The Mists of Time

It’s been some time now, hasn’t it?

I suppose I should explain why that is.

 

I didn’t expect it. I had just stepped outside on a cool January night when a thick fog rolled in from nowhere.

And just like that, all the lights went out, all along the street.

Allow me to return to something I mentioned before I left. The note from my sister. Susan.

She said she’d met the Pale Maiden, that she’d seen through the Mists of Time. I myself had already met the Pale Maiden by the time I had begun telling my story.

 

Now, I have been within the Mists of Time.

I see why Susan called it that. It’s a place of eternal fog, everything hazy and cold. The ground is covered in countless artifacts of the past, books and CDs and pieces of paper. I tried digging at one point, and it never stopped going down. I have to wonder if perhaps the objects themselves are the ground.

 

There was nothing that ever belonged to anyone I know. I suspect it’s the same for everyone else who finds themself there. It’s a world where you find yourself surrounded by relics of strangers’ pasts, with the only hope of finding your own being a false one.

 

I’m afraid my story may not have a happy ending. I am going to try to get into a mental institution, for my own protection as much as anything else. If the Pale Maiden finds me once more, my disappearance may at least have a witness. And if it is all in my head, if my mind was so broken by the horror of my sister’s disappearance that it altered my memories and made me hallucinate being trapped in a world of endless fog, perhaps they can help with that.

If this fails, I don’t know what else I can do. I can only pray the Pale Maiden doesn’t take anything more from me.

 

I’m just so tired of trying to hold onto the past.

A conversation with my parents

My parents had me over for dinner yesterday. They could tell that I wanted to say something, but I was unsure of how to broach the subject—“hello, Mom and Dad, I’m afraid I may have a sister who was erased from our memories by a woman with pure white eyes?”

Perhaps fortunately, I did not have to do so.

My mom spoke first.

 

“James, I’m sorry.”

She had tears in her eyes.

“I’m sorry about Susan. It wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”

 

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I know.”

“What is it, James?” Dad asked, placing his hand on mine. “You look like you have something to say.”

 

My throat felt tight.

 

“I… I don’t remember her,” I finally managed to say.

 

“What?”

 

“I don’t remember her,” I said again. “I don’t know why not. It's like she’s been taken from my memories. And it scares me.”

 

Mom and Dad looked at each other.

 

“Son,” Dad said, “do you… do we need to take you to a therapist, or…?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t… don’t know. Maybe.” I sighed. “You know, I saw this woman, the night she disappeared. A pale woman with pure white eyes. And I swear to God, I had this sense that something was wrong afterwards, that there was something missing, and I think it’s her. I think she took Susan from me. I know this sounds insane, but it’s true. Or it’s something I truly experienced, at least. I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

 

That night, I dreamed of pale white eyes.

Susan Templeton

I recently purchased a book at the store where I work entitled The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The book in question is comprised of clippings and transcripts collected from newspapers, notebooks, etc. by one Matthias Clark. All of these materials deal in some way with the strange and unexplained.

Of particular note is a transcript from the journal of Susan Templeton, a young woman who disappeared in 2014. The last thing she wrote before she disappeared was that she had “seen the Pale Maiden” and “walked through the Mists of Time.”

And this is why I have chosen to tell my story. You see, the photograph enclosed of Susan Templeton looks remarkably like myself, and my name is James Templeton.

Aftermath

When I realized that day that I had forgotten something, my first instinct was to try to remember. I knew that something was deeply strange about her, and I have always believed that something was out there more than our world, but I was not yet ready to believe that I myself had gone through such an encounter. I was certain that whatever I had lost, it was something I could recover.

It took me years to accept that I was wrong.

There are so many things we lose throughout our lives. The worst, however, are those we forget: sentences that slip our minds before we can speak them, stories we wrote long ago and cannot find again, songs of which we remember only fragments. These are the pieces we lose when we are broken apart.

The pale woman

My name is James. I am a bookstore employee living in Michigan.

That said, I would like to talk about something very peculiar that happened to me several years ago.

It was a crisp midwinter evening, and I was walking home from the local café, where I had been writing poetry. I was nearly at my home when I noticed someone with white hair and ragged winter clothes, bent over and digging through a pile of trash in an alleyway. I was prepared to write it off and continue walking when the stranger turned around, revealing themself to be a young woman with pure white eyes.

When I awoke in a nearby park several hours later, I realized I was clasping my hands tight over my ears, though I could not remember why.

I know that I forgot something that day. I know, deep in my heart, that when I met her, I lost something.

I do not know what I lost. I do not even know why I think I forgot something that night, save for the fact that all I remember of her face was the sight of her pale and empty eyes.