Just like before, the woman lunged toward him and clasped his face between her blood-smeared hands before he had time to reel from her abrupt appearance. This time, he was not hurled into the midst of a pouring rain. This time, it was somewhere familiar. The air was cold, the ground covered in snow, the forest naked. He was running for his life. But it wasn’t his life. It wasn’t even him. It was her.
He was inside the dream again. Inside the bleak December…
Something was chasing him. No. Not him. Her. And yet they were one and the same. Her heart was pounding in his chest. Her screams erupted from his lips. Her terror enveloped him. He was drawn in so completely that he didn’t have time to consider how or why this was happening to him. His only thought—and hers—was to flee this thing that pursued them, the thing that would soon murder them.
The cold was as real as anything he’d ever felt before. It made his lungs ache. It stung his eyes. (Her eyes, he had to remind himself.)
Skeletal branches slashed at the woman’s face and hands. He felt every scratch as if it were his own flesh. He had time to wonder if the dream was always this intense, this real, but then they were racing down a steep hill. She stumbled. He fell, rolled, slid over the snow and ice. He felt the rocks slashing at her bare hands, hot pain cutting through the biting cold.
He could see the terrain changing around them. They were moving between the bluffs, approaching the lake. Terror gripped his heart as he realized that they were moving toward the lake, rapidly approaching the bloody end. He tried to cry out, to warn her, to will her to turn. There was nothing for them on the frozen lake but agonizing death.
But then they were falling.
The ice seemed to race up to meet them.
He felt her ankle snap as she struck the ice. The pain was all-encompassing. The entire world bled away into white-hot agony and they both let loose a terrible scream.
When the world returned, he was looking up past the bluffs, into the naked boughs of the trees. Something was walking among those trees, something impossibly huge, something that snapped heavy branches and sent them crashing to the forest floor.
Eric tried to focus on this giant, tried to understand what he was looking at, but it was too dark. The details were lost in the shadows. All he could see was a burning glow, as if a fire were blazing in the treetops…a fire that floated like a cloud…
A terrible shriek filled the air and the woman turned away from the shore, desperately crawling away from the deadly forest. Eric could feel her broken bones grinding together as she struggled. More than just her ankle, he could feel something terribly wrong with her entire leg, as if she’d shattered all of the bones in that limb. She was in terrible pain and yet her terror was so great that she continued to claw her way farther and farther out onto the frozen lake, desperately trying to get away, regardless of her suffering.
He could hear the ice cracking beneath her. Already compromised by her fall, it was threatening to give way beneath her shifting weight and send her plummeting to a watery grave. But this didn’t concern her. Her only thought was to flee the giant in the woods.
Something crashed onto the lake behind her. The ice lurched. Freezing water sprayed over her, raining down around her. The whole world seemed to churn.
Terror like he’d never known erupted from the woman as something vile closed around her body.
Indescribable agony filled Eric’s brain. From inside this woman’s body, he howled for help.
Don’t let it take me!
His eyes opened. He gasped. He lifted his arms to defend himself. But he was alone. He was on his knees, staring wide-eyed into the empty forest, a scream hovering just behind his lips.
The bloody woman was gone.
The vision was over.
The dream was behind him once more.
But more than ever, he had the distinct feeling that the dying woman’s last words had always been meant for him, as if in those final seconds of her ill-fated life, she’d somehow sensed him and begged him to help her.
Don’t let it take me!
He shivered hard and stumbled to his feet. He was already reaching for his cell phone when it began ringing, but his hands were shaking so badly that it took until the fourth ring for him to wrestle it free of his pocket.
“Can I go home now?” he asked when he finally lifted it to his ear.
“I wish…” replied Isabelle. “I’m sorry, but that whole thing totally gave me the creeps!”
“Yeah, I got that, too. Oddly enough.”
“I mean, the dreams were bad, but that was… Ugh!”
Eric turned and looked around, scanning all of his surroundings, making sure nothing else was sneaking up on him. “It did seem a bit more vivid.”
“It was a lot more vivid. Your dreams, when you have them, come through a little compressed, like I’m seeing them in fast-forward. And they skip ahead sometimes, too. But this was much more real. I was almost convinced you were actually there.”
Eric ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Me too.” His heart was still racing. He couldn’t seem to make himself calm down. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he asked the question that he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer to: “Do you think that was her? The bloody woman? Was she the woman from my dream?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. But that would mean…”
“It would mean I’m not here to save her.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s already dead. I can’t save her.”
“Yeah.”
“So why did I have to live through that? What’s she trying to tell me? That the things out here are dangerous? I already know that!”
“There must be a reason.”
“But what?” Eric turned in a slow circle, scanning the area again. He felt nervous, on edge. “That was horrifying.”
“I know it was. Are you okay? You’re really tense.”
He forced himself to stop and take a breath. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. You need to be thinking clearly.”
She was right, of course. She was almost always right. He willed himself to relax. Then he said, “It’s not like it hadn’t occurred to me that she might already be dead. I wondered if the dream was showing me the past or the future. But I really thought I might be here to save her.”
“That would’ve been an easy explanation,” she agreed. “Save the woman. Not at all confusing, unlike this whole ghost, alien and monster mashup thing that’s going on out there.”
“No kidding…” Eric rubbed at his eyes. His heart was still thumping from that awful vision. “What’s going on, anyway? Why is everything so messed up? It’s way worse than usual.”
“Well, for starters, you’re in a triangle.”
The Hedge Lake Triangle. He recalled her saying something about it when he first met Owen and Pete. She told him that if he really was dealing with a triangle, things could get complicated. And things had definitely gotten complicated. “What do you know about triangles?”
“They tend to be associated with a wide range of claims.”
“That’s a check.”
“Most are actually just fissures, I think. Someone wanders in and disappears, a strange creature wanders out, rumors start to fly. People tend to make things up when they don’t understand something.”
“Makes sense,” agreed Eric.
“But some really do defy explanation.”
“And this one?”
“Jury’s still out, but so far it’s not making any sense to me. It’s obviously not a fissure. I’m sure I’d know if it was. But I can’t explain it, either. Something’s going on out there.”
Again, Eric scanned his surroundings. “So what should I do?”
“Personally, I’d go back to Specter Ten and see if you can learn anything else about the area. There must be more history. Didn’t Owen say that Pete could give you all the details of all ten disappearances?”
He sighed. “Yeah. He did say that.” But he really didn’t want to have to deal with those two again.
“Or…”
“Yes?” said Eric, eager to hear another option.
“Don’t you have a friend who’s a UFO nut?”
He thought about this for a moment. “You mean Gerry Nesby?”
“Yeah. Him.”
“What about him?”
“You could always call him.”
Eric drew an unpleasant face. Call Gerry Nesby? To ask about UFOs? On purpose? Gerry was a raving alien conspiracy fanatic and an old friend from back in his high school days. They had almost nothing in common anymore, but for some reason he still called every now and then just to catch up. He hadn’t heard from him in a while. The last time they talked, Gerry’s timing had been…unfortunate. It was during one of these weird journeys, actually, that business with Aiden Chadwick in Creek Bend. He’d been literally treed by a pack of monstrous black creatures and Gerry was tying up the line with his usual, pointless chattering and ultimately caused him to drop the phone so that he couldn’t talk to Isabelle when he desperately needed her. He was still a little sore about that, to tell the truth.
“You have his number on your phone, don’t you?”
“I think so. But he’s always called me. I’ve never actually wanted to talk to him…”
“I’m just saying,” said Isabelle, “that he might be able to tell you something useful about these aliens.”
“Or I might spend the next few hours listening to Gerry talk crazy at me. The guy’s no scientist.”
“True,” agreed Isabelle. “But most scientists don’t believe in hellhounds, either.”
“Valid point.” Gerry was a firm believer in more than just UFOs. If allowed, he’d go on and on about sinister alien plots and evil Men in Black and government cover-ups. He really didn’t want to open that can of worms.
“Okay. Then I guess you’ll talk to Specter Ten again.”
Eric groaned.
“Unless you want to go see what Fester Sweater wants to discuss,” she reminded him.
“Right. No thank you.” He hung up the phone and continued walking back toward Owen’s cameras. Isabelle was correct, as usual. He didn’t dare go nosing around Fettarsetter’s house until he had a better idea of what was going on. And there was no one else here, except for Jordan, who he hoped had gone home for the day and stayed out of these dangerous woods.
He brought up the directory on his phone. There was Gerry’s number, all right. Maybe he would end up calling him, just as Isabelle suggested. The guy was crazy, but so was this whole triangle thing. With all the UFO trivia that man had in his head, maybe he knew something that would actually be helpful.
But he wasn’t doing it yet. He was still mad about the apple tree incident.
He shook his head. Triangles. Fissures. Unseen. Nameless agents. Witches. Ghosts. He remembered back when he was grown up enough to not believe in all this nonsense…