Begrudgingly, Eric sat in an uncomfortable folding chair and allowed Specter Ten to record him as he recounted all that he could remember of his bizarre dream, which was pretty much all of it. Even after all this time, it remained shockingly vivid. Every detail rushed back to him as he recounted it. But delving back into it didn’t help him understand what was happening. He still had no idea who the woman was. He wasn’t even sure how it was that he knew it was a woman. From his peculiar vantage point behind the person’s eyes, he’d seen nothing but forest and lake and snow and ice. He didn’t even see what attacked her. She was turned away from it, crawling across the ice and calling out for help that would never come.
He couldn’t even remember precisely what her voice sounded like, which was a little curious since he could remember the biting cold, the exquisite pain and the numbing terror with perfect clarity.
When he’d finished, Owen switched off the recorder and made a show of stroking his ridiculous facial hair and considering what he’d just heard. “Have you ever had any other dreams like this?” he asked.
“No,” lied Eric. “Never.” They didn’t need to know about his other dream or about the fissure. He couldn’t trust these guys. Their goal was obviously to expose secrets. And he intended to keep most of his.
Besides, he was fairly certain that this genius would only end up getting himself killed if he ever learned the location of an actual fissure. They were dangerous places, crawling with dangerous things. And if a person happened to venture too far off the path, there was a very good chance that he could be lost forever in whatever nightmare version of hell awaited on the other side.
“Ever have dreams that come true?”
He started to lie again and reply that he didn’t believe in such nonsense, but a better idea struck him: “Only this one. So far. I mean, until I got here, I didn’t know this lake was even real. But I recognized it as soon as I arrived.” He leaned forward a little and tried to sound dramatically serious as he said, “This is where it happened.”
Owen’s face lit up with excitement. Isabelle was right. The kid was so desperate to find something supernatural that he was instantly willing to believe anything he said.
The truth was that he couldn’t tell the lake in his dream from almost any other lake in the world. It was Isabelle who’d known he was in the right place, because of the spiritual energy radiating off it. But of course, he had no intention of sharing Isabelle with these people any more than he intended to share the location of the fissure. If the wrong people ever found out about her, they’d stop at nothing to hunt her down.
And he knew perfectly well that there were some very wrong people out there…
“Prophetic dreams!” exclaimed Owen as he began pacing back and forth in front of Eric. “This is great!”
“Not so great for that woman,” Eric reminded him, recalling the desperate scream that had ejected him from his dream that morning.
(Don’t let it take me!)
But Owen didn’t seem to be listening. His eyes swept the ground in front of him as he paced, his thoughts racing. “Something was obviously calling out to you. Summoning you here.”
“Sure,” agreed Eric. “Why not.”
“Maybe it was a spirit seeking justice,” suggested Pete.
Eric looked up at him. “Spirit?”
“Some say these are the most haunted woods in the Midwest,” he explained. “Maybe the country.”
“Ghosts, too?” He couldn’t help but think about the shadowy figure he’d seen moving through the forest just before he met Jordan, the one that vanished without a trace before he could get a good look at it. But he still didn’t know what he might’ve really seen back there. And there were a suspicious amount of crazy claims about this area. Monsters and aliens. Ghosts and vanishing people. He’d seen enough in his journeys that he was ready to believe most things, but he had a hard time accepting everything these guys were telling him. He was beginning to think he was wasting his time here. Finding any grain of truth in all these local legends would be almost impossible. He would’ve been better off on his own.
“I’ll bet it’s the aliens,” suggested Owen. “Maybe they sent out a signal to lure you here.”
Eric couldn’t think of a single reason why advanced, extraterrestrial visitors would have any interest in him, or why they’d need to induce a bizarre, recurring dream and lure him into the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It seemed like a lot of trouble for a thirty-three-year-old, out-of-shape English teacher. Shouldn’t they be infiltrating the government or stealing cattle or something?
Before they could discuss it further, Mandy spoke up from the back of the van: “Hey, guys… You know that creepy Fester Sweater guy…?”
“Mr. Fettarsetter,” corrected Pete.
“Yeah, him.” She hadn’t moved from her spot, but now her eyes were fixed on the computer screen. She lifted a slender finger and pointed at it. “He’s um…lurking on camera two.”
Owen and Pete both leaned into the van to see.
Eric stood up, curious, and peered between them. The image displayed was a low-angle shot through a thicket of trees and out over the lake. He recalled Owen mentioning camera two when he was narrating into the video camera after their first meeting. He’d apparently walked in front of this camera, alerting them to his presence and sending them running noisily in his direction. Now, however, someone else was in the shot. A tall, slender figure was standing motionless at the water’s edge. He was nicely dressed in an expensive-looking suit, as if here on business, but Mandy was dead accurate when she described the guy as “creepy.” He appeared to be staring directly back at them, his dark eyes fixed on the camera’s lens.
“What do you suppose he wants?” asked Pete.
“Dunno,” replied Owen, sounding a little anxious. “But we’d better go see. He won’t like it if we make him wait.”
And with that, the two of them took off back into the woods, crashing through the brush without so much as a “goodbye” or a “thanks for the interview.”
Eric watched them go for a moment, then glanced back at Mandy. “Mr. Fettarsetter?”
She’d already returned her attention to her cell phone and didn’t bother looking up at him as she said, “One of the local landowners. Total creep, but apparently he’s into this supernatural stuff. He bought the guys all their equipment. Says they can keep it if they find ‘irrefutable evidence’ of…um, anything, I guess.”
“Have they found anything yet?”
Her eyes remained fixed on the phone. “They found you.” Her tone made it pretty clear that she didn’t consider him all that great of a find.
“I guess they did.”
She said nothing more. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t care to carry on a conversation with him, so he didn’t attempt to continue having one. Instead, he decided to follow after the Specter Ten boys and find out more about this Fester Sweater guy.
These two reminded him of some of his freshmen students, kids not even old enough to drive. And they managed the woodland terrain like his students managed their classwork: With a lot of noise and far too much arguing. They stumbled through the brush, practically tripping over themselves in the process so that he had no problem tracking them, even long after they were gone from his sight.
He didn’t bother trying to keep up. He wasn’t going to lose them. If they hadn’t captured a Hedge Lake Triangle monster by now, it wasn’t any wonder. Any monster worth its reputation could hear these two coming from a mile away. He was no expert, but he was fairly certain that Bigfoot and his friends weren’t stupid enough to stick around where people kept spreading their scent around, much less where people were making enough noise to wake the dead.
As soon as he was alone again, he pulled out his cell phone and whispered, “This feels like a waste of time.”
THEY’RE GOOFY, I’LL ADMIT IT, agreed Isabelle. BUT THEY’RE BOUND TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE LAKE THAN ANYONE ELSE
“You don’t really believe there are aliens here, do you?”
WELL, NO
“Waste of time.”
I NEVER SAID THEY’D HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS FOR YOU. IT’S NEVER THAT EASY. BUT THEY’RE A FINE PLACE TO START
He supposed that was true. If not for them, he’d still be blindly searching for the dream cove, which probably wouldn’t reveal anything to him, even if he found it. Now, at least he knew what people thought might be going on in these woods. As he learned more, he’d be able to piece together the truth around the myths. Given all that he’d seen the past couple years, there was probably a grain of truth in it all somewhere. He just had to find it.
He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and picked up his pace, but he only made it a few more steps before he came to an abrupt halt.
A strange feeling rapidly swept over him, a disorienting tide of dread and sorrow that hit him with a powerful wave of vertigo, a bitter mix of crippling emotions that came from nowhere and without warning, and yet seemed to churn upward from somewhere deep inside him. It was so overpowering that he had to lean against the trunk of a tree just to keep from collapsing onto the forest floor.
What the hell was happening to him?
He lifted his face toward the sky and looked up at the twisting branches that were slowly spinning above him. It was so quiet. Was the forest this quiet before? He couldn’t hear the song of a single insect, or even the whisper of the breeze through the branches. All he could hear was the blood rushing past his ears and a strange, faint ringing sound.
He lowered his eyes and looked out into the trees around him. There, to the right, he saw the same shadowy shape that had eluded him just before he met Jordan. It was definitely the form of a man, with broad shoulders and strong arms, but once again the figure was unnaturally dark, as if he were wandering through a dense gloom instead of through soft shade.
The figure was moving away from him, deeper into the woods, and as he watched, it passed behind a cluster of trees and vanished.
Eric watched after it for a moment, then turned and scanned the rest of the forest. That strange feeling was still with him. It didn’t vanish with the shadow man. Something else was out here.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Sensing something, he turned and looked behind him. A woman was there. She was bloody and ghastly, dressed in a tattered, blood-stained coat and pants, with wild, black hair and deeply haunting eyes. As soon as he saw her, she lurched forward and seized the sides of his head in her gory hands.
He didn’t have time to even cry out in surprise.
The forest changed. The tree he was clinging to vanished and sent him sprawling to his hands and knees. The ground was muddy. A hard rain fell around him, instantly soaking him to the bone.
He rose onto his knees and turned to look behind him. There was the lake, its surface boiling, spraying mist high into the air. The water was rising fast, swallowing the bases of trees, racing up the hill toward him.
Yet he couldn’t move.
Voices carried on the wind. Screaming. Howls of pain. Shrieks of torment. It was as if hell itself had cracked open and spilled its vileness out upon the earth.
The swelling water crept closer to him. He could see something in it, just beneath the surface, something that churned and boiled, like an endless mass of writhing snakes.
It was getting closer with each second that passed, and yet he still couldn’t move. He was frozen there on his knees, drenched in the pouring rain, listening to the tortured wails that carried on the wind.
In the center of the lake, a terrible form rose up from the water and stretched toward the sky. A massive thing, unthinkable not merely in size but also in dreadfulness. It was a horrible thing, a vile, insatiable thing that would leave only desolation in its wake.
This was the end, he realized.
The cold water surged toward him with its foul, roiling things that were eager to devour him.
He closed his eyes and tried to scream, but found that he could make no sound.
When he opened his eyes again, he was still leaning against the tree. He was dry. The sun was still shining.
He was alone.
He remained there for a moment, trying to catch his breath, waiting for his heart to calm. Then he stood up straight, shoved his hand into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone, which rang even before he could lift it to his ear.
“Did you catch any of that?” he asked.
“Every disturbing moment,” Isabelle assured him. He could tell by the slight quaver in her voice that she was just as horrified by the vision as he was.
“What was it?”
“Premonition?”
He fought back a hard shudder and said, “God, I hope not…”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“That was like doomsday… Who was that woman?”
“I think she was a ghost.”
“She was terrifying!” He’d met a few ghosts on these trips, but until now, only one had ever frightened him.
“You’re right,” Isabelle informed him. “They felt similar.”
“Hosler Avenue,” sighed Eric. Last summer, while exploring a series of inexplicably invisible buildings in his own hometown, he’d stumbled across an overgrown lot and an ancient and barely recognizable wreck of a home that was guarded by the nasty spirit of an old hag.
“The same kind of dark presence,” said Isabelle.
Eric ran a hand through his hair and leaned against the tree again. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good.”
He shook his head wearily. “You’d better call Holly. Tell her what just happened. I think it’s time for her to cast another spell.”
“I’m on it.”
The line went dead and Eric pocketed the phone again. That was a whole new kind of weird. He very much hoped that kind of thing didn’t start happening all the time. He wasn’t sure his heart could take it.
He turned around once, getting his bearings, then set out after the boys of Specter Ten once again.