The Unseen

by Brian Harmon

  “Is that Isabelle?” Karen asked, plucking a twig from his hair and examining it with a puzzled expression.

  Eric nodded. To Isabelle, he said, “And the woman?”

  “I don’t know. She was even weirder. I don’t know how to describe it. She wasn’t real, but she was real, all at the same time.”

  Eric rubbed at his eyes as he tried to follow her words. “I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Where’s your phone?” asked Karen.

  “Lost it.”

  “Again?”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” She still hadn’t gotten over him losing his first phone. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a cheap, prepaid model from Walmart. He bought a new one the following day, as good as the old. Better, even. (It had Sudoku on it.) But she still gave him a hard time about it. It was as if she suspected he’d done it on purpose.

  Like he’d ever actually do something like that…

  He turned to walk back into the living room with the phone, meaning to sit down in the chair. He needed to rest and clear his head. But as soon as he turned his back to her, Karen gasped.

  “Holy shit!” cried Diane. “What did you do?”

  Eric started to turn and face them, but Karen grabbed his shoulders and forced him back again. He realized that she was looking at where the woman slashed him with her queer claws. “Is it bad?” He knew she’d scratched him. He felt it plainly when it happened and could feel it still. His whole back burned. But he hadn’t thought it was that bad.

  “What did this?” Karen demanded.

  Eric pulled himself free of her grip and walked into the hallway where the mirror was hung. Looking over his shoulder, he could see that his shirt was shredded and about two dozen long, red lines were drawn across his pale skin. Little trails of blood had oozed down from each of them, soaking into the jersey fabric. More blood had been smeared across his exposed skin.

  He hadn’t thought to look when he got out of the car, but he probably left a gory stain on the driver’s seat of the PT Cruiser.

  “I don’t think it’s all that bad,” he decided.

  “Get to the bedroom and take off your shirt. I’ll get the first aid kit.”

  “What happened?” Diane asked again as Karen and Eric went in opposite directions. “Guys…?”

  Ignoring her, Eric spoke into the cordless phone as he climbed the stairs. “You’ve never seen anything like that before?”

  “Well, I haven’t actually seen a whole lot of anything, you know.”

  Eric pulled the phone away from his ear long enough to slip the ruined shirt over his head. “I know,” he said, not worrying about keeping his ear to the receiver. She could hear him no matter where he was or what he was doing. The purpose of the phone was to allow him to hear her. And she always knew when he could and couldn’t hear her. “But you’ve never…whatever it is?”

  “I’ve never encountered anyone who’s known anything about mean, black creatures and scary devil women with claws, no. But I kind of run in limited company.”

  Eric nodded as he entered the bedroom. When he first met Isabelle, she was trapped in an empty, sprawling mansion that had somehow melded with a fissure between two worlds and taken on a life of its own. The owner of that house, a con man and nudist resort owner named Isaac Altrusk, had gone utterly insane and turned into some kind of horrific monster that either controlled the bizarre moods of the house or was himself controlled by it (they were never entirely sure which). Although she’d been there almost four decades, she was unaffected by time and remained thirteen years old in both appearance and personality. But she also developed a strange, psychic ability to bond with people she became close to, like her parents, allowing her to remain connected to them at all times, feeling what they felt and hearing their thoughts. Therefore, she’d remained connected to the world through them. (Hence, she knew how to do things like send text messages and emails and managed to remain up-to-speed on current trends and slang, so that she didn’t even sound like an out-of-time seventies girl.) After saving him from Altrusk, Isabelle formed that same bond with Eric, allowing them to communicate like this now, and found the courage to escape that nightmare house, although only into other, similarly disconnected locations around the world. Now she jumped from place to place, exploring her limited environments and meeting others like herself who were trapped between worlds. Each time she met someone new in her strange journeys, that same psychic ability allowed her to absorb some of their knowledge. As a result, she knew a lot about the strange things that go on in the world. But as she’d just told him, she didn’t meet scores of people and her knowledge, while impressive, was still extremely limited.

  “I’ll let you know if I remember anything that seems relevant, though.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “I know you do.”

  Karen entered the room with the first aid kit and stared at his naked belly. “What did you do to yourself?”

  Eric looked down and saw that there was a long red mark painted across his stomach. “Branch…” he said absently, remembering his less-than-graceful descent from the tree. That one had knocked the wind right out of him on his way down in addition to scraping off a layer or two of skin.

  “Branch?”

  “Fell out of a tree.”

  Karen looked up from the painful abrasions on his belly, a bewildered expression on her face. “What were you doing in a tree?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “How is climbing a tree at your age a good idea at any time?”

  Eric shrugged. In his haste to find an escape from those strange creatures, the tree really had seemed like a good idea. “It wasn’t so bad. I’m thinking of building a tree house in the back yard.”

  “That’s a great idea. You’ll have a place to sleep the next time you do something stupid. Now lie down on your belly. Let me see how bad those cuts are.”

  He did as he was told.

  Karen sat on the bed next to him. “You want to tell me what happened? Because right now it kind of looks like Big Brooke had you for breakfast.”

  “Oh god…” groaned Eric. “I’ll never hear the end of that, will I?”

  “I’m just saying, claw marks on your back are always suspicious.”

  “She’s right,” agreed Isabelle.

  “Well they weren’t Brooke’s claws,” Eric insisted.

  “Whose were they?”

  “I don’t know. But she was old as dirt and scary as all kinds of hell.”

  “Wow. Well, whatever turns you on, I guess.”

  Isabelle giggled at this.

  “I don’t know about ‘turned on’ but I’m pretty sure she wanted to turn me inside-out.”

  “That’s fantastic. You’re not getting out of this baby shower, I don’t care if we have to hold you together with duct tape until it’s over.”

  “Crap. On the bright side, I hear there’s going to be beer now.”

  “Don’t get me started.” Karen prodded the cuts on his back. “Well, most of them aren’t very deep. But one…no two of them… Maybe three… I should probably make you go to the emergency room… Get some stitches.”

  “No way. I’m not explaining how I got these to any doctor. They’ll put me in a psyche ward and make me do arts and crafts all day.”

  “You never did like arts and crafts.”

  “Never did.”

  Isabelle giggled again.

  “So…” said Diane, who Eric realized suddenly had been hovering in the doorway this whole time, “Is anybody going to tell me what happened? Or is this the part where I’m supposed to leave quietly and come back on a less weird day?”

  “You’re fine,” Karen assured her. “I’m sorry.”

  Diane stepped all the way into the room and approached the bed. Suddenly, Eric felt like a freak show exhibit. “Wow…”

  Karen nodded. “I know. But I think I can patch these up pret
ty easy.”

  “Doesn’t look like this was his first rodeo.” The phone still pressed to his ear, Eric glanced up in time to see her gesture at his left shoulder. There were scars there, fully visible without his shirt on. They looked remarkably like three long, jagged claw marks…because that’s precisely what they were. He received that injury just before he first met Isabelle, he recalled.

  He and Karen exchanged a knowing glance.

  The events of Eric’s strange journey the previous year had remained mostly secret. Most of their friends knew about his weird, recurring dream and that he took a long drive out into the country to clear his head, but besides him, Karen and Isabelle, the only person who knew the whole story of what happened that day was his brother, Paul.

  It wasn’t that they hadn’t trusted Diane. They simply didn’t think she’d believe it. And Eric didn’t want everyone he knew thinking he’d lost his mind.

  He shrugged and rested his chin on his arm. She was here now. The truth was strange, but better than whatever she’d imagine the truth to be at this point.

  “So are you going to tell me what happened or not?” asked Karen.

  “After I got off the phone with you, I got to thinking about all those maps.”

  “Aiden’s maps?”

  “Yeah. Those circled locations.”

  “Who’s Aiden?” asked Diane as she seated herself on the bed next to them.

  “Aiden Chadwick,” said Karen.

  “Chadwick… Where do I know that name?”

  “I’ll catch you up later,” Karen promised. To Eric, she said, “Go on.”

  Eric told her about the location with the red X marked through it, and about finding the overgrown lot on Hosler Avenue. When he got to the part about getting out of the car to look around, he recalled something Isabelle said to him.

  “You told me the place felt weird to you, right?”

  “I did. I can’t really explain it…”

  “Put her on speaker,” said Karen. “I want to talk to her, too.”

  “What? Oh. Sure.” Eric laid the phone on the bed in front of him and pressed the speaker button.

  “How’s that?” asked Isabelle.

  “Good,” Eric told her.

  “Awesome. Hi, Karen.”

  “Hi, Isabelle. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Hi, Diane.”

  “Um, Hi.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too.” Diane turned and looked at Karen. She’d heard them talk about Isabelle a few times, but all she knew was that she was a friend of Eric’s. A former student, she’d thought…

  Karen didn’t notice the look. “Where are you today?”

  “Siberia, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been here the past two weeks. I’m all alone. It’s peaceful.”

  “Sounds lonely,” said Eric.

  “I’m never lonely. I’m always wherever you are. And wherever my parents are, too.”

  Eric thought that sounded exquisitely lovely.

  “That’s so sweet,” said Karen.

  But Diane was confused. “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Karen promised.

  “That lot,” Eric reminded Isabelle. “You told me something was weird about it.”

  “Right. It was like the apartment. But it was different, too. I didn’t understand it. And I still don’t. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I remember you told me to be careful.”

  Karen firmly applied a bandage over one of the deeper cuts. “You clearly didn’t listen very well.”

  “You knew I wasn’t a good listener when you married me.”

  “True.”

  Speaking to Isabelle again, he said, “I don’t understand how you felt things and I couldn’t. You did that back in the fissure, too, but…”

  “I know. Back then, I thought it was because we were both in the fissure.”

  “But I’m nowhere near the fissure now, am I?”

  “No. And neither am I. It must have to do with you. With our connection. I’m sorry. I don’t really understand it all.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What happened over there?” asked Karen. “You’re driving me nuts.”

  Eric described the lot and the rotting remains of the old house and the appearance of those awful creatures. He described his frenzied climb into the apple tree, the ill-timed call from Gerry Nesby and how he lost his phone. Finally, he described his fall from the tree, the old woman and his narrow escape from the property.

  “I drove off as fast as I could go and came straight here,” he finished.

  Diane turned and stared at Karen. She was at a loss for words. Was this a joke? Surely they couldn’t be serious. Strange, black creatures. Razor-taloned old hags. Those were the things of fiction. Such things didn’t exist. And neither did the overgrown lot that Eric described. She had a friend who’d lived over on Holser Avenue her whole life. She’d been there countless times and she’d never seen such a place.

  Karen didn’t look back. She continued bandaging her husband’s slashed back. “So do you think this is like last time?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric confessed. “It’s obviously not exactly the same. There was no dream. No overwhelming desire to go somewhere. I just kind of stumbled onto it. But I’m definitely noticing the similarities.”

  “The same strange creatures,” Karen said.

  “Well they’re not the same creatures,” Eric clarified.

  “They wouldn’t be,” said Isabelle. “The creatures you saw last time should’ve been unique to that particular fissure. They came from the other world or else were a result of the bond between those two worlds. The only other places you’d find those same creatures might be the other fissures that branch off from the same singularity at the cathedral.”

  “Makes sense,” said Eric.

  “Does it?” asked Diane. She couldn’t tell.

  “But there are creatures,” continued Karen. “And that’s exactly how everything went from weird to otherworldly last time.”

  “True,” admitted Eric. “And there’s one more thing.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the envelope that he found under his windshield wiper.

  Karen took it and read the message written on it. “What is this? Who’s going to die?”

  Diane snatched the envelope out of her hand, startled. “Someone’s going to die?”

  Eric shook his head. “I can’t be sure, but…”

  “Aiden,” said Karen. “You think it means Aiden.”

  “It can’t be a coincidence. The only reason I went to that place was because I found it on a map he led me to.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?” asked Diane.

  “And tell them what?” said Eric.

  Diane couldn’t think of a response. He was right, of course. Everything he was saying was crazy. They’d never take something like this seriously.

  “It’s not something you can ignore,” said Isabelle.

  “Sure it is,” retorted Karen. “You can totally ignore it. You can stay home and help me finish getting ready for the shower and just forget it ever happened.”

  Eric looked over his shoulder at her. “Do you really believe that’s what I should do?”

  Karen didn’t answer for a while. She continued applying the bandages. It was good enough by now, but she wanted to be sure it was going to hold. It was her job to take care of her husband. If not her, then who?

  Finally, she sighed and said, “Everything that happened in August… It happened for a reason, didn’t it?”

  “I think so,” replied Eric.

  “More than one reason,” added Isabelle.

  Eric smiled. She was right.

  Karen applied one last bandage and then closed up the first aid kit. Then, begrudgingly, she asked, “So where do you go next?”

  Eric rose from the bed, leaving the phone lying face up, and retrieved a new tee shirt and a new pair of
jeans from the closet. “I guess there’s only one place to start.”

  “Aiden Chadwick,” said Isabelle. “He’s the greatest common factor.”

  “That’s right. I need to find him.”

  “Wait,” said Diane. “I remember now. Aiden Chadwick. That was that kid who went missing a while back, right?”

  “The very same,” replied Eric. “I followed him into that apartment. I followed his map to that ruined house. If anyone can explain what’s going on, it’ll be him.”

  Diane stared at him. “Wait… You mean you saw him?”

  “I saw him and he saw me.”

  “And then he ran away,” Isabelle reminded him.

  Eric turned toward the bed where the phone was still lying. “Yes. And then he ran away.”

  “So how do you find him again?” asked Karen.

  That was a good question. Aiden didn’t seem to want to be found. “I guess I’ll go back to that apartment, have another look around.”

  “What if he catches you there?”

  “Good. Then he’ll have to talk to me, right?”

  “Or shoot you. You don’t know what he’s up to.”

  That was true. He couldn’t just assume that Aiden wouldn’t do something drastic if cornered. He still had no idea what was going on.

  As he thought about it, he stepped into the bathroom and closed the door so that he could change out of his torn jeans.

  “What apartment?” Diane asked him through the door. “Where?”

  “Over the tavern.”

  “Really? That’s where he’s been hiding?” asked Karen.

  “Probably not for all of the last six years, but for a while, it looks like. At least the past few weeks.”

  “Impossible,” said Diane. “Brooke and Leon live in the apartment over the tavern.

  “Not from what I saw,” said Eric. “The place looked deserted. Aiden was obviously squatting there.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “None of this does,” said Karen.

  “None of it ever does, apparently,” said Eric.

  After changing his clothes, Eric washed his face and brushed his hair, then he exited the bathroom, crossed the bedroom floor to the hallway and started down the steps with both women in tow.