The fog closed in like fog did in the old days. I could hardly see to the end of my nose and, with heart in my mouth, I continued tentatively with my evening constitutional.
I knew this much -- I was wandering through a city with which I had fallen in love over some time, that had become the place where I had set up home with my then future wife, beside a river that bled at sunset like dark wine.
The domes and turrets of its convoluted lanes were tonight closed off by this sudden curtain of fog and the most I could do was conjure up the familiar skyline from its under-scoring in my mind.
Ftflank! My face hit a cornerstone which, no doubt, on a better evening, would not even have been there at all. I rubbed away at the grazes on my nose and forehead, calling up an image of my long dead mother retrieving her invisible pot of magic ointment from inside her work-box.
I was lost, of course, but not desperately so, for, although this was a big city with acres of untrodden by-ways, I felt confident that I was still on a course not too distant from the river wharves (of which, on better evenings, I could see the shimmering yellowness from my house; and even hear the aching drip of its drenched timbers and the intermittent curse of its otherwise silent cargo workers and ballast shifters).
But, tonight, not a sound broke the silence, and even the sluggish, shaggy shapes of dossers slid easily through the fog like the engine-room oilmen on leave from the creaking cargo ships; and I realised, too, that the cafes to which I thought I had been heading were, if there at all, uncustomarily low-keyed...
Ftlappat! I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned to see a face of fog: my future wife had evidently been searching for me and was, thankfully, planning to lead me home. She smiled, wisps of fog, like cigar smoke, formed her gracious head of hair to which I was so familiar. Her tongue curled out her mouth & I found it hard to keep track of the words that darted from corner to corner of the face I had grown to love.
But what I heard, & what I heard clearly enough, as I now work the yellow cargo in an endless tangled night, I recall it more than clearly. Her mouth fixed itself finally somewhere in the rite of her body and emitted a snarly voice I did not recognize: “Eat yer heart out -- I’m you now, and I’ve got your beloved fiancee for my own.”
Schpplonk! A sharp swipe plunged on to the top of my head and forced my teeth and jaws together with a jolt: the river and all its foul detritus seeped from between my lips.
(published SKELETON CREW 1988)
