“True. But I can’t feel him anywhere.”
Eric looked around at the silent workers. It looked like they were manufacturing some kind of food, but he couldn’t tell what. Like the sound, the product itself was missing. Though the production lines were running at full-speed, there was nothing on the conveyors. It was like the rooms that remained dark. The foggy man had simply left it out.
“Snack foods,” said Isabelle.
“What?”
“They made snack foods here. Potato chips, cheese puffs, pretzels. That sort of thing. Some specialty organic brand.”
He kept forgetting that Isabelle could read his thoughts. That was going to take some getting used to.
“Did something bad happen here? Like at the resort?”
“I don’t think so. In this case, I think the factory just closed. But that doesn’t mean nothing bad ever happened here.”
“Are all these people dead now?” he wondered, studying the busy workers.
“I don’t know that, either.”
Eric didn’t think they were. Not all of them. Maybe not any of them. None of them had hair or clothes that looked very dated. These were people who probably worked here no earlier than the nineties.
If so, these weren’t ghosts at all. They were merely glimpses into the past.
“Why is he even here? Why isn’t he looking for the cathedral?”
“You’re not that far away,” Isabelle informed him. “Given the head start he had, he should’ve been there and gone. I really don’t know why he’s hanging around. But it obviously has something to do with you.”
“Obviously.”
“Sorry I can’t be more help.”
“You’re more help than anybody else I’ve met today.”
“I’m glad.”
“And unlike everybody else I’ve met, you’ve stayed with me. That’s a little reassuring. By the way, how is it you can call me when I don’t have a signal?”
“I’m not sure. I use the phone lines in this house to call you, so I really shouldn’t be able to reach you when no one else can. So I guess it can’t just be the phone. Maybe the connection has more to do with us, something about the way I’m in your head now.”
“Huh. Well I’m just happy you’re here.”
“Me too!”
“So what do you think I should do now?”
“What did you do in your dream?”
Eric tried to remember. “I went right,” he realized.
“I think that’s your best bet.”
He nodded. At least that way, he could let Dream Eric lead the way for him.
“I’ll hang up so you can watch for trouble. I’ll text you if I need to tell you anything.”
“Sounds good.”
He disconnected the call, but kept the phone clenched in his hand. He wanted to read anything Isabelle had to say to him immediately. And he wanted it at the ready in case the lights went back out, which didn’t seem at all unlikely, given the special nature of the light source.
The next room was mostly empty. An office of some sort sat in darkness on the other side of a door to the right. To the left was another corridor. It, too, was dark, but the room at the far end was brightly lit.
In his dream, he had wandered around the open rooms, trying his best to see the far ends of these empty spaces. There was no machinery in the dream. It was all residual, just like the people and the light. The factory had been cleaned out long ago.
He recalled peering into several offices and storage rooms, but ultimately he made his way down the left corridor.
As he turned around, a skinny woman with a remarkably unattractive face hurried past him and vanished halfway across the room. A moment later, a very fat man materialized from thin air just a few feet from where the woman disappeared and laboriously strolled out onto the production floor Eric just left.
A few short hours ago, that would’ve blown his mind.
He remembered being jumpy. In the dream, he’d been mostly calm throughout the day, sometimes in stark contrast to what he felt here in the waking world. He was never attacked by the wardrobe golem. He never saw the coyote-deer while trying to cross the gut-wrenchingly scary bridge. Nothing terrifying waited for him between the resort and Altrusk’s house. He’d even crossed the lake without encountering Furious George. Dream Eric had been surprisingly lucky. But whatever he encountered during the part of his dream that he could not quite recall had frightened him as badly as any of the things he’d encountered today and the result was that he was nearly sick with fear as he wandered these dark, deserted chambers in search of the way forward.
This did not in any way help him feel any calmer now. If anything, a worried Dream Eric made the situation much worse. He felt as though he would remember something bad happening any moment, at which point the bad thing would happen here and now, with no time to defend against it.
Yet as he made his way down the corridor, nothing terrible happened to either Eric.
Although there were bright lights at both ends of the corridor, he found that very little of it seemed to reach beyond the doorways, so that he found himself illuminating the floor before him with the cell phone’s digital display to ensure against any unforeseen hazards.
The next room was a great, empty space, likely a large storage area of some kind. Once upon a time, forklifts probably prowled up and down the corridor, moving things around, keeping the production lines running. But now the room was empty. Three men stood in the middle of the room. Two of them wore hair nets. One of them was talking, yet he made no sound.
His phone chimed.
SOMETHING SEEMS WRONG
“No kidding,” he told the phone.
BE CAREFUL.
“I will.”
Dream Eric had wandered around this empty room, exploring, searching for the path that would carry him forward. Eventually, he made his way to the far corner, where a set of steps led up to the second floor.
Now, the Eric that was running two days late walked past the three men and headed for the stairs.
Something felt wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He glanced back one last time at the three men conversing silently in the middle of the room and then ascended the stairs and entered a long, dark hallway.
In his dream, he peered into each room, probed it with the light from his phone and moved on. Now he used the returning memory of the dream to avoid these rooms. He was not at all eager to step through a door and find himself face-to-horrible-face with another golem.
And if he were to be completely honest with himself, this seemed like the perfect place for a golem, as far from any of the outer doors as possible, completely lacking in places to run and hide, plenty of dead ends in which he could find himself cornered.
Apparently, the residuals weren’t restricted to the illuminated rooms. His light fell on a man and a woman carrying on a silent conversation in the middle of the hallway, then an older man carefully examining a wall where a bulletin board must have once hung.
He followed his dream self down the hallway and into another large, empty room, his eyes wide open, his cell phone illuminating dreadfully little of the space before him. The fear he’d felt in the dream became contagious. A sick feeling began to spread outward from deep in his belly.
Yet nothing happened.
He made his way deeper into this dark room, past a young man busying himself with invisible work, through another door into another hallway and finally down a narrow set of stairs into yet another unlit room where he found a pretty young woman who looked as if she might be flirting with someone, except whoever she was chatting with was not there.
From here, another darkened corridor led to an illuminated room that he quickly recalled was the same room where the three men were talking.
But when he returned, only two of the men were standing there. The one without the hair net had either wandered off or vanished.
In the dream, he returned to the first production floor he’d found and made his way down the other darkened corridor.
Sometimes the dream came to him in bursts, giving him ample time to see what awaited him. Other times, he was forced to relive the events of his dream as they occurred. It seemed to be particularly stubborn in revealing the secrets of this factory to him.