by Brian Harmon
Eric ignored her. To Paul, he said, “You stay where you are. I’ll probably be gone before you could get here anyway. Like last time.”
“Last time wasn’t our fault,” returned Paul. “That was witchcraft!”
“Witchcraft,” agreed Kevin in the background. “Totally unfair.”
“I’ve got it covered. Just stay there.” He should’ve lied. He should’ve told him he was just reading. There was no need for him to get involved again. He was far too prone to misfortune. He’d either hurt himself or embarrass himself.
“So what’s going on?” Paul pressed. “Invisible shit? Another fissure?”
“I’m not sure yet. All sorts of stuff. I’m still piecing it all together.”
“Witches?”
“No witches. Not yet, at least.”
“Witches?” asked Jordan. “What are you talking about?”
He waved a hand at her, hushing her. “Nothing.”
“What?” asked Paul.
“Not you. I was talking to Jordan.”
“Who’s Jordan?”
“New friend. She’s…helping me.”
“She’s not a stripper, is she?”
“What? No!”
“He found another stripper?” asked Kevin.
“No!” snapped Eric. “She’s just a girl.”
“What, like Isabelle?” asked Paul.
“Yes. Well, sort of. She’s not…you know…”
“Inside your head?”
“Yeah.”
“As long as she’s not a stripper.”
“She’s not.”
“You bring home another stripper, Karen’ll murder you.”
Eric bit back the urge to swear and simply said, “I know.”
“Then she’ll murder me, just for the hell of it.”
“I know.”
“So stay away from strippers.”
“Are you done?”
“For now, I think.”
“Good.” Eric really wished everyone would just forget about the stupid stripper thing. It was really starting to annoy him.
“This is boring,” announced Jordan. Then she ran past him and hurried on ahead. “Don’t go too far. I’ll be back.”
Eric watched her go. It worried him that she was simply wandering free out here. Something dangerous was going on, after all. But if Specter Ten could remain unharmed when they were actually looking for this stuff, maybe she had nothing to worry about.
He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any of that kind of luck.
“Are there agents involved?” asked Paul.
There was a sensible question, at least. “I’m not sure yet, but I think there might be. There’s a lot going on up here. It reminds me of them. And there’s a guy here who definitely fits the part. But I thought that last time, too, and…well…”
“I know.” No jokes this time. Paul had a knack for finding his buttons and pushing them when he was in the mood—and he tended to be in the mood a lot—but he also knew what subjects to steer clear of. The way everything went down at the farmhouse last July… He knew how difficult that had been.
“I’m serious about coming out there, you know,” said Paul.
“I know. But like I said, I’m really far away.”
“Tell Isabelle to call me if you get in trouble. If nothing else, I know a guy up that way. He could probably be there in a couple hours tops. You know, just in case shit gets weird.”
“Oh, it’ll definitely get weird. It always does.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
A flash of light above him caught his attention. He looked up into the trees, squinting in the bright sunlight, and gawked at what he saw there. To Paul, he said, “Um…I’ve got to go.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Shit just got weird.”
“Wow. That was fast.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
Eric hung up the phone before Paul could say anything else and stared up at the sky. There, hovering near the treetops, was a strange, silvery object the size of a tanker truck.
As he watched, the object shifted in the sky, changing shape slightly, narrowing at both ends and swelling in the middle. It didn’t look like a machine, precisely. It didn’t have any identifiable front or back, or any visible moving parts. It was as if it were made of liquid metal.
Then a fiery flash burst from both ends and a series of silver-white lightning bolts streaked down the trees in an electric spider web of throbbing arcs that were rapidly moving toward him.
Once again, Eric fled into the woods.
Chapter Thirteen
What the hell was happening? He felt like he was trapped inside late-night movie television and someone kept changing the channels on him.
Only minutes ago, he was running for his life from a hellhound. A burning hellhound! As if the damn thing needed to be made more terrifying than it already was! Now he was being chased by invading aliens? It didn’t make sense. He didn’t even believe in aliens!
And yet, surprisingly, the thought never occurred to him to simply turn around and tell that to the freaky lightning-spewing spaceship that was now chasing him through the forest.
He hoped Jordan was safe. Bored with listening to Eric’s half of his conversation with Paul, she’d run ahead of him shortly before the lightning started. She should’ve had enough time to be a safe distance away, and the thing was now chasing him in the opposite direction. He was fairly sure she was fine, which was good, since he was busy running for his life. He wouldn’t be any help to her if he was a charred corpse, after all, and he could already feel the hair on his body standing on end. The air around him was charged from the lightning storm that raged at his back.
He wasn’t entirely sure what would happen to his body if he were to get struck by lightning. He’d never looked it up on the internet or anything. The short answer, he was sure, was that he would almost certainly die. That stubborn imagination of his, however, was more than happy to suggest that the end might be excruciating, especially since this was strange, silvery, alien lightning, and not the ordinary variety everyone was used to. For example, he might live long enough to feel his hair and clothes catch fire, his eyeballs explode and his internal organs melt into steaming goo.
Not for the first time, he wondered if maybe his brain wasn’t entirely normal.
From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the lightning arcing through the trees to his left and he turned right in time to avoid being zapped.
It was getting closer. He could feel little static shocks crackling at his arms and face as he pushed through the limbs. Any second now, his ridiculous luck would run out.
And it did run out…although not quite in the way he’d imagined.
The ground dropped out from under his feet and suddenly he was falling. He struck the ground, fell and rolled over the edge of a bluff. He let out a shout (well, really more of a shriek) and plummeted to the ground. It was only about a nine foot fall, but he landed hard and gracelessly on his side. Pain shot through his body and he was immediately sure that his arm and at least one if not all of his ribs were broken.
The air overhead flashed threateningly as the queer lightning raced across the sky, but whether by luck or by design, Eric found himself safe from the mysterious object in the sky at the bottom of this rocky bluff.
It was only now, as the lightning faded into the forest, that he realized how eerily silent the encounter was. There was no thunder to accompany the lightning. There was no engine noise emanating from the object in the sky. In fact, the only noise that he could recall hearing during the entire ordeal was made by him. And there had been plenty of that.
He rolled onto his back, wincing at the pain, and stared up into the tree limbs above him. His arm hurt. His side hurt. His hip hurt, too, he realized, a hard, steady pain, as if he might’ve landed on a rock, which was perfectly probable. There was no shortage of stones protruding from the earth here.
Now that he ha
d time to examine himself, he found to his great relief that he didn’t seem to have broken anything after all. He was probably bruised from knees to shoulders, but his bones remained intact.
Amazingly, he was even still clutching the cell phone in his hand. He lifted it over him and looked over the screen. It had a smear of dirt across its buttons, but like him, it appeared implausibly undamaged.
While he was looking at it, Isabelle sent him another text.
YOU HAVE TO BE THE LUCKIEST PERSON I’VE EVER KNOWN
Eric snorted. “Yeah. I’m blessed.”
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
He did. Somehow, he just kept avoiding certain death. He should’ve been overjoyed to have such remarkable luck, but as much as he appreciated the fact that the universe seemed to have made his continued existence a top priority, it was starting to become more than a little creepy. It’d been suggested to him more than once now that he had some greater destiny, but did that really mean that there was some higher force out there, looking after him, always ready to push him out of harm’s way?
YOU ASK ME, WE SHOULDN’T LOOK A GIFT GUARDIAN ANGEL IN THE MOUTH
Eric let his hand and the phone drop back to the ground beside him. “I know,” he sighed. He should be thankful. He knew that. But there was just something a little unsettling about the idea that he might not be in control of his own fate.
With a groan, Eric sat up and surveyed his surroundings. A low, rocky gully stretched out before him, leading back to the lake. He couldn’t see it, but it wasn’t far. He could smell it on the air.
He lifted the phone again so that he could see the screen. “You didn’t happen to see what happened to Jordan, did you?”
I’M PRETTY SURE SHE WAS GONE BEFORE THAT THING STARTED CHASING YOU
He thought so, too. But he didn’t like not being certain. She was only a girl.
I’M SURE SHE’S FINE
“I hope so. What the hell was that thing? You ever hear of anything like it?”
ONLY ON THOSE ALIEN SHOWS YOU AND MY DAD LIKE TO WATCH SOMETIMES
“No way was that an alien spaceship. I don’t buy it.” Although he wasn’t sure why. Why not aliens? Why was it so hard for him to believe in extraterrestrial life? The universe was comprised of endless galaxies, each teeming with countless planets. Surely they weren’t really alone out there. And over the past couple years he’d found himself to be a firm believer in witches and magic, alternate realities, imps and ogres, golems and even genies. So why not aliens? When you came right down to it, shouldn’t they be much easier to swallow than all the other weird things he’d found to be true?
And yet, somehow, he found himself reluctant to accept that the thing he just saw floating in the sky was a real alien spacecraft.
YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT, agreed Isabelle. HALF THE THINGS YOU’VE ENCOUNTERED AREN’T WHAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE
Eric rose shakily to his feet, rubbing at the pain in his side. “Exactly true,” he said. In all his travels, one constant was that he kept running into people who could create complicated constructs, seemingly straight from their minds. It seemed to be a psychic ability of some sort, similar to telepathy or telekinesis. Such an ability could easily explain away almost any monster legend, from imps and ogres to hellhounds and aliens to werewolves and chupacabras.
Of course, being a product of a psycho’s imagination didn’t necessarily make any of these things any less dangerous. On the contrary, it only meant that he was eventually going to have to deal with not only the lightning-spewing spaceship, but also its twisted architect.
He started walking toward the bottom of the gully, in search of the lake. He needed to get the hell out of these woods before something else showed up. Maybe he should return to Specter Ten’s base camp. He didn’t want to. Owen was an annoying dope. But at least he seemed perfectly harmless. Maybe they could help him to sort through all this weirdness and find some sort of common thread.
That was the problem, after all. He’d never had so much going on at once before. What did a family of residual ghosts, a shadow man, hostile aliens, a burning specter, a hellhound and a bloody spirit all have in common?
The trees began to thin around him and the foliage parted to reveal the lake. He paused at the shore and looked out over the surface for a moment, contemplating all that he knew about this place.
He decided that this did, in fact, look like exactly the sort of place where hell might rise. It was eerily reminiscent of Crystal Lake from those Friday the 13th movies. All it was missing was a psycho in a hockey mask holding a machete. He turned away, thinking that Fettarsetter probably owned a collection of both of those items, and resumed walking.
Of everything he’d seen, the residuals appeared to be the most harmless. They were completely insubstantial, after all, and incapable of any kind of deception, as far as he could tell. They’d distracted him long enough for the hellhound to catch his scent, but that was merely circumstance.
Given the choice, he’d spend his time with them over the hellhound any day.
Something splashed in the water behind him and he twirled around, startled. These woods had made him paranoid, and for good reason. After all he’d seen today, his mind immediately jumped to the reptilian creatures Pete had called “shallows walkers.” But this time, there was nothing there but a fading ring of concentric ripples. A fish. Nothing more.
And yet, who was to say that it wasn’t the monster fish Owen had described, merely toying with him before lunging onto the shore and swallowing him into an impossibly huge mouth of razor-sharp teeth.
Or maybe the hellhound had taken up scuba diving. He wasn’t discounting anything at this point.
He scanned the surface of the lake for any sign of danger. Then he scanned the shoreline in both directions. Then he scanned the forest. For the time being, he seemed to be alone. There was no sign of the old fishermen.
He needed a break. He had to find somewhere safe, somewhere he could take a breath in relative peace. Unfortunately, the only place that came to mind was still Specter Ten’s base camp. The old woman made it clear she wasn’t interested in making friends and Fester Sweater gave him the creeps.
Maybe he could just go back and sit in his car for a while. Rest. Clear his head.
He started making his way back along the shoreline.
He’d gone only about twenty paces when he was stopped by the sound of a woman weeping. He turned around, searching the area around him, trying to find the source, but he couldn’t see anyone. Strangely enough, the sound seemed to be coming from out over the lake.
Some stubbornly rational part of his mind tried to convince him that there was no one in the water. He could see all the way to the other side of the lake. Either the sound was echoing strangely or the source of the weeping was carrying all the way from the other side. But he knew better. He stood there on the shore, looking out over the undisturbed surface. He still didn’t know what was going on out here, but one thing was becoming painfully obvious: This lake was definitely haunted.
It was more than a few mere illusions conjured by some psycho. There was something deeply emotional about all of these spirits. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but something tugged at him with each ghostly encounter.
The weeping carried on for another minute, a desperately sad sound that Eric couldn’t help but feel deep in his heart. Then the voice fell silent and he was again alone.
Feeling strangely depressed, Eric turned away from the lake and continued along the shore, distracted, his eyes fixed on the ground at his feet as he tried to understand this sudden sorrow that the ghostly weeping instilled in him.
When finally he looked up, he once again found himself face-to-face with the bloody woman.
Chapter Fourteen
Just like before, the woman lunged toward him and clasped his face between her blood-smeared hands before he had time to reel from her abrupt appearance. This time, he was not hurled into the midst of a pouring rain. This time, it
was somewhere familiar. The air was cold, the ground covered in snow, the forest naked. He was running for his life. But it wasn’t his life. It wasn’t even him. It was her.
He was inside the dream again. Inside the bleak December…
Something was chasing him. No. Not him. Her. And yet they were one and the same. Her heart was pounding in his chest. Her screams erupted from his lips. Her terror enveloped him. He was drawn in so completely that he didn’t have time to consider how or why this was happening to him. His only thought—and hers—was to flee this thing that pursued them, the thing that would soon murder them.
The cold was as real as anything he’d ever felt before. It made his lungs ache. It stung his eyes. (Her eyes, he had to remind himself.)
Skeletal branches slashed at the woman’s face and hands. He felt every scratch as if it were his own flesh. He had time to wonder if the dream was always this intense, this real, but then they were racing down a steep hill. She stumbled. He fell, rolled, slid over the snow and ice. He felt the rocks slashing at her bare hands, hot pain cutting through the biting cold.
He could see the terrain changing around them. They were moving between the bluffs, approaching the lake. Terror gripped his heart as he realized that they were moving toward the lake, rapidly approaching the bloody end. He tried to cry out, to warn her, to will her to turn. There was nothing for them on the frozen lake but agonizing death.
But then they were falling.
The ice seemed to race up to meet them.
He felt her ankle snap as she struck the ice. The pain was all-encompassing. The entire world bled away into white-hot agony and they both let loose a terrible scream.
When the world returned, he was looking up past the bluffs, into the naked boughs of the trees. Something was walking among those trees, something impossibly huge, something that snapped heavy branches and sent them crashing to the forest floor.
Eric tried to focus on this giant, tried to understand what he was looking at, but it was too dark. The details were lost in the shadows. All he could see was a burning glow, as if a fire were blazing in the treetops…a fire that floated like a cloud…
