He’d received other, smaller injuries as well, including a gash in his ankle, which he received when he lost his shoe, and two bloodied elbows from rolling around on the rough shingles. He had friction burns all over his stomach and lower back. His face was scraped up, his nose and forehead raw.
There was a first aid kit in the glove box of the PT Cruiser, he recalled. As if that would do him any good.
He pulled his cell phone out, confirmed that he still had no signal and then pocketed it again.
He was on his own up here.
The cuts on his shoulder were the ones he needed to worry about. He rolled up his sleeve so that the fabric covered the entire injury and then pressed his hand against it and stood up.
The first thing to do was find a way down from here. He couldn’t go back the way he came, obviously, but perhaps there was another way down. Preferably one that didn’t involve breaking both his legs.
Chapter Eleven
Circling around the taller, middle section of the building’s roof, Eric finally located a window he was able to break.
Slipping inside, he found himself in a small, unfurnished bedroom. It was dark in here, gloomy, despite the white walls and the bright sunshine outside.
No one came to investigate the sound of breaking glass, but he hadn’t expected to be confronted. The overgrown yard had suggested that no one had been here for a very long time. And if all the noise of the monster’s horrible cries, his own screaming and cursing and the stomping around on the roof hadn’t alerted anyone to his presence, much less the deafening cacophony of the collapsing scaffolding, then it was fairly safe to assume that no adequately concerned homeowner was currently present.
In his defense, however, he was courteous enough to at least knock at the window before kicking in the glass.
Besides, anyone who could afford to build a place like this certainly wouldn’t miss the cost of replacing one window. Insurance would probably cover it anyway.
Still, he couldn’t help feeling a little guilty.
Quickly, not caring to linger any longer here than was absolutely necessary, he made his way through the door and into the hallway.
Like with the roof, nothing here was remotely familiar. Perfect, reliable, two-days-ago Eric, who didn’t put off getting in his car and driving to Weirdness, Wisconsin just because that was an insane thing to do, never had to break into this building to get down off a roof. Two-days-ago Eric never got into situations like this. He was on time, he did everything right the first time and he was always Mom’s favorite.
And he didn’t get his ass handed to him by nine-foot-tall towers of yowling teeth and claws, either, apparently.
He tried to recall the things he’d remembered about the yards outside. Everything he’d seen had suggested that this building was empty, deserted. But it wasn’t completely rundown. It was relatively clean in here. Just a heavy layer of dust and a few small cracks in the plaster.
For the most part, the house still looked new. But as he peered into one room after another, he found them all completely empty, as if no one had ever actually moved in.
But why spend this kind of money and never even use the place? What happened here?
Still keeping pressure on his bleeding shoulder, Eric made his way along the silent hallway, peering into bedrooms as he went, searching for a stocked bathroom. But although most rooms had private baths, none of them had any towels or running water.
At the end of the long hallway, he found a stairwell that took him down to an elegant but eerily empty foyer. Ignoring the exterior doors for now, he made his way deeper into the house again, peeking into room after room, until he at last found a guest bathroom with a towel.
With no water, he was unable to clean his wounds, but he was at least able to tear the towel into strips and use it to wrap his bleeding shoulder.
He probably needed stitches, but he doubted very much that this strange journey through the fissure would include a rest stop in a hospital emergency room. Unless of course said hospital was long deserted and haunted by demonic brain surgeons.
That wouldn’t surprise him.
Finished with his shoulder, he examined his leg and decided it was fine. The creature had only grazed him with its claw. He was more upset about the pants, which were still fairly new.
He stood up and examined his reflection in the mirror. The cut on his cheek wasn’t bad either. It, too, had already quit bleeding, but not before a large portion of the left side of his face had become covered in gore.
He looked awful. He didn’t exude any of the manliness of a bloodied action hero fresh from a hard-won victory. He just looked like an out-of-shape extra in a bad horror movie.
He took the last of the towel, spit into it and began wiping at the blood. It was now, as he leaned close to the mirror, trying to see through the gloom, that he glimpsed someone standing in the doorway, watching him.
Simultaneously jumping, shouting, cursing and flailing, he reeled around to see who was there.
But he was alone.
He ran from the bathroom and looked around, but there was no one there.
“Hello?”
The house remained silent. Perfectly silent, now that he was listening to it. Not a sound reached his ears but the thumping of his own heart.
A shiver raced through him.
Had he only imagined the figure in the doorway? He hadn’t seen it very clearly. There were no lights. The bathroom was dark. And it was only there for a split second.
Standing there, wondering if it was even possible to imagine something so startlingly realistic, he remembered what Grant told him about using the memories from his dream as a guide. If he couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t somewhere he visited in the dream. If he didn’t go there in his dream, then it was presumably not somewhere he would have gone on the first day. In other words, it was not somewhere he should be.
Having somehow managed to escape the foggy man’s second trap, he had assumed it was safe to linger. But he’d already determined that he never entered this house in his dream. Therefore, he was off the map.
Here there be monsters, he thought, and another violent shiver raced through him.
He was still holding the last strip from the torn towel in his hand. He glanced down at it, considering what to do with it, and decided to stuff it into his back pocket. It was no substitution for a fully stocked first-aid kit, but it was better than nothing.
Now he returned to the foyer and quickly made his way past the staircase to the front door, only to find it locked tight.
Heart sinking, he turned and pressed his back to the door, his eyes wide open.
The house was no longer silent. A low, rumbling groan now swelled through the room, as if rising from the very floor beneath his feet.
Monsters, he thought. Here there be monsters…
Chapter Twelve
This sucked.
It wasn’t even fair. He survived the foggy man’s trap. He beat the monster. All he’d wanted was to patch up his wounds and move on.
The whole room reverberated with that strange groaning. It seemed to pass right through him, shaking him all the way to his core. Suddenly, he was convinced that something very bad was going to happen if he remained here.
Where the hell was he? What was this place?
The door at his back was sealed shut. He was unable to escape that way. With no other choice left to him, he bolted back across the foyer from where he’d come, down the hallway and through the dining room into the kitchen.
Behind him, the groan swelled into an angry roar.
Spotting another door in the kitchen, Eric ran for it, jerked at the handle, but like the doors in the foyer, it wouldn’t open.
He turned and scanned the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was bare. There wasn’t even a carving knife he could pretend was an adequate weapon.