Hedge Lake

by Brian Harmon

  And now Holly was telling her she wasn’t supposed to go…

  Finally, she let out an exasperated sigh and met his gaze again. “You be careful out there.”

  “I always am.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re always getting yourself bitten by things and falling from high places.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘always’…”

  “Or getting sliced up by something with huge claws.”

  “But I always come home, remember?”

  She did remember. It was the one thing he brought back from his time with Holly’s coven that hadn’t earned him her fiery wrath: A prophecy of sorts. A magic spell had given him an assurance that although he would continue to be called away on these strange journeys, he would always return to her. It was a heartening message and it helped to ease her fears. But only a little. “I still don’t know how much I trust this witchcraft stuff,” she told him.

  Eric glanced at Holly. He recalled his brief time with the coven the previous July, all that he went through, all that he saw. “I trust her magic,” he told her. And it was the truth.

  Karen stared thoughtfully at him and said nothing. Though Holly had offered to teach her to use spells, too, she’d refused. In fact, she’d discouraged the girl from using any magic while she lived in Creek Bend. It wasn’t that she disapproved, exactly. After all, this magic had saved her husband’s life. But she found the very concept difficult to handle. It seemed so unnatural.

  Holly hadn’t pushed the matter. After all, she hardly needed to rely on witchcraft in her everyday life. A man she called “Grandpa,” but who wasn’t a father to either of her parents, had long ago taught her that magic wasn’t something one relied on for just anything. It was only for emergencies. Or special circumstances. Like these dreams Eric was having, for example.

  “Paul won’t be able to help this time,” said Karen.

  “I know.” Paul was his older brother. Usually, Karen would call him soon after Eric left and send him to keep an eye on her wayward husband. But today Paul, his wife, Monica, and his son, Kevin, were in Minnesota for a wedding. “It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t much help last time, remember.”

  “That wasn’t his fault.”

  “I know. But I still don’t need him.” In fact, he’d prefer that Paul, like Karen and Holly, stay well away from whatever bizarre trouble he was heading into. It was hard enough worrying about his own ass out there, without having to be concerned about someone else’s safety.

  “Have Isabelle keep me posted.”

  “She will.”

  She gave him a kiss and then turned back to her mixing bowls. “Well, get going. You wouldn’t want to be late for whatever trouble you’re about to get yourself into.”

  She was good. He could almost believe she really wasn’t concerned about him.

  Eric snatched up his keys. “No. I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “I love you. Be careful.”

  “I love you, too,” he assured her. He headed for the door.

  “Good luck,” said Holly.

  “Thanks.”

  As he opened the door, Karen added, “And try not to bring home any more strippers, ‘kay?”

  Chapter Two

  Eric took a sick day. He hated doing it, but there was no way around it. When the weird called out to him, he had no choice but to answer. Someone’s life could be on the line. Or at the very least his own sanity.

  He was sure his students wouldn’t mind having a substitute for a change. He was one of those teachers who was notorious for never missing class. He hated calling in. It messed up his schedule, forced him to move everything around. Fortunately, today was Friday. With any luck, he’d be back to teaching English on Monday, preferably with very few cuts and bruises to have to explain to everyone. Although that would probably require more luck than he could possibly muster. He always came home with injuries. Bite marks on his arms. Claw marks on his back. Lumps on his head. It was just like Karen said.

  Luckily, he was a fast healer. Abnormally so, as it turned out. He actually possessed an unnatural ability to heal from injuries much faster than normal. Not so fast that he was immune to bleeding to death, of course, but enough that he could avoid going to the hospital for stitches most of the time. It wasn’t something he was born with, but rather a side-effect of his first outing into what he’d begun to collectively refer to as “the weird.” It was those same events that took away his dreams and led him to the insane, living mansion where he first met Isabelle.

  Before that day, he was a perfectly ordinary man, living a perfectly unremarkable life. Now… Well, now he was something else. A mysterious old man once told him that there was a profound truth hidden somewhere inside him. And a beautiful witch once told him that he reeked of destiny.

  Personally, all he really wanted to be was an English teacher. It was a comfortable life. He had weekends and holidays and summers off. The worst things he had to deal with was troubled students and the occasional pissy parent. But those were only a few of the many. Most of the people he dealt with on a daily basis, he genuinely liked. Overall, it was nice. It was the life he chose.

  But this… He never chose this. This just happened.

  As he drove north, toward Oshkosh, he glanced down at his cell phone, plugged into the travel charger and resting in the cup holder where he could see the screen. “Any thoughts on what I’m up against?”

  Isabelle’s reply appeared before his question had entirely escaped his lips: NONE. BUT IT WORRIES ME HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLES YOUR FIRST TRIP

  Eric nodded. It worried him, too. But he didn’t have to say so. She knew. She was inside his head. She knew his every thought, his every feeling. The phone was only to let her speak to him. It was a one-way connection. “But there are differences,” he reminded her.

  Again, her reply was almost instantaneous. She wasn’t actually texting him. She didn’t even have a cell phone. She sent the words to him psychically, at the speed of thought, displaying them on his cell phone for him to read. It was a complex process that she wasn’t completely able to explain to him. THAT’S TRUE. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS ONE

  “Every awful detail.”

  The other dream, the one that compelled him to take a very similar drive almost two years ago (except that he’d traveled south that time) had been the beginning of all this weirdness. Before that, he was just an ordinary guy. The only extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him was Karen. (And meeting her was an entirely different kind of story.) This dream wasn’t the same. Back then, he hadn’t known what to expect, had never even dreamed of the things he’d soon see. He’d walked into it blindly, utterly ignorant of the weird world that lurked out there.

  THAT DREAM SHOWED YOU THE PATH YOU WERE DESTINED TO TAKE. IT WAS LIKE A ROAD MAP

  A very cerebral kind of road map. The dream began to return to him as he traveled, revealing itself to be a sort of premonition. He found himself walking a strange path full of wonder and terror and realizing that he’d been dreaming the whole thing for the past three nights.

  Confusingly, however, it had shown him the journey as he would have taken it only if he’d left the first time he had the dream. But he’d waited two more days before the insatiable desire to get up and go became more than he could bear. As a result, the dream wasn’t accurate. Two days had passed. Things that he’d seen in the dream were long gone. Things he’d missed in the dream were suddenly there. Obstacles had been placed in his path, forcing him to take terrifying detours.

  And on top of it all, he could never see where he would end up. The places he’d seen in the dream didn’t reveal themselves to him until he arrived there.

  It was all quite confounding.

  IT’S NOT LIKE THAT THIS TIME, Isabelle observed. THERE’S NO MAP. IT’S NOT GOING TO TELL YOU WHERE TO GO

  “This one wasn’t even about me,” Eric recalled. “It was about someone else.”

  BUT IN BOTH DREAMS, THE PERSON YOU WERE DREAMING ABOUT ENDED BADLY
<
br />   He frowned. “I know.” Last time, it was him. The dream had ultimately revealed his own death, which he only narrowly avoided. This time, however, it was the woman on the lake, whoever she was. Did that mean that he was going to have to save this woman before these events came to pass? He didn’t like the idea one bit. He didn’t want to be responsible for saving someone’s life. It was a lot to put on a thirty-three-year-old, soft-bellied English teacher, with zero training in how to be a savior.

  It wouldn’t be the first time, by any means. Just last summer he’d had to save Holly’s entire coven. The problem was, he wouldn’t call what happened in those Illinois farm fields a successful rescue.

  YOU DIDN’T FAIL ANYONE IN ILLINOIS, Isabelle assured him.

  Sometimes he hated that she could read his thoughts so clearly. “You know I can’t believe that.”

  IT’S NOT ALL BAD, she reminded him. YOU MET ME ON ONE OF THESE TRIPS, REMEMBER. AND HOLLY

  He grunted. “Yeah. A preteen nudist and a stripper. I’m sensing a pattern. All I need now is a porn star and a flasher named Phil and we can start our own adventure team.”

  I’M NOT A PRETEEN. AND I HAVEN’T BEEN NUDE IN ALMOST FORTY YEARS

  He stared out at the road ahead. Now he felt bad. He’d offended her. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Isabelle’s parents were naturists. (She was quick to tell anyone who showed the slightest hint of disdain upon hearing this fact that naturism was a lifestyle, not a perversion, and that people should take the time to look it up before passing judgment; it was family-oriented and not sexual.) They were vacationing at a naturist resort when thirteen-year-old Isabelle vanished without a trace. That was almost thirty-eight years ago. But when he found her, still alive and well in a mysterious mansion hidden on the flip-side of a cross-dimensional rift that ran straight through the long deserted Gold Sunshine Resort, she was the same thirteen-year-old girl whose picture could still be seen on the missing persons website today.

  Trapped in that dual state between worlds, she existed outside of time and was not affected by it. Physically, she was still thirteen. But thanks to her psychic connections to Eric and her parents, she remained aware of the passage of time. She didn’t sound, nor behave like a thirteen-year-old girl from the seventies. Mentally, she was a healthy, intelligent and well-informed fifty-one.

  The two of them had shared many long discussions over the phone since the fateful day they met, and he knew that one of the few things that upset Isabelle was when people looked down on her pre-disappearance lifestyle. It wasn’t that she was insulted personally, but rather by the suggestion that her parents were in some way bad people.

  They were still alive out there somewhere, her parents. She could read their minds as easily as she could Eric’s. She knew that they still thought about her every day. But she couldn’t just call them up out of the blue. It would turn their world upside-down again. First, she had to find her way back from the bizarre purgatory in which she was trapped.

  THE DREAM SHOWED YOU SOMEONE IN TROUBLE, Isabelle recalled, changing the subject. AND HOLLY’S SPELL MENTIONED SOME WEIRD STUFF

  Eric remembered. A beast with many names and funny space men. “Not very helpful.”

  IT PROBABLY WILL BE, ONCE WE UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANS

  “Probably.”

  I THINK WE’RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL WE GET THERE TO SEE WHAT’S GOING ON

  “I think so, too.”

  I’LL KEEP A LOOKOUT FOR ANY STRANGE ENERGIES

  “Thanks.”

  His thoughts churning inside his head like thunderheads in an approaching storm, Eric drove on, following the endless highway farther and farther north, past Oshkosh, past Green Bay, far out into unfamiliar surroundings, obeying the strange compulsion that drove him onward, even as he dreaded what he might find at the end of this road.

  He kept thinking of the dream, of the fleeing woman and the monstrous thing that pursued her through the frozen trees. Although the snow had by now melted, he couldn’t help but feel an icy chill when the farm fields began to yield to national forest and the landscape beyond the shoulders of the road began to resemble the eerie setting of his nightmare.

  Around nine, his cell phone rang. “You’d better not be sitting in another strip bar,” Karen told him as soon as he lifted it to his ear.

  “A guy orders one beer in one strip club and he never hears the end of it,” grumbled Eric.

  “You should’ve thought about that before you started making friends with strippers.”

  “Did you call just to fight with me or did you need something?”

  “Just wondering where you were.”

  “Still driving north.” He tried not to let her hear how much she was annoying him. That was the point, after all. She was still torturing him for what happened in July, when his weird world nearly upset her plans for their anniversary weekend.

  Nearly. In the end, he’d made it home in time and had given her the getaway she wanted. In fact, he’d made the weekend extra-special, just for her, doing everything in his power to make it the perfect anniversary. But that wasn’t the point.

  “How far are you going?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t gotten there yet.”

  “Don’t you have some sort of intuitional GPS or something to tell you how close you’re getting?”

  “It’s more of a compass, really. It just points me in the right direction. I don’t know how far I’m going until I get there.” Or at least, that’s how it was the last time he did this sort of thing. For all he knew, it could be different each time. He might not know he was there until something terrible ran out into his path and made him swerve off the road.

  “Your superpowers are really lame,” she told him.

  “I know.”

  “I should’ve married that Kent guy.”

  “You can’t trust a man with X-ray vision. I don’t care what he says, you know he’s always peeking at things.”

  “Well at least you can trust him to be discreet about it.”

  “Don’t you have something you should be baking?”

  “I’m multitasking.”

  “You’re so talented.”

  “I know. Are you still in Wisconsin?”

  Eric’s eyes drifted to the surrounding woods again. “I’m pretty sure I am. I haven’t seen any signs welcoming me to Michigan yet.”

  “Has Isabelle been able to feel anything?”

  “Nothing so far. What about Holly?”

  “She hasn’t tried another of her fortunetelling tricks yet.” She didn’t like calling them spells. The whole concept of witches and spell-casting still bothered her. “She’s been busy helping me.”

  “It probably won’t show me anything different anyway,” said Holly in the background. “Not until he’s done something to affect the order of things. He has to interact in the present to make a difference in the future. Then, when he’s actually become a part of whatever’s going on up there, I might be able to see more.”

  “Did you catch all that?” asked Karen.

  “I did.” And it made sense, he supposed. Or as much sense as anything ever made on these weird excursions.

  “Tell Isabelle to let us know when you finally get there. I guess Holly will try it again then.”

  Eric didn’t have to tell Isabelle anything. She heard her when she said it. But he told her he would anyway.

  “Did you eat breakfast?” she asked him.

  “Not yet.”

  “You’d better.”

  “I know.” He hadn’t woken with much of an appetite. It probably had something to do with dreaming about that woman being hunted down and brutally murdered. He was apparently a little squeamish about such things. “I’ll keep my eyes open for a drive-through,” he promised her, although he thought they might be few and far between in these parts.

  “You’d better be taking care of yourself.”

  Eric frowned. That was dangerously close to admitting she was
worried, and it was still pretty early in the day for that. “I’ll be fine,” he assured her.

  “I know.”

  She was lying. She knew no such thing. He knew no such thing. But she wasn’t going to come out and say it. Not yet. “Remember Delphinium’s promise,” he told her.

  Delphinium Thorngood was Holly’s sister. Not her real sister, but her coven sister, the one who found her on the streets when she was only fourteen and took her in, the one who taught her to master her unusual psychic abilities and to channel mysterious, magical energy into useful spells. It was Delphinium who found Eric, too, when she sought help against a murderous wizard. And it was Delphinium who cast the spell revealing that although he and Isabelle would have many more fantastic adventures together, he would always return home to Karen.

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t have to. Eric knew that she drew comfort from Delphinium’s promise, but she didn’t dare trust it as any kind of divine truth. She’d never even met the woman, much less had any reason to put any trust in her promises. And even Eric had to admit that if Delphinium’s spells had been perfect, she never would have needed him to rescue her family in the first place.