Rushed

by Brian Harmon

  Isabelle. His hand went to his pocket. He felt the weight of the phone at his hip.

  “I just wanted you to know that I’m with you,” she told him as he approached the cathedral. “And I’ll stay with you. No matter what.” Her words. So clear in his mind. She made him promise not to give up. She made him promise to believe. Even when all seemed lost.

  Now seemed a fitting time to heed her wise words.

  He realized that he was trembling and closed his eyes.

  He made himself breathe.

  He was on the stairs again. The blue sky hung overhead, a reminder that he had not, in fact, descended all the way into the darkest pits of hell.

  There was a light below him.

  He was finally nearing the bottom of the cathedral.

  Again he looked at his hand. The bandages were gone. It was intact. It had always been intact. Only in the dream had he lost it. The dream was infringing on reality as he struggled to separate the merged realities surrounding the singularity. After all, what was the dream but an alternate reality centered on him? Two physical realities colliding with two alternate time frames. It was no wonder he couldn’t seem to comprehend what was going on.

  Darkness fell one last time and Eric made his way to the bottom of the steps.

  There, in an inky darkness, a brightly lit doorway stood before him.

  Chapter Thirty

  Squinting into the light, Eric stepped through the doorway and found himself in a sunlit room at the very bottom of the cathedral.

  More than ever, he could feel the weight of the two worlds crushing down on him. He felt the air pressing against his skin, as if he were deep under water. His ears hurt. His eyes ached. His head throbbed. Even breathing was difficult. Claustrophobia washed over him, though the room was large and mostly empty. There wasn’t even a ceiling. Above him, the entire cathedral towered overhead with the blue sky shining down on him.

  Even though the sun could not be seen from this far down, and the rest of the cathedral had been gloomy at best and more often pitch black, this room remained bright and sunny somehow. Though darkness hung between the sky and this chamber, and there were no lights inside the room, it felt as if the sun were directly overhead.

  Looking up through both worlds into that slowly darkening blue sky high above, with the entire pit opening overhead, he finally understood why this place had been called a cathedral. The one constant here was heaven. It was difficult not to imagine that some god or another must be gazing down from that enormous, ever-present sky, watching over him.

  The foggy man was still nowhere to be seen, but Eric did not possess enough optimism to make himself believe that he had seen the last of him. He would need to complete this task quickly.

  The walls were smooth and featureless stone, broken only by the door through which he’d entered the room. In stark contrast, the floor was an intricate display of handmade tiles, laid out in a complicated spiraling pattern that swirled inward to a single, golden disk in the very center of the room. There was no furniture, no pedestal, no shrine, nothing at all fantastic within this room. The only feature besides the crafted floor was a single ledge, about four feet high, built into the wall around the perimeter of the chamber. On this ledge, scattered throughout the room, were eleven clay pots.

  Edgar told him that he and the others were once compelled by a dream much like his to find a clay pot and carry it to the cathedral. Clearly one of these was that very pot.

  But which one?

  With time ticking away, Eric walked around the room, examining the eleven pots, trying to determine which one was the one he came all this way to find. He was sure that opening the wrong one would put a quick and disappointing end to this long day. Yet he had no idea how he was supposed to choose the correct one.

  He found himself reminded of the third Indiana Jones movie, in which Harrison Ford found himself forced to choose the Holy Grail from a large display of various goblets. There were considerably fewer pots to choose from here, but picking a wrong one would likely be just as disastrous for him as it was for that movie’s villain.

  And he wasn’t half as smart or suave as Indie.

  Think…

  There had to be something here to tell him which one was the right one.

  They weren’t identical. Not by any means. One was green. Another was considerably larger than the others. A third had a chipped rim. Two of them had odd patterns painted on them. A sixth was smaller than the rest. A seventh had a red ribbon tied around it. Another had a black lid. He studied each of them as he made his way around the room. Here was one that was tall and skinny and stopped with an old cork. The next looked dirty and crusty. The last one had a rope tied to it for a handle.

  Which one?

  He recalled the lake. The two boats. Karen’s words of wisdom. There was always a way. He just had to find it.

  Isabelle told him the same thing. She said she’d discovered a thread of order in the universe since escaping Altrusk.

  He had to believe.

  He promised he would believe.

  He closed his eyes and tried to recall what Edgar told him. He said there were six of them who arrived in that hayfield. One died along the way. Ben. They carried a clay pot all the way to the cathedral and then the five survivors spent the rest of their lives in the fissure to ensure it stayed there.

  That was all he said.

  How was it, Eric suddenly wondered, that the five of them came here and survived to see another forty or fifty years? According to Father Billy, everyone who entered the cathedral remained there, never to be seen again.

  He couldn’t think about that now. Time was still ticking. Eric circled the room again, looking at each pot, examining it, trying to remember something. There must be something somewhere…

  Taylor told him how to stop the golems. But he never said anything helpful about the cathedral. Grant educated him on the importance of sticking to the path. Not one of them told him anything significant about the cathedral itself.

  Annette hadn’t told him much of anything at all. She was far too lost in her own grief to have been any real help.

  Again, he circled the room.

  The foggy man wouldn’t stay lost forever. And he was probably going to be pissed about losing him.

  He had to calm down. He had to think.

  Father Billy had only told him to stay away from the cathedral. Isabelle only knew what the other people trapped in Altrusk’s house knew. The gas station attendant revealed plenty, but none of it helped him determine which of these clay pots was the one delivered by Edgar and company nearly a century ago.

  The answer had to be with the ghosts. They were the ones who brought it.

  He tried to recall the dream, but he had only stood there in the dream much as he was now, staring at the pots, trying to decide which one he should open.

  This was getting him nowhere.

  And he desperately needed to hurry.

  He closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.

  At the same time, he recalled doing the same in his dream. He recalled thinking about everything that had happened to him. Every detail. Every conversation.

  It was difficult to think down here. The pressure was distracting. He wanted to leave.

  His mind kept turning back to Annette for some reason, but she was the one who told him the least about what he was doing here. She was too busy talking about her dead father and the husband she pretended wasn’t also long dead and gone.

  Was that a noise he heard outside the door? The sound of someone approaching?

  No.

  But he didn’t have much longer.

  Hurry!

  Again, he circled the room, practically darting from one to the next.

  Which one was it?

  Was it the tall one? The green one? The black lid?

  Come on!

  The big one? The red ribbon?

  Eric stopped, his breath momentarily stolen.

  Suddenly it occur
red to him…

  Annette…

  Something she said between telling him about her dead father and that it was a long way to the cathedral. He’d nearly forgotten. It seemed so unimportant at the time.

  “I gave him a red ribbon before he went in. That’s good luck. Did you know that?”

  Eric stared at the clay pot with the red ribbon tied around it.

  He recalled something else that Edgar told him as well. While talking about Annette’s tragic state, he said, “She couldn’t take losing someone again.”

  He thought Edgar had been referring to the father Annette told him about, but now he realized that there had been another tragedy in her life. There was a third man she’d loved and lost.

  He wondered before why it was that Father Billy was so sure no one had ever entered the labyrinth and lived to tell about it when Edgar claimed to have gone there with five others and then lived to a ripe old age. Now he knew the answer.

  Edgar never told him how Ben died.

  And because he didn’t care to think more than necessary about death on this journey, Eric hadn’t asked.

  But now he knew.

  Only Ben entered the cathedral with the clay pot.

  And he never came back out.

  “I gave him a red ribbon before he went in. That’s good luck.”

  He thought she was still talking about Ethan. But she was giving him the most important message of all. She didn’t give the ribbon to Ethan before he went in the hospital. She gave it to Ben. Before he went in the cathedral.

  And Ben left it tied around the clay pot.

  His heart broke a little for Annette.

  Yet he had no time to dwell on her tragedy.

  He stared at the pot with the red ribbon. He was finally here. He was at the end of his journey. The secrets were at last about to be revealed to him.

  He reached out and grasped the lid.

  In his dream, he recalled doing the same thing. Dream Eric had taken longer to piece it all together, but he got it in the end. And now the final memories of that dream were coming back to him at last.

  He hesitated. He closed his eyes. He made himself breathe.

  He remembered lifting the lid…

  And then he remembered his death.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Eric let go of the lid as terrible images returned from the depths of his memories and filled his mind with unimaginable horrors.

  The dream that had once been his guide became the worst kind of nightmare he had ever experienced. Something awful reached out of the pot. It seized his hand and raced up his arm. Agony shot up to his shoulder and neck to his head and then enveloped his whole body.

  Within seconds, he was alive with relentless, searing pain from head to foot. It consumed him. The memory was so perfect that he could actually feel it. His flesh crackled. His nerves were on fire. It felt like his bones were melting.

  But it was more than mere physical pain. He felt himself being torn apart emotionally and mentally. Terrible things, indescribable things, filled his brain, shredding his very sanity.

  Screaming in unspeakable agony, his final thought had for some reason been, Don’t open the pot!

  And then he had awakened in his bed, where his story began so long ago.

  “I’ll take it from here.”

  Eric turned, his face still contorted with fear, and found the foggy man’s gun aimed at his head again.

  Time was up.

  “Come on. Back away.”

  Eric stepped away from the awful clay pot, his hands out to his sides, in clear view. They were trembling.

  “I don’t know how you got away from me back there, and I don’t know how you got here before me, but I do appreciate you solving the riddle of the pots for me.”

  Clearly, Foggy had misinterpreted the fear on his face. He didn’t realize that it wasn’t the gun that had frightened him.

  Eric didn’t enlighten him.

  He circled around the psycho with the gun, trying to force himself to relax, to shake off the horrors he had seen, but he couldn’t stop himself from trembling. He couldn’t make his heart stop pounding.

  This was why he had felt such dread as he recalled the dream. Somewhere, deep inside, he’d known all along how it ended.

  Now standing between Eric and the clay pot, preventing him from making a last ditch grab for it, the Foggy man swung the gun and struck him across the side of the head.

  Eric dropped to the floor, cursing and clutching his face.

  He was getting really tired of this guy hitting him.

  “So this is the one, is it?”

  Eric glared up at him. “No. It’s the green one.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “The tall one, then?”

  “Shut up.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I was watching you. It was this one. You were sure of it. I could tell.”

  Eric stared up at him, studying him. “I just like the pretty ribbon.”

  Foggy grinned. “I kind of like you. You’re fun.”

  “I try.”

  He must have been watching from the door. When he settled on the one with the red ribbon, it would have been obvious that he knew it was the one. But he mistook hesitance for fear. From his perspective, as he crept up behind his target, it must have seemed that Eric let go of the lid because he heard his approaching footsteps. The fear in his eyes when he looked back was probably the same fear people had regarded him with for years.

  It was ironic, really, that it would be his arrogance that ultimately destroyed him.

  The foggy man shook his head in a mock display of regret. “But you’re just not useful anymore.”

  “You don’t know that. I have a lot of talents.”

  “Sorry. Nothing personal.”

  “How could I possibly take it personally?”

  “That’s the right attitude.”

  Eric really didn’t like this guy.

  “Now let’s see… Should I kill you before or after I see what’s so interesting about this pot?”

  Eric glanced past him at the clay pot with the red ribbon tied around it. The memory of his dream still shook him. He couldn’t get the horrors out of his mind. He had actually dreamed his own death. Looking back at the foggy man, he said as calmly as he could manage, “I’d say the least you could do is let a beaten old man see what he almost had.”

  Grinning, the man formerly known to Eric as the foggy man stepped up to the ledge next to the clay pot and placed his hand on the lid. “It’s something really powerful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” lied Eric. “If you’re really smart, you’ll take it and disappear with it instead of giving it to your bosses.”

  “Maybe I will.” Grinning, the foggy man lifted the lid off the clay pot.

  Eric turned away and stared at the floor, unable to watch as the man who had once struck fear into his heart cried out in pitiful, wailing shrieks of terror and anguish.

  He wasn’t proud to have let the man die. But he would have killed him. There was no question about that. If the boy’d had more brains than ego, he would’ve killed him immediately instead of making him watch as he took the prize.

  And he was going to get Father Billy killed, too. Eric couldn’t allow that.

  Still, no one deserved to die like this.

  It went on for a long time. A terribly long time. And it happened just as he remembered it happening to him in his dream.

  After all he’d been through, the dream he was following had been leading him to failure. If he’d arrived two days ago, when everyone here told him he was supposed to, he would have died.

  Instead, he now remained perfectly alive and in possession of both of his hands.

  But he never found what he was sent for, which meant he may still have to relive that violent death every night in his dreams. Except now he would remember every agonizing detail.

  It was no wonder they said it would drive him mad.

  Even after
the foggy man stopped screaming, Eric stared down at the floor, unwilling to look at the body of the man he’d essentially killed. As he did, he realized that there was an image of a hawk etched into the golden disk in the center of the floor.

  He looked up at the slowly darkening sky. The funnel opened up from this one point in the floor. Even the tiles had been arranged so that they spiraled into it.

  Grant told him it was a singularity, the exact place at which the two worlds met. A single point in space.

  Right at the bottom of this hole.

  Right in the middle of this floor.

  Birds. They’d been everywhere today, in some way or another, like signs. The eagle over the barn door. The birdhouses at the farmhouse. The totem pole at the resort. The Canada goose on the factory’s sign. Even the symbol on the hood of the Firebird at the salvage yard. And then there were the real birds. He’d been spooking them out of brush and trees all day. The hawks. The crows. The ducks in the lake. Even the freaky chickens back in the barn and that giant bird coasting over the swamp. He’d thought that he’d seen them in the dream because they’d been so prevalent along the fissure, but they were more than that. The birds had been pointing to his true goal all along.

  He felt around the edges of the disk and found that it was loose.

  It was here. Hidden in plain sight. The clay pots were only a distraction from the true prize.

  He pulled out the metal disk and found a narrow hole beneath it, barely large enough to fit his hand into. There was a wooden stick of some sort inside. He gripped it by its end and pulled it out, revealing it to be a four-foot long, wooden staff.

  As soon as it was free and in his hands, Eric knew what it was, who it belonged to, what it was used for.

  In fact, he knew a great many things.

  He knew too much.

  He closed his eyes and cried out as fantastic things flooded into his unprepared mind. Awesome things. Terrible things. Powerful things. This new knowledge shook him even more violently than the memory of his dream death.

  He tried to let go of the staff, but he couldn’t.

  He rose to his feet and tried to walk, but he stumbled.

  The things he suddenly knew…

  Such information that he could scarcely fathom it…