by Brian Harmon
“Well that explains everything. You might as well come on home.”
“I wish it were that easy.”
Karen sighed. “Me too.”
“It’ll be all right. Delphinium said so, remember?”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Be careful out there.”
“Always.”
“Liar.”
Eric smiled. “I don’t lie. Things just don’t always go as planned.”
“Things never go as planned.”
“And I still get in trouble for them.”
“You get what you have coming to you.”
“Right.”
“Try to avoid things with teeth and claws this time, okay?”
“I’ll do my best.”
She hesitated. Eric could tell she was having a difficult time with this. About now, she was regretting letting him and Holly talk her out of coming with him. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too. I’ll be home soon. Promise.”
“Just take care of yourself.”
“I will.”
“And no more strippers!”
Eric closed his eyes and bit back a curse. “Bye,” he said instead.
Karen hung up and he returned the phone to his pocket, grumbling to himself.
Great. Now he had to deal with ghosts, monsters, aliens, Fester Sweater and hell rising from the lake. What did that even mean? Hell was a place, not a thing.
Wasn’t it?
In his vision he’d seen something rising from the lake. A physical thing. It was enormous and terrifying, but he didn’t recall seeing anything about it that he could describe. It was just something huge and foreboding. It was a feeling more than anything.
Was it a monster? Something resembling the terrifying golems that he faced on his first journey into the weird, but much, much bigger and infinitely more dangerous? Something that would unleash a figurative hell upon the land around the lake? Or was it literally some incarnation of hell?
He felt a shiver as his frightfully vivid imagination offered him a terrible picture of a great, fiery demon rising from the murky depths, perhaps even Lucifer himself, a scene straight out of Revelations.
That shiver repeated itself with greater intensity as he recalled what Holly said about the beast with many names. Surely she hadn’t meant the Beast.
“Nope,” he said aloud to the empty forest around him, shoving the thought from his mind. “I can’t deal with that. Not going to happen.” He retrieved the phone from his pocket again and looked down at the screen. “Any thoughts?”
I’M STILL UP IN THE AIR ABOUT HELL, MYSELF
“Like, whether it exists?”
AS IN A PHYSICAL PLACE FILLED WITH FIRE AND BRIMSTONE
“It does seem a bit fantastic, if you start thinking about it.”
BUT WE BOTH KNOW THERE ARE PLACES OUT THERE THAT COULD BE DESCRIBED AS A HELL
Indeed they did. The fissure he traveled in his first outing like this was nothing more than a crack between this world and a dark and terrifying realm he was warned to stay out of, if he didn’t wish to be lost forever. Thinking about it now, the whole thing sounded like a metaphor for living well and avoiding damnation.
AND LET’S NOT FORGET THAT I’M PRETTY MUCH TRAPPED IN MY OWN VERSION OF HELL RIGHT NOW
“That’s true.”
Isabelle wasn’t exactly suffering. Trapped in that state outside of time, never aging, never affected by the countless ticking seconds passing around her, she’d found herself in a state of contentment that allowed her to carry on from day to day. But she’d been torn from her family, forced to watch her parents from afar as they suffered and grieved, never knowing what became of their only daughter. She couldn’t tell them where she was. She couldn’t ease their pain. All she could do was witness their misery. It really was a sort of living hell.
BUT THERE’S A LOT OF VERY POWERFUL BELIEF IN HELL AND DEMONS AND THE DEVIL. I WOULDN’T DISMISS IT
Eric nodded. “Especially in a world where we keep finding out that things like golems and imps and genies are perfectly real.”
EXACTLY
Still thinking about the prospect of a real hell, Eric glanced around at the quiet woods around him and glimpsed something shadowy moving among the dense trees.
It seemed his ghostly stalker was back again.
And as soon as he realized it was there, it occurred to him that the forest was cold and quiet again.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned around, scanning the area in every direction, afraid that the bloody woman had returned with another awful vision.
But he seemed to be alone. Even the shadow man had promptly vanished again.
The feeling of being watched, however, only grew stronger with each second that passed. He wasn’t alone. Something else was here.
He started walking. He had no idea where he was going, but he felt strongly compelled to move. Standing still in these suddenly hostile-feeling woods seemed like a terrible idea.
His heart was suddenly racing, his breath shallow and rapid. Dread rose from deep inside his knotted belly and spread over him like a cold blanket.
Something moved in his peripheral vision. A flitting shadow. He turned to face it, but there was nothing there. Immediately, he saw it again, this time to his left, again in the corner of his eye.
It was playing with him, messing with his head.
He stopped and turned around, searching the trees.
Then he saw it there, standing at the base of a large ash tree. A big shadow against the bark, cast by nothing, completely intangible, but perfectly visible.
The shadow man was indeed a man. A large man, with muscular arms and stout legs. He could even make out the outline of his jacket.
Eric stared at the figure, trying to piece it together, but no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t see the man’s face. His head was there, but his face was a blank plane.
“Hello?” he called, surprised to hear that his voice still worked.
The shadow man turned as if to walk away and promptly vanished.
Eric stood there, alone again, as confused as ever, searching the trees for signs of movement. When he saw nothing, he turned and glanced quickly all around him, but no bloody woman had crept up on him. No monster had hauled itself out of the lake and charged him.
The forest didn’t seem so cold anymore.
It was over.
He relaxed.
Then something cried out at his feet.
Chapter Ten
Eric let out a shrill, startled curse and stumbled backward, nearly tripping himself in the brush.
The terrible thing that had sent his heart skittering in his chest stood where it was, staring at him with its big, yellow eyes, its ears twitching, looking back at him as if he’d utterly lost his mind.
It was the damn cat.
Clutching at his chest, gasping for air, Eric cursed and waited to catch his breath.
It must’ve crept up on him while he had his back turned, staring at the shadow man.
He leveled a finger at the little beast and said, “Not cool, cat.”
It meowed at him again.
His cell phone rang. Once more, he withdrew it from his pocket and raised it to his ear without glancing at the screen, his eyes fixed on the feline and its big, curious eyes. “Hello?”
“Eric.”
He blinked and glanced around, forgetting about the cat. “Holly?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Are you okay? Karen said you weren’t feeling well.”
“I’m fine. I just told her that so I’d have a chance to call you privately.”
“Okay?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Please don’t tell her I lied.”
Eric smiled. “I won’t.”
“Thanks.” She owed Karen a lot. In spite of all the trouble she and her family caused them in the days leading up to their last anniversary, Karen had
reached out and helped her to make a life for herself on her own in Wisconsin. It was something she probably never would’ve done in Illinois, where she and her sisters had always taken care of each other. In return, the only thing Karen expected of her was that she follow her rules. Holly didn’t mind. It was a fair trade, really. More than fair. After all, they weren’t unreasonable rules. And she’d come to greatly admire Karen during her time here. She’d grown deathly afraid of disappointing her.
“So you’re okay, then?”
“Well, I wasn’t lying about the spell wearing me out, but I didn’t really have to have anything from home to make me feel better. I would’ve been fine. I just needed an excuse to call you from somewhere she couldn’t hear us.”
“Okay.” That was a relief, at least. “So then, what’s up?”
“I need to tell you something.”
Eric waited.
“That vision you had… It’s bad. A lot worse than I first thought. You have to help those people. If you can’t stop it, I think we’re all in trouble.”
“All of us? Like, all of Wisconsin?”
“Like, all the world.”
“That’s not at all daunting.”
“Sorry.”
“Do you know what it is? Karen said you used the word ‘hell.’ What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. The water’s not always clear about it. And I’m not as good as some of my sisters at reading it. I think I saw what you saw, something awful rising out of the water, and the only thing I could describe it as was ‘hellish.’ It wasn’t an exaggeration. It just felt…well…like hell.”
Eric nodded, remembering the vision as he’d seen it, with those shrieking voices in the wind. “Yeah. I think I felt that, too.”
“There’s something really bad going on up there. You need to be really careful.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“I do worry about you. You seriously need to be careful. You’re not safe.”
Eric glanced around at the empty woods again.
The cat cried at him. He ignored it.
“My sister told you once that you’d always make it back to Karen. She wasn’t making that up. The water doesn’t lie and the water showed her that you were going to be safe.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Well, yes… But you have to be aware that the future is never certain. It’s constantly churning, affected by every decision and action that you make between now and then. Your future is extremely well-built, because you’re an extremely strong person. Given no deceptions, you’ll always make the right decisions at all the right times. But there are no guarantees. At any given moment, it could all change. One wrong choice and you might never make it home again.”
He glanced around again, half expecting to see the forest’s ghostly inhabitants shuffling out of the trees, surrounding him, ready to claim this foolish man who wasn’t nearly as safe as he thought he was. “You’re kind of bumming me out, Red.”
“I’m sorry. But you need to know. I almost said something this morning when you mentioned Del’s promise to Karen, but I didn’t want her to worry. That promise was meant for her, not you. You need to keep your head in the game.”
“How do I know the right decisions from the wrong ones, then?”
“You will. I know you. As long as something doesn’t change who you are, you’ll be fine.”
“What could possibly change who I am?”
“Well… Somebody telling you that you’ll always make it home safe might give you the false impression that you can take an unnecessary risk or two.”
Eric nodded. “That makes sense.” And it did. If he found himself in a tight situation, he might be tempted to ignore his survival instincts and do something rash if he was foolish enough to believe that he was somehow blessed to survive.
Now he understood what she meant by making the wrong decisions.
“You have to be you,” she told him. “The real you, not the you Del might have made you believe you were.”
“Seems like a reckless thing to tell someone, now that you mention it.”
“I think she trusted me to tell you and you to understand it. After all, as long as you stay true to yourself and not a silly spell, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be all right.”
“I guess that’s true.” But he was disappointed that he didn’t have some magical protection. That would be a nice bonus.
“Don’t be greedy,” she told him. “You’ve already got that cool healing thing.”
Eric laughed. “That’s true.”
The cat cried at him again and he looked down at it. It seemed to be getting agitated.
“Just be careful, okay? Promise me?”
“I promise. No dumb decisions.”
“Good. I’ve got to get back to your place.”
“Keep Karen company for me.”
“I will. Bye-bye.”
Eric said goodbye and pocketed the phone again.
The cat let out a long, urgent cry and stood up. Then it sat down again, its intense eyes still fixed on him.
He stared at the little creature. “What do you want?”
Promptly, the cat turned and darted into the woods to Eric’s left, quickly vanishing into the trees.
He stood where he was, staring into the brush where he last saw the cat. “And now you’re gone. What the hell was the point in that?”
Cats were weird.
He started to turn away, but the cat cried at him again, its still-urgent voice carrying from somewhere in the foliage.
Eric sighed. “Fine. I guess I don’t have any better ideas.” He turned and followed the cat through the trees.
It wasn’t easy. He’d lost sight of it completely and was wandering blindly through the brush. Twice he paused, unsure if he was going the right way, and both times the odd little creature cried out for him to hear, drawing him along. But the third time he paused, the cat didn’t call out again.
“Um…Kitty?”
Nothing but the soft rustle of the leaves in the breeze.
“Marco…?”
But there was no Polo. It appeared that the cat had gone again.
He moved on, blindly exploring the forest. He was learning a lot about this lake’s horrific past and future, but he still had no idea what he needed to do here in the present. Ten people had vanished from these woods over the course of the last century, but that didn’t tell him where he should go next. And if it was true that an enormous beast of possibly biblical significance was about to rise from this harmless-looking lake and spread a blanket of doom across the entire planet…well, he had absolutely no idea what he could possibly do to stop it.
Above all, he was still only one man.
Distracted by the overwhelming feeling that he was in way over his head this time, he barely noticed the forest thinning around him. All at once, he found himself emerging from the trees altogether and into the shady back yard of a small ranch house.
He stopped, surprised, and looked around. There was a swing set standing off to his left, half-rusted and motionless. A small porch jutted off the back entrance, a small table and two metal lawn chairs waiting invitingly for someone to sit. A small flower garden bordered the foundation, but nothing flowery grew there. A few large, leafy plants and a lot of weeds dominated the space. From somewhere inside, he could hear music playing, something soft and strangely old-fashioned.
There hadn’t been any fences out here, nothing to indicate that he’d wandered onto anyone’s property. The last thing he wanted was to be caught creeping around in someone’s yard, mistaken for a burglar or a peeping tom, yet he somehow felt compelled to move forward. His eyes were drawn to the left corner of the house, to the side yard, and he found himself walking in that direction, drawn toward something just beyond his sight, just around the corner…
He had time to consider these strange compulsions he sometimes had, these irresistible urges to push forward, even when it flew in the face of logic.
Was it intuition? Some kind of psychic pull? A strange, subconscious desire to get himself into trouble?
So far, it had served him well, even saving his life a time or two, but he never knew for sure where it was going to lead him. He’d begun to think of it as a guiding hand, a little nudge for those times when he’d otherwise hold back. Like now, when an intelligent man would have chosen to turn around and walk back the way he came, if only out of common courtesy. And yet he continued on around the corner of the house, just hoping that he didn’t startle a timid housewife who’d be happy to have him arrested and placed on the sex offenders list for prowling at her windows.
But no one seemed to be around.
He emerged into the front yard and looked out over the empty driveway. There was something peculiar about this place, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
There were no other houses around. Not even a road could be seen. The driveway receded into the woods and out of sight. He couldn’t even hear any traffic. He’d never been to such an isolated home before. It would have driven Karen insane to live out here, all alone, miles from her favorite coffee shop.
But what was he doing here?
The cat had led him in this direction. Was that on purpose? It seemed ridiculous, and yet it wouldn’t be the first time a mysterious creature led him to where he needed to be. But this was only a cat. The silly thing was probably just screwing with him. They did that, he knew. When he was a kid, he used to sleep over at his cousin’s house. This cousin had an old gray tabby that would randomly stop whatever it was doing and stare intensely in some random direction, but whenever he’d look to see what had drawn its attention, there was never anything there. And when he looked back, the cat was always grooming itself as if nothing had ever happened. The little beast was the ultimate Made-You-Look champion. It got him every time.
You just couldn’t trust the little monsters.
And now this one had vanished again. He was nowhere to be seen.
Eric turned away from the driveway, but before he could take a single step, he was hit by a wave of vertigo that made him pause to steady himself.
His cell phone chimed in his pocket.
I FELT THAT
Eric squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. His stomach still felt a little queasy. “What was it? Spiritual energy?”