Through the Fog and Filthy Air

It was as an undergraduate that I had the only "psychic" experience of my life. I have never given it any more thought than is absolutely necessary—I am, if you will pardon my candor, aggressively uninterested in the topic of "ghosts"—but I have told some few about it, and it is through them, I suppose, that rumor of the incident has reached the Society. Trusting that your members will take it in the proper spirit, and that you will respect my privacy, I will convey it to you now with every detail I can remember.

This much you probably know already: that when I was young my family resided in a fifteenth-century rectory near the English coast. The rectory, which had formerly been associated with a Norman abbey (now vanished), is built around an ivy-shrouded tower, from which project two tall wings built of limestone slabs. (When approached from certain angles, the white walls rear over the shrubbery like the White Cliffs of Dover.) The surrounding park is narrowly hemmed in on all sides by thick woods that clamber over hillocky countryside. Some short distance away, stretching toward the sea, is a chain of boggy marshes populated by warblers, lapwings, and egrets. There is a clear-running brook overleapt by a stone bridge (replacing, in modern times, a much older one of brick), and at the base of the low hills some half a mile away is a flooded chalk pit.

The antiquity of the rectory undoubtedly accounts for the innumerable ghosts and manifestations associated with the grounds. These include, of course, spectral nuns (some with heads, some without) that are said to glide over the lawns at twilight, and a phantom coach and four that gallop silently down the lane at midnight when the moon is full. More particularly, the bridge is said to be haunted by the shade of a crusader-knight who drowned in the ford over which the bridge was subsequently built. More antiquely, there is a cairn of stones in the woods, reputedly covering the bones of the district's last Druidic priest. This site is thought especially dangerous to visit at the solstices.

I have nothing to report on any of these. It is to the chalk pit that I direct your attention.

It too is a site of some supposed antiquity, though my own cursory researches suggest that it was in use no earlier than the seventeenth century, and most work there ceased during the last quarter of the nineteenth. There was a subsidence in the area, possibly the result of blasting in the pit, with the result that some subterranean crack in the earth opened up, connecting the pit to the nearby sea. It was flooded as a result. Some excavation continued in the unflooded portions, but it was presumably found to be uneconomical and finally abandoned at some point. However, there is still a paved road that connects the pit to the nearest village, one tributary of which leads to the rectory where my family lived.

To my knowledge the pit itself has no psychical traditions attached to it—further evidence, I deem, for its being a recent addition to the landscape—but it was the scene of a terrible tragedy some decades ago. In 1936 a Short Empire flying boat carrying twenty-one passengers and crew hit the forest canopy while banking too low in fog. The airplane burst asunder, and the wreckage slid down the hillside into the flooded portion of the pit. There were no survivors, and authorities removed the remains to the near-most developed site, which were the rectory grounds. Though I have been unable to confirm it—the disaster happened nearly twenty years before my family acquired the property—I have heard that at least some of the bodies were carried into the house.

Such is the background to my experience.

It was December of 1974, and I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I had traveled down for the weekend to see my parents, but was greatly absorbed in my studies, so much so that it wasn't until the early afternoon, when I looked up to find the day grown very dark and dismal, that I discovered that I had the house to myself. I put on some lights, and returned to my reading.

I was working in the study, which opens via a set of French doors onto a stone patio and thence into the garden. On that afternoon, however I could scarcely see to the end of the patio. A freezing fog of great thickness had settled about the house, smothering the day under a gray and sodden blanket. To the extent I paid heed, however, I felt myself cheered, for weather of such blankness was very conducive to concentration.

I was aware, at some point however, of a roaring buzz that passed overhead, though not until it was fading did I lift a frowning face from my books. The sound was exactly like that of a multi-engine prop plane, and I wondered that such a machine should be sky-borne and flying so low (for so it sounded) in such dangerous weather. I put it out of my mind, however, reflecting that perhaps the fog was of no great height, and would perhaps be presently dissipating.

I learned afterward that I was not the only local to have heard what sounded like a plane. The proprietor of The Plough and Corn—long since now deceased—heard the same as he was cycling through the fog, and heard more, for he arrived at his pub wondering aloud about the "great thundering crash" he had heard in the hills above the marshland. As there was no result, he soon put it out of his mind, though a mutual acquaintance to whom I told my story confirmed to me that another had heard something similar to what I had.

I come now to the nub of the experience. I am not certain how much time had passed since I heard what I fancied to be a turboprop passing overhead, but it must have been an hour or more when I looked up with a palpable sense of unease. The day had turned even darker, so much so that I anxiously glanced at the clock, thinking that night must be falling, only to find that it was scarcely three. But the fog had thickened to such an extent that I could not see even the patio, and when, on an impulse, I clicked off the lights, I was plunged into a darkness almost subterranean.

I wrote just now that I turned the light off "on an impulse." I do not know where the impetus came from, but I do know I felt it almost as a desperate command from without. I think I had some premonition that the light of the study, if shining out onto such a dark afternoon, would act as an attractor. But an attractor of what? I only knew that I found the sudden darkness a comfort. So long as the lights are out, I felt, I am one with the fog and the dark, and whatever swims in the gloom outside will pass, unmindful of me.

But would it? I startled myself, even, when I felt myself pressing against the wall opposite as I stared doubtfully at the fog that swirled against the panes of the French doors. I remember a cold prickle of sweat down the top of my back, and a quickening anxiety lest the doors burst open, admitting something more into the study than the cold and dank. As I edged toward the study door I found I dared not turn my back on the windows, and in the blooms and tendrils of mist I couldn't help seeing—as one sees in a cloud—hands wiping at the glass, and faces forming and dissolving as they peered inside.

I finally found the open doorway behind me and fled to the interior of the house. This, somehow, was worse, for I heard and felt the house settling about me, as though being squeezed by some presence without. Yet I dared not move from the windowless scullery wherein I cowered, for fear of what I might see peering in at me through some window.

At last I heard my parents return—cheerful enough at the conclusion of their errand. The fog was lifting, and with trepidation (but also some curiosity) I returned to the study to look out.

The panes of the French door were filthy. There were no clear marks, but I couldn't shake the impression that a crowd of palms had been rubbing over the clear glass, leaving dirty traces behind.

Worse was what I found on the patio. A faint dew had settled over it, but slopped across it, as though left by a trampling crowd, were the muddy prints of dozens of feet. They formed a trail which I followed some brief distance, but left off when I found it turning down the road toward the abandoned pit.

-30-
Submitted for "SCREAMS!!!"  for 3-29-21
Prompt: A miasma clears, revealing something even more dreadful.