The Unseen

by Bryan, JL

  After he left, Cassidy stepped into the alley out back for a smoke break. The brick building was painted with geological layers of overlapping graffiti kept fresh and colorful by each generation. The decorations even covered the dumpster and the row of steel trash cans.

  She brought out Ibis’s phone number from her purse. Why not? She could use a little extra leg therapy—especially at his hands—and Peyton was not in the picture at the moment, as far as she was concerned. It could be fun to hang out with somebody new after months of Peyton’s depressed rambling.

  Cassidy took a deep breath and felt nervous as she dialed his number. While the phone rang, she caught herself fixing her hair, as though he were going to see her through the phone.

  “Hi,” Ibis said. It threw her for a second. He’d spoken as though greeting her in person, instead of the more distant tone of answering a call from an unknown number.

  “Hey, Ibis? It’s Cassidy, the one-legged tattoo artist.”

  “How does she draw tattoos with just one leg? Nobody knows,” Ibis replied.

  Cassidy laughed.

  “I hope you’re calling about Count Wildcat,” he said.

  “Yeah, exactly. I’m back at work, so...whenever you want it fixed. You’ve got my number now.”

  “Tomorrow good?”

  “Yeah, I should be here by two.”

  Ibis laughed. “Wish I worked those kind of hours.”

  “It’s not great when you’re leaving at midnight.”

  “Midnight’s still early. How’s your leg?”

  “Yeah, that’s the other thing. It’s not great. Can you help me out a little more?”

  “I’ll fix it right up for you,” he said. “Where do you stay?”

  “Right by Candler Park.”

  “Sunday morning in the park,” he said. “Fresh air and sunlight will help you out.”

  “How do you define ‘morning’?” Cassidy asked.

  “Eight-thirty?”

  “Eleven sounds good,” Cassidy replied. “I appreciate it a lot, Ibis.”

  “It’s a fair trade, nothing to appreciate,” he said. “You just make sure you get all that Muppet out of my wildcat.”

  Cassidy returned inside in a good mood, ready for more work.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Peyton sat in the DJ booth, listlessly watching his tracks unfold. He wasn’t feeling inspired, even though he’d bummed a line off a friend after Reese left the DJ booth. The coke wasn’t helping at all tonight.

  He’d been surprised when Reese accepted his invite to go to work with him, though she had teased him about working in “dens of temptation.” Reese had only stayed up in the booth for a minute before going down to join the packed crowd on the narrow dance floor below.

  She drank only water from the bar, but threw herself into the crowd with an abandon suitable for the fall of Rome. She danced with anyone who showed the slightest interest in her—close, sexy, and intimate with the girls, pressing and grinding against the guys, but never sticking with anyone very long. If she meant to turn Peyton on or make him jealous, it was working. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She’d even had some club wear in her trunk suitcase, low-slung black leather pants and a violet shirt that ended high on her rib cage, leaving her midsection bare.

  There was also the black opal on her finger, the one that seemed to contain all that was dark and sad and frightening in the universe. He wanted to stare into it again, to feel the darkness looking back into him. Even the best coke didn’t give him feelings so intense.

  When his set ended, he walked down to the dance floor, feeling relieved to be done with work. He took Reese’s arm.

  “Hi,” she said. “Nice sounds up there.”

  “Let me see it,” Peyton said. He hadn’t intended to say it right away, but he couldn’t help it.

  “See what?” Reese gave him a flirty smile.

  “You know.” His voice sounded hoarse. “The stone.” He looked at her left hand, but the stone was turned inwards and her fingers were curled around it.

  “You didn’t even say please.” Reese pouted. “You didn’t even kiss me.”

  Peyton kissed her hard on the mouth and took her left hand in his, but she wouldn’t open her fingers for him.

  “Please,” he whispered. It was almost a hiss.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t. Discipleship has to be a free choice, Peyton. You can’t bring someone there with little tricks. I have to show you something real. I have to make you believe.”

  “I’ll believe whatever you want.”

  “That’s not the right attitude. Come on.” With Peyton clinging to her left hand, she led the way out of the club. “I had fun tonight.”

  “Looked like it.”

  “I never get out and dance, so I wanted to make the most of it.”

  “I think you succeeded.” Peyton took a deep breath of outdoor air as they emerged into the parking lot outside the club, which occupied the basement of an old glass factory remade into retail space. It was one in the morning, and the shops above the club were all closed.

  Reese drove fast, moving toward his part of town but then making an unexpected turn down a narrow, unlit road.

  “Where are we going?” he asked. He didn’t feel like being out. He wanted to go home, get high, and stare into the black stone. He knew it held answers.

  “I am now allowed to give you a glimpse of the unseen world.”

  “In your stone?” he asked, feeling hopeful.

  “No, the real world.” Reese turned into a neighborhood of low, ramshackle houses with concrete front porches and tin roofs. At the end of the street, Reese pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a long-abandoned auto garage covered with graffiti, high weeds growing up through the blacktop. She parked behind the building, out of sight of the road.

  “Are we here to buy crack?” Peyton asked.

  “You’re funny.” Reese got out of the car and opened his door for him.

  “Seriously? We’re getting out here?”

  “You’ll see.” Reese helped Peyton out and closed his door.

  “Make sure you locked it,” Peyton whispered as they walked away through the parking lot, leaving the shining, polished Range Rover just begging to be robbed or stolen. “Why are we here?”

  “Aren’t you philosophical tonight?” Reese asked. They crossed a parking lot, then crossed the street to a high brick wall. The sidewalk here was brick, instead of the cheap and broken concrete on which they’d been walking.

  “Wait a minute,” Peyton whispered. “This is Oakland Cemetery.”

  “Yep. Graveyards are a good place for a regular person to glimpse the unseen world,” Reese said. “I’m going to show you what’s really out there.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Are you afraid of ghosts?” Reese teased, elbowing him.

  “I’m afraid of cops. We’ll get arrested.”

  “We won’t get arrested. Come on.”

  To Peyton’s surprise, Reese took a deep breath, then ran and leaped, landing on top of the wall, which must have been around six feet high. She beamed down at him. The streetlight above lit her face in an odd way, creating distorted shadows.

  “Your turn,” Reese said. Her voice had dropped into a smoky, husky tone that he hadn’t heard from her before.

  “I’m not climbing any walls right now.” Peyton thumped the brace under his shirt. “Listen, if you’re one of those goth girls who likes having sex in cemeteries, this isn’t a good pick. It’s like breaking into a national museum.”

  “I’m bringing you here for something better than sex.” She crouched down on the wall and held out her hands. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

  Peyton snickered. “Yeah. You’re going to pick me up.”

  “What, you think I’m a helpless little girl?” She snapped her fingers with both hands.

  “You can try.” Peyton reached up and took her hands in his. Her hands seemed feverishly hot.

  She wrench
ed his arms upward, so hard that pain flared in his shoulder sockets. She lifted Peyton off his feet and stood him on the wall beside her, then steadied him while he caught his balance.

  “What the hell?” Peyton rubbed his shoulder while he looked over the girl. “Are you on steroids or meth or something?”

  “The dancing.” She gave him a half-smile. Her face really did look different, her cheekbones higher and sharp as blades, her eye seeming to glow with intense blue heat. “I took power from each person I danced with tonight. I’m charged up and spilling over. Let’s have some fun.”

  Reese leaped down to the grassy lawn below, then held up her hands. “I’ll catch you,” she offered.

  “No, thanks.” Peyton sat down on the wall and scooted until he dropped, landing heavily on his feet. The impact jarred his ribs a little, but he thought having Reese catch him in her arms would have been even more jarring, in its own way.

  They stood in an open area with a broad view of the cemetery, almost fifty acres of narrow foot lanes between densely packed graves. It was a park full of trees and the mingled scents of summer blossoms, a pleasant city of the dead with crypts, chapels, Greek and Roman-style columns, tall bronze urns, and marble statues of gargoyles, animals, the dead themselves, and of the angels who hopefully watched over them. The impressive monuments in every direction were dwarfed by the glowing skyscrapers outside the park.

  “What are we doing here, again?” Peyton’s voice dropped to a whisper in the presence of so many dead.

  “We’re here to watch and listen,” she whispered back. She took his hand. “You lead the way, you pick a place for us to sit. I don’t want you to think I’m tricking you.”

  “So we’re ghost hunting.”

  “Call it what you like. Many things besides ghosts dwell in the unseen world, things that were never flesh at all.”

  Peyton felt a chill and tried to change the subject. “How did you really pick me up?”

  “I told you.” She smiled, and her teeth looked narrower and sharper than they had before. Peyton began to wonder whether it was really just the streetlight and the shadows on her face that had made her look so different.

  They walked up through a narrow lane flanked by hundred-year-old grave markers, under the sprawling limbs of oak and magnolia trees, and crepe myrtles heavy with red blossoms. This late at night, the cemetery lay mostly in shadow. There was no sound but their own footsteps. He tried not to imagine undead things hiding in the dark spaces between the stones or behind the crypts and statues, waiting to spring out on them.

  Peyton picked a little nook of a garden with beds of flowers and shrubs surrounding a circular brick water fountain. In the center of the fountain, statues of a little girl and a little boy seemed to stroll, holding an umbrella between them.

  “This looks good,” Peyton said. They sat on the wide brick lip of the fountain, their backs to the statues. The dark little plaza was surrounded by tall grave markers and crypts large enough to boast their own little granite stairways. He couldn’t help feeling a little child-like fear, sitting deep in an enormous graveyard in the middle of the night, though his brain told him he had nothing to fear from the decayed bodies all around them. The only thing he ought to fear was living police officers, not dead men.

  “Are you ready to see?” Reese sat close beside him, her body still radiating its unnatural heat.

  “Okay.” Peyton was trying not to freak out, between the spooky setting and Reese’s strange appearance and inexplicable strength.

  “You sound scared,” she whispered. “But that’s okay. Just tell me you want to see the unseen.”

  “Sure,” he said, though his voice was trembling. He couldn’t believe how frightened and superstitious he felt. “Show me.”

  She took his hand again and clenched it tight. A scorching heat passed from her palm to his, and he cried out in pain, certain his fingers were frying and black on the inside. He couldn’t release her, though; she was gripping him hard, and his hand felt glued to hers by the hot energy, as though he’d grabbed onto an electric fence and now couldn’t let go while it scorched him.

  “There.” Reese opened her hand, and he drew his own back quickly, checking it for burns. It didn’t look injured.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked.

  “I’m loaning you some power. Sh. Watch and listen.”

  Peyton’s senses were sharpened—he could hear the rasp of every leaf in the breeze, smell each individual flower. The carved names and images on the tombs around him stood out in a sharp relief.

  He opened his mouth to ask her about it, but she covered his lips with her blazing hot fingers and shook her head.

  He waited, hearing his own heart thump in his ears. He didn’t believe in ghosts, or any kind of nonphysical entities, but he still felt an irrational fear. Reese’s actions tonight were already making him question how well he truly understood the world.

  Peyton looked among high graves and dark shadows. He could hear insects in the grass. A cat yowled somewhere off to his left.

  The first footstep was almost too soft to hear, but there was a second, and a third, each growing just a little more distinct.

  “Someone’s coming,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered back.

  The footsteps approached them slowly. The sound was low and soft, like leather soles on the brick path, but it grew clearer with each step. Sometimes there was a pause of a few seconds between steps, which put him on edge.

  He watched the path from which he thought they were echoing, a narrow alley between headstones taller than he was, but nobody emerged from the shadows. There was another step, a long pause. Another step, sounding much closer, then a long pause. Peyton twitched nervously, waiting for the next one, but it never came.

  “Is it gone?” Peyton whispered, aware that he’d described the sound as an “it” and not a “he.”

  “Sh.” Reese glared at him. “Don’t speak again until I say.”

  Peyton heard something behind him, a quick half-second of a child’s laughter. He turned to see a low tree branch swaying at the edge of the plaza, as though a mischievous kid had been spying on them and had just run away.

  Could have been that cat, Peyton told himself. Or a squirrel, or a possum looking for bones to chew.

  From another row of graves, he heard a low, weary groan, like the sound of an old man who had suffered from some relentless pain for a very long time.

  He began to hear more wordless voices, scattered here and there through the enormous graveyard, whispers echoing from mausoleums and carved stone faces and the inscriptions of names long forgotten by the world of the living.

  A voice muttered low and fast somewhere nearby, the words indecipherable. Peyton imagined an insane man wandering the halls of an asylum at night, gibbering nonsense to himself.

  He looked at Reese, and there was no way to hide the naked fear on his face. She responded with a sharp smile, as though she enjoyed his growing terror.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I have to get out of here.”

  “No. No talking, no moving or they’ll attack you.”

  “Really?”

  “You want to find out?”

  Peyton did not, so he closed his mouth. He tried to come up with some reason why he should be hearing nearly-human voices whispering from the ground. He wished very much that he hadn’t agreed to come here, that they’d gone any other place tonight. His legs were actually shaking inside his pants.

  He heard a woman’s voice somewhere down a path to his right. At first he thought she was choking, then it became clearer, and he realized she was sobbing. That sound grew louder and closer.

  The hint of a shape began to form at the edge of the little fountain plaza. It was white and misty, thin and transparent, but definitely there. Peyton couldn’t blink it away. He felt the air around him grow cold, and goosebumps rose on his arms. He was cold on the inside, too, dead frightened. He didn’t want the whit
e thing to grow any clearer.

  But it did.

  It became the curved, gauzy shape of a white veil. A fringe of ribbon grew visible at one edge, and the suggestions of arms began to form, clasped at the figure’s chest as though in prayer.

  “Make it stop,” Peyton whispered. “Please.”

  “I can’t,” Reese whispered back. “You’re just seeing what’s always been there, Peyton, the part of the world you normally don’t have the power to see.”

  The ghost-woman’s fingers became visible, dripping with rotten lace, holding a bouquet of withered flowers. Layers of white veil shrouded her, all of them misty and barely visible. Peyton began to see a shadow inside the veil, suggesting the shape of a head. He wanted to run away. Only her warning that the ghosts could attack held him in place.

  “Look,” Reese whispered.

  “I’m looking,” Peyton whispered back, almost too scared to speak. He wanted to ask how to make the ghost bride go away, but he was afraid to ask it out loud. The ghost might hear him and become angry. “Who is she?”

  “Her? She’s nobody. Look over here.” Reese took him by the chin and turned his head.

  He was afraid to look away from the ghost and leave himself vulnerable to it, but what he saw next was worse. It stood inside a nearby gated area, on a narrow flight of stone stairs that twisted out of sight around a granite mausoleum. It resembled a man shrouded head to toe in black, leaving no skin exposed, visible only because it was so much darker than the shadows around it. It did not move. The little wrinkles and warps in its black cloth appeared frozen into place, unresponsive to the light breeze waving the leaves and branches around it.

  Peyton first tried to tell himself it was a statue. The bride ghost had been pale, transparent, and insubstantial, its edges fading and out of sight like curling mist, the grave inscriptions behind it still legible. This figure gave the impression of being heavy and extremely dense. Though it did not move and did not seem alive, he could definitely feel it watching him. The gaze from the figure’s unseen eyes touched Peyton’s face like an icy breeze.

  He was ready to take his chances running away.