Signal in the Fog
“If you ever hear the music, don’t hum along,” the caretaker told us. Bryn didn’t listen. The song came from somewhere beyond the fog and changed everything.
The caretaker’s voice was always rasping, thick with the mist that never left our town, so when he advised us against the music, most of us pretended not to hear. Bryn was different. Bryn always listened, especially to the things no one wanted to say.
It began on a gray Monday, the kind that blurred into every other day, the fog pressed against our little coastal village like an old hand over a mouth. I lived in Room Thirteen at the Home, if you could call it that, and only heard the music because Bryn dragged me out of bed before sunup.
“Come on, I heard it again,” Bryn said. His dark eyes flashed. “It’s beautiful. Like nothing else.”
I grumbled, but that tug of urgency in his voice peeled me out from the scratchy blankets. The Home was never fully quiet; boards creaked and the pipes groaned, but that morning a hush pressed around us as we slipped into the hall, our breath visible in the cold.
The caretaker always stood by the south window before breakfast, staring out where the sea vanished into nothingness. Sometimes I wondered if he saw anything at all, or just shapes and shadows moving where there shouldn’t be any.
Bryn pressed his forehead to the frosted glass. “Hear it?”
Faint and distant, not quite a song but more than wind. A melody half-remembered, delicate as threads between my ears. I did hear it. Or thought I did.
We listened together. The tune curled in the room and I saw Bryn close his eyes, lips moving as if he could catch the secret in every note. Then he hummed, softly, a perfect match.
The window burst with the sound of a crow slamming into the glass. Bryn jerked back with a sharp intake of breath.
Moments later, the caretaker’s cane struck the floor. “Didn’t I tell you?” he hissed. “Don’t hum. Don’t take it into yourself.”
Bryn was already pale, but the color left his face entirely. “Sorry,” he whispered.
We spent the morning in silence, but something had changed. Bryn fidgeted, tracing circles on his sleeve. When lunch came, he only picked at his food.
After sunset, when the fog thickened and the lights flickered, Bryn slipped away. I found him at the edge of the village, staring at the sea, the tune on his lips. I grabbed his arm. “Stop it,” I said, “before something happens.”
He shook me off. “Don’t you feel it? It makes me remember. Like I could reach something I’ve lost.”
Before I could argue, he stepped forward, swallowed by the fog.
Days passed. Bryn was gone; no one else seemed to notice. The Home shuffled along, but nothing felt right. I dreamed in music, strange old songs with missing words. Sometimes I’d swear I saw Bryn in the mist, humming along.
One night I woke to echoes on the staircase. At the bottom stood the caretaker, holding an old wax cylinder in his shaking hands.
“You’re the last, now,” he said. “I suppose you have to know.”
He played the cylinder. The same music. It filled the room, but something was wrong. Some notes slid in and out—an emptiness at the heart of it. “This is the archive,” he said, “the only copy. My voice, recorded years ago. And still, the melody finds its way out there, into the fog.”
He sat beside me, back curved like a question mark. “I built this place to keep people safe from it.” He wiped his mouth. “The music came long before us. Some days it threads people together; some days it tears them apart. My Bryn was my nephew. I lost him, too, long ago. That song…it calls to what we most miss. It feeds on that hunger. And if you hum along, you cross over.”
I felt a hollowness in my chest, a twisting grief for Bryn and for all the others the song had taken. “Is there a way back?”
The caretaker shook his head. “For some, maybe. If they can stop humming. If someone calls them by their real name, right at the edge. But not everyone wants to return.”
I gripped the wax cylinder. “Can I try?”
He shrugged. “If you go, you might not want to remember. You might not want to come back.”
That night, I left the Home. The fog was even denser near the water, shimmering with the same bone-deep music. I closed my eyes and sang Bryn’s name, again and again, until my throat ached.
At first, there was no answer. But then, through the swirl of icy air, a shape crept closer. Not quite Bryn, but carrying his outline, his lopsided grin. Bryn regarded me with ancient, hollow eyes, and opened his mouth in a nearly silent hum.
I hesitated. The music wanted me to join. I could give in. The fog promised no more loneliness, no more longing for warmth in the cold.
But I remembered the caretaker’s words: call him by his real name, at the edge.
“Bryn!” I screamed. “Remember me!”
The figure vibrated, the music faltering. The fog thinned, and with it, the shape of my friend—hardens, solidifies, just for an instant.
“I remember,” he managed. “But the song—”
“Don’t listen,” I said. “Don’t hum. Just try. With me.”
The fog trembled, the music growing fractured. I grabbed Bryn’s hand, felt it cold and unsteady in mine. We turned from the sea together, each step harder than the last. But with every stride, the melody faded, and Bryn’s grip on me grew stronger, more certain.
At dawn we made it back to the Home. The sky was streaked with pink, the fog lifting for the first time in months.
Bryn smiled, uncertain and tired, but there. “You brought me back,” he said.
I looked at the wax cylinder, now melted and useless in my hand. Some part of the music was gone for good—but not all. I knew it lived in memory, in longing, in all the places fog collects.
Still, when I pressed my ear to the window in years to come, I’d sometimes catch the hint of the old melody. I never, ever hummed along. Instead, I held tight to what was real: Bryn’s presence beside me, his fingers warm and alive.
Connection, I learned, is stronger than any song in the fog.
###END###
