They didn’t match.  It seemed they weren’t all from the same point in time.

By the far wall, a man in a hard hat was working on one of the machines, oblivious to the fact that the machine currently appeared to be in operation.

A thin man without a hairnet entered from the next room and strolled silently toward him, looking as if he was on his way home for the day.

From the darkened corridor to his left, where Dream Eric had wandered in search of the way out of here, a security guard strolled into the room with his flashlight, apparently going about his rounds in the dark after hours.

Taking a deep breath, Eric set off toward the darkened half of the factory.

He passed a very tall man with a very thick mustache, but found no golem.

At the end of the corridor was a large, empty space.  Another corridor led to another illuminated area far to the right.  Between here and there was only more darkness.

He stood against the wall for a moment, remembering the dream, letting it reveal the room for him.

Phantom workers walked past him, some of whom he’d seen before in other areas.  There was the heavyset woman he followed into that first office.  And the large man who had nearly swatted him with his shovel.  He watched them as he recalled wandering around this room in his dream, revealing nothing of interest before setting off down the next corridor.

Eric continued on as well and soon found himself in what appeared to be the packaging area of the plant.  Here, silent machinery thrummed and immaterial workers prowled the lines, tending to invisible product.

Only about half of the machinery had returned here, however.  The conveyor belts abruptly began and ended over an empty floor.

Eric walked up to one of the conveyor belts and watched it run.  It looked so real.  And yet no machine in the world could run so silently.  He reached out and tried to touch it.  The entire line was gone just like the people he’d tried to touch.

A woman who had been standing beside the machine continued working, unfazed by the disappearance of her workstation.

He looked around the room.  He recalled peering into the corners, probing the vacant darkness.  Again and again, nothing was here.

Another corridor went on into the darkness ahead.  He turned and walked toward it.

He was ready to be gone from this place.

What was the foggy man up to here?  What was the point of bringing back all these people and machines?  Was he trying to hide something?  There had been more than enough opportunities to spring a golem on him.  If the purpose was simply to ambush him, why bring back so much of the factory?

A young man in a black tee shirt and dark jeans with no hairnet was walking toward him from the next corridor.  He recognized him.  This was one of the three men standing together in the storage room where he ascended the stairs to the second floor a short while ago, the one who had disappeared by the time he came back around.

Perhaps he was some kind of supervisor.  There might be offices down here, where hairnets didn’t have to be worn when the factory was up and running.  He didn’t like the wide open spaces of the factory floors, but the idea of searching dozens of smaller rooms was no improvement.

No longer concerned with avoiding the residual people, he passed within a few inches of the young man and had taken a couple steps before it occurred to him that he felt a breeze as he went by.

Startled by this realization, he turned to take another look at the young man.

Before he could face the stranger who walked among the ghosts, something struck him in the side of his head and the world swam away.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The world spun chaotically around him, swirling through his clouded mind as he struggled against the sleep that dragged him down into the darkness.

Pain filled his head.  He couldn’t think.

Eric had a vague sense of being dragged across the floor by his feet.  But that didn’t make any sense.  He was terrified, though he couldn’t seem to remember why.

A door rattled loudly open.  The noise seemed thunderous.

Sunlight flooded over him, stabbing at his eyes when he tried to open them.

He fell.  He landed hard on the ground and pain exploded from his head and shoulder.  The world swam briefly into focus.

Blacktop before his eyes.

He tried to move, but he felt so heavy.  He squinted up, trying to see where he was.

A pair of legs.

A voice.  Someone said something, but he couldn’t understand the words.  He still couldn’t think.

Then something struck the ground in front of his face.

Darkness came again, chasing away the sunlight, washing away the pain, leaving only peaceful sleep.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The pain came back.

Eric awoke to a harsh buzzing noise that sent jagged shards of pain deep into his brain.

He opened his eyes, squinting into the blinding sunlight, confused.

What happened?

Where was he?

What was that awful noise?

Gradually, his eyes focused and he found himself on the ground, looking at his cell phone, which was lying on the asphalt next to his face.

It was vibrating.

Grimacing at the pain, he reached out and picked it up.  Immediately, it quit ringing and chimed at him.

He had a new text message.

Groaning, he sat up and looked at the screen.

THANK GOD!

As soon as he had read the message, the phone chimed again and the message changed.

THAT WAS SCARY!

“What happened?” Eric asked.

Again the phone chimed.

YOU WERE AMBUSHED

“Who?  The foggy man?”

WHO ELSE?

Who else indeed?  Eric rubbed at the swollen knot on the side of his head.  Slowly it came back to him.  The factory.  The residuals.  The young man in the black tee shirt and jeans.

A real person hiding among the residuals…

He felt as if he should’ve known.  But he’d been expecting more than a sucker punch.  He thought he’d find a golem.  He never expected to be attacked by a mere human.

The phone chimed again.

I DIDN’T SEE HIM IN TIME

“That’s okay.  Me neither.”  Eric realized that he had begun talking directly to Isabelle.  The phone did nothing but relay her messages to him.  Even from the other side of the world, she could hear him.  If his head wasn’t pounding, he might have found this unbelievably surreal.

YOU OKAY?

“I think so.  I have a pretty hard head.”  He rose shakily to his feet and groaned.  “Good thing, too.  What the hell did he hit me with?”

I DON’T KNOW

Looking around, Eric found that he was outside one of the factory’s loading docks.  The door was rolled up behind him.  He recalled being dragged across the floor.  There was a metallic rattling noise that must have been the door opening.  Bright sunlight.  Falling.  Landing on the hard asphalt.

The bastard tossed him out the loading dock door.

When he first looked down on this factory from the hilltop, it was standing amid hayfields with an old, paved road leading away from it.  But he could see no hayfields or roads from here.  A rocky valley stretched out before him.  Tall pine trees stood scattered across the terrain.  Once again, he appeared to have been transported out of Wisconsin and into a distant mountain range.

He recognized this area.  Eventually, he had found these doors in his dream.  He’d continued onward from here, along the valley.  He was back on the path.

Why the hell would someone club him from behind and then drop him off right where he’d wanted to be in the first place?  What was the point?

“Any idea where he went?”

I THINK HE WENT ON AHEAD

Eric gazed forward.  An odd-looking lizard was slowly making its way through the weeds where the broken blacktop gave way to hard earth and rock.  It was at least twenty inches long and bright red.  It had a long horn protruding from the top of its head.  He couldn’t recall ever having seen anything like it before.  It likely existed solely in the fissure.