Fog. That damned fog again. Thick, heavy, like the breath of a swamp. It creeps everywhere, obscuring everything that might have once been here. It stretches toward me, pulls me into itself. I step through an empty space that is neither a room nor a street, nor even a thought. No sound, no movement, not a flicker of an idea. Only cold. Only the clinging silence. Only the gray haze, endless and heavy, as if someone had poured an ocean of ash straight into my skull. Longford’s world had collapsed, no longer capable of life.

I tried to take a step, but the space resisted, viscous and unreal. The fog wrapped around me, chilled my skin, seeped into my lungs as if trying to take the place of air. Longford wasn’t that old, couldn’t have lost all traces of humanity so quickly for his mind to disintegrate into this dust. Even decrepit old men leave behind fragments - shattered faces, whispered regrets, something human. But here, nothing. Only emptiness, like a bottomless pit, and the fog, its senseless guardian.

Could Woodsworth have had a hand in this? Dressing him, sitting him at his desk - a helpless old man spoon-fed his meals, his thoughts long drowned in senility. The image formed before my eyes: Longford in a ridiculous robe and nightcap, his gaze frozen while someone else moved his hands like a puppet. But no, he had been alive when he died. Or was he? The body was found yesterday, but what if time or the butler lied? If he had been dead for far longer, his mind could have decayed, broken apart like rotten wood, leaving only this gray haze. A dead mind doesn’t hold its shape - it melts, dissolves, vanishes into nothing.

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Or perhaps Longford had always been this way - a small-minded fool with a head full of emptiness, just as his pockets were full of gold. A hollow man in an expensive suit, whose inner world had never known depth. But that didn’t add up. Wealth and power breed labyrinths - greed, paranoia, cunning. Men like him never have clean minds. Unless...

Unless the killer had scraped it all away. Left no trace, no hint - only the fog, a perfect veil. Only a psionic as strong as me, or stronger, could do that. That meant an unconscious attack by a close relative who had suddenly awakened their gift and resentment was out of the question. No, this was deliberate. The killer had left no clues in the mind.

I wrenched myself away, feeling the haze cling to me like a spider’s web to a fly. With effort, I pushed myself out, and Longford’s mind let me go. The dead cannot resist. Any hope of a quick resolution drowned in that gray filth. The case was growing murkier by the second. Dementia!