Edmund Harrow's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

Edmund walked back to town with the photographs in his borrowed camera, but he didn't go straight to the sheriff. The evidence proved the temple was older than the cult leader's fraud, but it didn't explain what had happened in the last three days. Three families who'd paid for liberation rituals had come to the boarding house asking for him. Each one described the same dream — something rising from dark water, reaching toward the surface. They'd all had it the same night, then again the next. Now they wanted to know what it meant. He found the first family at their home near the edge of town, a two-story place with a wide porch facing the bayou. The father met him at the door with hollow eyes. Inside, the mother and two children sat at the kitchen table, none of them touching the food in front of them. Edmund asked them to describe the dream in detail. The father spoke first — dark water, a shape beneath it, hands breaking the surface. The mother interrupted to add the circular stones around the edge. Edmund's chest went tight. He asked the children to draw what they'd seen. Both sketched the same thing: a pond ringed with rocks, something underneath pushing up. Neither child had been to the temple. Neither had seen the sarcophagus or the arrangement of bones inside it. But they'd dreamed it perfectly. Edmund walked to the pond behind their house. It sat thirty yards from the back porch, circled by stones the father had placed there years ago. The water was murky and still. He knelt at the edge and stared into it, looking for anything that might explain a shared dream. Nothing moved below the surface. But when he stood and turned back toward the house, he understood what he was facing. The cult leader's fraud had been built on top of something real. The temple had worked once, long ago, and the rituals the charlatan sold had opened a door he didn't know existed. Edmund couldn't prove the dreams were connected to the bones or the inscription, but he couldn't prove they weren't. And that uncertainty changed everything. He'd come to expose a liar, but now he had to decide whether to tell desperate families they'd paid money to wake something that had been sleeping for seventy years.