Ch.58Ch.5 – The Dead City Dreams and Waits (13)

The road to 13th Avenue was congested. Cars refused to yield. Even the Pollard police, rarely seen in person, were out directing traffic.

“Walters! Did you really transfer to Traffic?”

The youngest constable from the Investigation Department grumbled at Crayfield’s question.

“I was called in on my day off! It’s chaos because of the fog.”

Constable Walters pointed across the street. I craned my neck to look outside and indeed saw gray fog swirling.

“It’s sea fog rolling in from the eastern ocean.”

“What kind of sea fog crawls all the way up to an island?”

“If I knew that, I’d be working at the Weather Bureau! Hey! Stop! Stop!”

Walters disappeared, blowing his whistle repeatedly. Crayfield struck the steering wheel a couple of times.

“Fog. Fog. From the east? Eastern sea? Not good. This is really not good.

Fog on an island is normal, and the whole island being shrouded in fog happens.

It can even surround the entire island. But fog rolling in like waves from the eastern coast?”

I asked what was worrying him.

“Dagon. Hydra. Cthulhu. They’re all connected to the sea.

Dagon and Hydra go without saying, and isn’t R’lyeh, where Cthulhu sleeps, described as an underwater city?

The brave Norwegian Gustaf Johansen was also at sea when he charged toward Cthulhu with his steamship.

And now this fog suddenly comes from the eastern coast. Of course it’s not good.”

Looking ahead, cars were streaming out from 13th Avenue. Something was clearly causing a major disturbance up ahead.

Even cars heading toward 13th Avenue were attempting U-turns, making the road terribly chaotic.

The compass tracking our protagonist was in my hand, its angle changing by the second. It meant he was moving away from us.

Finally, Crayfield drove onto the sidewalk. As he honked and shouted, people cursed and moved aside.

After narrowly missing a fruit stand, he parked the car in a suitable spot in an alley and turned off the engine.

1929. 5. 12. PM 6:32

15th Avenue Alley

Pollard City

We got out.

The alley was already filled with fog up to our ankles. Panicked people could be seen hurrying into their homes and locking their doors.

“This isn’t fog, it’s like a swamp or downpour. Look at this.”

Crayfield scooped up a handful of the ground fog. It flowed through his fingers like accidentally caught fortune. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to stick to clothes or skin.

Then we encountered some unwelcome pedestrians. White Hand mafia members were glaring at us from the alley.

Two in front, one behind. We were surrounded. Everyone had guns in hand, though they weren’t aimed yet.

“Well, shall we tango, friends? I hear it still counts as dancing even if you trip and fall.”

“We can help you not trip. Great Mr. Crayfield. You’ve got nerve, causing trouble in our territory, huh?”

A female member with a distinctive square jaw sneered.

“By shooting at your feet.”

“Oh. Try it if you can. I can’t even see my feet in this fog, and neither can you.”

Suddenly Crayfield raised his revolver.

“Move!”

The gang member behind us also raised his gun. The two in front quickly ducked.

When the gunshot rang out, screams and the sound of windows hastily closing echoed from nearby houses.

‘Something’ collapsed with a thud under the fog, but then stirred again.

“Marco! Imelda! Over here! It’s still alive!”

The gang member behind shouted, and the two others ran behind us. With a growling sound, ‘it’ rose to its feet.

Its body was human, though swollen in places with pus and blood flowing.

The torn blouse and knee-length skirt indicated that it had once been a person, a woman.

But it no longer looked human.

Its lower jaw dangled like a napkin in front of its neck, and from inside its mouth protruded a dog’s head.

It looked like a wolf or dog wearing a living person’s head like a helmet.

The gang member behind fired again. With a yelping sound, the creature leaped up from the ground.

It wasn’t hit.

The terrified gang members fired randomly, but the creature, seemingly deciding this was futile, whimpered and ran away on all fours toward the back of the alley.

Crayfield and I reloaded and chased after it.

I could hear the gang members shouting something behind us, but we couldn’t spare attention for them.

“It’s a ghoul.”

Crayfield whispered as we ran through the alley.

“Remember the Omeli gang’s restaurant hostess who said she saw a human wearing a wolf mask? No. Wrong. Those are wolves wearing human masks. They live like humans normally, but when their true nature emerges, they transform like that. How do I know?”

Crayfield, pressed against a wall, fired a couple of shots into the air. With a yelp, something rolled down from the fence.

“Because I’ve encountered them! Listen. They’re hideous but killable, so don’t be afraid.

The real problem isn’t them. Ghouls roaming so openly means there’s a priest somewhere.

The fog is rising higher? It’s almost up to our knees now. Wait…”

Crayfield examined the buildings. They were densely packed together.

“Going this way is a perfect way to die. Let’s cross over the rooftops instead. If we get stuck, we can always come back down.”

Fortunately, a door leading to the roof was open.

It also helped that the roofs in this area weren’t steep gables but gentle slopes.

Since the gaps between buildings weren’t too wide, Crayfield and I could easily jump between them.

“Look.”

Crayfield pointed to the street below.

We could see ghouls writhing through the alleys under the fog.

Like salmon leaping through currents, they kept jumping above the flowing fog.

They were running somewhere. In the direction the compass pointed, where our protagonist was.

“It would be inconvenient to die.”

Finally, we reached the infamous 13th Avenue. It was an ordinary urban district with a main road in the center and small three- and four-story buildings lined up on both sides. But not anymore. White, writhing fog continued to rise as if a freezer warehouse had burst open. Now it had risen almost halfway up the first floor.

Music could be heard.

It wasn’t an illusion. It was definitely music. The violin’s uniquely delicate, sobbing melody.

Yet it was played haphazardly, as if carelessly scraping the strings against the body.

It wasn’t the performance of someone who understood beauty. It was the performance of a technician who merely understood that rubbing in this way produced sound.

I knew this sound. It was the same performance by the cemetery keeper I had heard when I descended into the southern underground cemetery with Sister Abassina.

The building moved.

“What?”

It wasn’t just my perception. The building was really moving. Subtly, shaking. The fog climbed the walls of the buildings.

Like an army of countless corpses forcibly climbing a fortress wall. The screams and shouts of people inside the buildings could be heard clearly from here.

And then we saw it.

CRUNCH

The second floor of the building in front of us collapsed entirely. Crayfield turned his head away. But at my urgent gesturing, he saw the second floor slowly extending again.

CRUNCH!

What should we call it? Should we say the building folded and unfolded like an accordion? Or should we say it was like a crusher moving up and down?

It was clearly chewing the people on the second floor.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

The fog-covered buildings trembled. They chewed what was inside them.

Crayfield and I watched as the fog grabbed fleeing people and threw them into the buildings’ maws!

“The buildings are chewing people! The buildings are eating people!”

Screams echoed from the streets. The violin’s laughter agitated the fog. An entire district, like a writhing stomach, like a chewing maw, devoured people!

“Help! Help!”

It was the fog. The fog lifted people like tentacles.

It placed people into the maws of buildings that chewed up and down! The entire district was a dining table for buildings!

“It has begun.”

Crayfield staggered. The building we stood on was also shaking up and down.

Like gourmets sitting at a table, elegantly and nobly chewing while shaking their heads, so did this building.

Tick.

The clock struck four.

WOOOOO –

The sound of steel bending. The sound of a massive crane collapsing. The sound of a huge structure tilting under its own weight. The sound of an enraged whale in fury!

WOOOOOOOOO –

Fog rose from the middle of the intersection. Buildings crawled like awakened giants.

Buildings that left their places collided with each other. Toothed buildings stacked on and devoured each other!

Buildings spitting red blood like saliva struck each other like giant hands!

KYARANG! KYARANG!

Ghouls eagerly tore at corpses. The cemetery keeper played the violin with fervor.

The fog rose like a pointed tower, like the Tower of Babel built by those arrogant humans, piercing the sky!

“Assistant!”

Crayfield shouted. He pointed to the side. The adjacent building, still chewing its third floor, was colliding toward us.

“Jump! We need to get down! Follow my signal, let’s jump down the side of the building! One, two, three! Now!”

Like a house of cards collapsing in the wind, the adjacent building pushed against ours.

The building we stood on tilted as if refusing to yield.

Thanks to this, the building wall developed a slope, and although it was somewhat steep, Crayfield and I ran down the incline.

As soon as we reached the bottom, Crayfield fired his gun. There was a ping sound, and the cemetery keeper’s body staggered.

When the violin sound abruptly stopped, the fog that had been frantically rising toward the sky ceased growing.

But that was all.

Having completely lost control, the buildings began to rampage. Bricks flew everywhere and broken glass whipped around.

The fog, like a mucous monster wearing buildings as clothes, was causing havoc.

The ghouls began to claw and bite each other, and meanwhile, the cemetery keeper disappeared into the fog.

Crayfield put away his gun and grabbed a fallen sign from the ground. Uprooted from the road, it resembled a long spear.

With a “KIYAT!” he made a great leap and impaled a ghoul mid-jump.

As the impaled ghoul convulsed, blood sprayed everywhere, and its fighting kin tore it apart and devoured it.

To an outsider, it would look like starving humans tearing apart and eating another human alive.

“You sons of bitches!”

The howling Crayfield shot at a fire hydrant installed on the road.

The burst of water struck the ghouls. Dazed by the water blast, the ghouls scattered in all directions, and in that gap, we ran toward the direction indicated by the compass.

It was the tower of fog in the middle of 13th Avenue.