Chapter 26: Rescuing Ryan

It didn't matter to Preston that his father was waiting for him in Wellow Falls . The dream also didn’t influence his decision. He would deal with every obstacle. A part of him knew that going back might not be the best idea but it was drowned out by one thought – he needed to help Ryan.

Preston slowed the car as a familiar sign came into view. "Welcome to Wellow Falls ."

Traffic had been nonexistent for the last thirty miles. It wasn’t normal. Wellow Falls and the surrounding towns were suburbs of the Big City and the crisscrossing highways were usually teeming with cars and trucks. Two or three cars had passed him and he had seen another twenty or thirty at the side of the road, empty and abandoned, the occupants nowhere in sight. One car's hazard lights blinked weakly on and off, on and off. Whatever had started in Wellow Falls was already spreading.

The sign sped past him and he was back.

Nothing happened. Of course not, he told himself, what did you expect? Monsters and demons? He tried to chuckle but he pictured his father waiting by the side of the road with a big silver nail b alan ced in his hand. He remembered the laugh and his father's prophetic last words:

"Leave now Preston , but you'll be back. I guarantee you will be back very shortly. Next time I will not be so merciful and you will be punished." How did his father know he would return?

The town was deader than when he had left it, if that was possible. There wasn’t a sound, and he could hear the tires crunching over the asphalt. He turned off the radio and looked up. There was a reddish tinge in the skyline several miles away. It was coming from the lake and he remembered that it was the holiday weekend. They must be setting of fireworks, he thought before he turned onto Ryan's street and began the journey towards her house.

There was no one in sight. Wellow Falls was sterilized, cleaned of any trace of life and flavor. If it was a taste, the town would be cardboard, if it was a sound, it would be the hollow nothingness of the wind blowing through a seashell. The vacuum of nothingness seemed overwhelmingly loud.

Martin, you bastard," he repeated to himself over and over again as his fury began to build. The smoldering anger had returned. It seemed to warm the seat under him and make him want to pounce out of the car and take action. His fear began to dissipate under the fury and Preston felt his old resolve return.

He stopped the car in front of her house and walked out. The shades on the front windows were still half closed, and the grass lining the sides of the house was browned by the lack of rain. He walked down the circular driveway and opened the unlocked front door. Pausing for an instant, he looked around before stepping inside and closing the door behind him.

The house creaked when he stepped into the foyer and he jumped.

"Ryan.” There was no reply. He walked into the living room where she had saved his life and then into the kitchen. He remembered sitting there, telling her about his trip to the cemetery. Empty. It was almost like his memories were noting more than dreams and Ryan had never lived in the house. It felt empty and alien.

Preston walked up the creaky stairs. At the top he paused, but still the air was dead and the house was quiet. He headed towards her bedroom. And as he walked slowly and quietly down the hallway, a memory came to him. He was walking down the hallway of his house, trying not to make a sound. He had heard something, or perhaps it had been a sixth sense which sometimes comes to little children. He had walked over to his parent’s room and stood in front of the door, listening, waiting, expecting to hear something. It was silent. He waited some more and then there had been a whack, a horrible sounding whack which seemed to ricochet out of the room and smack little Preston right in the face. Following the whack was a scream of terror which chilled him to the bones and froze him in his spot.

It was his mommy.

Despite being terrified and afraid that something was hurting his mother he had turned the handle and opened the door. He stood staring for a long time, listening to the thwacks and the screams, not moving and terrified that their faces would turn and they would see him staring there with tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I'm sorry, please stop, please I'm so sorry. Stop it please, Preston 's going to hear...."

"That was then," Preston whispered as he turned the handle to Ryan's room and opened the door. He almost expected to see her sprawled across the bed with a nail embedded in her chin. Her bed was as they had left it, empty.

Preston sighed in relief and walked around the room. He looked at the footprints which had dried into powdery granules of sand. He bent down and shifted one with his finger.

He rose and stared at the closet and tried to remember what had happened. Had it been a dream? Had energy come spilling out around the cracks? He walked towards it and remembered trying to hammer down the door. He spotted the hammer in the corner of the room. He reached out his hand to touch the knob and realized he was terrified. He didn't understand anything that was happening. He didn't understand Ryan and her dark spells, he didn't understand the strange dreams, and he didn't understand the monsters which had possessed and killed Wellow Falls . He only knew that he loved her and it gave him the courage to touch the brass doorknob and turn.

He didn't expect it to turn but it did. The lock creaked and then clicked. He heard the latch loosen and then the door swung towards him. He was breathing heavily and sweat dripped from his forehead. Bracing himself, Preston opened the door wide.

He stared into a normal looking closet. Other than a sole hanger dangling from the rack, it was empty. He just stared at it and as he did his finger began to itch. The hangar began to vibrate and Preston walked forwards. He looked at his missing stump and raised it towards the hangar. The twisted piece of metal began to vibrate violently and then, as if he was heating the metal, a reddish glow began to surround the metal tube. The twitching in his finger became a low grade throb that was unpleasant, but not like the pounding pain of a few days earlier. Preston thrust his digit towards the hangar and it flew off the hook and ricocheted off the back wall of the closet.

Something had been hanging in the closet. It was gone but not before it had left some weak residue on the hangar. What? What had been hanging in the closet and how did it relate to Ryan and to his finger? He looked at the stump and the dull red glow had entirely disappeared. If whatever was in the closet was gone, what about Ryan? He walked over to the window and leaned on the perch.

At first he saw nothing, but slowly as his view panned across the expanse of trees in the valley below, he saw the red glow again over the lake. The glow had grown and now the tops of all the trees in front of him were tinged with the sickly color. It was the same glow he had seen in the closet and then it clicked. There was something going on at the resort and Ryan was there.

He leapt from the window and hurtled himself down the stairs.

He would have driven straight to the resort if a strong explosion hadn't lifted the car off the ground and left Preston 's ears ringing. He slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop on the abandoned street. He looked around but the street was still empty. When he was convinced that no one was coming, he opened the door and stepped out.

That was when he heard the growl of an engine and saw a convoy of trucks emerge from the woods about a quarter of a mile up the road. He ducked behind the car and watched as a bunch of dump trucks turned in the opposite direction and disappeared over the other side of a hill.

There was another explosion almost directly to his left. Preston ducked behind the car and waited. Nothing. He didn't dare drive his car any further and he moved cautiously into the woods. He was familiar with this area and after a few minutes found a trail.

There was third explosion and after it had passed Preston heard other sounds – the roar of machinery, hammering, and rocks being smashed. He heard the distant sound of voices barking orders and giving curt directions. The path sloped upward and when he reached the apex, he froze.

The path abruptly ended, the land dropping hundreds of feet down into a monstrous crater. The size and enormity of the hole confounded his senses. It stretched further than he could see. At the bottom of the gigantic excavation were thousands of people and hundreds of pieces of machinery. The men and machinery moved together, synchronized, like ants or bees. He thought about the policemen who had disappeared at the quarry and wondered if they were down there. Machinery zigzazzed back and forth and thousands of people sifted, sorted, and shoveled.

A hand rested on his shoulder and Preston froze.

"It's a steep drop down, isn't it Preston ?" He spun around and faced a silver nail. Holding it with a big grin on his face was Ed O' Grady, the editor of the local newspaper. Preston looked at the man and wasn't surprised to see the small lump under his chin.

"Yeah, they got me, got me real good. But you know what Preston , it isn't that bad, it isn't bad at all. They've promised me so much more than what I would have had as an editor of some crummy little backwoods newspaper." O’ Grady’s face was dirty and his hair was a wild knotted mange. Preston thought he could see the man’s skin starting to peel away around his eyes and mouth. The stench was familiar, the smell of a dead man.

"Where's Ryan?" O'Grady smiled and looked out over the crater.

"You love the girl don't you?"

"Where is she?" O' Grady looked at the nail and twisted it in his hand.

"You'll see her soon enough, although you probably won't want to."

"What have you done to her!" O' Grady laughed and Preston sprung to the side and jumped onto a ledge at the edge of the crater. O' Grady cursed and lunged but he was too late. Preston thought he was going to make it into the woods when the ledge he landed on collapsed. His hands grabbed a small bush and he pulled it three quarters of the way out of the ground before the root system caught and stopped his plunge.

He should have been scared but instead, his mind was blazing with anger. They had taken his girl. They were hurting her. He clutched savagely at the hill in an attempt to clamber back to safety. Rocks and dirt cascaded down the edges, falling and ricocheting off the steep cliffs. He pulled himself up one foot and then another and finally put his fingers on the edge of the crater. As he lifted his head up to ground level, his eyes met O' Grady's boots.

Preston thought the editor was going to kick him but instead the man bent over and offered Preston his hand.

"Grab my hand Preston , I'll take you to her." He looked at the hand, at the scaling flesh and tentatively reached out to grab it. "That's it Preston , I'll take you to her. No harm done." O' Grady's hand was rough and cold, like a reptile’s. Preston clasped it and the anger washed over him in waves.

"I'll go to her myself?" he screamed as he locked his feet against the cliff and pulled O' Grady towards him. The man's eyes bulged and Preston felt the other entity inside of the editor's body. He screamed in fury as his legs slipped from under him and his body was dragged towards the edge of the cliff.

"No!" he shrieked. The little man lurched, righted himself, and lost his b alan ce. He hung for one last instant.

"Wait till you meet your lady," he hissed before the dirt under him crumbled and his body disappeared. He heard the form bouncing down the rock sides, reverberating where the bones hit rock, and then settle into silence.

Preston pulled himself up and lay at the side of the crater panting. When he had regained his breathe, Preston staggered to his feet and looked down to spot the ex-editor's body. It lay wedged in between several rocks, the limbs twisted at odd angles. Preston thought he could see a dark liquid moving slowly over the torn flesh and broken bones, and he wondered if O' Grady was impervious to death like Martin. Not wanting to find out, he moved away and into the woods.

He decided that it had been fortunate that the explosions had stopped him. Without them, he would have driven straight to the resort and that didn't seem like such a good idea. He wandered through the woods he had traveled many times as a boy and tried to formulate some type of plan. Yet, whenever he tried to calm his thoughts and think his mind reverted to fear and worry over Ryan. He thought about the hangar dangling slowly in the closet, the red energy slowly fading away to nothing, and he wanted to bolt ahead through the thicket and plunge onto the resort.

Control, he whispered to himself, control. The path he was on meandered across a stream and over a slight hill and then he came to a familiar clump of bushes. He walked around a tree and spotted his sleeping bag. It seemed like centuries ago that he been stalked by Martin at this spot. He hunched down and brushed aside some branches and dirt covering a small hole. Inside of it were a few of his choice books and below them was a medium sized hunting knife. He kept the knife in case his father ever followed him into the woods. There had been so many nights when he had lay huddled in the sleeping bag, waiting for the footsteps and trying to imagine what it would feel like to plunge the knife into his father's chest. His father had already taken his mother, and now he threatened to take away Ryan.

"No, no," he whispered intently as he focused his thoughts," I can't let that happen, not again." The red glow had expanded, now bathing the woods in the eerie light. Preston clasped the knife and started forward towards it.