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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