by Heidi Lang
“Oh, I don’t know. A normal person, probably. More or less. It would need some sort of physical tie to this dimension in order to stay here.”
“Like… a human’s eyes?”
His mom gave him a tight-lipped smile. “Exactly. And I would guess it would model itself to look very similar to its chosen prey.”
Caden thought of Patrick and his carefully handsome face and carefully handsome attire. He had supposedly been living in northern California before he moved to Whispering Pines, but maybe that was all made up.
“I’ll meet you at the doctor’s house in, say, an hour?” his mom said, already walking to the door.
“Wait, we’re going to do this now?”
“Of course. Once a decision is made, there’s no sense in waiting.”
“What about Dad? Shouldn’t we tell him?”
Her mouth twisted. “Let’s leave your father out of this one.” Which meant she didn’t think he would approve.
Which really meant this was a terrible, dangerous idea.
Caden’s mouth was too dry as he followed his mom out of her study and watched her leave the house. In an hour, he’d be opening a rift between dimensions. A rift that could only be closed by going into the Other Place.
His mom said she thought they could send the Unseeing back instead, and that would be enough of a sacrifice. But what if she was lying? What if she planned to trade herself for Aiden? Or what if she planned to trade him?
I love you, Caden.… I wouldn’t trade you for anyone.
He wanted to believe her. But he’d spent his life in the shade, watching the light of his mother’s attention shine on Aiden.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Caden opened it, half expecting his mom, but instead finding…
“Vivienne?”
“Hey,” Vivienne said. “Is Rae here?”
“What? No. Should she be?”
Vivienne frowned and glanced over her shoulder. Outside, the sky had already begun to darken, night hanging in the air. “I tried calling her, and no answer. So I biked to her house, and her sister told me she was with a boy.” Vivienne’s frown deepened. “I figured that would be you.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I haven’t seen Rae since last night.” Dread unfurled in Caden’s stomach. “Why are you looking for her?”
Vivienne adjusted her heavy backpack. “I just… I don’t know. She seemed worried about Alyssa today at school.”
“Why?” Caden had gotten the impression Rae didn’t really like Alyssa.
“I’m not sure. Maybe because Alyssa wasn’t there? And she skipped cross-country practice; Alyssa never skips practice. So I called her when I got home, and she told me her mom actually let her take a sick day from school because she couldn’t stop crying about Jeremy—so maybe Ms. Lockett isn’t a complete monster?” Vivienne tilted her head, considering. “Anyhow, Alyssa said she had still been planning on coming in for practice, but then Ivan called her, said he had more information about Jeremy. About how to help him.”
Caden had a weird sensation of déja vù. It was like one of his prophetic dreams, like he could see everything falling into place and was powerless to stop it.
“Alyssa was supposed to meet him, and she said she waited, but he never showed up. And now Rae is missing… I don’t like it.”
Caden gripped the doorway, his fingernails digging into the wood. “And she’s with a boy,” he said. “Someone who isn’t me.”
Vivienne nodded.
“So you think she’s with Ivan?” Caden asked. He’d seen Ivan around, but always from a distance. He didn’t really know him at all.
“Maybe?”
“But why would he call Alyssa, then meet with Rae inst—” Caden stopped, a sudden thought striking him.
And I would guess it would model itself to look very similar to its chosen prey.
He gasped. He’d been thinking about this all wrong. The Unseeing only took the eyes from kids. Which meant…
“Rae is in trouble.” Caden turned and darted into his kitchen, grabbing the flashlight his dad kept plugged in there. He left Vivienne alone on the doorstep while he sprinted into his mother’s study, grabbing her folded bone-handled knife and jamming it into the back pocket of his jeans. Then he hurried out the front door. “I think she’s in the woods,” he told Vivienne. That creature had chased them off for a reason, and if his prophetic dream was about to come true, then Rae would be going into some sort of building… “At the cabin.”
“The… oh.” Vivienne’s eyes got very round. “Oh no.”
“I’m going after her.”
“I’ll get help,” Vivienne said, “and then I’ll meet you there.”
As Caden ran for the trees, he could feel the weight of his mother’s knife pressing against him like a promise.
31. RAE
The gloom of the house pressed against Rae in all directions, swallowing up the timid glow of her phone and turning the evening light that dared to trickle inside into a sluggish ooze. The cabin itself felt strangely hot and way too stuffy, the air thick and musty-smelling.
The landing in front of the door opened up into a small sitting room, where a moth-eaten couch faced a large old-fashioned fireplace, the coals inside long dead. Past the couch, a doorway opened into a shadowy hallway. There was no sign of Ivan or Alyssa.
“Alyssa?” Rae called, stepping deeper into the stomach of the house. She turned slowly, noticing a second doorway across the room, and through it, stairs leading down into pitch black.
Bam!
The front door slammed shut, cutting off the main source of light. Rae whirled, her phone’s flashlight beam landing on Ivan’s pale face. He leaned against the door, his eyes shadowed, almost resembling the hollows of the eyes in the victims of the Unseeing.
“Ivan?” Rae hated how her voice trembled, fear shivering through her whole body. But this didn’t feel right. And as she looked at his strangely distorted face, she realized that every instinct in her body was telling her to run, and had been telling her to run every time she saw him.
He’d been at cross-country tryouts and could have overheard where they were going afterward. He obviously knew where she lived, and where her locker was. And he’d moved to the area in the last nine months…
I’m pretty new too. Got here last year.
Rae couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to think of him, even though she’d known deep down that there was something wrong there. But since no one else had seen it, she’d doubted her own instincts.
She never used to doubt her instincts. But after Taylor turned on her, she’d become unsure of herself. How could she trust her judgment when she’d been so positive Taylor was her best friend? If she was wrong about that, what else would she be wrong about? Humiliation had frozen Rae in that moment when Taylor had told all the others in her class about her “conspiracy freakiness.” And maybe part of her had remained frozen there still.
But not anymore.
Ivan was the Unseeing. Rae was sure of it, the same way she was sure about what had happened to her dad.
“It was you,” Rae whispered. “The whole time.”
Ivan grinned, his mouth stretching until the corners brushed the base of his ears. “Very good. I was wondering if you’d figure it out. You never did seem to trust me.” The proportions of his body were all wrong now too, his arms and legs stretching too long and thin, his torso thickening.
There was no way Rae was imagining it. “W-what do you want?” She backed away, her cell phone light wobbling in her trembling hand.
“Ahh, Rae.” Ivan shook his head. “I think you and I both know the answer to that.”
Her eyes. She felt sick, thinking of Brandi, of Jeremy, of what she would look like after this. Doctor Anderson had said the eyes were the windows to the soul. Was that what Ivan would take from her?
He glided toward her. Rae almost stumbled over her feet as she tried to keep some distance between them, the back of he
r foot bumping into the couch. Ivan stopped in front of the fireplace. He lifted his arm, his long fingers curling outward, bending in the wrong direction toward the back of his hand. The skin on his palm tightened, then ripped with a sound like splitting wood, the gap widening until the center of his hand was nothing but a giant gaping hole.
He brought his hand up to his left eye, covering it. All Rae could see were those twisted fingers, the dirty nails brushing against the back of his wrist, but she could hear the most horrible squelching noise, followed by a quiet pop. He lowered his hand, turning it so Rae’s light fell on his palm. So she could see the eye cradled inside it.
The blood roared through her ears. She clutched the back of the couch, her mind whirling. She’d never make it past him to the door.
Ivan lifted a jar from the mantel of the fireplace. “When I first arrived here, I was blind and hungry.” He held his mangled hand over the top of the jar, his fingers slowly uncurling, releasing the eye to drop into the goo inside. “So I took my first pair of eyes quickly and messily. Desperation drove me, and unfortunately, the boy did not survive the procedure.”
Rae remembered Peter McCurley, the boy who had disappeared around the same time as Caden’s brother, the one who was never found. She had a sick feeling she knew what had happened to him now.
“There are those who seek to destroy my kind, but if my victims remain alive, it masks my presence here. Anyone who looks at me will see nothing but a simple, charming human.” He grinned. “You suspected something, but even you didn’t see the truth.” He set the jar back down. “I had to lay low for three months while I burned through the energy of my first host. I learned from my mistake: my next hunting trip, I sought three, so I could spread out my hunger.” He raised his other hand toward his right eye. “But it was over so fast. Very unsatisfying.”
Rae cringed, but couldn’t look away as those fingers curled, the palm splitting.
“And then three months ago I came across a most delightful game of hide-and-seek. I took it upon myself to join in and had quite a good time.” He pressed his hand to his face, and popped out his remaining eye.
When he moved his hand away, the loose skin that had been his eyelids shriveled and sloughed off like a snake’s skin, leaving smooth, polished hollows behind.
“I realized I didn’t have to rush my hunt. I could spread out my next three victims. The first was the quickest: she was already intrigued with the human she thought I was, so I simply invited her out for an evening walk. The second I strung along all year, pretending to be a friend, until I got tired of him. And the third? Well…”
Rae swallowed hard.
“Originally I’d actually planned on inviting little Jasmine to play.” He uncurled his fingers, his eye popping free to quiver on his palm. “I so hate loose ends, you know. And I thought it would be very enjoyable to take the eyes from someone already so terrified of me. But then you came to town. You with your mistrust and your nosing about my woods.”
Rae thought of Jasmine, and what she’d told her about the eye snatcher. I thinks it likes to play games. The first seeds of a desperate plan blossomed in Rae’s mind. “You said you joined in Jasmine’s game of hide-and-seek,” she said. “But that’s not really true, is it?”
Ivan cocked his head to the side, those awful gaping hollows somehow sharpening on her face.
“They were playing by themselves, and you just crashed their game. That’s not the same.”
“I suppose not.”
“But we could play now,” Rae continued. “For real.”
“Interesting idea.” He picked up the jar again and dropped his second eye inside. “You came here to find your friend, right? Well, how about these rules: if you find her before I find you, you are both free to go home.”
It was a chance, however slim. Rae nodded, throat dry.
Ivan shook the jar gently, then set it on the mantel, the goo inside oozing. And suddenly Rae was staring at not two eyes, but a half dozen, all different shades of brown, all looking back at her. Pleading. Warning.
She gasped and put a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, and Rae?” Ivan said. “If you try to leave before finding her, I will make sure you never see the outside world again.” He smiled, his eye sockets as deep and bottomless as the school’s sinkhole, all of his humanity gone like the illusion it always was.
“I will give you a thirty-second head start. Beginning… now.”
Rae turned and sprinted from the room, Ivan’s laughter chasing her deeper into the house.
32. CADEN
Caden raced the night falling thick and fast over the treetops. The air flowed around him, the wind rustling the leaves and filling the woods with the whispers that gave the town its name.
As he ran, he tried picturing himself surrounded in white light, but all he could see were his jumbled emotions: the throbbing red of anger at his brother for setting all of this in motion; the poisonous green of guilt that he could have done something sooner, and he hadn’t; and the fear, a black so deep and dark he couldn’t look at it, because to stare too long was to be lost.
What if he got to Rae in time but then froze up like he had the night his brother vanished?
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to open a portal, or fight a supernatural creature, or save anyone.
Caden hadn’t always been so uncertain. When he was younger, he’d known exactly who he wanted to be: someone just like his brother. Powerful and confident and able to do anything. So he’d practiced on his own, doing exercises to increase his awareness and studying books of spells.
But after the Zachary Mitchell incident, Caden kept seeing Aiden’s face the way he’d looked that day in the hall, so cold and detached, his smile small and as secretive as a knife to the back. And whenever Caden tried practicing one of his brother’s spells, he’d hear Zachary’s broken voice sobbing and begging. Even after Zachary moved away the next year, Caden couldn’t shake the memory.
The worst thing was, there was a part of Caden that believed Zachary deserved it, a part that had thrilled at the sight of him slapping himself bloody. That part of Caden longed for the power to do the same thing.
Caden was terrified of that side of himself, dark and unexplored and ravenous. So he’d run the other way, focusing instead on spells of protection and learning how to control his empathy while avoiding anything dangerous. And not just magic. He’d avoided people, too, keeping himself closed off from his classmates.
Until Rae came to town.
Caden wasn’t sure if they were friends, exactly. But he felt like they understood each other. Both of them had lost someone in an unexplainable way. Both of them had been isolated by it. And both of them knew what it was like to pretend to be someone else. And Caden wanted to be her friend, which was a strange new thing for him. Before he met her, he hadn’t realized how tired he was of being alone all the time.
And now she might be gone from his life forever.
He put on a burst of speed, trying to leave his fear and his memories in the past where they belonged.
Caden reached the overgrown trail Vivienne had noticed and slowed his steps. Just ahead lurked the rundown cabin. As he moved closer, he could feel the way it hummed and throbbed with that same unnatural energy as the Other Place, all sickly sweet rot and a sense of things out of place. This was definitely the den of the Unseeing. Closer still, and he realized there was something more going on here. Evil rolled from this place like nothing Caden had ever felt before. Whatever event had tainted this house had happened well before Ivan crawled into this world.
Caden left the safety of the trees and crossed the weed-choked lawn. Overhead, a whippoorwill cried, the drawn-out sound eerie and lonesome. It felt like a bad omen to hear birds singing at night, and he hesitated in front of the sagging porch.
Why had Rae been so willing to come with Ivan here, of all places? It seemed very like her, though. He remembered how she’d practically thrown herself inside Docto
r Anderson’s house with little to no planning. Maybe he was too cautious, but she was definitely too impulsive.
He stepped up onto the porch, ignoring the way it groaned and shifted beneath him, and suddenly he wasn’t alone anymore. “Aiden?” He couldn’t see his brother, but he felt him standing there beside him.
“I’m glad I found you again.”
Caden smiled. “I’m glad you did too.” And he meant it; if he was going to save Rae from the Unseeing, he’d have to embrace the part of himself that scared him most. He would have to open himself up and draw on every ounce of his own power.
He would have to become like his brother.
33. RAE
Rae sprinted down the hall, shining her cell phone’s flashlight ahead of her. She saw a door to the left and yanked it open, revealing a storage closet full of old cleaning supplies and rusting shelving units, but no Alyssa.
“Twenty-four, twenty-three,” Ivan’s voice boomed down the hall.
Rae left the door to the closet open and hurried down the hall and into the kitchen at the end. Every breath was a wheeze, loud and painful. She pressed a hand to her lungs and kept moving through the kitchen, her light bouncing off the old-fashioned stove and illuminating the rotting wooden cabinets. A short counter separated the cooking side of the kitchen from a small breakfast alcove with a round table and three chairs.
“Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen… Half your time is up, and you’ve only made it to the kitchen?”
Rae leaped forward, her mind a blank sheet of terror, and her foot caught on the fourth chair, the one she hadn’t noticed, lying broken-legged to the side. She stumbled and went down, skidding across the floor on her stomach. She was up again in seconds, but she had precious few of them left.
Half sobbing, she sprinted out of the kitchen and down the next hallway, past a bathroom with nothing in it but a cracked toilet, a claw-foot tub, and a mason jar sitting on the sink counter, the whole room stinking of mold. No Alyssa. She hurried to the next room, a small bedroom, the bed carefully made, the desk tidy.