SEVEN
***
Lenore drove slowly down the street. It was deserted, which was unusual for this time of day. Generally there would be kids playing, neighbors chatting.
Today, however, there was nothing. And she had the strange feeling that she was being watched; as though the silence that had enveloped the town hid within it some kind of watchful, angry presence. Something that resented the inhabitants of Rising; something that wanted the town for itself.
Still, Lenore continued looking.
Finally she saw what she had hoped she would: after hours of rolling up and down Rising's streets, over and over, she saw Albert, camcorder in hand, filming his feet as he walked dejectedly down the sidewalk.
She pulled up next to him and rolled down her window.
"Albert," she said.
His head jerked up to look at her. He looked afraid, as though he had not noticed the car pulling up beside him. Worse still, when he did see the car and who was driving it, the look of fear only intensified. He cringed as though about to be struck some serious blow, the look of someone who had been beaten down so many times that this was the only way he had left to react.
He saw her, and started running.
She got out of the car without thinking, pausing only to turn off the engine before running after him.
"Albert, wait!" she hollered.
"Why? So you can make me look stupid again?" he shouted back, not slackening his pace, rapidly drawing away from her.
Lenore tried to keep up, but was no match for the heavy but deceptively fast kid. He leapt over an ivy-laden fence, halting only an instant at the top to scream at her, "You're all out to get me!"
Then he was gone.
Lenore's shoulders drooped. She had wanted to explain; to tell him...
What? Sorry I shouted but I saw your eyes start to bleed?
She turned and walked slowly back to her car. What could she have told him? And for that matter, what had caused that strange vision in the middle of the school?
A cloud fell across the sky. A storm was coming.
She walked by a house on the way back to her car and heard a chilling sound: the sound of a door shutting and a lock being thrown. In all her time in Rising, she could not remember ever hearing those sounds together before. Locks were something that out-of-towners used, not the people of this hamlet in the mountains. It was a measure of the fear that had fallen over the town, though, that people were actually trying to keep the monsters at bay with such basic methods as turning locks.
The wind blew for a moment, and Lenore could see stray wisps of fog curling down from the mountains, beginning the long crawl toward Rising. Soon, if they continued unabated, the fog would roll over the town, and all would be lost in the white darkness. Fog in Rising could reach otherworldly levels, making it all but impossible to move about, so thick that you could literally lose sight of your house - lights ablaze and all - within ten feet of exiting. It was never a death-sentence, as the fog usually came when the temperatures were fairly warm, so it wasn't as though getting lost would mean anything other than getting wet and uncomfortable until you could find your way to a friendly haven, but the fog was tremendously isolating and even frightening.
Not today, she found herself saying to herself in a kind of mystical mantra just short of prayer. Not today, not after the funeral. We don't need the fog.
But the low-hanging clouds that clung like nightmares to the mountains paid her no heed. They reached out tendrils of moisture and gradually started to writhe and roll into the town.
The wind whipped up again.
A storm was coming.
***