Текст книги "Rushed"

Автор книги: Brian Harmon

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Different from the other places in the fissure?”

“It’s different from anything I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to explain.  I don’t really get it.  It’s just dif—”

The phone went silent.

“Hello?”

But Isabelle was gone again, apparently cut off.

But he always had a connection to Isabelle.

Uncertain what this meant, Eric pocketed the phone and looked around.  Miraculously, he still seemed to be alone.  Nothing had tried to kill him yet.

He made his way along the shoulder of the quiet road.  At the same time, his memories unraveled and he saw himself bleeding and weak as the longhaired beast tracked him from the cover of the trees.

He remembered thinking that his only chance was to find help at the gas station.  If no one was there…

He shuddered at the memory.  It was so vivid.  Every emotion, every throbbing pain, as clear as if he were feeling it right now.

He kept looking down at his hand.  He could see it as it was, intact and strong.  And he could see it as it would have been, wrapped in his tee shirt, blood dripping through the fabric, so much smaller than it should have been.

He felt sick.

The gas station was deathly silent.  The building was in need of paint, the parking lot needed repaved.  But the place had a clean look that the deserted buildings back at the resort and the farmhouse lacked.

There was an old, white limousine backed into the woods next to the building.  It was badly rusted around its wheel wells and the paint was blistered on its roof and hood.  It looked like the sort of thing the owner of a place like this might have as a side business, except that he doubted anyone would want to rent a junky limousine.  That pretty much defeated the purpose.

As he drew closer, movement in the trees caught his eye, startling him.  But no danger lurked in the branches.  Instead, a large hawk flexed its wings and stared down at him.

He wondered if this could possibly be the same hawk he’d been seeing all day.  Ordinarily, that would be preposterous.  There were likely thousands of hawks out here.  The countless acres of fields made for ideal hunting grounds.  But the idea of being followed all this way by a single hawk didn’t seem so unlikely given all that he had seen.

Eric walked past the pumps to the door.  He knocked.  At the same time, he remembered knocking in his dream, pleading for someone to come to his aid.

Both then and now, the door opened and a broadly grinning man only the size of a ten-year-old boy stood staring up at him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Running a bit late, aren’t you?” said the man.

Father Billy had described the gas station attendant as a “little guy” and had not been exaggerating.  He did not possess the stout, dwarfish stature associated with most little people, but was instead perfectly proportional.  He was simply quite small.

Eric stared down at him, distracted.  In his dream, he recalled this man taking him by the arm and leading him inside.  Instead of, “Running a bit late, aren’t you?” he had instead said, “Aren’t you in a sorry state.”

Not sure what else to say, he rubbed tiredly at the lump the foggy man left on his head and replied, “I’m sorry.”

“Well, come on in.”

The gas station office was small and cluttered.  The little man moved a box from the seat of a dusty chair and invited Eric to sit, which he did.  Immediately, he recalled sitting in the same chair in his dream, except he’d been on the verge of passing out.

His eyes drifted to the large window that offered a view of the pumps.  In his dream, he recalled seeing the beast out there, crouching among the trees on the other side of the road.

“You look remarkably whole.  I half-expected you to come in missing a limb or two.”

Eric stared at him, surprised.  What was that supposed to mean?  His eyes dropped to his hand, the vivid memory of his missing digits in the dream left a burning knot deep in the pit of his stomach.

Opening an old refrigerator, the little man said, “Here, have a Coke,” and promptly passed him a can.

Eric felt numb.  The can was cold against his hand.  His mouth was dry.  He was thirsty.  He hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink since he left home early that morning.  Although he’d promised Karen he would stay caffeinated, he never stopped for coffee.  He hadn’t felt the need.  He was wide-awake.  “Thanks,” he said weakly.  He opened the can and took a long drink.

The gas station attendant walked around his desk and sat down.  He didn’t say anything.  He merely peered back at him with that constant smile.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.  “I’m just…”

“Overwhelmed by whatever you’ve just remembered in your dream, I’m sure.”

“My dream.  Yeah.  How do you…?”

He waved his little hand as if to say, “Forget about it,” and smiled.  “Don’t worry.  Just sit and take it in.  You’ve got time.  You’ve earned a break.”

The little man fell silent and Eric looked around.  He’d seen all this before.  In his dream.  It wasn’t vividly clear, like other parts of the dream.  He was in a lot of pain.  He was dying.  But the gas station attendant fixed him up.  He bandaged his wounds, stopped his bleeding.  He gave him something for the pain.  Something strong.

It was a dream.  It wasn’t real.  But…

He looked across the desk.  “If I’d shown up here badly injured…  Say, mauled by a big cat…”

The man’s eyes lit up and he opened his desk drawer.  He removed a small box and laid it on the table.  He recognized the box at once.  There were syringes inside.  “Morphine.”

“Morphine would probably do it,” Eric agreed.  He didn’t ask what a gas station attendant was doing with a supply of morphine in his desk.  Given the grim details of his dream, he didn’t dare complain.

The memory of the dream was breaking up as he recalled weaving in and out of consciousness beneath the apparently surgeon-like hands of the small attendant.  He recalled snippets of images as the little man bustled busily around his chair, which at some point had apparently reclined so that he was able to lie almost horizontally.

Eric glanced down at the chair, but could see nothing to indicate that it had such a feature.

It was as if the little man had transformed the dirty office into an operating room, disinfecting his wounds, stitching him up, stabilizing him.  He thought he even recalled seeing bags of blood and an IV hanging from the shade of the lamp in the corner.

But surely that had been a traumatic hallucination.

Yet the morphine was real…

“What’s happening to me?” Eric asked.

“What’s happening is you were called upon to make a journey to the cathedral, a journey that could only be made by walking along the path of the fissure.  The calling came to you in your sleep and in the form of a premonition that manifested as a dream.  No doubt, you awoke from that dream with an overwhelming urge to get up and go, but you didn’t remember the dream itself.”

“That’s right.”

“Given that I was expecting you two days ago, I’d guess you resisted the urge that night and the next.”

“Yeah.  I did.”

“That can be good or bad.  Things change from day to day.  Some of the things that weren’t there two days ago will be there today and things that were there two days ago will be long gone now.  But you already know that, don’t you.”

He did, in fact, know this.  None of this was information he hadn’t already worked out for himself.

“I’m guessing by the fact that you’re still in pretty good shape but look like you’ve just seen the reaper, that your most recent memory showed you something you’re glad you missed.”

“Yeah.  Big cat.”

“Fluffy thing?  Might be cute if it wasn’t so terrifying?”

“That’s it all right.”

“Yeah that’ll do it.  I take it you survived long enough in the dream to make it here.”

He had the strangest feeling that the little man already knew very well that he did, that he had known it long before he arrived.  But he responded anyway:  “I did.”

The little man smiled broadly again.  “And I’ll bet that, until now, the trip you took in your dream was much less burdensome than what you’ve been going through.”

Eric nodded.  With the sole exception of the strange bite-mark he’d obtained in the area he missed while detouring through Father Billy’s neck of the woods, Dream Eric hadn’t run into anything truly terrifying.  “Can you tell me what I’m doing here?  What am I looking for at the cathedral?  Why do I have to go through all this?”

Still, the gas station attendant smiled at him.  “Frustrating, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  It is.”

“All right.  There’s something hidden in the cathedral, something you have to retrieve.”

“Why?  Why me?  Why not you?”

“It’s on a high shelf.”

Eric stared at him for a moment.

“A joke,” the little man assured him.  “The truth is simply that you were chosen.”

“By who?”

“By powers far beyond your understanding.”

“All of this is far beyond my understanding.”

The little man laughed, but Eric wasn’t joking.  How was he supposed to accomplish anything?  He wasn’t even sure yet if he’d survived all this in his dream.  “What is the cathedral?  Grant told me it was at the exact point where two worlds meet.  A singularity.”

“That’s right.  The cathedral surrounds that singularity.  The conflicting energies, as you’ve been experiencing them as you’ve made your way through the fissure, come to a pinnacle in that one spot.  Everything changes there.  All that you know ceases to exist as you approach that singularity.  That makes it the perfect place to hide something no one should ever find.”

“So there’s something hidden there?  Something real?”

“Actually, there are two things.  One is hidden in the singularity.  The other…  Well…  Somewhere else.  Both are actually quite useless on their own.  One requires the other.”

“Okay…  So then what’s the point?”

“The point is that somebody, somewhere, has found the location of the other thing.  And it would be apocalyptically bad for the same people to locate both things.  That’s why you’re here.  Your one job is to make sure it doesn’t get found.  Even if it means claiming it for yourself.”

“But what makes me special enough to have whatever’s hidden in the cathedral?”

“You were chosen to find it.  That’s what makes you special enough.”

Eric fell silent as he tried to decide if this made any sense.

“Trust me.  You have all you need to succeed at this.  I mean, look at you.  You’re faring much better than you did in your dream.”

That was true.  He could still type.  He could still hitchhike ambidextrously.  He could still flip a double-bird when a single wasn’t enough to express just how he felt.  And he could still play cowboys and Indians with imaginary twin forty-fives.  Eric looked across the desk and said, “Father Billy…  He said the guy he used to work for was in the business of finding things.  He was after what’s in the cathedral, wasn’t he?”

“Yes and no.  Technically, he was only investigating whether something existed there.  He didn’t find it.  But the organization that he works for is persistent.  They’re the ones who’ve located the…other thing we were talking about.”

“You’re not going to tell me what these things are, are you?”

“Nope.”

Eric sighed.

“All things in their time.”

“Right.”

The two of them fell silent for a moment.  Memories from his dream passed before him.  He saw the little man tending to him, telling him many of the same things he was telling him now, about the thing hidden in the cathedral, about the people who wanted to claim the thing and its mysterious counterpart.  But in the dream, he told him all these things without being asked.  Dream Eric was in no shape to ask any questions.

He recalled the pain.  It was surprisingly vivid.  He kept rubbing his right hand.

Looking across the desk again, Eric said, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?  If these guys who are looking for it already have the other half, what’s going to stop them from just hunting me down and taking it from me?”

“First of all,” replied the little man.  “I never said they had the other one.  I only said they had located it.  As long as they don’t have this one, the other one is useless to them.  They’ll never expend the energy and resources to retrieve it.”

“So it’s pretty safe wherever it is?”

With his broadest smile yet, the little man replied, “You’d be amazed.”

“I see.”

“Secondly, they won’t come to take it from you.  I can assure you that.  They won’t know you have it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Trust me.”

It was strange, but Eric found that he really did trust this man.  There was simply something about him.  He was special somehow.  Meaningful.  If that made any sense.

“Directly behind this station is a narrow path.  It’s little more than a game trail.  Follow it and it’ll take you to an old salvage yard.  There’ll be scroungers there, but they shouldn’t bother you if you don’t get too close.”

Scroungers?  That was good.  He was worried there wouldn’t be any more freaky creatures to deal with.

“Edgar will meet you there.  He’ll show you the final road, the one that’ll take you to the cathedral.”

Eric sat there, staring at his nearly empty coke can, pondering all that he’d heard.  The attendant did not rush him.  He sat patiently behind his desk, continuously smiling.

He recalled the dream.  Like now, this man had told him all these things and sent him on ahead.  His head fuzzy with morphine, still weak from loss of blood, Dream Eric had barely understood everything that he was told.  Specifically, he realized, he’d neglected to ask the only question that really mattered.  So he asked it now:  “If I make it to the cathedral…will I survive?”

For the first time since they met, the little man’s smile disappeared.  He stared back at Eric with an expression that was actually quite sad.  “That’ll be entirely up to you,” he said.

“Father Billy said that you told him no one who enters the cathedral ever leaves alive.  You told him it would claim anyone who went looking for its secrets.”

“I might have said something like that once, yes.”

“Then how is that up to me?”

His smile returning, the gas station attendant replied, “It’s always up to you.”

Eric didn’t understand.  But he clearly wasn’t going to get any more than this.  He drained the rest of his coke and glanced around for a garbage bin.  There didn’t seem to be one.

“Just leave it anywhere.  I’ll toss it in the recycling bin next time I go out.”

Eric placed it on the corner of the desk and stood up.  “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re quite welcome.”  Then, leaning forward, the little man added, “For everything.”

Though it seemed impossible, Eric was sure that he was referring to the events of his dream, when the little man saved his life.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Eric left through the front door, just as he did in his dream.  In both time frames, no big, floppy-eared cat waited to tear out his intestines.

He glanced up and down the narrow blacktop road—not one car had driven by since he arrived—and walked around to the back of the station.  There, he found the narrow game trail, just as the little man had promised.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that he never asked the man’s name.

He considered going back, but decided to simply keep walking.  If he survived his journey to the cathedral, maybe he’d see him on his way out.  If not, what did it really matter whether he knew the man’s name?

Pushing past the overlapping branches, he made his way along the narrow trail, down a long and shallow hill, across a densely forested gully and up over the next rise.

His cell phone rang.  It was Isabelle.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“It’s like we got cut off.  But I didn’t think that could happen.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Did you catch all that weirdness back there?”

“Some of it.  But it was weird.  It was like you were in a cave or something.  I could barely reach your mind.”

“Strange.”

“Very.”

“You were saying there was something odd about the gas station before we got disconnected.”

“I was.  I don’t know what it is, but there’s something very different about that place.  I don’t think it’s a part of the fissure.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know.  It’s just…  Odd.”

“Well, it’s behind me now.”

“It is.  I should hang up.  Karen’ll be calling you soon.”

“I’m sure she will.”

“Bye.”

Eric disconnected the phone, but didn’t bother sticking it back in his pocket.  Now that his signal had returned, he saw that he had eight missed calls.  Karen had already been trying to reach him.  And sure enough, within five minutes the phone began to buzz again.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m in the woods.”

“How’s the dream coming along?  Remember anything interesting yet?”

“Interesting?  More like disturbing.  Apparently, two days ago I would’ve been mauled and almost killed by some kind of freaky cat.”

“What?”

“Crazy scary, right?”

“What happened?”

Eric told her about his trip through the canyon and the disturbing memories that churned up as he made his way along the stream.  He then told her about his visit with the diminutive gas station attendant and his curious smile.

“So weird…  Who do you think he was?”

“I have absolutely no idea.  I guess he’s like the old folks.  A caretaker of some sort.”

Karen considered this for a moment.  “Could be.  But he sounds more important than a caretaker.”

“He does.  Maybe he’s the head caretaker.  The guy in charge of it all.”

“Maybe.”

“I couldn’t even begin to guess.  This is all way over my head.”

“The cathedral is starting to sound like a crazy scary place.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“What did he mean when he said everything changes there?”

“You keep asking me like I’m going to have an answer for you.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.  I’m just saying that this is seriously beyond my field of study.”

“You didn’t take that class in theoretical dimensional compression physics?  How irresponsible of you.”

“I know.  It’s days like these when those fluff classes really come back to bite you.”

“Slacking never pays.”

“It really doesn’t.”

Both of them fell silent for a moment as Eric made his way deeper into the forest.

“Are you all right?” Karen asked finally.

“I’m fine.  I’m just a little shaken.”

“That sounded like a hell of a nightmare.”

“It was.  It was so vivid.  I can’t figure out how I managed to get up and walk out of the gas station in the state I was in.”

“Well, it was only a dream.”

“No.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”

Karen sighed.  “I guess it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t real.  But it was real, too.  It’s…”

“Totally insane.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“I think I see something up ahead.  I’m going to hang up for a little bit again.”

“Okay.  I’ll call you later.”  Apparently, she was done even pretending she could count on him to call her back in a timely fashion.

“Sure.  Bye.”

Pocketing the phone, Eric pushed through the dense foliage and stepped out into a wide field where tall grass and weeds struggled for real estate with seven impressively long rows of old and rusting automobile carcasses.  An old, red Firebird, half hidden in the tall grass, stood facing him.  The yellow bird painted across the vehicle’s distinct hood stared back at him.

This was obviously the salvage yard the gas station attendant told him to expect.  But it clearly hadn’t been used in many years.  The newest vehicle he could see was a seventy-seven Chrysler.

There didn’t even appear to be an obvious driveway by which any of these vehicles might have arrived here.  It had long ago become overgrown with brush to the point of vanishing into the trees, so that these cars looked as if they had simply dropped out of the sky.

Cautious and alert, Eric made his way deeper into the salvage yard.

It only took a few minutes before he heard the first unnatural sound.  Something rustled in the grass between two rusty, Chevrolets.  Only a moment later, something moved in the next row.  He stopped and scanned the area, but he could see nothing.

Then he glimpsed movement in the grass.

Scroungers.

The gas station attendant warned him there would be scroungers.  He hadn’t bothered to tell him what a scrounger was, and Eric hadn’t bothered to press the little man for the information, assuming—and rightfully so, it seemed—that he would see for himself soon enough.

The little man had, however, assured him that there was nothing to be feared from these creatures, assuming he did nothing stupid to provoke them.  But he couldn’t help but feel that he must make a very tempting target standing out here in the middle of all these rusted-out vehicles, isolated from the rest of the world.

He turned away from the noises and made his way up the row, away from the unseen scroungers.  He slipped between two long-silent trucks and made his way toward the middle of the field.

Several more times he heard something moving in and around the vehicles he passed.  Once, something scurried away almost underfoot and he barely resisted the urge to cry out and jump around like a frightened little girl.

Yet the things manage to remain frustratingly out of sight.

While he honestly didn’t care to see any more strange and unusual creatures—he’d seen enough already to last him a lifetime—he found that he didn’t care much for not being able to see what was moving around him.  Without his eyes to size up the beasts, he was left with only his imagination to fill in the blanks.  And his imagination had become vastly more frightening since he began this journey.  All sorts of horrid visions passed through his head, from giant, venomous snakes to great, bloated cockroaches, his mind was more than happy to churn out one horror after another to guess what awful surprises crawled unseen in the grass at his feet.

And his dream did not help soothe his curiosity.  As the memories unraveled themselves, he recalled himself moving through this field in a mental fog, his mind numbed to the horrors of unseen creatures scurrying around him.

Awake and in the present, Eric continued on, trying to ignore the dream.  He didn’t want to see the dream now.  It wasn’t doing him any good.  In the dream he kept looking at his hand.  It looked so small.  So wrong.

It made him feel sick.

As he passed an old Chevrolet pickup truck, something hissed at him from beneath the hood, urging him to step faster through the high grass.

“They’re mostly harmless.”

Eric turned to find an old man with a bald, sunburned head walking among the ruined automobiles.  He wore stained bib overalls over a flannel work shirt that looked far too hot for August.

“But you’d better trust me when I say you don’t want a closer look at them.”

Eric looked around, wondering where the old man had come from.  He was sure there hadn’t been anyone out here when he first entered the field.  “You’re Edgar?”

“I am.  And you?”

“Eric.”

“Eric,” repeated Edgar.  “You’re a damn idiot, Eric.”

Caught off guard, Eric could only think to say, “I’m sorry?”

“You must be.  To still be here, pushing on, after all you’ve been through already.”

Eric did not reply.  He was not insulted, really.  Given all that he had been through, given the horrors his dream had recently revealed to him, he found that he was inclined to agree.

Edgar strolled between two of the old vehicles, his eyes washing over them, a sad sort of expression on his face.  “A goddamned fool…”

Eric’s cell phone chimed.  He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

CHARMING GUY

Looking up from the phone, he said, “I wanted to turn back at the farmhouse.  Grant Stolyen talked me out of it.”

“Goddamned fools, the both of you.”

Again, the phone chimed.

RUDE!

“You think I should leave now?”

“You won’t quit now.”

“I won’t?”

“If you haven’t quit by now, you ain’t going to.”

“Then what’s the point in telling me what an idiot I am?  I mean, if you know nothing you say will change my mind…then you’re just insulting me.”

The old man shrugged.  “Just stating my opinion.  I’m entitled to one, aren’t I?”

“I expect you are.”  Eric caught a glimpse of movement to his left and glanced over in time to see something dark and scaly crawl out of the engine of an old, hoodless Ford and drop into the tall grass below.  “We’re all entitled to our opinions.  Even us fools.”

“True.”

“I, for instance, am of the opinion that you’re something of an asshole.”

This time, when his phone chimed, it said simply, LOL!

The old man smiled a little.  “That so?”

“All of you,” Eric continued.  “You and Grant and Taylor, even that crazy-ass Annette.  You’re all here just to tell me what you think I need to hear to keep me moving.”

Edgar cocked a hairy eyebrow.  “I thought I was telling you to go home.”

“But you just told me that you know I won’t.”

“Because you’re an idiot.”

“No.  Because I know by now that I need to see what’s waiting for me in the cathedral.  I know it just as well as you do.”

Edgar moved on to another vehicle, his crooked fingers sliding over the rusty metal, almost lovingly.  He pulled open the door and peered at the ruined interior as if reminiscing about the days when this car would have been brand new and sitting on the lot, that new car smell wafting from its upholstery.  He did not respond.

“Is there even a chance I would’ve come here and needed you to encourage me to go on?  Or was I always going to have resigned myself to this by now?”

Edgar turned and looked at him now, his expression serious.  “There’s always a chance.  For everything.  You should remember that.”

Eric stared at him for a moment, at the softness of his eyes, the blemishes on his skin, the creases in his face.  Every detail was so vivid.  “How long have you all been dead?”

WHOA…

Edgar sighed and turned away.  Again, he placed his bony hand on the car.  “I’ll have been gone fifty-three years this winter.”

Fifty-three years.  That would’ve been around the winter of sixty-one.

“And the others?”

“Nearly as long.”

“I see.  And you’re all stuck here?  Just waiting on someone like me?”

“Not someone like you.  You.  You’re the one we’ve all been waiting for, the reason we carry on with our lives the way we lived them when we still lived, tending to things.  And waiting, of course.”

“But why?”

“We all lived our whole lives along the fissure.  And we all died along the fissure.  A lot of things don’t work right here, you’ve seen that for yourself.  Death comes here just like it does anywhere else.  A fatal heart attack is just as final in any world.  But what comes next…well, that’s a little different.”

“Are you stuck here forever?”

Edgar shrugged.  “Couldn’t tell you.  Haven’t been here forever yet.  I sure as hell hope I’m not.  I hope we get to move on when you finish what you came to do.”

“If I succeed.”

“If you succeed.”

Eric stared at the man as he moved on from one vehicle to the next.  It was difficult to grasp the idea that he was speaking to a ghost, even more difficult to believe that Taylor, Grant and Annette had all been nothing more than spirits.  They had all seemed so real, so tangible.  But now that he thought about it, they’d all appeared as if out of nowhere.  Though they had each interacted with their environments in some way—Annette had her laundry, Grant his tractor, Taylor his tools and Edgar these long-discarded vehicles—he hadn’t touched any of them himself.  Not one of them had offered to shake his hand.

One thing bothered him, though.

“What about Ethan?”

Edgar sighed.  “Annette’s still waiting for him to come home, isn’t she?”  He lifted the hood on an old Chrysler and peered in at the long-rusted engine.  “But he never came home.  Took a turn for the worst.  Died in the middle of the night while she was asleep at home.  Couldn’t accept it.  She died just a few months later, still refusing to believe he wasn’t coming home, and that’s how she exists now, always waiting for him to come back home to her.  She just couldn’t handle it.  She couldn’t take losing someone again.”

Eric recalled the way Annette talked to him about her father’s death, as if he weren’t a complete stranger.  It wasn’t hard to imagine how difficult it might be to keep losing people you loved so much.  “But why isn’t Ethan here with her?”

“Because he died in a hospital bed, some twenty miles away.  She died in her home, here in the fissure.  He moved on.  He escaped while the rest of us were trapped.  And poor Annette ended up trapped twice.  Once here in the fissure and once inside herself.”

THAT IS SO SAD!

It was sad.  It was probably the saddest thing Eric had ever heard in his life.  He felt terrible for poor Annette.

Edgar stood and silently stared at the rusted engine of the Chrysler as a scrounger wormed its way up and over the fender.  It looked like a cross between a lizard and a bug, about thirty inches long, with six frog-like feet on very short stubs of legs.  It had no tail and no neck, only a snake-like head with a wide, toothless mouth and great, blank eyes that, like the rest of its body, were a muddy brown.

The old man watched the creepy creature flop gracelessly into the grass.  “They ain’t got no teeth, but you still don’t want to get bit by one.  Their saliva’s toxic.  Might not kill you, necessarily, but it’d feel like your skin was on fire.  You’d have terrible hallucinations and there’s a good chance you could go blind.”

Now Eric’s skin was crawling.  His eyes swept the grass around him, alert for dark shapes creeping toward him.

Edgar grinned.  “Don’t worry.  They rarely bite people.  They mostly eat bugs and rodents.  You’d pretty much have to step on one to goad it into biting you.”

Eric still wanted to get out of the salvage yard and as far away from the scroungers as possible.

His cell phone buzzed inside his pocket, but he chose to ignore it.  He did not like the idea of further dividing his attention in a field full of venomous scroungers.  His luck today wasn’t the worst it could have been, seeing that he was still alive, but it also wasn’t the kind he’d want to take on a weekend in Vegas.

“So you’ll be heading for the cathedral now, I take it.”

“I don’t see any other alternative.  I keep hearing that the dream will drive me crazy.”

“It might.  Or it might not.  That would be up to you, I guess, whether you’re strong enough to take it.  But for sure, the only way to make it stop is to go to the cathedral.  You do that and one way or another you won’t have that dream again.”