London, 1903
Day 23 of the Disappearances
The fog had teeth tonight.
At least, that's what Thomas Webb thought as he ran through the narrow alleys of Whitechapel, his boots slapping against wet cobblestones, his breath tearing from his lungs in ragged gasps. Behind him—close, too close—something moved through the mist. Something that didn't walk so much as flow, like oil poured across glass.
Twenty-three days ago, a man named Edward Pritchard vanished from his bed in Edinburgh. His wife woke to find his side of the mattress cold, the window locked from the inside, no sign of struggle. Just... gone.
Three days later, ten people disappeared from a textile factory in Manchester. Mid-shift. Witnesses reported a "thickness" in the air, a smell like spoiled milk, and then screaming that cut off all at once. When the foreman unlocked the floor, he found ninety workers standing at their stations, tools in hand, staring at the ten empty spaces where their colleagues had been.
None of them remembered what happened.
By day ten, the number was one hundred and seven. By day fifteen, three hundred and forty-two. The disappearances were accelerating, spreading like plague across Britain, then France, then Germany. The papers called it mass hysteria. The police called it impossible. The churches called it God's judgment.
Thomas Webb, sixteen years old, son of a dock worker and a seamstress, called it the thing that was hunting him through the fog.
He'd seen it take Mrs. Chen from the laundry two streets over. Seen the way her scream turned liquid in her throat, the way her body seemed to fold inward like paper being crumpled, and then—nothing. Just the wet slap of something moving away into the darkness.
He should have run then.
He'd run now instead, and now was too late.
The fog ahead of him thickened, congealed, and Thomas skidded to a stop, his back hitting the brick wall of a closed butcher shop. The street had become a dead end. No—it had always been a dead end, he just hadn't noticed until the thing herding him wanted him to notice.
Clever girl, some hysterical part of his mind whispered, and he almost laughed.
The fog pulled apart like curtains.
What stood there defied his mind's ability to process it. His eyes saw it—his brain simply refused the information.
It was white.
Not the white of snow or bone or pure cloth, but a white that hurt to look at, a white that seemed to exist in a frequency just beyond what human eyes were meant to perceive. The color of nothing. The color of absence.
Its shape was almost human—two legs, two arms, a torso, a head—but everything was wrong. The proportions stretched and compressed in ways that made Thomas's stomach lurch. Arms too long, with too many joints that bent in directions joints shouldn't bend. Legs that seemed to flex backward and forward with equal ease, as if the concept of "knees" was merely a suggestion.
And its hands—God, its hands—weren't hands at all. The arms simply tapered into points, sharp and surgical, like the world's cruelest needles.
But the face.
Thomas's bladder nearly let go when he saw the face.
It was smooth. Perfectly, horribly smooth. No eyes. No nose. No ears. Just blank white surface that rippled like milk disturbed by an invisible breath—and a slit.
Vertical. Crown to chin. A seam in reality that slowly, slowly began to peel open.
Inside was worse.
Layer upon layer of writhing protrusions, each one like a finger, each one tipped with a tiny mouth that whispered. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All moving independently, all whispering words in languages that sounded like drowning, like suffocation, like the last breath leaving a dying man's lungs.
"hungry... hungry... HUNGRY..."
The words overlapped, echoed, harmonized into a symphony of need.
Thomas tried to scream. His throat locked. His legs wouldn't move. Every instinct in his body screamed RUN, but his muscles had turned to water, his bones to lead.
The thing moved.
Not walked. Moved. One moment it stood ten feet away; the next it was three feet closer, as if it had simply skipped the space between. Those terrible pointed arms rose, the face-slit peeling wider, the finger-mouths reaching, grasping—
Thomas fell backward, his hands scrabbling at the wet bricks, and the thing was on him, around him, that vertical mouth opening impossibly wide, wide enough to swallow a man whole, and the smell—God, the smell of spoiled milk and rotting copper and something else, something ancient and wrong—
The finger-mouths touched his face.
And then they were in his mouth, down his throat, and Thomas was falling—no, being pulled—into that white body, into the hollow space inside it, and everything went black and wet and silent.