Every single day, the same dreams. I am forced to relive the same memories whenever I close my eyes. Over forty years have passed since then, but my subconsciousness is still trapped in one of those nights. As sad as it sounds, life moved on and so did I. As much as I could call it moving on, after all, my life’s mission was to do away with the source of my problems. To do away with the Man Made from Mist.
Or so I thought. I’ve clamored for a chance to take my vengeance on him for so long. The things I’ve done to get where I needed to would’ve driven a lesser man insane; I knew this and pushed through. Yet when the opportunity presented itself, I couldn’t do it. An additional set of terrors wormed its way into my mind.
A trio of demons aptly called remorse, guilt, and regret.
I’ve tried my best to wrestle control away from these infernal forces, but in the end, as always, I’ve proven to be too weak. Unable to accomplish the single-minded goal I’ve devoted my life to, I let him go. In that fateful moment, it felt like I had done the right thing by letting him go. I felt a weight lifted off my chest. Now, with the clarity of hindsight, I’m no longer sure about that.
That said, I am getting ahead of myself. I suppose I should start from the beginning.
My name is Yaroslav Teuter and I hail from a small Siberian village, far from any center of civilization. Its name is irrelevant. Knowing what I know now, my relatives were partially right and outsiders have no place in it. The important thing about my home village is that it’s a settlement frozen in the early modern era. Growing up, we had no electricity and no other modern luxuries. It was, and still is, as far as I know, a small rural community of old believers. When I say old believers, I mean that my people never adopted Christianity. We, they, believe in the old gods; Perun and Veles, Svarog and Dazhbog, along with Mokosh and many other minor deities and nature spirits.
What outsiders consider folklore or fiction, my people, to this very day, hold to be the truth and nothing but the truth. My village had no doctors, and there was a common belief there were no ill people, either. The elders always told us how no one had ever died from disease before the Soviets made incursions into our lands.
Whenever someone died, and it was said to be the result of old age, “The horned shepherd had taken em’ to his grazing fields”, they used to say. They said the same thing about my grandparents, who passed away unexpectedly one after the other in a span of about a year. Grandma succumbed to the grief of losing the love of her life.
Whenever people died in accidents or were relatively young, the locals blamed unnatural forces. Yet, no matter the evidence, diseases didn’t exist until around my childhood. At least not according to the people.
At some point, however, everything changed in the blink of an eye. Boris “Beard” Bogdanov, named so after his long and bushy graying beard, fell ill. He was constantly burning with fever, and over time, his frame shrunk.
The disease he contracted reduced him from a hulk of a man to a shell no larger than my dying grandfather in his last days. He was wasting away before our very eyes. The village folk attempted to chalk it up to malevolent spirits, poisoning his body and soul. Soon after him, his entire family got sick too. Before long, half of the village was on the brink of death.
My father got ill too. I can vividly recall the moment death came knocking at our door. He was bound to suffer a slow and agonizing journey to the other side. It was a chilly spring night when I woke up, feeling the breeze enter and penetrate our home. That night, the darkness seemed to be bleaker than ever before. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. A chill ran down my spine. For the first time in years, I was afraid of the dark again. The void stared at me and I couldn’t help but dread its awful gaze. At eleven years old, I nearly pissed myself again just by looking around my bedroom and being unable to see anything.
I was blind with fear. At that moment, I was blind; the nothingness swallowed my eyes all around me, and I wish it had stayed that way. I wish I never looked toward my parent’s bed. The second I laid my eyes on my sleeping parents; reality took any semblance of innocence away from me. The unbearable weight of realization collapsed onto my infantile little body, dropping me to my knees with a startle.
The animal instinct inside ordered my mouth to open, but no sound came. With my eyes transfixed on the sinister scene. I remained eerily quiet, gasping for air and holding back frightful tears. Every tall tale, every legend, every child’s story I had grown out of by that point came back to haunt my psyche on that one fateful night.
All of this turned out to be true.
As I sat there, on my knees, holding onto dear life, a silhouette made of barely visible mist crouched over my sleeping father. Its head pressed against Father’s neck. Teeth sunk firmly into his arteries. The silhouette was eating away at my father. I could see this much, even though it was practically impossible to see anything else. As if the silhouette had some sort of malignant luminance about it. The demon wanted to be seen. I must’ve made enough noise to divert its attention from its meal because it turned to me and straightened itself out into this tall, serpentine, and barely visible shadow caricature of a human. Its limbs were so long, long enough to drag across the floor.
Its features were barely distinguishable from the mist surrounding it. The thing was nearly invisible, only enough to inflict the terror it wanted to afflict its victims with. The piercing stare of its blood-red eyes kept me paralyzed in place as a wide smile formed across its face. Crimson-stained, razor-sharp teeth piqued from behind its ashen gray lips, and a long tongue hung loosely between its jaws. The image of that thing has burnt itself into my mind from the moment we met.
The devil placed a bony, clawed finger on its lips, signaling for me to keep my silence. Stricken with mortifying fear, I could not object, nor resist. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I did all I could. I nodded. The thing vanished into the darkness, crawling away into the night.
Exhausted and aching across my entire body, I barely pulled myself upright once it left. Still deep within the embrace of petrifying fear. It took all I had left to crawl back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The image of the bloodied silhouette made from a mist and my father’s vitality clawed my eyes open every time I dared close them.
The next morning, Father was already sick, burning with fever. I knew what had caused it, but I wouldn’t dare speak up. I knew that, if I had sounded the alarm on the Man Made from Mist, the locals would’ve accused me of being the monster myself. The idea around my village was, if you were old enough to work the household farm, you were an adult man. If you were an adult, you were old enough to protect your family. Me being unable to fight off the evil creature harming my parent meant I was cooperating with it, or was the source of said evil.
Shame and regret at my inability to stand up, for my father ate away at every waking moment while the ever-returning presence of the Man Made from Mist robbed me of sleep every night. He came night after night to feast on my father’s waning life. He tried to shake me into full awareness every single time he returned. Tormenting me with my weakness. Every day I told myself this one would be different, but every time it ended the same–I was on my knees, unable to do anything but gawk in horror at the pest taking away my father and chipping away at my sanity.
Within a couple of months, my father was gone. When we buried him, I experienced a semblance of solace. Hopefully, the Man Made from Mist would never come back again. Wishing him to be satisfied with what he had taken away from me. I was too quick to jump to my conclusion.
This world is cruel by nature, and as per the laws of the wild; a predator has no mercy on its prey while it starves. My tormentor would return to take away from me so long as it felt the need to satiate its hunger.
Before long, I woke up once more in the middle of the night. It was cold for the summer… Too cold…
Dreadful thoughts flooded my mind. Fearing for the worst, I jerked my head to look at my mother. Thankfully, she was alone, sound asleep, but I couldn’t ease my mind away from the possibility that he had returned. I hadn’t slept that night; in fact, I haven’t slept right since. Never.
The next morning, I woke up to an ailing mother. She was burning with fever, and I was right to fear for the worst. He was there the previous night, and he was going to take my mother away from me. I stayed up every night since to watch over my mother, mustering every ounce of courage I could to confront the nocturnal beast haunting my life.
It never returned. Instead, it left me to watch as my mother withered away to disease like a mad dog. The fever got progressively worse, and she was losing all color. In a matter of days, it took away her ability to move, speak, and eventually reason. I had to watch as my mothered withered away, barking and clawing at the air. She recoiled every time I offered her water and attempted to bite into me whenever I’d get too close.
The furious stage lasted about a week before she slipped into a deep slumber and, after three days of sleep, she perished. A skeletal, pale, gaunt husk remained of what was once my mother.
While I watched an evil, malevolent force tear my family to shreds, my entire world seemed to be engulfed by its flames. By the time Mother succumbed to her condition, more than half of the villagers were dead. The Soviets incurred into our lands. They wore alien suits as they took away whatever healthy children they could find. Myself included.
I fought and struggled to stay in the village, but they overpowered me. Proper adults had to restrain me so they could take me away from this hell and into the heart of civilization. After the authorities had placed me in an orphanage, the outside world forcefully enlightened me. It took years, but eventually; I figured out how to blend with the city folk. They could never fix the so-called trauma of what I had to endure. There was nothing they could do to mold the broken into a healthy adult. The damage had been too great for my wounds to heal.
I adjusted to my new life and was driven by a lifelong goal to avenge whatever had taken my life away from me. I ended up dedicating my life to figuring out how to eradicate the disease that had taken everything from me after overhearing how an ancient strain of Siberian Anthrax reanimated and wiped out about half of my home village. They excused the bite marks on people’s necks as infected sores.
It took me a long time, but I’ve gotten myself where I needed to be. The Soviets were right to call it a disease, but it wasn’t anthrax that had decimated my home village and taken my parents’ lives. It was something far worse, an untreatable condition that turns humans into hematophagic corpses somewhere between the living and the dead.
Fortunately, the only means of treatment seem to be the termination of the remaining processes vital to sustaining life in the afflicted.
It’s an understanding I came to have after long years of research under, oftentimes illegal, circumstances. The initial idea came about after a particularly nasty dream about my mother’s last days.
In my dream, she rose from her bed and fell on all fours. Frothing from the mouth, she coughed and barked simultaneously. Moving awkwardly on all four she crawled across the floor toward me. With her hands clawing at my bedsheets, she pulled herself upwards and screeched in my face. Letting out a terrible sound between a shrill cry and cough. Eyes wide with delirious agitation, her face lunged at me, attempting to bite whatever she could. I cowered away under my sheets, trying to weather the rabid storm. Eventually, she clasped her jaws around my arm and the pain of my dream jolted me awake.
Covered in cold sweat, and nearly hyperventilating; that’s where I had my eureka moment.
I was a medical student at the time; this seemed like something that fit neatly into my field of expertise, virology. Straining my mind for more than a couple of moments conjured an image of a rabies-like condition that afflicted those who the Man Made from Mist attacked. Those who didn’t survive, anyway. Nine of out ten of the afflicted perished. The remaining one seemed to slip into a deathlike coma before awakening changed.
This condition changes the person into something that can hardly be considered living, technically. In a way, those who survive the initial infection are practically, as I’ve said before, the walking dead. Now, I don’t want this to sound occult or supernatural. No, all of this is biologically viable, albeit incredibly unusual for the Tetrapoda superclass. If anything, the condition turns the afflicted into a human-shaped leech of sorts. While I might’ve presented the afflicted to survive the initial stage of the infected as an infallible superhuman predator, they are, in fact, maladapted to cohabitate with their prey in this day and age. That is us.
Ignoring the obvious need to consume blood and to a lesser extent certain amounts of living flesh, this virus inadvertently mimics certain symptoms of a tuberculosis infection, at least outwardly. That is exactly how I’ve been able to find test subjects for my study. Hearing about death row inmates who matched the profile of advanced tuberculosis patients but had somehow committed heinous crimes including cannibalism.
Through some connections I’ve made with the local authorities, I got my hands on the corpse of one such death row inmate. He was eerily similar to the Man Made from Mist, only his facial features seemed different. The uncanny resemblance to my tormentor weighed heavily on my mind. Perhaps too heavily. I noticed a minor muscle spasm as I chalked up a figment of my anxious imagination.
This was my first mistake. The second being when I turned my back to the cadaver to pick up a tool to begin my autopsy. This one nearly cost me my life. Before I could even notice, the dead man sprang back to life. His long lanky, pale arms wrapped around tightly around my neck. His skin was cold to the touch, but his was strength incredible. No man with such a frame should have been able to yield such strength, no man appearing this sick should’ve been able to possess. Thankfully, I must’ve stood in an awkward position from him to apply his blood choke properly. Otherwise, I would’ve been dead, or perhaps undead by now.
As I scrambled with my hands to pick up something from the table to defend myself with, I could hear his hoarse voice in my ear. “I am sorry… I am starving…”
The sudden realization I was dealing with a thing human enough to apologize to me took me by complete surprise. With a renewed flow of adrenaline through my system. My once worst enemy, Fear, became my best friend. The reduced supply of oxygen to my brain eased my paralyzing dread just enough for me to pick a scalpel from the table and forcefully jam it into the predator’s head.
His grip loosened instantly and, with a sickening thump, he fell on the floor behind me, knocking over the table. The increased blood flow brought with it a maddening existential dread. My head spun and my heart raced through the roof. Terrible, illogical, intangible thoughts swarmed my mind. There was fear interlaced with anger, a burning wrath.
The animalistic side of me took over, and I began kicking and dead man’s body again and again. I wouldn’t stop until I couldn’t recognize his face as human. Blood, torn-out hair, and teeth flew across the floor before I finally came to.
Collapsing to the floor right beside the corpse, I sat there for a long while, shaking with fear. Clueless about the source of my fear. After all, it was truly dead this time. I was sure of it. My shoes cracked its skull open and destroyed the brain. There was no way it could survive without a functioning brain. This was a reasoning thing. It needed its brain. Yet there I was, afraid, not shaken, afraid.
This was another event that etched itself into my memories, giving birth to yet another reoccurring nightmare. Time and time again, I would see myself mutilating the corpse, each time to a worsening degree. No matter how often I tried to convince myself, I did what I did in self-defense. My heart wouldn’t care. I was a monster to my psyche.
I deeply regret to admit this, but this was only the first one I had killed, and it too, perhaps escaped this world in the quickest way possible.
Regardless, I ended up performing that autopsy on the body of the man whose second life I truly ended. As per my findings, and I must admit, my understanding of anatomical matters is by all means limited, I could see why the execution failed. The heart was black and shriveled up an atrophied muscle. Shooting one of those things in the chest isn’t likely to truly kill them. Not only had the heart become a vestigial organ, but the lungs of the specimen I had autopsied revealed regenerative scar tissue. These things could survive what would be otherwise lethal to average humans. The digestive system, just like the pulmonary one, differed vastly from what I had expected from the human anatomy. It seemed better suited to hold mostly liquid for quick digestion.
Circulation while reduced still existed, given the fact the creature possessed almost superhuman strength. To my understanding, the circulation is driven by musculoskeletal mechanisms explaining the pallor. The insufficient nutritional value of their diet can easily explain their gauntness.
Unfortunately, this study didn’t yield many more useful results for my research. However, I ended up extracting an interesting enzyme from the mouth of the corpse. With great difficulty, given the circumstances. These things develop Draculin, a special anticoagulant found in vampire bats. As much as I’d hate to call these unfortunate creatures vampires, this is exactly what they are.
Perhaps some legends were true, yet at that moment, none of it mattered. I wanted to find out more. I needed to find out more.
To make a painfully long story short, I’ll conclude my search by saying that for the longest time, I had searched for clues using dubious methods. This, of course, didn’t yield the desired results. My only solace during that period was the understanding that these creatures are solitary and, thus, could not warn others about my activities and intentions.
With the turn of the new millennium, fortune shone my way, finally. Shortly before the infamous Armin Meiwes affair. I had experienced something not too dissimilar. I found a post on a message board outlining a request for a willing blood donor for cash. This wasn’t what one could expect from a blood donation however, the poster specified he was interested in drinking the donor’s blood and, if possible, straight from the source.
This couldn’t be anymore similar to the type of person I have been looking for. Disinterested in the money, I offered myself up. That said, I wasn’t interested in anyone drinking my blood either, so to facilitate a fair deal, I had to get a few bags of stored blood. With my line of work, that wasn’t too hard.
A week after contacting the poster of the message, we arranged a meeting. He wanted to see me at his house. Thinking he might intend to get more aggressive than I needed him to be, I made sure I had my pistol when I met him.
Overall, he seemed like an alright person for an anthropophagic haemophile. Other than the insistence on keeping the lighting lower than I’d usually like during our meeting, everything was better than I could ever expect. At first, he seemed taken aback by my offer of stored blood for information, but after the first sip of plasmoid liquid, he relented.
To my surprise, he and I were a lot alike, as far as personality traits go. As he explained to me, there wasn’t much that still interested him in life anymore. He could no longer form any emotional attachments, nor feel the most potent emotions. The one glaring exception was the high he got when feeding. I too cannot feel much beyond bitter disappointment and the ever-present anxious dread that seems to shadow every moment of my being.
I have burned every personal bridge I ever had in favor of this ridiculous quest for revenge I wasn’t sure I could ever complete.
This pleasant and brief encounter confirmed my suspicions; the infected are solitary creatures and prefer to stay away from all other intelligent lifeforms when not feeding. I’ve also learned that to stay functional on the abysmal diet of blood and the occasional lump of flesh, the infected enter a state of hibernation that can last for years at a time.
He confirmed my suspicion that the infected dislike bright lights and preferred to hunt and overall go about their rather monotone lives at night.
The most important piece of information I had received from this fine man was the fact that the infected rarely venture far from where they first succumbed to the plague, so long, of course, as they could find enough prey. Otherwise, like all other animals, they migrate and stick to their new location.
Interestingly enough, I could almost see the sorrow in his crimson eyes, a deep regret, and a desire to escape an unseen pain that kept gnawing at him. I asked him about it; wondering if he was happy with where his life had taken him. He answered negatively. I wish he had asked me the same question, so I could just tell someone how miserable I had made my life. He never did, but I’m sure he saw his reflection in me. He was certainly bright enough to tell as much.
In a rare moment of empathy, I offered to end his life. He smiled a genuine smile and confessed that he tried, many times over, without ever succeeding. He explained that his displeasure wasn’t the result of depression, but rather that he was tired of his endless boredom. Back then, I couldn’t even tell the difference.
Smiling back at him, I told him the secret to his survival was his brain staying intact. He quipped about it, making all the sense in the world, and told me he had no firearms.
I pulled out my pistol, aiming at his head, and joked about how he wouldn’t need one.
He laughed, and when he did, I pulled the trigger.
The laughter stopped, and the room fell dead silent, too silent, and with it, he fell as well, dead for good this time.
Even though this act of killing was justified, it still frequented my dreams, yet another nightmare to a gallery of never-ending visual sorrows. This one, however, was more melancholic than terrifying, but just as nerve-wracking. He lost all reason to live. To exist just to feed? This was below things, no, people like us. The longer I did this, all of this, the more I realized I was dealing with my fellow humans. Unfortunately, the humans I’ve been dealing with have drifted away from the light of humanity. The cruelty of nature had them reduced to wild animals controlled by a base instinct without having the proper way of employing their higher reasoning for something greater. These were victims of a terrible curse, as was I.
My obsession with vengeance only grew worse. I had to bring the nightmare I had reduced my entire life to an end. Armed with new knowledge of how to find my tormentor, finally, I finally headed back to my home village. A few weeks later, I arrived near the place of my birth. Near where I had spent the first eleven years of my life. It was night, the perfect time to strike. That was easier said than done. Just overlooking the village from a distance proved difficult. With each passing second, a new, suppressed memory resurfaced. A new night terror to experience while awake. The same diabolical presence marred all of them.
Countless images flashed before my eyes, all of them painful. Some were more horrifying than others. My father’s slow demise, my mother’s agonizing death. All of it, tainted by the sickening shadow standing at the corner of the bedroom. Tall, pale, barely visible, as if he was part of the nocturnal fog itself. Only red eyes shining. Glowing in the darkness, along with the red hue dripping from his sickening smile.
Bitter, angry, hurting, and afraid, I lost myself in my thoughts. My body knew where to find him. However, we were bound by a red thread of fate. Somehow, from that first day, when he made me his plaything, he ended up tying our destinies together. I could probably smell the stench of iron surrounding him. I was fuming, ready to incinerate his body into ash and scatter it into the nearest river.
Worst of all was the knowledge I shouldn’t look for anyone in the village, lest I infect them with some disease they’d never encountered before. It could potentially kill them all. I wouldn’t be any better than him if I had let such a thing happen… My inability to reunite with any surviving neighbors and relatives hurt so much that I can’t even put it into words.
All of that seemed to fade away once I found his motionless cadaver resting soundly in a den by the cemetery. How cliché, the undead dwelling in burial grounds. In that moment, bereft of his serpentine charm, everything seemed so different from what I remembered. He wasn’t that tall; he wasn’t much bigger than I was when he took everything from me. I almost felt dizzy, realizing he wasn’t even an adult, probably. My memories have tricked me. Everything seemed so bizarre and unreal at that moment. I was once again a lost child. Once again confronted by a monster that existed only in my imagination. I trained my pistol on his deathlike form.
Yet in that moment, when our roles were reversed. When he suddenly became a helpless child, I was a Man Made from Mist. When I had all the power in the world, and he lay at my feet, unable to do anything to protect himself from my cruelty, I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t shoot him. I couldn’t do it because I knew it wouldn’t help me; it wouldn’t bring my family back. Killing him wouldn’t fix me or restore the humanity I gave up on. It wouldn’t even me feel any better. There was no point at all. I wouldn’t feel any better if I put that bullet in him. Watching that pathetic carcass, I realized how little all of that mattered. My nightmares wouldn’t end, and the anxiety and hatred would not go away. There was nothing that could ever heal my wounds. I will suffer from them so long as I am human. As much as I hate to admit it, I pitied him in that moment.
As I’ve said, letting him go was a mistake. Maybe if I went through with my plan, I wouldn’t end up where I am now. Instead of taking his life, I took some of his flesh. I cut off a little piece of his calf, he didn't even budge when my knife sliced through his pale leg like butter. This was the pyrrhic victory I had to have over him. A foolish and animalistic display of dominance over the person whose shadow dominated my entire life. That wasn't the only reason I did what I did, I took a part of him just in case I could no longer bear the weight of my three demons. Knowing people like him do not feel the most intense emotions, I was hoping for a quick and permanent solution, should the need arise.
Things did eventually spiral out of control. My sanity was waning and with it, the will to keep on living, but instead of shooting myself, I ate the piece of him that I kept stored in my fridge. I did so with the expectation of the disease killing my overstressed immune system and eventually me.
Sadly, there are very few permanent solutions in this world and fewer quick ones that yield the desired outcomes. I did not die, technically. Instead, the Man Made from Mist was reborn. At first, everything seemed so much better. Sharper, clearer, and by far more exciting. But for how long will such a state remain exciting when it’s the default state of being? After a while, everything started losing its color to the point of everlasting bleakness.
Even my memories aren’t as vivid as they used to be, and the nightmares no longer have any impact. They are merely pictures moving in a sea of thought. With that said, life isn’t much better now than it was before. I don’t hurt; I don’t feel almost at all. The only time I ever feel anything is whenever I sink my teeth into the neck of some unsuspecting drunk. My days are mostly monochrome grey with the occasional streak of red, but that’s not nearly enough.
Unfortunately, I lost my pistol at some point, so I don’t have a way out of this tunnel of mist. It’s not all bad. I just wish my nightmares would sting a little again. Otherwise, what is the point of dwelling on every mistake you’ve ever committed? What is the point of a tragedy if it cannot bring you the catharsis of sorrow? What is the point in reliving every blood-soaked nightmare that has ever plagued your mind if they never bring any feelings of pain or joy…? Is there even a point behind a recollection that carries no weight? There is none.
Everything I’ve ever wanted is within reach, yet whenever I extend my hand to grasp at something, anything, it all seems to drift away from me…
And now, only now, once the boredom that shadows my every move has finally exhausted me. Now that I am completely absorbed by this unrelenting impenetrable and bottomless sensation of emptiness… This longing for something, anything… I can say I truly understand what horror is. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the Man Made from Mist isn’t me, nor any other person or even a creature. No, The Man Made from Mist is the embodiment of pure horror. A fear…
One so bizarre and malignant it exists only to torment those afflicted with sentience.
Written by MLycantrope
Content is available under CC BY-SA