Seventeen-year-old Lena begins to notice that on foggy nights, Suspended slips out of ordinary reality and into something stranger, quieter, and far less safe.
Suspended sat between the black edge of the forests and the rusted hills, where evening mist always seemed to arrive a little earlier than it should. Lena lived on the twelfth floor of a grey block of flats on the corner of the street, high enough to see the town blur at the edges, as if it were already halfway gone.
On a June night, she saw it happen for the first time.
The lights died without dying. Streetlamps, stairwell bulbs, the neon sign above the bar at the end of the road all vanished at once, and the darkness that followed was not quite dark. A milky haze seeped through the cracks in the balcony doors, cold and silent, filling her room with the smell of wet concrete and something older.
Lena stepped to the glass and looked down.
People were moving through the courtyard, but not in any way she recognised. They were only shapes at first, pale outlines sliding between the trees and benches, too smooth and too quiet to be neighbours coming home late. The square itself seemed wrong. The branches in the centre swayed without wind, as if something inside them was breathing, and from somewhere below the pavement came a faint blue shimmer, pulsing through the sewer grates.
Her phone shook in her hand when she called David.
"You need to come," she whispered.
"Come where? Lena, it’s midnight."
"Just listen to me. The town’s doing something."
He started asking questions, but she was already leaving her room. She opened the door carefully and stepped into the stairwell, where the air had gone still enough to hear a thread of sound moving through it, soft as a voice spoken through walls. Her footsteps should have echoed on concrete. Instead, the stairs gave under her like damp grass.
By the time she reached the ground floor, the fog had spilled inside the building.
Outside, it settled around her shoulders like a hand that knew her name. The bench by the entrance was gone. In its place stood an old metal clock on a crooked post, its hands pointing to 3:13 a.m. Lena glanced at her smartwatch, then looked back at the clock, and felt her stomach tighten. It still read midnight.
Something tall moved at the corner of the block, catching what little light there was with a surface that looked almost transparent.
Lena took one step forward.
The mist shifted again, and this time it brought more than one figure with it. One shape, then another, then a third, all standing still now, all facing her. Across the buildings, the clocks started to race, their ticking rising into a frantic, uneven stutter, as if time itself had suddenly remembered it was running out.
Then a voice came out of the fog, deep and unmistakable.
"Lena."
One of the figures lifted a hand and pointed straight at her.