“Sentry?”
“What are you doing?” Benny wanted to know, and he swung his light around to follow mine, even though it wasn’t showing anything but endless curtains of patchy white fog.
“Sentry?” I called again. “He’s here. I hear him. That noise. You know—the static sound. I hear it. He’s nearby. Sentry!”
“Stop yelling, he’ll hear us!” Benny begged, but I moved away from him, still searching the fields and the trees with my limited fistful of light.
“I want him to hear us. ”
“What about the guy who’s got Jamie? You want him to hear you too? Or do you think we’re still out of shouting distance?” He looked so worried that I let my wrist droop and quit calling.
“He might help us. He might—” But I couldn’t think of a good way to end the thought, so I quit talking. Besides, the fizzing air was drawing itself close up around us, and if my companions couldn’t hear it yet, they would hear it soon enough.
The mist around us was quickening too, as if it also heard the approaching and familiar hum, and it gathered itself up to meet the source. It did not congeal so hard that we couldn’t see through it, though, or around it. It appeared to be flowing, and not hardening into something so impenetrable that we couldn’t pass through.
A wind kicked up, steady and pulsing, helping to push the pale tendrils of damp air along.
“What’s going on?” It was a useless question, but Benny asked it anyway. We were all wondering. We were all speculating. And we were all going to find out, one way or another. “What’s happening? Do you see any ghosts yet? Is that what this is?”
“No,” I told him. I saw no shapes, no personalities, no movement that could not be accounted for by the swirl of the low, damp cloud. But I could hear that noise, and it kept me on guard. It kept me looking, even when squinting showed me nothing at all.
“Where are you?” I asked, but no one answered me.
“Hey, look,” Dana said, and she meant that we should look at the fields and the road, back the way we came. “Does that look weird to you at all? The way it’s so clear? It was hazy when we went through it not ten minutes ago. ”
She was right. The fog that billowed and burst past us in fleeting ribbons was not merely gathering, it was slipping. Pouring. It emptied itself from the distant stretches of grass and woods, and it charged on towards the back of the park. It was as if someone had released a sink plug and the fog was being drawn down the drain. It leaked past us in a fluffy gray gushing that parted around us as though we were rocks in a stream.
“It’s going towards the Tower, isn’t it?” I watched it bleed away, into a tighter cloud as its collective density increased. “We’ve got to follow it. ”
So we did.
We began to run again, directly into the maelstrom; and the less we could see, the more we tried to tell ourselves that we were headed the right way. And the whiter the night became, the louder the static became—until even Dana and Benny could no longer pretend it didn’t reach their ears.
Our feet skidded off the edge of the road back into gravel and grass, and we almost tumbled over each other trying to stop. The déjà vu was nearly painful; we were back into the near-perfect blindness that had held us prisoner before.
It made us stiff, and nervous. It made us afraid.
But we were in the literal thick of it, and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t see to move forward, and there could be no retreat. We drew close together. Dana reached for my hand. I took hers and squeezed it, and with my other—the one that held the light, too—I took Benny’s free hand.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Listen,” I told him. And I snapped off my light.
He did the same. We stood in the pale black spot beside the road, and we clung to one another. And then, we were not alone.
Here. And there. And to our left. To the right.
Behind us, and past us. The night became sentient, and it began to move. Shadows were rising up, out of the ground. They were moving out from behind trees. They were falling into step, into patterns, into rows, and into waves. The dead came up in a tide of determined faces, and they marched.
“Sentry,” I said, “you’re doing this, aren’t you?”
Bring it, bring it all. It will cover us.
He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to them. And they brought it—every tendril, and every white breath. The fog came with them, every bit of it. They wore it like clothing, they pulled it along, they drew it out, and they dragged it after themselves deeper into the park.
Some of the shades still wore their uniforms, and here and there I saw the larger shape of a horse. One came very close to me; it stomped and stepped past, its eyes flashing a strange silver light as it glanced down to look at me.
Follow.