The Mist

by Stephen King

The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

she might be dreaming awake.

there are all ways of handling a thing like this.

I think I screamed. I’m not sure.

Maybe you can tell me—why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?

The things in the mist followed their truest sense. They followed their noses.

She was totally wound up. She seemed to need no sleep. Her sermon, a steady stream of horrors out of Doré, Bosch, and Jonathan Edwards, went on and on, building toward some climax.

Her group began to murmur with her, to rock back and forth unconsciously, like true believers at a tent revival. Their eyes were shiny and blank. They were under her spell.

It wasn’t so much the monstrous creatures that lurked in the mist; my shot with the pinchbar had shown me they were no Lovecraftian horrors with immortal life but only organic creatures with their own vulnerabilities.

It was the mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will.

Her voice was cracking and hoarse now, but still full of power.

And it occurred to me that it was the mist that had given her that power—the power to cloud men’s minds, to make a particularly apt pun—just as it had taken away the sun’s power from the rest of us. Before, she had been nothing but a mildly eccentric old woman with an antiques store in a town that was lousy with antiques stores.

There were four of us in the Scout, but if push came right down to shove, I’d find some other way out for myself.

This suicide never happened, yet the movie did this.

And what has become of those people I do not know.