Weird Horror #8 by Michael Kelly

Author:Michael Kelly [8, Issue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Undertow Publications

When the Marks boy went missing later that month, and stayed missing, the boy’s mother came to Floyd’s door to ask for his help. It was known that Floyd used a Ouija board, and the woman was desperate.

“I’ve already tried it,” he told her. “I’m not getting anything.”

She begged him, on her knees on his doorstep, to try again.

“I will,” he said, “I’ll keep trying,” but he would not let her stay; he could not do it, he told her, with anyone else in the room.

Alone at his kitchen table, in near darkness, with his inch of brandy to warm him and his feet flat on the floor, he asked, “Are you there?” His voice went beseechingly into the dim and flickering corners and there was a miserable lack of response.

He had to tell the Marks woman, when she came again, that he had not been able to speak to her son, and she thought perhaps that meant there was hope but the whole thing put Floyd in a terrible mood. He didn’t know what it meant, that he could not reach a spirit. The truth was, sitting there with his Ouija board, he had never once had a response. He had sometimes wondered if a Ouija board could be defective, if he had a dud, but he had tried more than one with no joy. And yet he knew that there were spirits; even as a child, he had known that.

He’d been about five, spending the night in a guest house somewhere on the Scottish coast with his parents. They had a family room, but when he woke in the night in a strange bed in the dark, and called for his mother, nobody came. Floyd did not know where he was, or what time it was, or where his mother had gone. He got out of bed and went barefoot to the door, which was closed but not locked. He opened it just enough to stand in the gap and look out at the dim landing, rubbing the Sandman’s grit from his eyes and seeing the lady made of fog. That’s what he called her, in the morning, at the breakfast table. “There was a lady made of fog,” he said, “standing at the top of the stairs.” “Is that right?” said his dad, glancing at Floyd’s mother. Floyd, who knew that look, insisted she had been there, he had seen her. He felt, too, that she knew he was there, though she didn’t turn towards him. He had watched her going through the wall. “Soft in the head,” said his dad, when Floyd was out of the room. Out in the hallway, five-year-old Floyd was looking up at the landing, looking for the fog lady, but she wasn’t there in the daytime, perhaps she was still in the wall, or at least she wasn’t visible, and after lunch they went home.

From time to time, someone would mention the fog lady — not just his parents but uncles and aunts and family friends.

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