Fog.

Fog is the kindest way for the world to lie to you.

It blurs the edges. Softens the shapes. Pretends that what you cannot see cannot hurt you. It drapes itself over the familiar and whispers that nothing has changed.

It had settled over our suburb that afternoon like a second sky, low and oppressive. The streetlights glowed faintly inside it, small suns trying and failing to be brave. You could barely see five feet ahead.

“We won’t be long,” my mother said.

That is what adults always say before they lead you somewhere you cannot come back from.

We were moving soon. Or trying to. The house we lived in had begun to feel cramped, my parents said. Too small. Too ordinary. I had once said I wanted woods. Space. Something that felt like it meant something.

Careful what you wish for.

The drive began normally enough. The grocery store faded behind us. Then the park. Then the familiar rows of identical houses. The fog followed. Or perhaps it waited for us ahead.

The road narrowed.

Sidewalks disappeared.

The GPS cut out.

My father frowned at the screen, then at the road. “It’s just past the tree line,” he said.

The tree line.

The forest rose up suddenly, swallowing the road. Branches arched overhead like ribs closing around a lung. The headlights pushed into the fog and bounced back, blinding us with our own light.

It felt less like driving through something and more like being drawn inward.

I watched the trees pass, tall and silent, and had the strange sense that they were not trees at all but witnesses.

Then the forest ended.

The clearing opened.

And there it was.

The manor.

It stood alone in the center of an empty field, tall and crooked and impossibly theatrical. Pointed gables. Leaning shutters. Windows narrow and suspicious. It looked like it had practiced looming.

To the right, a massive cornfield stretched outward, rows upon rows of dry stalks disappearing into fog. To the left, more woods. Behind it all, the gray sky pressed low.

“It has character,” my mother said.

Character is what people say when they mean unsettling.

We stepped onto the porch. The boards groaned beneath our weight, as if announcing us.

Before my father could knock, the door opened.

An old woman stood there, folded inward by time. Her back bent, her skin thin and pale. Her smile stretched wide, almost generous.

“Oh good,” she said. “You made it.”

Her voice was calm. Too calm.

The house swallowed us whole.

Inside, the air was colder. It smelled of damp wood and something faintly metallic. The wallpaper peeled in long strips. A chandelier hung crookedly above us, missing crystals like lost teeth.

“It has been in my family for generations,” she said as she led us through room after room.

The rooms were large but decaying. A piano with broken keys. A dining room table set too precisely. Bedrooms with tall windows that let in gray light but no warmth.

Nothing overtly wrong.

And yet.

The house felt aware.

My parents saw potential. I saw patience.

Eventually, the woman turned toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you sit,” she said. “I will prepare something.”

My parents followed her, already speaking in hopeful tones.

I lingered.

Curiosity is another word for self-sabotage.

Upstairs, the hallway stretched longer than I remembered. Doors stood open along both sides. A rocking chair sat in one room, unmoving. A mirror in another reflected the hall in a way that made it seem narrower.

At the end of the corridor, one door was closed.

Every other door had been open.

Closed things demand attention.

I stood there, listening. The air felt colder near it. Still.

I turned the knob.

The room was lined with knives.

Hundreds of them.

They covered the walls in careful rows. Long blades. Short blades. Rusted cleavers. Thin, gleaming instruments that looked designed for precision. They caught the dim light and fractured it.

This was not clutter.

It was collection.

One blade near the center glistened as if freshly cleaned.

Or freshly used.

I shut the door.

I ran.

Down the stairs, breath tearing at my throat.

I burst into the dining room just as my mother screamed.

The table was set perfectly. Plates aligned. Silverware straight.

But the food—

A bowl of pale soup churned with maggots. Thick white bodies twisting lazily.

A pan of lasagna sagged under blooming green mold.

Meat split open, raw at the center, blackened at the edges.

The smell hit me seconds later. Sweet rot. Thick and suffocating.

“What is this?” my mother cried.

The old woman stood beside the table.

Smiling.

“You found the knives,” she said softly.

Her spine arched.

Not gently. Sharply. Unnaturally.

Her shoulders rose. Her arms lengthened, fingers stretching thin and jointed. Her jaw widened far beyond what bone should allow. Something unfolded from her back—legs. Too many legs.

Her skin tightened and darkened.

She became something spider-like, towering and wrong, her limbs striking the floor in sharp, rapid beats.

We ran.

The hallway stretched longer than before. The floor tilted beneath us. Behind us, she skittered, fast and certain.

We burst through the door into the fog.

The field lay before us.

The corn to the right.

The woods to the left.

We did not decide together.

My parents ran into the cornfield.

The stalks swallowed them whole.

I ran toward the trees.

Branches tore at my arms. The fog thinned here, but the darkness deepened. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs trembled.

Behind me, the cornfield moved.

A violent rustling. Stalks snapping.

My mother screamed first.

A sound sharp enough to split the air.

My father shouted her name.

Then he screamed too.

Silence followed.

Absolute.

I stumbled through the woods until I found a great oak rising from the earth, its roots arching outward like ribs. Beneath it, a hollow space.

I dove inside and pressed myself into the damp soil.

I covered my mouth and listened.

No footsteps.

No breath.

Only fog drifting between the trees.

I stayed there, curled beneath the oak, waiting for something heroic to happen. For courage to bloom in my chest. For narrative justice to restore what had been taken.

Instead, there was only stillness.

And the distant shape of the manor, barely visible through the trees.

Watching.

Waiting.

Fog does not hide things.

It preserves them.

And somewhere beyond the clearing, beyond the corn and the woods, the house remained exactly where it had always been.

Patient.