He would never forget the first object he had found—it had been a stupidly conical cheese grater. Its design had been thoroughly impractical, more for display than for anything else—and not a very attractive display at that. To begin with, as he lived alone, he thought that somebody could have snuck into his house and left it there as an obscure joke, although that had been a rather worrying prospect, since all the doors and windows had remained appropriately locked.
That morning, conversations had begun to spring up everywhere. You will never guess what just happened to me… except, of course, many could, as it had just happened to them too. Only then did the counter-conversations begin to flourish. That is all very well, but quite the opposite happened to me overnight… yet, of course, quite the opposite had also already happened to everybody else over the preceding weeks—they were only just beginning to realise it.
This was how it continued—sometimes objects were taken, sometimes objects appeared. Nobody with any credibility had actually seen either of the processes happen, yet the correlation with the fog quickly became indisputable. It was hard to avoid the speculation that the new arrivals seemed to be condensed from the very stuff itself, whereas those that disappeared were dissolved into it; this clearly did not fit with the fact that the fog remained politely outside one’s house whilst allegedly exerting these implausible effects. Video surveillance demonstrated conclusively that something highly unusual was going on, but it ultimately proved no more enlightening than that. Everything occurred between frames, with no incriminating traces of vapour to be seen; it were as if objects were being cleanly edited into or out of existence.
The only exceptions were those recordings that captured instances of objects being helped to disappear by less mysterious means—a few opportunists sought to profit from the situation by breaking into buildings on ordinary misty nights and making away with whatever they fancied, often planting some cheap and meaningless decoy items to redirect the blame. However, such operations were difficult to execute convincingly and were largely unsuccessful; the better class of criminal knew that it would only really be possible under the cover of the true fog and, once that had descended, the whole endeavour would become rather perilous. As if to prove that it was not really worth the hassle, two burglars were once interrupted about their work and were forced to make a panicked, unsighted getaway through the fog; their bodies were discovered the next day, having blindly slipped down a riverbank, to drown amongst the reeds. Afterwards, things rather quietened down on that front.
Instead, more legitimate undertakings began to flourish. Once the fog had dissipated, people emerged with carts, travelling from house to house, offering to buy up any newly arrived items or promising to keep a lookout for anything that had gone missing, for a modest finder’s fee. He was always more than happy to get rid of everything, but others held on to what they had received, either to keep for themselves—after all, sometimes something genuinely useful turned up—or else to trade directly at the town square, which was then hastily transformed into a lively market.
There, the carts were unloaded and one could browse the stalls for one’s own lost property or acquire other people’s unwanted condensates, as they began to be called. Amongst the assembly, there were often several weird objects that were obviously defective or simply strange—in the most peculiar of cases, they seemed to be spliced together from at least two rather more mundane items. Some people were fascinated, even fixated, by such things and they became prized almost as objets d’art. His deepest suspicions had mellowed over time and he now viewed these hybrids with curiosity, rather than hostility; similarly, he now visited the market with the same attitude, instead of avoiding it entirely—yet he never bought anything there, especially not if he saw something eerily familiar, something that might once have belonged to him.
This was a point of some contention—was anything ever truly returned? Although certain objects did appear to recondense after a period of time, they were never restored to their original locations and, more often than not, were rediscovered in an entirely different part of town. Furthermore, a cursory analysis would often reveal that they had been subtly changed in some way; even if they looked identical, his impression was that they felt intrinsically altered by whatever process they had undergone. Still, plenty were happy to welcome back their apparently prodigal possessions and were willing to ignore any underlying inconsistencies, perceptible or otherwise.
He had made a complete inventory of all items he had knowingly lost and everything that had appeared inside his home, in addition to noting any sightings of condensates that were masquerading as his missing property at the market. He continued to find no intelligible pattern, but he kept up the activity regardless—the ledger had become part of the routine. Of course, he had to make two records, copying out the list again, in case his primary notebook was taken. Redundancy was key. Nevertheless, he tried to show restraint and resisted the temptation to accumulate anything to unreasonable excess. After all, certain items had become rather more expensive than they ought to have been, thanks to a minority of people taking the principle to absurd extremes. Beyond a certain acquisitional horizon, their motives seemed to collapse to a singular desire—the feeding of their voraciously expanding hoards. He did not want to end up like that.
Given that the concept of ownership had become rather volatile since the advent of the fog, some had evacuated their most treasured possessions elsewhere or even relocated themselves and everything they owned entirely—this had certainly been the preferred policy of several official institutions and businesses, afraid of losing various artefacts, records and valuable stock—but that was hardly a viable option for most, without somewhere else to go. It would be impossible to sell one’s house in the current climate. Who would willingly move to a place of such impermanence? He thought about fleeing for a short period of time, but then he imagined coming back after a few months, once his savings and the charity of relatives had been exhausted, to find that his whole life had been rearranged in his absence. He resolved to stay and witness it all, whatever happened.
For the benefit of the nervous and the gullible, various remedies were sold by enterprising charlatans, guaranteeing to provide security in this changeable new world. Methods advertised for protecting whole buildings were difficult to defend, because they were inevitably proven to be ineffective; however, the likelihood of any individual object being taken was rather small. Who could say that storing some valuable possession inside a copper cage or beside a special crystal did not protect it from the caprices of the fog? Whenever these less ambitious preventative solutions failed, the complaints travelled rather more slowly than the evolving propaganda. All sorts of pseudoscientific explanations were employed to promote alleged successes and dismiss any contrary evidence. These attempts would have been laughable, were it not for the fact that the phenomenon at large often felt just as far-fetched.
On the other hand, the actual scientists were afflicted by a more rigorous level of uncertainty, which was not especially reassuring, when life itself was already so unpredictable. Still, they were doing their best, no doubt. A large catalogue of vanished objects was being collated, with the hope that enough data could eventually be accrued to begin to explain the inexplicable; in the meantime, however, there were plenty of condensates lying around that could be subjected to experimentation. They were deconstructed all the way down to their very atoms, which were then taken apart too, for good measure. At every single step, such investigations could find nothing to distinguish any component from the constituents of regular matter. (The same process was applied to samples of the fog itself, which was repeatedly shown to be composed of nothing but ordinary water droplets.)
The condensates were therefore evidently not made of some new, indivisible substance—they were entirely capable of being dispersed to a subatomic level. However, it gradually became clear that they shared one unique feature—persistence in the face of chaos. Nothing, once condensed, was ever taken back by the fog. This raised the rather tantalising prospect that they were being ignored on purpose—and that this was the deliberate work of a hidden consciousness.
Persistence in the face of chaos! Love it, now there's something to aspire to.
Despite the creeping menace, I'm still pro-fog... if nothing else, it's bringing the community together.
Not sure whether it was conscious, but I think you've hit on something with the flea markets. I've always found it a little baffling the way one can be so drawn in to looking through what is frankly—and I do mean this with love—a collection of someone else's junk. But maybe something in the pile will remind you of something you lost, something you've forgotten, or something you could imagine belonging to someone you knew. Anyway, a bit of a tangent, the feeling just jumped out at me! Great read.
"It was hard to avoid the speculation that the new arrivals seemed to be condensed from the very stuff itself, whereas those that disappeared were dissolved into it"
Love this, along with the term "condensates" being applied to the objects.
"Nothing, once condensed, was ever taken back by the fog." -- the plot/fog thickens! A really great continuation. I'm eager to know where this will go, or how it will disperse...