Turning back to the stairs before him, he tried to focus on taking one step at a time.
The light came back, revealing that the steps had turned to stone. It also revealed a vast, gaping cavern opening to his right. The floor of that cavern was alive with crawling things.
He closed his eyes and took one step after another.
He was so tired. He felt so heavy.
And the throbbing pain in his hand wouldn’t stop.
Was that the sound of someone yelling? The foggy man, perhaps? Calling out for help? Lost in this hole? Lost in his head?
The stairs were gone again. Eric walked on solid ground once more, with no memory of when they ended. The columns were gone again as well. Only darkness surrounded him. Darkness, and that queer blue sky above.
He stared at his hand. So small, despite all those bandages. So much of it gone.
What was he going to do?
He closed his eyes.
He walked.
The weight of two worlds pressed down on him, threatening to crush him before he could reach whatever it was he was here to find.
Was he going to die here?
What was he even doing here? He tried to remember. The dream. All those miles in the PT Cruiser. Annette’s house. The barn. The monster in the wardrobe.
Why didn’t he just leave? What was he thinking?
The morphine was wearing off.
He couldn’t take much more of this pain.
His shoulder hurt. The resort monster.
Altrusk…
Isabelle…
Isabelle. His hand went to his pocket. He felt the weight of the phone at his hip.
“I just wanted you to know that I’m with you,” she told him as he approached the cathedral. “And I’ll stay with you. No matter what.” Her words. So clear in his mind. She made him promise not to give up. She made him promise to believe. Even when all seemed lost.
Now seemed a fitting time to heed her wise words.
He realized that he was trembling and closed his eyes.
He made himself breathe.
He was on the stairs again. The blue sky hung overhead, a reminder that he had not, in fact, descended all the way into the darkest pits of hell.
There was a light below him.
He was finally nearing the bottom of the cathedral.
Again he looked at his hand. The bandages were gone. It was intact. It had always been intact. Only in the dream had he lost it. The dream was infringing on reality as he struggled to separate the merged realities surrounding the singularity. After all, what was the dream but an alternate reality centered on him? Two physical realities colliding with two alternate time frames. It was no wonder he couldn’t seem to comprehend what was going on.
Darkness fell one last time and Eric made his way to the bottom of the steps.
There, in an inky darkness, a brightly lit doorway stood before him.
Chapter Thirty
Squinting into the light, Eric stepped through the doorway and found himself in a sunlit room at the very bottom of the cathedral.
More than ever, he could feel the weight of the two worlds crushing down on him. He felt the air pressing against his skin, as if he were deep under water. His ears hurt. His eyes ached. His head throbbed. Even breathing was difficult. Claustrophobia washed over him, though the room was large and mostly empty. There wasn’t even a ceiling. Above him, the entire cathedral towered overhead with the blue sky shining down on him.
Even though the sun could not be seen from this far down, and the rest of the cathedral had been gloomy at best and more often pitch black, this room remained bright and sunny somehow. Though darkness hung between the sky and this chamber, and there were no lights inside the room, it felt as if the sun were directly overhead.
Looking up through both worlds into that slowly darkening blue sky high above, with the entire pit opening overhead, he finally understood why this place had been called a cathedral. The one constant here was heaven. It was difficult not to imagine that some god or another must be gazing down from that enormous, ever-present sky, watching over him.
The foggy man was still nowhere to be seen, but Eric did not possess enough optimism to make himself believe that he had seen the last of him. He would need to complete this task quickly.
The walls were smooth and featureless stone, broken only by the door through which he’d entered the room. In stark contrast, the floor was an intricate display of handmade tiles, laid out in a complicated spiraling pattern that swirled inward to a single, golden disk in the very center of the room. There was no furniture, no pedestal, no shrine, nothing at all fantastic within this room. The only feature besides the crafted floor was a single ledge, about four feet high, built into the wall around the perimeter of the chamber. On this ledge, scattered throughout the room, were eleven clay pots.
Edgar told him that he and the others were once compelled by a dream much like his to find a clay pot and carry it to the cathedral. Clearly one of these was that very pot.
But which one?
With time ticking away, Eric walked around the room, examining the eleven pots, trying to determine which one was the one he came all this way to find. He was sure that opening the wrong one would put a quick and disappointing end to this long day. Yet he had no idea how he was supposed to choose the correct one.
He found himself reminded of the third Indiana Jones movie, in which Harrison Ford found himself forced to choose the Holy Grail from a large display of various goblets. There were considerably fewer pots to choose from here, but picking a wrong one would likely be just as disastrous for him as it was for that movie’s villain.
And he wasn’t half as smart or suave as Indie.
Think…
There had to be something here to tell him which one was the right one.
They weren’t identical. Not by any means. One was green. Another was considerably larger than the others. A third had a chipped rim. Two of them had odd patterns painted on them. A sixth was smaller than the rest. A seventh had a red ribbon tied around it. Another had a black lid. He studied each of them as he made his way around the room. Here was one that was tall and skinny and stopped with an old cork. The next looked dirty and crusty. The last one had a rope tied to it for a handle.
Which one?
He recalled the lake. The two boats. Karen’s words of wisdom. There was always a way. He just had to find it.
Isabelle told him the same thing. She said she’d discovered a thread of order in the universe since escaping Altrusk.
He had to believe.
He promised he would believe.
He closed his eyes and tried to recall what Edgar told him. He said there were six of them who arrived in that hayfield. One died along the way. Ben. They carried a clay pot all the way to the cathedral and then the five survivors spent the rest of their lives in the fissure to ensure it stayed there.
That was all he said.
How was it, Eric suddenly wondered, that the five of them came here and survived to see another forty or fifty years? According to Father Billy, everyone who entered the cathedral remained there, never to be seen again.
He couldn’t think about that now. Time was still ticking. Eric circled the room again, looking at each pot, examining it, trying to remember something. There must be something somewhere…
Taylor told him how to stop the golems. But he never said anything helpful about the cathedral. Grant educated him on the importance of sticking to the path. Not one of them told him anything significant about the cathedral itself.
Annette hadn’t told him much of anything at all. She was far too lost in her own grief to have been any real help.
Again, he circled the room.
The foggy man wouldn’t stay lost forever. And he was probably going to be pissed about losing him.
He had to calm down. He had to think.
Father Billy had only told him to stay away from the cathedral. Isabelle only knew what the other people trapped in Altrusk’s house knew. The gas station attendant revealed plenty, but none of it helped him determine which of these clay pots was the one delivered by Edgar and company nearly a century ago.