Jeronimo

 

There’s something weird about the fog here. It never happens in the manicured lawns of modern cemeteries—that flat expanse of stone markers, uniform little rectangles, all lined up in symmetrical rows. 

 

No, this fog only wells up in the old churchyards, those ghost cities packed with mausoleum houses and paved streets no one ever walks anymore, lit with flickering cobwebbed lampposts. That’s where he wanders: under the canopies of century old trees, where the grim shapes of the old crumbling graves peek behind overgrown ivy like ancient stone spirits—tombstones askew, green with moss, some split down the middle. Celtic crosses sport faded lettering, mystical symbols carved around the names and morbid epitaphs like skulls, bones and dancing skeletons. 

 

And through the fog, they seem to glow.  

 

The thing about the fog is how fast it happens. Like a drape pulled shut, everything blurs into grey haze in a single blink. ‘Don’t get caught in the Darken,’ they used to say in the nearby villages.  No one says that anymore, but they also don’t drive their cars that way. They switch off and then you’re stuck in the fog all night.

 

Because the only thing worse than being stranded in your car beside a cemetery, is making the mistake of getting out to walk away.

 

If you did, you’d not go a few steps before you got that portentous, dark feeling. That curious sensation that something waits beyond the darkness of the quiet graves. The unsettling whisper, the movement in the corner of your eye. The chilling touch that creeps up your spine. 

 

And that mysterious man. 

 

Once he arrives, you’ll wish you stayed in that car with the doors locked. Because he’s not really there. Surely not. Just stone angels kneeling in eternal prayer, watching with cold eyes. After all, who would visit the dead in the middle of the night? 

 

But perhaps a shadow was to sweep through the cemetery gates, leaving a swirl of leaves across the graveyard path. Footfalls, light and almost completely soundless, might surround you as the mists rise, like some ethereal fluid, to conceal what could be a mystical presence, quietly approaching. 

 

Yet the cemetery is so very still. And then a sense of creeping dread, as you somehow feel unwelcome. You urgently want to leave, but you’re trapped, because your phone’s dead and your car won’t start. Everything with a battery or plug, has fizzled out. 

 

When you wake up the next morning, frozen stiff in the driver’s seat and shivering painfully head to toe, you have no idea why you are there or what happened last night. 

 

The fog has evaporated.

 

And if there’s one thing Jeronimo knows, it’s that you’ll never remember the night you met him.