In his dream, he struggled to keep going, staggering, fighting to remain conscious.  He was beginning to think he was about to recall every detail of his own, gruesome death.

But it wasn’t long after the last remnants of the canyon were out of sight that he came across a paved, two-lane road.  And there, about a hundred yards to his right, stood a small gas station.

“I see something,” he told Isabelle.

He remembered stumbling toward this station in his dream, somehow still on his feet, desperate for help.

He also remembered what Father Billy said about being helped by the “gas station attendant” and that he would likely meet him later in his journey.  Clearly, coming across this place was no coincidence.

“That’s an odd place,” Isabelle observed.

“What?”

“There’s something strange about that place.  What is it?”

“It’s just a gas station.”

“Weird…  I couldn’t quite tell.  It’s different.”

“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.”