'I am Bruce Ackerman. My wife is Sophie. I came here on purpose.'
He reminded himself as he kept moving.
He almost walked past it because he was looking at the ground in front of his feet, watching the give of the grey. But something at the edge of his vision pulled his attention up and to the right, and when he looked properly, he stopped walking entirely.
Ahead of him, perhaps a hundred paces away, the mist was moving.
Not drifting the way the rest of it drifted. Not the slow, almost-still flow he had been walking through for hours. The mist in this one spot was spinning, pulling inward toward a center he could not yet see, a slow, deliberate spiral that thickened and brightened the closer it got to its core. From where Bruce stood, the swirl looked like a small storm in the middle of a still grey sea.
His first instinct was to turn around.
