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Fantasy Stories

Scraps of Fog

Written by Sarah A. Hoyt

Illustrated by Jennifer Miller

Sandra saw the ghost in the patio, but only for a moment.

She threw open the back door of her grandmother's house—the house where she'd lived her whole life—onto the thick white fog that sometimes blanketed the north of Portugal on summer mornings.

The fog, milky-white and thick, pushed tendrils into the cool, stone-paved kitchen, like children's fingers exploring a candy box, and Sandra wrapped her arms around herself.

It was then she saw him on the patio—a man atop a tall white horse. A man with short red hair and piercing blue-gray eyes, looking straight at her.

"Who—" she started, stepping forward. But the fog roiled, and there was nothing there, nothing where she thought she'd seen a horse or a man. Which made perfect sense, she thought to herself, as she shivered, in her T-shirt and jeans. After all, the patio, with its pergola roof, through which green grapevines threaded, was at the back of the house, and it and the fields it bordered on were enclosed in seven-foot stone walls. A man might have climbed over it, but a horse—never.

She turned back into the house, shaking her head. She was imagining things. It was all the pressure of having to clean the house, of disposing—somehow—of the clutter of the four generations who'd lived in the house before her, of putting the house up for sale. Of marrying Miguel. Of moving.

She filled a teakettle, set it on the stove. The kitchen had a tiny sink, a narrow complement of cabinets, a single faucet. The gas stove, almost an antique, sat across the broad kitchen from the Franklin stove it had replaced.

The rest of the kitchen was cavernous and bare, calling for children or women chatting, for the bustle it had known for most of its existence. On the far side, [Change okay?] at the innermost wall, a broad pine table and twelve chairs sat, awaiting a family that would never cluster around it.

Sandra held the match, ready to blow it out, but frowned, instead, at the table. It, and the chairs, had been made by Sandra's great-grandfather. It had seen generations of children and grandchildren sit around it, enjoyed lively argument and calm conversation, wedding feasts and funeral dinners. And now all the family were gone, to Brazil, to Venezuela, to lands near and far, where their fortune seemed better, or to the grave, to sleep—as quaint Bible language would have it—with their ancestors. All except for Sandra, who would soon marry and go live in Miguel's condo. But what was to become of the table?

The phone rang, waking her. She blew out the match just before the flame reached her fingers, and tossed the burnt bit into the sink.

****

"Have you taken the day off from work?" Miguel's voice, issued from the old-fashioned black Bakelite phone in the hallway, all brisk curtness and businesslike, to the point. He spoke with the detachment of someone who is also typing a document, looking over a planner—anything but performing a single action at a time.

Sandra tried to suppress her annoyance at his remoteness. He was a busy port wine reseller, a man whose day to day involved tens of business calls. That she was his fiancée meant nothing. Theirs had never been an arrangement of love.

Oh, he told her often enough that he needed her. And it was true. He needed a wife to run his household, to organize his parties, to play the society lady to his successful business career. And she needed—she looked around at the narrow hallway, mahogany-paneled by some affluent Victorian ancestor, and crammed with occasional tables, silk flower arrangements and an old rosewood love seat—she needed someone to break the lonely days of her life since her grandmother's death a year ago. And someone to take her away from her job as a policewoman in downtown Porto—what remained of the medieval area of town, the most decayed and run-down of urban slums. She'd taken the job years ago with the idea that she could do some good, help some of the people down there, discourage juvenile offenders, solve crimes.

But she'd found herself bumping into the velvet ceiling of traditional Portuguese machismo. It wasn't that the men working with her thought poorly of her abilities—though they probably did—but that they thought it their duty to shield her from everything dangerous or even too unpleasant. And, unlike other countries, Portugal had no apparatus to enforce its antidiscrimination laws.

So her desk piled high, daily, with minor vandalism cases, with the cases of juveniles from other, more affluent parts of town who came to Ribeira to joyride in stolen cars, or to buy pot, or to cause a drunken disturbance in a picturesque restaurant.

She was held at bay from real life, from the police work she'd truly trained for. She was kept apart from the world that she'd hoped to improve.

"Well, did you take the day off?" Miguel asked.

"Yes." Sandra woke. "Yes, of course. I told you I was going to go through the attic today, see if I can get all the old letters and papers together and light a bonfire in the patio. Although if it will burn with this heat, it's something—"

"You know, you probably could sell those old pictures," Miguel said. "And the papers to an antique store."

"No." She might not recognize anyone in those pictures. She might not even know most of the people who'd sent letters from South Africa or France, or England—but they'd been relatives who had emigrated long ago. Or relatives of relatives. Or friends of relatives. She could no more sell them than she would sell her relatives. Not that she liked burning them. But modern life didn't allow for the sentimental clutter of generations past and she had to do something with it all. Best burned than violated by the hands of strangers, she thought.

Miguel didn't understand. He made a sound that was not quite a sigh—an exhalation of annoyance. "Okay. But, you know, the house is not going to bring much and—"

"I thought you'd agreed to take me in my shift," she said. He had. They'd been friends since childhood, and when they'd contracted their passionless match, he'd wanted her to quit right away, a year and half ago. To quit her job and get pretty dresses and start studying the role of a society wife. He'd offered to support her. He'd said she had no need of working. No need of putting herself through any unpleasantness.

"That's not it," he said. "I just hate to see you wasting money. People pay good money for old pictures, so they can pretend to have known ancestors."

She didn't answer. She'd long ago learned, in their childhood tussles and arguments, that the only thing Miguel couldn't counter was silence.

At length he spoke again, and his voice, momentarily engaged in their dispute, had become remote and calm again. "At any rate, I'm sending an antiques dealer over," he said. "For the furniture. Your grandmother's washstand, in her room, the one with the dog's heads, I'm sure it is worth a lot of money. And even that kitchen table. Primitive is in, you know."

"Couldn't we keep it?" she asked. "If it's in?" But even as she spoke, she could see the tiny dining room of Miguel's condo in Boavista, the most upscale of districts, long known as the Portuguese Hollywood.

Miguel didn't answer, which was his way of countering her ridiculous suggestion. "Anyway," he said, "I just wanted to make sure you would be there when the dealer came. And I wanted to ask if we could go out to dinner today?"

"Probably not," she said. "I'll be busy." He was so used to going out to dinner that his idea of getting together was meeting at an expensive restaurant. Where, doubtless, he would feel forced to hold her hand across the table, just for the sake of appearances.

He sighed at the other end. "All right, then. Another time."

And he hung up, without saying good-bye, as he usually did.

Sandra set the receiver down, dismayed. She could no more think of selling that table than she could think of selling the family pictures. She tried to imagine it serving as someone's fashionable dining-room table in some ultramodern apartment and cringed. To her, the table was too intimately associated with her grandmother, who'd raised her after Sandra's parents emigrated to Brazil.

They had left her behind because she was only one, and sickly. They were supposed to send for her. They were always supposed to send for her. But first, she'd been frail, and they'd been penniless. And then, as time passed, and they had other children, the matter had simply dropped away and Sandra had been glad of it. This was her home, this village of Aguas Santas, between the Atlantic Ocean and the mountain ridge that separated Portugal from Spain. This land of small family farms—so tiny that, from a plane, they looked like handkerchiefs dotting the landscape—had become part of her blood, as it had been part of the blood of her relatives before her.

She loved the broad main street, bordered on either side by two-floored houses, which touched each other on each side, presenting the impression of an unbreakable facade to the world. And she loved the life beneath those facades—the people who knew her because they'd known her mother and father, her grandmother, the passing generations of Sousas. She loved the sprawling private backyards and the fields extending beyond them.

But now her grandmother was dead, and her career might as well be. The people in the houses had seemed to disappear, as, increasingly old, they spent the time in their bedrooms or their beds. Children and grandchildren had already left, to nearby Porto or to more distant parts—to Lisbon, throughout Europe, overseas.

Only she remained. And she could not stand the loneliness anymore.

She'd backed up, till she sat on the bottom step of the staircase, holding her head in her hands. She did not want to leave the village, but she wanted to marry Miguel.

Oh, he wasn't the love of her life, but at almost thirty she knew that she was too rational, too analytical to fall in love. Love was something, like the ballads and stories her grandmother used to tell her—the stories of princesses and werewolves and the King Sebastian who would one day come back upon his white steed to mend all wrongs and set every maiden free.

In Sandra's world, she had to set herself free. And she'd been doing miserably at it.

Miguel had offered, and he was an old friend, not repulsive, someone she could live with. And even when he opposed her, he never treated her as a child.

Unlike the men at the station.

****

The phone rang. She got up. It was probably Miguel, who'd booked another furniture dealer. Or perhaps an old letters and photos dealer.

But when she picked up the receiver, the voice that greeted her was Costa, desk sergeant at the Ribeira station. "Sandra, come in," he said.

He sounded excited, or amused, like a man who is laughing, inside, at some joke.

"I'm taking the day off, remember?" She wondered if they'd planned some sort of party for her, as she was quitting to get married within the month. If she'd been a male, she'd have known that this secret laughter of Costa's meant they had already hired the stripper to jump out of the cardboard layer cake.

But she wasn't male. And she didn't think Costa or any of his confreres would even think of hiring a male stripper.

"I know, but you want to come in," he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and right up your alley."

"My alley?" That meant, doubtless, that it was a particularly inventive form of vandalism, or perhaps the theft of a really expensive car by joyriding teenagers.

"No," Costa said. "You'll never believe this. It's a kid, twenty or so, picked up at the museum of Henry the Navigator. He was throwing a fuss, claiming to be King Sebastian."

"King Sebastian? Hold a moment." She'd heard the kettle whistle and ran to the kitchen to turn it off. Cordless phones hadn't been part of her grandmother's belief system, and Sandra had not thought it sufficiently worthwhile to push the matter.

How strange that someone had been claiming to be King Sebastian just as she was thinking of the legendary king who, tradition said, would return, despite close to five hundred years having passed since his death at Alcazar Kibir. When she returned to the phone, she had her answer ready. "Has he been checked for drugs?"

"Yeah. Clean. Not drunk either."

"But then he's mad. Surely he knows that King Sebastian died around 1580."

Costa made a sound like he'd just clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Oh, he knows. But he says he's returned, on a foggy morning."

Sandra thought of the patio, immersed in smoke, and the brief illusion of the man on the white horse. She sucked in a breath. She was going crazy. No, she was already crazy, or she wouldn't have seen the man. Perhaps it was the pressure of cleaning the house and moving.

Who could completely clean the pigeonholes stuffed full of papers in the library, the confusion of suitcases in the attic, the furniture and wood in what had once been her grandfather's workshop? Who could even hope to dispose of all of it—the varied clutter of generations?

Her mind told her Miguel could. But Miguel, though he'd grown up in Aguas Santas, was the son of recent immigrants, his parents having come from the city, Porto, to which Miguel had now returned. What could he know of the smell of wild roses down in the lanes amid the fields in the summer? What could he know of the houses, closed, rank on rank, keeping their own secrets, their own untouched, inviolate counsel through succeeding generations?

She shook her head. That had nothing to do with it. It was just the work.

"If you don't come in," Costa said, "they're just going to send him over to Conde Ferreira. And then, who knows when he'll get out."

Conde Ferreira, once the palace of the Counts of Ferreira and now the largest mental hospital in town, was a morass of paperwork and delay, a feud of dueling psychiatrists.

"I don't think he's that nuts," Costa said. "I think he just snapped, like Jorge last year, over the promotion examinations, remember, when he ended up downtown, holding the statue's horse?"

She remembered. Jorge, a young recruit to the force had tried to take the examinations to become an officer, and in the midst of studying, something had snapped, making him think he was some sort of medieval ensign to some long-forgotten king. He'd been found downtown, holding the stone reins of a sculpted horse.

As she was in danger of snapping, she supposed, over the stress of cleaning her grandmother’s house.

But, in Portugal, where the ages and centuries, the past glory and the immense weight of lost empire always seemed to press close upon the living, this type of illusion could hardly be called madness, requiring incarceration. It was as though sometimes, the past, more glorious and much greater than the drab present, pressed upon the brains of the living till it found a point of entry, a weakened link.

Sandra remembered a girl—Isabel—in her fourth-grade class, who had decided she was the queen of the same name, dead in the thirteenth century and canonized shortly thereafter. Throughout the final quarter of the year she had talked about being the Queen Isabel and how her crown weighed heavy upon her brow. But the next year, after vacation, she'd come in fully restored. She was now a secretary in Porto, happily married and none the worse for the wear.

But if the boy went to Conde Ferreira, who knew? Psychiatrists didn't have the calm of the common people about this kind of thing.

She drummed her fingers against the mahogany paneling. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm coming in."

Even if her job was being a glorified social worker, she was still the only person in the station who had the slightest interest in saving the young.

She closed the kitchen door behind her, locked it, and