The Circle

They all stared

at the fog outside the window. Guy and his new girl friend Dana had been sitting under the window, and they'd moved into the center of the room. "What is it?" Dana asked. Her voice had a tremor in it that made Lesley even more frightened than before.
"It's called fog," Brian sneered. "Haven't you ever seen fog before?" He started for the door. "Look, I'll show it to you."
Don't---," Lesley started, but her throat caught before she could finish the sentence.
The candlelight glinted off Brian's moist lips and oily hair. "What's the matter with you guys'What are you afraid of?"
He jerked the door open.
The fog lay outside like a wall of cotton wool. The edge of it, where the door had been, was as smooth as if it had been sut with a razor. Not even the thinnest wisp tried to reach through the doorway. 
"See?" Brian said, sticking his arm into it. "Fog." Lesley saw his nose wrinkle, and then she smelled it herself. It was a salty, low-tide odor like dead fish.
"Yuck," Brian said. He took a step toward the porch of the cabin, lost his balance, and caught himself by gripping the molding on either side of the door. "What the hell?"
He extended one leg as it would go, then lay down and reached out into the fog. "There's nothing there."
"I don't like this," Susan said, but no one was listing to her. 
"No porch," Brian said, "no ground, nothing." Almost imperceptibly they all began to move closer to the fireplace. 
"Close the door," Walter said calrnly, and Brian did as he was told. "Lesley, what's the next line of the story?"
"With the fog came the sound of the wind. It howled and it screamed, but the air never moved and the fog lay heavy over the cabin."
The noise began.
It started as a low whistle, then built into a moaning, shrieking crescendo. It sounded less like a wind than a chorus of human voices, frightened and tortured out of their minds.
"Stop it!" Susan screamed. "Stop it, please make it stop!" Walter put his arms around her and held her head to his chest. She began to sob quietly. They were now a circle in fact, a tight circle on the floor in front of the fireplace, knees touching, eyes searching each other's faces for some sign of understanding. 
"What is it?" Dana cried. She was nearly shouting in order to be heard. 
"Where's coming from?"
Lesley and Walter looked at each other, then Lesley's gaze dropped to the floor.
"It's that story, isn't it?" Dana said, her voice so high it was starting to crack. 
"Isn't it?"
"It must be," Walter said. His voice was so low that Lesley could barley hear it over the howling outside. "Rob must have found something in Mexico. A Way to get back at us."
"This isn't happening," Brian said. "It's not. It can't be." 
"It is," Walter said, raising his voice over the wind. "Pretending it is not real is not going to help." Susan whimpered, and he held her tighter to his chest. 
"Look, we've all read stories like this. Some of us have written them. We all get irritated when people to accept what's happening to them. How long is it going to take for us to admit what's happening here?"
"All right," Brian said. "It's real. What do we do?"
Lesley said, "The paper and ink. Rob said they were special. In the story."
"Why don't we just burn the damned thing?" Brian said. "We should have done that in the first place." As if in answer, the wind roared up to a deafening volume.
"No," said Walter. He waited until the noise subsided again and added, "What if we burn it and trap ourselves here? If only we knew how it ends."
"That's easy enough," Brian said. He reached across and took the papers from Lesley's unresisting fingers.
"No!" Walter shouted, lunging at him, but Brian had already flipped over to the last page.
"We all die," he said, handing the story back to Lesley. "Not very well written, but pretty gruesome." His levity failed completely. The wind was so loud it seemed to Lesley that the walls should have been shaken to pieces.
"Ideas?" Walter said. "Anybody?"
"I say burn it," Brian said again. "What can happen?"
"Rewrite it," Lesley said.
"What?" Walter asked. Lesley realized that the awful noise had swallowed her words.
"Rewrite it!" she repeated. "Change the ending!"
"I like it," Walter said. "Guy?"
He shrugged. "Worth a try. Anybody got a pen?"
"No," Lesley said. "I don't think that'll work."
"Why not?"
"I think," she said. "It's written in blood."