Rushed

by Brian Harmon

  He couldn’t make any of it come together. It was no use.

  But somewhere along the way, he’d been bitten. And the shape of the teeth marks in his arm was almost human…

  He couldn’t even tell himself that it was only a dream.

  But at least he hadn’t been seriously harmed. He’d continued on, little worse for the wear, meaning that Dream Eric had still probably ended up with the preferred path. He had only traded a bite mark on his right arm for a painful scratch on his left.

  Around him, the fields were quiet. These were mostly fallow, empty, allowing him an unobstructed view all around him.

  Nothing stalked him here.

  But perhaps farther out, beyond where he could see clearly…

  He walked and he watched for unnatural things, until at last he crested a hill and looked down into the next valley. A large building waited there for him.

  It appeared to be an old factory of some kind. Several smoke stacks rose from one end of the facility. Several large storage tanks stood at its back. A large loading dock with six bays stood empty and silent. A single stretch of blacktop led away from the building and off through the open hayfields.

  An old sign still stood out by the road. Half of it had blown off long ago—likely in a storm—so that it was impossible to read the name of the company, but its logo was still visible. It appeared to be a Canada goose.

  Standing at the top of the hill, looking down at the sprawling structure, his only thought was, What now?

  He closed his eyes and recalled the dream. Two days ago, the Eric who would never have met Father Billy set off down the hill toward the silent factory. Today, the Eric who was never bitten did the same.

  He had barely begun when his phone rang again.

  “I just had the strangest conversation of my life,” Karen announced before he could even say, “Hello.”

  He didn’t have to ask who this conversation was with. “Isabelle’s a sweet kid, isn’t she?”

  “Very sweet, yes. Also kind of spooky.”

  “Well she has been trapped in a psychotic, inter-dimensional house for the last thirty-six years.”

  “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “I’ve dealt with harder things to accept today.” The foggy man’s three golems were not the least of these things.

  “I guess you probably have.”

  “She looks really good for someone old enough to be your mother.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when she told me who she was. Not just that she got out of the house, but that I was even talking to her. I mean I believed you…”

  “You sort of believed me,” Eric challenged. “You didn’t entirely believe me. You never did. You couldn’t have. It’s too much to accept. I didn’t even entirely believe it. I’m still not sure I do.”

  “I guess so. But it was like when you sent me those first pictures. Those things from the barn… It was such a shock.”

  “I know. If it’s even remotely the way I felt when I saw all those things, when I experienced them, then I’m amazed that any part of you believed me at all.”

  “I’ve known you too long to doubt anything you tell me. I trust you. It would be impossible for me to not believe anything you say to some degree.”

  “That’s good. Because I’m racking up some mileage over here.”

  “You are,” she agreed. “She’s really taken with you, you know?”

  “What?”

  “Isabelle. She adores you. She went on and on about you.”

  “That’s…sweet…I guess. I didn’t do anything though. I just stumbled into the house. She was the one who rescued me. I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for her. I would’ve vanished into that house just like she did thirty-six years ago if she hadn’t appeared in that hallway and led me to her secret room. I was nothing but trouble for her.”

  “Well, she doesn’t think so. She thinks you gave her the courage to get out of that monster’s house. It’s kind of adorable. I think she might even have a little crush on you.”

  “That’s awkward. I’ve never been into older women.”

  “Thinking about it now, I kind of like it. You’re her hero. And she’s ours.”

  “She’s definitely mine. In fact, I seem to be collecting those today.” He recalled Grant’s timely intervention with his tractor and Father Billy courageously taking on the freak-in-the-box.

  “I’m just happy you’re running into so many helpful people.”

  “I’m not sure how helpful most of them really are. No one wants to tell me exactly what it is I’m expected to find in the cathedral.”

  “Hopefully they all know what they’re doing.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So where are you now?”

  “I’m heading toward what looks like an abandoned factory way out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That sounds lovely. I can’t imagine it possibly going wrong.”

  “I know. What do you think? Another of the foggy man’s golems or a nest of ravenous monsters?”

  “Maybe it’s where you’ll have your epic showdown with the foggy man, himself.”

  “Nice. I can’t wait.”

  “Isabelle promised me she’d watch out for you.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “I’m really glad someone is.”

  “You’ve done a fine job watching out for me yourself.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be standing around at that dock, trying to figure out where to go next.”

  “You’d have figured it out on your own. Eventually.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “I am. You’re pretty slow, but you usually get it in the end.”

  “Thanks. You’re too kind.”

  “I know.”

  “Did Paul call you?”

  “He did. He’s in a real mess, isn’t he?”

  “It’s pretty damn funny, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of, yeah. Did he send you a picture of the thing that won’t let him out of the cabin?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have to send it to your phone. It’s almost cute.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Paul’s thinking about bringing it home.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “At least he’s safe in the cabin.”

  “I know. Hopefully Kevin can get to him before too long.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to go. Toni’s here for the cake.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve got to go get the living hell scared out of me by whatever’s waiting in this factory.”

  “Have fun.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Eric…”

  “What?”

  For a moment, Karen was silent. He could tell she was frightened. Between all the pictures he’d sent her and now talking to the undeniably real Isabelle, it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss all these things with a joke and a smile.

  “Be careful,” she said at last.

  “I will.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Bye.”

  Eric said goodbye and hung up the phone. He didn’t like hearing so much worry in her voice. She was usually much stronger than that. He could tell that she was ready for him to come home.

  The factory loomed ahead of him.

  It was silent.

  The overgrown lawns and crumbling parking lots confirmed that this was not merely a day off. No one had worked here in a very long time.

  Glancing down at his phone again, he saw that he was beginning to lose his signal. The factory was on the edge of the gray zone. He recalled his dream. This was like the lake. He wouldn’t be able to go around. The only path was through the facility.

  Had the fissure always been here? Surely a factory could not have been built in such a place without someone noticing it. Perhaps the fissure was always growing. Perhaps i
t had spread to this place only after the facility was built. Or maybe it was like the resort and someone chose this place specifically because of the fissure, with intentions that went well beyond manufacturing American-made products.

  He crossed the parking lot with its weed-choked cracks, following the same path he recalled taking in his dream, and found himself walking toward a heavy, steel door with peeling, green paint.

  The lock was broken. The door remained closed only because it happened to be weighted so that it rested closed. He recalled this from his dream. He also recalled the darkened hallway behind the door, the eerie silence that had settled with the dust.

  Now he climbed the steps and pushed open the door, trying to prepare himself for whatever terror must await him in the darkness.

  The hallway was brightly lit.

  He stood in the doorway, confused, as a tall man in business casual clothes and a white hairnet walked from a doorway on the right-hand side of the corridor to a set of stairs on the left and ascended out of sight. At the end of the short hallway was a door with a scuffed plastic window. The room beyond was well-lit, too. As he looked on, someone walked briskly by.

  A heavyset woman in a pair of bright yellow coveralls came down the stairs and entered what appeared to be an office without glancing at him.

  Where was the darkness he remembered? Why were these people here?

  In the dream, there had been no one. The entire building had been bathed in gloom so deep it was difficult to see anything. There had been no signs to indicate that anyone had been here in a very long time.

  He stepped through the door, letting it bang closed behind him, and entered the room where the yellow-clad woman had gone. This room was open and empty, filled with dust, but brightly lit. There was another door in the far corner, but the room behind it was unlit.

  He peered into this darkness and found only another empty room. There were no other doors. Where had the woman gone? And where had she come from? He hadn’t seen any cars outside.

  There was no furniture in this darkened room. No desks, no chairs, no office equipment filled the empty space.

  He took a step back, away from the disconcerting darkness, confused, and turned around.

  Walking toward him was a very large man in the same yellow coveralls the heavyset woman had been wearing. In his meaty hands, he lifted a heavy-looking shovel into the air and swung it at Eric’s startled face.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Eric closed his eyes. He stood there, his back to the wall, cringing in anticipation of the blow. But it never came. When he dared a peek, the large man and his shovel were gone.

  A tall man was standing in the middle of the room instead, studying a piece of paper.

  “What just happened?” he asked, but the man merely turned away and walked out of the room.

  “Excuse me…”

  Eric followed him into the hallway, but he was gone. Instead, an attractive woman with dark features was walking toward him from the door at the end of the hallway. She was carrying a clipboard under her arm and pulling her long, black hair out from under her hairnet.

  “Can you help me?” he asked, but the woman ignored him so completely that he had to step quickly out of her way to keep from being pushed aside.

  “The hell?”

  His cell phone chimed at him, announcing a new text message, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, he again found a single word staring back at him.

  LISTEN

  He frowned at the word. Listen to what? The place was silent.

  Then it occurred to him. It was silent. Utterly silent. There was none of the noise a factory should have been making, even before its machinery began running. It wasn’t even the polite hush of a quiet hospital wing. Even the footsteps of these people were perfectly silent.

  Duh.

  He’d been so distracted by the shock of finding people working here that he hadn’t noticed how unnaturally quiet they all were.

  Beginning to understand, he turned and peered into the room where the big man had swung the shovel at him. There, on the wall directly over where he’d been standing, was a metal rack, exactly the sort of place someone might hang such tools when they were done with them. The man hadn’t been trying to brain the hapless intruder at all. He was merely hanging up his shovel. If he hadn’t closed his eyes, he might have seen it pass right through him.

  Or simply disappear.

  Turning around, he found a very short, rotund woman moving toward him from the door at the end of the hall. The door wasn’t swinging as if someone had just passed through it, and he very much doubted it that it would open so soundlessly.

  This time, he stood his ground and the woman faded away just before she could collide with him.

  Residuals.

  Completely harmless, Grant had assured him, but deceptive. The foggy man left them to trip him up. The first lured him into a trap. The second had been put there to try to deter him from staying on the path, likely in hopes of making him either give up or try to find another path, which likely would’ve resulted in straying too far into the other world and becoming lost forever.

  So what was the point of these guys?

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember what he did in his dream.

  It had been dark. Very dark. But he’d had a light.

  Why did he have a light? He wasn’t carrying a light now.

  Then he remembered. He used the cell phone.

  Dream Eric was pretty smart.

  He’d poked around these offices without finding anything. Then he made his way through the door, which he recalled now was not at all quiet, but instead extremely noisy when pushed open in this deep silence. Using the light from the phone’s digital screen, he began to explore.

  Eric didn’t need the phone to light his way today. These rooms were brightly illuminated. But as he looked up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, curious about why they were on now and not two days ago, he realized that they were unlit. The light didn’t seem to be coming from those.

  This was new. Apparently the foggy man could even manufacture residual lighting.

  How the hell did that even work?

  Too tired to contemplate such a thing, Eric pushed open the door, wincing at the loud screeching of its hinges, and stepped out onto the factory floor.

  If this were a real factory, the noise would be deafening, the air would be stifling and the very floor would be rumbling beneath his feet. But in spite of the dozens of people bustling around, the thrumming of the machinery, the conveyor belts clattering, there was not the subtlest noise to be heard beyond his own shallow breathing. The air was stale and cool, musty-smelling. His ears and nose detected the truth. Only his eyes saw the lie.

  He stood in the middle of the walkway, gazing around at the silent chaos, wondering what the foggy man was doing here.

  A young man walked past him, appearing no less real than Eric, and he reached out to touch his arm. It was as if he had only imagined him there. As soon as his fingers came close, he was gone without a trace. He did not fade. And he did not disappear, exactly, if that made any sense. He was just gone, as if never there in the first place, as if he vanished not before his eyes but even for a second or two in his very memory.

  This was insanely weird.

  And after all he’d seen today, that was saying a lot.

  To his left was some kind of office. It was dark beyond the door. No residual lighting had been used there. Farther to his left, a corridor led into another room where it was also dark. But to the right, another area of the factory was lit up. It seemed that the foggy man hadn’t bothered to animate the entire facility.

  But why?

  Eric looked up at the overhead lights. Like the ones in the hallway, they were dark. Looking down, he realized that he did not cast a shadow here, suggesting that the light he was seeing was just like the people: of another time.

  His cell phone rang.

  No name.

&n
bsp; Isabelle.

  He put the phone to his ear and immediately heard her sweet voice say, “That foggy guy’s good.”

  “This is definitely quite a trick,” Eric agreed.

  “Residual lighting, huh? That’s a new one.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  “No idea. I can’t feel him. Even when you were looking at him from Father Billy’s church, I couldn’t see him. It’s like he’s not really there, like he’s residual, too.”

  “He can’t be residual. He causes too much trouble.”

  “True. But I can’t feel him anywhere.”

  Eric looked around at the silent workers. It looked like they were manufacturing some kind of food, but he couldn’t tell what. Like the sound, the product itself was missing. Though the production lines were running at full-speed, there was nothing on the conveyors. It was like the rooms that remained dark. The foggy man had simply left it out.

  “Snack foods,” said Isabelle.

  “What?”

  “They made snack foods here. Potato chips, cheese puffs, pretzels. That sort of thing. Some specialty organic brand.”

  He kept forgetting that Isabelle could read his thoughts. That was going to take some getting used to.

  “Did something bad happen here? Like at the resort?”

  “I don’t think so. In this case, I think the factory just closed. But that doesn’t mean nothing bad ever happened here.”

  “Are all these people dead now?” he wondered, studying the busy workers.

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  Eric didn’t think they were. Not all of them. Maybe not any of them. None of them had hair or clothes that looked very dated. These were people who probably worked here no earlier than the nineties.

  If so, these weren’t ghosts at all. They were merely glimpses into the past.

  “Why is he even here? Why isn’t he looking for the cathedral?”

  “You’re not that far away,” Isabelle informed him. “Given the head start he had, he should’ve been there and gone. I really don’t know why he’s hanging around. But it obviously has something to do with you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Sorry I can’t be more help.”

  “You’re more help than anybody else I’ve met today.”