Eric held fast.
“Just go!” Isabelle screamed. “Leave me!”
“No! I’m taking you with me!”
“I can’t!”
“Try!”
“No! I physically can’t!”
Eric’s eyes dropped to her hand and he saw that her fingers were sinking into the door, binding her to the house. He knew she was right. Whatever happened to her, whatever Altrusk did to her, it had somehow fused her into the house. But he couldn’t bear to leave her. She didn’t belong there.
“Just go!” Isabelle screamed again. “I’ll be fine! He can’t hurt me anymore!”
The dark, snaking fingers crept up her arm and reached for his hand. In another moment, those foul tethers would coil around his wrist and he would be dragged back inside to suffer fates worse than madness and death.
“Go! Before it’s too late!”
His heart breaking, Eric let go.
The door snapped shut like a steel trap and left him standing there, staring at his own reflection in the window. Instantly, all was silent. Nothing stirred. There was no movement behind the glass. All that remained were shadows and dust. Both Altrusk and Isabelle were gone.
Feeling profoundly numb, Eric turned and gazed around. He was on the patio. He ran by here while fleeing the monster. To his left was the planter it shattered as it raced after him. Rich, dark soil and fragments of clay were spilled across the pavement. To his right was the pile of broken scaffolding.
Again, he was struck by the forgotten memories of his dream. Everything came back to him. He walked past here, calmly, curiously, wondering about the purpose of this building that looked so elegant but appeared abandoned. Nothing pursued him. Nothing shattered the planter. With no need to flee for his very life, he never climbed the scaffolding. It never collapsed. He was never stranded on the roof and therefore never needed to break into the house to get down.
He never met Isabelle.
That version of him simply walked on by, around the corner of the building, utterly and blissfully unaware.
His heart still pounding in his chest, a deep aching inside him, Eric began to walk in that direction.
The house loomed over him, monstrous in size and eerie in its silence, but otherwise perfectly unremarkable. There was absolutely no way to know that the rooms and hallways did not lead where they were supposed to, that a man who had become a monster stalked unwary trespassers…that a young girl was hopelessly trapped inside.
It was difficult to breathe.
In the dream, he’d wandered these grounds for a while before discovering the little path that weaved through the garden and into a dense thicket of trees. But because of the dream, he already knew it was there. He followed the path and left the house of Altrusk behind him forever.
Once he reached the other side of these trees, once the house was completely out of view, Eric succumbed to the weakness in his legs and sat down in the middle of the path, where he stared despairingly up at the bright sky.
The trees swayed gently in a soft breeze. A hawk was circling lazily overhead. Inexplicably, the world carried on.
His phone rang.
Apparently, he was home again.
He fished it from his pocket. It was Karen.
“Thank God, Eric. I’ve been trying to reach you for like two hours now.”
“I’m sorry.”
Apparently, something about his voice revealed his distress because she immediately asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” But his voice was unconvincing.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s gone.”
“What?”
“Isabelle. She’s gone. I couldn’t save her.”
“Baby, what are you talking about?”
“She’s just a little girl. Just a girl… And I couldn’t save her…”
“God Eric, what happened? Talk to me.”
“I never should’ve gone inside. I didn’t know. Never could’ve known. But she saved me. She saved me and I couldn’t save her.”
Karen fell quiet.
“I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s fine.”
“It’s just hard right now.”
“I can tell.”
“I just need a minute.”
“You want me to call back later?”
“No. It’s okay.” And it was. He didn’t have time to sit down and cry. He had to keep moving. The cathedral waited. The foggy man might already be there. He couldn’t stay here, couldn’t fail again.
He stood up and continued walking. “I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Just… Just talk to me for a little bit, okay?”
“Okay. Well… You want to tell me what these things are that you sent me a picture of?”
“Picture? What things? Oh!” Now he remembered. Before entering the resort’s main building, back in the world before Altrusk, while he was still speaking with Taylor, he’d snapped a picture of the three creatures that were watching them. He’d completely forgotten that he sent it. “Just some things I saw following me. Taylor says they’re harmless. Basically some freaky breed of wild dogs or something.”
“Taylor?”
“Guy I met. Friend of Grant and Annette, I guess.”
“Oh. Well I didn’t know what was going on. I got this picture and then you stopped answering your phone.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to worry you.”
“You were just gone for so long.”
“Didn’t feel like so long. What time is it?” He looked at his watch.
“Almost noon.”
That wasn’t right. “My watch says it’s not even eleven yet.”
“Well it’s almost noon here in the real world.”
Eric compared his watch to the time on the phone. They matched.
“I wasn’t gone that long…” he said. He’d lost over an hour while stuck in Altrusk’s insane house.
“What?”
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. His head hurt.
“Well I was worried. I was starting to think these things attacked you after you took the picture.”
“Like I said, I was told they’re pretty well harmless. Other things out here…not so much.”
“What other things?”
Eric told her about the abandoned nudist resort and the monster that was waiting for him behind the kitchen door. He described his terrifying flight through the garden and up onto the roof. He told her of his lucky escape. Somehow, he even managed to tell her the rest of the story as well, including his encounter with Altrusk and losing Isabelle. It all poured out of him. He couldn’t seem to help himself.
“That’s horrible,” Karen said when he’d finished. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
“Me too.” He remembered Isabelle promising him that if he became a permanent addition to the house, like her, she would keep him company, and he found himself struggling just to hold back a tear. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.
“Are you all right? How’s your shoulder?”
“It’s okay. I’ve stopped the bleeding.” For now, he thought but didn’t dare say. He didn’t keep the injury from her, but he might have sugarcoated it a bit. She didn’t have to know that he probably needed stitches. That would only worry her needlessly. She already had more than enough reasons to worry about him, most of them far better than a few nasty cuts.
“Where are you going now?”
Eric gazed ahead. “I have no idea.”
“Anything coming back to you from your dream?”
“What I’m looking at now. The path. Actually, I guess it’s more like a road. It’s all familiar, like I’ve been here before. But only as I see it. I won’t know what’s around the bend until I get to it.”
“Not the most useful of abilities then, is it?”
“No. But it does come in handy. I can immediately tell if anything’s changed, if there’s something that shouldn’t be there.”