by Brian Harmon
“I’m glad.”
“And unlike everybody else I’ve met, you’ve stayed with me. That’s a little reassuring. By the way, how is it you can call me when I don’t have a signal?”
“I’m not sure. I use the phone lines in this house to call you, so I really shouldn’t be able to reach you when no one else can. So I guess it can’t just be the phone. Maybe the connection has more to do with us, something about the way I’m in your head now.”
“Huh. Well I’m just happy you’re here.”
“Me too!”
“So what do you think I should do now?”
“What did you do in your dream?”
Eric tried to remember. “I went right,” he realized.
“I think that’s your best bet.”
He nodded. At least that way, he could let Dream Eric lead the way for him.
“I’ll hang up so you can watch for trouble. I’ll text you if I need to tell you anything.”
“Sounds good.”
He disconnected the call, but kept the phone clenched in his hand. He wanted to read anything Isabelle had to say to him immediately. And he wanted it at the ready in case the lights went back out, which didn’t seem at all unlikely, given the special nature of the light source.
The next room was mostly empty. An office of some sort sat in darkness on the other side of a door to the right. To the left was another corridor. It, too, was dark, but the room at the far end was brightly lit.
In his dream, he had wandered around the open rooms, trying his best to see the far ends of these empty spaces. There was no machinery in the dream. It was all residual, just like the people and the light. The factory had been cleaned out long ago.
He recalled peering into several offices and storage rooms, but ultimately he made his way down the left corridor.
As he turned around, a skinny woman with a remarkably unattractive face hurried past him and vanished halfway across the room. A moment later, a very fat man materialized from thin air just a few feet from where the woman disappeared and laboriously strolled out onto the production floor Eric just left.
A few short hours ago, that would’ve blown his mind.
He remembered being jumpy. In the dream, he’d been mostly calm throughout the day, sometimes in stark contrast to what he felt here in the waking world. He was never attacked by the wardrobe golem. He never saw the coyote-deer while trying to cross the gut-wrenchingly scary bridge. Nothing terrifying waited for him between the resort and Altrusk’s house. He’d even crossed the lake without encountering Furious George. Dream Eric had been surprisingly lucky. But whatever he encountered during the part of his dream that he could not quite recall had frightened him as badly as any of the things he’d encountered today and the result was that he was nearly sick with fear as he wandered these dark, deserted chambers in search of the way forward.
This did not in any way help him feel any calmer now. If anything, a worried Dream Eric made the situation much worse. He felt as though he would remember something bad happening any moment, at which point the bad thing would happen here and now, with no time to defend against it.
Yet as he made his way down the corridor, nothing terrible happened to either Eric.
Although there were bright lights at both ends of the corridor, he found that very little of it seemed to reach beyond the doorways, so that he found himself illuminating the floor before him with the cell phone’s digital display to ensure against any unforeseen hazards.
The next room was a great, empty space, likely a large storage area of some kind. Once upon a time, forklifts probably prowled up and down the corridor, moving things around, keeping the production lines running. But now the room was empty. Three men stood in the middle of the room. Two of them wore hair nets. One of them was talking, yet he made no sound.
His phone chimed.
SOMETHING SEEMS WRONG
“No kidding,” he told the phone.
BE CAREFUL.
“I will.”
Dream Eric had wandered around this empty room, exploring, searching for the path that would carry him forward. Eventually, he made his way to the far corner, where a set of steps led up to the second floor.
Now, the Eric that was running two days late walked past the three men and headed for the stairs.
Something felt wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He glanced back one last time at the three men conversing silently in the middle of the room and then ascended the stairs and entered a long, dark hallway.
In his dream, he peered into each room, probed it with the light from his phone and moved on. Now he used the returning memory of the dream to avoid these rooms. He was not at all eager to step through a door and find himself face-to-horrible-face with another golem.
And if he were to be completely honest with himself, this seemed like the perfect place for a golem, as far from any of the outer doors as possible, completely lacking in places to run and hide, plenty of dead ends in which he could find himself cornered.
Apparently, the residuals weren’t restricted to the illuminated rooms. His light fell on a man and a woman carrying on a silent conversation in the middle of the hallway, then an older man carefully examining a wall where a bulletin board must have once hung.
He followed his dream self down the hallway and into another large, empty room, his eyes wide open, his cell phone illuminating dreadfully little of the space before him. The fear he’d felt in the dream became contagious. A sick feeling began to spread outward from deep in his belly.
Yet nothing happened.
He made his way deeper into this dark room, past a young man busying himself with invisible work, through another door into another hallway and finally down a narrow set of stairs into yet another unlit room where he found a pretty young woman who looked as if she might be flirting with someone, except whoever she was chatting with was not there.
From here, another darkened corridor led to an illuminated room that he quickly recalled was the same room where the three men were talking.
But when he returned, only two of the men were standing there. The one without the hair net had either wandered off or vanished.
In the dream, he returned to the first production floor he’d found and made his way down the other darkened corridor.
Sometimes the dream came to him in bursts, giving him ample time to see what awaited him. Other times, he was forced to relive the events of his dream as they occurred. It seemed to be particularly stubborn in revealing the secrets of this factory to him.
It was weird recalling the dream when so much looked so different. It was distracting.
He made his way back to the production floor and looked around at the dozen silent workers busying themselves with the empty line, going through the motions they went through ten or twenty years ago, oblivious to the fact that this factory would one day replay their actions for a stranger in torn and bloody clothes.
His cell phone chimed again.
I FEEL SOMETHING
Eric glanced around him at the room. He tried to recall everything he saw in his dream, but too much had changed between then and now. Thanks to the foggy man, it was almost impossible to know what was real and what wasn’t, much less tell if something had changed.
I DON’T THINK YOU’RE ALONE
Swearing louder than he’d intended (he kept forgetting that the only sounds in this place were those he made), Eric turned and scanned the room.
In the dream, he’d continued on to the left. But he hesitated to go in that direction now. Was it another golem? How would he deal with it this time? He had neither a tractor nor any dynamite. And he didn’t know how to get to the roof. No foul-mouthed father was here to help him. All he had was a cell phone and a little girl in Australia.
Residual remnants of people who hadn’t been here in years walked silently past him, carrying on their endless business as if he wasn’t there. Because he wasn’t there. And they weren’t here.
It was strange being all alone in a room filled with people.
“What am I supposed to do?” he wondered.
A young woman walked away from the line for no apparent reason and vanished into the doorway through which he’d entered the production floor. A middle-aged man simply vanished from his work station and a much younger man appeared a few feet to his left, silently nodding as if spoken to, though no one was talking to him. Farther away, a grumpy-looking woman with curly blonde hair escaping from under her hair net hurried around the machinery as a heavyset man strolled thoughtlessly along the isle straight toward her. The two came within a fraction of an inch of colliding and then both of them abruptly vanished, exactly as they did when he touched one of them.
They didn’t match. It seemed they weren’t all from the same point in time.
By the far wall, a man in a hard hat was working on one of the machines, oblivious to the fact that the machine currently appeared to be in operation.
A thin man without a hairnet entered from the next room and strolled silently toward him, looking as if he was on his way home for the day.
From the darkened corridor to his left, where Dream Eric had wandered in search of the way out of here, a security guard strolled into the room with his flashlight, apparently going about his rounds in the dark after hours.
Taking a deep breath, Eric set off toward the darkened half of the factory.
He passed a very tall man with a very thick mustache, but found no golem.
At the end of the corridor was a large, empty space. Another corridor led to another illuminated area far to the right. Between here and there was only more darkness.
He stood against the wall for a moment, remembering the dream, letting it reveal the room for him.
Phantom workers walked past him, some of whom he’d seen before in other areas. There was the heavyset woman he followed into that first office. And the large man who had nearly swatted him with his shovel. He watched them as he recalled wandering around this room in his dream, revealing nothing of interest before setting off down the next corridor.
Eric continued on as well and soon found himself in what appeared to be the packaging area of the plant. Here, silent machinery thrummed and immaterial workers prowled the lines, tending to invisible product.
Only about half of the machinery had returned here, however. The conveyor belts abruptly began and ended over an empty floor.
Eric walked up to one of the conveyor belts and watched it run. It looked so real. And yet no machine in the world could run so silently. He reached out and tried to touch it. The entire line was gone just like the people he’d tried to touch.
A woman who had been standing beside the machine continued working, unfazed by the disappearance of her workstation.
He looked around the room. He recalled peering into the corners, probing the vacant darkness. Again and again, nothing was here.
Another corridor went on into the darkness ahead. He turned and walked toward it.
He was ready to be gone from this place.
What was the foggy man up to here? What was the point of bringing back all these people and machines? Was he trying to hide something? There had been more than enough opportunities to spring a golem on him. If the purpose was simply to ambush him, why bring back so much of the factory?
A young man in a black tee shirt and dark jeans with no hairnet was walking toward him from the next corridor. He recognized him. This was one of the three men standing together in the storage room where he ascended the stairs to the second floor a short while ago, the one who had disappeared by the time he came back around.
Perhaps he was some kind of supervisor. There might be offices down here, where hairnets didn’t have to be worn when the factory was up and running. He didn’t like the wide open spaces of the factory floors, but the idea of searching dozens of smaller rooms was no improvement.
No longer concerned with avoiding the residual people, he passed within a few inches of the young man and had taken a couple steps before it occurred to him that he felt a breeze as he went by.
Startled by this realization, he turned to take another look at the young man.
Before he could face the stranger who walked among the ghosts, something struck him in the side of his head and the world swam away.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The world spun chaotically around him, swirling through his clouded mind as he struggled against the sleep that dragged him down into the darkness.
Pain filled his head. He couldn’t think.
Eric had a vague sense of being dragged across the floor by his feet. But that didn’t make any sense. He was terrified, though he couldn’t seem to remember why.
A door rattled loudly open. The noise seemed thunderous.
Sunlight flooded over him, stabbing at his eyes when he tried to open them.
He fell. He landed hard on the ground and pain exploded from his head and shoulder. The world swam briefly into focus.
Blacktop before his eyes.
He tried to move, but he felt so heavy. He squinted up, trying to see where he was.
A pair of legs.
A voice. Someone said something, but he couldn’t understand the words. He still couldn’t think.
Then something struck the ground in front of his face.
Darkness came again, chasing away the sunlight, washing away the pain, leaving only peaceful sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The pain came back.
Eric awoke to a harsh buzzing noise that sent jagged shards of pain deep into his brain.
He opened his eyes, squinting into the blinding sunlight, confused.
What happened?
Where was he?
What was that awful noise?
Gradually, his eyes focused and he found himself on the ground, looking at his cell phone, which was lying on the asphalt next to his face.
It was vibrating.
Grimacing at the pain, he reached out and picked it up. Immediately, it quit ringing and chimed at him.
He had a new text message.
Groaning, he sat up and looked at the screen.
THANK GOD!
As soon as he had read the message, the phone chimed again and the message changed.
THAT WAS SCARY!
“What happened?” Eric asked.
Again the phone chimed.
YOU WERE AMBUSHED
“Who? The foggy man?”
WHO ELSE?
Who else indeed? Eric rubbed at the swollen knot on the side of his head. Slowly it came back to him. The factory. The residuals. The young man in the black tee shirt and jeans.
A real person hiding among the residuals…
He felt as if he should’ve known. But he’d been expecting more than a sucker punch. He thought he’d find a golem. He never expected to be attacked by a mere human.
The phone chimed again.
I DIDN’T SEE HIM IN TIME
“That’s okay. Me neither.” Eric realized that he had begun talking directly to Isabelle. The phone did nothing but relay her messages to him. Even from the other side of the world, she could hear him. If his head wasn’t pounding, he might have found this unbelievably surreal.
YOU OKAY?
“I think so. I have a pretty hard head.” He rose shakily to his feet and groaned. “Good thing, too. What the hell did he hit me with?”
I DON’T KNOW
Looking around, Eric found that he was outside one of the factory’s loading docks. The door was rolled up behind him. He recalled being dragged across the floor. There was a metallic rattling noise that must have been the door opening. Bright sunlight. Falling. Landing on the hard asphalt.
The bastard tossed him out the loading dock door.
When he first looked down on this factory from the hilltop, it was standing amid hayfields with an old, paved road leading away from it. But he could see no hayfields or roads from here. A rocky valley stretched out before him. Tall pin
e trees stood scattered across the terrain. Once again, he appeared to have been transported out of Wisconsin and into a distant mountain range.
He recognized this area. Eventually, he had found these doors in his dream. He’d continued onward from here, along the valley. He was back on the path.
Why the hell would someone club him from behind and then drop him off right where he’d wanted to be in the first place? What was the point?
“Any idea where he went?”
I THINK HE WENT ON AHEAD
Eric gazed forward. An odd-looking lizard was slowly making its way through the weeds where the broken blacktop gave way to hard earth and rock. It was at least twenty inches long and bright red. It had a long horn protruding from the top of its head. He couldn’t recall ever having seen anything like it before. It likely existed solely in the fissure.
It didn’t seem concerned with him. Hopefully it was as harmless as the coyote-deer and the mutant livestock.
Again, Eric rubbed at the knot on his head. He recalled seeing someone standing over him while fighting for consciousness. Was it the foggy man? Or was it someone else? He didn’t recall seeing that weird illusion of invisible fog. But then again, he hadn’t seen much of anything. “I guess we should keep going.”
BE CAREFUL
He nodded and began walking, circling well around the red lizard.
Just in case.
The pain receded a little, but only a little. His head continued to pound, his shoulder throbbed. He ached all over. But he was slowly regaining his focus.
Making his way through the valley, he checked the cell phone, but still it had no signal. Only Isabelle could talk to him without a signal.
He also saw that his battery was starting to run low. This surprised him a little, since he’d never had to recharge it after only a single day. But then again, he’d never used the stupid thing this much.
He hoped it lasted long enough to see him through the rest of this odd journey. As much as he hated the phone, he’d grown accustomed to having some connection with the world outside the fissure.
Besides, without the phone, he couldn’t talk with Isabelle.
He returned it to his pocket and glanced up in time to see a hawk soar overhead.
