the bedroom door and onto the landing. It would find the spare bedroom—nothing here, boys … let’s move on—and then the stairs leading down to the kitchen and the tinny radio sounds.

Bennett stretched and threw the window wide.

A boy appeared out of the mist, dodging the tendrils that grasped for but never quite caught hold of his bicycle wheels. The boy was standing on the pedals, pumping like mad, a cowlick pasted down on his forehead, a brown leather sack crossed across his chest and filled with news and stories, comments, cartoons and quotes. The boy reached into his sack, pulled out a rolled-up paper and made to throw, his arm pulled back like a Major League pitcher. As the paper left his hand, spinning through the milky air, he caught sight of Bennett and smiled.

“Hey, Mist’ Diff’ring!” the boy yelled, a Just Dennis kind of boy, his voice sounding echoey and artificial in the silent, mist-shrouded street.

Forest Plains was full of boys just like this one, all tow-heads, patched denims and checked shirts. But many of them didn’t have names, at least not names that Bennett knew. They were just boys, boys who whispered giggling and mysterious behind your back when you bought something—anything—in the drugstore; boys who viewed any structure as merely something else to climb; boys who propped up the summertime street corners, drinking in the life and the sounds and the energy; boys with secret names … names like “Ace” and “Skugs.”

He’d heard two of them talking in the drugstore just the day before yesterday, the one of them calling over to the other—Hey Skugs, get a load of that, will ya!—holding up a comic book, his eyes glaring proudly as though he were responsible for the book and the story and the artwork. And the second boy had dutifully sidled up the aisle to his friend, and equally dutifully exclaimed Wow! as he was shown a couple of interior pages. Wow! Neato!

Bennett had wanted to interrupt, stop the boys in the middle of their comic book explorations, and ask, What kind of a name do you have to wind up with Skugs? But he knew it wouldn’t make sense. It would be Charles or James—which would only explain “Chuck” or “Jim”—and the surname would probably be Daniels or Henderson, both equally unhelpful. And that would have meant him having to ask, So why “Skugs”? and then the boys would have looked at each other, shrugged, dumped the comic book back on the rack and run out of the store giggling.

Bennett suddenly felt that he wanted to be standing out in an early-morning street, alone with an invading mist, hair-plastered onto his forehead, Schwinn between his legs and his old leather Grit sack around his shoulder, drinking in the sights and smells and sounds of a life still new … still filled with so many possibilities. Suddenly he wanted a secret name of his own … one that made no sense at all and that would make adults frown and shake their heads as he ran off laughing into the life that lay ahead.

He wondered what the secret name was for the boy in the street and, for a second, considered asking him. But then he thought better of it. At least he knew this kid’s real name: it was Will Cerf.

Bennett waved. “Hey Will. Looks a little misty out there,” he shouted as the paper hit the screen door below him, its thud sounding like a pistol crack.

“Fog,” the boy retorted, his face serious, brow furrowed.

Fog. Such an evocative word when spoken by a voice and a mind still alive to things not so easily explained by the meteorological charts on the morning news programs.

The boy stopped the bike and straddled it, one foot on the curb, and waved an arm back in the direction he’d just ridden. “Coming in thick and fast,” he said, sounding for all the world like a tow-headed Paul Revere thumbing back over his shoulder at the advancing British troops. For a second or so, Bennett glanced in the direction indicated and felt a small gnawing mixture of apprehension and wonder.

“Down by the scrapyard,” Will Cerf added. “Cold, too,” he almost concluded. “And damp.” The boy rubbed his arms to confirm his report.

Bennett nodded absently and looked back along the street.

Already the first fingers of fog had consolidated, holding tight onto picket fence and garage handle, wrapping themselves across fender and grill, posting sentries beside tree trunks and fall-pipes, settling down alongside discarded or forgotten toys lying dew-covered on the leaf-stained lawns.

“Gotta go,” Will Cerf said, a hint of sagacious regret in his voice.

“Me, too,” Bennett said. “You take care now.”

The boy already had his head down, was already reaching into that voluminous bag of news and views, his feet pumping down on those pedals, the tires shhhhing along the pavement. “Will do,” came the reply as another airborne newspaper flew through the mist, gossamer fingers prodding and poking it as it passed by. “You, too,” he added over his shoulder.

And then, as if by magic, Will Cerf disappeared into the whiteness banked across the street in front of Jack and Jenny Coppertone’s house. The whiteness accepted him—greedily, Bennett thought … immediately wishing he hadn’t used that word—and stretched over to Audrey Chermola’s Dodge, checking out the JESUS SAVES sticker on the back fender before swirling around the rain barrel out in front of her garage, climbing up the pipe and over the flat roof to the back yard beyond.

Bennett pulled the window closed.

Outside visibility was worsening.

Now the power lines and their silent bird population had gone. Even the posts were indistinct, like they were only possible ideas for posts … hastily sketched suggestions for where they might be placed. The Hells Angels gulls had gone, too. He leaned forward and looked up into the air to see if he could see any shapes negotiating the milky currents, but the sky appeared to be deserted.

Deserted and white.

As he watched, a milky swirl of that whiteness rushed at the glass of the window, making him pull back with a start… it was as though the mist had momentarily sensed him watching it, like a shark suddenly becoming aware of the presence of the caged underwater cameraman and his deep-sixed recording lens. Then the cushion of mist moved off, lumbering, up and over the house … out of sight. Bennett craned forward and tried to look up after it… to see what it was doing now.

Just for a second, he considered running to the spare bedroom, where Shelley always kept a window wide to air the room …

But then his bladder reminded him it needed emptying. He turned away from the window and padded out to the bathroom.

Taking a pee, Bennett was suddenly pleased that Shelley wasn’t downstairs. Pleased that she hadn’t heard the newspaper hit the screen door because then she would open it, bring the paper inside into the warmth.

And that would mean she would let the fog inside.

He hmphed and shook his head, flushed the toilet.

Downstairs, on the radio, The Mamas and Papas were complaining that all the leaves were brown. Bennett knew how they felt: roll on summer!

He closed the bathroom door and stepped into the warmth of the shower, feeling it revitalize his skin.

Through the steamed-up glass of the shower stall, Bennett could see the whiteness pressing against the bathroom window. Like it was watching him. Lathering his hair, he tried to recall whether he had heard the radio anchorman mention the fog.

*

After the shower, Bennett shaved.

The man staring back at him looked familiar but older. The intense light above the mirror seemed to accentuate the pores and creases, picked out the wattled fold of skin beneath his chin … a fold that, no matter how hard he tried and how hard he stretched back his head, stoically refused to flatten out. That same light also highlighted the shine of head through what used to be thick hair, the final few stalks now looking like a platoon of soldiers abandoned by their comrades. If he were still able to have a secret name now, it would be “Baldy” or “Tubby” or maybe even “Turkeyneck.” As he shaved, he tried to think of what names he did have as a boy: he was sure he used to have one, and that it had annoyed him for a time, but he could only think of Ben.

He pulled on the same things he’d been wearing last night. Despite the fact he had two closets literally brimming with shirts and sweaters, jogging pants and old denims that were too threadbare to wear outside the confines of the house, Bennett considered the wearing of yesterday’s clothing as something of a treat… and something naughty, something he could get away with the way he used to get away with it as a kid.

There were so few things an adult could get away with.

Feeling better, more refreshed, he opened the bathroom door and stepped out onto the landing. As he neared the staircase he could hear thick static growling downstairs and, just for a second, he almost shouted out his wife’s name as a question, even though he knew she was long gone to the mall.

He padded downstairs slower than usual, checking the layout over the rim of the handrail as the next floor came into view.

In the kitchen everything was neat and Shelley had left out the cutting board, a jar of marmalade and a new loaf out of the freezer. The coffee smelled good. But first things first: he had to attend to the radio. Bennett leaned on the counter and pushed a couple of the preset buttons to zone in on another station … anything to relieve that static. But each time he hit a button, it was the same … didn’t even falter, just kept on crackling and hissing and …

whispering

something else. He leaned closer, put his ear against the speaker and listened. Was there a station there? Could he hear someone talking, talking quietly … very quietly indeed? Maybe that was it: maybe it was the volume. He twizzled the dial on the side but the static just got louder.

Bennett stepped back and looked at the radio, frowning. He had been sure he could hear something behind the static but now it was gone. He switched it off and on again, got the same, and then switched it off. He’d watch TV

After flicking the set forward and backward through all the available channels, Bennett gave up. Static, static everywhere. Static and voices, soft faraway whispering voices… saying things—he was sure they were there and they were saying things, but he just couldn’t get them to register. He tossed the remote onto the sofa and sat for a few minutes in the silence.

Coffee. That was what he needed. That would make things right.

He strolled back into the kitchen, poured a cup and walked across the hall into his office.

The cumulative smell of books and words met him as it always did, welcomed him back for another day.

He powered up the old Aptiva, heard it click once—the single bell-tone it always made—and then watched the screen go fuzzy.

“Huh? What the hell’s going on here?” he asked the room.

The millions of words and sentences tucked up in the double-stacked shelves of books and magazines shuffled amongst themselves but, clearly unable to come up with a good response, remained silent.

Bennett placed his coffee on his mouse mat and shuffled the mouse. Nothing. The computer wouldn’t even boot up. He pressed the volume button on the CD-ROM speakers and heard the static invade his office.

Along with the faraway whispering voices.

He flipped the Rolodex until he got the number for the maintenance people and pressed the hands-free key on the fax/telephone at the side of his desk. This time he knew there were voices in that white haze of crackle coming from the fax machine … and the voices sounded like they were chuckling.

Forgetting the coffee, he went out into the lounge and picked up the handset of the house line.

It was the sound of the sea and the wind, the hiss of the tallest trees bending to the elements, the hum of the Earth spinning. All this and nothing more. Nothing more except for the unmistakable sound of someone—something—calling his name … calling it as though in a dream.

Now the panic really set in. It had already been lit and its flames fanned without him even seeing the first sparks, but when Bennett walked quickly to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the stoop, the fire became a conflagration in his stomach.

The fog was everywhere, thick and solid, unmoving and ungiving, leaving no single discernible landmark of the street he and Shelley had lived in for more than twenty years. It was an alien landscape—no, not so much a landscape as a canvas … a blank canvas sitting on an old easel in a musty loft somewhere in the Twilight Zone, and Bennett was the only dab of color to be found on it.

And he felt even he was fading fast.

He stared towards the drive at the side of the house and was pleased to see that he could make out the fence running between his property and Jerry and Amy Sondheim’s. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed by the fact that Shelley had the car. Then he decided he was relieved: if the car had been there, he would have gone to it, slid into his familiar position behind the wheel and driven off.

Driven off where? a soft voice asked quietly in the back of his head.

Bennett nodded. He couldn’t have driven anywhere in this. Nobody could drive anywhere in this. Christ, what the hell was it?

He stared into the whiteness trying to see if there was just the tiniest hint of movement. There was none. The fog looked like a painted surface, as though the entire planet was sinking into a sea of mist, submerging itself forever, removing all traces of recognizability. No radio or TV, no telephones … not even any Internet! Was this the way it was all going to end? The whole planet being cut off from itself as though nothing existed? As though nothing had ever existed?

It was right then—as Bennett was looking first to the left along Sycamore Street to where it intersected with Masham Lane, trying to imagine the old bench Charley Sputterenk erected in memory of his wife, Hazel, and then to the right, down towards Main Street, trying to see if he could hear the distant sound of moving traffic—that he heard something moving in the fog.

He snapped his head back to face front and stared, stared hard. But he couldn’t see anything … except now the mist seemed to be swirling a little, right in front of his face … as though something was pushing it towards him. Something coming towards him and displacing it …

“Hello?” His voice sounded weak and querulous and he hated himself for it. Hated himself but was unable to do anything about it. The mist continued to swirl and Bennett’s eyes started to ache with the effort.

“Somebody out there? Need any help?”

This time he had tried to make his tone initially mock-serious— Jesus Christ, is this some weather or what?—and then helpful … a fogbound Samaritan calling to a lost and weary traveler.

The sound came again—a hesitant shuffle of shoes on sidewalk, perhaps?—and was accompanied by what sounded to be a cough or a low, throaty rumble.

Bennett took a step back, reaching his hand behind until it touched the reassuring surface of the doorjamb, and felt something under his foot. Quickly glancing down he saw the folded newspaper. There was something sticking out of it, a gaudily-colored handbill protruding from the printed pages.

He bent down and scooped up the paper and its contents and then backed fully into the house, allowing the screen door to slam and pushing the house door closed without turning around, and securing the deadbolts top and bottom before turning the key.

There had been no sound out there, no sound at all. And there should have been. Even if the fog had shrouded the entire county— though it was far more likely that it had merely entrapped Forest Plains, and possibly only a couple of the town’s many streets—he should have been able to stand on his own doorstep and hear something … a siren, a voice, a car engine, someone’s dog howling at the sudden claustrophobic curtain that had dropped down.

But it was silent out there.

More silent than he could ever have imagined.

And he should have been able to see something … anything at all: a glimpse of windowpane across the street, the muted and silhouetted outlines of roof gable or drainpipe, the indistinct shape of a parked car whose owner was either unable or unwilling to brave the murk.

But there was nothing to see at all through the whiteness.

The thought came to him

… somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto

that it wasn’t Sycamore Street at all. And it wasn’t Forest Plains. And the mall where Shelley was shopping-till-she-dropped with her sister Lisa was a world away.

He went to the window at the side of the door and looked out into the street. It was the same as before. He could see his own drive and his own lawn run down to the sidewalk, and he could see the vague outline of the road … but nothing more.

The handbill slipped out of the newspaper and fluttered to the floor at his feet just as he thought for a moment that he could see a shape forming out in the whiteness, but nothing appeared … though the mist now seemed to be swirling thickly in the middle of the street.

Bennett lifted the handbill and stared at it.

It was just a regular-sized insert, like any of the ones that dropped out of Bennett’s Men’s Journal or Shelley’s Vanity Fair … ablaze with color and just three lines of curlicued fonts, seraphed letters and ubiquitous exclamation marks, all of the text bold, some of it italicized.

It read:

CONGRATULATIONS TO BENNETT DIFFERING!

in huge letters in the very center of the sheet, with Bennett’s name appearing to have been typed into place on a line. Below that, the handbill announced

You Have Won A Visit From YOUR FATHER!

with the words appearing in slightly smaller lettering, employing the best sideshow-barker’s spiel, and in a typesetting nightmare of a mixture of small caps, dropped first letters and the typed-in words YOUR FATHER. And then:

HAVE A GOOD TIME!

And that was that.

Bennett turned the sheet over to see if there was anything on the back, but there was only a pattern of swirling lines, like the ones printed for security on foreign currency.

Won? How could he have won anything when he didn’t recall even entering any competitions? And his father? John Differing had been dead some twenty-seven years. Maybe it was some kind of gag. Maybe everyone on the street—maybe even everyone in Forest Plains—was receiving a similar handbill in their newspaper. Bennett wished he could ask young Will Cerf to look in the other papers he was delivering to check out that particular theory.

Outside, a haurrrnk! Sounded … like a ship’s horn.

Bennett looked up at the window and saw a shape forming out of the thick swirls of mist in the middle of the street. Someone was walking towards the house … walking slowly, even awkwardly. Someone had been hurt.

With the handbill still clutched in his hand, Bennett rushed to the door and started to release the deadbolts. But then he stopped.

Who was this person? Maybe it was some kind of weirdo, some transient brought in with the fog … like the guys that howl at a full moon. And here was Bennett busily opening the door to let him inside.

He pushed the top bolt home again and moved back to the window.

The shape was now fully emerged from the mist: it was a man, a man in a dark suit, no topcoat—no topcoat! and in this weather!— and wearing a hat. Bennett immediately assumed an age for the man—he had to be older than seventy, maybe even eighty, to be wearing a hat. Hardly anyone he knew wore hats these days, at least around Forest Plains.

The figure stopped for a moment and moved its head from side to side like he was checking out the houses. The man had to have 20/20 vision no matter how old he was: when Bennett was last outside he wasn’t able to see across the street let alone distinguish one house from another.

When the man started moving again, Bennett thought there was something familiar about him. Maybe he’d come out of Jack Coppertone’s house across the street… it wasn’t Jack himself—-too old, though Bennett still couldn’t see the man’s face—but it could be Jenny’s father. Bennett rubbed the glass and remembered that the mist was outside the window, not inside. But, no, it couldn’t be Jenny’s father— he was a short man, and fat. Whereas the man walking across the street was tall and slim, a soldier’s gait, straight-backed and confident … despite the fact that he had just had to stop and check which house he was heading for. Whatever, and whoever the man was, Bennett didn’t think he posed a problem … and he could be in difficulty. Lost at the very least. And it would be good to speak with somebody.

He moved back to the door, released the last bolt and pulled it open.

The man’s shoes on the black surface of the street made a click-clack sound. The mist swirling around his arms and legs looked like an oriental dancer’s veils, clinging one second and voluminous the next … and brought with it now the unmistakable sound of distant voices muttering and whispering. Then his face appeared, frowning and unsure, one eye narrowed in an effort to make some sense of the house and the man standing before him, the shadow of the hat brim moving up and down on his forehead as he strode forward.

He looked wary, this fog-brought stranger from afar. And well he might do.

The house, Bennett knew, he had never seen before.

And when he had last seen the man standing before him in this alien street, the man had been little more than a boy.

The whispering voices echoed the word “boy” in Bennett’s head like circling gulls warning of bad weather out on the coast.

He successfully fought off the urge to cut and run back into the house—to throw the deadbolts across—how appropriate that word suddenly seemed: deadbolts—to bar the stranger’s way … to erase the errant foolishness of what he was thinking, of the silly déjà vu sense he had ever seen the man before. But he was just a man, this stranger to Forest Plains … a man lost and alone, maybe with a broken-down Olds or Chevy a couple of blocks parked up somewhere down near the intersection with Main Street, a trusted and faithful vehicular retainer that he cleaned and polished every Sunday but which now languished with a flooded carburetor or a busted muffler trailing down on the road.

The man stopped and looked at Bennett, just twenty or thirty feet between them, the man out on the sidewalk and Bennett standing in the open doorway of his home, screen door leaning against him, the fresh and welcoming lights spilling out onto the mist which held their shine on its back and shifted it around like St. Elmo’s Fire.

“Hey,” Bennett said softly.

The man shifted his head to one side, looked to the left and then to the right. Then nodded.

Bennett crumpled the handbill into a ball and thrust it into his pants pocket. “Quite a morning.”

“Quite a morning,” came the response.

It was as though someone had pumped air or water or some kind of helium gas into Bennett’s head. There were things in there—sleeping things, memory things that lay dormant and dust-covered like old furniture in a forgotten home that you suddenly and unexpectedly went back to one magical day … things awoken by three simple and unexciting words delivered in a familiar voice and a familiar drawl the accuracy of which he thought he had misplaced—or, more realistically, had filed away and ignored.

These things grew to full height and shape and revealed themselves as remembered incidents … and the incidents brought remembered voices and remembered words: these were real memories … not the cloying waves of rose-colored-eyepiece nostalgia that he got watching a re-run of favorite childhood TV show or hearing a snatch of a onetime favorite song. He saw this man—many versions of him, each older or younger than the one before—playing ball, laughing, talking … saw him asleep.

“You lost?”

The man looked around for a few seconds and then looked back at Bennett. “I guess so. Where am I?”

“This is Forest Plains.”

“Where’s that?”

Bennett shrugged and tried to stop his knees shaking. “It’s just a town. Where are you heading?”

“I’m going—” The man paused and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he smiled at Bennett. “Home,” he said. “I’m going home.”

Bennett nodded. “You want to come in for a while? Have a cup of coffee?” He had never heard of a ghost that came in for coffee but, what the hell … all of this was crazy so anything was possible. He glanced along the street and saw that the mist seemed to be thinning out, the first vague shapes and outlines of the houses opposite taking hesitant form.

The man followed Bennett’s stare and when he turned back there was a wistful smile on his mouth. “Can’t stay too long,” he said.

“No,” Bennett agreed. He nodded to the fog. “Bad day.”

The man turned around but didn’t comment. Then he said, “You ever think it’s like some kind of vehicle? Like a massive ocean liner?”

“What? The fog?”

The man nodded, gave a little flick of his shoulders, and stared back into the mist. “Like some huge machine,” he said, “drifting along soundlessly and then—” he snapped his fingers “—suddenly pulling into a port or a station, somewhere we’ve not seen for a long time… sometimes for so long it’s like … like we’ve never seen it at all. And it reveals something that you weren’t expecting … weren’t expecting simply because you don’t know how far you’ve traveled.” He turned back. “How far not just in distance but in time.”

“In time?” Bennett said, glancing out at the swirling mist. “Like a time machine,” he said.

The man smiled, the intensity suddenly falling away. “Yeah, like a time machine. Or something like that.”

Bennett stepped aside and ushered the man into the house.

The man who looked for all the world like John Differing removed his hat and held it by the brim with both hands at his waist. Looking around the kitchen, he said, “Nice place.”

Bennett closed the door and stood alongside the man, noting with an inexplicable sadness that he seemed to be around four or five inches shorter than he remembered. He followed the man’s stare and drank in the microwave oven, the polished electric hobs, the chest freezer over by the back door, the small TV set on the breakfast counter. What would these things look like to someone who had not been around since 1972?

“We like it,” Bennett responded simply. “So, coffee?”

The man shrugged as Bennett walked across the kitchen to the sink. “Whatever you’re making.”

“Coffee’s fresh. Shelley—my wife—she made it. It might have gotten a little strong, sitting. I’ll just boil some water.”

“Uh huh. She here?”

“Shelley? No, she’s out. Shopping. Christmas shopping. With her sister. Does it every year.” Placing the kettle on its electric base, Bennett pulled a chair from the table. “You want to sit down?”

The man shook his head. “No, I don’t think I can stay that long. Don’t want to get too settled.”

“Right.”

The man placed his hat on the table and straightened his shoulders. “Mind if I look around?”

“No, no … go right ahead. Coffee’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.”

He watched the old man walk off along the hallway and tried to think of all the things he wanted to ask him. Things like, what was it like … where he was now? Things like, did he know who he was … and that he was dead? Did he even know that Bennett was—

“This your office?” The voice drifted along the hallway and broke Bennett’s train of thought.

“Yes.” The kettle clicked off and Bennett poured water into the electric coffee jug.

“You work from home?” The voice had moved back into the hallway.

“Yeah. I gave up my day job about five years ago. I write full-time now.” He went to the refrigerator and got a carton of milk.

Pouring steaming coffee into a couple of mugs, Bennett wondered what the hell he was doing. The fog and the fact that it had cut him off from civilization had messed up his head. A stupid handbill—he felt in his pocket to make sure it was still there … make sure he hadn’t imagined it—some half-baked ramblings about the fog maybe being a time machine that the dead used to travel back and forth, and the appearance of a man who looked a little like his father had freaked him out. Looked like his father! What the hell was that? He hadn’t even seen his father for twenty-seven years.

He shook his head and added milk to the mugs. The fact was he had invited some guy into the house, for crissakes. Shelley would go ape-shit when she found out. If he told her, of course. Putting the milk back in the refrigerator, he suddenly thought that maybe Shelley would find out … when she got home and found her husband lying in the kitchen with a knife in his—

“What kind of stuff do you write?” the man asked, standing right behind him in the kitchen.

“Shit!” He spun around and banged into the refrigerator door.

“Pardon me?”

“You startled me.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry for—”

“Didn’t mean to do that.”

“Really, it’s okay.” He closed the refrigerator door and took a deep breath. “Guess I must be a little nervous.” He waved a hand at the window. “The fog.”

The man walked across to the counter by the sink and nodded to the window. “Looks like it’s clearing up.” He reached a hand out towards the two mugs and said, “Either?”

Nodding, Bennett said, “Yeah, neither of them have sugar, though. There’s a bowl over to your—”

“I don’t take it.” He picked up one of the mugs and, closing his eyes, took a sip. “Mmm, now that’s good. You don’t know how good coffee tastes until you haven’t had it for a while.”

The man continued to sip at his coffee, eyes downcast, as though studying the swirling brown liquid.

Bennett considered just coming right out with it there and then, confronting this familiar man with the belief that he was Bennett’s very own father. But the more he watched him, the more Bennett wondered whether he was just imagining things … even worse, whether he was in some way trying to bring his father back. After all, who ever heard of a handbill that advertised returning dead relatives. He may just be putting two and two together and getting five.

On the other hand, maybe it was his father. It could well be that there were forces or powers at large in the universe that made such things possible. Maybe Rod Serling had had it right after all. Maybe the dead did use mist as a means of getting around—so many movies had already figured that one out… and maybe they did travel in time.

Bennett took a sip of his own coffee and thought of something he had often pondered over: if a chair falls over in an empty house miles from anywhere, does it make a sound? Natural laws dictate that it must do, but there were plenty of instances of natural law seemingly not figuring out. The thing was—the thing with the chair in the deserted house-—there was no way of proving or disproving it … because the only way to prove it was to have someone present at the falling over, which destroyed one of the criteria for the experiment. So maybe whatever one wanted to believe could hold true.

The same applied to the man in Bennett’s kitchen. So long as Bennett didn’t actually come right out and ask him and risk the wrong response.

John Differing? No, name’s Bill Patterson, live over to Dawson Corner, got a flooded Packard couple blocks down the street, and a wife in it—Elite’s her name—busting to get home soon as this fog’s cleared up

it was safe to assume the man was Bennett’s father. And the plain fact was there were so many things that supported such a belief. Thinks like …

“My father drank his coffee that way, sipping,” Bennett said, pushing the encroaching silence back into the corners of the room where it didn’t pose a threat.

The man looked up at Bennett and smiled. “Yeah?”

Bennett nodded. “Looked a lot like you do, too.”

“That right?”

Bennett took a deep breath. “He died more than twenty-seven years ago. He was fifty-eight.” He took another sip and said, “How old are you? If you don’t mind my—”

“Don’t mind at all. I’m fifty-eight myself.”

“Huh,” Bennett said, shaking his head. “Quite a coincidence.”

“Looks like it’s a day for them,” the man said as he lowered his cup down in front of his waist. “My boy—my son—he always wanted to be a writer.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I must say, I never had much faith in that. Seemed like a waste of time to me.” He lifted the cup again. “But a man can be wrong. Could be he made a go of it.” His mouth broke into a soft smile. “Could even be he’ll get real successful a little ways down the track.”

Bennett wanted to ask if the man ever saw his son these days, but that would have been breaking the rules of the game … just as it would have been courting disaster. The response could be Sure, saw Jack just last week and he’s doing fine. And Bennett didn’t want that response. But the more they talked, the more sure he became.

They talked of the man’s past and of the friends he used to have.

They talked of places he had lived and things he had done.

And in amongst all the talk, all the people and all the places and all the things, there were people and places and things that rang large bells in Bennett’s mind—so many coincidences—but there were also several people and places and things that didn’t mean anything at all. Things Bennett had never known about his father. But he still refrained from asking anything that might place the man in some kind of cosmic glitch … or that might provoke an answer that would break the spell.

In turn, Bennett told the man things about his father … things that not only was he sure his father had never known but also that he himself hadn’t known. Not really known… not known in that surface area of day-to-day consciousness that we can access whenever we want.

And each time Bennett said something, the man nodded slowly, a soft smile playing on his lips, and he would say, “Is that right?” or “You don’t say” or, more than once, “You make him sound like quite a man.”

“He was. Quite a man.”

For a second, the man looked like he was about to say something, the edge of his tongue peeking between those gently smiling lips

thank you

but he seemed to think better of it and whatever it had been was consigned to silence.

Bennett placed his mug on the counter and pulled the handbill from his pocket. “You believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Ghosts?”

“Mm hmm.” He moved across to the man and showed him the handbill. “Got this today, in the newspaper. Ever hear of anything like that?”

The man shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, no.”

“You think such a thing is possible?”

The man shrugged. “They do say anything’s possible. Maybe ghosts see everything in one hit … the then, the now and the to come. Maybe time doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Could be they just hop right on board of their fog time machine and go wherever or whenever they’ve a mind.”

Bennett looked again at the handbill, his eyes tracing those curly letters. “But why would they want to come back … ghosts, I mean?”

“Maybe because they forget what things were like? Forget the folks they left behind? They say the living forget the dead after a while: well, maybe it works both ways.” He shrugged again, looked down into his coffee. “Who knows.”

Was the man nervous? Bennett frowned. Maybe he was breaking some kind of celestial rules by moving the conversation to a point where the man would have no choice but to corroborate Bennett’s belief… and maybe that would mean—

He thrust the handbill back into his pocket and the man looked immediately relieved, if still a little apprehensive.

“Yeah, well,” Bennett said in a dismissive tone, “what are ghosts but memories?”

The man nodded. “Right. Memories. I like that. And what is Heaven but a small town … a small town like this one. A small town that’s just a little ways up or down the track.”

Now it was Bennett’s turn to nod. “You know,” Bennett went on, “we used to play a game, back when I was a kid, where we used to say which sense we would keep if we were forced to give up all but one of the senses, and why.

“Kids would say, ‘hearing’ and they’d say ‘because I couldn’t listen to my records,’ or they’d say ‘sight,’ ‘because I couldn’t read my comic books or watch TV or go to the movies.’”

“And what did you say?”

Bennett smiled. This was a story he’d told his father on more than one occasion. “I used to say I wouldn’t give up my memory, because without my memory nothing that had ever happened to me would mean anything. Everything I am—forget the skin and flesh and bone, forget the muscles and the sinews and the arteries—everything I am is memories.”

The man smiled. “You ever stop to think that maybe you’re a ghost?”

Bennett laughed. “Did you?”

And the man joined in on the laughter. “An angel, maybe.”

“An angel?”

The man shrugged. “A messenger. That’s what angels are … messengers.”

“Yeah? And what’s your message?”

The man laughed. “Oh, that would be telling now. Wouldn’t it.”

Bennett suddenly realized he could now see the house across the street quite clearly. Could see the front door opening … could see the unmistakable outline of Jenny Coppertone stepping out onto the front step, staring up into the sky. Then she turned around and went back into the house.

Bennett heard the muted sound of a door slamming.

The fog’s hold on the world was weakening.

He looked across at the man standing in front of the sink, saw him frowning at the mug of coffee, shuffling his arms around like he was having difficulty with it. Maybe it was too hot for him … but, hadn’t he been drinking it all this time?

Outside, a car went by slowly, its lights playing on the mist.

Then the haurrrnk! blasted again, the same sound he’d heard before … but different in tone now. This time it sounded more like a warning.

The man dropped the mug and Bennett watched il bounce once, coffee spraying across the floor and the table legs and the chairs.

Bennett watched it roll to a stop—amazingly unbroken—before he looked up. The man was looking across at him, his face looking a little pale … and a little sad.

“I couldn’t… I couldn’t keep a hold of it,” he said.

“You have to go,” Bennett said. He knew it deep in his heart … deep in that place where he knew everything there was to know.

“Yes, I have to go.”

“I’ll see you off—”

The man held up his hand. “No,” he snapped. And then, “No, I’m sure you’ve got things to do … things to be getting on with.”

“Memories to build,” Bennett added.

“Right, memories to build.” He moved forward from the counter, unsteadily at first, watching his feet move one in front of the other as though he were walking a tightrope. Bennett made to give him a hand but the man pulled away. “Can’t do that,” he said.

They stood looking at each other for what seemed like a long time, Bennett desperately wanting to take that one step forward—that one step that would carry him twenty-seven years—and wrap his arms around his father, bury his face in his father’s neck and smell his old familiar smells, smells whose aroma he couldn’t recall … how desperately he wanted to give new life to old memories. But he knew he could not.

As he reached the door, the man stopped for a second and turned around. “You know, my son, when he was a kid, he had a nickname.”

Bennett smiled. “Yeah? What was it?”

“Bubber.”

“Bubber?” Oh my god… Bubber… it was Bubber because I—

“He had a stutter—nothing too bad, but it was there—and his name was … his name began with a B.”

Bennett could feel his eyes misting up.

“Kids can be cruel, can’t they?”

It was all he could do to nod.

The door closed, the screen door slammed a ricochet rat-a-tat and Bennett was alone again … more alone than he had ever felt in his life. “Take care,” he said to the empty kitchen.

And you, a voice said somewhere inside his head.

He waited a full minute before he went to the door and opened it, stepped out into the fresh December air and walked to the street. “And what was the message, old timer?” he said.

The fog had gone and the watery winter sun was struggling through the overhead early-morning haze.

Cars were moving up and down, people were walking on the sidewalks, but there was no sign of the man.

“Hey, Bennett!”

Bennett gave a wave to Jack Coppertone as he pulled the handbill from his pants pocket. It was now a flyer for The Science Fiction Book Club; maybe that was what it had always been. As he folded it carefully, thinking back to that final sight of his visitor pulling open the door, he suddenly turned and ran back to the house.

On the table, right where the man had placed it, was a hat.

The message!

Bennett walked carefully across the kitchen, heart beating so hard he thought it was going to burst through his chest and his shirt, and reached for it, closing his eyes, expecting to connect with just more empty air.

But his fingers touched material.

And he lifted it, not daring to open his eyes … he was breaking rules here, of that he was sure … but maybe, just maybe, if only one or maybe two senses were working, he could pull it off. He lifted the hat up and buried his face inside the brim.

What are ghosts but memories? he heard himself saying from just a few minutes earlier. And there they were … memories. The only question was, were they from the past or the future?

Almost as soon as he had breathed in, the fragrance dissipated until there was only the smell of soap and the feel of Bennett’s empty hands cradling his face. But deep inside his head, the memories were still there, smelling fresh as blue bonnets in spring air.

Haurrrnnnnnnnnk!

Bennett looked at the window and saw that it had started to snow.

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