by Brian Harmon
“So what’s the deal, anyway?” asked Paul. “Why are you so determined to see this thing through?”
“I don’t know. It’s Aiden, I guess. That note I found. I’m worried he’s in trouble.”
“I get that. But Aiden’s not your problem. You’re not responsible for him. He’s not even a kid anymore. What’s he now? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
Eric shrugged. He was right. It had nothing to do with him. And yet, he felt compelled to push on.
“I mean, I get why you went last time. You had that weird, recurring dream that you couldn’t stop thinking about.”
Eric started up the steps. “Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Besides, I learned the dream might drive me crazy if I didn’t keep going.”
“Reason enough.”
“This isn’t so different. When I saw Aiden, I just couldn’t drop it. It’s like I have to know what’s going on. I have to know why he disappeared. How he disappeared. Where he’s been all this time. What he’s doing back now. And I just keep going. It’s like I need to know.”
“Maybe it’s whatever it was you found last time, down in that cathedral.”
Eric shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t remember what I found. It was…significant. I remember that. But I couldn’t tell you anything else. It’s just gone. After all I did, I don’t know what it was I discovered in that God-forsaken hole in the ground.”
“You told us when you first came back that you still remembered it in your dreams.”
“That’s what I was told. But… I don’t really remember my dreams anymore. All I ever seem to remember in the mornings are vague little snippets.”
“You know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“I think maybe that place did something to you. I think it made you special somehow. I think it made you the kind of person who does these kinds of things. Maybe you have some kind of greater purpose now. And maybe this Aiden kid is a part of that.”
“What, like some kind of strange destiny thing?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
Eric laughed. “Sounds like a bad book series.”
“I just said ‘maybe.’ It wouldn’t be any more unbelievable than that thing I hit with my truck a little while ago.”
“True,” agreed Eric. “Maybe you’re right.” Now that he thought about it, maybe that was why he could suddenly see these places. Maybe this was a part of what he found at the cathedral that day. Maybe that journey left him with this fantastic ability to see things that were hidden. Or… “Or maybe I’m just too stupid to know when to take my dumb ass home and stay there.”
“Or there’s always that.”
The second floor was mostly open, like the sales floor below. It seemed too large for only storage, yet it had not been turned into an apartment and was not readily accessible to customers with the stairs leading up from the back corner of the store room. Eric wondered what the point of such a space was.
There was an exit in the rear and windows on both sides, lending enough light to the space that he no longer needed to rely on the light of his cell phone.
“This kind of reminds me of Badgers,” said Paul as he emerged from the steps behind him.
Eric glanced back at him. “Really?”
“Yeah. Kind of the same layout.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“You should go sometime. I bet Karen would like it.”
“I think she does, actually. I think she and the girlfriends like to go there.”
Madge Badgers was a trendy art shop and gallery with a jazz bar on the second floor. It was one of Creek Bend’s little hidden treasures, a favorite social place for sophisticated locals. It was a frequent gathering place for many of the other teachers in the district, too, but Eric was never all that interested in spending his evenings there. He’d rather stay home and read.
“So only you haven’t been there.”
“Seems that way.”
“You’re really boring. You know that?”
Eric raised an eyebrow.
“You know… When you’re not adventuring into strange worlds and fighting golems and shit.”
Eric turned his attention back to the empty room in front of them. He supposed he couldn’t argue with that. He never was very good at socializing. Lecturing, he could handle. He didn’t mind running a classroom. He liked talking with the kids. But he never felt all that comfortable mingling with his own peers. It was a miracle he ever managed to get married, when he thought about it. But when he met Karen…
Well, Karen was practically a force of nature. She completely derailed his life. She was so beautiful, so enchanting, so thrilling. He lost himself. He fell in love in a way he never imagined, almost literally, like Alice plummeting down the rabbit hole. She showed him things he never knew existed.
He started across the floor, focusing himself. There would be plenty of time to reminisce on that magical autumn once he’d sorted out this business with the hidden places.
And right now, he saw something familiar.
There was no furniture up here. Nor was there any of the litter that had been strewn about the apartment over the tavern. But there was plywood nailed up over the window in the far left corner. Already, he could see the light shining through a hole in the board.
It was the same setup he found inside the apartment. Two pieces of plywood, each with a hole drilled into it, and about an inch of empty space between them so that one could only see through at a fixed angle. Just like before, peering through these holes revealed the same strange, rectangular tower rising over the rooftops of the stores on the other side of the street.
Again with that mysterious building… Eric still didn’t recognize it. And clearly it was important.
But why? What was so special about it?
“Come look at this,” he said. “What building is that?”
Paul bent and peered through the hole. “I…don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it before. Is it part of the courthouse or something?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I guess that would be more in that direction, wouldn’t it?” He gestured toward the northwest. “Library, maybe? No… I don’t think I know. That’s really weird.”
“It is.”
“Maybe it’s like this place. Hidden.”
It was certainly possible. He’d already found three such hidden places. If he drove back to Hosler, he’d probably even find that he’d been to four. Apparently they weren’t that uncommon.
“I saw this same setup at the apartment, too. And there was a similar one in that asylum. It has to mean something.” He walked over to the next window, but from here the mysterious building was obscured. He looked down at the street outside. People drove by. Two teenage girls were walking past on the other side of the street. No one glanced in the direction of the empty store. Could they really not see this place? It was hard to imagine that he was actually invisible to everyone out there.
But as he considered it, he wondered how many of the world’s greatest mysteries might be explained by such places.
“What’s that on the wall?”
Eric turned and looked. It was another of those strange, spiraling symbols, drawn between two of the windows. Looking around, he spied another one on the west wall.
There always seemed to be two of them.
“What does it mean?”
But Eric didn’t know. He took a quick picture of each of the symbols and then realized that the battery was running low. He didn’t like the idea of losing the phone. Most of the time he hated these things, but today was a massive exception. Without the phone, he’d be left without Isabelle. And he needed Isabelle. If only for emotional support.
“Do you have a good charge on your phone?”
Paul withdrew it and looked at the screen. Like Karen’s it was an iPhone. “Yeah, mine’s pretty well full. I charged it last night.”
That was good.
>
He bent and examined the symbol between the windows. Just like the ones in the institution, it was a spiral of numbers. The last five digits were the same again. Two, three, two ones and a six. He still had no idea what these numbers meant, but they were clearly important in some way.
He needed to get back into the apartment and look at the symbols over there. Maybe once he had them all, he’d be able to discern a pattern of some sort.
He wished he’d had the foresight to take pictures while he was in there the first time, but it hadn’t yet occurred to him. Besides, unless he’d also thought to send them promptly to Karen, they would’ve been lost along with his phone anyway.
“Is this what we were looking for in here?”
“I think so. I don’t see anything else.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I think I need to go back to the tavern.”
“There’s a plan I can get behind. It’s a little early yet, but you know. I’ll do what needs to be done.”
Eric chuckled. “Right.”
The two of them turned and walked back across the room toward the stairs. As they approached it, they were surprised by someone hurrying up from the storeroom below. At first, Eric thought that it must be Pink Shirt again, but when the person came into view, he saw that it was Aiden, who immediately froze at the sight of the two of them standing there.
For a moment, all three of them stood that way, startled and uncertain. Then Aiden cursed and bolted back down the steps.
Immediately, Eric set off after him, with Paul right on his heels. “Wait! Aiden!”
But Aiden had no intention of waiting. He ran down the steps as fast as he could go, which was considerably faster than Eric was able to navigate the steps.
When he finally neared the bottom, Aiden turned and withdrew a handgun from the pocket of his hoodie. Surprised and left with nowhere to run, Eric ducked and covered his face just as the weapon went off. He heard the report, felt something sail over his head, and then Paul let out a startled grunt and fell back onto the steps behind him.
Eric turned, terrified as Aiden fled through the fire exit and vanished for the second time that day.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t care about Aiden or about the mysterious symbols or about those damned hidden places. None of that mattered.
All that mattered was that his brother had just been shot.
Chapter Eleven
Paul cursed bitterly. It wasn’t your average, everyday swearing, either. Although Eric was perfectly familiar with nearly all the words his brother was using, he could honestly say that he’d never heard anyone string them all together in quite the same way before. It was almost poetic.
Almost.
Eric had to sit down on the steps. The wave of relief that had washed over him was practically overwhelming.
Paul had indeed been shot, but only in the thigh, and not with a bullet, but by a Taser. He was perfectly unharmed.
He was livid. But he was unharmed.
Eric thought it was probably best that Aiden fled when he did. If he’d still been in the room when Paul regained his motor skills, he probably would’ve beaten the boy half to death.
“You going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Paul growled. “Go after him. I need to sit for a minute. My legs feel wobbly. ”
“He’s already gone. Don’t worry about him.”
Karen’s phone vibrated in Eric’s pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
OH MY GOD THAT WAS SCARY!
“It really was.”
“What?” asked Paul, craning his neck to see the screen.
“You gave Isabelle a scare.”
“It was just a stun gun.”
“Well, I thought it was a real gun, so she thought it was too.”
It seemed to take him by surprise that anyone had thought he’d been hit with anything other than a Taser. “Oh… Sorry…”
“It’s fine. Let’s just get you out of here.”
“I’m fine. You need to go after that kid.”
“I already told you. He’s gone.”
“Go look for him anyway. He could still be hiding around here somewhere. He can’t get too far in broad daylight with that face of his. He obviously doesn’t want to be recognized.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. But if you catch him, make sure you knock the little shit upside his head for me.”
Eric stood up, but he wasn’t convinced he should leave him here.
“Go,” Paul insisted. “I just need to walk it off. I’ll meet you in the truck.”
Eric nodded reluctantly and walked away. He was right. Aiden couldn’t simply go running down the street. If too many people saw him, someone was sure to recognize him. He’d stayed missing for six years. He must have had his reasons. He wouldn’t want to suddenly be making headlines again. But at the same time, he wasn’t likely to still be hanging around outside.
While Paul rubbed at his thigh and grumbled obscenities, Eric stepped out the back door and looked around.
Not surprisingly, Aiden was nowhere to be seen. He was clearly desperate to remain a missing person. And he’d just shot a man with a Taser. While Paul wasn’t the most intimidating person he knew, Eric still wouldn’t have stuck around to see how he took such an attack.
The alley behind the store was blocked by a fence on the right. Beyond that was a loading bay for the warehouse that occupied the other side of the alley. Unless he’d taken the time to scale the fence, the only way out was to the left, and that was Carter Avenue over there. It was a fairly busy street. Aiden would have been taking a pretty big chance going that way. And given how desperate he was to avoid talking to Eric, it stood to reason that he didn’t want to be recognized.
There were two doors between him and the street. One of those would be the back door of The Creek Boutique. This would likely be the one closest to the two dumpsters. The other probably led to yet another apartment.
Eric tried both doors, but they were firmly locked.
He was gone.
Unless he was hiding in one of the dumpsters…
Eric didn’t think this was very probable. That was a huge risk. Not only would it be disgustingly unsanitary and very dangerous to dive into an unfamiliar dumpster loaded with any manner of refuse, from broken glass to nails to discarded syringes, he’d be left with utterly nowhere to go should he be found.
Aiden was clearly desperate, but to have remained missing for all those years, he obviously wasn’t stupid.
But with no more options available to him, Eric opened both dumpsters and peered inside anyway.
He was gone.
Eric walked over to Carter Avenue and looked both ways. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of a young man in an out-of-season, navy blue hoodie.
He started walking along the sidewalk, back toward Milwaukee Street. “Any ideas?” he asked, withdrawing the iPhone from his pocket again.
NONE. HE’S TOTALLY GONE
“Yeah. That Taser trick was pretty effective, I’ve got to admit.”
IT WAS SCARY
“Very scary. For a second there…”
I KNOW!
Eric shuddered. He was still shaken up about that. If anything had happened to his brother… What would he have told everyone? How would he even begin to deal with something like that?
Eric shook away the thought. “Anyway… Is any of this making sense to you yet?”
NOPE
Eric nodded. “I didn’t think so.”
He walked up to the intersection and turned back toward Paul’s truck. He wasn’t behind the wheel. Clearly, he hadn’t emerged from the building yet.
He decided to go back in the front and meet him in the store room. But as he approached the doors of The Creek Boutique, he caught sight of the man in the pink shirt.
He was walking down the sidewalk, directly toward him, his sunglass-clad face turned toward the upper windows of the empty building.
&nb
sp; Cursing under his breath, Eric ducked into the doorway of the Creek Boutique.
He had no intention of having another awkward conversation with that man. He still didn’t know how he fit into all of this.
Peeking out around the corner, he saw Pink Shirt stop in the doorway and glance around as if checking to see if anyone was watching. When he turned his head toward him, Eric quickly slipped inside the boutique and ducked between two clothing racks.
Now what was he supposed to do? Paul was still in there!
He didn’t trust Pink Shirt. There was something unpleasant about him. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was just an IRS agent.
Whatever it was, there was nothing he could do now. He’d have to trust that Paul would be okay on his own. Hopefully, he’d be able to slip out the back without being seen.
Eric turned and looked around. The boutique was a much smaller store than the empty one next door, but it was crammed full of clothing racks overflowing with women’s wear. Dresses and skirts and blouses and jackets surrounded him. There was even an entire wall dedicated to shoes. Nearby stood an expressionless manikin wearing a curiously edgy business suit.
He’d never been in here by himself before. And he wasn’t entirely sure he should be here now. Without his wife to follow around and hold stuff for, he hardly knew what to do with himself. Was there some sort of etiquette required?
“Good morning!” sang a cheerfully girlish voice from somewhere in the back of the store. “If I can help you with anything, just let me know.”
Eric recognized the voice. He peered around the racks, but to no avail. “Gertie?” he called.
“Yes?”
A wispy woman with very long red hair and round, oversized glasses floated into view, seemingly right out of a large rack of formal wear. She was dressed in a long, flowing dress that looked like something out of the sixties, except it was mostly black with jingling gold baubles cascading down the front.
“Oh,” she said. “Eric Fortrell.” She practically sighed his name. “What a surprise.”
“Hey, Gertie.”
Gertie Britmacher was another of Karen’s longtime friends. She was the owner and operator of the store, along with her daughter, Sabrina. They were also the designers of many of the items on display in the store. They even made a lot of the accessories. (These were Sabrina’s specialty.)