The dream was broken here.  Everything came back to him in jumbled pieces and out of order, compounding the confusion.  He couldn’t recall if he saw something scurrying past his feet or merely heard it.  And that shape that scuttled overhead…  Was that from the dream?  Or did he see it just a moment ago?  And that scream?  Was it real or imaginary?  Now or then?  Here or there?

He was beginning to remember why the dream had always filled him with such dread.

The light went and came without any warning or reason.

“Are you feeling this too?” he asked as the shadows lifted and revealed a forest of stone columns rising up into the sky.

But Foggy did not answer.

“Where are we?  What’s going on?”

When silence met him again, Eric turned to face his unwanted companion, only to find that he was utterly alone.

Where had he gone?  How long had he been gone?  How long had he been down here?

Nothing made sense.

He turned around, his eyes rising up to the towering columns.

What was going on?

He continued down the stairs, descending several of the steps before thinking to wonder where these stairs came from and when, exactly, he began this descent.  But he immediately began to wonder if he’d ever stopped descending the stairs, if he had only imagined walking on solid, horizontal ground among those massive columns.

It was becoming difficult to keep up with where he was.  The cathedral was doing something to his mind.  The two worlds…  They overlapped.  Two realities.  Trying to occupy this one space.  The distortions grew stronger as he neared the singularity.  He couldn’t tell one from the other, couldn’t even distinguish reality from his dream.

When he looked back, however, the foggy man was still gone.

He was still alone.

The bizarreness of the cathedral must have allowed them to get separated.

Apparently, Foggy’s skills were no match for the otherworldly nature of the cathedral.  He’d failed to keep track of his prisoner.

Eric knew that he should take advantage of this.  This was his opportunity to beat the foggy man to the prize.  But he still had no idea what he was doing.  And it was hard to ignore the fact that there was now a likely pissed off psychopath running around down here with a gun.

He peered up into the blue sky that hung over him.  Night had not fallen up there, but perhaps night never fell up there.  It would not surprise him.  Nothing here would surprise him.  This place defied all manner of logic.  But there remained a few certainties.  The first of these was that there was no way back from here.

He was sure that if he turned around and tried to make his way back out, he would find himself turned back again and again, hopelessly forced to continue only downward, swallowed whole by this unearthly pit.

Closing his eyes, he made himself breathe.  He tried to focus.  It was hard.  The morphine blurred his thoughts, dulled his senses even as it dulled the pain.

No.  The morphine wasn’t real.  That was the dream.

It was becoming so hard to keep the two apart in his weary mind.

Noises behind him.  He turned to look.  But darkness had fallen over him again.

Somewhere far above him, he heard a scream.

Or was it a laugh?

Or was it only a memory from the dream?

God, it was so hard to tell anymore.

Never in his life had he ever been this afraid.

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.