Текст книги "Rushed"

Автор книги: Brian Harmon

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Cathedral?”

But the woman was apparently done with their conversation.  She entered the house and left him standing alone in her back yard.

Eric stared out into the cornfield for a moment.  This was beginning to get spooky.  He’d assumed that these urges to get in his car and drive were all in his head.  He thought this even as he found himself getting out of his car and walking along the riverbank.  But this woman had just told him that he was expected, as if he had been drawn here intentionally.

She also told him about “the other one.”  The one who looked like he was shrouded in fog, but without the fog.  As if that made any kind of sense at all.

And she told him he was supposed to be looking for a cathedral.

It was beyond crazy.  Either he just imagined this whole conversation, or she confirmed that he was here for a reason and not just because his brain was short-circuiting.

Or maybe they were both completely crazy.

He could still feel that strange pull, as if the cornfield were calling out to him.  He did not want to go out there.  Something was terribly wrong about all this.  But he was fairly certain that he would find no peace by turning around and going home.  And he certainly didn’t want to converse any further with Mrs. Sunny Disposition.

Preparing himself for whatever weirdness awaited him on the other side, Eric lifted the latch on the gate and stepped through it to the other side.

Chapter Three

Eric walked through the tall grass between the sunken wheel ruts of the dirt road.  He didn’t like the feel of the tall corn on either side of him, the way it refused to let him see more than a few yards in either direction.  Having already turned the bend, he could not even see the old woman’s Victorian home anymore.  Even the tallest peaks of its roof were quickly lost behind the endless stalks.

It was silly, but he found himself unwilling to stray past the ruts, as if something might reach out and snatch him away if he dared get too close.  It was that woman’s fault.  Her insane rambling about the “other one” and how he was somehow shrouded in an invisible fog.  It was a creepy thought, especially now that he was all alone out here, with nothing to be seen in every direction but corn.

She had obviously been delusional.

Yet, she had managed to make a strange sort of sense, too.  Or at least more sense than his irrational compulsion to drive here in the first place.

He pulled out his cell phone and checked his screen.  He was surprised to find that he still had good service out here.  There must be a tower somewhere nearby.  He wondered how far he was from the nearest sizable town.

The road curved again and he turned with it, still keeping between the wheel ruts.

According to the old woman, he was looking for a cathedral.  His immediate assumption was that he was looking for a large, ornately built church, but a cornfield didn’t seem to be a very likely place for such a structure and he certainly didn’t see any towering steeples rising over the corn.  But then again, the woman also said it was a long walk.  He wondered if this road would take him all the way there and if he would have to stare at the corn the whole way.

He knew that he should probably call Karen and update her on his whereabouts.  But he also knew that she would just as likely be calling him any time to check up on him.  And since she was the one who loved to talk on the stupid phone, he tended to let her do the calling.

He was trying to determine how he was going to explain to her why he left the PT Cruiser when he abruptly realized that something had changed.

He stopped and looked around, but he couldn’t quite decide what was different.  It was as if the light had changed, but when he squinted up into the sky, he saw that no clouds were passing before the sun.  Yet everything suddenly felt colder and darker.

He turned around and surveyed the corn.  The shadows seemed deeper somehow, the shade beneath the broad leaves darker, colder, more sinister.

That was ridiculous.  Corn could not look more sinister.  Broccoli, maybe.  But corn was just corn.  It was tasty.

Gazing forward, he saw that the plants were getting shorter as he went.  He found himself passing through a strange swath of sickly stalks.  It cut into the healthier, taller corn for about thirty yards to his right and curved out of sight to the left.  It was as if the soil in just this one, narrow strip lacked the proper nutrients to fully sustain the crop.

As he passed through this odd area of the field, he checked his phone and saw that his signal had nearly vanished.  A single bar kept flickering in and out, the words “NO SIGNAL” flashed at him as the little phone struggled to maintain its suddenly tenuous connection to the rest of the world.

He’d always hated cell phones.  He hated the way people were always attached to them like a bad addiction.  He’d met far too many people who were practically incapable of putting them down.  They were constantly tinkering with them, as if they couldn’t bear to be left unentertained for even a few minutes, constantly taking calls, sometimes in the middle of a conversation!  People even drove with the stupid things, as if the roads weren’t already dangerous enough.  And it especially pissed him off when he caught his students playing with them in his class.  He was notorious for his intolerance of cell phones in his classroom and still he had to confiscate the damn things at least once a week.  He despised them and had proclaimed on occasions far too numerous to count that if every device on the planet abruptly quit working and they never made another one for as long as he lived, he’d continue his life quite happily.

But now that he was standing out here in this odd field, his signal cutting in and out, he felt a slow dread creep into him.

A soft rustling noise made him snap his head up.  He scanned the area around him, but there was nothing to see but cornstalks.

The hairs on the back of his neck were suddenly standing at full attention.

He told himself it was probably nothing more than a crow.  Or perhaps a deer.  But that eerie chill persisted.  He began to walk faster, his eyes darting back and forth from the corn on his left to the corn on his right and back again, half expecting something to spring out at him, determined to drag him out into the sickly stalks.

Past the middle of the stunted patch, the corn grew taller again, and soon his vision was reduced to only a few shadowy yards.

Then, abruptly, everything felt different again.

Eric paused and looked around.  The sky was still the same blue.  The corn was still the same green.  But everything suddenly appeared brighter somehow.  That odd chill was gone.

He glanced back at the path behind him.  It looked perfectly normal, except for the stunted stalks.  Yet that feeling of uneasiness remained.  He continued walking and glanced down at his phone again.  The signal was strong and clear.

He stuffed the phone back into his pocket as he tried to see through the corn, but he had barely withdrawn his hand when the phone buzzed to life against his leg.

“Where are you?” Karen asked as soon as he answered.

Shaking off that strange feeling of irrational dread that had been creeping into his gut, Eric dismissed the weirdness of the corn and forced himself to relax.  “I’m in a cornfield,” he replied.  “Where are you?  What are you wearing?  Are you naked?  I like it when you’re naked.”

“Yes.  I’m naked.  I lounge around in my birthday suit all day when you’re gone.  Did you say cornfield?”

“I did say cornfield.  You’re never naked when I get home.”

“Why would I still be naked when you get home?  It wouldn’t be relaxing with you around.  What are you doing driving around in a cornfield?”

“I didn’t say I was driving.”

“Okay.  What are you doing walking around in a cornfield?”

“Checking things out.  Considering buying a farm.  What do you think?”

“I think I wouldn’t make a very good farm girl.”

“Why not?  Fresh air.  Sunshine.  Outdoors.  The chores.  ‘Green Acres is the place for me.’  The good life.”

“I get allergic smelling hay.”

“Well there go all my barn fetish fantasies.  Thanks for leaving me empty inside.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“I know I will.”  He scanned the field around him.  Now and then he thought he saw something moving, but could not be sure it wasn’t just the breeze churning through the leaves.

“So really, can we talk about you walking around in a cornfield?  Because that’s a little troubling.”

“I’ve got to admit, I can see where you might think so.”

“Yeah.  Where’s our car?”

“Parked it next to a bridge.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry.  I locked it.”

“That’s good.  That makes everything all right.”

“I’m glad.  I was worried this was going to be an awkward conversation.”

“Why would you think that?  You just abandoned our car and decided to take a walk in a cornfield.  There’s no reason at all to doubt the soundness of your mind.”

“I have the most patient wife on the planet.”

“Yes you do.  Now please explain the cornfield to her.”

“That’s going to be tricky.”

“I was worried it would be.  What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.  Really.  I have no idea what’s going on.  All I know is the farther I drove, the more sure I was that I was doing what I needed to do.  And when I finally pulled off the road, I felt just as sure that I needed to get out and walk.  I followed the river to a little path in the woods and I found my way to this house…”

In as much detail as he could recall, he described his encounter with the old woman and the enigmatic things she’d said to him.

“That’s so weird,” Karen said when he’d finished.

“I know.”

The road curved to the right, winding ever deeper into the field, and again he was struck by that strange sensation of something changing.  It happened only briefly this time, for merely a second or two, but the cell phone crackled in his ear as if he’d passed quickly through a tunnel.

“Do you think she really knew you were coming?”

“She couldn’t have.  I didn’t even know I was coming.”

Karen was quiet as she contemplated the idea.

“I don’t think she was entirely there.  She probably thought I was somebody else.”

“Maybe…  That stuff about the half-there man…  That’s creepy.”

“I know.  Kind of gave me a chill.”

“I can believe she might’ve just been crazy, but it’s really weird that she said she expected you two days ago.”

“I know.  That was a spooky coincidence.”

“It was.”

Again, something changed.  At the same moment, the phone crackled.  He stopped and began to walk backward.  After a few steps, everything suddenly seemed normal again.

This was interesting.

He began to walk forward once more.  It seemed that he needed to walk almost twice as far as the first time, but that queer, shifting feeling came back as reliably as he could have hoped.  There was a definite chill to the air here.  And although the sky and the corn and the weeds and the earth remained unchanged, something about the underlying quality of it all seemed altered.  It wasn’t as if it had grown darker, exactly.  It was, as crazy as it sounded, as if everything had grown deeper.

He couldn’t wrap his head around it.

“Listen,” he said as he glanced ahead and saw that the corn was becoming shorter again.  “My phone’s been cutting out a little in this field.  I lost the signal completely just before you called.  So if you lose me, don’t freak out, okay?”

“I don’t ‘freak out.’”

Yes, she did.  She simply managed to do it with considerably more grace than most.  But he decided not to tell her this.

“You just worry about yourself.  Don’t get rattlesnake bit or anything.”

“I’ll watch where I step,” he promised.

Karen’s next words were gnarled into a sputtering of disjointed sounds.

“Karen?”

Another quick burst of noise crackled in his ears and then there was nothing.

“Karen…?  Hello…?”

He ended the call and glanced around.  Again, he had that uneasy feeling.  On either side of him the corn became shorter and shorter until it was little more than sickly sprigs jutting out of the cracked earth, most of them half wilted, some completely dead.  He found himself in an odd valley of pathetic stalks barely clinging to life and was unnerved by how silent it was here.

What was killing the corn?  Was there something in the soil?  Pollution, maybe?  Or Radiation?

A hard shiver raced through his body as he imagined himself being slowly irradiated by something buried in the ground beneath him.  Was he being exposed to something?  Would it kill him if he remained here long enough?

Countless old movies began to surface from his memory, gleefully filling his head with thoughts of crashed alien spacecrafts that oozed terrible chemicals into the ground and filled the air with strange fumes, transforming harmless wildlife into gruesome and violent freaks of nature.

Why did it have to be a cornfield?  Aliens loved cornfields.  They were drawn to them like toddlers to coloring books.

He stepped up his pace to a near jog and soon the corn began to grow taller again, but the queer deepness remained.

Something rustled in the corn again.  Something big.  Something definitely not restrained to his imagination.  He turned to face it, ready to defend himself, but he could see nothing.  He was standing in an open strip of stunted stalks, completely exposed, searching the taller corn farther out.

“Hello?  Is someone out there?”

Of course there wasn’t.  If there was, it would be someone with a chainsaw and a shirt made out of human faces.  Why would such a person reply to a stupid question like that?  It would spoil all the fun.

Eric began to run.

The corn grew taller and his visibility dwindled.  He thought he could hear things moving all around him.  An odd, chittering noise rose from somewhere nearby.

Then everything abruptly became normal again.  That strange depth was gone from his surroundings, the chill vanished and everything seemed once more to be perfectly fine.

He turned and looked behind him, but there was nothing there.  It was just an ordinary dirt road winding through an ordinary cornfield.  Again, the only thing out of the ordinary was the sickly-looking corn.

The cell phone buzzed to life in his hand, startling him so badly that he almost dropped it.

He took a moment to curse at the stupid thing before answering it.

“What happened?” asked Karen.

“Nothing.  I just lost the signal for a minute there.  Like I told you would happen.”

“That was kind of scary.”

“Just a lost signal,” he repeated.  He had no intention of telling her about hearing something in the corn.  He didn’t want to worry her.  Besides, he still had no idea what it was or how much of it had only been his imagination.  It was probably nothing more than a deer hiding in the field.

He turned and began walking again.  Ahead of him, the road was curving to the right and beginning to slope a little downhill.

Despite the chill he felt when he was in the strange area with the sickly corn, he now found himself sweating a little.  It was going to be a very warm day.

“How goes the cake?” he asked.

“Still cooling.  I’m getting ready to whip up the frosting.  Strawberry pies are done.  I have three caramel apple pies just about ready to come out of the oven and two blackberries ready to go in.”

“See, it’s probably good I’m not there.  I can’t behave myself around your blackberry pie.”

“It does have an effect on you.”

He followed the road around the curve, his eyes still searching the corn for signs of movement.  Why didn’t he hear it anymore?  Where had it gone?

“I kind of wish I’d come with you.”

“You have pies and cakes to make.  And you hate long car rides.  They make you sick.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you’d like cornfields, either, actually.”

“I guess I probably wouldn’t.”

“Besides, I’m on an adventure, remember.  You can’t expect me to take a girl on an adventure.”

“Oh, right.  What was I thinking?”

Eric emerged from the corn into a wide, weedy clearing and stopped, his eyes fixed on the structure that stood before him.  All at once, the mysteries of the field were forgotten.

“Karen…”

“Huh?”

“I just remembered something from my dream.”

“You did?  What?”

“A barn.  A big, red, wooden barn with peeling paint and a sagging roof.  …And I’m looking at it right now.”

Chapter Four

He recognized the monstrous red structure as soon as he saw it.  It was not merely a vague recollection, but was instead perfectly vivid in every detail.  It was exactly as he had seen it each of these past three nights, right down to the gaps between the boards and the rusted-through tin roof.

The memory of the barn from his dream—this barn—came rushing back to him in an instant, and with it came that awful feeling of gut-wrenching fear and foreboding with which he’d awakened each night.  Though he could still remember no other details about the dream, not even the reason why this barn filled him with irrational dread, he was sure that he had seen this very same barn in his sleep.

But how?  He’d never been here in his life.  How would he even know that such a place existed?

“What do you mean you’re looking at it right now?” asked Karen.  “You mean it’s real?  It’s there?”

“I’m looking right at it.  It’s here.  I’m standing right in front of it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Uh huh.”

“How do you know it’s the same barn?”

“I just do.”

“But you didn’t remember anything from your dream until just now.”

“I know.  But this was in my dream.  This exact barn.  I know it was.  As soon as I saw it, I remembered it.”

“Send me a picture of it.”

“What?”

“Send me a picture.  I want to see it.”

“How do you expect me to—?”

“The camera on your phone, goofball.”

“I have a camera on my phone?”

“Yes.  You know that.”

“No I don’t.”  But he realized even as he argued with her that he did recall her telling him about the camera when she first gave the annoying little device to him.  At the time, he thought the phone was an utter waste of money even without a camera in it.  It was just one of dozens of extra features he’d never had any intention of using.

“Send it to me.”

“How do I do that, exactly?”

Karen talked him through the process.  He had to hang up to do it, but soon enough she was looking at the very same barn on her phone, seeing precisely what he was seeing.

He refused to admit that that really was kind of cool.

“That’s a really creepy barn,” agreed Karen after calling him back.

“Yes it is.”

“You’re sure this was in your dream?”

“Positive.”

“That’s really weird, Eric.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Scary weird.”

“I know.”

“What if…”

“What if what?”

For a moment she was silent.  Then she surprised him by saying, “What if it’s all real?  You’re…feelings.  The things that old woman said.  All of it.  What if it’s real?”

“You don’t really believe any of that stuff, do you?”

“Do you?”

There was the real question.  After all, if he didn’t believe any of it, why would he be out here?  Some part of him must have expected to find something.  Otherwise he would have turned around long before he reached the county line.  And he certainly never would have left his car.

“I don’t know,” he confessed.  “I really don’t.”

“I can’t decide if it’s really scary or really kind of cool.”

Eric found himself leaning toward “really scary” but perhaps that was just him.  “Listen, I’m going to have to hang up for a little while.”

“Don’t hang up.  I want to know what you find.”

He was surprised to realize that he was already walking toward the door.  “Even if I don’t, I have a feeling I’m going to lose the signal again in a minute.”

“Okay.  Just…  Please be careful.”

“I will.”

He hung up the phone and approached the barn.  He thought he might find the huge, double doors locked or otherwise blocked off in some way.  Given the condition of the barn, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find the hinges sagging or broken, leaving the heavy doors weighted hopelessly into the dirt.  If he were to tell the honest truth, he hoped that he would find his way blocked.  But one of the two doors stood ajar, almost as if it were waiting for him.

Just above the doors, someone had mounted a bronze eagle with its wings spread in flight.  The instant he looked up at this decoration, he recognized it.  He’d looked upon it in the dream, just as he did now.

An eagle…

The only thing he’d been able to remember of his dream until a moment ago was that there was something about a bird.  And here was a bird now, blatantly emblazoned right above the entrance of the rundown barn.  Even if he could somehow convince himself that this barn wasn’t really the same one from his dream, that it was just his mind playing tricks on him, he couldn’t possibly deny the image of a bird so obviously placed above the entrance.

Eric tucked his cell phone into his front pocket, looked back one last time at the cornfield and the little dirt road that brought him here and then stepped through the door and into the shadowy interior of the barn.

Even the inside was familiar.  The way the sunlight filtered through the gaps in the boards and the holes in the tin roof was exactly as he had seen it in his dream, down to the last detail.  Even the weeds that were reaching through the many sunlit openings near the floor were the same.  Every place his eyes fell, he found details he remembered.  It was as if he’d been here a million times before, as if he’d spent his whole life here.

Except there was nothing as warm and comforting as a memory of home.  A deep and churning dread was rising in his gut.  Something was very, very wrong here.

He began walking through the barn, toward the door on the far side, his eyes searching every crack and crevice for the slightest sign of danger.  But the building was deserted.  The stalls on either side were empty, with no evidence remaining of whatever animals they may have once housed.  There weren’t even any birds roosting in the high rafters above his head.

He wished he could remember more of his dream.  What happened to him in the barn?  What did he see?  What did he find?  Every surface, every beam of sunlight, every creak and groan of the aging lumber was familiar to him, yet he could not seem to remember anything beyond what he was looking at.  It came back to him only as he saw it with his own eyes.

But some part of him, buried deep down in some far corner of his brain, must have still remembered it, because that awful, gut-churning fright remained.  Whatever it was he’d found here in his dream, it wasn’t pleasant.

An odd noise startled him and he stopped to listen, his skin prickling with gooseflesh.  It came from somewhere on the other side of the far door, a sickly bleating sound, like nothing he’d ever heard before.  He was no expert on farm animals, but to his ears, it was like the utterances of a wretched, starving animal.

That nauseous feeling in his belly grew.

Slowly, he crept toward the back of the barn, his eyes fixed on the second set of large, double doors that stood partially opened, just like the first.  But while there was brilliant sunlight cutting through the shadows where he had entered the barn, the space beyond those far doors was dark and shadowy.

He felt a chill creep through him and realized he was holding his breath.  He had to force himself to breathe normally.

Why was he so worried?  What had he seen within these walls while he was dreaming?

When he reached the doors, he felt a cool draft flowing across his sweat-dampened skin and was reminded of the strange moments back in the cornfield, where the corn had withered.  This was like those areas, he realized.  It was connected somehow.

His eyes swept across the ground as he again wondered if some invisible poison might be soaked into the soil, undetectable fumes rising around him, invading his body, poisoning and twisting his mind.

He forced the unpleasant thought away and peered through the open doors.

For a moment, he was confused.  He turned and looked back toward the sunlit front doors.  The barn was big.  Each set of double doors was more than large enough to allow entry for a sizable tractor, but it could not have been much bigger than this room when he stood staring at it from outside.  Yet through this door waited a second room easily twice as long as the first.  Empty stalls lined the walls on either side of a wide walkway that reached far past where the barn should have ended given its exterior dimensions.

It was impossible.  It was like stepping inside an M. C. Escher work.

It had to be an optical illusion of some sort.  There was no other logical explanation.

But then again, why would anything here be logical?  Nothing he had done today was logical.

And even as he tried to make himself accept what was happening to him, he realized that he recalled discovering these same impossible dimensions in his dream.

Movement drew his attention to the far end of the second room.  Something that appeared to be some kind of chicken was making its way across the floor near the next set of double doors.

Another bird…

As he watched it, he quickly realized that there was something wrong with the creature.  Though small and plump, like a chicken, it wasn’t moving like any barnyard fowl he had ever seen.  It didn’t hold its head up as it walked, surveying the room in lively jerks.  Instead, it looked as if it were hanging its head in a curiously forlorn manner.  Also, it didn’t strut like a chicken.  Instead, it moved in slow, lurching motions, as if on the verge of death.  It was either the most depressed little chicken he had ever laid eyes on or there was something very not right about it.

Again, that awful bleating noise came.  It seemed to come from beyond the far doorway.  It reminded him a little of a lamb or a calf, but it was gruff and choked, like something slowly strangling to death in the jaws of a steel snare.

The chicken-thing continued its labored lurching, unfazed by the terrible sound.

Still standing in the doorway, Eric checked his cell phone.  He wasn’t remotely surprised to see that he had no signal.  He returned it to his pocket and looked around again.  The sunlight drilled through the holes in the rusted roof and the gaps between the boards in the walls, just like in the last room of the impossible barn, but it did not seem nearly as warm and bright as it should have been.  The air felt cold against his skin.  Even the sound of the gentle wind outside was muted.  Only that awful bleating noise disturbed the stillness.

And yet, even the weirdness was familiar.  His dream unfolded before him, promising to reveal to him in vivid detail why he had awakened breathless and afraid these past three nights, but only if he continued to walk in the footprints of the nightmare.

Glancing over his shoulder at the bright strip of sunlight once more, he braced himself for whatever horrors his nightmare still had in store for him and continued toward the far doors and the mysteries that waited beyond them.