Of the Island

I was a shepherd on a remote island, once, until something began frightening the sheep.

Thirty years ago it came, on an afternoon glazed opaline by November fog, the hills awash in it to such an extent that I saw almost nothing ahead of me but the dogs, their dark heads emerging from its vapour like seals.

Occasionally the mist would retreat across the herd of nonplussed sheep, towards the sea, taunting me each time with a moment’s relief. Then it would return again, unsettling me with the sense of some cosmic trick at work, which I brushed off as the paranoia that came of living there alone.

I had moved to the island through a natural want of solitude, being—by my own admission—a difficult and rather quiet person with little tolerance for human company.

My sheepdogs, Elton and Sebastian, were descended from those I’d grown up with on my father’s land, upon whose death I purchased, with my inheritance, property on a nameless island on which we went to live.

There I remained for three years with a flock of well-bred sheep, largely undisturbed, and glad of the quiet.

In the beginning I took a boat out to the mainland one a week for supplies, or to trade, a task that I heartily despised. Then I found that I could schedule deliveries at a reasonable cost, and so had little reason to leave my comforts, or the animals I tended.

I knew happiness there, briefly, but no more.

Watching my dogs move the sheep on the day of the fog, I saw that the herd was in some distress, their numbers drawn tightly as one, as though anticipating an aggression from some enigmatic assailant. Neither Elton nor Sebastian had much luck distracting them from this strange temper, and as the fog persisted, they, too, became uneasy, ears flattened to their narrow skulls.

Both dogs stared into the mist and bayed, deaf to my attempts to quell them, and flinching from my hand at their flanks. There was something on the island with us— a wild animal, I thought, then, slinking invisibly through the mist, though of what kind native to that land I could not fathom.

Fear came to me through the animals, powerful in its infection; I called the dogs to work again in a voice strained and quivering, without authority. Still, they obeyed, though uncertainly, coaxing the sheep inch by inch out of the mist, which had not been forecast, but had unmoored itself from the hills like a dream.

I noticed, then, a silence so absolute that even the sea itself moved without the whisper of the tide. The brays of the sheep and growling dogs seemed drawn into a void, scarcely projected across the valley around them. It was unnatural, yet somehow I knew it to be an effect of the fog, little reason though I had for this belief.

To my right, a ewe released a cry so like a human scream that, in my veins, there ran a garnet ice.

As I looked, I saw the fog bear down upon the animal from one side and then the other, tendrils coiling outwards with what I could only interpret as sentient purpose.

The sheep reared and struggled in all directions, its limbs scrambling beneath it on the slick grass.

The fog was toying with it, I realised, the way a child might a spider in its hands.

A cry left me, some wordless shout, and at once I realised my mistake. The fog was all around me, and I was blind and powerless in its grasp. That I could not predict or comprehend it frightened me almost to mindlessness; I had, after all, no proof but the response of my charges that the vapour was indeed alive, and yet I believed it utterly.

Believed it, and stood beneath its pallid fall as though before an ancient God, such was my mortal terror. Still I heard, felt, and scented nothing of any creature but the sheep and the dogs, which snapped and howled at either side of me in panicked defence against this thing they understood even less than I.

It was a token of luck that I knew the route back to my house by instinct of routine; whistling to Elton and Sebastian, I stumbled a drunkard’s path through the outer mist towards it, the shrieks of the tormented ewe dwindling at our backs.

What became of the poor creature I did not wish to know, though images came to me of its marred form, eyeless and bleeding fog from every orifice like a house fire set from within. I only ran, turning my ankle on many a loose stone as I fled across the island, the dogs bumping close on either side of me as though I were but another sheep to be coaxed to safety.

The fog could have taken me then, and I anticipated with every sightless step that it would do so. Yet it only passed above my person, and only in hindsight does it occur to me that my fear was as much a liquor to that shapeless entity as my flesh would have been in its place.

At last, I fell through the front door of my house, the dogs shoving between my legs and beneath the furniture with such violence I almost fell. I locked my door with a fumbling haste, tugging coats down from the nearby rack to stop the gap beneath it.

Even then I was struck by the futility of the action; the fog may well have found its way into the house in a thousand ways, if it so willed it.

But to do nothing seemed irrefutably worse, and so I left the bolster intact and went to console Elton and Sebastian, their shuddering forms emitting a great heat through their fur.

Glancing up, I saw through the open curtains of my parlour window that the fog was pressed against the glass, filling it so entirely that I could see nothing beyond but the sinister obscuration of its pale matter. Terror closed me in its limpid hands, for as I looked on, two dark apertures formed within that ivory, each of a churning depth that seemed at once both mindless and possessed of a knowing malice.

The eyes stared through the house and into me, and again I found I could not scream, as though the noise itself was taken by that hollow darkness. Clumsily I went across the room and drew the curtains shut, childlike in the insistence that, in failing to be seen by evil, it could not harm me.

Still I felt the fog moving over the house with the pressure of a storm, its very silence becoming a sound I cannot easily describe. Yet, in compare with the usual quiet I knew the difference exactly, a sonic phenomenon of many layers, each as menacing and incomprehensible as the last.

All evening I lay with the dogs in that same room, too afraid of inciting the entry of the fog across the threshold to move even to the stairs. I hoped that, as the hours passed, it would dissipate into the night, yet when I peeked through a mite gap between the curtains I saw the mist remained quite as impenetrable as before.

In desperation I went to the telephone and called one of my surviving relatives on the mainland, curious as to whether they, too, had found themselves driven inwards by this terrible mist. The question was received with perplexment; both day and night had been quite clear, and there was no talk of any fog in the weather forecast, even in the vicinity of my distant island.

My sense as to the supernatural origins of the mist was all but confirmed by this, and thus it was with a resigned sense of doom that I returned to my hiding place to wait out the fog.

At about midnight the sheep began crying out in the fields, their vocalisations of such tortured anguish that the sheepdogs began to howl in unison. I clapped my hands to my ears to shut it out, yet I, too, found myself adding to their wild music with helpless screams.

The herd quietened with a suddenness like the falling of a theatre drape, and all that I could think as I lay sobbing upon the floorboards was that I had abandoned them to the fog, these creatures I had cared for.

I must have slept at some point; the night was long, and I had been frightened to an exhaustion more akin to physical illness than want of slumber. But I did not dream— no, there were no dreams. What passed before my closed eyes was a smothering veil of white, through which the silence of the fog’s strange voice spoke to me in words I was glad neither to understand nor later recall.

I was awoken by the two dogs licking my face insistently until, at last, I stirred. Beneath the curtains shone a beam of anaemic daylight; morning had found me, and as I looked in trepidation from my window I saw that the fog had greatly cleared, at least enough that the island’s rough pebble beach was faintly visible at its peripheries.

Noting this, I decided that I must leave the island immediately before the mist regained its strength again. I did not believe for a moment that its siege had ended, perhaps even knew with certainty from its gloating in my troubled sleep that it would not.

The island was no longer my home, but its domain, and I could not exist there without becoming one with that terrible fog.

Within the space of an hour I fed the dogs, packed some small bags with what essentials I required from the house, and set out across the field beyond, towards the pebbled beach.

The anxiety that walked with me there could itself have killed me, had it gone on, a plaque on my lungs that sorely laboured my breathing.

My dogs strained ahead of me, towards the boat, intuiting from the bags on my back that we were to go there, and on out to sea. Their heads swung towards the beginnings of fog pooling on the hills with the same base horror I myself felt at its approach.

All three of us got into the boat and crowded together, arranging ourselves quickly in preparation to leave.

I undid the rope tethering us to land and pushed the vessel out to sea, working quickly and without grace, soaking myself rather badly in the process. That done, I dug the oars into the umber froth of seawater and began at once to row.

Though fit from my work, I had scarcely used the boat but for my mainland ventures, and was unaccustomed to it; later my muscles would shriek in rally against that savage exercise, and ached even then with a passion that brought tears to my eyes.

Elton and Sebastian whined like pups, their trembling bodies jammed tight against my knees. Their tongues lolled, ivory with a nervous froth; I muttered words of comfort to them through gnashing teeth, each syllable cut off in a stutter of cold.

Seawater writhed beneath the boat as though possessed by some spirit of evil temperament, though there was little wind that morning to render it so. Its colour was the stained dun of the clouds overhead, like the excretion of some bilious God; I was half-sick myself with the thought that land and water had both turned against me in league with the mist.

I would have to forsake all my things at the house, I knew, begin again on the charity of what distant family I had left on the mainland. The sheep I could not save, for I dared send no one else across to aid them, in my stead. Even through the mire of my terror I pitied them, yet it was only when I was many feet across the ocean that I looked back to the flock I’d left behind.

The fog sat across the island in such density that it was as though the land was cut from smoke, an unstirring opacity but for the holes I took for its eyes. Then a breeze picked up across the jaundiced sea, and the vapour shifted back into the hills again.

My hands dropped in petrification from the oars. My heartbeat was the thud of a train’s passage, and I clung to the dogs as they had to me, their desperate heat my only comfort in the lonely country of fear.

The sheep were no more, the viridian island burned red with their blood.