by Brian Harmon
He was standing in front of the stairwell door, staring back at him.
Eric stood his ground, looking back at the stranger. Neither spoke.
Was this person responsible for those creatures that chased him up here? He didn’t act surprised to see him here. He wasn’t demanding to know who he was or why he was trespassing.
In fact, he continued to say nothing at all.
But Eric had no intention of speaking first. He couldn’t say precisely why, but he had a very distinct feeling that it was in his best interest to not appear weak in this situation.
Why he should feel this way was beyond him. He wasn’t overly reliant on his intuition. He usually relied more on hard logic. But logic didn’t always serve him very well. Especially when it rained molten gold upside-down on the top floor of a building that had appeared out of thin air.
The man in the pink shirt continued to study him in silence.
Just when he didn’t think he could take it anymore, the stranger finally spoke: “Nice day out.”
This was even more disconcerting than the silence. He was small-talking? Not sure what else to say, Eric replied, “It is.”
“Little hot, but not bad.”
“Little. Yeah.”
Again, the man fell silent. Those glasses concealed his eyes. Eric couldn’t see a thing through them. He was sure that was precisely the point. Right now he wished he had a pair. Maybe they’d hide the anxious distrust that must be shining like headlamps from his face right now.
“Interesting place, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Is it yours?”
Eric cocked his head a little. It wasn’t an entirely voluntary reaction. The question had caught him as much off guard as the man’s comment about the weather. He thought he was the building’s owner? Or was he just testing him.
A new thought occurred to him. Perhaps this man was a cop. A detective maybe. He didn’t see a badge, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying one. He decided a lie was probably not a good approach. “No. I was just…exploring.”
The man’s lips curled into a friendly smirk. “Me too.”
Eric was standing beside an open door. Something in the room caught his eye and he glanced over to see another of those strange, golden drops sliding down the wall below the narrow window sill.
When he looked back at the man in the pink shirt he realized that another was slowly oozing up the glass in the stairwell door behind him, visible just over his left shoulder.
“Very interesting history here, don’t you think?”
Eric’s eyes returned to the sunglasses. He could see his own reflection. They made him look short. “Is it? I’m not really familiar with it.”
“No?”
“I really just stumbled on this place this morning, to tell the truth.”
“That so?”
“It is.”
The man turned and looked at the wall next to him. He seemed to study it for a while, as if it were the most fascinating wall in the world. Without looking forward again, he said, “Used to be an asylum for the criminally insane. Some very disturbed individuals were locked up here.”
“I hadn’t heard about that.”
“You wouldn’t have, would you?”
Eric wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
The man faced forward again. “Everyone’s forgotten, haven’t they?”
“Have they?”
He stared at Eric for a while in silence. “There’s something very interesting about you, too.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t put my finger on it. But I don’t think you’re what I came here to find.”
“What exactly was it you came here to find?”
Again, that smirk appeared. “Something…else.”
It seemed this guy wasn’t in the business of giving away useful information. Or even his name. He still hadn’t introduced himself.
A single drop of that strange, golden liquid glinted on the ceiling, directly above the stranger’s head, threatening to drop right into his nicely cut hair. He didn’t seem to have noticed it.
The man in the pink shirt started walking. Eric stepped aside and let him pass. There was something odd about him.
Eric lifted the phone and snapped a picture of him as he walked away, then studied the image on the screen.
The stranger paused and looked back at him. “What are you doing?”
“Just making sure you’re really alive.”
Pink Shirt raised an eyebrow over his sunglasses. “And am I?”
“Far as I can tell.”
“Do the dead not photograph very well?”
“They don’t, actually.”
He stared at Eric for a while in silence. He seemed to be trying to decide if this odd person he’d found himself conversing with was amusingly strange or dangerously demented.
Eric was hoping for amusing. Who didn’t like to be amused?
Pink Shirt turned and walked on down the hallway. He was heading toward the room with the strange symbols and that weird, golden liquid. Was that where the “something else” was that he claimed to have come here for?
Eric hurried back to the stairs without pausing to consider what the stranger’s intentions were in that room. He was impatient to be out of this building. He needed to go somewhere to think for a while.
No black beasts stood on the landing, nor were there any standing guard on the third and second floor hallways.
That he could see.
Where had they all gone? And why hadn’t they attacked the stranger in the pink shirt? Again, he wondered if that man had something to do with their mysterious appearance.
And what the hell was with that strange, golden goo?
Karen’s cell phone sang at him and he answered it without hesitation. “Isabelle?”
“I know I say this a lot, but that was really weird.”
“Yes, it was. Any feelings about that guy?”
“Plenty, but nothing I can really describe. I don’t like him. He’s…”
“Weird?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think he’s just here for a tour of the place.”
“Be careful around him. I don’t trust him.”
Eric thought that went without saying. “Don’t worry, I’m getting as far away as I can.”
“Good.”
“Do you think he has something to do with those creatures?”
“Possible.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Just be careful.”
“I will.”
He hung up the phone, but didn’t bother returning it to his pocket. He wanted to be able to talk to Isabelle immediately if something else popped up.
He pushed the door open and emerged from the first floor landing into a deserted hallway. The beasts that drove him into the stairwell in the first place were gone.
He made his way all the way back to the nurses station without encountering any more black creatures and then peered through the window into the hallway that led back to the waiting room and the building’s main doors.
It was empty.
He still didn’t know how it was that they came and went, but all that mattered was that they were gone. He intended to leave this asylum before it drove him mad. But as he pushed open the door, he again heard the scratching on the door behind him.
Pausing, he looked back over his shoulder. He could see the door shuddering on its hinges. Was that where all those creatures came from? Was there a den of some sort in the basement?
But as he watched, something appeared in the window, a strange, alien face with blood-red eyes.
His heart leapt into his throat.
He turned and fled down the hallway as the door to the stairwell flew open and something unthinkable tore after him.
He shoved his way through the swinging door, sprinted through the waiting room and slammed open the front doors.
Blinded by the brill
iant sunlight, he shielded his eyes with the wrist of the hand that held Karen’s phone as he fumbled for the keys in his front pocket with the other.
He ran around the front of the PT Cruiser, but as he reached the door, the thing leapt up onto the hood and shrieked at him.
Eric stumbled back, dropping the keys and nearly tripping over his own feet, but somehow managing to hang on to Karen’s phone.
The thing looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. If it stood up straight, it would probably be at least ten feet tall, but it sat with its long, bony limbs folded up and its huge head stretched out toward him.
With no better ideas coming to him, he scooped up his dropped keys and then turned and ran as hard and as fast as he could go across the parking lot.
But he was so far from anything. There was no chance this thing wasn’t going to catch him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw it coming for him. In fact, it was almost on top of him already, a long, insect-like thing on huge, spindly legs, reaching out for him, almost touching him.
Pushing himself a little harder, he faced forward again.
A horn sounded. Sunlight flashed off of metal in his peripheral vision. He turned and glimpsed the grill of a truck heading straight for him.
Chapter Eight
Eric threw himself out of the path of the truck as it collided with the monster. Whatever the thing was, it disintegrated on impact. A crude, black substance splashed up over the hood and onto the windshield, as if the thing had been nothing but an impossibly elaborate balloon animal filled with used motor oil.
The truck skidded to a stop and Eric rose shakily to his feet.
Now that the terrible incident was over, he realized that he recognized the truck. The aged F150 was as familiar to him as the man who emerged from the driver’s side door and hurried to his side.
“Are you okay?”
Eric stood gasping for breath. His heart was still racing and he felt as if he had to make a conscious effort to remain on his feet, but he nodded. “Nice timing.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Karen called. Said you were up to weirdness again.”
Of course. On the surface, Karen always seemed to be calm and unfazed, but inside, she was deathly afraid for him. She’d never been comfortable expressing herself, especially when it came to admitting she was afraid. She just made her jokes and carried on like nothing ever bothered her. But she never hesitated to call in favors. This time, she’d called his big brother, Paul, to look after him for her.
Eric squinted up at him in the brilliant sunshine. Paul was awkwardly tall, standing a good seven inches over him. He also possessed quite a few more inches around his midsection and was a surprisingly hairy man, with long, disheveled hair, a bushy beard and a considerable amount of hair covering his exposed arms and bristling out of his work shirt where he’d left the top two buttons undone. Eric was happy to have been blessed with an entirely different combination of genes. “How the hell did you find me?”
“She said you were somewhere by the hospital.”
Eric nodded and looked over at the urgent care entrance again. He had told her he was snooping around near the hospital when he talked to her last.
“I drove around until I found your car parked out here, but I didn’t see you anywhere. So I just sat and waited.”
“And then you saw me come out of the building.” It made perfect sense. His silver PT Cruiser wasn’t hard to miss, especially parked all by itself like it was. But the timing was still uncanny. A few more seconds and he would’ve been done for.
But Paul frowned at him, confused. “What building?”
Eric looked up at him again. “What?”
“What building?”
He turned and gestured at the abandoned building beside which he’d parked, but it was no longer there. The PT Cruiser stood alone in the vast parking lot. “The hell…?”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s gone…” Eric felt as if the world were spinning out of control around him. What was going on, indeed?
“What’s gone?”
“You didn’t see where I came from?”
“No. All I could find was your car. I’ve been sitting here watching for you for a while. I was starting to think you’d left it behind like you did last year when you went on that crazy walk you took. Then I just…looked up…and you were there, running across the parking lot with that thing loping after you. What the hell was that?”
“Well at least you saw that, I guess.”
“It just exploded when I hit it. Like it was made of oil or something… Then even that stuff disappeared.”
It was true. Paul’s truck was not only undamaged by the impact, it wasn’t even dirty. The crude, black fluid had vanished almost as soon as it struck the windshield. Not a trace of it remained.
That creature… It reminded him of other creatures he’d encountered, creatures an unlikely man of God once called “golems.” Those beasts were relentless hunters, pursuing their prey to the ends of the earth if necessary, but had uncannily short attention spans. Breaking their focus with a large enough distraction would send them back where they came, like a reset button. But none of the golems he encountered ever looked like this thing. In fact, they’d never looked much like anything. They lacked conceivable shape, as if they defied reality. This thing looked more like a creature of some sort, with definite, biological features, although not like anything he’d ever seen before.
Paul’s cell phone rang and he fished it from his pocket. “Hello? What? Oh… Hi…” He gave Eric a bewildered look as he listened. “Sure, hold on.” He took the phone from his ear and pressed a button. “It’s Isabelle.”
“Isabelle?”
Paul held the phone out between them and Isabelle’s voice rose from the speakers: “Hi, guys.”
“Hi,” said Eric. “What’s up? Why did you call him instead of me?”
“Paul actually knows how to use his phone, so he can do things like put me on speaker.”
Eric nodded. “Fair enough. Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “What was that thing I hit?”
“No idea. But it was obviously real if even Paul could see it.”
Paul nodded. “Looked real to me.”
Eric ran a hand through his hair. It was certainly comforting to have someone validate some of the insane things he’d seen. It helped to know he wasn’t entirely nuts.
“And that building was real, too,” continued Isabelle. “I’m sure of it. I could feel something about that place.”
“But where did it go?” asked Eric. “How does a whole building just vanish without a trace?”
“I still don’t know, but I do think it had something to do with that apartment. Those two places felt very similar.”
“Well,” said Eric, “they did both disappear into thin air.”
“Besides that, I mean.”
Paul looked out over the empty parking lot. “I’m not sure about the Main Street shops, but I’m positive I’ve never seen a building here. The hospital’s looked just like this since they remodeled it and added the east wing back in the early nineties. Even before that, there was no building over here that I was ever aware of.”
Eric stared at his PT Cruiser. When he parked it, it was right in front of that building. Now it was just sitting there all alone. He recalled moving the vehicle there after he noticed the building… He hadn’t seen it at first…almost as if it simply appeared while he wasn’t looking. But how did a building appear out of nowhere? And how was it that he was the only one who saw it while it was here?
“So what should we do now?” asked Paul.
It was a good question. Eric wasn’t sure.
“Do you remember any more locations from the map?” asked Isabelle.
“I don’t. All I remember is this one, the place on Hosler and whatever was supposed to be on Milwaukee Street.”
“Maybe you should go back to Milwaukee,” she suggested.
“There wasn’t anything there.”
“There wasn’t anything here until there was.”
Eric shrugged. “Makes sense.”
“It does?” asked Paul.
No. It didn’t. But he understood what she meant. When he first drove around over here, there was nothing. Then, suddenly, he found it. But what was he even looking for?
“Don’t these first three locations have something in common?” pressed Isabelle.
Eric considered it. Immediately, he knew that she was right. The apartment. The lot on Hosler. The asylum. “They’re all deserted.”
“I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Paul glanced around again. There was still no building here, deserted or otherwise.
“A deserted location on or near Milwaukee Street…” pondered Eric. “It’s a start.” He looked up at Paul. “You want to drive, or should I?”
“I’ll drive.”
The Spice Girls began singing from Karen’s phone again. Swearing, Eric stuffed his hand into his pocket and wrestled it free, unable to miss the smirk on his brother’s face. “It’s Karen’s phone,” he said.
“Why do you have Karen’s phone?”
“I lost mine.”
“Again?”
“I dropped it at the last place I was nosing around. I didn’t have a chance to go back for it.”
“You need to be more careful with your phones.”
“I don’t lose that many phones!”
Paul shrugged.
Eric looked down at the screen and paused, letting the Spice Girls play on.
“Who is it?”
Eric looked up at him, confused.
“Who is it?” he asked again.
“It’s me.”
This didn’t make sense. “What do you mean it’s you?”
Eric held it up for him to see. The number displayed on the screen was his. The call was coming from his cell phone. The one he left in the weeds under the apple tree on Holser Avenue.
Paul looked from the phone to Eric. “Well, what do you suppose you want?”
Turning the phone around again, Eric opened the line and silenced the Spice Girls. Then he held it up to his ear. “Hello?”
“So you’re the one,” said an unfamiliar voice in his ear.