Rushed (23 page)

That would be a stroke of luck. 

He followed the trail of blood along the stream and around the bend, cautiously peering around each rock.  The last thing he wanted to do was walk up on the thing and surprise it during its meal. 

A dreadful thought occurred to him suddenly.  He imagined turning a corner and finding the beast snoozing among the carnage of its last kill.  Among that carnage would be his own face, inconceivably dead even as he stood staring at himself. 

It didn’t even make sense, yet the image was so profoundly terrifying that it nearly paralyzed him. 

After all, he could hardly expect that anything was really impossible after all he’d seen and done today. 

But as he made his way around a pair of fallen boulders, he found that there was nothing left to fear.  The trail of blood led him directly to the still body of the cat itself. 

Things had happened so quickly in his dream that he didn’t get a really good look at the beast.  Now he saw that it was at least as big as a full-grown tiger.  It had an extra-long, bushy tail and paws the size of a grizzly bear.  It was amazing the thing hadn’t killed him instantly in his dream. 

But then again, if it
was
a cat, perhaps it liked to play with its food.  It was a gruesome idea, but one that might explain why Dream Eric still lived. 

The beast lay collapsed on its side, its eyes glazed and staring up at the rock walls of the canyon.  A drying pool of blood had spread around it.

In his dream, he’d kept going, managing somehow to remain on his feet, all the way to the canyon’s far end.  He hadn’t seen another predator. 

What could have killed this thing? 

But then it came to him.  What was here that wasn’t here in his dream? 

Isabelle answered the question for him:  THE FOGGY MAN

Yes.  The foggy man.  And given that he’d just put in an appearance back at the factory, it was obvious that he didn’t have that big of a lead on him.  He would have only been by here in the past hour. 

The foggy man had dispatched the cat that would have nearly killed him had he arrived two days ago when he was supposed to.  Had the foggy man, then, just saved his life?  That would be an ironic twist in all this. 

But the three golems had been more than proof enough that the foggy man wasn’t here to protect him.  Likely, the cat had merely inconvenienced him as he passed through.  The foggy man was probably sure enough of himself that he didn’t feel the need to let the cat finish him off. 

Still clinging to the pointed rock, just in case, Eric left Fluffy where he lay and continued on. 

Above him, the walls began to recede and withdraw and the rocky ground gave way to soil and trees.  Soon, the canyon began to give way to a forest where he recalled making his way from tree to tree as the cat prowled along behind him at a distance, watching him, waiting for him to topple over.

His cell phone began to vibrate in his hand.  It was Isabelle.

“That was terrifying!” she announced as he lifted the phone to his ear.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you.  I’ve never heard of anything like that in the fissure before.  I had no idea it was out there.”

“Don’t worry about it.  I can’t expect anyone to know everything.  Not even you.”

He kept looking around, still expecting to see something stalking him among the rocks.  Fluffy’s mate, perhaps. 

In his dream, he struggled to keep going, staggering, fighting to remain conscious.  He was beginning to think he was about to recall every detail of his own, gruesome death. 

But it wasn’t long after the last remnants of the canyon were out of sight that he came across a paved, two-lane road.  And there, about a hundred yards to his right, stood a small gas station. 

“I see something,” he told Isabelle. 

He remembered stumbling toward this station in his dream, somehow still on his feet, desperate for help. 

He also remembered what Father Billy said about being helped by the “gas station attendant” and that he would likely meet him later in his journey.  Clearly, coming across this place was no coincidence. 

“That’s an odd place,” Isabelle observed.

“What?”

“There’s something strange about that place.  What is it?”

“It’s just a gas station.”

“Weird…  I couldn’t quite tell.  It’s different.”

“Different from the other places in the fissure?”

“It’s different from
anything
I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to explain.  I don’t really get it.  It’s just dif—”

The phone went silent.

“Hello?”

But Isabelle was gone again, apparently cut off. 

But he
always
had a connection to Isabelle. 

Uncertain what this meant, Eric pocketed the phone and looked around.  Miraculously, he still seemed to be alone.  Nothing had tried to kill him yet. 

He made his way along the shoulder of the quiet road.  At the same time, his memories unraveled and he saw himself bleeding and weak as the longhaired beast tracked him from the cover of the trees. 

He remembered thinking that his only chance was to find help at the gas station.  If no one was there… 

He shuddered at the memory.  It was so vivid.  Every emotion, every throbbing pain, as clear as if he were feeling it right now. 

He kept looking down at his hand.  He could see it as it was, intact and strong.  And he could see it as it would have been, wrapped in his tee shirt, blood dripping through the fabric, so much smaller than it should have been. 

He felt sick. 

The gas station was deathly silent.  The building was in need of paint, the parking lot needed repaved.  But the place had a clean look that the deserted buildings back at the resort and the farmhouse lacked. 

There was an old, white limousine backed into the woods next to the building.  It was badly rusted around its wheel wells and the paint was blistered on its roof and hood.  It looked like the sort of thing the owner of a place like this might have as a side business, except that he doubted anyone would want to rent a junky limousine.  That pretty much defeated the purpose. 

As he drew closer, movement in the trees caught his eye, startling him.  But no danger lurked in the branches.  Instead, a large hawk flexed its wings and stared down at him. 

He wondered if this could possibly be the same hawk he’d been seeing all day.  Ordinarily, that would be preposterous.  There were likely thousands of hawks out here.  The countless acres of fields made for ideal hunting grounds.  But the idea of being followed all this way by a single hawk didn’t seem so unlikely given all that he had seen. 

Eric walked past the pumps to the door.  He knocked.  At the same time, he remembered knocking in his dream, pleading for someone to come to his aid. 

Both then and now, the door opened and a broadly grinning man only the size of a ten-year-old boy stood staring up at him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Running a bit late, aren’t you?” said the man. 

Father Billy had described the gas station attendant as a “little guy” and had not been exaggerating.  He did not possess the stout, dwarfish stature associated with most little people, but was instead perfectly proportional.  He was simply quite small. 

Eric stared down at him, distracted.  In his dream, he recalled this man taking him by the arm and leading him inside.  Instead of, “Running a bit late, aren’t you?” he had instead said, “Aren’t you in a sorry state.”

Not sure what else to say, he rubbed tiredly at the lump the foggy man left on his head and replied, “I’m sorry.”

“Well, come on in.”

The gas station office was small and cluttered.  The little man moved a box from the seat of a dusty chair and invited Eric to sit, which he did.  Immediately, he recalled sitting in the same chair in his dream, except he’d been on the verge of passing out. 

His eyes drifted to the large window that offered a view of the pumps.  In his dream, he recalled seeing the beast out there, crouching among the trees on the other side of the road. 

“You look remarkably whole.  I half-expected you to come in missing a limb or two.”

Eric stared at him, surprised.  What was that supposed to mean?  His eyes dropped to his hand, the vivid memory of his missing digits in the dream left a burning knot deep in the pit of his stomach. 

Opening an old refrigerator, the little man said, “Here, have a Coke,” and promptly passed him a can. 

Eric felt numb.  The can was cold against his hand.  His mouth was dry.  He
was
thirsty.  He hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink since he left home early that morning.  Although he’d promised Karen he would stay caffeinated, he never stopped for coffee.  He hadn’t felt the need.  He was wide-awake.  “Thanks,” he said weakly.  He opened the can and took a long drink.

The gas station attendant walked around his desk and sat down.  He didn’t say anything.  He merely peered back at him with that constant smile. 

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.  “I’m just…”

“Overwhelmed by whatever you’ve just remembered in your dream, I’m sure.”

“My dream.  Yeah.  How do you…?”

He waved his little hand as if to say, “Forget about it,” and smiled.  “Don’t worry.  Just sit and take it in.  You’ve got time.  You’ve earned a break.” 

The little man fell silent and Eric looked around.  He’d seen all this before.  In his dream.  It wasn’t vividly clear, like other parts of the dream.  He was in a lot of pain.  He was
dying
.  But the gas station attendant fixed him up.  He bandaged his wounds, stopped his bleeding.  He gave him something for the pain.  Something strong. 

It was a dream.  It wasn’t real.  But…

He looked across the desk.  “If I’d shown up here badly injured…  Say, mauled by a big cat…”

The man’s eyes lit up and he opened his desk drawer.  He removed a small box and laid it on the table.  He recognized the box at once.  There were syringes inside.  “Morphine.” 

“Morphine would probably do it,” Eric agreed.  He didn’t ask what a gas station attendant was doing with a supply of morphine in his desk.  Given the grim details of his dream, he didn’t dare complain. 

The memory of the dream was breaking up as he recalled weaving in and out of consciousness beneath the apparently surgeon-like hands of the small attendant.  He recalled snippets of images as the little man bustled busily around his chair, which at some point had apparently reclined so that he was able to lie almost horizontally. 

Eric glanced down at the chair, but could see nothing to indicate that it had such a feature. 

It was as if the little man had transformed the dirty office into an operating room, disinfecting his wounds, stitching him up, stabilizing him.  He thought he even recalled seeing bags of blood and an IV hanging from the shade of the lamp in the corner. 

But surely that had been a traumatic hallucination. 

Yet the morphine was real…

“What’s happening to me?” Eric asked. 

“What’s happening is you were called upon to make a journey to the cathedral, a journey that could only be made by walking along the path of the fissure.  The calling came to you in your sleep and in the form of a premonition that manifested as a dream.  No doubt, you awoke from that dream with an overwhelming urge to get up and go, but you didn’t remember the dream itself.”

“That’s right.”

“Given that I was expecting you two days ago, I’d guess you resisted the urge that night and the next.”

“Yeah.  I did.”

“That can be good or bad.  Things change from day to day.  Some of the things that weren’t there two days ago will be there today and things that
were
there two days ago will be long gone now.  But you already know that, don’t you.”

He did, in fact, know this.  None of this was information he hadn’t already worked out for himself. 

“I’m guessing by the fact that you’re still in pretty good shape but look like you’ve just seen the reaper, that your most recent memory showed you something you’re glad you missed.”

“Yeah.  Big cat.”

“Fluffy thing?  Might be cute if it wasn’t so terrifying?”

“That’s it all right.”

“Yeah that’ll do it.  I take it you survived long enough in the dream to make it here.”

He had the strangest feeling that the little man already knew very well that he did, that he had known it long before he arrived.  But he responded anyway:  “I did.”

The little man smiled broadly again.  “And I’ll bet that, until now, the trip you took in your dream was much less burdensome than what you’ve been going through.”

Eric nodded.  With the sole exception of the strange bite-mark he’d obtained in the area he missed while detouring through Father Billy’s neck of the woods, Dream Eric hadn’t run into anything truly terrifying.  “Can you tell me what I’m doing here?  What am I looking for at the cathedral?  Why do I have to go through all this?”

Still, the gas station attendant smiled at him.  “Frustrating, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  It is.”

“All right.  There’s something hidden in the cathedral, something you have to retrieve.”

“Why?  Why me?  Why not you?”

“It’s on a high shelf.”

Eric stared at him for a moment.

“A joke,” the little man assured him.  “The truth is simply that you were chosen.”

“By who?”

“By powers far beyond your understanding.” 

“
All of this
is far beyond my understanding.”

The little man laughed, but Eric wasn’t joking.  How was he supposed to accomplish anything?  He wasn’t even sure yet if he’d survived all this in his dream.  “What
is
the cathedral?  Grant told me it was at the exact point where two worlds meet.  A singularity.”

“That’s right.  The cathedral surrounds that singularity.  The conflicting energies, as you’ve been experiencing them as you’ve made your way through the fissure, come to a pinnacle in that one spot.  Everything changes there.  All that you know ceases to exist as you approach that singularity.  That makes it the perfect place to hide something no one should ever find.”

“So there’s something hidden there?  Something
real
?”

“Actually, there are two things. 
One
is hidden in the singularity.  The other…  Well…  Somewhere
else
.  Both are actually quite useless on their own.  One requires the other.”

“Okay…  So then what’s the point?”

“The point is that somebody, somewhere, has found the location of the
other thing
.  And it would be apocalyptically bad for the same people to locate
both
things.  That’s why you’re here.  Your one job is to make sure it doesn’t get found.  Even if it means claiming it for yourself.”

“But what makes me special enough to have whatever’s hidden in the cathedral?”

“You were chosen to find it. 
That’s
what makes you special enough.”

Eric fell silent as he tried to decide if this made any sense. 

“Trust me.  You have all you need to succeed at this.  I mean, look at you.  You’re faring much better than you did in your dream.”

That was true.  He could still type.  He could still hitchhike ambidextrously.  He could still flip a double-bird when a single wasn’t enough to express just how he felt.  And he could still play cowboys and Indians with imaginary twin forty-fives.  Eric looked across the desk and said, “Father Billy…  He said the guy he used to work for was in the business of finding things.  He was after what’s in the cathedral, wasn’t he?”

“Yes and no.  Technically, he was only investigating whether something existed there.  He didn’t find it.  But the organization that he works for is persistent.  They’re the ones who’ve located the…
other thing
we were talking about.”

“You’re not going to tell me what these things are, are you?”

“Nope.”

Eric sighed. 

“All things in their time.”

“Right.”

The two of them fell silent for a moment.  Memories from his dream passed before him.  He saw the little man tending to him, telling him many of the same things he was telling him now, about the thing hidden in the cathedral, about the people who wanted to claim the thing and its mysterious counterpart.  But in the dream, he told him all these things without being asked.  Dream Eric was in no shape to ask any questions. 

He recalled the pain.  It was surprisingly vivid.  He kept rubbing his right hand. 

Looking across the desk again, Eric said, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?  If these guys who are looking for it already have the other half, what’s going to stop them from just hunting me down and taking it from me?”

“First of all,” replied the little man.  “I never said they
had
the other one.  I only said they had located it.  As long as they don’t have
this
one, the other one is useless to them.  They’ll never expend the energy and resources to retrieve it.”

“So it’s pretty safe wherever it is?”

With his broadest smile yet, the little man replied, “You’d be amazed.”

“I see.”

“
Secondly
, they won’t come to take it from you.  I can assure you that.  They won’t know you have it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Trust me.”

It was strange, but Eric found that he really did trust this man.  There was simply something about him.  He was special somehow. 
Meaningful
.  If that made any sense.

“Directly behind this station is a narrow path.  It’s little more than a game trail.  Follow it and it’ll take you to an old salvage yard.  There’ll be scroungers there, but they shouldn’t bother you if you don’t get too close.”

Scroungers?  That was good.  He was worried there wouldn’t be any more freaky creatures to deal with. 

“Edgar will meet you there.  He’ll show you the final road, the one that’ll take you to the cathedral.” 

Eric sat there, staring at his nearly empty coke can, pondering all that he’d heard.  The attendant did not rush him.  He sat patiently behind his desk, continuously smiling. 

He recalled the dream.  Like now, this man had told him all these things and sent him on ahead.  His head fuzzy with morphine, still weak from loss of blood, Dream Eric had barely understood everything that he was told.  Specifically, he realized, he’d neglected to ask the only question that really mattered.  So he asked it now:  “If I make it to the cathedral…will I survive?”

For the first time since they met, the little man’s smile disappeared.  He stared back at Eric with an expression that was actually quite sad.  “That’ll be entirely up to you,” he said. 

“Father Billy said that you told him no one who enters the cathedral ever leaves alive.  You told him it would claim anyone who went looking for its secrets.”

“I might have said something like that once, yes.”

“Then how is that up to me?”

His smile returning, the gas station attendant replied, “It’s
always
up to you.”

Eric didn’t understand.  But he clearly wasn’t going to get any more than this.  He drained the rest of his coke and glanced around for a garbage bin.  There didn’t seem to be one. 

“Just leave it anywhere.  I’ll toss it in the recycling bin next time I go out.”

Eric placed it on the corner of the desk and stood up.  “Thank you,” he said. 

“You’re quite welcome.”  Then, leaning forward, the little man added, “For
everything
.”

Though it seemed impossible, Eric was sure that he was referring to the events of his dream, when the little man saved his life.