One thing bothered him, though.
“What about Ethan?”
Edgar sighed. “Annette’s still waiting for him to come home, isn’t she?” He lifted the hood on an old Chrysler and peered in at the long-rusted engine. “But he never came home. Took a turn for the worst. Died in the middle of the night while she was asleep at home. Couldn’t accept it. She died just a few months later, still refusing to believe he wasn’t coming home, and that’s how she exists now, always waiting for him to come back home to her. She just couldn’t handle it. She couldn’t take losing someone again.”
Eric recalled the way Annette talked to him about her father’s death, as if he weren’t a complete stranger. It wasn’t hard to imagine how difficult it might be to keep losing people you loved so much. “But why isn’t Ethan here with her?”
“Because he died in a hospital bed, some twenty miles away. She died in her home, here in the fissure. He moved on. He escaped while the rest of us were trapped. And poor Annette ended up trapped twice. Once here in the fissure and once inside herself.”
THAT IS SO SAD!
It was sad. It was probably the saddest thing Eric had ever heard in his life. He felt terrible for poor Annette.
Edgar stood and silently stared at the rusted engine of the Chrysler as a scrounger wormed its way up and over the fender. It looked like a cross between a lizard and a bug, about thirty inches long, with six frog-like feet on very short stubs of legs. It had no tail and no neck, only a snake-like head with a wide, toothless mouth and great, blank eyes that, like the rest of its body, were a muddy brown.
The old man watched the creepy creature flop gracelessly into the grass. “They ain’t got no teeth, but you still don’t want to get bit by one. Their saliva’s toxic. Might not kill you, necessarily, but it’d feel like your skin was on fire. You’d have terrible hallucinations and there’s a good chance you could go blind.”
Now Eric’s skin was crawling. His eyes swept the grass around him, alert for dark shapes creeping toward him.
Edgar grinned. “Don’t worry. They rarely bite people. They mostly eat bugs and rodents. You’d pretty much have to step on one to goad it into biting you.”
Eric still wanted to get out of the salvage yard and as far away from the scroungers as possible.
His cell phone buzzed inside his pocket, but he chose to ignore it. He did not like the idea of further dividing his attention in a field full of venomous scroungers. His luck today wasn’t the worst it could have been, seeing that he was still alive, but it also wasn’t the kind he’d want to take on a weekend in Vegas.
“So you’ll be heading for the cathedral now, I take it.”
“I don’t see any other alternative. I keep hearing that the dream will drive me crazy.”
“It might. Or it might not. That would be up to you, I guess, whether you’re strong enough to take it. But for sure, the only way to make it stop is to go to the cathedral. You do that and one way or another you won’t have that dream again.”
“One way or another… Nice.”
“You wanted me to be truthful.”
“I did.”
Edgar lowered the Chrysler’s hood again and began walking between the isles of long-forgotten vehicles. Eric walked with him. “Straight ahead is the old driveway. You can just make it out. About half a mile ahead, it’ll clear out and you’ll find yourself on a dirt path. Don’t even think about turning around. Try to follow the road back to here and you’ll be lost forever in the other world.”
“One way road. Got it.” After all he’d seen he did not doubt this to be true for even a second. “By the way, how far have I gone now?”
“You’re in the extreme northwest of Wisconsin now.”
That was a long way from where he started.
“By the time you get to the cathedral, you’ll be somewhere in northern Minnesota. No one’s sure exactly where it is. You technically can’t even get there from here. The only way to reach the cathedral is to walk the entire length of the fissure, starting at Annette’s house.”
Annette’s house. That was where the dream began…
Eric nodded. If he’d been told he was in the Congo, he’d have little reason to doubt it.
“Like the others, I’ll be leaving you to go on alone.”
Eric turned and looked at the old man. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
Edgar looked back at him. He did not wear any question on his expression. He did not even pretend ignorance. He only waited.
“You and the others. You’re not just random, are you? It’s no coincidence that you all lived and died in the fissure. You have a connection to the cathedral.”
Edgar did not lie. “We do.”
“Are you at least going to tell me what it is?”
Edgar considered it for a moment. Eric didn’t think he would respond, that this information was simply not for him to have. But he was about to be surprised.
“This thing you’re looking for, the thing that’s hidden inside the cathedral…we were the ones who put it there. Nearly a hundred years ago.”
This caught Eric off guard. “You put it there?” He’d assumed that whatever was at the cathedral had simply always been there, or at the very least that it had been there for untold ages. He never even considered the possibility that someone had walked this path before him.
“I had a dream just like yours once. We all did. Except there were six of us. There was me and Taylor, Grant, Annette and Ethan. We were the five who survived the trip. And we all stayed here to make sure what we left there remained safe. Only Ethan moved on when he died. The rest of us are here still.”
“And you’re still not going to tell me what it is you put there, are you?”
“Can’t. We never knew what it was. We weren’t allowed to see it. We all followed our dreams and we all ended up in the same Illinois hayfield, gathered around a curious little clay pot. Each of us knew somehow that we weren’t allowed to open the lid and look inside.”
“So the six of you carried it north. All the way to the cathedral. And one of you died along the way.”
“Ben.”
“His name was Ben?”
Edgar nodded.
Eric started to ask what became of him, but he found he did not want to know. Somehow, he felt that knowing what happened to Ben would only make the task ahead of him harder.
Edgar was staring at him now, studying him. “How have you done in your dream? Are you better today than you would have been?”
Eric remembered his mangled hand. His head fuzzy with morphine, he never learned Edgar’s secrets in the dream. He’d only learned the way forward and stumbled blindly on. He recalled the three golems, the foggy man. But he also recalled Father Billy. Isabelle. “I’m definitely better off today,” he replied.
“Good. Our dreams were different, too. Some things were better. Some things were worse. To this day, I’m not sure which was better.”
The two of them reached the edge of the salvage yard and stopped. Eric could see where the old drive used to be by the gap in the trees, but the brush and branches had crowded it until it was barely recognizable. If he wasn’t careful, he could easily wander off the path and get lost forever.
“Off you go,” Edgar said. “Might as well get on with it.”
Eric nodded. He considered asking if he should expect to run into more creatures between here and the cathedral, but decided he was better off not knowing. As long as he remained aware of the possibilities, he was as prepared as he was ever going to get. “Thank you,” he said, but as he turned, he found that Edgar had already turned away and was walking back toward the salvage yard. Like the others, he did not disappear. He simply walked away like a man still of flesh and blood. He lifted a hand in a silent wave.