Michael John Grist is a freelance writer of fiction and non-fiction based out of Tokyo, Japan. Links to all his published fiction can be found at his website www.bigreddot.net, along with articles on the Ruins (or Haikyo) of Japan, and a variety of off-beat Japanese cultural commentaries. His fiction is generally weird, dark, and strikes at the chords of loneliness, madness, and what it takes to get happy. That said- the stories end well more often than not.

There was a village in the mountains at the top of the world that was always shrouded in mist. Its name was Ballahee, and in it lived a small community of people, good people, who tended to their crops on the mountainsides, and looked after their sheep and their hardy goats, and helped each other through the cold and cruel winters.

The villagers had many problems, such as the cold winters, and the wolves in the scrub-woods, but by far their biggest problem was the mist.

The mist covered every inch of Ballahee. It covered the houses and the roads and the fields, from the top of the mountains peak down to the valley. It swirled over the cemetery and round the children's playground. It delved inside the villagers homes, creeping through their thin windowpanes and round the door jambs and the cracks in the barns, and through the hay they put as stuffing and round the blankets they strung up to keep it out. It rolled in and dampened the fires in every hearth, and soured the milk, and turned the babies' skin cold and clammy in the night.

The mist had always been there, and the villagers knew there was nothing they could do to stop it. They could barely see each other out on the street, but that was normal, and they accepted it. They could barely see the earth to pull out their crops, turnips and potatoes. The school-children could scarcely see the school-teachers jottings on the blackboard in the school, and lovers could barely see the names, their own names, that they had etched into the old oak tree behind the Jansen's stead. But that was normal, and they accepted it.

Things had always been like this in Ballahee. The villagers had tried everything, but nothing did any good, and they all thought the mist would always remain.

That is, until the Mistman came.

The Mistman came on a night when the mist was especially thick. It rolled down the muddy main road, past old Reese's trade store, past the small-celled constabulary with Ivors the town drunk locked up drunk inside. It fugged round the village's one pub, the Siren's Peak. It rolled inside and throughout while the good people tried to play billiards, peering at the balls to make out their colors. It plumed and billowed and lay like heavy white treacle over the town.

And then the Mistman came. He came with a blaring bugle-horn, riding two horses at the same time. He was tall and gangly and he wore a large red top hat on his head, and he played a rousing 3-note riff on his bugle-horn. He wore black boots and had yellow and purple checkered leggings, with a brown overcoat decked with frills and garters. In his left hand he carried a jester's mop, and in his right a pig's bladder, while the bugle was affixed to his chest by a leather strap and pole.

He rolled into the Siren's Peak with his bugle blaring and soon all the good people of Ballahee were looking up at him.

"My good people of Ballahee," he began, "I am here to end your plague."

Then he ducked out the door and went to stand in the street. The villagers filed out to behold this tall gawkish jester of a man, with the two horses and the chest-mounted bugle and the pig's bladder and jester's stick.

From one of the horse's packs he produced a lute. From another he produced a flute.

"Presently," he declaimed, as he strode through the mist, leaving eddies of it curling in his wake, his bright colored clothing drawing the eyes of the villagers as they peered through the soupy mist. "I shall whistle away your worries."

Then he removed the bugle from its chest mount and fastened the flute there instead. He hung the lute around his neck.

"Now I shall play the mist away," he called, and began to play.

He played both the lute and the flute at the same time.

The sound was incredible. It was like none the villagers had ever heard. There was no music in their little town, but for sometimes the clanging of home-made drums, for the mist tarnished all wind instruments, cracked and buckled all wood instruments, and all leather strings and drum hides rotted in its constant moist presence.

But the Mistman played his two instruments beautifully. The lute jangled under the flute as it soared, and all the villagers in the crowd felt themselves soothed, and they felt themselves relax as they never had before. Their breathing eased, and they found they no longer had to fight against the mist to see the Mistman in his jester's clothes.

He played, in a slow twirling dance around the village square, his hob-nailed boots striking percussion off the cobble-flagged floor, and the villagers found themselves drawn to follow him. He led them round the old church, in and out and around the pews, and back to the pub, and up the hill to the Farrer's estate, where cows lowed at their approach.

And all the while, the mist was thinning.

He played on, round the town-meeting hall, past old Ivors in his drunk tank mumbling about the pub's watered down ale, round the public green where the village folk sometimes played bowls, and round and on and all the while the mist was thinning.

Then, all of a sudden, he stopped.

He stopped singing and he stopped dancing and he stopped moving.

And for the first time in as long as any of them could remember, the villagers looked around and saw their village without the mist. They could read the faded sign around the cricket field. They could see each other's faces, worn with time and age and the passing seasons. They could see the sky, and the stars, and the smiles on each other's faces.

Old friends greeted each other, smiled, shook hands, even hugged, as if seeing each other for the first time after a long break.

And in the middle stood the Mistman. He waited until they fell silent, and their happiness dimmed down, and they were all looking at him again.

"I ask for only one thing in return for this service I have done you," said the Mistman, his voice light and airy as his music. "I ask that you deliver to me the grandest home in the village, and the largest parcel of land, and the prettiest girl in town and the strongest shoes to wear when I work, and the gaudiest brightest shoes to wear when I trot the foxtrot. Can you deliver those things to me?"

The prettiest girl in town just so happened to be in the group of villagers that night, her name was Dora and she worked as a barmaid for Old Si Plunkleton who ran the pub.

"I'll marry you," she called, from amidst the crowd, and blushed immediately as the villagers turned to look at her.

"I'll deed you my home," came the call of another, rich Bobby Grinthing, who ran the mill and worked a banking service from the pub's back corner. "If the others'll invest too."

"And I'll make those shoes you want," said the blacksmith and leatherworker Fairview Childress.

"I'll deliver you your steak and milk in the mornings, and at night," said the widow Yarrow.

"I'll stitch and sew your jerkin," said another.

"I'll saddle and brush and keep your stallions!"

And so it went. The villagers offered the Mistman everything he'd asked for and more, because for the first time in their lives the village was free of mist, and they could see.

And they went to their homes that night, after drinking until the small hours in the Siren's Peak, full of life, and happiness, and joy at seeing the stars once again.

But things did not stay so fair for long.

The next day the mist was gone, but the wolves had come in the night. Now they could see clearly, and the village green had been torn up, the cemetery had been ravaged, the crops savaged and the livestock of every farmer killed to the last chicken. 1 bull was dead too, and half-dismembered lying in the middle the Farrer's fallow field.

Young Keith Farrer stood weeping over the bullock for most of the morning. The villagers, when they had time, when they were done resetting their chicken coops, righting the broken potteries from the kiln, resetting headstones, came by to see him, and pat him on the back.

That was the only bullock the village had. All they had beside that were cows.

That night the Mistman called out for his steak and milk. The widow went to him, in his largest house, decked out anew with the finest things the villagers had to offer, and explained they couldn't give him steak that night, as all the pantries had been raided by wolves, and they couldn't kill another cow, not without a bullock yet, as they'd have to trade some of the cows for a bullock, and it would take time to rebuild a herd, so no-one could have steak.

In the house, dim behind the Mistman in the door, she saw the Dora sitting in a corner huddled up in a blanket, her naked shoulders jutting out from underneath.

"But I must have steak," said the Mistman, baring his yellowy grin. Stuck between his teeth were pieces of red and yellow lint. "If I don't have steak and milk, as you promised, then I'll have to release the mist."

"But you didn't even ask for steak and milk," said the widow. "I offered that, you didn't even request it."

"But you did offer," said the Mistman, his eyes glinting brightly. "And now you must keep to your promise, or I shall release the mist."

Dora nodded her head weakly from behind. The old widow nodded back. They didn't want the mist back. Those clammy babies in the night, and the damp, and the blind corners and never seeing your husband's face, or his grave, or a smile or the food as you ate it.

"Very well." She returned to Keith's stead and explained they had to kill one of his cows. He refused. So she took it to the pub, and she explained, and they grouped into a mob and they descended upon Keith's place, and they held him back while they slaughtered one of his cows.

And that night, they all feasted on beef, and they drank wine and beer, and the Mistman was out amongst them singing and dancing with the brightest shoes in town, with the prettiest girl Dora on his arm, though her eyes seemed to have lost some of their sparkle, and her skin some of it's vital tone.

That night Keith lay sobbing amongst his herd, a broom-pike in his hands, vowing to kill any wolf that came at all near his herd.

The villagers laughed off his concern, as they ate his beef and drank their wine, saying the wolves would never come back, not with the Mistman amongst them.

The next morning they found Keith frozen and dead amongst his cows.

The Mistman called upon his bugle and asked the widow for his steak and milk. The widow peered into the gloom of his biggest and finest house in the village, and asked did he not have any milk and steak remaining from the night before.

"No, my dear," he said. "I do not."

"Then where is Dora? Can she not fetch the milk and steak? Would that not be better than these old bones traipsing up and down every day?"

"Dora is busy," said the Mistman, and gestured over to the corner where she had been huddled before.

The widow looked, and saw Dora huddled in the blanket. Only this time she was smaller than before.

The widow found herself walking into the Mistman's room. She moved over to Dora, and drew a nearby curtain.

Dora had shrunk, and turned to grey. Her eyes bloomed with grey clouds, swirling blindly inside her head.

"Dora?" said the widow, growing frantic. "Dora!"

"She cannot hear you," said the Mistman from behind her gaily. "She is lost in the fog now. I suspect she'll last a few more days. Then I shall require the next prettiest girl in town."

"What? Why do you need another?"

"Why, as a lock-box, my dear!" sang the Mistman suddenly. "As a lockbox keep-safe heirloom spot, a place to keep your things and bits you never want forgot!"

"She'll die?"

"Of course, but all in the service of the village, my dear. Now, about that steak and milk."

The widow nodded dumbly and left.

She met Dora's father as he was picking up Keith's body to bury him, and told him what was happening. Dora's father dropped the corpse of Keith the bullock-minder and ran to the pub to gather another posse.

He took them to the Mistman's finest and largest house in the village and demanded to see his daughter.

The Mistman brought her out by the hair. She was small enough that he could hold her out now, and her legs wouldn't touch the floor. Her eyes had grown like pig's bladders, and rolled and ebbed like the tide of the sea with the grey clouds within.

"Give her back to me!" cried Dora's father. "Give me back my daughter!"

"I'm afraid not," said the Mistman, and flung her behind himself and back into the room. "She was part of the deal, and she came willingly."

"We didn't know you would kill her!"

"But I knew. If you'd have asked, I would have told you."

That night the villagers gathered in the Siren's Peak and plotted their assault of the Mistman's house. As the widow delivered him his steak and milk, they smashed through the front and back doors and pinned him to the ground.

They found Dora like a burst balloon on the ground, shredded and dry and big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Like a banana peel, or a coconut husk, not that the villagers had even seen such things.

"What have you done?" screamed the father.

"Only as the mist commanded," said the Mistman. "Would you rather it were back?"

The villagers hoisted him and carried him to a streetlamp, which they threw a noose over. They fixed his neck in the circle of rope, and hauled it up so he was dragged up into the air.

He continued to smile as they hauled him up. And as his smile opened, the pieces of green and red lint between his teeth began to vibrate, and then like a torrent of snow or an avalanche the mist poured out of his mouth.

It jetted in an impossible torrent, the sheer weight of it knocking the men back and the rope from their hands, so the Mistman fell to his feet.

"I'll take two more of your prettiest," he said to them as they lay there around him in the thickening grey, "to go away and never come back. I will take your mist with me, and your prettiest girls, and I suggest you think on this very carefully. For there will always be more girls. But can you ever drive out the mist on your own?"

The villagers tried to find him again, but ended up only fighting and wrestling with each other, for they couldn't see at all in the thick white mist.

The next day the village lay silent.

It lay silent because it was empty.

The Mistman woke and found himself tied to his bed. His brightest and strongest boots had been nailed to the bed frame. He was bound and wrapped three times over with the skin of his own two horses.

His lute and flute and bugle had been smashed and lay in pieces on the floor.

He screamed out for his steak and his milk. He screamed out for his two prettiest girls.

But nobody answered, because the villagers had all gone.

The villagers walked out of the mist sometime around noon. None of them had ever left before. They knew nothing about what was beyond their vale, down from their mountain. All they'd ever known was the mist. All they'd ever known was the mountain top and the wolves and the thick white all around them.

Now they were on rolling lands of green. There was a crystal clear river and fields full of dandelions and roses. There was wild corn, and herds of cattle grazing.

They settled at the river mouth and agreed never to return to Ballahee. Dora's father buried her tiny shrunken body under the first stone he laid for his new home. He had new daughters with his wife, and they named them both after Dora.

In the mountains the Mistman continued to scream and order and cry, wrapped up in his horse-skins with his instruments broken nearby, with the mist encircling him, passing down into his lungs and his throat and his stomach, passing through him, becoming part of him, until night fell and the wolves came.

Drawn by the blood of the slaughtered horses they found the Mistman nailed to the bed, and they ate him up alive.

When Old Ivors the once-drunk told the story, of the old misty village of Ballahee up in the Mistman shrieking mountains, the children shivered in their beds. He told the tale of the Mistman dancing with glee through the misty buildings and round and round the village pub. He told the story of poor Dora, shrunken, and with eyes filled with blind grey.

And the children cried when they went to bed. And old Ivors chuckled as he talked to the parents.

"They'll not steal the cookies again, will they?" he asked. Or "that'll teach them to be out after dark."

And so the new village grew, and became a town, which in time became a city, and filled the valley with people working and tending and raising their children.

And if, one day, a child was to stumble into the wrecked old ruins of a once-fine home, where the mist of ages still swirled, and see the stripped bare bones of a long thin man nailed to a bed by his fine leather shoes, then he would know to run away as fast as he could, for that was the Mistman's burial ground, and no good could come of venturing in.