Story 1. It Can Get Quite Foggy Near the Coast.
September.
The town of Dunwich was the kind of place that barely existed on maps. It lay crumbling on the Suffolk coast, its buildings swallowed by time, its people speaking in hushed tones of things best left forgotten.
Zemo and Bucky arrived just past dusk, their car rumbling through the town square under the watchful gazes of a few scattered villagers.
“You ever notice how every one of these places looks the same?” Bucky muttered, rubbing his metal arm, adjusting his coat. “Gray, damp, filled with people who look like they were born afraid.”
Zemo surveyed the nearly empty streets. “Makes you wonder what they’re afraid of.”
“Yeah, and why we’re the ones dumb enough to find out.”
They had been called here by a professor from Miskatonic University. Dr. Wentworth Latimer, whose frantic letter spoke of nightmares taking shape, of voices rising from the sea.
Now, Latimer was missing.
His cottage sat at the town’s edge, a lonely, weather-beaten structure perched too close to the ocean. They parked on the gravel drive and wandered up to the front door. The house was dark, but the door was unlocked.
Inside, a half-eaten meal still rested on the table. Books lay scattered across every surface, their pages filled with sketches of impossible shapes, diagrams of the human mind fraying into madness. The air smelled of salt and something else, something wrong.
Zemo tried the light switch. No luck.
They rummaged around and found a few candles and lanterns, so they used those for illumination.
Bucky lifted a sheaf of notes, his brow furrowing. “Looks like he was obsessed with the fog,” he said. He flicked through a few more sheets. “Keeps describing it as alive.”
“Alive?” Zemo queried, his voice barely above a whisper.
Bucky looked over at him and shrugged.
Zemo scanned the professor’s journal, flipping past entries written in an increasingly frantic hand. “And listen to this, James,” he said. “It comes from the sea,” he read aloud, his accent thick and his voice husky. “It watches. It whispers.”
Bucky stared flatly at Zemo and exhaled sharply. “I hate it when things whisper.”
Then, the door slammed shut. The candles spluttered and went out.
They both whirled, weapons drawn. The room had darkened, even the lanterns flickering as an unnatural mist coiled beneath the doorframe, creeping inward like living ghostly tendrils.
“Okay,” Bucky said. “That’s new.”
Zemo took a cautious step forward. “Fog doesn’t usually move like that.”
A shape stirred within it.
A voice, thin and layered with echoes, slithered through the air. You should not have come.
Bucky swallowed. “OK, then. I vote we go.”
Zemo tightened his grip on his golden revolver. “Not yet.”
The mist thickened, rising, congealing into something almost human. A vague silhouette, shifting and incomplete, its form stretching and unraveling like smoke in water. Its eyes, if they could be called that, gleamed with something old and knowing.
“Dr. Latimer?” Zemo ventured.
The figure shuddered violently. No longer, it rasped.
Zemo’s pulse quickened. “What happened to you?”
The voice twisted, words curling in on themselves. The tide called. He answered.
And then it lunged at them.
Zemo fired first, the shot tearing through the mist… and passing through it harmlessly.
Bucky emptied his own revolver, but the bullets dissolved into nothing.
“Plan B?” he shouted.
“The notes,” Zemo ran round the desk, putting it between him and the mist. He grabbed the professor’s journal, flipping desperately through pages. “There has to be something here.”
The figure surged forward, tendrils of fog reaching for them.
“Any time, Hel,” said Bucky, backing up.
Zemo’s eyes landed on a phrase scrawled over and over again: The names bind. The names bind.
“James!” he snapped. “Help me read this out!”
Bucky didn’t hesitate, running to Zemo’s side and grabbing a handful of notes. Together, they spoke the strange, jagged words aloud, their voices overlapping in imperfect harmony.
The fog stalled, and then, miraculously, recoiled.
The figure within shuddered, its form unraveling, its many voices crying out in pain. The mist thinned, curling away from the walls, retreating under the doorframe, back toward the sea.
And then, just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.
The lanterns flickered once, then steadied. The room smelled of old paper and gunpowder again.
Bucky let out a slow breath, running his metal hand through his hair. “That was close. Too close.”
Zemo exhaled, his grip loosening on the journal. “We need to find out what Latimer knew.”
Bucky shook his head. “Pretty sure he knew too much.”
They exchanged a look - one that spoke of too many nights spent staring into the unknown - then they gathered up Latimer’s papers and journals.
Outside, the fog was rolling back from the shore and out across the sea.
Watching.
Waiting.
***