by Brian Harmon
I CAN’T MAKE ANY SENSE OF IT. BUT I CAN’T REALLY SEE IT. IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF RANDOM MARKS
Eric had to agree. It looked a little like shorthand, but…
IT’S DEFINITELY NOT SHORTHAND. I PICKED UP A LITTLE OF THAT FROM ANOTHER PRISONER IN ALTRUSK’S HOUSE BACK WHEN I WAS FIRST TRAPPED THERE.
That narrowed it down slightly, he supposed.
SORRY
“Don’t worry about it.”
Aiden glanced over at him. “What?”
Eric shook his head. “Isabelle.”
“Oh. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to him doing that.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to you talking about me in third person all the time.”
Aiden looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Aiden stopped at a stop sign and turned left. They were driving around randomly. It was all they could do until they figured out Glen’s code. Or until the cowboy turned up to collect the journals. “I don’t suppose code-breaking is one of Isabelle’s skills.”
“Afraid not.”
“Bummer.”
It was a bummer. Eric flipped through the pages. There were obvious parallels between the two journals. There were the same number of pages, and in the same basic places. But the markings were completely different. “You said you needed both to be able to read it, right?”
“That’s what Glen told me when he gave me the first one and told me to hide it somewhere safe.”
“That was the one you pulled out of the motel wall, right?”
Aiden nodded. “I never saw the second one until I dug it up today. He told me I wouldn’t see it unless I desperately needed it.” He glanced over at the two journals. “I kind of thought it would make more sense once I saw it.”
“I don’t see anything here that makes any sense.” Except for a few scattered letters intermixed with the markings, nothing on any of these pages was even remotely legible. “But if you needed both journals then they must go together somehow.”
Aiden cocked his head suddenly. “Wait… Say that again.”
“Say what again?”
Aiden shook his head and held out his hand. “Never mind. Let me see those.”
Eric handed the two small journals to him and watched as he held them side-by-side against the steering wheel. For a moment, he seemed to stare at them, cocking his head slightly to the side and squinting.
“I’ll be a son of a…”
“What?”
Aiden blinked and gave his head a quick shake, as if he suddenly had a bad headache. Then he handed Eric back the notebooks. “Glen used to have this book of stereoscopic photographs. Two pictures side-by-side of the same scene, but from slightly different angles. He showed me that if you crossed your eyes and made the images overlap each other, you’d see a three-dimensional image without any kind of special glasses.”
Eric nodded. He was familiar with stereographs. “Similar to those old Magic Eye pictures.”
“Yeah. I thought it was kind of neat, but I never got as much joy out of them as he did. I thought it was kind of silly, actually.”
Eric looked down at the journal pages in front of him. “Wait… You mean these pages are stereographs?”
“Try it for yourself.”
Eric held the two notebooks up in front of his face and let his eyes cross a little. It took a moment to make them line up, but eventually the two pages fused. The random marks lined up to form letters and a message appeared before his eyes. “I’ll be damned…”
It was so absurdly simple that he hardly believed it. The marks were just parts of letters. Put the pages over each other and they formed words. It was a little difficult to read, but a single, succinct sentence had materialized from the chaos:
The key to the secret lies in ruins.
It was right there, the answer they’d been looking for, right in the very first sentence.
“That means…”
“Yep!” exclaimed Aiden suddenly and a little louder than necessary, given that Eric was sitting right next to him. “Back to the asylum.”
Eric looked over at him, baffled. The asylum? How did he come to that conclusion?
But then he met Aiden’s gaze and realized what he was doing. Of course. If the cowboy’s aura plasma was still with them, listening in on this conversation…
“Back to the asylum,” Eric agreed. “Quickly. Before that lard-ass bastard beats us there.”
Aiden stifled a laugh and then said in a convincingly serious tone, “Hopefully we’re not too late.”
Ideally, the cowboy, if he was listening, was now on his way to the asylum to head them off. Meanwhile, Aiden sped west, toward the highway.
The key to the secret lies in ruins. Only one of the places Eric had been today were in such a state of disrepair that it could be described as in ruin.
And it was the last place he wanted to go.
Aiden mumbled something to himself and Eric looked up at him, curious.
“Sorry,” he said, catching Eric’s eye. “Just… Glen. He lied to me.”
Aiden had insisted several times today that the Hosler lot was not a part of all this, and maybe it wasn’t. But clearly Glen had made it a part of all this.
But why?
According to both Aiden and Pink Shirt, Glen Normer was obsessed with finding some kind of profound secret hidden in the unseen structures of Creek Bend. He searched the country, looking for clues, and finally narrowed it down to this city. He put all the pieces together. He located all the unseen locations. He even found the rail car and whatever was hidden there. But then he just…hid it again?
It didn’t make any sense.
If he had the “key to the secret,” then why didn’t he use it? Why would he hide it in the most dangerous place he could find? He even left a trail for Aiden to follow, as if he knew he was never going to finish it.
Eric looked out the window. A wide pasture was spread out before him, dotted with brown and white dairy cows. The world looked so normal out there. How could it be so confusing in here?
Something caught his eye, a flash of gold on the side of the road, as if something metallic had just risen from the ditch.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
Eric turned and looked back behind them. Paul was back there in his truck, following at a safe distance. He didn’t look alarmed.
He searched the road around him.
“What’s going on?” Aiden asked.
Had he only imagined it?
Once more, he turned and looked behind them. At that moment, a massive column of familiar, gleaming liquid appeared, rising right up out of the asphalt like a golden geyser, right into the path of Paul’s truck.
Eric cursed, terrified.
Paul veered and slammed on the brakes. He missed the aura plasma, but the truck left the road, jumped the ditch, and plowed through the fence.
Before either of them could react, something slammed hard into the underside of the New Yorker and they were thrown into the air.
Everything became disjointed.
The world rolled around them.
The roof of the car crashed into the pavement and compressed inward.
There was an awful grinding noise.
And the world swam out of focus.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The next thing Eric was aware of was a strange sensation of vertigo, as if the entire world had gone wrong somehow.
Beside him, Aiden was murmuring desperately to himself. “Where is it?” he kept asking. “Damn it, where is it?”
Later, he would realize that he must have been searching for the dropped journals, but for now, he was too confused. Everything was blurry. He felt like he was in slow motion.
“There!” exclaimed Aiden. “Thank God!”
Eric realized that the world felt wrong because it was upside-down. He looked out the window at the pavement above and the sky below. For one, delirious momen
t, he felt very proud of himself for figuring that out.
(It was hard, with his vision doubled and the blood rushing to his brain.)
“Mr. Fortrell?”
Mr. Fortrell? Eric thought. He still calls me Mr. Fortrell? It seemed odd that he should still be speaking to him as if they were student and teacher.
A hand seized his shirt sleeve and tugged at him.
Eric turned and looked. Aiden was upside down, too. He was crawling on the ceiling of the Chrysler. As he struggled to focus his eyes, he found himself seeing Aiden not as he was now, but as he had been in high school, a kid of just sixteen, yet unblemished by the cruel world that swallowed him up a year later and spirited him away.
“We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
Eric nodded. Yes. Out of here. He fumbled for the seatbelt that was still holding him to the seat. For some reason, all he could think about was that Karen was going to be so pissed when she found out he was in an accident.
Aiden seized the latch. “Ready?”
Again, Eric nodded. But it turned out he wasn’t as ready as he thought he was. As soon as the belt came loose, he dropped like a stone and crumpled into a heap.
“You okay?”
Eric nodded. In hindsight, that was probably really stupid. What if he’d suffered a neck injury?
“Come on! He’s here!”
There was a noise from outside. Footsteps, running toward the car. For a moment he felt a panic as he thought that these were the footsteps of the cowboy, coming to complete his revenge. But then he heard Paul’s voice and felt an overwhelming wave of relief as he remembered watching the Ford pickup leave the road and crash into the fence. The feeling cleared his head a little.
“Eric!”
“I’m okay. Just help me out.” Aiden was right. The cowboy was here. He found them in spite of all they’d done to keep him away. Somehow his aura plasma told him where they were.
“Can you move?” asked Aiden.
“I can.” He looked up at Aiden, his senses returning. “You need to hide.”
“We all need to hide.”
But as Eric watched, a great, golden hand materialized behind Aiden and closed around him. In the space of a few frantic heartbeats, he was encased in fluid gold and dragged backward from the window of the Chrysler and out into the forest.
“Aiden!”
“What’s happening?” bellowed Paul.
He had to get out of here. Ignoring the pain in his body, Eric rolled himself onto his belly and crawled out of the vehicle after Aiden.
“Hey! Careful!” Paul ran around to the other side of the car, cursing, and reached Eric just in time to help him to his feet.
But Eric pulled himself free of his brother’s grip and stumbled across the ditch and into the woods.
Paul chased after him. “What’s going on? Where’s Aiden?”
Eric stumbled through the trees until he’d lost sight of the road and then stopped and stood. Once again, he was standing in a forest, his heart racing, lost and looking for monsters.
“Eric?”
Eric shook his head. He listened. But there was no sound but the birds and the bugs and the rustling of the branches in the breeze. Aiden was gone.
“Was that the stuff that you told me about? The aura plasma? That shit was freaky!”
Eric nodded. It was.
“The cowboy.”
Eric nodded again. The cowboy had Aiden. He also had both journals.
So much for their plan to send him on a wild goose chase at the asylum. Somehow, he’d seen right through that deception.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Paul looked at him. “Well you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“No, seriously. You’re bleeding.”
Eric reached up and felt the lump on his head. His fingers came away bloody. That was two head injuries in one day. He’d end up doing arts and crafts, yet.
“You need me to call an ambulance?”
“No. I’ll be fine.” He looked up at Paul now. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Just bounced around a little.”
“Good. That’s good.” He turned and looked out into the trees again. “I need to find Aiden. I need to find that damn cowboy.”
“We don’t have a clue where he might be now.”
“I know exactly where he’ll be.”
Karen’s phone rang in his pocket. The Spice Girls were a brilliant contrast to Eric’s current mood. He wanted desperately to throw it onto the ground and stomp on it, but he managed to control himself.
It was from his lost phone again.
“It’s time!” shouted the mysterious man who was holding his phone hostage.
“What?”
“You have to hurry! It’s inevitable!”
“What’s inevitable?”
“Death!” The word came through in a desperate hiss that gave Eric a chill all the way to his bones.
He felt overwhelmed. So much had happened so fast and now this person was screaming at him to hurry? He still didn’t even know what he was doing! “I don’t—”
“Turn back the clock!”
“I don’t know what that—”
“Things get twisted when they go deeper!”
“That’s—”
“Turn back the clock and spiral down! You have to do it now! Everything depends on you!”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying!”
“Turn back the clock and spiral down! Sixteen!”
“Just—”
“Sixteen!”
“I don’t know what that means!”
But the stranger was gone again.
Paul watched him as he lowered the phone and stared at it, bewildered. “Crazy guy again?”
“Yep.”
“He starting to make any sense yet?”
“Nope.” Eric stuffed the phone back into his pocket and looked around again. Time was running out. That’s what the mysterious caller told him. Was he still talking about Aiden? Why was he so important? What was going on around here?
Behind them, they heard the sound of an approaching engine.
Paul looked back. “Listen, you’d better take off.”
“What?”
“Half of my truck’s parked in a cow pasture back there. I’m going to have to explain that. But no one knows you were here. I’ll tell them I was following that car when it suddenly lost control and flipped. I hit the brakes and ran off the road. I’ll say the driver got up and wandered off and I can’t find him. By the time they get people out looking for him, you’ll be down the road and gone.”
Eric thought it was some impressively quick thinking on Paul’s part, except for one thing: “I’m not going to get far all bloodied up like this.”
“I’ll call Kevin and have him look for you down the road a ways. He’ll bring a first aid kit.”
A car door slammed. Someone was getting out to check the wreckage. Chances were good they’d already called 911.
“Hurry!”
Eric nodded. “Thanks.”
“Just go. That way. Stay out of sight.”
Eric nodded and took off into the trees as Paul made his way back to the road. By the time he heard Paul’s voice drifting back from the roadside, he was already too far away to make out more than a murmur of conversation. In less than a minute, even that murmur had faded, leaving nothing but the sound of the forest.
Karen’s phone alerted him to a new text message. Eric hadn’t realized he was still holding it in his hand until he looked down at it.
ARE YOU REALLY OKAY?
“I think so.”
REALLY?
“I don’t have much choice. For Aiden’s sake, I have to be.”
I GUESS THAT’S TRUE
“Don’t worry about me.”
I’LL DECIDE WHO I WORRY ABOUT
Eric smiled. “Fair enough. But I do have a pretty solid skull, you know.”
TH
AT DOES SEEM TO BE TRUE
Eric chuckled. “Any chance you can feel anything I can use out here?”
NO. SORRY
“Didn’t think so.”
She didn’t ask if he thought Aiden was dead or alive. She already knew that he had no idea. Instead, she said, ARE YOU REALLY GOING BACK TO HOSLER?
She knew the answer to this, too. She only asked because she knew that he was asking himself the same thing. He almost died the first time he went there. The creatures in that place were not as friendly as the others he’d encountered. And he doubted very much that the old woman would hesitate to finish carving him to pieces.
But that was where the journal told them to go. That was where Glen hid the final clue. And in the end it was the only thing that made sense. Clearly, the other unseen places weren’t safe. The vengeful spirit of that scary old woman made a perfect guardian for something like that. The only question was how the hell were they supposed to retrieve it?
I’M SCARED FOR YOU
“Don’t be. It’s Aiden we should be scared for. That note this morning… All these phone calls… It’s like someone’s got it in for him.”
WHY IS HE SO IMPORTANT?
“I don’t know. But I have to believe I can save him.” He looked around him at the forest. “First, I have to figure out how I’m supposed to meet up with Kevin.”
JUST GET WITHIN EARSHOT OF THE ROAD. I’LL CALL HIM AND HAVE HIM TURN UP HIS RADIO. WHEN YOU HEAR IT, I’LL HEAR IT AND I CAN TELL HIM TO PULL OVER
Eric was impressed. “Clever girl.”
THANK YOU
Chapter Thirty-Three
Eric climbed up into the cab of Kevin’s Jeep and slammed the door.
“Jesus, Eric… Dad wasn’t kidding. You really got messed up.”
“It’s been one of those days.”
Kevin handed him a small first aid kit. “I don’t think all of us have had those kind of days…”
“Maybe it’s just me.”
“’Cause you really look like shit. You know that, right?”
Eric lowered the vanity mirror and nodded. “I’ve heard. Thanks.”
There was more blood on his face than he realized. A gash on the top of his head had run down the left side of his forehead, over the lump the cowboy put there with the butt of his shotgun, and all the way down his cheek. He also had a small, oozing gash on his jaw, just in front of his right ear. It was a damn good thing he didn’t try to walk all the way to Hosler like this. Somebody almost certainly would’ve called the police.
