“And was his girlfriend’s cabin in Widowsfield?” asked Paul.
Alma nodded. “Yeah. I remember that our spring break came one week before the kid’s in the town. My brother and I used to watch them all walking home after school, and we would ask if we could go play with them, but my father would always say no. Anyhow, the last time we went there was the week before the town disappeared. I can remember everything about that week up until just after the fog rolled in.”
“The green fog?” asked Jack. “I remember hearing about that part.”
“Yeah, although it wasn’t so much green as it was lit up with green light, if that makes sense. It was thick, and rolled through the street almost like it was more liquid than cloud. And somewhere inside of it there was an electric energy that kept bursting into green light, almost like there was a thunderstorm going on inside of the mist. My brother and I were watching a movie, Toy Story to be exact, and were waiting for the kids to get out of school. We always liked to watch them walk down the street. It was kind of pathetic, really, but we even started giving them all fictional names and pretending like they were our friends. We were waiting for school to get out when the fog rolled in.”
Alma heard the coffee maker start to chug through the last drops of water. She wanted to get up and go to the kitchen, but realized that she was just trying to find an excuse to stop telling her story. She spun the ring on her finger and forced herself to continue. “My brother and I were terrified. We didn’t know what to do, and my brother…” She paused and stopped spinning the ring. “Jesus Christ, it’s even hard for me to remember his name. His name was Ben. I don’t know why I have so much trouble remembering it. Sometimes I can’t even remember what he looked like.”
“I have trouble remembering what my dad looked like,” said Jacker. “He died in a car accident when I was twelve. My mom says he looked like me, but I have trouble remembering much about him.”
Alma recognized that Jacker was sharing his own pain as a way of trying to help. The big guy was genuinely sweet, and Alma liked him almost immediately. He was the epitome of the teddy bear personality.
“Ben wanted to tell my dad about the fog, but I told him not to go up the stairs. I begged him not to go.”
Alma paused for too long, and Paul asked her, “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed uncomfortably and looked at them both as she shook her head. “That’s just it. I can remember everything leading up to Ben going up those stairs. I was standing at the bottom as Ben went up, and then the fog surrounded the cabin. It blocked out the sun and I can remember the shadows closing in over us. The green electricity flashed and the television died, but there was still light coming from up the stairs as Ben went up. I yelled out for him to stop, and that’s the last thing I can remember about what happened.”
“The next thing I recall is driving in the car with my father. We were in the fog, and there were shadows all around us, almost like there were creatures running through the mist beside us. They were huge, like dragons or monsters or something, but I couldn’t see what they were. The electricity kept flashing and my father was screaming at me to shut up, but I wasn’t saying anything. He was driving fast, and was leaning forward as if he was trying to see through the fog. I was curled up in my seat, and my brother was gone. The worst part of all it though was that I didn’t know Ben was supposed to be there. It was almost like I’d forgotten he ever existed.”
“We got out of the fog, and didn’t stop driving the whole way home except to get gas. I remember crying, a lot, and my father kept telling me to shut up. He told me that we were never in Widowsfield, and that nothing happened. He said that we were in a different town, called Forsythe, and that we never went through Widowsfield. And he kept checking his watch, over and over, for no apparent reason.”
Paul held Alma’s hand and she thanked him by the way she looked at him. His massive hand was so warm, and her thin fingers seemed to disappear in his grip. “Neither of us mentioned Ben until we got home, and then my mother went insane. I can remember her screaming and crying and shaking me, begging me to tell her what happened. It felt like she knew that my father had done something to Ben, and just needed me to confirm it, but I didn’t remember. Honestly, I didn’t even remember who Ben was anymore.”
“The police came, and my father was accused of all sorts of things, but no one could prove anything. I told them that we were in Widowsfield, but my father denied it. He said that we passed through the town on our way home, but that we’d been staying at a cabin in Forsythe. He even had the keys to prove it. The police eventually assumed I was making everything up, and that I had heard the rumors about what happened in Widowsfield. They couldn’t find any evidence that my father had done anything, so he was eventually cleared of all charges.”
“My mother never gave up, though. She was determined to find out what happened. She would take me back to Widowsfield, and try to get me to show her where the cabin was at, but I lied and said I didn’t know. I just didn’t want to go back there. My mother tried all sorts of tricks to get me to remember, including hypnosis, and even herbal concoctions that were supposed to help me remember past trauma. That’s how she got introduced to Chaos Magick.”
“What’s that?” asked Paul.
“You’ve actually probably heard of it, but didn’t know what it was,” said Alma. “Have you ever heard of The Secret? That book that Oprah used to talk about all the time?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Jacker.
“That’s basically the same thing as Chaos Magick. It’s the idea that if you focus on one thing, you can make it a reality. I never studied up on it, but my mother was obsessed with it. She said that we had to come up with a symbol that we could focus on that was tied to the day Ben disappeared. She started with his name, and would write it on slips of paper that she would hide all over the house, but when that didn’t work she decided to try the date.”
“March 14th?” asked Paul.
Alma nodded and took her ring off. “To be more specific, 314.” She held the ring up to show to them. “3.14 is also the number for pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”
“Uh oh,” said Paul as he made a goofy grin. “We’re not getting into math, are we? Because I suck at that.”
Alma shook her head and offered a grin. “No, not exactly. The reason it was important is because the date that my brother disappeared was also a symbol; the symbol for pi. In Chaos Magick, you’re supposed to choose a symbol that you can focus on to help force everything else out of your mind. My mother started writing 314 on everything, and then switched to the symbol for pi. She would force me to stare at it for what felt like hours at a time.”
“Wow,” said Jacker. “You had some nutball parents.”
“Well, the crazy thing is that it kind of worked.”
Both Jacker and Paul sat forward in anticipation of what Alma was going to say next.
“My mother found a scrap of paper that my father had written the cabin’s address on. She took me back to Widowsfield, to the cabin, and forced me to stare at the symbol. She kept asking about what happened, but I couldn’t remember anything. And you know how I was saying that I’d forgotten about Ben?”
Paul and Jacker nodded.
“That was still the case. I couldn’t remember anything about him except for what I saw in pictures. It was as if he’d never existed except for how my mother could prove that he did. It was in Widowsfield, when my mother was forcing me to look at the symbol for pi that I suddenly remembered who Ben was. I remember it so clearly. I was standing in the kitchen, and my mother had drawn the symbol on the kitchen floor and circled it with candles. She made me sit there and stare at it while I hummed a tune. Then, suddenly, everything came flooding back. It was the most intense and terrifying moment of my life. I can’t even explain what it was like. One minute I had no brother, and the next I was feeling such terror and grief over his loss. It was overwhelming.”