Rushed

by Brian Harmon

  “Village?”

  “I went back and found out you took a little detour. Visited Lonneskey at that church instead.”

  The village must have been what he missed. He’d recalled a building or two, but because he circled so far around it, that part of the dream never recurred to him in enough detail to reveal what he’d found there. Now he knew.

  “I saw you there, saw who you were with. I don’t know what business you were up to. I didn’t care. I just needed you both gone. So I left another golem. And I made sure you saw me leave it.”

  “I didn’t have any ‘business’ with Father Billy. I left the path because I was chased by a bunch of corn creeps. He was a good enough man to not let me die on the lawn of his church.”

  “Lonneskey is hardly a good man.”

  “People change.”

  “No. They don’t.”

  “How did you get back to us if you were already here? Some of these paths are one-way. It’s impossible to go backward.”

  “The fissures create disturbances in the spectrums. I can feel them. I can see the paths. All of them. Including the ones that lead backward.”

  “Convenient.”

  “It is.”

  “So then what was up with the factory?”

  “After I left that golem at the church, I realized something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I realized that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that you were here. I realized you were probably looking for whatever’s hidden here. That’s also when I realized that I might need you. Lucky for me, you managed to survive a third golem. But then I had to keep you alive long enough to meet you here. The problem with that was that I left a particularly nasty golem in the factory.”

  So there was another golem at the factory.

  “My second rule is always remain flexible. I had to distract you so you wouldn’t stumble across the golem and finally get yourself killed just when I needed you.”

  “The residuals.”

  “Residuals? Yeah. I suppose so. I can’t really take credit for that trick. I learned that one from an old friend. Just before I killed him.”

  “Your mother must be so proud. So you put the residuals there to hide the golem from me?”

  “That, and to spy on you. I wanted to know what was so special about you, how it was that you defeated three of my golems. I saw you talking to someone… But after knocking you out, I couldn’t make that device work. It looked like an ordinary, cheap phone.”

  It figured that someone would knock him over the head just to get a closer look at his stupid phone. “It is an ordinary, cheap phone.”

  “You weren’t using it like a phone. You were talking to someone. They were feeding you information.”

  That’s right… He was talking to Isabelle. And he wasn’t simply talking on his phone. He’d been talking to it. Isabelle was sending him text messages, warning him that something seemed off in there. And he hadn’t sent any texts back to her because she didn’t need him to. She could get into his thoughts. To someone who didn’t know about Isabelle, it would seem that his device was communicating with him independently and despite the lack of a signal.

  But this man had already threatened Father Billy’s life. He had no intention of letting him know about Isabelle.

  “Someone was talking to you,” the foggy man insisted.

  “Yes,” admitted Eric. “The crew of the Enterprise. They’ll be beaming me up shortly.”

  “I don’t care for sarcasm.”

  “I don’t care for pompous, murderous little pricks.”

  The young man shrugged. “Fine. I dragged you safely around the office where I hid the golem and I sent you on your way. Even gave you your phone back. Didn’t want to risk you not making it here for our little talk.”

  “You’re a real saint.”

  “I also took care of that cat for you. I’ll bet that could’ve ruined your day.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Eric met the young man’s stony gaze. For a moment, they both remained silent.

  This man didn’t seem to know anything about his dream, or about the old folks who had helped him along the way. He was under the impression that he must be some kind of government agent, specifically sent to either confront him or beat him to the prize in the cathedral. And his peculiar use of the cell phone only reinforced that fantasy. It was clear that he didn’t trust him, but the irony was that he would never in a million years believe the truth.

  And if he was really lucky, that would give him just a sliver of an advantage.

  Finally, Eric asked, “So what now?”

  “Now, we’re going to go down there. And you’re going to lead the way.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. I’ve heard enough. There’s nothing scary about you. You’re just a rotten kid who needs his ass kicked real good. I’m not playing your game. You can go to hell.”

  The foggy man, no longer foggy at all, barely even a man, pulled a handgun from under the back of his tee shirt and pointed it at Eric, instantly regaining his full attention. “One more rule: I never rely solely on my talents.”

  Eric stared into the barrel of the gun. “How prudent of you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The foggy man’s pistol pointed at his back and an ominous darkness waiting below, Eric descended the wooden stairs into the black depths of the cathedral.

  Nothing about this situation gave him a good feeling. All things considered, the gun was probably the least of his worries at this point. (But it still pissed him off to think that the little bastard had so completely taken control of the situation.)

  He promised Isabelle he would be careful, yet here he was, in a very vulnerable position, shepherded into this nightmare hole in the ground at gunpoint, his very fate in the hands of the enemy and his odds of making it out alive dwindling with each passing second.

  He was ashamed to admit that he had let his guard down a little. Discovering that the foggy man was no longer foggy, that he no longer had his ghostly tricks at his disposal, made him careless.

  Karen would be so disappointed in him.

  The sun still shined overhead. Eric could still feel it on the sunburned skin of his arms, neck and face. Yet there was also that peculiar chill in the air, the cold from that other world as it crushed down on him. The duality of the fissure was distinctly noticeable here. He felt as if he could feel both worlds at once, their opposing forces at work on him, the hot and the cold, the light and the dark.

  He felt as if he were growing heavier with each step. His ears popped. His eyes felt dry and heavy, like they did when he rose with too little sleep. His head ached. His feet hurt.

  Miserable, Eric descended deeper and deeper into the darkness.

  He looked up at the sky, expecting to find that it had grown black, but in spite of the gloom that was quickly enveloping him, it remained clear and blue.

  Lowering his eyes to the steps before him, Eric found that the cathedral’s rock wall had inexplicably turned into huge stone columns that appeared to run all the way up to the rim of the hole, yet there had been no such columns there when he stood at the top looking down. The walls had been nothing but rough stone.

  And he found himself not entirely surprised by this transformation. The columns were familiar. They had been in his dream. As he carefully descended the steps, his thoughts muddled in a fog of pain and morphine, he had marveled at these same massive columns, his weary mind struggling to recall whether they had been here all along.

  Soon the gloom thickened, his sight reduced to a few yards and then only a few feet, a few inches…

  Eric stepped carefully, willing himself not to stumble beneath his inexplicably increasing weight.

  He could no longer see anything in front of or below him. All he could see was the sky above, still blue and bright, but utterly unaffect
ing the shadows of the cathedral. He gazed up into that blueness, but had to lower his eyes. It was unnervingly alien to see something like this. His mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around the concept. He felt like he would go mad if he kept trying.

  But navigating these steps in the dark was almost as unnerving. He kept expecting the steps to end without warning and spill him screaming into the black emptiness beneath him.

  He considered turning around and making a move for the gun now that the light had gone, but he didn’t quite dare risk it. He couldn’t be sure the young man didn’t possess unnatural night vision in addition to spectrum-shifting and golem-conjuring.

  Besides, he would probably only end up getting himself shot as he fumbled awkwardly in the dark. He was hardly James Bond. The foggy man, in his curious line of dark work, would almost certainly have the advantage over him in any confrontation.

  The foggy man… He’d grown tired of that. Over his shoulder, he asked, “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes.”

  “You going to share it with the rest of the class?”

  “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  Eric shrugged and faced forward again. Foggy it was, then. “So what is it we’re looking for down here?”

  “No idea,” replied Foggy. “You tell me.”

  “How the hell should I know? You’re the agent of darkness. Don’t you know what you came here for?”

  “Nope.”

  “What did your bosses tell you to find?”

  “I was just told to find what’s here and bring it back.”

  “But they didn’t tell you what it is?”

  “They didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”

  Eric recalled Father Billy telling him that his old bosses paid him to not ask questions. It seemed that Foggy here worked under the same contract. “Sounds like information I’d demand to have before I took a job like this.”

  “You don’t demand anything from the people I work for.”

  “Who are the people you work for?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “You don’t know who you work for?”

  Foggy fell silent.

  “Right. If you say so.”

  “It’s a need-to-know kind of thing.”

  Just like Father Billy said. “And you don’t need to know. It’s only your ass on the line.”

  “Just shut up and keep walking.”

  Clearly, Eric had found a touchy spot. If he had to hazard a guess, he’d say that Foggy wasn’t too happy about the lack of information he was given. But he was far too stubborn to admit that he was nothing more than someone’s loyal little, waggily-tailed lapdog.

  He didn’t push the subject. He had no doubt that Foggy would kill him if he grew tired of his mouth, but he was beginning to agree with Isabelle. The people this man worked for were bad. It was unsettling to know that there was an organization like this out there somewhere.

  Although it would tickle the hell out of the conspiracy theorists, he imagined.

  Abruptly, the light began to return. The sky above never changed, but suddenly the sun’s rays were able to reach them again. Eric’s visibility grew from a few inches to a few feet to a few yards. But with the visibility came unsettling things.

  The columns were gone again. Only smooth bedrock covered the wall. But far more disturbing than that was the fact that the wall had inexplicably changed sides. It was now on their right, and they were spiraling down into the darkness counter-clockwise, in the opposite direction, with no memory of having turned around.

  Eric stopped, forgetting about the gun at his back. “Are you seeing this?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. Just checking.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You do realize that if you kill me you’ll be all alone down here, right?”

  “If I have to take my chances, I will.”

  “Suit yourself.” Clearly, he wasn’t going to reason his way out of this.

  The cathedral was silent but for the sounds of their footfalls on the steps, and even that noise was eerily hushed within these walls. The wood did not creak, despite its obvious age, and there had been no echoing of their voices when they spoke.

  Nothing down here seemed to be working quite like it should.

  Darkness fell again.

  Darkness went away.

  Things changed.

  Openings appeared in the walls here and there and Eric peered into great, cavernous chambers where shadowy things seemed to stir in the stillness. Odd shuffling noises rose from beneath the steps. Sometimes strange lights seemed to flicker through the darkness at the far side of the hole.

  The wall was on their left again. Then it was on the right and Eric was sure he’d only imagined that it had ever been on the left. Without being aware of exactly when the steps ended, he was walking on a flat surface, stumbling blindly through the darkness.

  Were they at the bottom already?

  Had only a few minutes passed? Or had it already been a few hours?

  The sky above remained blue and calm.

  Were the walls moaning at him?

  Was that a face peering at him from the gloom?

  Pressing his hands to his eyes, Eric tried to force himself to focus. Something was terribly wrong here. Nothing made sense. It felt like his mind was breaking.

  The dream was broken here. Everything came back to him in jumbled pieces and out of order, compounding the confusion. He couldn’t recall if he saw something scurrying past his feet or merely heard it. And that shape that scuttled overhead… Was that from the dream? Or did he see it just a moment ago? And that scream? Was it real or imaginary? Now or then? Here or there?

  He was beginning to remember why the dream had always filled him with such dread.

  The light went and came without any warning or reason.

  “Are you feeling this too?” he asked as the shadows lifted and revealed a forest of stone columns rising up into the sky.

  But Foggy did not answer.

  “Where are we? What’s going on?”

  When silence met him again, Eric turned to face his unwanted companion, only to find that he was utterly alone.

  Where had he gone? How long had he been gone? How long had he been down here?

  Nothing made sense.

  He turned around, his eyes rising up to the towering columns.

  What was going on?

  He continued down the stairs, descending several of the steps before thinking to wonder where these stairs came from and when, exactly, he began this descent. But he immediately began to wonder if he’d ever stopped descending the stairs, if he had only imagined walking on solid, horizontal ground among those massive columns.

  It was becoming difficult to keep up with where he was. The cathedral was doing something to his mind. The two worlds… They overlapped. Two realities. Trying to occupy this one space. The distortions grew stronger as he neared the singularity. He couldn’t tell one from the other, couldn’t even distinguish reality from his dream.

  When he looked back, however, the foggy man was still gone.

  He was still alone.

  The bizarreness of the cathedral must have allowed them to get separated.

  Apparently, Foggy’s skills were no match for the otherworldly nature of the cathedral. He’d failed to keep track of his prisoner.

  Eric knew that he should take advantage of this. This was his opportunity to beat the foggy man to the prize. But he still had no idea what he was doing. And it was hard to ignore the fact that there was now a likely pissed off psychopath running around down here with a gun.

  He peered up into the blue sky that hung over him. Night had not fallen up there, but perhaps night never fell up there. It would not surprise him. Nothing here would surprise him. This place defied all manner of logic. But there remained a few certainties. The first of these was that there was no way back from here.

  He was sure that if he turned around and tried to make his way back out,
he would find himself turned back again and again, hopelessly forced to continue only downward, swallowed whole by this unearthly pit.

  Closing his eyes, he made himself breathe. He tried to focus. It was hard. The morphine blurred his thoughts, dulled his senses even as it dulled the pain.

  No. The morphine wasn’t real. That was the dream.

  It was becoming so hard to keep the two apart in his weary mind.

  Noises behind him. He turned to look. But darkness had fallen over him again.

  Somewhere far above him, he heard a scream.

  Or was it a laugh?

  Or was it only a memory from the dream?

  God, it was so hard to tell anymore.

  Never in his life had he ever been this afraid.

  Turning back to the stairs before him, he tried to focus on taking one step at a time.

  The light came back, revealing that the steps had turned to stone. It also revealed a vast, gaping cavern opening to his right. The floor of that cavern was alive with crawling things.

  He closed his eyes and took one step after another.

  He was so tired. He felt so heavy.

  And the throbbing pain in his hand wouldn’t stop.

  Was that the sound of someone yelling? The foggy man, perhaps? Calling out for help? Lost in this hole? Lost in his head?

  The stairs were gone again. Eric walked on solid ground once more, with no memory of when they ended. The columns were gone again as well. Only darkness surrounded him. Darkness, and that queer blue sky above.

  He stared at his hand. So small, despite all those bandages. So much of it gone.

  What was he going to do?

  He closed his eyes.

  He walked.

  The weight of two worlds pressed down on him, threatening to crush him before he could reach whatever it was he was here to find.

  Was he going to die here?

  What was he even doing here? He tried to remember. The dream. All those miles in the PT Cruiser. Annette’s house. The barn. The monster in the wardrobe.

  Why didn’t he just leave? What was he thinking?

  The morphine was wearing off.

  He couldn’t take much more of this pain.

  His shoulder hurt. The resort monster.

  Altrusk…

  Isabelle…