Rushed (20 page)

He stepped through the door, letting it bang closed behind him, and entered the room where the yellow-clad woman had gone.  This room was open and empty, filled with dust, but brightly lit.  There was another door in the far corner, but the room behind it was unlit.

He peered into this darkness and found only another empty room.  There were no other doors.  Where had the woman gone?  And where had she come from?  He hadn’t seen any cars outside. 

There was no furniture in this darkened room.  No desks, no chairs, no office equipment filled the empty space. 

He took a step back, away from the disconcerting darkness, confused, and turned around. 

Walking toward him was a very large man in the same yellow coveralls the heavyset woman had been wearing.  In his meaty hands, he lifted a heavy-looking shovel into the air and swung it at Eric’s startled face. 

Chapter Twenty-One

Eric closed his eyes.  He stood there, his back to the wall, cringing in anticipation of the blow.  But it never came.  When he dared a peek, the large man and his shovel were gone. 

A tall man was standing in the middle of the room instead, studying a piece of paper. 

“What just happened?” he asked, but the man merely turned away and walked out of the room. 

“Excuse me…”

Eric followed him into the hallway, but he was gone.  Instead, an attractive woman with dark features was walking toward him from the door at the end of the hallway.  She was carrying a clipboard under her arm and pulling her long, black hair out from under her hairnet. 

“Can you help me?” he asked, but the woman ignored him so completely that he had to step quickly out of her way to keep from being pushed aside. 

“The hell?”

His cell phone chimed at him, announcing a new text message, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, he again found a single word staring back at him. 

LISTEN

He frowned at the word.  Listen to what?  The place was silent. 

Then it occurred to him.  It
was
silent. 
Utterly
silent.  There was none of the noise a factory should have been making, even before its machinery began running.  It wasn’t even the polite hush of a quiet hospital wing.  Even the footsteps of these people were perfectly silent. 

Duh. 

He’d been so distracted by the shock of finding people working here that he hadn’t noticed how unnaturally quiet they all were. 

Beginning to understand, he turned and peered into the room where the big man had swung the shovel at him.  There, on the wall directly over where he’d been standing, was a metal rack, exactly the sort of place someone might hang such tools when they were done with them.  The man hadn’t been trying to brain the hapless intruder at all.  He was merely hanging up his shovel.  If he hadn’t closed his eyes, he might have seen it pass right through him. 

Or simply disappear. 

Turning around, he found a very short, rotund woman moving toward him from the door at the end of the hall.  The door wasn’t swinging as if someone had just passed through it, and he very much doubted it that it would open so soundlessly. 

This time, he stood his ground and the woman faded away just before she could collide with him. 

Residuals. 

Completely harmless, Grant had assured him, but deceptive.  The foggy man left them to trip him up.  The first lured him into a trap.  The second had been put there to try and deter him from staying on the path, likely in hopes of making him either give up or try to find another path, which likely would’ve resulted in straying too far into the other world and becoming lost forever. 

So what was the point of
these
guys? 

He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember what he did in his dream. 

It had been dark.  Very dark.  But he’d had a light. 

Why did he have a light?  He wasn’t carrying a light now. 

Then he remembered.  He used the cell phone. 

Dream Eric was pretty smart. 

He’d poked around these offices without finding anything.  Then he made his way through the door, which he recalled now was not at all quiet, but instead extremely noisy when pushed open in this deep silence.  Using the light from the phone’s digital screen, he began to explore. 

Eric didn’t need the phone to light his way today.  These rooms were brightly illuminated.  But as he looked up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, curious about why they were on now and not two days ago, he realized that they were unlit.  The light didn’t seem to be coming from those. 

This was new.  Apparently the foggy man could even manufacture residual lighting. 

How the hell did that even work? 

Too tired to contemplate such a thing, Eric pushed open the door, wincing at the loud screeching of its hinges, and stepped out onto the factory floor. 

If this were a real factory, the noise would be deafening, the air would be stifling and the very floor would be rumbling beneath his feet.  But in spite of the dozens of people bustling around, the thrumming of the machinery, the conveyor belts clattering, there was not the subtlest noise to be heard beyond his own shallow breathing.  The air was stale and cool, musty-smelling.  His ears and nose detected the truth.  Only his eyes saw the lie. 

He stood in the middle of the walkway, gazing around at the silent chaos, wondering what the foggy man was doing here. 

A young man walked past him, appearing no less real than Eric, and he reached out to touch his arm.  It was as if he had only imagined him there.  As soon as his fingers came close, he was gone without a trace.  He did not fade.  And he did not disappear, exactly, if that made any sense.  He was just gone, as if never there in the first place, as if he vanished not before his eyes but even for a second or two in his very memory. 

This was insanely weird. 

And after all he’d seen today, that was saying a lot. 

To his left was some kind of office.  It was dark beyond the door.  No residual lighting had been used there.  Farther to his left, a corridor led into another room where it was also dark.  But to the right, another area of the factory was lit up.  It seemed that the foggy man hadn’t bothered to animate the entire facility. 

But why? 

Eric looked up at the overhead lights.  Like the ones in the hallway, they were dark.  Looking down, he realized that he did not cast a shadow here, suggesting that the light he was seeing was just like the people:  of another time. 

His cell phone rang. 

No name. 

Isabelle.

He put the phone to his ear and immediately heard her sweet voice say, “That foggy guy’s good.”

“This is definitely quite a trick,” Eric agreed.

“Residual lighting, huh?  That’s a new one.”

“What’s he up to?”

“No idea.  I can’t feel him.  Even when you were looking at him from Father Billy’s church, I couldn’t see him.  It’s like he’s not really there, like
he’s
residual, too.”

“He can’t be residual.  He causes too much trouble.”

“True.  But I can’t feel him anywhere.”

Eric looked around at the silent workers.  It looked like they were manufacturing some kind of food, but he couldn’t tell what.  Like the sound, the product itself was missing.  Though the production lines were running at full-speed, there was nothing on the conveyors.  It was like the rooms that remained dark.  The foggy man had simply left it out. 

“Snack foods,” said Isabelle.

“What?”

“They made snack foods here.  Potato chips, cheese puffs, pretzels.  That sort of thing.  Some specialty organic brand.” 

He kept forgetting that Isabelle could read his thoughts.  That was going to take some getting used to. 

“Did something bad happen here?  Like at the resort?” 

“I don’t think so.  In this case, I think the factory just closed.  But that doesn’t mean nothing bad
ever
happened here.”

“Are all these people dead now?” he wondered, studying the busy workers. 

“I don’t know that, either.”

Eric didn’t think they were.  Not all of them.  Maybe not any of them.  None of them had hair or clothes that looked very dated.  These were people who probably worked here no earlier than the nineties. 

If so, these weren’t ghosts at all.  They were merely glimpses into the past. 

“Why is he even here?  Why isn’t he looking for the cathedral?”

“You’re not that far away,” Isabelle informed him.  “Given the head start he had, he should’ve been there and gone.  I really don’t know why he’s hanging around.  But it obviously has something to do with you.”

“Obviously.” 

“Sorry I can’t be more help.”

“You’re more help than anybody else I’ve met today.”

“I’m glad.”

“And unlike everybody else I’ve met, you’ve stayed with me.  That’s a little reassuring.  By the way, how is it you can call me when I don’t have a signal?”

“I’m not sure.  I use the phone lines in this house to call you, so I really shouldn’t be able to reach you when no one else can.  So I guess it can’t just be the phone.  Maybe the connection has more to do with us, something about the way I’m in your head now.”

“Huh.  Well I’m just happy you’re here.”

“Me too!”

“So what do you think I should do now?”

“What did you do in your dream?”

Eric tried to remember.  “I went right,” he realized. 

“I think that’s your best bet.”

He nodded.  At least that way, he could let Dream Eric lead the way for him. 

“I’ll hang up so you can watch for trouble.  I’ll text you if I need to tell you anything.”

“Sounds good.”

He disconnected the call, but kept the phone clenched in his hand.  He wanted to read anything Isabelle had to say to him immediately.  And he wanted it at the ready in case the lights went back out, which didn’t seem at all unlikely, given the special nature of the light source.

The next room was mostly empty.  An office of some sort sat in darkness on the other side of a door to the right.  To the left was another corridor.  It, too, was dark, but the room at the far end was brightly lit. 

In his dream, he had wandered around the open rooms, trying his best to see the far ends of these empty spaces.  There was no machinery in the dream.  It was all residual, just like the people and the light.  The factory had been cleaned out long ago. 

He recalled peering into several offices and storage rooms, but ultimately he made his way down the left corridor. 

As he turned around, a skinny woman with a remarkably unattractive face hurried past him and vanished halfway across the room.  A moment later, a very fat man materialized from thin air just a few feet from where the woman disappeared and laboriously strolled out onto the production floor Eric just left. 

A few short hours ago, that would’ve blown his mind. 

He remembered being jumpy.  In the dream, he’d been mostly calm throughout the day, sometimes in stark contrast to what he felt here in the waking world.  He was never attacked by the wardrobe golem.  He never saw the coyote-deer while trying to cross the gut-wrenchingly scary bridge.  Nothing terrifying waited for him between the resort and Altrusk’s house.  He’d even crossed the lake without encountering Furious George.  Dream Eric had been surprisingly lucky.  But whatever he encountered during the part of his dream that he could not quite recall had frightened him as badly as any of the things he’d encountered today and the result was that he was nearly sick with fear as he wandered these dark, deserted chambers in search of the way forward. 

This did not in any way help him feel any calmer now.  If anything, a worried Dream Eric made the situation much worse.  He felt as though he would remember something bad happening any moment, at which point the bad thing would happen here and now, with no time to defend against it. 

Yet as he made his way down the corridor, nothing terrible happened to either Eric. 

Although there were bright lights at both ends of the corridor, he found that very little of it seemed to reach beyond the doorways, so that he found himself illuminating the floor before him with the cell phone’s digital display to ensure against any unforeseen hazards. 

The next room was a great, empty space, likely a large storage area of some kind.  Once upon a time, forklifts probably prowled up and down the corridor, moving things around, keeping the production lines running.  But now the room was empty.  Three men stood in the middle of the room.  Two of them wore hair nets.  One of them was talking, yet he made no sound. 

His phone chimed.

SOMETHING SEEMS WRONG

“No kidding,” he told the phone.

BE CAREFUL.

“I will.”

Dream Eric had wandered around this empty room, exploring, searching for the path that would carry him forward.  Eventually, he made his way to the far corner, where a set of steps led up to the second floor. 

Now, the Eric that was running two days late walked past the three men and headed for the stairs. 

Something felt wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. 

He glanced back one last time at the three men conversing silently in the middle of the room and then ascended the stairs and entered a long, dark hallway. 

In his dream, he peered into each room, probed it with the light from his phone and moved on.  Now he used the returning memory of the dream to avoid these rooms.  He was not at all eager to step through a door and find himself face-to-horrible-face with another golem. 

And if he were to be completely honest with himself, this seemed like the perfect place for a golem, as far from any of the outer doors as possible, completely lacking in places to run and hide, plenty of dead ends in which he could find himself cornered.