As the fog continued to dissolve in the darkening air he felt as through the towering structures of the city had grown taller since being blanketed in the shroud, as if they had extended like penknives into the sky to pierce the cloud of fog that had balefully bore down upon them. He felt as if at the bottom of a gaping, shadowy chasm, dwarfed by almighty cliff-faces of jagged metal, that were weathered only by the incoming acid rain, that scratched against the protruding pillars, and gnawed at the few remaining stone bastions of an older world. The rain trickled like blood from the sky, as if the city towers had scored a fatal blow on the ever-expanding void that had opened its great starry mouth from far above to spew down nature’s will. All wind had temporarily ceased, and so the billows of ashy smoke that crawled up from the snakish sewers below merely hung in the air, taking the form of dusty rainbows that wrapped around every street corner, lit as they were by the shifting neon lights emanating from the many windowed apartments where the city folk now hid.

It seemed in fact that the streets were altogether barren, with even automobiles growing scarcer in number. The buildings seemed to have shifted within the fog, clanging like tectonic plates into new formations, rubbing together and emitting mighty, noiseless vibrations that made the bones chatter and the mind whirl. All the while city life confined itself only to isolated dimensions of interior apartments, where only beams of neon and the silhouettes of sneaking geometrical shapes revealed themselves to a voyeurs eye. He pondered that there must be many a voyeur in the city, who gazed with fascination from their own window to the windows of others, to spy around the angular corners of the superstructures to acquire a glimpse of an exotic other world, or perhaps a sign of familiarity to justify one’s own style of existence. He supposed that if this were true then he would become prime victim of many a voyeur, being the only man to walk even on the high-street, where almost every window flickered on and off with breathing lights that seemed to flow like clockwork from window to window, as if the many lights and rooms and buildings were not distinct inanimate spaces of habitation, but organs of a living, conscious, organic creature. He wondered then that it could even be the case that there were no voyeurs altogether, or people at all within those neon capsules. Perhaps in the cages that stood stacked up all around him there were only corpses and rooms lingering with that atmosphere of a place that harbored only the memories of the dead. Perhaps the rooms lived autonomously with their lights and their shifting ornaments and doors and appliances, the whole place seeming like a kingdom of phantasmagoria, a home of electric poltergeists, performing invisible parodies of human habitation. But he could not fancy a place such as this, and so kept his mind settled on the explanation of reclusivity, caused by the malice of the weather.

Still, as he made his way from the high-street and nearer to the bench that overlooked the wooded plains beyond the outskirts of the city, having navigated the whole diameter of the city on foot with mysterious speed, almost confirming his sense of shifting layout, he saw that the tree which had blocked the road like a clotting of the artery had not been removed, but merely cut. It was one of very few trees that had been kept within the city borders. Now, it’s discarded remains were still scattered over the pavement, and already etched with doodles and graffiti, proving after all a human presence. The bark rotted intensely in the acid rain, shriveling like fruit on the concrete pavement with captivating speed. Indeed, to his eyes, it seemed as if the whole world was moving more quickly, and, though his eyes were still plagued with a twitching mania from prior experiences, he refused to accept that this was all the trickery of a weary mind. After all that he had seen and heard and encountered in this place, he could no longer irk the conviction that some elusive process was afoot. Perhaps it was pride on his part, but he refused to put his increasingly gnawing longing for, and anxiety of, company as the culprit for his increasing delirium. He wished only for acquaintance with normality, nature unperturbed by imposing oddities. Yet, as if in mockery of this desire, fluttering and darting low in the sky above his head was a whirlwind of bats, emanating, he assumed, from the disregarded open sewer tunnels he knew bats to reside in, and seeming now to be fleeing in a great haste and high-pitched panic from the city, fading into the night air, as if for the last time.

A grating chill stabbed through him. This was, to him, the final straw. Something in this sight, after all the other sights, snapped loose a screw in his brain.

…The plants are rotting away, the weather is growing ghastly, the people are barricading themselves inside, this wretched city appears to be moving, and now even the disease-ridden rodents fancy this city too vile to breed in...

…My employers, I cannot understand them. My apartment is malfunctioning, the television, the ventilation, the damn taps... My pills are not working - are they distorting my head? Oh, but it could be the stinking water, the dire filth… and the queasiness I feel…. Oh my wife you plague me worse day by day, is it the rot of your once tender skin that makes me feel you move in that ungodly room?… And the noises, those damned noises. The calls, the cries, the screams, like some dreaded banshee haunting me… What is it? Who is it?! Is it…. Is this all a job, an assignment, another petty task?! Oh, but could they know…

In a sudden convulsion brought on by his mental anguish he collapsed to the ground, and sizzling vomit burst from his shivering mouth. He crunched his teeth, strained his eyes, and clawed at the grainy wet concrete beneath him. He was sweating all over, flaccid, soaked in the rain, and now his vision grew hazy, as if a spell was cast upon him. In this haze, just as he tried to stand, a figure hovered before him, not in his view, but in front of his view, as if superimposed in the realm between his eyes and the world. And in a flicker, it was gone, a green blotch of faint flowing tendrils that vanished like smoke just as it arose. He stumbled, and slipped over on the street, losing his footing, and smashing against what he realised was the bench he had journeyed to find. Seething in pain, he was not sure whether the wail he heard was his own or another, pleading from afar. Nevertheless, as he composed himself, he saw what he had slipped on.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was a mobile phone, jagged and bulky, contained in a strangely shaped casing, that was both caked in rain and… a goo of some sort, some faint wispy substance that mediated between liquid and membrane. It was soap-like in texture and gave off a hideous reek, but he wiped it away as he gained a grip on the phone, holding it in his hand. It seemed to have been blown from the bench as if in a gale before he had picked it up. Now, he turned it on, to see it was fully charged, but possessing some cryptic language unfamiliar to him, and no apps or widgets to speak of. There were merely static pixels dazzling on the shining screen. He pocketed the device, anticipating it to ring sooner or later.

During this time the rain had all but gone, yet in its place the fog had returned, suddenly, like the second advance of an invading army. Partnered with the fog, the wind came once more, rumbling like a barrage of smoke, and with the damp ground and his staggering gait and diluted vision, maintaining his balance became immediately and intensely strenuous. The fog poured in thick and fast, with clouds of almost solid vapour charging through the air like beasts, gathering up dirt and mud in their wake, ripping up loose pebbles from the aged concrete. A storm became a mighty gale without clear direction, then almost a tornado, lashing out within the confines of the street, bouncing like a pinball from wall to wall. He clung to the bench, shielding his eyes from the flying dirt, desperately struggling against pummells of air to keep himself upright. As he did so, blurry lights refracted through the shards of glassy fog and seemed to dart from placed to place and rotate within the air as if the entire universe was shifting on an axel right below his feet. The ground spun and the dirt stung and the lights dazzled and the wind howled and his wet hands lost the grip of his bench, his brain burning with a fierce throbbing that panged as it was rattled by every roar of the monstrous air. He was spinning endlessly now on the ground, pulled to and fro like a clockwork ballerina, yet refusing to lose his footing even as more vomit boiled up to his throat and skin was scorched by the flying earthly debris and his nose choked on some horrid stench that was battered into him. He saw that in the air bushes and bugs and birds and bats were now caught in the mighty blast, skinned and shredded and dead, splatters of blood painting over the city structures, sometimes a bird whacking with a thump and a splat against the metal walls. One bat even smashed through a window, and he anticipated a shriek from inside the building, but heard none. He supposed the room was empty, and in his despair, he clamoured towards the gaping window, hoping for shelter. Even whilst being shoved from side to side by the storm, he scampered on to the window, only to cut his wrists on shards of glass as he fell towards it. The room was dark and empty, but the shallow growl of some urban mechanism lingered. He could not fit through the hole in the window, but as he went to smash the remaining glass, in the place where his hand had wiped away the mist, he saw a reflection as clear as a mirror, and through it, a figure, standing behind him, motionless in the mighty storm. Faint vaporial garments blew softly in the fierce gale, as did the hair of the thing - it appeared as a silhouette of a woman, unrecogniseable in the fog, but distinctly pale and deathly, with a shroud of vapour gathering around her, freezing around her eerie atmosphere. The wet, glazed over, reddened eyes stabbed through the shroud however, and he saw the shadow was crying. Without a single thought he lurched towards the figure of the woman, responding, he only recognised as he did so, to a grief-stricken shriek emanating from the figure that cut at his bones and pierced his heart with a palpitation like none he had before experienced. But as he stumbled forth to embrace the shadowy figure, the storm gave in and dissipated with a dastardly haste, causing him to trip and fall through calm, currentless air.

He found himself alone on drying ground, damp and sweating and caked in dirt and wincing with bloodied hands and a pounding skull, and a heart that still stung with stabbing pain. He regained his footing once more, almost falling multiple times, and sought frantically after where the figure might have disappeared to. But soon, after tumbling back and forth through the street, his energy was utterly drained, and he returned panting and in pain to where he had fallen, checking for any dropped items. In his coat, he felt something clinking and broken. He retrieved the item, only to find his copy of ‘The Evil Dead’, with case and tape both wrecked and ruined. His other videotape was undamaged, however.

He then looked to the ground by his feet. There was one, small, solitary puddle, despite all the rain having slithered into gutters on the sides of the road. He crouched down to examine it, pricking his finger with the static water. He put his finger to his tongue and found that the water tasted of salt. Taken aback, he shuddered harshly.

What is this… tears? But was that figure not a figment of my struggling mind? How could she have vanished as she did? Are these tears my own?

With all the haste he could muster, he retreated from this cursed street, but as he did so, a ghostly black bus lurched around the corner with searing headlights that widened and scorched his retinas, almost blinding him, and it stopped with a screech right before him. With a hoarse sigh he flapped his arms and cried for the door to open, as if portraying a discordant bird, before crawling aboard the vehicle. He heaved and sagged into his seat without a single look to the driver, hyperventilating with twitching eyes, wrapping himself in his coat, for despite his sticky heat he had begun to shiver. The bus lurched forth once again and he rested against the glass, which was blackened, with only the harshest of lights from the city piercing through.