I
The fog persisted, turning the world to a strange and muffled place, and
seeming by its secrecy to favour the evil deeds of men. Within its
shroud a man bent on dark purposes might creep unobserved by his
fellow-beings. It could be imagined to breed such purposes, as miasmic
places breed fantastic lights and unwholesome growths. It was the more
oppressive because it had no tangible weight; only the moral weight, and
the obscuring of vision. It was a foul-playing foe, insidious and
feline, not to be lifted by strength, or countered by resistance. It was
stealthily horrible, as the destroyer of clarity, setting itself mutely
but quite implacably against all bright and manifest things, against the
proclamation of the sun and the sweet glory of the breeze. Like an
influence that intentionally confuses clear thought and strong
endeavour, discolouring all that is pure, fostering all that is obscure
and fungoid, it made more difficult the road of the traveller, and,
waiting ever outside the doors of houses, tried to slip in its
unwholesome presence through any crack of door opened to admit it. It
wreathed strangely around the corners of houses so entered. The
inhabitants of Abbot’s Etchery spoke of it as a living thing. “He’s
terrible thick to-day,” they said, or else, “He’s not thinking of going
away from us as yet.”