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  But some part of him, buried deep down in some far corner of his brain, must have still remembered it, because that awful, gut-churning fright remained. Whatever it was he’d found here in his dream, it wasn’t pleasant.

  An odd noise startled him and he stopped to listen, his skin prickling with gooseflesh. It came from somewhere on the other side of the far door, a sickly bleating sound, like nothing he’d ever heard before. He was no expert on farm animals, but to his ears, it was like the utterances of a wretched, starving animal.

  That nauseous feeling in his belly grew.

  Slowly, he crept toward the back of the barn, his eyes fixed on the second set of large, double doors that stood partially opened, just like the first. But while there was brilliant sunlight cutting through the shadows where he had entered the barn, the space beyond those far doors was dark and shadowy.

  He felt a chill creep through him and realized he was holding his breath. He had to force himself to breathe normally.

  Why was he so worried? What had he seen within these walls while he was dreaming?

  When he reached the doors, he felt a cool draft flowing across his sweat-dampened skin and was reminded of the strange moments back in the cornfield, where the corn had withered. This was like those areas, he realized. It was connected somehow.

  His eyes swept across the ground as he again wondered if some invisible poison might be soaked into the soil, undetectable fumes rising around him, invading his body, poisoning and twisting his mind.

  He forced the unpleasant thought away and peered through the open doors.

  For a moment, he was confused. He turned and looked back toward the sunlit front doors. The barn was big. Each set of double doors was more than large enough to allow entry for a sizable tractor, but it could not have been much bigger than this room when he stood staring at it from outside. Yet through this door waited a second room easily twice as long as the first. Empty stalls lined the walls on either side of a wide walkway that reached far past where the barn should have ended given its exterior dimensions.

  It was impossible. It was like stepping inside an M. C. Escher work.

  It had to be an optical illusion of some sort. There was no other logical explanation.

  But then again, why would anything here be logical? Nothing he had done today was logical.

  And even as he tried to make himself accept what was happening to him, he realized that he recalled discovering these same impossible dimensions in his dream.

  Movement drew his attention to the far end of the second room. Something that appeared to be some kind of chicken was making its way across the floor near the next set of double doors.

  Another bird…

  As he watched it, he quickly realized that there was something wrong with the creature. Though small and plump, like a chicken, it wasn’t moving like any barnyard fowl he had ever seen. It didn’t hold its head up as it walked, surveying the room in lively jerks. Instead, it looked as if it were hanging its head in a curiously forlorn manner. Also, it didn’t strut like a chicken. Instead, it moved in slow, lurching motions, as if on the verge of death. It was either the most depressed little chicken he had ever laid eyes on or there was something very not right about it.

  Again, that awful bleating noise came. It seemed to come from beyond the far doorway. It reminded him a little of a lamb or a calf, but it was gruff and choked, like something slowly strangling to death in the jaws of a steel snare.

  The chicken-thing continued its labored lurching, unfazed by the terrible sound.

  Still standing in the doorway, Eric checked his cell phone. He wasn’t remotely surprised to see that he had no signal. He returned it to his pocket and looked around again. The sunlight drilled through the holes in the rusted roof and the gaps between the boards in the walls, just like in the last room of the impossible barn, but it did not seem nearly as warm and bright as it should have been. The air felt cold against his skin. Even the sound of the gentle wind outside was muted. Only that awful bleating noise disturbed the stillness.

  And yet, even the weirdness was familiar. His dream unfolded before him, promising to reveal to him in vivid detail why he had awakened breathless and afraid these past three nights, but only if he continued to walk in the footprints of the nightmare.

  Glancing over his shoulder at the bright strip of sunlight once more, he braced himself for whatever horrors his nightmare still had in store for him and continued toward the far doors and the mysteries that waited beyond them.

  Chapter Five

  It felt wrong in here. The wrongness weighed down the air, seeming to ooze into his very pores.

  And there was a stench, too. He hadn’t noticed it when he was standing in the doorway, but as he moved deeper into the long, gloomy interior of the barn, it enveloped him. It was far worse than the odor of ordinary farm animals. It was a death-like stench, the sickly reek of decay.

  He peered into each open stall as he passed it, finding one after another empty, just like in the previous room, until, about a third of the distance between the two sets of doors, he found a second chicken (or whatever the hell the thing was) sitting slumped in a corner.

  He turned and approached the creature, but stopped short of the stall door. He wanted to see it. He wanted to understand what was so strange about it, but he dared not get any closer than absolutely necessary.

  The wretched creature looked diseased. It was mostly bald, with black and gray mottled skin exposed except for a few small, blotchy patches of black and yellow feathers. It sat with its neck bent like a limp hose, the shriveled crest atop its head resting on the floor beside it. Its black, beady eyes stared blankly back at him.

  He thought the poor creature had died, but then it flexed its useless, naked wings and uttered a loud noise that was far less a cluck than a swine-like squeal.

  He doubted there was a force anywhere on the planet that could have prevented his feet from leaving the floor at that moment. His heart thumping hard against his ribs, his nerves electrified, Eric promptly left the freaky chicken to its roost and moved on.

  What the hell was this place?

  Three stalls down, he spied another of the strange fowl and he took a wide path around it, half-expecting it to dart out and attack him.

  Another long and mournful bleating sound rose from the other side of the door and when he looked toward it he saw that there were now two of the ugly chicken things at the far end of the room. A second had just emerged from the last stall. Even from this distance, he could tell something was wrong with its feet, likely the cause for its odd, lurching gait. The ones in the stalls had been sitting with their legs tucked beneath them, hidden from view and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pick one up for a closer look.

  He continued to peer into the open stalls as he passed them, but he kept well between them and constantly ready to spring out of the way in case something small and barely feathered emerged with the intention of pecking out his eyes.

  But as he approached the door, the two birds remained unconcerned with doing him harm. In fact, the nearest one loped away with greater urgency, as if it were he who was a monstrous mockery of nature.

  Empowered by the birds’ apparent wariness, he dared to take a moment and consider the nearest of the two. He could now see what was wrong with its feet. They were swollen and gnarled and clenched like bony fists. They walked not with their toes spread, like other birds, but upon the knuckles of their feet instead. But the true cause of their odd lurching appeared to be that their skinny legs didn’t quite hold their weight. With every step they simply rose and then collapsed.

  Earlier that summer, like he did every year, he’d visited the county fair and strolled through the various animal barns. He was well aware that there were many breeds of farm fowl, some of them remarkably ugly. Hell, your ordinary Thanksgiving turkey was no looker when you saw a live one close up. Even breeds with very few feathers weren’t uncommon. But he’d never seen anything quite like these thing
s. They weren’t just ugly. They didn’t even look healthy.

  Again, he thought about the stunted corn and shivered.

  More and more, he wondered if something otherworldly was at work here.

  As he pushed open the door, he saw that the barn had a third chamber. That awful stench struck him with renewed force, knotting his stomach into an ever tighter ball.

  At least a dozen of the ugly, loping chickens were stumbling around in here.

  Again, he heard the sickly bleating noise and realized that it was originating from somewhere in this room.

  He also could now hear the sound of buzzing flies.

  His heart still pounding, he pushed on. It was strange how it seemed to grow darker without the light growing any dimmer. The shadows seemed to be taking on life and substance all their own, wholly separate from the shapes that cast them.

  He paused as a realization came to him. Like the other two rooms, this part of the barn was familiar to him. He remembered it from his dreams. And he even remembered the strange chickens, now that he had seen them. In his dream he’d had the same reaction to them: disgust and distrust mixed with a certain morbid curiosity. But he realized now that he didn’t recall seeing them in the previous room in his dream. And he didn’t recall seeing as many in this room, either.

  But of course, it had only been a dream. Not every detail would be perfect, he supposed. Not even in an apparently prophetic dream.

  He started moving again and almost immediately his eyes fell on a shape far stranger than the creepy chickens. Inside one of the stalls to his right lay an animal as big as a cow, but with short, stubby legs and a long, limp tail.

  He found that he remembered the creature as soon as he saw it, just as it looked now, and he felt as strongly drawn to the beast as he was repulsed by it.

  Covered in short, charcoal gray hair, it lay facing away from him, its head pressed into the corner of the stall as if it were ashamed to exist. All he could make out were long, floppy ears and a short, blunt snout. A great, meaty sack, far larger than any cow udders he’d ever seen at any state fair, bulged from between its splayed and useless legs, at least a dozen teats bulging from it, some of them oozing a thick, sour-yellow substance that fell in thick ropes to the filthy floor beneath it.

  The stench was strongest here. This stall had not been cleaned in a very long time. A foul stench filled the air and a swarm of flies shared the enclosure with the poor creature.

  It was neither bovine nor swine, but something else entirely, and it looked at least as miserable as the half-dead-looking chickens.

  He could almost believe that the fowl were merely some sort of new and exceptionally unbecoming exotic breed, but he was quite sure that these things should not exist.

  Staring at it now, he realized that no one was ever going to believe that he actually saw these things. Even Karen, who trusted him as completely as any wife ever could, would never be convinced that he had actually seen such things. Telling her would only help convince her that her husband had utterly lost his mind.

  Then he remembered his cell phone. The camera.

  He pulled it from his pocket and saw that it remained out of service. For a moment he thought that his plan to prove his sanity had been foiled, but then he realized that he didn’t need cell service to use the phone’s camera. He snapped a single picture of the thing and then turned and snapped a picture of the nearest bird as well.

  That would prove he wasn’t crazy.

  Or maybe it would prove that he was crazy. If all Karen saw when she received these pictures was a dozing cow and an ordinary chicken, he’d know it was time to pack up this silly adventure and check himself into the nearest psychiatric ward.

  As he backed away from the sorry-looking creature and resumed walking toward the barn’s back door, he heard the pathetic bleating noise again. Whatever creature was making that awful sound was in one of the stalls on the right-hand side of the room, near the end. He had only just begun to wonder if it was the same sort of creature that he had just seen when something to his left let out a long and irritable-sounding moan.

  Jumping at the noise, he turned to see another creature staring at him through the wooden slats of the gate. It had huge, black eyes and a long, drooping tongue that hung from its gaping mouth and lay like a slab of raw meat on the filthy floor. Flies were crawling over the flaccid organ. Like the one in the other stall, it was lying on its side, its stubby legs spread around its bulging sack, seemingly incapable of standing.

  Once more, his thoughts strayed to the stunted corn and those old movies about UFOs and horrific alien experiments.

  Again the creature moaned at him. It was a disturbingly despondent sound.

  He snapped another picture.

  Feeling as if he might soon retch at the sight of these beasts, he turned his attention forward and continued on.

  At least nothing here seemed especially dangerous. The birds fled as he approached, keeping their distance from him, no different from hundreds of other farm birds he’d seen. And the much larger creatures locked in the stalls didn’t look remotely vicious. They didn’t even look like they could move.

  He approached the source of the sickly bleating sound. Even this didn’t sound like anything dangerous. It was not an angry sound, but rather pitiful. It sounded miserable, not bloodthirsty. Yet he still felt reluctant to see it. If it was half as disturbing as the other livestock, he was not sure he could stand the sight.

  But the stall from where the noise came was not gated like the others. Instead, the gate had been replaced with a ten-foot-tall, plywood and lumber door and chained shut so that it was impossible to see in.

  He was relieved to be spared the sight of whatever was inside, yet the trouble someone had taken to shut the creature away enflamed his curiosity. Why? What would he find if he climbed to the top of the gate and peered over?

  From inside, another long, pitiful call rang out.

  In his dream, he had turned away without looking. He did the same now. He didn’t want to see it. Whatever was inside, he was sure it would be far more disturbing than the other livestock. He didn’t think it would be something he’d want to remember.

  Ready to be out of this nightmare barn, he turned his attention forward again, just in time to see a tall, bearded man emerge from the farthest stall.

  Startled, Eric stopped.

  The man walked straight to the door and pushed it open. Bright sunlight spilled in, but somehow the barn’s interior remained just as shadowy. As soon as he was gone, the door swung shut behind him.

  Eric bolted for the door.

  He ran past every stall, startling the limp-necked chickens into squealing fits as they stumbled over their own twisted feet and rubbery legs to get out of his way.

  He reached the door without being attacked by mutant farm animals and shoved it open. Finally, he found himself back under the August sun.

  Yet the chill in the air remained.

  At first, he didn’t know where the man went. Then he spotted him crossing the porch of an old farmhouse and entering the front door.

  He wasn’t sure how it was that he didn’t notice the little house before he entered the barn. He assumed he’d been too preoccupied with the startling realization that the barn was actually a part of the dream that started all this craziness.

  Hopeful for some answers, he hurried across the overgrown lawn and climbed the porch steps.

  The house was in fairly poor shape. It needed a fresh coat of paint years ago and several of the windows had been boarded up. But he had no interest in discussing good housekeeping.

  He knocked on the door.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “Excuse me, sir? I need some help.”

  Still nothing.

  “Hello?” He pressed his forehead to the screen door and peered inside. The living room was sparsely furnished and lacked any kind of decoration. It looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. He pulled the door open a
nd leaned over the threshold. A musty smell met his nose. “Hello?”

  He stepped off the porch and stood in the doorway, listening. The house was eerily silent. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that there was a thick layer of dust over everything. No one seemed to have lived here for quite some time.

  But where did that man go? He couldn’t have simply disappeared.

  Or maybe he could have. Stranger things had happened already today.

  “Hello? Can anybody help me?”

  There was not a single sound to be heard.

  “Where the hell did you go?” he breathed.

  He walked through the living room and into the kitchen. There were no appliances except for a very old refrigerator. The shelves that he could see were bare. An old, rusty bread pan had been left on the counter next to the empty sink. The dust here was undisturbed.

  At the far end of the kitchen was a door, but he couldn’t make it open. If the man left through here, he must have locked it behind him somehow.

  He returned to the living room and peered down the hallway. He could see a bathroom and a single bedroom. This house certainly didn’t offer much in the way of space. It wasn’t much bigger than his and Karen’s first apartment.

  He walked to the bathroom and flipped the light switch. In case the empty kitchen and accumulated dust hadn’t been enough for him, the lack of power confirmed that this was no one’s permanent residence.

  He stood in the hallway for a moment, trying to piece together what had happened so far. Even ignoring the dreams and the weird compulsion to drive out to this freaky backwoods, there was plenty to think about. Was someone screwing with his head?

  That old woman… Ethan’s wife. She’d mentioned another man. “Him.” Could the vanishing figure he followed from the barn to this house have been the very same man who had frightened her yesterday? He hadn’t seen anything like the invisible fog that she had described, but he’d only caught the two brief glimpses.

  He stepped into the bedroom and looked around. The bed was stripped down to a stained mattress with broken down springs. There was an old wardrobe against one wall. The only other thing in the room was an old, tarnished mirror hanging on the wall opposite the doorway.