“Yes,” lied Eric. “If you’re really smart, you’ll take it and disappear with it instead of giving it to your bosses.”
“Maybe I will.” Grinning, the foggy man lifted the lid off the clay pot.
Eric turned away and stared at the floor, unable to watch as the man who had once struck fear into his heart cried out in pitiful, wailing shrieks of terror and anguish.
He wasn’t proud to have let the man die. But he would have killed him. There was no question about that. If the boy’d had more brains than ego, he would’ve killed him immediately instead of making him watch as he took the prize.
And he was going to get Father Billy killed, too. Eric couldn’t allow that.
Still, no one deserved to die like this.
It went on for a long time. A terribly long time. And it happened just as he remembered it happening to him in his dream.
After all he’d been through, the dream he was following had been leading him to failure. If he’d arrived two days ago, when everyone here told him he was supposed to, he would have died.
Instead, he now remained perfectly alive and in possession of both of his hands.
But he never found what he was sent for, which meant he may still have to relive that violent death every night in his dreams. Except now he would remember every agonizing detail.
It was no wonder they said it would drive him mad.
Even after the foggy man stopped screaming, Eric stared down at the floor, unwilling to look at the body of the man he’d essentially killed. As he did, he realized that there was an image of a hawk etched into the golden disk in the center of the floor.
He looked up at the slowly darkening sky. The funnel opened up from this one point in the floor. Even the tiles had been arranged so that they spiraled into it.
Grant told him it was a singularity, the exact place at which the two worlds met. A single point in space.
Right at the bottom of this hole.
Right in the middle of this floor.
Birds. They’d been everywhere today, in some way or another, like signs. The eagle over the barn door. The birdhouses at the farmhouse. The totem pole at the resort. The Canada goose on the factory’s sign. Even the symbol on the hood of the Firebird at the salvage yard. And then there were the real birds. He’d been spooking them out of brush and trees all day. The hawks. The crows. The ducks in the lake. Even the freaky chickens back in the barn and that giant bird coasting over the swamp. He’d thought that he’d seen them in the dream because they’d been so prevalent along the fissure, but they were more than that. The birds had been pointing to his true goal all along.
He felt around the edges of the disk and found that it was loose.
It was here. Hidden in plain sight. The clay pots were only a distraction from the true prize.
He pulled out the metal disk and found a narrow hole beneath it, barely large enough to fit his hand into. There was a wooden stick of some sort inside. He gripped it by its end and pulled it out, revealing it to be a four-foot long, wooden staff.
As soon as it was free and in his hands, Eric knew what it was, who it belonged to, what it was used for.
In fact, he knew a great many things.
He knew too much.
He closed his eyes and cried out as fantastic things flooded into his unprepared mind. Awesome things. Terrible things. Powerful things. This new knowledge shook him even more violently than the memory of his dream death.
He tried to let go of the staff, but he couldn’t.
He rose to his feet and tried to walk, but he stumbled.
The things he suddenly knew…
Such information that he could scarcely fathom it…
He opened his eyes wide and stared at the staff he now held in his hands.
The hands that once held it… Hands so strong… Hands that had known God…
And he wasn’t the first to hold this staff since those ancient times. Others had possessed this secret as well. Eleven of them. The last was entombed in a clay urn and deposited in an ordinary hayfield in Illinois. Not the secret at all, like Edgar and the others had believed, but merely a return of the last sentry into this tomb.
That was why there were six of them. They were the pallbearers.
He also knew that the staff was no longer important. Its power was spent, the knowledge it contained passed into him. It was time to put it back in its resting place.
Eric returned the staff to its hole and replaced the gold disk over the top of it.
His body still twitching with the power of the revelations he’d been given, he stood up on shaking legs and turned toward the door.
He didn’t look to see what became of the foggy man. He was gone. That was all that mattered. He had no need to see what became of the body. It was better not to know.
He would likely never know who the man was. He never shared his name. And Eric didn’t care to know it. He wasn’t anybody, just a thug, another monster in the road.
Father Billy was right, it turned out. There was no reason to know a dead man’s name.
Still trembling, Eric walked through the door and began the long ascent up the cathedral stairs.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The way out of the cathedral was far more treacherous than the way in. An ordinary man would never have found his way through the hellish labyrinth of darkness and shadows. He would have wandered aimlessly until something in the darkness ended his journey for him. But he was no longer an ordinary man. He knew the way out now. He knew how the cathedral worked. And he made the journey without thinking about where he was going. He merely climbed, his poor, exhausted mind still struggling to grasp the awesome things the staff had shown him.
He barely remembered the ascent.
Soon, he found himself standing in the crater, looking around, trying to recall where he was supposed to go next. But there was nothing to recall. The dream was over. And no one had bothered telling him what to do next.
He couldn’t return along the same path that brought him here, and he had no idea which way would take him back home.
He sat down on the crushed earth and stared up at the sky for a while. The sun had fully set. The first of the stars had come out.
It was so peaceful.
He felt so incredibly small.
“Magnificent view out here.”
Eric lowered his eyes and found himself looking at the gas station attendant. He was standing in front of him, staring up at the sky above. He tried to remember how long he’d been staring up, but he was sure it wasn’t long enough for the little man to have made his way across the wide floor of the crater without him noticing.
“Nothing to spoil it out here. No lights. No pollution. Just you and the stars.”
Eric stared at the little man. “Are you God?”
Without looking down from the sky, the gas station attendant said, “Me? No. Not exactly.”
Not exactly? What did that mean?
“But I can answer the questions you have for Him.”
“Can you?”
The little man looked at him now. “Sure. Let’s start with what happened down there, shall we?”
Eric stared at him. He felt so sluggish. He was like a computer that had used up all its memory. He nodded. “I found the staff. It… Showed me things…”
“It imparted onto you some very specific knowledge.”
“That’s what I said…” Eric replied drunkenly.
The little man laughed softly. His smile was so kind, so welcoming. And his eyes remained compassionate. “Some things are too important to ever be fully forgotten, but too dangerous to leave commonly known.”
Eric thought about this for a moment, and then nodded. “This would definitely qualify.”
“Definitely. These things you know…only one man was chosen to remember while all others were allowed to forget. When that man died, the knowledge lived on, stored in the living wood of that staff, waiting for another to come along and take the knowledge once more. In times when darkness closes in on this knowledge, a new man is chosen to take the information from the staff, leaving the staff itself empty in its cradle. Long after the danger has passed, and when the new caretaker passes on, the information returns automatically to the staff, waiting for the next to find it.”