The answer had to be with the ghosts. They were the ones who brought it.
He tried to recall the dream, but he had only stood there in the dream much as he was now, staring at the pots, trying to decide which one he should open.
This was getting him nowhere.
And he desperately needed to hurry.
He closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.
At the same time, he recalled doing the same in his dream. He recalled thinking about everything that had happened to him. Every detail. Every conversation.
It was difficult to think down here. The pressure was distracting. He wanted to leave.
His mind kept turning back to Annette for some reason, but she was the one who told him the least about what he was doing here. She was too busy talking about her dead father and the husband she pretended wasn’t also long dead and gone.
Was that a noise he heard outside the door? The sound of someone approaching?
No.
But he didn’t have much longer.
Hurry!
Again, he circled the room, practically darting from one to the next.
Which one was it?
Was it the tall one? The green one? The black lid?
Come on!
The big one? The red ribbon?
Eric stopped, his breath momentarily stolen.
Suddenly it occurred to him…
Annette…
Something she said between telling him about her dead father and that it was a long way to the cathedral. He’d nearly forgotten. It seemed so unimportant at the time.
“I gave him a red ribbon before he went in. That’s good luck. Did you know that?”
Eric stared at the clay pot with the red ribbon tied around it.
He recalled something else that Edgar told him as well. While talking about Annette’s tragic state, he said, “She couldn’t take losing someone again.”
He thought Edgar had been referring to the father Annette told him about, but now he realized that there had been another tragedy in her life. There was a third man she’d loved and lost.
He wondered before why it was that Father Billy was so sure no one had ever entered the labyrinth and lived to tell about it when Edgar claimed to have gone there with five others and then lived to a ripe old age. Now he knew the answer.
Edgar never told him how Ben died.
And because he didn’t care to think more than necessary about death on this journey, Eric hadn’t asked.
But now he knew.
Only Ben entered the cathedral with the clay pot.
And he never came back out.
“I gave him a red ribbon before he went in. That’s good luck.”
He thought she was still talking about Ethan. But she was giving him the most important message of all. She didn’t give the ribbon to Ethan before he went in the hospital. She gave it to Ben. Before he went in the cathedral.
And Ben left it tied around the clay pot.
His heart broke a little for Annette.
Yet he had no time to dwell on her tragedy.
He stared at the pot with the red ribbon. He was finally here. He was at the end of his journey. The secrets were at last about to be revealed to him.
He reached out and grasped the lid.
In his dream, he recalled doing the same thing. Dream Eric had taken longer to piece it all together, but he got it in the end. And now the final memories of that dream were coming back to him at last.
He hesitated. He closed his eyes. He made himself breathe.
He remembered lifting the lid…
And then he remembered his death.
Chapter Thirty-One
Eric let go of the lid as terrible images returned from the depths of his memories and filled his mind with unimaginable horrors.
The dream that had once been his guide became the worst kind of nightmare he had ever experienced. Something awful reached out of the pot. It seized his hand and raced up his arm. Agony shot up to his shoulder and neck to his head and then enveloped his whole body.
Within seconds, he was alive with relentless, searing pain from head to foot. It consumed him. The memory was so perfect that he could actually feel it. His flesh crackled. His nerves were on fire. It felt like his bones were melting.
But it was more than mere physical pain. He felt himself being torn apart emotionally and mentally. Terrible things, indescribable things, filled his brain, shredding his very sanity.
Screaming in unspeakable agony, his final thought had for some reason been, Don’t open the pot!
And then he had awakened in his bed, where his story began so long ago.
“I’ll take it from here.”
Eric turned, his face still contorted with fear, and found the foggy man’s gun aimed at his head again.
Time was up.
“Come on. Back away.”
Eric stepped away from the awful clay pot, his hands out to his sides, in clear view. They were trembling.
“I don’t know how you got away from me back there, and I don’t know how you got here before me, but I do appreciate you solving the riddle of the pots for me.”
Clearly, Foggy had misinterpreted the fear on his face. He didn’t realize that it wasn’t the gun that had frightened him.
Eric didn’t enlighten him.
He circled around the psycho with the gun, trying to force himself to relax, to shake off the horrors he had seen, but he couldn’t stop himself from trembling. He couldn’t make his heart stop pounding.
This was why he had felt such dread as he recalled the dream. Somewhere, deep inside, he’d known all along how it ended.
Now standing between Eric and the clay pot, preventing him from making a last ditch grab for it, the Foggy man swung the gun and struck him across the side of the head.
Eric dropped to the floor, cursing and clutching his face.
He was getting really tired of this guy hitting him.
“So this is the one, is it?”
Eric glared up at him. “No. It’s the green one.”
“Sure it is.”
“The tall one, then?”
“Shut up.”
“If you say so.”
“I was watching you. It was this one. You were sure of it. I could tell.”
Eric stared up at him, studying him. “I just like the pretty ribbon.”
Foggy grinned. “I kind of like you. You’re fun.”
“I try.”
He must have been watching from the door. When he settled on the one with the red ribbon, it would have been obvious that he knew it was the one. But he mistook hesitance for fear. From his perspective, as he crept up behind his target, it must have seemed that Eric let go of the lid because he heard his approaching footsteps. The fear in his eyes when he looked back was probably the same fear people had regarded him with for years.
It was ironic, really, that it would be his arrogance that ultimately destroyed him.
The foggy man shook his head in a mock display of regret. “But you’re just not useful anymore.”
“You don’t know that. I have a lot of talents.”
“Sorry. Nothing personal.”
“How could I possibly take it personally?”
“That’s the right attitude.”
Eric really didn’t like this guy.
“Now let’s see… Should I kill you before or after I see what’s so interesting about this pot?”
Eric glanced past him at the clay pot with the red ribbon tied around it. The memory of his dream still shook him. He couldn’t get the horrors out of his mind. He had actually dreamed his own death. Looking back at the foggy man, he said as calmly as he could manage, “I’d say the least you could do is let a beaten old man see what he almost had.”
Grinning, the man formerly known to Eric as the foggy man stepped up to the ledge next to the clay pot and placed his hand on the lid. “It’s something really powerful, isn’t it?”