by Heidi Lang
“Ten, nine, eight,” Ivan chanted.
Rae bolted into the next room—the last room of the house. Another bedroom, this one a little larger and a lot messier, full of the stench of rotting wood and dirt.
“Five… four…”
Think, Rae, think! she told herself, fighting down the rush of panic. Obviously Alyssa wasn’t on this floor, so that left the basement. But she’d never make it there before Ivan caught up with her. Which meant she needed to hide. But how did you hide from something that didn’t need eyes to see?
She opened the closet door. It was full of jackets and clothing and stacks of old paper. It would also be the first place he’d look. She closed it, but not quite all the way, and turned to the bed. It didn’t look promising, just a lumpy old mattress, a rumpled comforter lying half on the floor, and three large pillows.
“Ready or not, here I come!”
Rae tugged the mattress away from the headboard a little and squeezed into the gap left behind, pulling the pillows on top of her and flicking off her cell phone flashlight. Mold and dust filled her nostrils, and all the things that had been hiding under the mattress and burrowing into the soft wood of the bedframe began crawling over her, slithering up her shirt, wriggling through her hair. She didn’t move, even as she imagined spiders, beetles, and more.
If she miraculously survived this, she was going to take the world’s longest, hottest shower.
Creak!
Rae caught her breath. That creak had come from right outside the bedroom door. She held herself as flat as she could, the headboard pressing into her back while certain doom loomed from the other side. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears spilling from the corners.
She couldn’t die here; she had to keep looking for her dad.
“Rae,” Ivan’s voice sang out. He was close. Too close. She could picture him standing right over the bed. “I know you’re in here.”
She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, expecting the pillows to be removed any moment.
“Got you!”
Rae flinched, then forced herself to be still. She could hear Ivan rustling around. He must be in the closet, barely a foot from her head. She waited for him to grab her, but apparently he hadn’t heard her movement.
“Pretty good, Rae. Pretty good.”
Rae kept her eyes closed and held her breath. Even without the wheeze, she knew breathing would make the pillows move. Finally she heard Ivan’s footsteps moving back toward the door, and then out into the hall again.
The breath exploded from Rae’s lungs in a painful wheeze, and she clawed her way out from behind the pillows, gasping as silently as she could. She listened hard for Ivan, but in such an old wooden house there were plenty of groans from all directions, and she couldn’t be sure where he had gone.
She had to get to the basement, and fast.
Rae slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out Vivienne’s Mint Attack. It wasn’t much as far as a weapon went, but she felt better holding something in her hand, at least. Then she eased her way out of the room, leaving her phone off. The shadows were so dark, Ivan could be hiding anywhere, and she wouldn’t be able to see him until it was too late. But her flashlight would just make her easier to see.
Rae retraced her steps, creeping to the end of the hallway. She peered out at the dark kitchen.
Still no sign of Ivan.
It was somehow worse. She kept imagining him leaping out at her, or waiting around the next corner, or sneaking along just behind her…
She swallowed down the fear and inched through the kitchen, keeping close to the wall. She made it to the next hall, and then into the sitting room. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could see a little bit of light filtering through the cracked wooden boards over the windows, enough to show her that Ivan wasn’t there.
Maybe he’d gone outside to see if she’d made a run for it?
Rae hesitated near the couch. She looked at that front door, so inviting, and then she turned away from it and over to the stairs heading to the basement. She kept one hand on the wall, her feet feeling the way down one step, two, eight, a dozen. She had to be near the bottom now.
Creak!
Rae froze.
Something large scurried behind her, long nails clicking against wood like an insect’s legs.
Her shoulder blades prickled, and she knew it was right behind her. She could feel it watching her, waiting for her to notice. She didn’t want to look, but haltingly, the world moving in slow motion, she turned.
A trickle of dim light filtered in through the upstairs, gently outlining the top steps, and nothing else. No one was there.
Until a large dark shape dropped from the ceiling.
Rae bit her lip so hard to keep from screaming that she tasted blood, metallic and sharp, as Ivan landed at the top of the stairs like a humanoid spider. He lurched upright, his silhouette framed in the stairway, too-long arms hanging loosely at his sides.
She crouched low, pressing herself against the wall and hoping the shadows were thick enough down here to cover her. Please, please, she thought, just walk by. Don’t come down here…
“I know you’re there.” Ivan seemed to grow larger until he blocked the whole top of the stairwell. “You can’t hide from me any longer, Rae.”
She was trembling, her lungs burning with the effort of keeping her breathing quiet. If he knew she was there, her only hope was to get down to the basement, find Alyssa before he caught her, and pray he kept his word and let them both go.
She straightened, slowly and carefully, and inched her foot down another step.
Ivan leaped abruptly down the stairs, so fast Rae didn’t have time to react before he crashed into her.
She fell backward, tumbling the last few steps and landing awkwardly on the cement basement floor. Her vision filled with sparks, everything going too bright, and then dark. She knew she needed to get up and run, but her body wasn’t listening very well. She blinked, her vision clearing, but all she could see was Ivan’s monstrous face looming over her. His skin throbbed with a sickly yellowish light, flickering like a bad fluorescent lamp, giving her flashes of that wide mouth full of jagged teeth, the tiny sliver of nose, and the swirling pits of deepest pitch where his eyes had once been.
34. CADEN
Caden opened the front door. It swung wide silently, the house beyond dark and disturbingly still. The flashlight was a comforting weight in his hand, but he didn’t want to turn it on yet. It would feel too much like a beacon announcing his presence to whatever lurked inside. Instead, he waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The inside looked innocent enough, just a small sitting room with a couch and a bulky mantel, and no people.
Caden knelt and pulled off his shoes, wedging them under the door to keep it open, then continued on in his socks. As he moved deeper into the house, he could feel pressure building like a large unnatural storm. And beneath that, Rae’s fear vibrated from the walls, as if the house itself was feasting on it.
“You know what you have to do, right?” Aiden whispered.
Caden swallowed hard. He did know. The only way to truly defeat the Unseeing would be to send it back to its own dimension.
Which meant he’d have to somehow reopen the rift here.
“Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”
But after he opened it, he’d have to close it again. And there was only one way he knew to do that.
Blood opens and blood closes. A sacrifice given and taken.
Caden tried not to think that far ahead. He didn’t want to remember the way the Other Place looked or imagine what it would be like to be trapped in there forever. If he spent too long thinking about it, he’d never get up the nerve to do what he had to do, so for now he just focused on each step at a time, starting with number one: find Rae.
Caden squinted in the dim lighting, studying the couch, the doorway behind it, and—
Thump! Thump!
He sp
un, accidentally knocking a jar off the mantel of the fireplace. The glass shattered on the ground. Caden winced, looking down at the mess.
At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Marbles? Balls of goo? And then he realized: they were eyes. A dozen of them sliding around in some weird jelly solution, oozing slowly across the floor. They all rolled around until they were staring right at him.
Caden put a hand over his mouth and backed away. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t—
Somewhere deeper in the house, Rae screamed.
And Caden ran without thinking, leaping over the eyes and sprinting toward the sound.
35. RAE
Rae struggled back, managing to half sit before Ivan dug his long, sharp fingers into her shoulders and shoved her down again. He shifted his weight, one spindly leg curling beneath him and then dropping down onto her chest like an anvil, crushing the breath out of her. Pain burst in her lungs, spots exploding around the edges of her vision. She was suffocating, drowning on land.
Ivan let go of her shoulders and raised his hands toward her face, his fingers curling backward once more, the skin on his palms splitting open. The gaps inside looked just like the hollows of his eyes, bottomless and hungry.
Rae screamed as Ivan slowly lowered his palms toward her face, those gaping holes pulling at her like a low energy vacuum, threatening to suck the eyes right out of her head. She couldn’t blink or look away as her vision filled with darkness. And she knew this would be the last thing she ever saw.
And then suddenly Ivan sat up and turned away from her, growling. Rae wasn’t sure why, but she knew she wouldn’t get another chance. She thrust herself up and shoved Ivan’s chest as hard as she could to knock him away from her. When he spun back, she whipped up the Mint Attack still clutched in her right hand and emptied the entire canister in his face.
Ivan shrieked and fell back, dragging his hands like claws down his face. The metallic smell of his blood mingled with the overpowering minty goodness in the air.
Rae stumbled to her feet and staggered away from Ivan, but she’d only taken a few steps when she tripped over something. It shattered under her, the broken pieces moist and slimy like moss, her fingers sliding over them when she tried to push herself back up. And it stank.
She wrinkled her nose and glanced down.
For a second, in the dim basement light she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. Horror cushioned her mind, softening the image, allowing her the chance to let it go, to pretend it was furniture clutching at her skin and clothing.
But Rae had always believed in chasing the truth, no matter how horrible it might be. She blinked and made herself see the reality: she was tangled up in a rib cage—a human rib cage—splinters of bone jabbing into her clothing, snagging her in place. There was no moss, just the decayed remains of clothing left to rot. And of the rest of the body, now almost completely decomposed.
Immediately the smell seemed to double, and Rae gagged. She thrust herself to her feet, pieces of rib clinging to her, the damp of the body soaking into her pants and sweatshirt. Frantic, she batted at her clothing, stumbling over the leg bones, desperate to get away.
The skeleton wasn’t that big, only a little bigger than her. A kid.
Alyssa.
No, Rae told herself, panic twisting in her mind. No, Alyssa wouldn’t be so decomposed. This had to be someone else, someone who’d been dead almost a year. Ivan’s first victim.
Rae realized this must be what happened to poor missing Peter McCurley.
Peter McCurley. Ivan must’ve killed him when he’d arrived in their dimension. Alyssa still had to be alive somewhere in—
Rae stopped and looked at Ivan. He no longer clawed at his face. He could have passed for one of the basement’s many shadows as he stood between her and her one way out.
“You told me Alyssa was here,” Rae whispered.
Other than a boarded-up window, a drain in the middle of the cement floor, and the body of Peter, there was nothing in the basement, and nowhere else Alyssa could be.
“And you foolishly believed me.” Ivan laughed, showing off all his rows of teeth.
Rae backed away, her mind a whirl as she tried to think of a way out. She kept picturing that jar of eyes, and how hers would be joining them. All brown eyes… It made sense. Ivan wouldn’t want to attract attention by changing eye colors, and his first victim had brown eyes. Which meant Alyssa had never been in danger, not with her blue eyes. This whole thing had been a trap for Rae from the start.
Rae’s back hit the cracked brick walls. She looked past Ivan at the stairs, but they seemed so far away. She would never make it to them.
Ivan advanced on her, his hands raised, showing off the gaps in his palms that were waiting to be filled with her eyes. “And now,” he said, “you have nowhere left to go. Game over.”
36. CADEN
Caden got to the top of a dark stairwell and clicked his flashlight on.
“Are you trying to get yourself noticed?” Aiden demanded.
Caden flinched and immediately turned off the flashlight again. He kept one hand on the railing while he hurried down the steps, trying not to trip in the darkness. As he got closer to the bottom, he realized there actually was some light coming from the basement, just not much of it.
“Rifts are unstable by nature, so you need something to give it shape. Like this stairway.”
“Here?” Caden whispered.
“Here and now, if you want to save your friend.”
Caden’s eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, the gloom of the basement lifting enough that he could see two shadows in the far corner. Rae… and the Unseeing. He started forward.
“The rift!” his brother shrieked. “You need to open it now! It’s her best chance.”
Caden knew Aiden was right. He wouldn’t be able to beat the Unseeing in a fight; he needed to send it back into the Other Place. He just didn’t know how.
“Immerse yourself in the energies of the house, and…”
“Aiden?”
“Something’s happening. Someone is here who… no, stop! Cad—”
His brother’s voice abruptly cut out. Caden couldn’t feel his presence at all.
Caden’s mouth went dry, his hands trembling. He needed to save Rae from the Unseeing and rescue his brother from the Other Place. And there was only one way he could truly help both of them now.
Somehow he had to reopen the rift by himself.
Caden took a deep, cleansing breath and closed his eyes. He’d watched his brother do this. He could do it too. He pictured his usual protective white bubble surrounding him, and then he imagined that bubble popping, opening him up to all the negative energies of the house.
Death, despair, hopelessness. Blood, fear, hunger.
He felt it all scraping and crawling over him like rats in a nest, digging claws into his very self. Dimly he was aware of the flashlight clattering from his hand, of Rae screaming, of the Unseeing saying something, but he was frozen on that bottom step as images of the victims the Unseeing had targeted flashed through his mind in quick succession. He felt their terror as the creature pulled their eyes from them. And not just their eyes. He fed on them, on their internal essence, burning through it the way a fire burned through wood.
Caden didn’t want to know this, didn’t want to feel this. He tried pulling away, but the more he struggled, the more it sucked him down. He fell below the victims’ emotions, and toppled into the memories of the Unseeing.
Caden saw his brother through its eyes. Aiden stood frozen with his arms outstretched, blood trickling down his arms. Behind him the blue light of another dimension pulsed with energy. Caden felt the Unseeing’s interest, its hunger for this new place. And he was with it when it stepped through the rift and suddenly found itself plunged into complete and all-encompassing darkness.
It reacted instinctively, like a spider suddenly thrust into light, scuttling from the house and into the woods. It crashed through
the trees, confused and disoriented, until it stumbled upon its first victim: a boy camping alone in the woods.
The boy barely put up a fight as the Unseeing fell on him, yanking the boy’s eyes out and feeding on his soul. Afterward, the Unseeing slid the new eyes into the hollows in its face, and the darkness lifted until it could see the world around it. A world full of possibilities. It could do very well here.
The eyes were an anchor. With them, the Unseeing could look at this world the way the humans looked at it, understand things the way they understood. It could blend in among them. But it knew there were those nearby who would be able to sense the truth of its nature. It had to protect itself.
It looked down at the body of its first unwilling host, and knew it would have to do things differently the next time. If it spread out its feeding over three, it could leave just enough of their own essence to mask its presence here in this dimension.
The Unseeing scooped up the body of Peter and carried him deeper into the woods. The cabin called to it, the energies of the place welcoming it. And as it stepped through the creaking doorway, Caden slid out of its mind and sank beneath the memories tied to the house.
These memories were several hundred years old and had fragmented into broken pieces of emotion. Caden caught the overwhelming feeling that something terrible had happened here, followed by a glimpse of a woman doing some kind of summoning spell. A ripple of negative energies cascaded out in one violent wave as the spell fell apart. Caden saw the woman’s face clearly, her mouth open, eyes wide and terrified, and then his vision went crimson with blood—her blood—while the fabric of her reality tore open.
There were other people with her, helping her with her spell. Caden sensed the wave from that tear crashing against them, too, and was part of their group as they all died, crushed beneath that tide. He felt himself getting washed away with them—
Focus, Caden, he thought. Don’t lose yourself to the past. Aiden wouldn’t.