the Strand comes the Gray Man who walks the surf line when the skies are black with storm warnings and leaves no footprints when he slips at last into the mist.
The Story: It was that kind of day.
Gray sand.
Gray sea.
Gray sky.
Gray time of day.
Nothing but gray, and the wind came riding across the waves, churning up a spray of angry whitecaps, which was the only color to blot the face of the Strand other than gray.
Thelma Allen had trouble breathing. Plenty of air. None in the lungs. Her chest felt as though someone was standing on her sternum and tightening its fist around her heart. It was hot and stifling on this sultry September afternoon. The last of the sun had been swallowed up by a blanket of gray clouds, and a searing wind dried the sweat that creased her face. She shuddered. There was a chill in the air, and it had nothing to do with the weather.
Thelma Allen and her husband were pioneering a building development on the southern tip of Pawleys Island, and it seemed to her that the last hinges of a desperate summer were hanging on to the Strand, refusing to let go, keeping the suffocating heat locked up on sands that had grown crusty and bare. The season had ended. Summer had forgotten to leave. Summer had trapped them all.
She walked out on her porch and lay down on a cot. The breeze should be cooler by now, she thought. It wasn’t. The man in the Red Cross store down the street swore that the hot air had been funneled across the Strand from the backdoor furnaces of hell.
The gray day turned to night, grayer still. The moon must be shining somewhere, but not on Pawleys Island. Sleep came and went as noiselessly as cat’s feet on a hot tin roof. Just before dawn, Thelma Allen opened her eyes. She did not know why. Nothing had startled her. Even the winds in the trees were traveling with hushed tones.
She saw someone standing in the inside doorway of her home.
A gray man.
On a gray morning.
Outlined against a gray sky.
With a gray sea feverishly raking the gray sands.
He was looking directly at her, but she could not see his eyes. There were black holes where his eyes should have been. She waited for him to speak.
Silence.
No words.
No smile.
The gray man stepped back into the shadows and was gone.
She ran to awaken my husband, and they turned on every light in the house. They moved together from one room to another. No one was there. Nothing was out of place. The windows were closed, the shutters buttoned up and battened down, and the doors were all locked, even the inside door, the place where the gray man stood. Outside, the mist and the fog and the darkness had become as one. No figure walked the sand. The gray was lost amidst the gray.
The gray sky was calm. A gray sky could lie to you. If a storm were brewing, it was hiding beyond the gray clouds. No one could read anything into the wind. The winds were always howling.
At a party the next afternoon, Thelma Allen mentioned that she had seen a figure among the shadows, and the sight of him gave her chills and a dark sense of foreboding. She did not believe in ghosts, but neither did she doubt the possibility of their existence.
It could have been a dream, but nightmares never came with her eyes wide open. She knew what she had seen, and what Thelma Allen had seen left her unsettled and afraid.
“Don’t worry,” said a friend.
“Why not?”
“It must have been the Gray Man.”
Thelma Allen frowned and narrowed her eyes. She and her husband were among the newcomers to Pawleys Island. She had seen the gray days, the gray skies, the gray seas, the gray sands, but had never heard of a gray man.
She raised an eyebrow. It was a question.
“You are a fortunate woman if the Gray Man comes,” the friend said. “He always walks the sands before a storm.”
“But he was in my house.”
“The message must have been urgent.”
“What message?”
“He wants you to leave.”
“He didn’t say anything.’
The friend smiled. “He doesn’t have to,” the friend said. “When he looks at you, you know what to do.”
“I certainly didn’t know.”
“You do now.”
Thelma Allen was perplexed. A little confused. Slightly shaken.”Who is the Gray Man?” she asked.
“No one knows for sure,” the friend said quietly. “But, I can tell you, he’s no stranger to Pawleys Island.”
He was first sighted, if the old, yellowed newspapers are correct, just before the hurricane of 1822, a fierce storm that hammered Charleston and killed more than three hundred people scattered across the connecting isles and marshlands. In 1893, the Gray Man walked out of the gray fog and appeared before the Lachicotte family. His eyes were dulled. His words were silenced in the winds. But the meaning of his arrival could not be denied or rebuked. The Lachicotte family frantically fled to the mainland before the Sea Islands Hurricane tore across the coast and left fifteen hundred people dead and dying in the devastation and debris.
Bill Collins and his bride had come to the Grand Strand on their honeymoon during a fateful autumn of 1954. During the approaching hours of dawn, a rapid knock was heard on their door. Collins opened it. A man stood before him dressed in rumpled clothing. He had a gray coat wrapped around his shoulders and a gray hat pulled low across his gray eyes. “I’ve been sent to tell you to leave,” the Gray Man whispered.
“Why should we?” Bill Collins was stunned, a little addled, and still trying to work his way from the gray fog of a deep sleep. “A big storm’s coming.”
Bill Collins always believed that he could smell a salty brine on the man’s clothes. The Gray Man did not move. He did not walk away. He simply faded into the woodwork. Bill Collins was staring into the dead of night.
The gray had gone black. He and his wife drove off Pawleys Island only hours before Hurricane Hazel struck the Atlantic coastline as a Category 4 storm. It would snatch away the lives of ninety-five and destroy more than fifteen thousand homes.
Thirty-five years later, Jack and Clara Moore were walking among the gray dunes during the last dying shadows of a September afternoon. All around them the day was the same.
Gray sands.
Gray skies.
Gray seas.
They
