Now he climbed the steps and pushed open the door, trying to prepare himself for whatever terror must await him in the darkness.
The hallway was brightly lit.
He stood in the doorway, confused, as a tall man in business casual clothes and a white hairnet walked from a doorway on the right-hand side of the corridor to a set of stairs on the left and ascended out of sight. At the end of the short hallway was a door with a scuffed plastic window. The room beyond was well-lit, too. As he looked on, someone walked briskly by.
A heavyset woman in a pair of bright yellow coveralls came down the stairs and entered what appeared to be an office without glancing at him.
Where was the darkness he remembered? Why were these people here?
In the dream, there had been no one. The entire building had been bathed in gloom so deep it was difficult to see anything. There had been no signs to indicate that anyone had been here in a very long time.
He stepped through the door, letting it bang closed behind him, and entered the room where the yellow-clad woman had gone. This room was open and empty, filled with dust, but brightly lit. There was another door in the far corner, but the room behind it was unlit.
He peered into this darkness and found only another empty room. There were no other doors. Where had the woman gone? And where had she come from? He hadn’t seen any cars outside.
There was no furniture in this darkened room. No desks, no chairs, no office equipment filled the empty space.
He took a step back, away from the disconcerting darkness, confused, and turned around.
Walking toward him was a very large man in the same yellow coveralls the heavyset woman had been wearing. In his meaty hands, he lifted a heavy-looking shovel into the air and swung it at Eric’s startled face.
Chapter Twenty-One
Eric closed his eyes. He stood there, his back to the wall, cringing in anticipation of the blow. But it never came. When he dared a peek, the large man and his shovel were gone.
A tall man was standing in the middle of the room instead, studying a piece of paper.
“What just happened?” he asked, but the man merely turned away and walked out of the room.
“Excuse me…”
Eric followed him into the hallway, but he was gone. Instead, an attractive woman with dark features was walking toward him from the door at the end of the hallway. She was carrying a clipboard under her arm and pulling her long, black hair out from under her hairnet.
“Can you help me?” he asked, but the woman ignored him so completely that he had to step quickly out of her way to keep from being pushed aside.
“The hell?”
His cell phone chimed at him, announcing a new text message, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, he again found a single word staring back at him.
LISTEN
He frowned at the word. Listen to what? The place was silent.
Then it occurred to him. It was silent. Utterly silent. There was none of the noise a factory should have been making, even before its machinery began running. It wasn’t even the polite hush of a quiet hospital wing. Even the footsteps of these people were perfectly silent.
Duh.
He’d been so distracted by the shock of finding people working here that he hadn’t noticed how unnaturally quiet they all were.
Beginning to understand, he turned and peered into the room where the big man had swung the shovel at him. There, on the wall directly over where he’d been standing, was a metal rack, exactly the sort of place someone might hang such tools when they were done with them. The man hadn’t been trying to brain the hapless intruder at all. He was merely hanging up his shovel. If he hadn’t closed his eyes, he might have seen it pass right through him.
Or simply disappear.
Turning around, he found a very short, rotund woman moving toward him from the door at the end of the hall. The door wasn’t swinging as if someone had just passed through it, and he very much doubted it that it would open so soundlessly.
This time, he stood his ground and the woman faded away just before she could collide with him.
Residuals.
Completely harmless, Grant had assured him, but deceptive. The foggy man left them to trip him up. The first lured him into a trap. The second had been put there to try and deter him from staying on the path, likely in hopes of making him either give up or try to find another path, which likely would’ve resulted in straying too far into the other world and becoming lost forever.
So what was the point of these guys?
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember what he did in his dream.
It had been dark. Very dark. But he’d had a light.
Why did he have a light? He wasn’t carrying a light now.
Then he remembered. He used the cell phone.
Dream Eric was pretty smart.
He’d poked around these offices without finding anything. Then he made his way through the door, which he recalled now was not at all quiet, but instead extremely noisy when pushed open in this deep silence. Using the light from the phone’s digital screen, he began to explore.
Eric didn’t need the phone to light his way today. These rooms were brightly illuminated. But as he looked up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, curious about why they were on now and not two days ago, he realized that they were unlit. The light didn’t seem to be coming from those.
This was new. Apparently the foggy man could even manufacture residual lighting.
How the hell did that even work?
Too tired to contemplate such a thing, Eric pushed open the door, wincing at the loud screeching of its hinges, and stepped out onto the factory floor.
If this were a real factory, the noise would be deafening, the air would be stifling and the very floor would be rumbling beneath his feet. But in spite of the dozens of people bustling around, the thrumming of the machinery, the conveyor belts clattering, there was not the subtlest noise to be heard beyond his own shallow breathing. The air was stale and cool, musty-smelling. His ears and nose detected the truth. Only his eyes saw the lie.
He stood in the middle of the walkway, gazing around at the silent chaos, wondering what the foggy man was doing here.
A young man walked past him, appearing no less real than Eric, and he reached out to touch his arm. It was as if he had only imagined him there. As soon as his fingers came close, he was gone without a trace. He did not fade. And he did not disappear, exactly, if that made any sense. He was just gone, as if never there in the first place, as if he vanished not before his eyes but even for a second or two in his very memory.
This was insanely weird.
And after all he’d seen today, that was saying a lot.
To his left was some kind of office. It was dark beyond the door. No residual lighting had been used there. Farther to his left, a corridor led into another room where it was also dark. But to the right, another area of the factory was lit up. It seemed that the foggy man hadn’t bothered to animate the entire facility.
But why?
Eric looked up at the overhead lights. Like the ones in the hallway, they were dark. Looking down, he realized that he did not cast a shadow here, suggesting that the light he was seeing was just like the people: of another time.
His cell phone rang.
No name.
Isabelle.
He put the phone to his ear and immediately heard her sweet voice say, “That foggy guy’s good.”
“This is definitely quite a trick,” Eric agreed.
“Residual lighting, huh? That’s a new one.”
“What’s he up to?”
“No idea. I can’t feel him. Even when you were looking at him from Father Billy’s church, I couldn’t see him. It’s like he’s not really there, like he’s residual, too.”
“He can’t be residual. He causes too much trouble.”