Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

  “You’re positive?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m positive.”

  He waited a good ten minutes after she left, just to be sure she had really gone and not changed her mind halfway there. When he was confident she had, he closed his book, got up from the table and went out the back door.

  Night had fallen, but with the moon still full and the sky relatively clear, everything was well silhouetted. Even so, the stillness made it all look ominous. There was no breeze. The trees looked painted against the inky backdrop. It was as if a hush had come over the world in anticipation of what he was about to do.

  He hesitated on the top step and listened. He couldn’t remember when it had been so quiet before. He scanned the darkness, looking for a thicker, darker shadow. Was he out there, waiting? Had he honed in on the torn cloth bag, found it, and decided to wait for the one person who could peel away the shadows and reveal him?

  Satisfied he was alone, David made his way down the back stairs and went directly to the bush where he had hidden the torn cloth bag. He didn’t know how it would help, only that it would. So much of what he was doing, he did instinctively, directed by a consciousness that he now realized had been passed down to him through the genes.

  The cloth bag was a tangible link with the shadow of death. It had belonged to the killer. Something of him was still on it, and David, like some kind of bloodhound, now held it in his hands and tried to identify him through it. He brought it closer to his face, not to smell it, but to fully sense it. He met the challenge with all his concentration.

  With his eyes closed, he held it up before him and first envisioned again how the killer had used it. As the images began, he felt light and had the impression he was rising out of his own body. He saw the bag being pulled down over Diane Jones’s head, but he noticed that in this vision he was closer to her. In fact, the shadowy figure wasn’t between him and Diane.

  It was as if his fingers were pulling the strings tightly around her neck. It was as if he grabbed her arm and twisted it. He was pushing her toward the forest; he was directing her toward the clearing. He wrapped her hands together with the fishline and pushed her to the ground.

  It took him only another moment to realize what was happening, but it was too late to retreat. Because of the bag, because of what he was able to do with it, he had entered the world of the shadow and now saw the world as he saw it. But even more than that, he was merging with the shadow; he was assuming his point of view and, in effect, he was becoming the killer.

  He struggled against the loss of his separate identity, but something much stronger was pulling him. He was slipping further and further out of himself. At one point in the vision, he turned and saw himself, an empty shell, waiting in the darkness behind them.

  He tried to return; he wanted to escape, but he had gone too far. He could see only what the shadow wanted to see, hear what the shadow heard, and do only what the shadow did.

  The rape of Diane Jones was ugly. He felt the sexual pleasure as a weapon. Pleasure came only from inflicting pain. But in the middle of it all, he envisioned a new face within the cloth bag, and a new body appeared. At first it was like a double exposure, but then, Diane’s face and body dissolved and the new woman was there.

  The new face was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t make out details about her because she appeared encased in ice. He could see she was older and not nearly as beautiful. He understood that in the shadow’s mind, he was attacking this woman, tormenting and venting his rage on her. This was who the shadow really saw. Diane was some kind of surrogate.

  Afterward, when he struck out with the thick branch, he was striking at the other woman. Then he had ripped the torn cloth bag from Diane Jones’s face, but David still couldn’t see who it was because of the ice around her. He could barely make out the eyes, nose, and mouth.

  Nevertheless, the vision, especially because it was seen and committed from the shadow’s viewpoint, was terribly painful for David. He continued his struggle to escape, but the shadow was magnetic, and he was unable to open his eyes or release his hold on the torn cloth bag, either of which would have permitted him to return to himself. It was just like what used to happen when he had those terrible visions early in his life, the ones that would play on the insides of his eyelids. He would be unable to open his eyes and stop them until they were over.

  He tried to resist, but he had to drag the body to the pond. His fingers grew numb from grasping the ice and cold flesh. After the body sank, he, too, dropped the heavy rocks over it to keep it down. He stood at the side of the water, staring down into the liquid grave. When it was over, he walked back through the path and, through the shadow’s eyes, actually saw himself hiding in the shadows and watching. Did that mean that the shadow knew he was there?

  He stepped back onto the avenue, but he was still moving and seeing things as the killer. For some reason, he couldn’t get warm. It seemed he was out in the middle of the winter. He gathered up her schoolbooks that had been dropped to the pavement and walked quickly down the avenue, keeping to the side of the road. When he reached the village proper, he paused. There was little traffic and not a pedestrian to be seen.

  He crossed the tracks and made a left turn, walking quickly in an attempt to keep himself from freezing, still carried along by the killer, still seeing things through his eyes. Indeed the village did look different; it was the village of his nightmares with its darkened windows and peering faces. It was an unfriendly place. Most every door looked locked. It made him feel like an enemy who had conquered the village and was not welcome in its streets.

  But who was he? In whose body had he transported himself? Through whose eyes did he see the world and why was it such a cold, winter world?

  The answer came when he made the turn at Maple Avenue and hurried up the street until he reached the bottom of Dead Man’s Hill.

  So this was why the footprints were big and easily confused with Gerry Porter’s footprints, and this was why Charlie Williams knew that whoever was spying on and haunting girls and women in town was not a kid.

  The killer was the man who had always made him feel uneasy, the man who had been driving the illusionary hearse, the man who had triggered the memory of the gutted deer before, the man with the invalid wife: Peter Sills.

  His struggle to return to himself became more intense. He didn’t want to go any farther because he could see what awaited in Peter Sills’s house. But he was at the door, turning the handle and walking in.

  Vaguely, at first, he could hear himself screaming. It sounded like a distant echo coming from the bottom of the inside of a giant body. Gradually his voice grew louder as it came up the legs and reached the waist. He was screaming at the top of his voice when it reached the chest, and when the mouth finally reached the head, he opened his eyes.

  He was still screaming. With the torn cloth bag still in his hands, he was actually standing in the entranceway of Peter Sills’s brick house, shivering.

  And the front door was closed behind him.

  13

  He understood immediately that this was no longer an illusion. He imagined that what he had done was to travel like a somnambulist walking in a dream. While he had been envisioning the reenactment of the crime, he had left his house and come here. But hadn’t anyone noticed him going through town, clinging to this torn cloth bag, his eyes opened but not seeing? Perhaps people had spoken to him, but because he ignored them, they ignored him. In any case, no one had stopped him. He was here.

  It wasn’t a terribly long walk from his house to Dead Man’s Hill and the Sills’s house, but he felt physically exhausted. His legs ached as if he had been running for miles. His body must have been tense all the way, perhaps trying to resist what was occurring. Whatever had happened had demanded great energy. He felt he could lie down and sleep forever.

  Except for the hall light, the house was dark. It was also cold, terribly cold. He had never been in it before, but just from hearing the gossip abou
t the Sills, he knew that this was a three bedroom house and one of the few brick structures in the community. The women who talked about the house said it was wasted. What good was the large living room, beautiful dining room, and the large kitchen with all the up-to-date appliances? Betty Sills never had any one over for dinner; she was always too sick to do anything like that; and the Sills never had a house party.

  David wanted to turn and run out of the house, but he couldn’t do it. He felt drawn to what awaited him down the long corridor that led deeper into the house. The anticipation both fascinated and terrified him. He was attracted to it the same way people were tempted to look at a corpse in a coffin or slow down to gape at the site of a car accident. And yet he sensed no immediate danger. Peter Sills was not at home. He was out there somewhere in the night, moving in his guise as the shadow of death. Confident of his safety, David started forward.

  The house was fully carpeted. The carpet in the hallway was thick and soft. His footsteps were practically silent. Indeed he felt like a ghost gliding as quietly as his shadow moving along the wall beside him, accompanying him, even comforting him.

  There wasn’t another sound in the house. He looked through a doorway that led to the dining room and the kitchen. Both rooms were totally dark, but the little light that came from the hallway fixture made the top of the dining room table glisten like ice. He paused. The breeze that came through the opened dining room window lifted the curtain away from the sill silently, making it seem as if some small ghost had slipped in behind it.

  He looked down the hallway at the remaining doors, but he knew which way he had to go. Now that he was closer to it, it loomed before him threateningly. There was still time to turn back, to rush out of the house and run through the village to home. He could see himself doing it, his feet slapping the pavement, his eyes wide with excitement, his arms swinging back and forth with his great effort to flee from—from what was to be discovered.

  Did he have to actually go in to see? He knew what was there; he had known it for awhile now. Still, he had to confirm it. The visions and the images were not enough. In the end dreams had to be justified. They demanded it. He didn’t want the dreams; he didn’t ask for the visions, but they had come and he was here.

  He went through the dining room door, moving gracefully forward through the darkness, avoiding tables and chairs, guided by a sonarlike power. He still held the torn cloth bag, which by now had become something magical. It had served him like a beacon lighting the way through his mad nightmares and visions. It had brought him here, and he had the notion that without it in his possession, he could never leave or return to his normal life.

  He paused at the doorway of the kitchen. The door was closed. He looked back through the darkness to the hallway, listened for a moment, and then put his hand on the kitchen doorknob. It felt very cold, so cold he imagined his fingers sticking to it the way they would stick to dry ice. He turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  For a moment he just stood there acclimating himself to the darkness. Then he felt along the wall to his right until he found the light switch. The ceiling fixture was so strong and bright, it seemed to explode above him. He looked at the table and chairs, the wall stove and range, the counter and the refrigerator whose motor hummed smoothly. Everything was clean and organized. All the metal looked polished. The tabletop sparkled. Even the linoleum floor looked recently scrubbed. In fact, the room looked frozen in time, untouched and unused for years, but maintained like some room in a museum.

  He turned to the right and, with an inevitable sense of doom, went to the large, walk-in pantry. He opened the door and reached up to pull the string which would turn on the ceiling fixture. As soon as he did so, he put his hand on the top of the long freezer, which was immediately to the left of the entranceway. He knew the moment had come.

  His mother was always talking about their getting a freezer like this. It would make things so much easier in the summer time, she said. They could stock up on all the foods they needed and not have to go shopping when all the tourists were here crowding the stores. They could just go to Selznow’s to buy the daily necessities. But such a freezer was very expensive. Few people could afford to buy one. They were found mostly in stores.

  Did he really have to pull back the lever and lift the lid? His powerful imagination permitted him to see through it, yet he held the lid open and looked down and in. Even though he knew what was there, he wasn’t prepared for the gruesome reality.

  There lay Betty Sills in her coffin of ice, naked and wrapped in a clear plastic bag. The puncture in her chest still looked fresh, and the streak of iced blood that ran down from her breasts over her diaphragm and down her stomach looked exactly like the incision made in the gutted deer that hung from the top of Stanton’s garage. Except for the knife wound and the streak of blood, her body was unblemished, but she looked up at him with deer’s eyes, frozen in the same fear and the same question, why.

  This was the face and the body he had seen in his recent illusion and reenactment of the murder of Diane Jones. Now he understood the reason for it. Peter Sills had been striking at his wife again and again and again when he attacked Diane.

  David continued to stare at her, fascinated by the way she had been captured at the moment of death and held there by the arctic air. A part of him wanted to close the lid quickly and shut away the horrible sight, but his arm seemed unable to bend, and his hand seemed already frozen to the lid.

  He didn’t step back and away to let the lid slam shut until that now familiar dark shadow fell over him, and he looked up to see Peter Sills in the pantry doorway. His body filled it; there was no way out.

  David had always been afraid to look directly at this man, and so when he looked up at him now, unable to look away, it was like looking at him for the first time. He seemed aged beyond his years; his face was drawn and haggard. The lines in his forehead and around his mouth were as deeply cut as the wrinkles in the skin of an elderly man.

  His dark, wavy hair was disheveled and hung about his temples and forehead like it would had he just come in from pouring rain. Indeed, his face had a wet shine to it; he was in a deep sweat.

  The wetness around his lips made them look thicker. David thought about masks again, only this time, the face he was looking at already had been unmasked. This was reality; this was who Peter Sills really was.

  He was the man with dark, brooding eyes, the man whose face revealed great inner turmoil and pain. The creases in his skin came from the grimace. His forehead protruded because of the agony behind it.

  He clenched his teeth and pressed his head outward, lifting his chin and straining the skin over his throat so that his Adam’s apple became emphatic. His upper back rose and his neck sank. He appeared like a hawk about to pounce. Within his light, short-sleeved shirt, his shoulders looked round and muscular. He lifted his arms in one motion as if they had no independent movement. His hands were tightened into large fists, both pointed in his direction. But he didn’t come at David right away.

  “You’re the one who was there,” he said. “You were at her house, standing by the tree, looking in at her. Peeping Tom, violator,” he added accusingly. The words were spit at him.

  David couldn’t talk; he couldn’t respond.

  “Then you brought your friends to gape at her, didn’t you? I put an end to that, though. I put an end to that.”

  “You killed her,” David said. It took all the strength he could muster to utter the words.

  Sills blinked quickly, and David saw that his posture softened. He wasn’t looking directly at him anymore, either. It was eerie.

  “I had to kill her. She wouldn’t let me go out; she wouldn’t let me do anything. And when I did go out, she kept accusing me. I didn’t do anything. I only looked. But she’s okay,” he added, a wry smile coming over his face. “She’s not much different from what she was. I take her out and bring her food and her medicine, and she lies around reading her maga
zines and listening to her radio and complaining just like always.

  “I couldn’t stop her complaining,” he added, his smile softening. “She was born complaining. Her mother said the doctor didn’t have to slap her behind to get her to cry. She was crying as they were bringing her out of her mother’s womb. She’s always crying about one thing or another.

  “It was always too hot for her. No matter what I did, it was too hot. I turned the heat down; I opened the windows; I brought her ice water, but no, it’s too hot.

  “Now it’s not too hot. She’s comfortable. She’s better off. You see, it’s not so bad,” he said, and then he stopped abruptly, realizing to whom he was talking. David took a step back.

  “But why did you come here and disturb her? Now you’ve set her off…bitching. Can’t you hear her? For Christsakes, why did you come here? Why can’t you leave us alone? You go around peeping in on everyone, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “No,” David said. “You do. And the police know it, too. They know it’s not just kids.”

  Peter Sills didn’t respond. He stared at David for a moment, and then he stepped back and closed the pantry door. A moment later he opened the door again, only this time he held a long bread knife in his hand.

  Any confidence David had, he had because he hadn’t foreseen his own death. There had been no visions of this. Of course, it occurred to him that such personal foreknowledge might be beyond him. Surely it had been beyond his grandmother’s brother, otherwise why did he permit his own murder to take place? He knew that people didn’t want their sins exposed, and eventually they would do anything to stop it. Why did he go out and endanger himself?

  Once, when he was discussing dreams with his friends, everyone admitted having had a dream in which he was in some kind of danger, but everyone described waking up just at the fatal moment, whether it be falling from a great height or being hit by a car, whatever. The conclusion was that no one could actually see himself die.