The mist of Claremore

By some stroke of luck, Penelope found herself with the upstairs bedroom for a change. Upstairs, for the first time in her twelve years alive – no longer in an unfinished basement, or a converted study, or sharing a bedroom with LaVern and arguing over whether the window shade should be up or down. The last house had seen her sleeping in an old guest room which had a Murphy bed that didn’t fold up any longer. It took up most of the room with its size, and Penelope had to do most things on it, like her homework and folding her laundry.

The McNichols had lived in nine different houses since Penelope was born, her father a Major in the Air Force. The latest move was to a small community in the Maryland foothills - Claremore - where the trees turned fiery colors in the Fall and snow was always present during the winter. The house they had moved in to was old, like a handful of the others had been, but it was old in a charming way. Penelope had seen the dingy lace curtains over the attic window when they pulled up in the moving van and was curious what the view would be like from up there, though when she climbed the creaky stairs to the attic she was surprised to see it was something of an actual room and not just a drafty attic.

“DIBS!” Penelope screamed from the top of the stairs. LaVern emerged at the bottom of the stairs carrying a box of her things.

“Whatever,” she said with hardly a glance upward, “I get the room down here. You freeze to death up there.”

Penelope felt a little deflated – it would have been more fun if she knew she had beaten LaVern to the “dibs,” but it was just as well.

The trees had just started turning colors when the McNichols moved in, and in just a few short weeks the air was cold and crisp in the mornings and the sun was setting earlier and earlier. One night Penelope awoke with a shiver; outside the window beyond the dingy lace curtains, a thick mist swirled among the tree branches. She pulled the blankets up tightly around her head and laid there for a time, trying to fall back to sleep but the chattering of her teeth kept her awake.

“Geez, did someone turn off the heat?” she asked out loud. She slowly opened her bedroom door and it groaned loudly into the darkness. She knew the thermostat was at the bottom of the stairs and she gingerly crept down each one, and at the bottom she found the dial and turned it up. She remembered the thick woolen throw that her mother draped over one of the sofas and she wrapped herself in it before climbing the stairs again.

Penelope sat on the edge of her bed and stared out the window at the swirling mist; she could feel the air moving and a little bit of heat blowing across her face, and with the warmth of the woolen throw she soon found it hard to keep her eyes open. She laid back down and soon fell fast asleep.

It was sometime later; sometime that same night, in between the midnight hour and the first bluish hue of dawn that Penelope awoke with a start. Her hair was damp with sweat, and she was impossibly tangled up in the woolen throw, and with a heavy sigh she fought to get herself unwound from it. She sat up and noticed that the mist outside was so thick she could no longer see the tree branches. There was an old streetlamp a way down the road which cast a yellow glow over the asphalt, but even that was impossible to see now in the mist. The window was simply a deep, deep gray, and freezing to the touch.

Penelope almost didn’t notice the sound at first. It was quiet and small, like maybe the sound a mouse would make in the middle of a dream. She was attempting to fold up the woolen throw to make it easier to sleep under, and the noise was so faint that at first she assumed it was something she had made herself. But when she paused, it was still there – a faint whoosh that filled the whole room and made her heart jump into her throat. She couldn’t remember ever hearing it before.

“It’s probably the furnace,” Penelope whispered to herself as she laid back onto her bed. She pulled her blankets up to her chin and laid motionless, staring wide-eyed into the dark. The whoosh sounded close, like close enough for her to touch, but there was nothing she could compare the noise to. Her heart was still thumping loudly in her ears and with nervous energy she rubbed her bare feet together under her sheets. In her mind she began picturing all sorts of wild and fantastic explanations for it, from dozing mice to owls swooping over the rooftop. But just as quickly as she had noticed it, the noise was gone. Laying motionless, she stared at the ceiling and held her breath, but all Penelope could hear was the ticking of the clock in the hallway downstairs.

“I must be dreaming,” Penelope thought with a relieved sigh, and as her heart slowed down, she felt herself growing sleepy again. It would be a creepy story she could tell LaVern in the morning at breakfast, that was for sure. LaVern was easy to spook; she hated Halloween and she hated scary movies and didn’t even like sleeping without a night light.

Penelope hadn’t been asleep for long when she became aware she was awake again, curled up tightly beneath her blankets with the same mist rolling slowly out her window. She leaned up and much to her dismay, there was the noise again. Her heart raced as she sat up in bed and looked quickly around the room. Everything seemed normal, or as normal as it could in the middle of the night: there was her vanity and her writing desk; her drawers and coat rack with her shawls and raincoat; there was her backpack laying next to the bedroom door. But that noise…something wasn’t right. She couldn’t decide whether to get out of bed and turn on the light or stay wrapped up in her blankets and stay awake until morning. She felt some sympathy for LaVern now that knew what it felt like to be so spooked.

In the dark, Penelope made up her mind: she would turn on the light. Whatever was causing the noise, it was probably something obvious she would recognize as soon as she could see clearly. Casting the blankets down, she slid off the bed and took two quick hops to the light switch and flipped it on.

It was suddenly very bright and very hard to see, and Penelope squinted harshly beneath the light and rubbed her eyes roughly. She looked over to the window and could only see the glare of the light reflecting off the glass. Across the room she saw her tubes of lip balm and costume jewelry on her vanity, her dirty clothes piled up on the floor beneath her drawers, her writing desk with her stack of books and her backpack.

Penelope felt silly. There was nothing to worry about, and whatever the noise was, it didn’t matter. This was just a new house that probably had all sorts of strange sounds that would take getting used to.

Turning to switch off the light, Penelope was struck by something she had never noticed before. She hesitated at the light switch and then stepped away from it altogether, curious by what she saw near her bed. It looked like a large, hairy foot. But not like a human foot – it looked like some type of paw.

At first Penelope thought she was seeing things and she rubbed her eyes again, but the paw was still there. Or at least it looked like a paw. She took a cautious step forward and tried to imagine what it could possibly be; she had given all her stuffed animals to LaVern a couple years ago, so it wasn’t one of those. She had left her slippers downstairs near the radiator in the family room, so it couldn’t be one of those, either. The paw was a deep brown with black padding – not a deep brown she recognized in any of her own clothing.

Penelope stared across the room at this large, paw-like mound that was hanging out a bit from under the bed. She tiptoed over to it; it wasn’t moving at all, but she could still hear the whoosh sound. Very slowly, very silently, she knelt onto the rug and leaned forward to get a better look at it.

It absolutely was some sort of paw, that was obvious to her now. Penelope’s breathing was fast and shallow, her heart pounding in her chest. She wasn’t sure if she should scream or run away or grab it and pull on it. On the floor, beside the bed, she could now tell that the whoosh wasn’t a whoosh at all – it was the sound of breathing. She slowly scooted away from the paw and stood beside her closet door, ready to run down the stairs. Then she remembered her lacrosse stick she kept in her closet. Quietly she plucked it from the closet floor and crept back over to the foot.

Holding her breath, Penelope slowly pointed the end of the lacrosse stick at the paw and gave it a short jab. In a flash, the paw was yanked back under the bed, out of sight, and the breathing sound disappeared. But Penelope was too startled to scream or make any sound at all. She stumbled backward and fell against her vanity but managed to keep herself upright.

With a clench of her jaw, she leapt back over to the bedside and dropped to the floor with the lacrosse stick at the ready. She waited…and waited…but nothing happened. Her flashlight on her writing desk caught her eye and she grabbed it and flashed it on, kneeling and shining it under the bed.

Penelope might have screamed, but she was so surprised by what she saw that while her mouth opened, not a sound came out. There beneath her bed, among some dirty socks and a kitchen plate, was a short, furry, brown creature. Its fur was wiry and coarse, like millions of pipe cleaners, and it had four legs, though two of the legs appeared to be shorter, like arms, perhaps. At the end of the arms and legs were paws with thick dog-like pads, but she couldn’t make out any claws like a dog’s paw.

Though she was frightened, Penelope found a bit of courage in her. Perhaps because the creature was small, or perhaps because it didn’t look any scarier than a dog or maybe a big porcupine.

“Okay you…thing,” Penelope hissed, raising her lacrosse stick. “Come out!”

A few agonizingly long seconds ticked by, and then to her utter amazement, with a loud sigh the creature slowly pulled itself out from beneath the bed, into the bright light which made Penelope drop her lacrosse stick in sheer surprise.

Its face looked like something of a cross between a cow and an opossum, with large, round eyes which were black through and through. Even though it was obviously not human (or animal, for that matter,) it moved about like a small child.

Penelope’s face registered a mix of shock and perplexity. She could only stare at it, and it could only stare back…