The fog

The story I am about to tell you happened to a friend of mine, Sam Lamar. Sam is a software engineer and many consider him a genius in his field. Well, it was a chilly October evening and Sam was on his way home from a conference. He was driving along the coast, when, all of a sudden, his car entered a heavy fog bank. Sam turned on the fog lights and inadvertently thought about the tragic death of his pet hamster, Aldridge, who escaped from his cage and was run over by a truck last May. "Oh Aldridge," he sighed. But Sam couldn't afford to allow this sad memory to distract him, because he had to focus all of his attention on the road. The fog was growing thicker and thicker, and even the strong fog lights of Sam's car couldn't cut the heavy mist anymore. "What is this?" Sam thought to himself. "The fog isn't normally this thick around here."

But the fog soon engulfed Sam's entire car so completely that he couldn't even see out of his windshield anymore. He was forced to pull over to the side of the road. As he turned the key in the ignition, a weird feeling started to wash over him, like something was really, really wrong here. He started to think about how his mother used to force him to eat his broccoli (Sam hates broccoli), and how his father used to call him a sissy for crying when "Old Yeller" died at the end of the movie. Sam shuddered, it almost felt like his parents were right there in the car with him harping in his hear. He shook off the sensation and instinctively reached for his cell phone. He wanted to call his friend, because he felt the need to hear someone's voice. But when he finally had dug the phone out of the glove compartment, there was no signal.

Sam cursed loudly as he flung the phone on the passenger seat. Meanwhile the fog outside intensified and Sam began to fidget with his radio, but nothing seemed to be able to penetrate this bizarre mist. All he could hear was some exceedingly unnerving static. It was as if this fog wanted to swallow him whole. Sam got a disturbingly eerie feeling in the pit of his stomach as more and more bad memories started to flood back to him. He remembered events he had thought he had long forgotten as vividly as if they had only happened yesterday, like the time when Carl Fister gave him a wedgy in front of Susan Mayer in 8th grade, or the time he asked that cute clerk at the coffee shop for her phone number and she started to laugh hysterically.

Sam started to whistle to try to divert his mind, but it was to no avail. He remembered more and more things, the time his little sister flushed his goldfish, Muriel, and the time Lewis Mickelson blamed him for painting the headmaster's car pink; the time he caught Loretta, his first girlfriend, making out with the running back of the football team. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.

"This will all be over soon, this fog will lift soon, this fog will lift soon," he mumbled to himself desperately, over and over again.

Sam shook his head and laughed, he was really starting to loose it. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he froze. For an instant, he didn't dare to move. His body was gripped by a complete and utter terror. He slowly forced himself to open his eyes and cautiously looked around. Then he saw IT.

The thick fog was seeping inside the car through the heater vent. The mist slowly made its way towards him and started to encircle him like a predator encircles its prey. When it finally settled upon his body, Sam felt like some unspeakable evil was slowly tightening its grip on him. For a moment, Sam resisted, but he knew there was no escape. Then he just surrendered and all of Sam's bad memories started to rush back to him. They were all back and in full force: Every bad memory he had thought he had long since forgotten was there, with all the emotional intensity and power of the moment itself. He relived them all, from his earliest memory to the time George Caldwell brought his son to Sam's office and left him unattended long enough to reformat the hard drive on his computer. Sam was a strong man. Sam was a brave man, basically a good man, but this was too much for any man. Mercifully, it was at precisely this moment that he lost consciousness.

The highway patrol found him passed out in his car the next morning. After he was woken, Sam asked about the fog the night before. The officer peered at him suspiciously with narrowed eyes and asked: "Sir, have you been drinking? There was no fog last night."

After Sam got back home, he locked himself into his basement for 32 days. When he finally emerged, he had a smile on his face. Sam had programmed the MemoryEraser.

Spidey's tip Why don't you rid yourself of some bad memories once and for all by trying out the MemoryEraser. All you have to do is follow the on-screen instructions. And don't worry. It's perfectly safe, really.

MemoryLifter is available for free. The success of this freeware depends on whether people recommend it to others. Please forward this newsletter or tell a friend.