Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

  David decided that because his father was such a mystery to him, he was at a great disadvantage. He had even come to believe that what made him different from his friends could be attributed to, in part, the absence of a father in his life.

  David had to go through the story he had fabricated for Mr. Jones once again for Mrs. Jones and Pamela. He, Rube, and Tony sat on the couch facing the two of them. Rube and Tony stared ahead, wide eyed, listening as attentively as Mrs. Jones and Pamela. David found he was enjoying adding details: how they had run through the village, spotted Buzzy going into the woods, followed him, but deliberately kept a safe distance behind so they could surprise him, and then found him sprawled on the dirt road.

  “Who would do such a thing?” Mrs. Jones asked when he was finished. She looked to Tony and Rube, but neither wanted to offer a syllable.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Jones.” David looked at Rube and Tony, and they both shrugged so quickly and so simultaneously they looked comical to David. He smiled at them and then turned back to Mrs. Jones. But his attention was quickly drawn to the doorway.

  Diane stood there, a towel wrapped around her head. She wore a light-blue bathrobe and matching slippers. Her face was still flushed from the hot shower.

  “What’s going on?”

  Her mother started to explain, relating David’s story with remarkable accuracy, as though keeping to the insignificant details was critical. David simply stared at Diane.

  “God. I thought I heard something before, but I thought it was a dog. Where’s Daddy?”

  “Cleaning and treating Buzzy’s wound in the main bathroom.”

  Main bathroom? David thought. How many bathrooms did they have in this house? A moment later Buzzy and Mr. Jones appeared. Buzzy’s head was wrapped neatly in a gauze bandage. In the well-lit room, he looked white and sickly.

  “How do you feel?” Mrs. Jones asked. Knowing that his mother and father were about to arrive, Buzzy felt rather weak. He had retreated to the only defensive tactic left: play on their sympathy.

  “Not so good.”

  “He’s got to go to the hospital,” Frank Jones said. The doorbell rang. It was the police followed by Buzzy’s parents. It was apparent from the look on Buzzy’s father’s face that he had come to reprimand him severely, but Buzzy either did a good job of acting or actually was feeling terrible. It stopped his father and mother in their tracks, and they quickly agreed with Frank Jones’s suggestion to get him to the hospital emergency room. They thanked him and ushered Buzzy out quickly.

  That left David, Rube, and Tony to face Charlie Williams, the village patrolman on duty. Charlie was only twenty-two years old. He had gone into the army straight out of high school and saw some action in Korea. He commanded respect more from the fact that he had seen actual combat than from the uniform he wore.

  He was a six foot two inch, well-built man with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, with eyebrows so light colored they looked nonexistent. His muscular body and seasoned-soldier look compensated some for his baby face. David often heard him compared to Van Johnson, the movie actor, but he had a much deeper voice. High school girls were fond of him, but he had a girlfriend in the city and still lived with his parents.

  Charlie’s family had moved into Centerville when Charlie was only five years old, so he was considered a homegrown boy. His father had been a bus driver up until last year when he retired on a disability due to his eyesight. They lived in a small, two story gingerbread on a road just outside of Centerville.

  Charlie had rapidly become a good, small-town cop. He was familiar with most everyone in town, knew their families and their children. He attended the high school basketball games, spent time talking to the students, and patrolled his community with the kind of detailed knowledge that would permit him to distinguish a suspiciously lit store or a suspiciously parked car.

  David grew nervous now that he realized he would be confronted by the actuality of a police report. It wasn’t going to be as easy to fabricate facts when he talked to Charlie Williams. And what if Charlie bore down on Rube, Tony, or Buzzy later on?

  Charlie listened to Mr. Jones first and then looked at Mrs. Jones, Pamela, and Diane. He nodded and turned to the three of them. David sensed the suspicion in his eyes. It was as if Charlie wore two faces, the real one just below this mask put on to deal with people in an official capacity. On his real face there was a knowing smile.

  Such an idea about people had come to him more vividly recently. Looking around him at the people in the village he had known all his life, he sensed the same two-faced personalities. He could see it in the way people spoke to one another, even when they spoke casually to one another. Smiles often covered up looks of disgust. This perception he had begun to recently enjoy was getting so much stronger so quickly that he felt like going up to some of these people and ripping off their masks.

  “Why don’t you guys go out and get in the patrol car. We’ll talk about this down at the station,” Charlie said. To David it was obvious why he wanted to talk to them alone.

  Rube and Tony looked terrified. Neither budged from the couch.

  “We gotta get home soon, Charlie,” David said.

  “That’s all right. Maggie Thomas is still there doing some clerical work. She’ll call everyone’s parents.”

  “Shit,” Tony said under his breath.

  “Let’s go,” David said. They got up. Diane touched his arm as he went past her and he stopped.

  “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt,” she said. Her sincerity nearly brought him to tears. He wanted to blurt it all out: We weren’t playing a game; we were spying on you, watching you get undressed. I don’t deserve your concern.

  But he said nothing and turned away quickly.

  The three of them went outside and stood waiting by the police car.

  “What the hell are we going to do now?” Rube asked.

  “Just stick to the story,” David said. He looked back at the house, and then his attention was drawn to the shadows to his right. He stepped toward them.

  “What is it?” Tony asked.

  “It’s him,” he said.

  “Who? The guy who hit Buzzy?” Both Rube and Tony came up beside him and looked.

  “I don’t see nobody,” Tony said.

  “Besides, the police is here,” Rube said. “He ain’t going to come after us now.”

  David said nothing for a moment. The shadows lightened again, but he still felt that ominous chill.

  “He’s not here for us,” David said, speaking like one under a hypnotic spell. His friends looked at each other and then at him. The way he was staring into the darkness unnerved them both.

  “What do you mean?” Rube said, but before David could respond, Charlie emerged from the house and told them to get into the patrol car. They all got into the back seat, and Charlie got behind the wheel. He looked back at the three of them for a long, silent moment.

  “I can’t wait to hear this story,” he said and started away.

  David looked back through the rear window. He didn’t see anything specific; he could distinguish no one in the darkness and had nothing concrete to offer that would turn Charlie Williams around.

  But he knew that something terrible was still there. As usual, his ability to perceive things beyond others left him frustrated. Only this time, it did much more; it left him sickly afraid, but not for himself.

  He was afraid for Diane Jones.

  5

  The Centerville Police Station was located in the basement of the Centerville Town Hall, a building that went back to the original settlers of the community. In those days it served as a meeting hall and a church. After a fire in the mid-nineteenth century, it was rebuilt as a town hall, and the basement just naturally evolved into a police station. Recently, it had been redesigned and redecorated. Within it were a distinct holding room and a distinct examination room, as well as a chief’s office.

  The Centerville Police Department consisted of only three ful
l-time patrolmen year round, but in the summer, the town council added two additional part-time officers. Most of the year there was very little traffic to direct, and criminal activity was restricted to an occasional burglary, a brawl in one of the local taverns, vandalism, and reckless driving. For this quiet little Upstate New York community, murder, rape, and other capital crimes were still considered synonymous with urban areas.

  In fact, the only murder that had occurred in this village had happened more than thirty years ago. It was the favorite Halloween story. Cornelius Harding killed his younger brother, Boris, and kept the murder secret for weeks before people realized that no one had seen or spoken to him. An investigation turned up a gruesome situation: Cornelius had bludgeoned Boris to death and was cutting his brother’s body up gradually and feeding the parts to the fire in the coal stove, taking some additional mad pleasure in the serialized cremation. Shortly afterward, Cornelius committed suicide in prison.

  The Hardings had been living together for nearly fifteen years after their parents died. The house remained unoccupied for years afterward, until a family from the city bought it and redid much of it. Since they occupied it only during the summer months, it nevertheless remained the village’s haunted house. Boris’s spirit was forever imprisoned within its walls.

  However, for most of the adults in town, time had turned what was once a gruesome and vicious murder into a relatively harmless fable. Fewer and fewer people remembered the Harding brothers, and details of the crime were confused and distorted. Apparently, no one was really ever sure of the motive for the murder. Stories ranged from an argument over a game of checkers to the final result of latent sibling rivalry.

  It was a standard joke in town, understood by year-round residents, that if something unexplainable happened, it was to be blamed on the spirit of Boris Harding. It was the way Charlie Williams began his interrogation of the boys.

  “So who hit Buzzy—Boris Harding?” he asked. He had taken the three of them into the chief’s office and sat down behind the desk. There were other chairs in the room, but no one else took a seat.

  “We don’t know, Charlie. We weren’t there when he was attacked,” David said. Rube and Tony continued to let him be their spokesman.

  “Bullshit. I know why you guys were there. You were looking in on Diane Jones. Now don’t give me no more bullshit,” he said sitting up quickly and pointing his right forefinger straight at David. “I want the truth, or Buzzy won’t be the only one going up to the hospital.”

  For a moment no one said anything. Then David nodded. Charlie sat back in his chair. How did he know for sure what we were really doing there? David wondered.

  “Buzzy was behind us, but we didn’t know he was coming,” David said without actually confessing to the accusation. “We heard him scream and then, when we went back, we found him on the dirt road. I saw someone in the shadows, but I couldn’t make out who it was. It was a man, though.”

  “Aw, come on. You know it was just another one of you pricks on the prowl.”

  “No, Charlie, honest, I…”

  “Someone played a little too rough, right? You covering up for him?”

  “No. We ain’t,” Rube said. “He’s telling you the truth.”

  “Truth? You guys wouldn’t know the truth even if it popped out all over you like the chicken pox.” He thought for a moment. “I oughta call Frank Jones and tell him what was really going on,” he muttered, but David knew that he wouldn’t. He was just using the threat to pressure them. But why wouldn’t he tell Mr. Jones the truth? he wondered. Shouldn’t he?

  “Buzzy wasn’t hit by any of us,” David said. “None of us would hit him that hard, Charlie, and you know it,” he added, sounding older, stronger, and unafraid. Charlie looked up sharply. He does know it, David thought, but he doesn’t want us to know. Why?

  “Buzzy didn’t see anyone? He just got hit?”

  “The guy grabbed him first,” Tony said and looked at David. “Show him.” Charlie waited for the demonstration. David clasped Tony’s throat with both his hands and tightened the fingers.

  “Like that,” David said, letting go. “One of us wouldn’t have done this. It’s no game.”

  Charlie stared at the three of them for a few moments. Then he sat up again.

  “I’ll go to the hospital and talk to Buzzy myself. He better have the same story.”

  “Well, he won’t. He’ll tell you what I first told you,” David said.

  “I don’t mean that part. All right, I won’t have Maggie call your parents.” He looked down at his desk. “Go on home,” he said waving his hand at them as though he were driving away flies, “and keep away from the windows of the girls in this town, understand?” he added, looking up to give them his sternest expression.

  “Yeah, sure,” Tony said. “Thanks,” he added. He and Rube started to back toward the doorway, but David didn’t move.

  “Go on,” Charlie repeated, “before I change my mind.”

  “Come on,” Rube said. David eyed Charlie for a moment. He sensed Charlie was hiding something he knew already. The face he wore now was more of a mask, but David didn’t know how to get him to say more to them. He followed Rube and Tony out of the station and into the street. The two of them broke into a run.

  “Wait up,” he called and ran after them. They stopped near the train station.

  “I’m going home,” Tony said.

  “Me too,” Rube added.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What for?” Tony said. “Shit, we’re lucky we got out of there without having our parents down. My father would break my neck.”

  “If my father got called down, you wouldn’t see me for a couple of days,” Rube said.

  “How did he know we had gone there to spy on Diane?” David asked. “Why was he so sure?”

  “Maybe someone was caught there recently,” Tony said.

  “Then why wouldn’t Mr. Jones have been more suspicious when he first saw us?”

  “Who gives a shit? Charlie Williams ain’t tellin’ Mr. Jones about us so we’re not gonna get into trouble for it,” Rube said. “Forget about it.”

  “But who hit Buzzy?” David asked insistently. Why weren’t his friends as concerned?

  “You know who I think did it,” Tony said. He looked up the street as if to be sure no one could hear him. “I think it was Gerry Porter. I think the moron followed us and grabbed Buzzy. He’s a fucking maniac.”

  “Gerry Porter?” David thought about it a moment.

  “Yeah. We should have told Charlie about him,” Rube said. “Now I’m sorry I fooled around with him. He must’ve gotten excited and followed us.”

  “But why would he attack Buzzy?”

  “Maybe he thought Buzzy was after him,” Tony said. “Who knows?”

  “Or maybe he thought Buzzy had spotted him,” Rube said.

  “I don’t know,” David said. “Gerry Porter?”

  “Well it ain’t our problem,” Tony said. “I’m going,” he repeated and started away.

  “See ya,” Rube said and followed. David stood there watching them go up the street.

  Just before he turned to start for home himself, he saw what looked to be a long, dark vehicle approaching on his left. It looked like a hearse. It paused at the tracks, and when it continued and went by him, he saw Peter Sills was driving it. He was glad the man didn’t seem to notice him. If he had, he might have stopped and bawled him out about the near accident they had had earlier. Maybe Charlie would learn about it and that would make for more problems.

  Even so, he couldn’t help wondering about Sills. From time to time, the women who came to play cards at his house talked about Peter and Betty Sills. He heard them say that Peter Sills had assumed the role of homemaker, that he kept his house immaculate, and because he was so involved with the upkeep of the house and caring for his wife, he had few men friends. He wasn’t very active in any organization.

  Actually, no one particularly dislike
d him, even though David gathered from the way the women talked that they were critical of the way he tolerated his spoiled wife.

  David remembered when he and his friends had been in the drugstore at the same time Peter Sills came for his wife’s medicine. Even now he felt sick at the memory of the gutted deer he had envisioned and the transformation of Mr. Sills’s car into a hearse right before his eyes.

  Was Mr. Sills going to die? The knowledge saddened him, but there was nothing he could do.

  He watched the car until it disappeared from view. As it had passed under the last few streetlights, he had seen that it wasn’t a hearse at all, but Mr. Sills’s own station wagon.

  After a moment he started for home. With luck he thought he might get back into the house without his grandmother’s realizing he had gone. As he crossed the tracks and went up Main Street, he thought about Gerry Porter. Had he sensed something dangerous about the retarded man when they were talking to him or was that a product of his overworked imagination as well? Porter could have followed them, and he could have grabbed Buzzy. He was certainly strong enough to have done it. Maybe he would tell Charlie about him tomorrow.

  And yet there was something more, something indistinct and gray that made him doubt the guilt of Gerry Porter. He couldn’t verbalize it, but he was sure it had something to do with Charlie’s being so positive they were Peeping Toms. And also, he didn’t believe Charlie when he acted skeptical about Buzzy’s being attacked by someone other than another kid. David sensed he knew it wasn’t another kid.

  He looked back at the center of the village. The streets were nearly deserted. Only an occasional vehicle went by, and the only storefront lit was the front of Porkey’s Bar and Grill. Even that place looked dead tonight.

  Despite the bright streetlights that illuminated the downtown area of the village, David sensed a cloud, an ominous darkness settling over everything. There’s a great evil here, he thought, and it’s not the spirit of Boris Harding. It’s not the evil born out of wild imaginations. It’s something quite real and quite common. Something here every day, but something few, if any, could realize.