by Brian Harmon
“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.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Eric left through the front door, just as he did in his dream. In both time frames, no big, floppy-eared cat waited to tear out his intestines.
He glanced up and down the narrow blacktop road—not one car had driven by since he arrived—and walked around to the back of the station. There, he found the narrow game trail, just as the little man had promised.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he never asked the man’s name.
He considered going back, but decided to simply keep walking. If he survived his journey to the cathedral, maybe he’d see him on his way out. If not, what did it really matter whether he knew the man’s name?
Pushing past the overlapping branches, he made his way along the narrow trail, down a long and shallow hill, across a densely forested gully and up over the next rise.
His cell phone rang. It was Isabelle.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“It’s like we got cut off. But I didn’t think that could happen.”
“I didn’t either.”
“Did you catch all that weirdness back there?”
“Some of it. But it was weird. It was like you were in a cave or something. I could barely reach your mind.”
“Strange.”
“Very.”
“You were saying there was something odd about the gas station before we got disconnected.”
“I was. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something very different about that place. I don’t think it’s a part of the fissure.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s just… Odd.”
“Well, it’s behind me now.”
“It is. I should hang up. Karen’ll be calling you soon.”
“I’m sure she will.”
“Bye.”
Eric disconnected the phone, but didn’t bother sticking it back in his pocket. Now that his signal had returned, he saw that he had eight missed calls. Karen had already been trying to reach him. And sure enough, within five minutes the phone began to buzz again.
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in the woods.”
“How’s the dream coming along? Remember anything interesting yet?”
“Interesting? More like disturbing. Apparently, two days ago I would’ve been mauled and almost killed by some kind of freaky cat.”
“What?”
“Crazy scary, right?”
“What happened?”
Eric told her about his trip through the canyon and the disturbing memories that churned up as he made his way along the stream. He then told her about his visit with the diminutive gas station attendant and his curious smile.
“So weird… Who do you think he was?”
“I have absolutely no idea. I guess he’s like the old folks. A caretaker of some sort.”
Karen considered this for a moment. “Could be. But he sounds more important than a caretaker.”
“He does. Maybe he’s the head caretaker. The guy in charge of it all.”
“Maybe.”
“I couldn’t even begin to guess. This is all way over my head.”
“The cathedral is starting to sound like a crazy scary place.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“What did he mean when he said everything changes there?”
“You keep asking me like I’m going to have an answer for you.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m just saying that this is seriously beyond my field of study.”
“You didn’t take that class in theoretical dimensional compression physics? How irresponsible of you.”
“I know. It’s days like these when those fluff classes really come back to bite you.”
“Slacking never pays.”
“It really doesn’t.”
Both of them fell silent for a moment as Eric made his way deeper into the forest.
“Are you all right?” Karen asked finally.
“I’m fine. I’m just a little shaken.”
“That sounded like a hell of a nightmare.”
“It was. It was so vivid. I can’t figure out how I managed to get up and walk out of the gas station in the state I was in.”
“Well, it was only a dream.”
“No. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”
Karen sighed. “I guess it wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t real. But it was real, too. It’s…”
“Totally insane.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“I think I see something up ahead. I’m going to hang up for a little bit again.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.” Apparently, she was done even pretending she could count on him to call her back in a timely fashion.
“Sure. Bye.”
Pocketing the phone, Eric pushed through the dense foliage and stepped out into a wide field where tall grass and weeds struggled for real estate with seven impressively long rows of old and rusting automobile carcasses. An old, red Firebird, half hidden in the tall grass, stood facing him. The yellow bird painted across the vehicle’s distinct hood stared back at him.
This was obviously the salvage yard the gas station attendant told him to expect. But it clearly hadn’t been used in many years. The newest vehicle he could s
ee was a seventy-seven Chrysler.
There didn’t even appear to be an obvious driveway by which any of these vehicles might have arrived here. It had long ago become overgrown with brush to the point of vanishing into the trees, so that these cars looked as if they had simply dropped out of the sky.
Cautious and alert, Eric made his way deeper into the salvage yard.
It only took a few minutes before he heard the first unnatural sound. Something rustled in the grass between two rusty, Chevrolets. Only a moment later, something moved in the next row. He stopped and scanned the area, but he could see nothing.
Then he glimpsed movement in the grass.
Scroungers.
The gas station attendant warned him there would be scroungers. He hadn’t bothered to tell him what a scrounger was, and Eric hadn’t bothered to press the little man for the information, assuming—and rightfully so, it seemed—that he would see for himself soon enough.
The little man had, however, assured him that there was nothing to be feared from these creatures, assuming he did nothing stupid to provoke them. But he couldn’t help but feel that he must make a very tempting target standing out here in the middle of all these rusted-out vehicles, isolated from the rest of the world.
He turned away from the noises and made his way up the row, away from the unseen scroungers. He slipped between two long-silent trucks and made his way toward the middle of the field.
Several more times he heard something moving in and around the vehicles he passed. Once, something scurried away almost underfoot and he barely resisted the urge to cry out and jump around like a frightened little girl.
Yet the things manage to remain frustratingly out of sight.
While he honestly didn’t care to see any more strange and unusual creatures—he’d seen enough already to last him a lifetime—he found that he didn’t care much for not being able to see what was moving around him. Without his eyes to size up the beasts, he was left with only his imagination to fill in the blanks. And his imagination had become vastly more frightening since he began this journey. All sorts of horrid visions passed through his head, from giant, venomous snakes to great, bloated cockroaches, his mind was more than happy to churn out one horror after another to guess what awful surprises crawled unseen in the grass at his feet.
And his dream did not help soothe his curiosity. As the memories unraveled themselves, he recalled himself moving through this field in a mental fog, his mind numbed to the horrors of unseen creatures scurrying around him.
Awake and in the present, Eric continued on, trying to ignore the dream. He didn’t want to see the dream now. It wasn’t doing him any good. In the dream he kept looking at his hand. It looked so small. So wrong.
It made him feel sick.
As he passed an old Chevrolet pickup truck, something hissed at him from beneath the hood, urging him to step faster through the high grass.
“They’re mostly harmless.”
Eric turned to find an old man with a bald, sunburned head walking among the ruined automobiles. He wore stained bib overalls over a flannel work shirt that looked far too hot for August.
“But you’d better trust me when I say you don’t want a closer look at them.”
Eric looked around, wondering where the old man had come from. He was sure there hadn’t been anyone out here when he first entered the field. “You’re Edgar?”
“I am. And you?”
“Eric.”
“Eric,” repeated Edgar. “You’re a damn idiot, Eric.”
Caught off guard, Eric could only think to say, “I’m sorry?”
“You must be. To still be here, pushing on, after all you’ve been through already.”
Eric did not reply. He was not insulted, really. Given all that he had been through, given the horrors his dream had recently revealed to him, he found that he was inclined to agree.
Edgar strolled between two of the old vehicles, his eyes washing over them, a sad sort of expression on his face. “A goddamned fool…”
Eric’s cell phone chimed. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen.
CHARMING GUY
Looking up from the phone, he said, “I wanted to turn back at the farmhouse. Grant Stolyen talked me out of it.”
“Goddamned fools, the both of you.”
Again, the phone chimed.
RUDE!
“You think I should leave now?”
“You won’t quit now.”
“I won’t?”
“If you haven’t quit by now, you ain’t going to.”
“Then what’s the point in telling me what an idiot I am? I mean, if you know nothing you say will change my mind…then you’re just insulting me.”
The old man shrugged. “Just stating my opinion. I’m entitled to one, aren’t I?”
“I expect you are.” Eric caught a glimpse of movement to his left and glanced over in time to see something dark and scaly crawl out of the engine of an old, hoodless Ford and drop into the tall grass below. “We’re all entitled to our opinions. Even us fools.”
“True.”
“I, for instance, am of the opinion that you’re something of an asshole.”
This time, when his phone chimed, it said simply, LOL!
The old man smiled a little. “That so?”
“All of you,” Eric continued. “You and Grant and Taylor, even that crazy-ass Annette. You’re all here just to tell me what you think I need to hear to keep me moving.”
Edgar cocked a hairy eyebrow. “I thought I was telling you to go home.”
“But you just told me that you know I won’t.”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
“No. Because I know by now that I need to see what’s waiting for me in the cathedral. I know it just as well as you do.”
Edgar moved on to another vehicle, his crooked fingers sliding over the rusty metal, almost lovingly. He pulled open the door and peered at the ruined interior as if reminiscing about the days when this car would have been brand new and sitting on the lot, that new car smell wafting from its upholstery. He did not respond.
“Is there even a chance I would’ve come here and needed you to encourage me to go on? Or was I always going to have resigned myself to this by now?”
Edgar turned and looked at him now, his expression serious. “There’s always a chance. For everything. You should remember that.”
Eric stared at him for a moment, at the softness of his eyes, the blemishes on his skin, the creases in his face. Every detail was so vivid. “How long have you all been dead?”
WHOA
Edgar sighed and turned away. Again, he placed his bony hand on the car. “I’ll have been gone fifty-three years this winter.”
Fifty-three years. That would’ve been around the winter of sixty-one.
“And the others?”
“Nearly as long.”
“I see. And you’re all stuck here? Just waiting on someone like me?”
“Not someone like you. You. You’re the one we’ve all been waiting for, the reason we carry on with our lives the way we lived them when we still lived, tending to things. And waiting, of course.”
“But why?”
“We all lived our whole lives along the fissure. And we all died along the fissure. A lot of things don’t work right here, you’ve seen that for yourself. Death comes here just like it does anywhere else. A fatal heart attack is just as final in any world. But what comes next…well, that’s a little different.”
“Are you stuck here forever?”
Edgar shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. Haven’t been here forever yet. I sure as hell hope I’m not. I hope we get to move on when you finish what you came to do.”
“If I succeed.”
“If you succeed.”
Eric stared at the man as he moved on from one vehicle to the next. It was difficult to grasp the idea that he was speaking to a ghost, even more difficult to believe that Taylor, Grant and Annette had all
been nothing more than spirits. They had all seemed so real, so tangible. But now that he thought about it, they’d all appeared as if out of nowhere. Though they had each interacted with their environments in some way—Annette had her laundry, Grant his tractor, Taylor his tools and Edgar these long-discarded vehicles—he hadn’t touched any of them himself. Not one of them had offered to shake his hand.
One thing bothered him, though.
“What about Ethan?”
Edgar sighed. “Annette’s still waiting for him to come home, isn’t she?” He lifted the hood on an old Chrysler and peered in at the long-rusted engine. “But he never came home. Took a turn for the worst. Died in the middle of the night while she was asleep at home. Couldn’t accept it. She died just a few months later, still refusing to believe he wasn’t coming home, and that’s how she exists now, always waiting for him to come back home to her. She just couldn’t handle it. She couldn’t take losing someone again.”
Eric recalled the way Annette talked to him about her father’s death, as if he weren’t a complete stranger. It wasn’t hard to imagine how difficult it might be to keep losing people you loved so much. “But why isn’t Ethan here with her?”
“Because he died in a hospital bed, some twenty miles away. She died in her home, here in the fissure. He moved on. He escaped while the rest of us were trapped. And poor Annette ended up trapped twice. Once here in the fissure and once inside herself.”
THAT IS SO SAD!
It was sad. It was probably the saddest thing Eric had ever heard in his life. He felt terrible for poor Annette.
Edgar stood and silently stared at the rusted engine of the Chrysler as a scrounger wormed its way up and over the fender. It looked like a cross between a lizard and a bug, about thirty inches long, with six frog-like feet on very short stubs of legs. It had no tail and no neck, only a snake-like head with a wide, toothless mouth and great, blank eyes that, like the rest of its body, were a muddy brown.
The old man watched the creepy creature flop gracelessly into the grass. “They ain’t got no teeth, but you still don’t want to get bit by one. Their saliva’s toxic. Might not kill you, necessarily, but it’d feel like your skin was on fire. You’d have terrible hallucinations and there’s a good chance you could go blind.”
Now Eric’s skin was crawling. His eyes swept the grass around him, alert for dark shapes creeping toward him.