The Fog

Things had been out of the ordinary all week. 

At first, you weren’t quite sure what was going on. The thick tendrils of fog rolling into the university town in the evenings and disappearing without a trace the next morning somehow seemed too beautiful and mesmerizing to even be real. The chill that ran through your body even though the weather forecasts had predicted scorching heat waves were enough to tell you that there was something eerie about the town that you called home. Despite the fact you were new to the town, you felt a deep sense of belonging that could not be explained with words. You only knew that there was something mysterious going on here that you needed to investigate and find out more about, wherever it may lead you. 

The peculiar occurrences had only increased when you met Alice and Jamie. 

You had met your curious friends, two energetic and spritely fellow art students, at a secret party which had included art performances, overpriced wine and events of a magical nature that could not be seen by the naked eye. You thought you were seeing things, or perhaps someone had drugged your wine, but suddenly you were seeing floating objects and people with pointed ears and teeth that were far too sharp, with a mysterious glint in their eyes as they sauntered across the room. You looked to Alice for an explanation, and her only response was a laugh and a brief “I knew it” thrown in the direction of Jamie’s face. If only you’d have known it, too. 

After that, things only got stranger. You started to notice little differences in life around the campus. The cliques of people who hung around each other became more obvious. You could hear otherwise incoherent incantations in the back of lecture halls, you could see the glowing elements on various shots at parties that definitely did not contain normal alcohol. You started to wonder what you were even doing here, and then everything changed. 

The next thing you knew, Alice and Jamie had dragged you along to their shared apartment with an eagerness to answer the thousands of questions that were running through your head. They explained that you were definitely human, and so were they, but that it didn’t mean you would be human forever. You had also found out that day that they were part of a secret society that they wanted you to be a part of.  They had only told you that what you were seeing was real, and the only reason that they took you to the party in the first place was so that you could see for yourself the supernatural goings on in the quaint arts faculty of your university. 

The train journey was long and tedious. You paid no attention to Alice and Jamie and instead decided to survey the landscape in front of you. The weather was beautiful outside, sun radiating a lovely glow against the green grass and the flowers covering the field for miles. It was beautiful, but nothing compared to what you would be witnessing in the near future. 

You had prepared yourself for a tiring journey across the countryside. Alice had frequently mentioned that all would be explained in more detail over the summer if you joined them at her family’s summer cottage, which was why you were sitting in a train carriage across from a sleeping Jamie leaning her head on Alice’s shoulder. She watched you intensely as you gazed out the window, the British countryside passing by in flashes. Little did you know that the world around you would soon change in ways you never thought it would. You were brought out of your daydream by splashes of rain against the window. You felt yourself do a double take as you looked closely and noticed that the rain drops had an iridescent shine to them. 

You gasp suddenly,  your attention caught by a familiar thick fog slithering through the pale green fields, making its way around the train and soon engulfing you all in a dim shadow, all while the windows were being pelted with what looked like magical rain. You panicked, looking to Alice, who only smiled reassuringly and told you that this was completely normal. You look out of the window and, not for the first time, think about how wrong the weather forecast had been. You take a second to think about how bizarre this all was, how in your own blind trust you’d followed your only close friends to their cottage in the middle of nowhere, knowing that somehow the university you were attending was also home to a thousand year old secret society that dealt with supernatural beings. It was certainly not how you had expected your year to turn out, yet here you were, itching to know more about your place in all of this madness. The fog had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and in its wake stood a town with a beautiful gothic cathedral in its center. You didn’t know what had just happened, but you were definitely not in the real world. You knew this partly because before you had entered the fog it was light outside, and now it was so dark that it could have been midnight. Watching as crops passed by, you discovered flowers which were glowing in fluorescent life, the stars above you shooting through the sky in different colours as you tried to take in the parallel universe that you had just entered merely seconds before. 

The cottage was even more spectacular than you had imagined. The living area was filled with books both ancient and modern, on subjects of the occult that you were sure were not being taught in the arts course. The walls were lined with oddly shaped bottles holding oddly coloured liquids inside. If you’d have known any better you would have thought that Alice and Jamie had been witches this whole time…