Halloween Tale - The Fog Wardens

Fog Warden

The old man nodded as the logs in the grate crackled and popped.

“Yes, I remember it well. There were seven of them, good hunters all. The marsh-folk had been plaguing travellers again, so they gathered up their followers and headed out onto the moors. This was at the height of the suppressions, you see, so there was still some fight left in those damnable mutants. I can't remember their names, but I remember their faces. They were smiling and joking as they set out in a great cavalcade.

“Seven hunters and two dozen soldiers, plus all the staff and porters for their gear. I waved and cheered with all the other children. It was like a festival, yes? The roads were almost clear for the first time in living memory, and these heroes were going to show the last of the bandits what-for.”

He paused, his blind eyes gazing into the fire.

“The one that made it back...that poor girl. She was so badly burned they thought she was a beast at first. The acid and poison had ruined her. But she returned to tell us all about the disaster. My father, the doctor, treated her wounds as I listened at the door.

“Something came out of the mist, she said. Tall as a tree and about as hard to topple. Spindle-limbed and hooting like a fog horn. Dressed like a soldier too, like it was mocking them. Like it was deriding our pogrom against the mutants. It melted men and animals, even the tents, as it moved. Nothing could stand that terrible miasma.

“Seven hunters faced it, and six died. The soldiers fled or were rotted where they stood. The porters died screaming. But she fought it, even as it burned her skin away. She cut it down and brought its head back as a trophy. Carried it in her fleshless hands for mile upon mile through the fog.

“But when they opened the sack she had dragged across the moors, there was nothing inside but filth and bog water.” He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “She laughed when she was told. Kept laughing too, all the way to the Bedlam House. Poor girl.”