Free Cloud Castles by Michael Scott Rohan

stove in. I’d stopped to report it, not that it would do any good, but it would keep the hire company off my back. The police were politely sceptical, asking if driving on the right had not by chance confused my lane discipline, and squaring upto breathalyse me – until they found out where I’d been. One mention of Lutz and C-Tran, and it was yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir, which isn’t supposed to happen, but does. That put me in an even filthier temper, and to avoid another set of explanations I said I’d park the car myself. I trundled around to a suitably obscure corner in the shadows at the side of the hotel, and that made me think of 1726. I looked up at her window, but the light was off. I resisted the temptation to rush up there and wring some more explanations out of her, though; the best thing for me would be getting out of here, fast, and back home, to find some more reliable advice. And somehow, during all this lunatic pursuit, my subconscious had placed that strange symbol on that beautiful floor, and disturbed me deeply in the process. I wished it had been something like a swastika; that I could almost have comprehended, loathed but related to history, to purely human horrors. But the last place I’d seen a shape like that was among the ghastly tangles of obscene carving on the high stern transom of the Wolfship
Chorazin.
A geometric five-pointed star, set within a double circle of inscription, an emblem of ill intent, a pentacle.
    Though this one had been filled with what looked like odd mosaic patterns …
    I stopped suddenly, turned round. Something had moved behind me, something like a momentary flicker of light, a rustle of movement to go with it. When I spun around again it stopped, then sounded again, louder. Over the bonnets of the parked cars something flowed, barely visible except against their mirror polish, a faint misting that moved in tendrils, amoeba-like. Now I could see it in the air, just, as the lights glimmered on it. There was that sound again – not a rustle exactly, more like a faint hoarse exhalation. It looked like nothing at all, and yet the feeling grew on me that it would be a very bad idea to have that clammy cloud wrap itself about me. I backed away, and saw it seem to rear up, facing me, an invisibility no more than a shimmer against the stunted trees behind and their single low lantern – and then, shockingly, whiter, thicker, as mist flowed back into it from all around. It was gathering itself into a thick misty cloud there; and I turned and ran. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the thing move, too, gliding forward, on my tracks, glittering among the parked cars, flowing over their cold metal like a caress. It was fast, too, but I was faster; I made the front, and practically fell through the glass doors as they soughed back. The porterwas contemplating me with fascination.
    ‘Mist,’ I explained. It happens to mean ‘manure’ in German, but that was all the explanation I felt like right then. I limped over to the lifts and straight up to my room; but though I was bone-weary I poured myself a drink and went out onto the balcony, unable quite to credit the last couple of hours I’d lived through. The physical attacks, maybe, though who had anything to gain I couldn’t imagine. But even they seemed improbable now, faintly ridiculous, as if I’d somehow exaggerated them out of distorted memories. And the mist – okay, I’d had strange things happen before; but surely
that
had to be pure panicky imagination. Hysteria, even, triggered off by stress.
    But when I looked down all those floors the car park was still shrouded in that faint haze, setting glittering haloes around all the lights, enveloping the ground floor of the hotel. It stirred as I leaned over, and seemed to stretch a long tendril up towards me, like a wave climbing a sea cliff. But it couldn’t make it, and like a wave it fell back into the stuff it came from, spreading faint ripples of