“Huh.  Well I’m just happy you’re here.”

“Me too!”

“So what do you think I should do now?”

“What did you do in your dream?”

Eric tried to remember.  “I went right,” he realized.

“I think that’s your best bet.”

He nodded.  At least that way, he could let Dream Eric lead the way for him.

“I’ll hang up so you can watch for trouble.  I’ll text you if I need to tell you anything.”

“Sounds good.”

He disconnected the call, but kept the phone clenched in his hand.  He wanted to read anything Isabelle had to say to him immediately.  And he wanted it at the ready in case the lights went back out, which didn’t seem at all unlikely, given the special nature of the light source.

The next room was mostly empty.  An office of some sort sat in darkness on the other side of a door to the right.  To the left was another corridor.  It, too, was dark, but the room at the far end was brightly lit.

In his dream, he had wandered around the open rooms, trying his best to see the far ends of these empty spaces.  There was no machinery in the dream.  It was all residual, just like the people and the light.  The factory had been cleaned out long ago.

He recalled peering into several offices and storage rooms, but ultimately he made his way down the left corridor.

As he turned around, a skinny woman with a remarkably unattractive face hurried past him and vanished halfway across the room.  A moment later, a very fat man materialized from thin air just a few feet from where the woman disappeared and laboriously strolled out onto the production floor Eric just left.

A few short hours ago, that would’ve blown his mind.

He remembered being jumpy.  In the dream, he’d been mostly calm throughout the day, sometimes in stark contrast to what he felt here in the waking world.  He was never attacked by the wardrobe golem.  He never saw the coyote-deer while trying to cross the gut-wrenchingly scary bridge.  Nothing terrifying waited for him between the resort and Altrusk’s house.  He’d even crossed the lake without encountering Furious George.  Dream Eric had been surprisingly lucky.  But whatever he encountered during the part of his dream that he could not quite recall had frightened him as badly as any of the things he’d encountered today and the result was that he was nearly sick with fear as he wandered these dark, deserted chambers in search of the way forward.

This did not in any way help him feel any calmer now.  If anything, a worried Dream Eric made the situation much worse.  He felt as though he would remember something bad happening any moment, at which point the bad thing would happen here and now, with no time to defend against it.

Yet as he made his way down the corridor, nothing terrible happened to either Eric.

Although there were bright lights at both ends of the corridor, he found that very little of it seemed to reach beyond the doorways, so that he found himself illuminating the floor before him with the cell phone’s digital display to ensure against any unforeseen hazards.

The next room was a great, empty space, likely a large storage area of some kind.  Once upon a time, forklifts probably prowled up and down the corridor, moving things around, keeping the production lines running.  But now the room was empty.  Three men stood in the middle of the room.  Two of them wore hair nets.  One of them was talking, yet he made no sound.

His phone chimed.

SOMETHING SEEMS WRONG

“No kidding,” he told the phone.

BE CAREFUL.

“I will.”

Dream Eric had wandered around this empty room, exploring, searching for the path that would carry him forward.  Eventually, he made his way to the far corner, where a set of steps led up to the second floor.

Now, the Eric that was running two days late walked past the three men and headed for the stairs.

Something felt wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He glanced back one last time at the three men conversing silently in the middle of the room and then ascended the stairs and entered a long, dark hallway.

In his dream, he peered into each room, probed it with the light from his phone and moved on.  Now he used the returning memory of the dream to avoid these rooms.  He was not at all eager to step through a door and find himself face-to-horrible-face with another golem.

And if he were to be completely honest with himself, this seemed like the perfect place for a golem, as far from any of the outer doors as possible, completely lacking in places to run and hide, plenty of dead ends in which he could find himself cornered.

Apparently, the residuals weren’t restricted to the illuminated rooms.  His light fell on a man and a woman carrying on a silent conversation in the middle of the hallway, then an older man carefully examining a wall where a bulletin board must have once hung.

He followed his dream self down the hallway and into another large, empty room, his eyes wide open, his cell phone illuminating dreadfully little of the space before him.  The fear he’d felt in the dream became contagious.  A sick feeling began to spread outward from deep in his belly.

Yet nothing happened.

He made his way deeper into this dark room, past a young man busying himself with invisible work, through another door into another hallway and finally down a narrow set of stairs into yet another unlit room where he found a pretty young woman who looked as if she might be flirting with someone, except whoever she was chatting with was not there.

From here, another darkened corridor led to an illuminated room that he quickly recalled was the same room where the three men were talking.

But when he returned, only two of the men were standing there.  The one without the hair net had either wandered off or vanished.

In the dream, he returned to the first production floor he’d found and made his way down the other darkened corridor.

Sometimes the dream came to him in bursts, giving him ample time to see what awaited him.  Other times, he was forced to relive the events of his dream as they occurred.  It seemed to be particularly stubborn in revealing the secrets of this factory to him.

It was weird recalling the dream when so much looked so different.  It was distracting.

He made his way back to the production floor and looked around at the dozen silent workers busying themselves with the empty line, going through the motions they went through ten or twenty years ago, oblivious to the fact that this factory would one day replay their actions for a stranger in torn and bloody clothes.

His cell phone chimed again.

I FEEL SOMETHING

Eric glanced around him at the room.  He tried to recall everything he saw in his dream, but too much had changed between then and now.  Thanks to the foggy man, it was almost impossible to know what was real and what wasn’t, much less tell if something had changed.

I DON’T THINK YOU’RE ALONE

Swearing louder than he’d intended (he kept forgetting that the only sounds in this place were those he made), Eric turned and scanned the room.

In the dream, he’d continued on to the left.  But he hesitated to go in that direction now.  Was it another golem?  How would he deal with it this time?  He had neither a tractor nor any dynamite.  And he didn’t know how to get to the roof.  No foul-mouthed father was here to help him.  All he had was a cell phone and a little girl in Australia.

Residual remnants of people who hadn’t been here in years walked silently past him, carrying on their endless business as if he wasn’t there.  Because he wasn’t there.  And they weren’t here.

It was strange being all alone in a room filled with people.

“What am I supposed to do?” he wondered.

A young woman walked away from the line for no apparent reason and vanished into the doorway through which he’d entered the production floor.  A middle-aged man simply vanished from his work station and a much younger man appeared a few feet to his left, silently nodding as if spoken to, though no one was talking to him.  Farther away, a grumpy-looking woman with curly blonde hair escaping from under her hair net hurried around the machinery as a heavyset man strolled thoughtlessly along the isle straight toward her.  The two came within a fraction of an inch of colliding and then both of them abruptly vanished, exactly as they did when he touched one of them.