The Fire Unseen

by Andrew C Jaxson

  I stood up, grabbed a towel, and let the plug out. I hurried to dry myself before the water started making that growling noise as it went down the drain. I’d always found it scary when I was little, and every night, I used to try to get dressed and escape the bathroom before the water drained too far. The noise no longer terrified me, but old habits die hard.

  At the moment, I was avoiding mirrors. The blackish-purple bruises on my face weren’t something I wanted to see. But tonight, I caught sight of myself as I dried my hair. The marks seemed to be healing. I paused and looked closer. It was probably time to inspect the damage anyway.

  Slapping both hands on the counter, I took stock of my recovery. The fluorescent light wasn’t exactly flattering, but at least the marks on my neck were fading. The stitches on top of my head weren’t noticeable at all anymore. A benefit of having black hair, I guess. I wasn’t supposed to get the stitches wet, but I didn’t much care.

  Sighing, I stared right into my eyes. I looked different since the accident, and not just because of the bruises. I seemed darker inside, or maybe just older. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.

  My eyes are unusual, anyway. One is bright aqua blue, and the other is brown. I’ve read that having different-coloured eyes isn’t uncommon, but it’s definitely not normal. That kind of sums up my life, to be honest.

  I’ve always felt a bit out of place. I’m the girl who hangs back from the crowd. Some days, I just feel disconnected, like everyone else is having fun and I’m just watching. Like I’m standing outside in the cold, looking through the window at someone else’s family. I have a few close friends, but I don’t make new ones easily. I know a lot of people, and I hang out with a group, but when it comes to being close with someone, it takes a while for me to trust them.

  Trust was even harder after Dad walked out. That does something to you. It’s sort of like part of you shuts down, at least for a while. That survival mechanism kicks in, and your defenses go up. Everyone tells you to be strong, and everyone tells you he isn’t worth your tears, and everyone tells you that you should hate him, but at the end of the day, you still want him to be there and he’s not. It’s easy to get cynical, but I have to remind myself sometimes that not everyone is like him. I have to remind myself that there is good in the world. I think we all need to now and then.

  I threw my pyjamas on and headed out to the back room. It was a hot night, so I was wearing a pink nightshirt I got when I was twelve. It didn’t exactly fit the best anymore, but it was comfy, and it was only my mum and sister around, so I didn’t really care.

  Mum was lying on the lounge, asleep. The TV was blasting some awful reality show, but Mum’s slight snore meant she’d obviously lost interest in it some time ago. The only light in the room was ever-changing, provided by the cheesy romance playing out on-screen. An empty wine bottle sat next to the cabinet. She’d been drinking again. I could smell it from here.

  Mum wasn’t a violent drinker, but since the split, it’d been the only way she could get to sleep. Most nights, I was the one who ended up making dinner for me and my sister. Tonight, I stopped for a moment and looked at her, my mother, unconscious, still in her work clothes, oblivious to the world and the needs around her. The needs of her family. The few days of attention she’d given me in the hospital were about all she could muster. She was burned out now. When I was a child, she’d been this amazing, fiery, red-headed force of nature. Now, she just looked very, very small.

  “Ari!” My sister came bounding in, full of nervous energy. When Skye decided something was important, everything else had to be dropped immediately so the world could revolve around her. I motioned for her to be quiet so she wouldn’t wake Mum. Skye had dark hair like mine, but her eyes were such a deep shade of brown they were almost black. In the blue light of the television, she looked otherworldly.

  “Sorry,” she hissed in the forced and incredibly loud whisper of a six-year-old. “I can’t find Stewie; he’s not in the yard.”

  I sighed. Stewie, our weird little pug, had a habit of digging under the fence and escaping. He normally came back, but Skye wouldn’t settle until she knew he was okay. I was going to have to head out and find him. Great. I loved my sister to bits, but I was still in a fair amount of pain and the humid summer heat had made my pyjamas stick to my skin. It was gross. Heading outside was the last thing I felt like doing.

  “At least come with me,” I huffed.

  Skye nodded, and I grabbed my dressing gown and went outside. The sun was setting, so we didn’t have much time to find Stewie before we lost the light.

  My bare feet warmed by the still-hot pavement, I trod the route I had covered so many times before. Inventive as he was, Stewie was a predictable creature. He would be down by the park, on the edge of the creek, desperately trying to catch a beetle. Any time he escaped, that’s where we found him.

  Skye’s porcelain fingers interlocked with mine. She was so small, so fragile, but she was also my whole world. It’s amazing how something so tiny can take up so much space in your heart. With Mum mostly off in space, I had become a kind of surrogate parent, and I threw myself into the role with as much energy as I could manage. It was hard, being both big sister and mum, but without me, Skye would be lost. As if she knew what I was thinking, she locked her gaze with mine and smiled. “Love you.”

  “Love you too.” I could never stay mad at her for long.

  “Piggyback?”

  “Sure.”

  She climbed a fence and jumped on my back, legs and arms wrapped around me like a backpack. It hurt a bit, as I was still sore from the accident, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. I breathed in the hot summer air, which was thick with leftover humidity from the afternoon storm. On the horizon, just below the quietly emerging stars, clouds flashed as the storm passed over the lake, lightning shimmering like fireworks in the inky sky.

  I’d always loved summer. With windows and doors propped open, everything felt a little more connected. You could hear dishes clink as families had dinner, faint snatches of conversation drifting through their open windows, and so even Skye and I, walking outside, somehow became a part of other families’ routines, their bedtime rituals, laughter, even their fights. It was nice to get a glimpse into other lives, even if only for a moment.

  Reaching the edge of the park, I focused on the task at hand. Time to find this idiot pug. The sun had fully set now, and the streetlights cast a green glow over the playground. I’d never liked this park at night. It backed onto a reserve that was split in two by a dark creek, one that began somewhere up in the mountains and trickled all the way down. The forest here was connected by a thin thread of trees right up to the Ettney National Park.

  Looking out into the reserve felt like looking into a chasm where wilderness took over and humanity wasn’t welcome. There was an urban legend about a ghost in those mountains, sparked by the occasional missing hiker or tour group stray that never turned up. The ghost stories were ridiculous, of course; people get lost in national parks all the time, especially one as wild and huge as this. Still, staring at the dark tree line, my mind got away from me, and the forest became an ominous blanket of charcoal trunks and murky shadows.

  Somewhere in the darkness there was a flutter of wings and the scream of a rodent. Skye jumped, and I shuddered. We needed to find Stewie as soon as possible. I peered into the twilight, trying to make out the stumpy tan figure of our dog. But nothing moved.

  “Stewie, where are you?” I muttered, my gaze roaming across the park. The place was still and silent, the only movement the grass swirling in the wind. I took a step forward, and froze.

  There was a figure amongst the trunks. Black against black. Silhouette against shadow.

  Despite the hot night, my spine chilled. But the figure didn’t move. A trick of the dusk? I shook my head and glanced away. The last shreds of blue were disappearing in the sky above, and thunder still cracked in the distance. When I looked back, the figure was closer. Sta
tionary, but closer. He was watching us.

  Somehow, the crickets stopped. The wind stopped. There was silence. The streetlamps faded, the light draining out of them like blood from a vein. For a moment, the whole world went dark, but the shadow man was darker still.

  I wanted to hold Skye tight and run, but I couldn’t move.

  The figure felt dangerous. Deadly. We were both going to die if I didn’t run.

  I didn’t run.

  “Stewie!” Skye called, and his loud bark broke my trance. I snapped back to the world like a rubber band, and the streetlamps once again flooded the park with anaemic light. Snatches of a commercial drifted from the television in the house across the road, and Stewie bounded across the grass as if nothing had happened. Skye didn’t seem to have noticed either, neither seeing or fearing the figure in the trees.

  But I had. So I grabbed our dog and ran, Skye still perched on my back. I didn’t dare look behind me to see if the figure was still there. My foot hit the gutter, and I stumbled, sure I could feel him closing in behind us. Our front porch light gleamed like a lighthouse through the sticky air, and when we reached the threshold, I fell inside, slamming the door shut and locking it behind me.

  “That was fun! Thanks!” Skye jumped down and hugged Stewie, unaware of my terror.

  I turned to reply but gasped instead when I saw her face. Her chin was covered in blood. “Skye! Are you hurt?”

  “No … Why?”

  I washed her face off, but she had no cuts anywhere. There was a throbbing in the back of my head, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. I placed my hand on my stitches, and it came away wet. I took a deep breath. The cut in my head was weeping again, probably from the increased blood pressure. Skye’s chin had hit it as I ran. It was my blood on her face.

  I didn’t want to freak her out, so I tucked her into bed before retreating to my room.

  The blinds were open, and the windows were black squares now night had truly fallen. Closing the blinds, I turned on the TV in my room to make some background noise. I’d been imagining things, surely, just creeping myself out like I always did down near the reserve.

  A red drop fell onto my cheek. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the cabinet mirror. My head was bleeding badly now. I undressed and got in the shower, red streaks running down my body and staining the white ceramic tiles, spinning into pinwheels as they twisted round the vortex in the drain. I washed my hair until the water ran clear and then placed a towel on my pillow in case my wound leaked any more.

  Then I went to bed, but left the light on.

  THREE

  “Investigations continue into the truck accident that claimed twenty-three lives in Ettney. Blackwood Logistics, the tanker’s parent company, is claiming human error, providing investigators with a full-service history earlier—”

  I punched my alarm clock, and the voices stopped. It was a harsh awakening and an unwelcome reminder. I forced my eyes open and blinked, adjusting to the light that filtered through the crack in my curtains. The TV chattered dimly in the back room. I did not want to be awake. My hazy brain pieced together the reason for my alarm.

  Monday morning.

  School.

  I sat up, and pain behind my eyes shocked me further awake. I fumbled for the painkillers on my bedside table and downed them. Then I looked back at my pillow. A red stain soaked the towel where my stitches had leaked overnight.

  In the warm morning light, my encounter from the night before seemed distant and unreal, the memories unfamiliar but somehow still present, like déjà vu. Had it even happened? Perhaps my long walk to find our potato face of a dog had relapsed my concussion or something. I probably should’ve gone to the doctor, but I’d had enough of scans and wanted to see my friends. If I was still feeling strange after school, I would make an appointment.

  Internal conflict semi-resolved, I got dressed, skipped breakfast, and began the slow walk to school. Mum was still asleep when I left – she was on the late shift today – and there were no buses to speak of in our town. You either drove, biked, or walked. I didn’t trust my brain enough to get back on my bike just yet. It’s a weird place to be, not trusting your own mind, knowing it might give out on you at any moment. Trusting myself was something I had taken for granted for a long time. No longer. I couldn’t trust my own perceptions, my own judgement. I was feeling all right, but last night had thrown me. Now I wasn’t sure what to think.

  A group of guys from school walked a block ahead of me. Some were in my year, and others the year below. Hoping they wouldn’t notice me, I dragged my feet. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, and they’d only want to ask me questions about the accident. These guys would never normally talk to me, but they would feign concern when what they really wanted were gruesome details. I wasn’t up for that.

  I pulled out my new phone as I walked and tried searching online for shadow related hallucinations, but got a bunch of results about people on drugs. Maybe the painkillers were getting to my head, making me see things that weren’t there. On a whim, I searched the word “unseen”, but just got a bunch of dictionary definitions and not much else, even after ten pages of results. I locked my phone and put it in my back pocket as I made it to the highway that ran through our part of town.

  A passing truck blew its horn, and I jumped. My shoulders and fists clenched tight, sending a ripple of pain down my back. I turned to the noise, expecting the worst, but the driver was just warning a dog off the road. Nothing to be concerned about.

  The doctors had warned me this might happen. My body was having an automatic, sympathetic response, triggered by something connected to my experience of the accident. Very common, but still unpleasant. I closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and resumed my walk to school.

  Stepping onto campus was weird. Nothing had really changed; there were the same squat, red-brick buildings, the same musty smell, the same oak trees blushing green in the heat of summer. Somehow, though, it was different. Quiet. Bad quiet. The oppressive silence that happens after tragedy. After all, this was the first time many of us had seen each other since our friends or family had died.

  The bell sounded as I made it to the quad. I was only just on time but ambled slowly to roll call. I hadn’t seen my friends yet, and now I wouldn’t see anyone until second period.

  I wasn’t very close with anyone in my first class, but I was okay with that. It meant I didn’t have to force conversation. Though I did catch people looking at me, trying to casually glance in my direction so they could gawk at the bruises on my face. Nobody was subtle, but at least they didn’t ask me outright. Besides, the focus was really on Kelly, the sister of one of the girls who died. I was surprised to see her back at school so soon. I think maybe her parents needed the space, and she needed the routine.

  It was hypocritical, but I couldn’t help but stare at her. She looked so normal but still somehow different. People are drawn to tragedy. It’s a sick fascination we have. We want to understand the pain of others because it makes our own seem less severe. We want to hear stories worse than our own because it reminds us that we, for the most part, are doing okay.

  Then again, maybe it’s more than that. Maybe somewhere deep inside we’re drawn to death. Like a dog to a water bowl, we lap up reminders of our own mortality. Something inside us really wants to be reminded that one day, it’s going to be us lying there in a wooden box. The most powerful stories are the ones where people die. Romeo and Juliet, Icarus, Macbeth. Joan of Arc, Braveheart. Maybe those are the only kinds of stories that feel truly real to us because something deep within us doesn’t trust a happy ending.

  Kelly held it together through the whole of first period. Honestly, though, I didn’t really know what I was expecting her to do. I guess when someone you know experiences something that traumatic, you feel like something big should change. Some huge, drastic, sweeping transformation. There was still an emptiness in her though. There was less of her, somehow. She was slower. Absent.
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br />   Kelly glanced my way, and I jumped, pretending I wasn’t staring at her. She looked away. I glared at the board, cheeks burning. She probably felt like a goldfish in a glass bowl—looked at, talked about … but never talked to.

  The bell whined, and I shuffled off to my next class. That bell would continue to ring on time, every time, regardless of what happened in our lives. If our town were wiped out by an asteroid, rescuers would be baffled by the sound of a bell deep in the rubble, still ringing every forty-eight minutes.

  While letting the crowd herd me to my next class, I caught sight of the new kid who’d started today. Among the other whispers in my first class, I’d heard rumours of a new guy in the year above mine, but now I knew they were true. And I’d somehow caught his eye.

  He grinned at me, and for the second time in a week, I was painfully aware of my bruised appearance. By the time I had composed myself, his eyes no longer met mine and it was too late to smile back. I mentally kicked myself for being so awkward.

  “Ari, you’re here!” Caitlyn’s voice bubbled over the background noise.

  Caitlyn and I met in second grade, when we’d bonded while pretending to be fairies at recess. Embarrassing, maybe, but when you’re seven, that’s what you need in a friend. We weren’t always super close; like any long-term friendship, we went through our share of phases, but I had no trouble looking like a complete mess in front of her. She passed the track-pants test—that invisible line you cross when you realise you’re comfortable wearing your absolute worst when they sleep over. Like any great friendship, we racked up hundreds of hours dancing like idiots, singing badly as loud as we could, and daring each other to try and hit my grumpy neighbour in the head with a paper aeroplane while he wasn’t looking. We got him more than once.