As a preface to this, my friends and I all just graduated from university, separate universities far away from each other. We don’t see each other much. Practically never, actually. So when we do meet up things can get a little… hectic.
What started as a general hang out, coffee and chat session turned into a full fledged adventure full of crazy fog, creepy atmosphere, and a looming sense of dread.
The story began in a coffee shop in Toronto, the city I live in (for now). The three of us were all drinking expensive lattes and rejoicing over our long awaited completion of university. Understandably, we were ecstatic to be done. No longer would we stay awake until ungodly hours writing papers, reading books, and preparing notes. Now we have the delightful task of paying back student loans and searching for employment! Why were we spending ten dollars on a coffee if we were broke? Good question, but not important to the tale at hand.
One of us gets the great idea to just got back to Matteo’s house for a night of relaxing beers and conversation. His house is a good hour’s drive away, so naturally we all decided it was a genius idea. We trekked through the rain in nothing but thin summer clothes in spite of the chill in the air to the parked car and zipped out of the my university campus to the highway home.
So far so good.
It started to get a little crazy closer to home. Suddenly the rain stopped, the window wipers were turned off, and we talked about our lives post-post-secondary. This went on for some time until we noticed the wall of fog before us as we descended the hill. A literal wall of gray creeping out from behind the trees and stretching across the road. We slowed down and looked at each other.
The high beams went off and we slowed the car down to a crawl. On one side of the road was a huge drop down a ravine, on the other was a steep incline covered in trees. Our talk strayed into a discussion on whether we had stumbled into a horror movie. General consensus: definitely.
Jackson pointed out that the tree branches looked like ‘thin, skeletal monsters’ in the fog watching our vehicle drive slowly past them. The whole scene was eerie, especially concerning the time of night. We were dangerously close to the infamous ‘Witching Hour’, that thin stretch of time between midnight and 3am when supernatural occurrences were known to happen. Did we buy into that whole idea? No. But what if?
That sense of the unknown crept into our minds frequently throughout the night. Trees became ogres, branches become Lovecraftian horrors. The fog persisted, swallowing light and blocking out the stars.
Finally, we arrived home. The scene there was just as ominous. Amidst a forest of budding trees wreathed in thick fog sat a house illuminated by a single light. The forest was dead silent, the only sound the tires crunching the gravel on the driveway. We parked, got out, and took a look at the surroundings.
Now, any normal people would have gone inside and stayed there.
We are not normal people.
To us, the only sensible idea would be to go for a hike through a forest so wrapped in fog you couldn’t see three meters in front of you. We stashed our stuff in the house, forgot to grab flashlights, and ventured out into the darkness with nothing but our knowledge of the forest and the dim lights from our nearly dead phones.
If we thought it was creepy looking at the branches from the safety of our moving car, being in the middle of the foggy forest was enough to make all of us shudder. We were constantly waving our phone lights around us as we trekked through the woods. Was that branch some animal staring at us from afar? Was the stump a man watching our every move? More importantly, what was lurking in the fog, out of sight, waiting for us to stray to far from home?
Soon the light from the house dissipated and we were left in crushing darkness. The sound of the distant river, overflowing from the recent rainfall, echoed through the fog. We kept walking. Where were we going? No one had any idea. We just kept going until the light from the road appeared.
We stumbled out into the middle of the dirt road and looked around. Never had the world been more quiet, more dark, more other-worldly. We walked back up the drive and locked the doors behind us.
Nomaddic 