Though it seemed impossible, Eric was sure that he was referring to the events of his dream, when the little man saved his life.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Eric left through the front door, just as he did in his dream.  In both time frames, no big, floppy-eared cat waited to tear out his intestines.

He glanced up and down the narrow blacktop road—not one car had driven by since he arrived—and walked around to the back of the station.  There, he found the narrow game trail, just as the little man had promised.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that he never asked the man’s name.

He considered going back, but decided to simply keep walking.  If he survived his journey to the cathedral, maybe he’d see him on his way out.  If not, what did it really matter whether he knew the man’s name?

Pushing past the overlapping branches, he made his way along the narrow trail, down a long and shallow hill, across a densely forested gully and up over the next rise.

His cell phone rang.  It was Isabelle.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“It’s like we got cut off.  But I didn’t think that could happen.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Did you catch all that weirdness back there?”

“Some of it.  But it was weird.  It was like you were in a cave or something.  I could barely reach your mind.”

“Strange.”

“Very.”

“You were saying there was something odd about the gas station before we got disconnected.”

“I was.  I don’t know what it is, but there’s something very different about that place.  I don’t think it’s a part of the fissure.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know.  It’s just…  Odd.”

“Well, it’s behind me now.”

“It is.  I should hang up.  Karen’ll be calling you soon.”

“I’m sure she will.”

“Bye.”

Eric disconnected the phone, but didn’t bother sticking it back in his pocket.  Now that his signal had returned, he saw that he had eight missed calls.  Karen had already been trying to reach him.  And sure enough, within five minutes the phone began to buzz again.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m in the woods.”

“How’s the dream coming along?  Remember anything interesting yet?”

“Interesting?  More like disturbing.  Apparently, two days ago I would’ve been mauled and almost killed by some kind of freaky cat.”

“What?”

“Crazy scary, right?”

“What happened?”

Eric told her about his trip through the canyon and the disturbing memories that churned up as he made his way along the stream.  He then told her about his visit with the diminutive gas station attendant and his curious smile.

“So weird…  Who do you think he was?”

“I have absolutely no idea.  I guess he’s like the old folks.  A caretaker of some sort.”

Karen considered this for a moment.  “Could be.  But he sounds more important than a caretaker.”

“He does.  Maybe he’s the head caretaker.  The guy in charge of it all.”

“Maybe.”

“I couldn’t even begin to guess.  This is all way over my head.”

“The cathedral is starting to sound like a crazy scary place.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“What did he mean when he said everything changes there?”

“You keep asking me like I’m going to have an answer for you.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.  I’m just saying that this is seriously beyond my field of study.”

“You didn’t take that class in theoretical dimensional compression physics?  How irresponsible of you.”

“I know.  It’s days like these when those fluff classes really come back to bite you.”

“Slacking never pays.”

“It really doesn’t.”

Both of them fell silent for a moment as Eric made his way deeper into the forest.

“Are you all right?” Karen asked finally.

“I’m fine.  I’m just a little shaken.”

“That sounded like a hell of a nightmare.”

“It was.  It was so vivid.  I can’t figure out how I managed to get up and walk out of the gas station in the state I was in.”

“Well, it was only a dream.”

“No.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”

Karen sighed.  “I guess it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t real.  But it was real, too.  It’s…”

“Totally insane.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“I think I see something up ahead.  I’m going to hang up for a little bit again.”

“Okay.  I’ll call you later.”  Apparently, she was done even pretending she could count on him to call her back in a timely fashion.

“Sure.  Bye.”

Pocketing the phone, Eric pushed through the dense foliage and stepped out into a wide field where tall grass and weeds struggled for real estate with seven impressively long rows of old and rusting automobile carcasses.  An old, red Firebird, half hidden in the tall grass, stood facing him.  The yellow bird painted across the vehicle’s distinct hood stared back at him.

This was obviously the salvage yard the gas station attendant told him to expect.  But it clearly hadn’t been used in many years.  The newest vehicle he could see was a seventy-seven Chrysler.

There didn’t even appear to be an obvious driveway by which any of these vehicles might have arrived here.  It had long ago become overgrown with brush to the point of vanishing into the trees, so that these cars looked as if they had simply dropped out of the sky.

Cautious and alert, Eric made his way deeper into the salvage yard.

It only took a few minutes before he heard the first unnatural sound.  Something rustled in the grass between two rusty, Chevrolets.  Only a moment later, something moved in the next row.  He stopped and scanned the area, but he could see nothing.

Then he glimpsed movement in the grass.

Scroungers.

The gas station attendant warned him there would be scroungers.  He hadn’t bothered to tell him what a scrounger was, and Eric hadn’t bothered to press the little man for the information, assuming—and rightfully so, it seemed—that he would see for himself soon enough.

The little man had, however, assured him that there was nothing to be feared from these creatures, assuming he did nothing stupid to provoke them.  But he couldn’t help but feel that he must make a very tempting target standing out here in the middle of all these rusted-out vehicles, isolated from the rest of the world.

He turned away from the noises and made his way up the row, away from the unseen scroungers.  He slipped between two long-silent trucks and made his way toward the middle of the field.

Several more times he heard something moving in and around the vehicles he passed.  Once, something scurried away almost underfoot and he barely resisted the urge to cry out and jump around like a frightened little girl.

Yet the things manage to remain frustratingly out of sight.

While he honestly didn’t care to see any more strange and unusual creatures—he’d seen enough already to last him a lifetime—he found that he didn’t care much for not being able to see what was moving around him.  Without his eyes to size up the beasts, he was left with only his imagination to fill in the blanks.  And his imagination had become vastly more frightening since he began this journey.  All sorts of horrid visions passed through his head, from giant, venomous snakes to great, bloated cockroaches, his mind was more than happy to churn out one horror after another to guess what awful surprises crawled unseen in the grass at his feet.

And his dream did not help soothe his curiosity.  As the memories unraveled themselves, he recalled himself moving through this field in a mental fog, his mind numbed to the horrors of unseen creatures scurrying around him.

Awake and in the present, Eric continued on, trying to ignore the dream.  He didn’t want to see the dream now.  It wasn’t doing him any good.  In the dream he kept looking at his hand.  It looked so small.  So wrong.