by Brian Harmon
He might not be able to see it, but he could definitely sense that someone was watching him.
“I know you’re there,” he said. “Come out and talk to me.”
Silence.
But Eric stood his ground and waited.
He glanced toward the door, making sure no one was trying to sneak up behind him, and when he turned back, he was no longer alone. Steampunk Monk was standing there with him, only ten feet away. He looked sinister in the growing gloom.
Eric wasn’t startled by his appearance. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“Have you?”
“I need to get into the schoolhouse.”
“What business do you have there?”
“I need to see your partner.”
“Associate,” he growled.
“Whatever.”
He didn’t respond. He stared back at him, as if sizing him up.
“What did you do with my friend?”
“You mean the young gentleman who was here a minute ago?”
“You know damn well that’s who I mean.”
“He’s fine. Taking a little nap.”
Eric recalled hearing Jay sneeze before he vanished. It was easy to imagine him wandering past the unseen door, close enough to reach out and touch the little bald man who no doubt blew some kind of dust or ash in his face to knock him out.
“Funniest thing, though. I’d swear that guy was dead.”
“Twin brother,” said Eric. “Damnedest thing, right?”
Steampunk Monk’s lip curled into a little smile. “What’re the odds?”
“Considerably better than coming back from the dead, I’d say.”
He shrugged. “That might be true.”
“That’d be ridiculous.”
“Absurd,” he agreed.
“So are you going to let me in or what?”
“My…associate…made it clear she didn’t want to be disturbed tonight.”
“I was invited,” said Eric.
His eyebrows raised. “Is that so?”
“It is. Well… Technically it was more of a challenge, I think. But either way, I’m expected.”
Steampunk Monk remained quiet for a moment. He stared at Eric, his eyes narrowed. Finally, he said, “What is it she finds so fascinating about you?”
“Clearly it’s my god-like physique.”
Again, his mouth curled into a little smile. “Clearly.”
Eric ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. “Can we move this along? It’s been a really long day.”
Steampunk Monk shrugged. “If you insist.” He reached into one of his many pockets and withdrew a gun. It wasn’t the same one he used to dispatch the wendigo at Goss. That was a modern handgun. This looked like a relic from around the time of the civil war, and not one that had been particularly well cared for. It was so covered in rust that there was no way it could possibly fire. And yet he pulled back the hammer and aimed it at him.
Eric took a step back, wary. “You sure you should be playing with that thing? You’re going to blow your hand off.”
That curious smile widened a little. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
“Good to know.”
This wasn’t going as he planned. What kind of mess had he gotten himself into this time?
“Your partner’s going to be pissed if you kill me.”
“My associate,” he growled. “And she’d get over it.”
Eric glanced over his shoulder. He was still standing in the middle of the gymnasium. There was nowhere to hide. He was completely exposed and at this lunatic’s mercy.
Steampunk Monk smiled wider still. Then, unexpectedly, he turned the gun on himself. He pressed the barrel into the underside of his chin.
Eric squinted at him. He was too surprised and confused to even attempt to convince him that he had plenty to live for.
He pulled the trigger.
Instead of a loud report and a messy splattering of brains, there was complete silence, as if the entire world had suddenly been stripped of all sound, and a brilliant light blossomed atop the shiny, bald dome of his head. The world behind him began to break apart into a fantastic, slow-motion starburst of colors.
Then everything went to hell.
Chapter Fifty
Although the steampunk monk had fired the ruined pistol into his own head, it was Eric who took the brunt of the strange, psychic projectile.
He actually felt it. It was like an uppercut to the chin that drove his teeth violently together and knocked him backward. A shockwave of blazing agony passed through his head, funneled upward through his brain and exploded from the top of his skull.
He tried to cry out, but he had no voice. In fact, he had no mouth. He had no lungs. No body. Inexplicably, he found himself adrift in a strange and chaotic sea, tossed around like a hunk of driftwood, helpless against the rolling waves.
Throughout it all, the silence remained unrelenting. He couldn’t even hear that white noise inside his head, the one that he’d always heard whenever he found himself in complete silence…the one that he’d always thought of as the sound of his body running…
Where was he? How did he get here? Why couldn’t he move?
He couldn’t feel his body.
Was he dead?
Was this the other side?
Was this hell?
He could feel himself being tossed from side to side and up and down in the turbulent waves of whatever this strange place was, but he couldn’t feel any water. He didn’t feel wet. He felt neither cold nor hot. He felt nothing at all except for that queer sense of being caught in rolling waves.
But although this strange world he’d found himself in was without sound and touch, it wasn’t without color. On the contrary, he was surrounded by color so brilliant that it hurt. His head screamed at the warbling shades that pulsed around him. And he couldn’t seem to close his eyes.
He wasn’t even sure his eyes worked. The colors might be inside his own head. It was impossible to say for sure, impossible to think clearly.
It was the reds. They were the brightest of the colors, the most intense. They burned his mind, like lava inside his thoughts.
Agony.
And he couldn’t look away…
He couldn’t even scream.
(Come back.)
Her blood was red like that. Red and shiny. It felt slippery between his fingers. Slippery and warm.
Until it wasn’t warm anymore. Then it was cold and sticky.
There was nothing he could do.
There was nothing anybody could do.
The blade was cursed.
They said it wasn’t his fault. She forced him to do it. She would have killed everyone. She was insane. But it didn’t change the fact that he was the one who ended her life. Her blood was on his hands. And it was never coming off.
Never.
(…running out of time…)
It was never going to stop chasing him.
Never.
It was its only purpose. A single-minded, endlessly relentless killer that never tired, created specifically to attack anyone unfortunate enough to come near it. And it was right behind him, closing in on him.
It was so big.
Branches from high up in the trees were crashing down around him. Sometimes an entire tree would slam flat against the ground, barely missing him.
He hated the forest. The forest was dangerous. Awful things lurked in forests.
His legs were aching from running. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. He was exhausted. He could feel the sweat dripping down his face.
He was soaked.
(…before it’s too late…)
He had to get out of the water. It wasn’t safe.
There was blood in the water.
But no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t free himself from the fish’s jaws. It only released its grip on his feet to gulp him further down, threatening to swallow him whole into its slimy, reek
ing belly as it dragged him deeper and deeper into the murky water, all the way to the bottom of the lake.
He didn’t want to go to the bottom of the lake.
There were horrible things down there.
Nightmarish things.
He couldn’t hold his breath any longer, and yet somehow he wasn’t drowning.
Was that too kind a fate for him?
The fish gulped him further down. He was already half gone.
Something was squirming around his feet, writhing in the great fish’s twisting guts.
He lost the last of his breath in a terrible, bubbling scream.
(Please, Eric…)
The air was hot and dry. It rasped across his chapped lips as he drew it into his lungs.
He blinked to clear the stinging sweat from his eyes.
This was…
Where was he?
Had he ever been to this place before?
The sky was black. The air was thick with smoke. Everything was on fire.
Coughing, he turned around, scanning the scorched area around him. He could hear the crackling of nearby fires and the eerie howling of the hot wind in the distance.
And something else, too.
A soft whimpering.
He turned to the left, toward a dark, smoldering shape in the smoke. Was it coming from that direction?
He couldn’t tell. It was gone again.
He began to walk.
What was this place?
The ground was scorched. Embers floated through the air. Was it only his imagination, or was that a subtle whiff of sulfur?
Brimstone.
The very thought made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
How did he get here? He couldn’t quite remember. Something about the school… That strange man in the ugly, red coat. Steampunk Monk.
He winced as a sharp pain shot through his head.
What was he doing again?
He looked around. There was something familiar about this place.
Again, he heard that soft whimpering.
He turned in the direction it was coming from. That smoldering shape again. It was closer now. It was a structure of some kind.
A house?
He moved toward it, picking up his speed a little, concerned that someone might need help.
He passed a tree that was burned black and skeletal. Smoke was rising from its charred limbs.
Another tree appeared from the gloom as he passed the first one. Then another. And another.
He coughed as the smoke thickened around him.
Still the smoldering structure loomed ahead of him.
He began to run.
Finally, the structure appeared and he stopped, horrified to find that it was his own house, gutted by flames. He stood there, staring at it, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. His home ruined? How did this happen? When?
The entire neighborhood was scorched.
Then he heard the whimpering again.
It was coming from behind him.
Confused, he turned and looked back the way he came.
Something was there, a pale figure standing there, staring at him, obscured by the haze.
Slowly, he walked toward this figure. After just a few steps, it became evident that it was a person. A child. A little girl in a long, white dress.
But as he drew closer, the smoke grew thicker, stinging his eyes and making him choke, so that it became impossible to see her clearly.
It was someone he knew. He was sure of it. But he couldn’t quite remember…
His eyes burned from the smoke. The pain forced him to stop before he could get close enough to see her face. He pressed the palms of his hands against them and waited for the stinging to fade.
With tears spilling down his cheeks, he blinked up at the figure again and found that she had vanished.
He was alone again.
Except he wasn’t.
The wind picked up. It howled eerily through the burned buildings. With it came an ominous feeling.
Something was behind him.
He turned to face it, only to find that nothing was there.
The next thing he was aware of was a sharp pain in his belly. He pressed a hand against the area and was surprised to find it wet. He was bleeding.
Confused, he lifted his shirt and examined it. The wound was deep. Frightfully deep.
Something had stabbed him.
He looked around, confused. What happened? Who did this?
He turned and tried to flee, but his strength was already fading him. He stumbled, barely keeping his balance.
It didn’t matter anyway. There was nowhere to go. Creek Bend was ashes and smoke. No one could help him. He was dying and there was nothing he could do about it.
It became harder and harder to see. The world blurred before him.
He fell to his knees.
He collapsed into the dirt and rolled onto his back.
That’s when he saw them. They crowded around him, half a dozen in all, each one looking down at him, their gray eyes shimmering like silver in the dim firelight.
Wendigoes.
As the last of his strength failed, he felt himself being dragged through the dirt and ash. This was the way the world was now. It belonged to the monsters.
Maybe this was how it was always supposed to be.
The world faded away from him. Darkness enveloped him. Silence closed in around him. Even the pain seemed distant.
Was this what death felt like?
But then, as he floated in that hellish void, he felt someone take his hands.
A soft, pretty voice spoke to him in the silence: “Save me.”
This was not the same voice that told him to enter the darkness that afternoon, yet it was familiar. He recognized it.
He could feel her hands. They were warm and soft and small. She was standing right in front of him, but he couldn’t see her through the eternal darkness of this strange hell. And yet he found that he didn’t have to see her. He knew her face. She was pretty, but in an average sort of way, not glamorous, with blonde hair, a spattering of freckles upon her face and two different colored eyes. One was dark brown. One was pale blue.
She spoke these same two words to him while he was briefly trapped in a torturous mental prison by a psychic parasite in an abandoned area of a hospital in rural Illinois eleven months ago.
He’d almost dismissed her as a hallucination brought on by the trauma of the situation, but here she was again.
“Look for me in the abyss.”
What abyss? Where? Like the last time she came to him, he was unable to speak or even move. The most he could do was softly squeeze her hands.
“Save me,” she said again.
Then she let go of his hands and left him alone in the darkness again.
He wanted to call out to her to wait, to come back, but she was gone.
(Come back!)
Eric opened his eyes.
He was lying on a dirty floor in a dark hallway, still alive for the time being. But he could still feel the place on his belly where something stabbed him. It was strangely warm there. And it felt like there was a weight pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe.
He lifted his head and looked down at himself, fearing the worst. Instead of the worst, he found two yellow eyes staring back at him.
Spooky mewed at him, as if scolding him for lying down on the job, then he hopped off of his belly and wandered off.
Eric sat up, grumbling about the cat, and pulled out his cell phone, which promptly rang.
“Thank God!” cried Isabelle. “Don’t ever scare me like that again!”
“I’m sorry.” He rose to his feet and looked around. Where the hell was he? The last thing he remembered was the steampunk monk shooting himself in the head with that ruined pistol. “What happened?”
“Some kind of weird, psychic feedback. It even knocked me for a loop. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
E
ric realized that he was inside the old schoolhouse. Steampunk Monk must’ve dragged him in here while he was unconscious. That kind of external stimulus might explain that dream about dying and being dragged away by a pack of wendigoes.
“Dream or not,” said Isabelle, reading his thoughts, “You dying and being dragged away was Holly’s last prediction. You’re almost out of time.”
Time… Eric looked around at the dark hallway. He’d never been here at night. Every surface was scorched and grimy with age, absorbing what little light there was, sinking it even further into shadow. It was indescribably spooky. “How long was I out?”
“About an hour.”
“That long?” Usually those kinds of things felt like forever and only lasted an instant.
“You had me worried out of my mind! You even scared Yuna.”
“Yuna?” asked Eric. “Oh. Right. Your friend.” He’d almost forgotten about the poor woman trapped in the building with her.
“She’s not doing so well tonight. I think I’m losing her. I’ve been keeping her updated about what you’re doing. It helps her not be so scared. But when that steampunk monk guy pulled the trigger on that thing, it really scared her. I guess I kind of just went blank for a little while. She thought I had some kind of stroke or something.”
He could certainly see how that would be frightening, especially to someone like poor Yuna, who was all alone without Isabelle.
“And when I came back, I couldn’t find you. I thought for a minute you were really dead. I was totally freaking out. Then I started getting flickers of your dreams and I knew you were still alive.”
“Did you see any of what I saw?”
“Only the flickers. Snippets here and there. Nothing that made any sense.”
“Did you see the woman?”
“Woman?” She was quiet for a moment as she read through his thoughts. “Her again?”
“Any idea who she might be?”
“No clue.”
“What about an abyss?”
“Nope. Why can’t she just give you directions like a normal person?”
Eric shook his head. He had no idea. “Do you think she’s real?”
“I’m sure she is. I mean we kind of dismissed your first vision of her as a hallucination brought on by that psychic parasite thing, but if she appeared to you a second time, she’s probably real. Whether she’s a human, a ghost or some other thing, though, I can’t say. But I’m sure she’s out there somewhere.”