He called himself Ellery Curtis, but that was not his real name.
The first time he saw the golden fog, he was shaving, staring at his pale blue eyes in the bathroom mirror. The fog took shape about fifteen feet behind him, somewhere in the adjoining bedroom.
He jumped, startled, and put a deep gash in his chin. Unmindful of the pain, he threw his razor into the sink and turned to face the bedroom.
"Who's there?" he demanded.
There was no response. He walked carefully into the bedroom and began searching, looking behind the old leather recliner that had seen better days, inside his small narrow closet, under the beat-up four-poster that had come with the apartment.
He opened a dresser drawer, pulled out a .38 automatic, uncapped the safety, and made a careful tour of the apartment's four small rooms. He found nothing.
Shrugging, he returned to the bathroom and applied a styptic pencil to his chin. He washed, dressed, and walked to the kitchen to prepare breakfast ... and had the unearthly feeling of being watched.
He raced across the kitchen and burst into the bedroom. He thought he saw a trace of gold out of the corner of his eye, somewhere in the vicinity of the window, but when he turned to look at it, it was gone.
He checked the window latches. Bolted.
He checked the door. Locked.
And, because yellow fogs aren't exactly the norm for housebreakers, he checked the fireplace flue. Closed.
He was sweating now, and his chin began stinging, but he forced himself to finish his breakfast. He debated tucking the pistol in his belt but decided that bullets weren't all that useful against an overactive and undercontrolled imagination and left it at home.
He spent the next three hours teaching judo and karate to flabby housewives whose fears were probably as groundless as their talents and, at noon, he took a quick shower and prepared to go out for lunch--and saw it again, more clearly this time.
It hung a few inches above the floor of the locker room, oblivious to air currents, and yet not without its own internal movement, as if this enormous mass of translucence were trying to become something.
Curtis remained motionless for an instant, then threw a water glass at the fog. It vanished, and the glass smashed into a thousand fragments against the tiled wall. Curtis walked over to where it had been, hoping to find some trace of it. The room seemed exactly as it had before, with nothing but the broken pieces of glass to give testimony that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
He stood motionless, waiting, but the fog did not return. Finally he shrugged and walked back to his locker, muttering a brief "Damn!' as his bare foot came down on a sharp fragment of glass. He sat down on a bench, pulled the glass out of his foot, got a bandage from the first-aid kit, and dressed.
He walked slowly through the building, past the tumbling mats and the plush desk in the reception room, but saw nothing unusual. Finally he walked out on the sidewalk. The teeming mass of humanity scurrying by him made him feel a sense of relief and security. He was back in the real world, where the only fogs were those that came off the ocean at night.
He walked the three blocks to his usual restaurant, picking up a newspaper and greeting an occasional acquaintance along the way. He was about twenty feet from the doorway when he saw it again, a little less shapeless than before.
It filled the entrance, glowing a dull gold, shimmering slightly, still seeking a form that seemed beyond its grasp. Curtis, shaking violently, looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it. A small, fiftyish woman who had been walking beside him continued on into the restaurant, walking right through the pulsating fog. Curtis shook his head and rubbed his eyes; when he looked up, it was gone.
Suddenly food was the last thing he wanted. Instead, his hands still trembling, he pulled a small address booklet out of his pocket.
)
A Vietnam veteran is confronted by a ghostly apparition seeking revenge for what happened in the village of Quang Chai.
