The Unseen

by Brian Harmon

  “Okay, I’m not going back to see that devil woman again.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “I don’t know. Trust issues I think. You’re too jealous. I’m telling you, she’s not my type.”

  “Paul said you were all in an accident.”

  Eric shook his head. “Paul’s got a big mouth. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”

  “It didn’t sound fine. It sounded like you almost got yourself killed.”

  “Paul’s got a really big mouth. It wasn’t so bad. I promise.”

  Karen was quiet for a moment.

  Eric took advantage of this and moved on with the conversation. “I found what we were looking for. Now I just have to find Aiden.”

  “You lost him?”

  “He was taken. By the cowboy.”

  “So you’re looking for the cowboy now?”

  “Not now, no.”

  “You found him?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “I can definitely say I know where he is.”

  “You need to be careful, Eric.”

  “I’m fine. He’s not going to be a problem anymore.”

  Again, Karen fell silent.

  “I just have to figure out where Aiden is. He could be anywhere in the city. Hell, after all I’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was anywhere in the world.”

  A voice called out to him from across the street. Looking up, he saw a black SUV pulling up to the curb. Aiden was waving at him from the open, passenger-side window.

  “Or…you know…not.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  He disconnected the call without waiting for a response and set off across the street. “What happened to you?”

  Aiden leaned out the window. “That cowboy creep dragged me off with his aura stuff. I couldn’t breathe. Blacked out. Thought for sure I was dead. Then I woke up in the basement of the asylum, locked in one of those rooms. Then this guy rescued me.”

  Eric stepped up to the window of the SUV and peered in. Sitting behind the wheel was the man in the pink shirt.

  “I was trying to locate my partner when I heard him shouting for help. He must have figured out the clue on that stone faster than I expected.”

  “Except there was no clue,” said Aiden.

  “He must’ve still been spying on us,” said Eric. “He would’ve known as soon as I caught up with you that AG was a message for you, not a clue.”

  “But how did he find us so fast?”

  “The aura plasma can reach long distances,” Pink Shirt informed them. “It wouldn’t have been hard for him to reach out and drag you to him.”

  “But why?” pressed Aiden. “He didn’t ask me any questions or anything. He just locked me up and left. I never even saw the guy.”

  Pink Shirt had an answer for this, too: “Clearly, he wanted to separate the two of you. He probably thought it would be easier to control you that way.”

  “Well he won’t be controlling anyone anymore,” Eric assured them.

  Pink Shirt looked over at him, surprised. “You disposed of him?”

  Eric cringed inwardly. He didn’t care for the word “disposed.” It sounded so…brutal. “Something like that.”

  He looked impressed. “Bravo. That couldn’t have been an easy task.”

  Eric shrugged. He didn’t really want to talk about it. It wasn’t something he was proud of. Even though he hadn’t killed him with his own two hands, it still made him feel sick.

  “Did you find it?” asked Aiden. “What Glen left for me?”

  Eric glanced at Pink Shirt. He still didn’t trust the man. But Aiden had clearly decided he was okay. “I did.”

  “So do we still need what my partner took from you?” asked Pink Shirt.

  “No,” replied Eric. “It’s not important anymore.”

  “All we have left is to find the schoolhouse and finish all this,” said Aiden.

  “Excellent,” said Pink Shirt. “Get in.”

  Eric opened the back door and climbed into the SUV. “Are you sure we should keep looking for this thing?” he asked as he slammed the door. “Maybe we’re better off leaving it where it is. Look at all the trouble it’s already caused.”

  Aiden looked back at him, his expression shocked. “I can’t quit now. I have to know what’s out there.”

  Pink Shirt, as usual, showed very little emotion at all beneath those dark glasses. “I’d be inclined to agree with you, except I know for a fact there’ll be more like my partner and me if we don’t end this today. We have to find what’s hidden in Creek Bend and make sure it can’t find its way into the wrong hands.”

  Eric didn’t think he could argue with that logic, but he still wasn’t sure about this. There were still so many unanswered questions. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was a reason Glen Normer chose to hide the glass shard rather than use it. Was it simply that he couldn’t find the schoolhouse? Or had he decided that whatever was hidden inside was too dangerous to let out?

  “There’s a first aid kit in the glove box,” said Pink Shirt.

  As Aiden passed it to him, he made a mental note to have Isabelle tell Kevin not to bother picking him up. He immediately felt the iPhone vibrate in his pocket and knew she’d gotten the message.

  As they drove off, Eric spotted the cowboy’s truck parked discretely around the block. How long had he been sitting there, waiting for him? It couldn’t have been very long. And yet, had he been smart enough to simply have Kevin drive once around the block before dropping him off, perhaps he could have avoided that encounter altogether.

  But then he’d still have to deal with the fat, murderous cowboy and he wouldn’t have found the glass shard.

  “So where do we go from here?” asked Pink Shirt.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” replied Aiden. He looked back at Eric. “Let me see what he found.”

  Eric glanced at Pink Shirt, uncertain, but withdrew the glass shard from his pocket and handed it to him.

  Aiden looked confused. “What’s this?”

  Eric shrugged. “It’s all that was there.”

  “This is what Glen hid from me? It looks like junk. What’re we supposed to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric lied. He wasn’t ready to lay all his cards in front of the man in the pink shirt just yet.

  “This doesn’t tell me how to find the schoolhouse.”

  Eric took the shard back and slipped it safely into his pocket again. “Maybe it’ll make sense when we get there.”

  “If we get there,” countered Aiden as he withdrew Normer’s journals from the pocket of his hoodie.

  “The cowboy let you keep those?” asked Eric.

  “I guess he didn’t think he needed them anymore.”

  “Or he didn’t expect you to go anywhere with them,” suggested Pink Shirt. “I doubt if he expected me to help you escape.”

  “Did he need them?” asked Eric.

  Aiden glanced back at him. “I don’t know. I can’t find anything about how to find the schoolhouse. But I don’t know where else to look.”

  Leaning back in his seat, Eric stared at the two men sitting in front of him. What an unlikely threesome they made. Aiden seemed to have accepted the man in the pink shirt, but Eric still wasn’t convinced. There was still something wrong about him.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  His bleeding arm bandaged, Eric took a moment to close his eyes and relax. He’d been going nonstop since he walked out of the flower shop that morning. He needed a break. It felt like days ago that he picked up those damned daisies.

  He remembered walking into that ally, climbing those steps, exploring that empty apartment.

  Opening his eyes now, Eric asked, “How did you get out of that apartment this morning, anyway? I followed you up the steps. The only other way out was through the tavern.” The front doors were locked, as he found out. Any back door would have required him to sneak pas
t Leon and Brooke. And the only other exit was the fire door, which would’ve set off an alarm.

  Aiden looked back at him over his shoulder and grinned. “I was hiding in the cabinets under the counter.”

  Eric was shocked. “No kidding?”

  “I panicked. I grabbed my Taser and hid myself just as he knocked on the door.”

  Eric recalled walking into the kitchen and looking around. His imagination in overdrive, he hadn’t dared search the cupboards or refrigerator for fear that he would find something horror movie worthy. It was hard to believe that Aiden had been only inches away, curled up in the darkness, clutching the Taser.

  Right under his nose the whole time.

  “When I heard him talking to someone on his phone, I slipped out and ran.”

  Eric remembered being startled by the sound of the door clicking closed. He’d thought at first that it was someone entering the building. It never occurred to him that it was the sound of Aiden leaving. He’d dismissed it as the wind.

  Perhaps there was something else he’d missed as well…

  He withdrew Karen’s iPhone and stared at it, trying to remember everything that had happened that day.

  After finding the apartment empty, he’d wandered through the rooms, trying to understand what it was his former student was doing here. The map on the table had drawn his attention. Seven circled locations, one of them crossed out in red marker. Six lines reaching out from each of the remaining circles, pointing in six different directions.

  The answer, he realized, had to have been just like Aiden: right under his nose.

  He left the apartment and found himself in the closed tavern, where the Rufars obviously had nothing to do with any of this.

  After that he finished his chores and drove to Hosler Avenue, where he lost his phone…

  And where someone later found it…

  Right under his nose…

  Just like Aiden…

  What was it that old man kept shouting at him? Besides begging him to hurry and warning him that death was at the doorstep, he kept shouting those strange phrases. Turn back the clock and spiral down… Sixteen… Something about everything becoming twisted as it went deeper…

  He hadn’t understood, but clearly it had something to do with what was going on in Creek Bend.

  “The map…” he said. “Aiden, I need that map you had.”

  “I lost it when my backpack burned up.”

  “I’ve got a map,” offered Pink Shirt. He reached down into the console between the seats and withdrew a tablet. With a few practiced swipes of his finger, he brought up a digital version of Aiden’s map of Creek Bend and passed it back to Eric. “I assume it was probably something like this.”

  It was, indeed. This map was much smaller than Eric’s, but it had clear, yellow circles around each of the seven locations and the same random lines showing the unmatched line-of-sight angles to the schoolhouse. It also had the circles drawn that converged at Lister Park.

  Eric stared at the map for a moment and then searched his cell phone for one of the clues he’d photographed. “Spiral down…” he sighed. The mysterious old man kept telling him to spiral down. And each of these clues were written in a spiral. A counter-clockwise spiral. “Turn back the clock…”

  “What is it?” pressed Aiden.

  Eric looked at the map. “The alpha structure might be more hidden than the others. We discussed that at the library.”

  “I remember,” Aiden replied. “It makes sense. I mean, obviously there’s some reason none of us can see it like we can the others.”

  “It’s more hidden… More unseen…”

  Aiden stared at him, unsure where it was he was going with this.

  “It’s…deeper…than the others.”

  “Deeper?”

  Eric recalled that last conversation with the mysterious old man. “‘Everything gets twisted when you go deeper.’”

  Aiden was lost. “What does that mean?”

  But Eric was looking at the map again. “If you make something more unseen…if you make it deeper…maybe it skews things. Like the way a black hole bends light and time around it.”

  “It’s not impossible,” agreed Pink Shirt.

  “If that’s the case, maybe things become twisted around an alpha structure in the same way.”

  The only question left was how to adjust for this twist.

  Eric looked at the picture on Karen’s phone again. “Did we ever figure out what all the numbers meant in all the clues?”

  “No,” replied Aiden. “There are two digits left. The same number on every clue, right after the train car number.”

  Eric stared at the symbol. It was no surprise what that number was.

  “Sixteen,” said Aiden.

  “Sixteen,” repeated Eric. The same number the guy holding his phone hostage kept shouting at him. And now that he was thinking about it… “There are sixteen digits in each of these clues.”

  Aiden nodded. “He’s right…”

  Now Eric realized something else as well. “Six stand guard where the water turns.”

  “Seen by few, each points the way home,” finished Aiden.

  “Sixteen syllables.”

  Aiden counted them on his fingers. “You’re right. But what does it mean?”

  Eric looked at the map again. “It means that sixteen is a very important number.” He looked at each of the lines. “Turn back the clock,” he muttered. Counterclockwise. Spiral down. Deeper. He estimated sixteen degrees counter clockwise from two of the lines and made a mental note of where they would meet. As he redrew each line in his head, he found that they did, in fact, converge at the same point.

  He looked up at Aiden. “Subtract sixteen from each of the degree measurements. Sixteen degrees left of where you think you see the schoolhouse is where it really stands.”

  Aiden took the iPad from Eric and stared at it.

  “Impressive,” said Pink Shirt.

  Aiden finished estimating the adjustment and stared at him. “You’re kidding?”

  “What?” asked Pink Shirt. “Where are we going?”

  “Where else?” Eric asked. “The high school.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Pink Shirt parked the SUV in the empty high school parking lot and the three of them stepped out into the warm, early-evening sunshine.

  “Creek Bend High School,” said the nameless man in pink. “That’s one school. So where’s the other one?”

  Eric and Aiden looked at each other. There was nothing here that shouldn’t be. But they both knew all too well that the eyes could be fooled.

  Eric withdrew the blue shard of glass from his pocket and held it up in front of his face. Peering through it, he saw that there was now another building in addition to those that were supposed to be here. A tall, narrow tower rose up behind the flat, square shape of the gymnasium.

  He passed the shard to Aiden.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  Eric couldn’t either. It had been hard enough to believe that all these things were happening in his own hometown, but that the endgame was taking place right here at his own school? He’d been teaching here for years. Before that, he’d been a student here. He saw this building almost every day.

  And yet here was the most unseen structure of them all, towering over him. His classroom overlooked the damned thing!

  Pink Shirt took his turn looking through the glass and then looked back at Eric. “Excellent job, gentlemen.”

  “Not yet, it’s not,” said Eric. “We still have to see what’s in there. For all we know, it’s crawling with monsters.”

  “That would figure,” said Aiden. “After daydreaming about video games in class all those times, I’m probably going to die dungeon crawling right outside the cafeteria doors.”

  “Irony’s a bitch,” agreed Eric.

  Aiden shook his head. The irony was deafening. He still couldn’t believe this epic journey he began six years ago had led him
to teaming up with his old English teacher of all people, much less that it would lead him right back to the very same high school where they first met.

  Eric didn’t blame him. It seemed even more absurd to him.

  Pink Shirt lowered the glass shard and examined it. “Interesting.”

  “I know,” said Aiden. “I wonder how it works.”

  “It was obviously a part of something larger at one point,” he observed, turning it over in his fingers. “It sounds crazy, but I hear a lot of stories in my line of work. Apparently, there are a lot of strange things out there.”

  “Any stories about a glass that lets you see hidden things?” asked Aiden.

  “None come to mind. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I did hear about a curious photograph of a pale-faced woman who keeps turning up in the pockets of brutally murdered men.”

  “Let’s hope that remains completely unrelated to what we’re doing here,” said Eric.

  “Seconded,” said Aiden.

  “Agreed.” Pink Shirt handed Eric back the shard. “Let’s go.”

  “Who put you in charge?” Aiden demanded.

  “Nobody. But you two are just standing there.”

  “Mr. Fortrell’s in charge,” Aiden decided. “I still don’t trust you. It was your people who killed Glen.”

  “Fine. Understandable. Please lead the way, Mr. Fortrell.”

  “It’s Eric.” He looked at Aiden. “I’m not your teacher anymore. That ship’s long gone.”

  “Yes, I get it. I’m a dropout. I’m also probably legally dead by now. Get over it, already.”

  The three of them set off across the campus, circling around the gymnasium to the back.

  As they walked, Eric withdrew Karen’s phone and looked down at the screen.

  HE STILL FEELS WEIRD TO ME

  Eric nodded.

  HE HAS THE SAME FEEL TO HIM AS THE COWBOY DID. AND THE FOGGY MAN LAST YEAR

  Eric didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. Isabelle read his thoughts perfectly.

  FATHER BILLY WAS DIFFERENT SOMEHOW

  Was that because Father Billy had abandoned the organization? Had he turned out to be fundamentally good, unlike these other agents who felt no remorse at killing? Or was it because he’d been in hiding for so long, separated from the whole of the group?