Текст книги "Rushed"

Автор книги: Brian Harmon

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Chapter Five

It felt wrong in here.  The wrongness weighed down the air, seeming to ooze into his very pores.

And there was a stench, too.  He hadn’t noticed it when he was standing in the doorway, but as he moved deeper into the long, gloomy interior of the barn, it enveloped him.  It was far worse than the odor of ordinary farm animals.  It was a death-like stench, the sickly reek of decay.

He peered into each open stall as he passed it, finding one after another empty, just like in the previous room, until, about a third of the distance between the two sets of doors, he found a second chicken (or whatever the hell the thing was) sitting slumped in a corner.

He turned and approached the creature, but stopped short of the stall door.  He wanted to see it.  He wanted to understand what was so strange about it, but he dared not get any closer than absolutely necessary.

The wretched creature looked diseased.  It was mostly bald, with black and gray mottled skin exposed except for a few small, blotchy patches of black and yellow feathers.  It sat with its neck bent like a limp hose, the shriveled crest atop its head resting on the floor beside it.  Its black, beady eyes stared blankly back at him.

He thought the poor creature had died, but then it flexed its useless, naked wings and uttered a loud noise that was far less a cluck than a swine-like squeal.

He doubted there was a force anywhere on the planet that could have prevented his feet from leaving the floor at that moment.  His heart thumping hard against his ribs, his nerves electrified, Eric promptly left the freaky chicken to its roost and moved on.

What the hell was this place?

Three stalls down, he spied another of the strange fowl and he took a wide path around it, half-expecting it to dart out and attack him.

Another long and mournful bleating sound rose from the other side of the door and when he looked toward it he saw that there were now two of the ugly chicken things at the far end of the room.  A second had just emerged from the last stall.  Even from this distance, he could tell something was wrong with its feet, likely the cause for its odd, lurching gait.  The ones in the stalls had been sitting with their legs tucked beneath them, hidden from view and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pick one up for a closer look.

He continued to peer into the open stalls as he passed them, but he kept well between them and constantly ready to spring out of the way in case something small and barely feathered emerged with the intention of pecking out his eyes.

But as he approached the door, the two birds remained unconcerned with doing him harm.  In fact, the nearest one loped away with greater urgency, as if it were he who was a monstrous mockery of nature.

Empowered by the birds’ apparent wariness, he dared to take a moment and consider the nearest of the two.  He could now see what was wrong with its feet.  They were swollen and gnarled and clenched like bony fists.  They walked not with their toes spread, like other birds, but upon the knuckles of their feet instead.  But the true cause of their odd lurching appeared to be that their skinny legs didn’t quite hold their weight.  With every step they simply rose and then collapsed.

Earlier that summer, like he did every year, he’d visited the county fair and strolled through the various animal barns.  He was well aware that there were many breeds of farm fowl, some of them remarkably ugly.  Hell, your ordinary Thanksgiving turkey was no looker when you saw a live one close up.  Even breeds with very few feathers weren’t uncommon.  But he’d never seen anything quite like these things.  They weren’t just ugly.  They didn’t even look healthy.

Again, he thought about the stunted corn and shivered.

More and more, he wondered if something otherworldly was at work here.

As he pushed open the door, he saw that the barn had a third chamber.  That awful stench struck him with renewed force, knotting his stomach into an ever tighter ball.

At least a dozen of the ugly, loping chickens were stumbling around in here.

Again, he heard the sickly bleating noise and realized that it was originating from somewhere in this room.

He also could now hear the sound of buzzing flies.

His heart still pounding, he pushed on.  It was strange how it seemed to grow darker without the light growing any dimmer.  The shadows seemed to be taking on life and substance all their own, wholly separate from the shapes that cast them.

He paused as a realization came to him.  Like the other two rooms, this part of the barn was familiar to him.  He remembered it from his dreams.  And he even remembered the strange chickens, now that he had seen them.  In his dream he’d had the same reaction to them:  disgust and distrust mixed with a certain morbid curiosity.  But he realized now that he didn’t recall seeing them in the previous room in his dream.  And he didn’t recall seeing as many in this room, either.

But of course, it had only been a dream.  Not every detail would be perfect, he supposed.  Not even in an apparently prophetic dream.

He started moving again and almost immediately his eyes fell on a shape far stranger than the creepy chickens.  Inside one of the stalls to his right lay an animal as big as a cow, but with short, stubby legs and a long, limp tail.

He found that he remembered the creature as soon as he saw it, just as it looked now, and he felt as strongly drawn to the beast as he was repulsed by it.

Covered in short, charcoal gray hair, it lay facing away from him, its head pressed into the corner of the stall as if it were ashamed to exist.  All he could make out were long, floppy ears and a short, blunt snout.  A great, meaty sack, far larger than any cow udders he’d ever seen at any state fair, bulged from between its splayed and useless legs, at least a dozen teats bulging from it, some of them oozing a thick, sour-yellow substance that fell in thick ropes to the filthy floor beneath it.

The stench was strongest here.  This stall had not been cleaned in a very long time.  A foul stench filled the air and a swarm of flies shared the enclosure with the poor creature.

It was neither bovine nor swine, but something else entirely, and it looked at least as miserable as the half-dead-looking chickens.

He could almost believe that the fowl were merely some sort of new and exceptionally unbecoming exotic breed, but he was quite sure that these things should not exist.

Staring at it now, he realized that no one was ever going to believe that he actually saw these things.  Even Karen, who trusted him as completely as any wife ever could, would never be convinced that he had actually seen such things.  Telling her would only help convince her that her husband had utterly lost his mind.

Then he remembered his cell phone.  The camera.

He pulled it from his pocket and saw that it remained out of service.  For a moment he thought that his plan to prove his sanity had been foiled, but then he realized that he didn’t need cell service to use the phone’s camera.  He snapped a single picture of the thing and then turned and snapped a picture of the nearest bird as well.

That would prove he wasn’t crazy.

Or maybe it would prove that he was crazy.  If all Karen saw when she received these pictures was a dozing cow and an ordinary chicken, he’d know it was time to pack up this silly adventure and check himself into the nearest psychiatric ward.

As he backed away from the sorry-looking creature and resumed walking toward the barn’s back door, he heard the pathetic bleating noise again.  Whatever creature was making that awful sound was in one of the stalls on the right-hand side of the room, near the end.  He had only just begun to wonder if it was the same sort of creature that he had just seen when something to his left let out a long and irritable-sounding moan.

Jumping at the noise, he turned to see another creature staring at him through the wooden slats of the gate.  It had huge, black eyes and a long, drooping tongue that hung from its gaping mouth and lay like a slab of raw meat on the filthy floor.  Flies were crawling over the flaccid organ.  Like the one in the other stall, it was lying on its side, its stubby legs spread around its bulging sack, seemingly incapable of standing.

Once more, his thoughts strayed to the stunted corn and those old movies about UFOs and horrific alien experiments.

Again the creature moaned at him.  It was a disturbingly despondent sound.

He snapped another picture.

Feeling as if he might soon retch at the sight of these beasts, he turned his attention forward and continued on.

At least nothing here seemed especially dangerous.  The birds fled as he approached, keeping their distance from him, no different from hundreds of other farm birds he’d seen.  And the much larger creatures locked in the stalls didn’t look remotely vicious.  They didn’t even look like they could move.

He approached the source of the sickly bleating sound.  Even this didn’t sound like anything dangerous.  It was not an angry sound, but rather pitiful.  It sounded miserable, not bloodthirsty.  Yet he still felt reluctant to see it.  If it was half as disturbing as the other livestock, he was not sure he could stand the sight.

But the stall from where the noise came was not gated like the others.  Instead, the gate had been replaced with a ten-foot-tall, plywood and lumber door and chained shut so that it was impossible to see in.

He was relieved to be spared the sight of whatever was inside, yet the trouble someone had taken to shut the creature away enflamed his curiosity.  Why?  What would he find if he climbed to the top of the gate and peered over?

From inside, another long, pitiful call rang out.

In his dream, he had turned away without looking.  He did the same now.  He didn’t want to see it.  Whatever was inside, he was sure it would be far more disturbing than the other livestock.  He didn’t think it would be something he’d want to remember.

Ready to be out of this nightmare barn, he turned his attention forward again, just in time to see a tall, bearded man emerge from the farthest stall.

Startled, Eric stopped.

The man walked straight to the door and pushed it open.  Bright sunlight spilled in, but somehow the barn’s interior remained just as shadowy.  As soon as he was gone, the door swung shut behind him.

Eric bolted for the door.

He ran past every stall, startling the limp-necked chickens into squealing fits as they stumbled over their own twisted feet and rubbery legs to get out of his way.

He reached the door without being attacked by mutant farm animals and shoved it open.  Finally, he found himself back under the August sun.

Yet the chill in the air remained.

At first, he didn’t know where the man went.  Then he spotted him crossing the porch of an old farmhouse and entering the front door.

He wasn’t sure how it was that he didn’t notice the little house before he entered the barn.  He assumed he’d been too preoccupied with the startling realization that the barn was actually a part of the dream that started all this craziness.

Hopeful for some answers, he hurried across the overgrown lawn and climbed the porch steps.

The house was in fairly poor shape.  It needed a fresh coat of paint years ago and several of the windows had been boarded up.  But he had no interest in discussing good housekeeping.

He knocked on the door.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Excuse me, sir?  I need some help.”

Still nothing.

“Hello?”  He pressed his forehead to the screen door and peered inside.  The living room was sparsely furnished and lacked any kind of decoration.  It looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.  He pulled the door open and leaned over the threshold.  A musty smell met his nose.  “Hello?”

He stepped off the porch and stood in the doorway, listening.  The house was eerily silent.  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that there was a thick layer of dust over everything.  No one seemed to have lived here for quite some time.

But where did that man go?  He couldn’t have simply disappeared.

Or maybe he could have.  Stranger things had happened already today.

“Hello?  Can anybody help me?”

There was not a single sound to be heard.

“Where the hell did you go?” he breathed.

He walked through the living room and into the kitchen.  There were no appliances except for a very old refrigerator.  The shelves that he could see were bare.  An old, rusty bread pan had been left on the counter next to the empty sink.  The dust here was undisturbed.

At the far end of the kitchen was a door, but he couldn’t make it open.  If the man left through here, he must have locked it behind him somehow.

He returned to the living room and peered down the hallway.  He could see a bathroom and a single bedroom.  This house certainly didn’t offer much in the way of space.  It wasn’t much bigger than his and Karen’s first apartment.

He walked to the bathroom and flipped the light switch.  In case the empty kitchen and accumulated dust hadn’t been enough for him, the lack of power confirmed that this was no one’s permanent residence.

He stood in the hallway for a moment, trying to piece together what had happened so far.  Even ignoring the dreams and the weird compulsion to drive out to this freaky backwoods, there was plenty to think about.  Was someone screwing with his head?

That old woman…  Ethan’s wife.  She’d mentioned another man.  “Him.”  Could the vanishing figure he followed from the barn to this house have been the very same man who had frightened her yesterday?  He hadn’t seen anything like the invisible fog that she had described, but he’d only caught the two brief glimpses.

He stepped into the bedroom and looked around.  The bed was stripped down to a stained mattress with broken down springs.  There was an old wardrobe against one wall.  The only other thing in the room was an old, tarnished mirror hanging on the wall opposite the doorway.

He walked over to the mirror and gazed at himself.

It was now that a thought occurred to him.  The whole time he was in the barn, everything he saw also emerged from the buried memory of his dream.  But here, inside this house, he had no such recollections.  In fact, he didn’t remember the tall, bearded man.  He recalled exiting the barn and walking out into the tall grass and bright sunshine and that was all.  The rest of the dream remained clouded in his memory.

What did that mean?

A horrible feeling began to creep into his gut again.  But this was different than what he felt as he entered the barn.  This was much worse, much more urgent.

A thought occurred to him:  If this place wasn’t in his dream, then maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here.

He turned away from the mirror and began to walk toward the door, eager to leave these empty rooms, even if it meant returning to that nightmare barn.  But as he passed in front of the wardrobe, the doors burst open and something shot out at him.  An awful, convulsing shape exploded outward, snarling viciously.

Eric cried out and stumbled away from it, backing himself into the corner behind the bed.

Impossibly, the gnarled shape unfolded itself from the cramped confines of the wardrobe.  It was difficult to make out.  The thing was almost entirely black, seemingly enfolded in its own shadows, with bright red, glistening streaks undulating across its oily flesh.  Every time he thought he could almost discern its shape, it changed, warping and flexing and coiling itself.

Something that looked like a hand with dozens of taloned fingers blossomed from the black and crimson mass and reached across the room for him.

Fairly certain that Narnia was not where it intended to take him, Eric leapt onto the stained mattress and threw himself across the bed and onto the floor on the other side.  A blood-chilling roar shook the room as he scrambled back to his feet and bolted for the door.

He saw something from the corner of his eye and barely managed to duck out of the way as a heavy mass passed over his head.

Behind him, he heard the bed crash against the wall.

Somehow making it to the door, he ran down the short hallway, past the bathroom and into the living room before daring to look back over his shoulder.

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t.  A horrid mass of snaking black and blood-red flesh was boiling from the bedroom door, wicked claws tearing open the wallpaper and the carpet, decimating the plaster ceiling tiles.  In the very center of the mass, a horrid face snarled at him, its gaping mouth revealing countless gnashing teeth.

Terrified out of his mind, Eric ran screaming through the screen door and onto the porch, where he found himself directly in the path of a charging bulldozer.

Chapter Six

Coherent thought failing him, Eric reacted less on calculated strategy than on pure instinct and adrenaline.  Uttering a startled and, to his credit, a rather creative curse, he turned and leapt over the porch railing with the kind of grace he hadn’t demonstrated in at least ten years.  And then he sprawled face-first into the grass with exactly the kind of grace befitting him these days.

Behind him, the wooden porch burst into splinters against the onslaught of the dozer’s blade.

Even over the roar of the engine and the resounding crash of cold steel against breaking wood, Eric could hear the thing that came out of the wardrobe.  A terrible, rage-filled howl cut through the air and seemed to carve its way into his very soul.

Then there was only the thrumming roar of the machine.

Then even that sputtered into silence.

“You okay?”

Eric sat up and turned around to see what the hell had just happened.  The first thing he saw was that it was not a bulldozer that had nearly flattened him as he fled the farmhouse after all, but rather an ordinary tractor with an impressive hydraulic blade mounted on its front.  The blade was now firmly pressed against the front door of the house, preventing the wardrobe monster from following him.

He had no idea what was keeping it from lunging through one of the house’s windows instead.  It had been fully capable of throwing the bed across the room and tearing apart the hallway.  But the house seemed to have fallen utterly silent in the wake of the tractor’s unexpected assault.

The next thing his racing mind took in was the old man climbing down from the tractor’s seat, the man who had likely just saved his life, but just as easily could have squashed him into jelly.  All the easier for the monster to chew.

He was a tall, slender man, with hard, sun-beaten skin wearing dark, oversized glasses and a blue and white cap.  “When I saw you go in there, I thought you were done for.”

“Guess I almost was.”  He recalled looking back down the hallway and seeing that awful face clawing after him.  He also recalled, now that the gripping panic had subsided and he was thinking back on it without the mortal fear of his imminent and violent death, that the screams he was spouting at that moment weren’t exactly the manliest of cries.

Well, at least he hadn’t wet himself.  That would have to do, he supposed.

“Didn’t Annette warn you about leaving the path?”

“Annette?”

The old man cocked his head, lifted his hat and ran a hand through his thick, gray hair.  “No.  I suppose she didn’t.”

Eric’s eyes drifted back to the ruined porch.  What was keeping that thing inside?  He couldn’t think of a single reason why a thing like that wouldn’t still be tearing after him, yet the old man didn’t seem remotely concerned about standing this close to the house.

“I guess she’s still going on about Ethan.”

Ethan?  Ethan was the old woman’s husband, he recalled.  Now he understood.  She was Annette.

“She never accepted it.  He’s been gone a while now.”

At this, Eric turned and met the old man’s eyes.  Ethan was dead?  Suddenly, he remembered the way she kept staring at the shirts as she hung them up, that profoundly sad look in her eyes.  She talked about her father, and made it sound like she was worried that she might lose Ethan the same way.  She even said something about giving him a red ribbon for good luck.  But Ethan was already dead and gone.  That was perhaps the saddest thing he had heard in a long time.

“Let’s see if we can keep you on the path from now on, okay?”

Eric took a step back, surprised.  “What?  Oh.  No.  No way.  I’m done with this nonsense.  I mean…what the hell?  I was just attacked by a goddamn…”  He thrust his finger toward the farmhouse several times, his mouth moving with words he couldn’t find.  Then he pressed his hand to his face and rubbed at his eyes.  “What…?  What was that thing?  Exactly?”

“Not sure what you call it,” said the old man.  “Just something he left behind when he came through here.”

“‘He?’”

“The other guy.  Scary as all kinds of hell.”

“Looks like he’s half-hidden in fog, but there isn’t any fog?”

“That’s him.  At least Annette gave you something.  He passed through here yesterday afternoon.  Left you that little surprise.”  He gestured toward the barn and added, “Left that, too.”

Eric turned and saw a man walking toward them from the barn.  It was the same man he saw before, the one he followed into the house.  Tall, broad-shouldered, young, with a full beard.  Before he could even begin to wonder how he had made his way back from the house to the barn, the man faded away before his eyes and was gone.

He blinked hard, as if that might correct the strangeness of what he had seen.

“Over there,” said the old man, gesturing toward the house now.

When he turned, he saw the man again, this time walking through the dozer blade as if it wasn’t there and the porch were still under his feet rather than folded into a gnarled pile of splinters in the tall grass.

“Can’t hurt you.  Not directly, anyway.  It’s residual.  Repeats itself over and over again, several times every hour, ever since he came through here.  You’ll have to watch out for those.”

“Clearly.”  Again, Eric’s eyes drifted to the farm house.

“It can’t get out,” the old man assured him.  “It’s lost you.  Unless you go back inside and stir it up again, it’s done with you.  By the way, name’s Grant.  Grant Stolyen.”

“Eric Fortrell.”

“Eric.  Good to meet you.  Sorry it’s not the best of circumstances.”

“Yeah.  About that…”

“You want to know what the hell is going on?”

“I do, actually.  I mean…  Everything was fine until three nights ago.  Then I wake up from a dream I can’t even remember and every waking thought is ‘I have to go!  Now!’”

Grant nodded.  “Three nights ago.  So you ignored it?”

“Tried to.”

“That’s why you’re so late then.”

“Late?”

“You should’ve been here two days ago.”

Eric recalled that Annette told him basically the same thing.  “Late for what?  What is all this?”

“Sorry, but I can’t explain all of it.  Don’t actually understand all of it myself, to be honest.  But I can try my best.  You’ve probably noticed the cold spots by now.”

He nodded.  “And the stunted corn in the field.  Light seems funny there, too.  What is that?  Some kind of pollution?”

“Nothing so simple.”

“And all those mutant animals in your barn.  I’ll be honest, I was starting to imagine I’d find a crashed UFO or something.”

“Again, nothing so simple, I’m afraid.”

“Right.  Why would it be that simple?”

“And it’s not actually my barn.  I’m the neighbor.  I just keep an eye on things, but I don’t go in the barn no more.  Creepy bunch of bastards in there, ain’t they?  Give me the creeps.  I kind of figured they’d die if I didn’t take care of them, but apparently they don’t need cared for.”

“Nobody feeds them?”

“Not that I know of.  Weird, huh?”

“Very.”

“Anyway, I was talking about the cold spots.  Those’re the places where you’re inside the fissure.”

“Fissure?”

“Yeah.  Like a crack between worlds.”

“Worlds?  What, like a wormhole?”  Again, he thought of aliens and extra-terrestrial spacecraft.

“No.  You’re thinking of planets.  I said worlds.  Dimensions, if you prefer.”

“Like parallel realities?”

“Sort of.  Yeah.  There’s our world, the one we know, and then there’s this other one.  Scary-ass place, apparently.  I think it’s where those things in the barn came from.”

Eric stared at him, trying to wrap his head around the very idea of this simple-talking old man explaining rents between alternate realities to him.

“Don’t think I don’t know how it sounds.”

“Sounds crazy.”

“Yeah.  But you’ve already seen it for yourself, haven’t you?”

“I guess I have.”

“When you cross into the cold spots, into the fissure, you’re actually in some kind of gray zone between the two worlds.  It’s like a border realm.  Things can move back and forth there.  You’ll see some scary things there, let me warn you.  And if you go too far into those areas, you could find yourself all the way out in the other world.  And that’s not somewhere you ever want to be.”

Eric nodded.  It sounded like good advice.

“You’ll want to stick to the path or you’ll never get where you’re going.”

“And where exactly is it I’m supposed to be going?”

“To the cathedral.”

The cathedral.  That’s what Annette said, too.

“That’s where the singularity is.”

“The singularity?”

“The exact point where the two worlds meet.  The rest of this stuff is just what bleeds through the crack that runs out from that point.”

“And if I find this cathedral?  Then what?  What am I supposed to do there?”

“Hell if I know.  I’m just here to keep the path open for you.”

“And if I refuse to do it?  If I just turn around and walk back home?”

Grant looked surprised, as if he’d never once considered the possibility that anyone wouldn’t want to do these things.  “Then he’d win.”

“The foggy guy.”

“Yeah.  Him.  Course, he might win anyway, with you running so late.”

“And what happens if he wins?”

“I couldn’t tell you.  But I’m sure it’d be bad.”  And the look on his face suggested that he did, indeed believe it would be quite bad.

“Right.”  Eric took his cell phone from his pocket and checked to see if he had a signal yet.  He didn’t.

“That’ll come back a little farther up the path.”

“I haven’t decided to do this.  I don’t know how much of this nonsense I even believe.”

Grant shrugged.  “You believed enough to come here in the first place.”

“I believed I was having a stupid recurring nightmare that was making me feel crazy.”

“But it wasn’t just a nightmare, was it?  You’ve already found that much out without my help.”

That was true, but he still had no intention of taking on another wardrobe monster.

“Besides, the barn doesn’t always work so good going the other way.  It might not spit you back out in Annette’s field.”

“I had no intention of going back in there with those things.”  But as Eric turned, he realized that the cornfield was gone.  The area behind the barn was now densely wooded.  In fact, now that he was looking, he realized that the barn from which he’d emerged was not the same one he’d entered.  This barn was much smaller and not nearly as old and rundown.  “Wait…”

Grant laughed.  “Weird, right?”

“Where’s the other barn?”

“Annette’s place is about fifty miles southeast of here.”

“Fifty miles?”

“Give or take.”

“But…  My car…”

“It’ll be fine.”

Eric stared at the barn, trying to wrap his head around the idea of having traveled fifty miles by merely walking through a barn.

Two barns?

“But I meant what I said.  I really wouldn’t recommend trying to go back through the way you came.  I’m not sure where people end up, but sometimes they never come back.  They might even end up in that other world.  If so, I don’t envy them.”

“So you’re saying I can’t actually go back?”

Grant stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and glanced away.  “Well, you can.  Technically speaking.  I mean…  You could call for a ride.  I could show you the way to the highway.  You just can’t walk back the way you came.”

“And if that’s what I chose to do, you’d let me?”

Grant sighed.  “I can’t make you go.  Only you can make that decision.  But you need to understand that this is important.  Without you…he wins.”

Again with the “he wins” stuff.

“And what?” Eric pressed.  “The world ends?  We’re plunged into eternal darkness?  The Packers start a hundred-year losing streak?  What?  I mean, who is this guy?  You guys are talking about him like he’s the devil or something.”

“I don’t know who he is.  I don’t know what he wants.  But he’s bad.  And he’s trying to get to the cathedral right now.”

“But even if I get to the cathedral first, you can’t even tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“No, I can’t.  Only you know that.”

“No, I don’t.  Remember?  I’m the one who doesn’t know anything about what’s going on here?  I’m the one who just walked into that house and almost got eaten by Anti-Narnia?”

“You saw it in the dream that brought you here.”

“Oh.  Well that’s convenient, since I can’t remember that dream!”

“Don’t you?”

“No!  Or…”  Eric looked back toward the barn.  “No.  I did remember some of it…”

“It’ll unravel itself as you go,” Grant explained.  “By the time you reach the cathedral, you’ll remember it all.  That’s how you’ll know what to do when you get there.”

Eric stared silently toward the barn, considering.  Now that he thought about it, he realized that he could recall seeing this second barn in his dream as well.  In fact, he even remembered meeting Grant…except there had been no tractor involved in their meeting…because he’d never gone inside the house…  They met in the yard, instead.

“And if you turn back,” Grant added.  “I can’t promise you the dream will ever stop recurring.  Even long after it’s too late.”

Eric met the old man’s eyes and saw the depth of his emotions.  He was truly sorry to have to say these things.

“This might be your only chance to be free of it.”

Eric sighed.  Continue this insanity or never sleep through the night again.  He’d had better options given to him.  But the choice seemed pretty clear.  The whole reason he came here in the first place was to try and rid himself of his recurring dream.

“Okay,” he said.  “Show me where to go next.”