Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

  “I met a friend of mine on my way home. Merle.”

  “Merle?”

  “Merle Zalsky,” Charlie said. “I know him.” Comfort nodded, obviously asking Charlie to make note of the name.

  “What time did he come in, Mrs. Steiner?” Lieutenant Comfort asked.

  “I don’t know,” Roselyn said. “I…I was out and by the time I came in, he was asleep. We made a lot of noise and woke him and then after we told him what happened, he said he had to go into town to tell the police what he knew.”

  Everyone was quiet again for a moment.

  “You can’t tell us any more about this…shadow, David?” Donald Sacks asked. He just shook his head.

  “How come you’re so sure it’s not this Gerry Porter?” Lieutenant Comfort asked.

  “He’s not dangerous,” David said. “Not really.” He was about to add that he believed Gerry had confronted the shadow, but he felt guilty about submitting him to this kind of questioning. He knew they wouldn’t understand his reluctance to say anything, and they could only consider that a form of cover-up.

  “How come you’re so sure?” Comfort pursued.

  “I…I can sense it,” David said.

  David’s mother brought his eggs and toast to the table.

  “Are you going into school today?” Comfort asked.

  “He should,” Roselyn said. “It’s only a couple of days to tests.”

  David looked at the clock. He realized he could still make most of his classes.

  “Yeah, I’ll go.”

  “After school, come down to the station,” Comfort said.

  “Why?” Roselyn asked.

  “I want him to take us back to the scene of the crime. Sometimes, people remember things when they look at something twice.”

  “But he never really looked at it,” she said. “He had a dream. It was only a dream,” she repeated.

  No one responded. The three men thanked her for the coffee and then left.

  David expected the reactions he got when he went to school. He sensed them as he walked toward the building. It was as if he were walking against a giant balloon, pressing his way forward against slight, but nevertheless, new and real resistance. Something was trying to hold him back, either to protect him from what would be or to keep him away because he was no longer wanted.

  It was very warm, more like an August day. The air was heavy, and when he reached the side door and entered the building, there was no relief. In fact, it was harder to breathe inside. He felt as though he had entered a trap. Was it from the high humidity or was it all a product of his own imagination? By the time he went to the general office and got his late pass and then went to his math class, his face was bright red. That, plus all that had happened, drew everyone’s attention to him.

  His classmates were unable to turn away; they were mesmerized by his presence, by his mere existence. He did nothing to encourage it. He took his seat as quickly as he could, opened his notebook, and listened attentively to Mr. Rosenfield’s description of the main areas of curriculum the final exam would cover. Throughout it all, he felt everyone’s eyes on him.

  Mr. Rosenfield tried to ignore what was happening, but before the period ended, he realized he could have just as well been talking to an empty room. No one was hearing his words any longer. Frustrated, he stopped talking a good five minutes before the period ended and told the class to look through their notes. He said he was available for questions. No one asked any. David had something he wanted to ask, but he was afraid of what his voice would sound like. He felt more like a new student than a lifelong resident, and had a new student’s timidity.

  When the bell rang to end the period, he got up hopefully. His friends all turned away as if they were embarrassed to know him. No one smiled; no one offered a word. In fact, the class made its exit in a funerallike silence, everyone moving slowly, quietly. There wasn’t the usual scraping of chair legs over the floor and an explosion of chatter. And everyone left orderly too, the way teachers dream of students leaving a room. The terrible events had turned everyone into adults and stolen away the nonchalance of childhood.

  David was one of the last to leave. When he looked at Mr. Rosenfield, Mr. Rosenfield became busy with papers on his desk. Even his teachers weren’t going to break the ice. He looked down, rather than at anyone in particular, and started out. When he entered the hallway, things first looked as if they would go back to normal. There was the usual noise and confusion. Students were yelling to each other and moving up and down the middle instead of staying to the right. He welcomed the normal bedlam.

  But it didn’t last. As soon as the other students saw him, noise in the hall dropped. People were whispering instead of talking and gaping at him as though he were a new breed of teenager just imported.

  He was on his way to English, traveling to the thirties corridor which was one flight up. He crossed the main lobby and started up the stairs, but before he reached the second step, he heard his name and turned to face Ted Davis, Westlake, Shatsky, and a few other senior boys. The sound of his name brought everything to a halt. Students stopped moving on the stairways and through the hall and lobby. Even the office help paused in what they were doing and looked his way.

  David was surprised that Ted had come to school, but then again he imagined Ted needed the comfort of his friends. It was terrible to be alone in mourning. He knew that from his period of bereavement after his grandmother’s death. Ted was pale and without his characteristic neat appearance. His hair was disheveled, his shirt was out of his pants, and the sleeves were unbuttoned. One sleeve was partly rolled up, one was not. He looked as if he had been pulling on his clothes.

  His eyes were bloodshot, and he had a wild look about him. It was a look that reminded David of the inebriated hobos he occasionally came upon down by the tracks. Their facial muscles were so relaxed they looked unconscious with their eyes open. They had a hard time controlling the movement in their mouths, and their foreheads were deeply creased from the effort to keep their eyelids from shutting. Despite their weakened and confused state, or perhaps because of it, David was always frightened by them. He recognized that they were no longer in charge of themselves; they had lost authority over their limbs, their words, and their expressions. Something released in the whiskey possessed them, or, and he often thought this was more probably the case, something in the whiskey released the spirit asleep in them.

  Diane’s gruesome death and the weight of his own sorrow had released something dormant in Ted Davis as well. David sensed that it was dangerous and evil. It had quickly overpowered any of his softer emotions and had driven back any and all rational thought. Ted stood before him more like a puppet. David could almost see the strings dangling in the air, controlled by a malicious and ruthless spirit eager to show its power. Instinctively, David took another step back, moving up the steps, and held onto the railing.

  Ted started toward him, his friends moving with and beside him like a linked clump, all of one thought, all of one brain and muscle. They wore the same mask of anger and distrust. They looked like the citizens from the country of bad dreams: eyes wide, mouths tight, bodies as firm as fingers locked in a fist. Every one of them was distorted by his effort to not only feel what Ted felt, but to feel it as intensely.

  “You wanna tell us how come you knew so much?” Ted said. He had two books and a notebook clamped in his right hand and held away from his body. He held both his arms out and down, his neck taut, the skin under his chin straining. For a moment David said nothing. He looked from one to the other and then back at Ted.

  “I had a dream about it,” David responded, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “A dream? You had another dream? Another magical dream?” Ted raised his voice so dramatically on the third phrase that it created a ripple of comments throughout the crowd of students now gathering in the lobby.

  “I told it all to the police,” David said. He searched the mass of faces, looking for an expres
sion of sympathy, but all looked either frightened or angry.

  “He told it all to the police,” Ted repeated. “You’re fulla shit,” Ted said. “You didn’t tell it all. You didn’t tell it all,” he repeated and started up the stairs.

  “What’s going on out here?” Mr. Gotman called from the entrance to his office. The principal, Mr. Gotman, was a tall, muscular man who commanded respect and administered discipline simply on the basis of his mere physical presence. Everyone knew that he had played football in college. He was rarely challenged. He came forward quickly. “Everyone get moving to class. Let’s go. Get moving,” he commanded. Ted stopped inches from David on the stairway and glared down at him. Students started moving away as Mr. Gotman came toward them.

  David saw the fire and the pain in Ted Davis’s eyes, but he didn’t hate him for it. Oddly enough, at this moment he felt understanding. He believed that only he and Ted could feel the sorrow this deeply.

  “I didn’t do anything to hurt her. I tried to help her,” he whispered.

  “Davis, what’s going on here?” Mr. Gotman said. He was right beside them. Ted didn’t reply. He continued to stare down at David, but David didn’t look away. He found that he wanted to look directly into Ted’s eyes; he found that he wanted to face the anger and hate and turn it back. He could actually feel the struggle going on; it was like an arm wrestle: his power, his concentration against the power and the concentration of the evil spirit. Perhaps it was the same evil spirit that drove the shadow to attack and kill Diane Jones.

  He didn’t retreat and after a long, heavy moment, he felt Ted ease off. He felt himself winning the struggle. The spirit slipped back, choosing not to face him directly. It did not surrender; it merely opted for a different time and a different way.

  “Davis,” Mr. Gotman repeated. Ted turned to him and then rushed back down the stairs to his awaiting clump of friends. Without a word, they all started across the lobby to their next class. Mr. Gotman looked at David. “Go on to class,” he said, “and stay away from him.”

  David said nothing. He moved up the stairs quickly, the students in front of him parting and moving back as though they were afraid he might touch them and somehow contaminate them. He didn’t look at them; he didn’t care anymore. It had been a mistake to come to school today, he thought. He should have listened to his instincts.

  The students behaved the same way in all his remaining classes. Those who spoke to him, spoke perfunctorily, quickly, avoiding his eyes. He realized that what his buddies were afraid of was being associated with any suspicions laid at his feet. After all, Rube, Tony, and he had gone to look in at Diane Jones when she was undressing in her bedroom. The two of them had a look of doom about them as if they anticipated being called in at any moment and charged with being Peeping Toms. Was that like being considered an accomplice to a crime? He could almost hear them ask the question.

  He didn’t force himself upon anyone. If Ted didn’t understand and believe him, who would? Ted had seen some of the things he could do, even though most of that was discounted as mere trickery now. He had confided in Ted, but now it seemed that Ted hated him for what he could do. Would it have been better not to tell the police about his dreams? Would it have been better not to have led them to the path and the clearing and the pond? They would all be still looking today, and Diane’s parents wouldn’t know the truth, would continue to hope that their daughter was alive.

  Was this what his grandmother meant when she warned him to beware of what he could do? No one is really more disliked than a good fortune teller, for the fortune teller knows things about people that they don’t really want to know about themselves, he thought. Instinctively David understood that people despised those who brought bad news, even though they didn’t cause it. They were forever associated with it. Diane Jones’s mother and father would never again look at him without remembering his words and the pain those words brought. And he could never look at them without thinking about it either. Wasn’t it easier, wasn’t it safer to not speak, to keep the dreams and the images trapped in his own mind?

  But could he do that even if he wanted to? That kind of knowledge built up a pressure. Revealing the information brought him relief. He realized that this was why his grandmother was so sad for him, why she wanted to avoid talking about it. She knew the heavy weight he would carry and that what some people would consider a blessing was really a burden.

  He did not move quickly to leave the building the way he and his friends usually did when school ended. No one had invited him to join in anything afterward, and anyway, he had to go back to the police station to talk to that state investigator. He wasn’t anxious to do that. He didn’t like the man, and he didn’t want to do what he had suggested: go back to the scene of the crime, the scene of his terrible dream. But he had no choice.

  When he came out of the building, he saw small groups of students gathered here and there. Most of them were upperclassmen. His appearance stopped their conversations. He felt their eyes on him as he walked down the sidewalk. He had half expected another confrontation with Ted, but he wasn’t around. Neither were his close friends. He imagined they had gotten him to leave, thinking it was only added pain and agony for Ted to talk to him.

  Perhaps it was. He was fatalistic about it all now. What could he do to make Ted understand? He walked on slowly, his head down, ignoring some of the comments deliberately stated loud enough for him to hear. He heard the words, “flaky, queer, perverted.” Did they really think he had something to do with the death of Diane Jones?

  He didn’t run from them. He moved more like someone in a daze and looked up only when it came time to cross a street. When he reached the other side, he started to walk faster, stopping automatically at Stanton’s garage. For a long moment, he didn’t know why he had stopped. He looked about in confusion.

  Two of the four Stanton brothers were working on a vehicle parked in front of the garage. They had the hood up and the car jacked up on the left side. The vehicle looked familiar. The Stantons didn’t notice him standing there and staring at them. After a moment he realized what was familiar about the car. It was Peter Sills’s vehicle.

  He closed his eyes because the ringing began, and he ran the palm of his right hand over his forehead and down over his face.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was like he was looking at a sepia-tinted photograph. Late spring was gone; it was fall, and there were no vehicles parked in front of the garage. The big garage door was down, but dangling in front of it were two bucks with long, red incisions down the center of their stomachs. They stared out at him with eyes frozen in fear. He felt accused merely because he was a member of the species that hunted and killed them for sport. And like the time when he actually did see them hanging there, he ran from the scene, pursued by the confused faces of the animals seeking an answer to the question why.

  He had no answers for them; he could only leave them dangling there, trophies in rigor mortis.

  When he was a good block and a half from the garage and nearly halfway to the police station, he stopped running. He caught his breath and looked back and around him to see if he had attracted any attention with his frantic flight from a memory and a vision. The pedestrians whom he saw didn’t appear to have taken notice of him. He was grateful for that. But then he wondered why that particular memory had come.

  He had had it before and relatively recently. The violent image seemed out of place then, but now he realized it had had something to do with the shadow of death.

  The shadow was starting to turn toward him, the darkness peeling back off its face. Soon, soon, he would know exactly who it was. He was confident of that, but it wasn’t something he would tell anyone just yet, least of all the state investigator who was obviously skeptical of everything he said.

  He went on, afraid but determined.

  12

  Charlie Williams and Lieutenant Comfort were the only ones waiting for him when he arrived at the police station. Ch
arlie was sitting behind the desk, and Comfort was seated in a chair to the right. Neither of them got right up to get started when he walked in. Instead, they both sat there looking at him almost as casually as they would had he come in to register his bike.

  David was surprised by this lack of intensity and excitement. What had happened to Diane Jones was spectacular, not only in the history of this small community, but in the history of the township and county, for the occurrence of capital crimes in that semirural area in those times was rare. True, the local newspaper, a weekly, didn’t have the sophistication nor the staff to pursue a criminal case as did the urban dailies, and the local radio station depended entirely on news being brought to it, yet David still anticipated a crowd of people at the station, phones ringing, and maybe even a New York reporter already on the scene. Instead, he found deceptive peace and quiet. It was almost as if he had not only dreamt the murder, but all that had followed as well.

  The moment Lieutenant Comfort began to speak, however, David sensed that the tone of nonchalance was a technique intended to catch a suspect off guard.

  “So,” Comfort began, “how was your day at school?”

  “Not very good,” David replied. He looked at Charlie and Charlie nodded in understanding.

  “Take a seat, David,” Comfort said, indicating the chair directly across from him. It had been pulled away from the desk, about equally distant from Charlie and from Lieutenant Comfort. David imagined they had placed it just so, anticipating his arrival. “We’ll get started in a few minutes,” Comfort said. He almost smiled.

  David looked down at the chair as if it could somehow entrap him. He was aware that his demeanor and his movements made him seem suspicious, but he didn’t know how he should be acting. He sat down firmly, pressing his spine straight up against the back of the chair. For a few seconds, Comfort just stared at him. Charlie Williams played with a pen on his desk.

  “David,” he said sitting back, “where exactly did you have this dream?”