Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

  Perhaps that was what had happened now, he thought. His mind wouldn’t let him envision his own death; it was a way of protecting itself from the ultimate horror. But how could he protect himself from it now that he was really here and the danger really confronted him?

  Before Peter Sills took another step toward him, David held up the torn cloth bag as though it would serve him as some kind of shield. Indeed, when Peter Sills saw it, his gaze seemed locked on it.

  Sills’s hesitation gave David an idea. He knew he had turned to the bizarre to confront the bizarre. At that moment it seemed to be a logical and intelligent move.

  He threw open the freezer lid again. The action caught Peter Sills by surprise, and he actually stepped away. His dark, brooding eyes widened with shock as David came up close to the freezer and held the bag over it.

  “He didn’t just kill her,” he began. “He put this over her head,” he said. “And then he forced her into the woods and raped her. He raped her.”

  “No.” Peter Sills shook his head and looked at the freezer.

  “Then he beat her and beat her until he killed her. After that, he dragged her body to the nearby pond and weighed her down with rocks.”

  “No.” Peter Sills started toward him again, but David reached in, took hold of Betty Sills’s dead, but frozen hand under the plastic cover and pulled with all his might. The iced corpse was lifted just enough for the head to appear above the top of the compartment.

  “He’s lying!” Peter Sills screamed, but then, instead of fleeing from what David hoped he saw as an angry and accusing wife, he raised the knife above his head.

  Before he brought it down, however, Lieutenant Comfort was behind him, seizing his arm with one hand and grabbing him in a choke-throat hold with his other arm. The state investigator pulled Peter Sills back out of the pantry. In the kitchen, Charlie Williams helped him subdue Sills and get the knife out of his hand. Then they put his hands behind him, put handcuffs on them, and left him sobbing on the kitchen floor.

  “Lucky for you, kid, that we followed you up here,” Lieutenant Comfort said, squatting beside Sills. David stood in the pantry doorway and looked down at the insane man. He felt as cold as the woman in the freezer.

  “It was the lieutenant’s idea to follow you,” Charlie said. It seemed important to him to give the state investigator the credit. David said nothing.

  “Why did you come to this guy’s house anyway?” Comfort said standing.

  “He’s the killer,” David said.

  “You knew that all the time?”

  “No.” He looked at Charlie. “Yes.”

  “Huh?”

  “I knew it, but I didn’t know I knew it,” David said.

  “Still on this wacky stuff, huh? Still with the dreams?”

  “It’s what brought me here,” David said.

  “Right. We followed you to this house, saw you go in and then saw him follow. Why did you go in this pantry? Did he chase you?” Comfort asked. David shook his head. Then he stepped back, clearly indicating they should enter.

  “Jesus,” Charlie said.

  “How long has she been in here?” Comfort asked.

  “I don’t know,” David said. “But I think for some time.” Sills was still sobbing gently and pressing his face against the floor. “He’s the man who’s been spying on other women,” David told Charlie. Charlie nodded. “And he’s the one who attacked Buzzy that night.”

  David started out of the kitchen.

  “Wait a minute, kid,” Comfort said. He came out to him. “I still don’t understand how you knew all this.”

  David looked up at him and then down at Sills, who had become quieter. He looked like he was falling asleep.

  “If you look in the garage in the far right corner, you’ll find Diane Jones’s schoolbooks in a box,” he said. Then he looked at Charlie. “I’m tired; I gotta go home.”

  Neither of the policemen stopped him from continuing his exit, but when he reached the kitchen doorway, he paused. He was still holding onto the torn cloth bag.

  “This was what he put over her head before he attacked her,” David told them and left it on the counter. “It brought me here,” he said.

  He walked home slowly. He was so tired he wondered if he would make it. The fatigue and the events made him numb. He imagined that, once again, he looked like a sleepwalker. The thought made him laugh. What if the same people who had seen him come from his home like this, now saw him going back? They’d think he was sleepwalking all over town. He laughed again, nearly hysterical with exhaustion.

  He walked down through the center of town, crossed the tracks, passed the luncheonette, and walked up the hill. He paused at Chonin’s, looked back at the quiet village, and then turned and went up the street to his house. He entered through the back door.

  After he went to the bathroom and washed, he got undressed and slipped into bed. Almost immediately, he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamt, of course, but these dreams were pleasant and quiet ones, more like happy memories. His grandmother was in all of them.

  He had forgotten the time he and she had gone for a walk in the woods. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. And they discovered the nest of baby robins. Surprisingly, the mother had built the nest on a low bush, so it was easy for them to look into it. The baby birds looked ready to leave.

  “Who teaches them to fly, Grandma?”

  “They just know how.”

  “How can you just know?”

  “It’s instinctive, part of what they are,” she said. “Some things don’t have to be learned. They’re with you when you’re born.”

  “People too? They have things with them when they’re born?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But not flying.”

  “I wish I just knew how to fly,” he said. His grandmother laughed.

  “Then you would leave the nest,” she said. “And you would be so in love with the sky, you wouldn’t want to come back down.”

  He looked up. She was right. If he knew how to fly, he wouldn’t come back down.

  In his mind’s eye, he envisioned it. His grandmother was looking up at him, and she was becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until he could barely make her out below. His heart ached. He didn’t want to leave her, but oh how the blue sky called to him. He had to go on; he had to glide in the wind.

  By late in the morning, everyone in the village knew who the killer of Diane Jones was and knew something about how he had been caught. The story reached the school community and spread rapidly through the entire student body, faculty, and administration. But no one could ask David any questions because he hadn’t gone to school. He slept late into the morning, and his mother didn’t wake him. When he did wake up, they decided he should stay home. He could study for his exams better at home. There would be too much distraction in school.

  Lieutenant Comfort and Charlie Williams came to ask him a few more questions in the afternoon, but they didn’t stay long. His mother didn’t go to work. Fred Myers came by and looked in on him. There were a number of telephone calls. He saw that his mother enjoyed telling people about what he had done.

  To them, David was a hero who had figured out through some evidence exactly who the killer was and led the police to him. The only magic that was involved was the magic of someone that young doing something this significant.

  Both David and his mother agreed to leave it that way. When he went to school the next day to start his exams, he noticed the change in the way the other students viewed him now. Now, he was truly heroic. He felt uncomfortable, cast in this role.

  It amazed him that he was able to go at his exams with such concentration. He was confident afterward that he had done well, too. When the bell rang to end the last test of the day, he got up and walked out of the school building exhilarated. His friends were all around him, everyone talking at once, asking questions about Peter Sills, the frozen wife, the attempt on his life. So many of the details had becom
e distorted. He had to laugh.

  He told them what he knew and what had happened. Whenever he spoke, everyone grew silent. It saddened him, for all this excitement and this new respect he was being given stemmed from the death of Diane Jones. If she hadn’t been attacked, none of this would have come about. He would rather have her back, walking through the village, her hair shining, her eyes gleaming, her beautiful smile warming him, haunting with the promise of his approaching manhood.

  But she was gone, destroyed by something evil and ugly. And nothing would ever again be the same for David.

  His friends wanted him to join them for a soda at Rosenblatt’s, but he thought it would be better for him to go home.

  “Your mother’s working there today,” Merle reminded him. “You can get a soda for free.”

  “Afterward, we’ll play King of the Hill,” Rube said. “David and I will stand the whole lot of you.”

  David smiled. They were all waiting for his response.

  “All right,” he said. “I just want to run home and change. I’ll meet you all down there.”

  He didn’t. Instead, when he came out of his house after changing his clothes, he saw Ted Davis waiting in his car. David opened the door and got inside.

  “I didn’t go to her house yet,” Ted said. “I just can’t get myself to do it.”

  “Neither could I,” David said.

  “I don’t know how you helped the police find the killer, but I’m glad that you did.”

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore how I did it.”

  “I’m sorry I was so—”

  “You don’t have to say anything about that. I know how it looked.”

  “Jesus,” Ted said. There were tears coming out of his eyes now, tears coming from the big senior’s eyes.

  “She was beautiful,” David said. “I was jealous of you.”

  Ted nodded. They shook hands.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go to the funeral together,” Ted said.

  After that he couldn’t go down to the village and meet his friends. There was no way he could go back to box ball and King of the Hill as if nothing had ever happened.

  It was a big funeral. Most of the student body was there, as were most of the teachers and all of the administrators. There were a great many of the people who worked with Frank Jones at the hospital, too. Gerry Porter was there, standing with his mother at the rear. He was kicking a stone back and forth between his feet while the hymns were sung.

  David and Ted stood with the family. Neither of them cried; they were too busy comforting everyone else. After it was over, he and Ted remained the longest. They watched the coffin lowered into the grave.

  “Hey, Houdini,” Ted said. “What do you think death really is? You probably know something more than everyone else about it.”

  “I think it’s like flying,” he said.

  “Flying?”

  “Yeah, you just glide and glide and glide against the sky, and it doesn’t bother you that you can’t come back because you love the feeling of being up there so much. After a while you even forget what it was like to be down here.”

  “And you forget everyone else?”

  “Until they join you and when each one you love joins you, it makes you fly higher.”

  Ted laughed.

  “You’re a weirdo, all right.”

  “I know.”

  They watched the grave diggers for a few more moments, and then they left. Ted drove him home. His mother had gone back to work. When he got into the house, he did something he hadn’t done before. He went to his grandmother’s things and looked through her old photographs until he found the one he knew to be her dead brother. He was still looking and thinking about him when his mother returned.

  “I had forgotten about the old picture. She never took it out in front of me or you.”

  “We look a little alike, don’t we?”

  “A little. So,” she said, wanting to get away from morbid subjects, “did you hear about the Levines getting a television set? They invited us over to look at it.”

  “Really?”

  “Mr. Rosenblatt says his son wrote and told him in less than two years, television will be so much bigger than radio, nearly every home in America will have one. Isn’t it amazing, seeing someone far away talk and do things?”

  “Yes,” he said. It was amazing.

  “Fred’s coming over tonight. For dinner,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “David, you do like Fred, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because—”

  “He asked you to marry him.”

  “There you go again, telling me things before I tell them to you.”

  He laughed.

  Was it a good thing or a bad thing to be Gypsy eyes? Perhaps if he listened to his grandmother’s dying warnings and lived according to them, it could be a good thing.

  Epilogue

  David stepped out of the limousine and lifted the cape so the bottom of it wouldn’t dip into any of the puddles on the street and sidewalk in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater. Actually, he had grown to like the cape, even though it took a great deal of convincing on his manager’s part to get him to wear it for his appearances.

  “You’ve got an image to uphold, whether you like it or not, David; and the cape helps.”

  He didn’t see the need for any gimmicks. Why wasn’t the real thing enough to impress them?

  “It is. No question,” his manager said, “but we want to sell you as much as we want to sell what you do.”

  In the end he relented because he knew that his manager was right, and it was a sacrifice he was willing to make. He had made quite a number of them along the way, and wearing the cape, the now famous dark-black suit, and white gloves, signing autographs, responding to the demands of fans who wanted to know whether they should change jobs, get married, have children, move to another city, even play the lottery, all of it was relatively minor sacrifices compared to what he had gained in return.

  It bothered him that ninety percent of what he did was now show, but it also amused him that the audiences wanted the show; they wanted the costume and the music and the words of mystery, even though all of that had little or nothing to do with what he could do.

  The stage door attendant held the door open for him, and he hurried into the theater. He had cut it a little close, and the New York City traffic did its part to cut it even closer. Fortunately, he had done his own makeup.

  The assistant director, a short and rather plump twenty-five-year-old woman, was at the sound stage door. She looked down at her clipboard as though her dialogue were written on it and then looked up at him.

  “Mr. Steiner, we were getting a little worried about you. Merv’s already announced your appearance.”

  “That’s okay. If I wasn’t going to be able to make it, I would have known it, and I would have called you,” he said, his increasingly identifiable wry smile punctuating his response. How he enjoyed putting people on like this. The young woman’s eyes widened with understanding.

  “Of course,” she said. She looked up at him in awe. Before he was eighteen years old, he had grown to six foot three; obviously, he took after his father’s side of the family. He hadn’t realized his father was well over six feet until they met during one of his shows at the Palace in Las Vegas. But that was years ago. His father hadn’t kept in contact with him as he had promised, but David knew that he wouldn’t. He didn’t even tell his mother and Fred that he had met his old man. He could hear his mother’s response even without telling her. “Sure, now that you’re making big money and you’ve become famous, he wants to know you and remind you he’s your father.”

  He didn’t laugh when he thought of what she would say; she would be right.

  “How much longer before I go on?” he asked the assistant director. Once again, she referred to her clipboard.

  “There’s five more minutes of this and then a commerci
al break and then Merv will introduce you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You can wait in the green room,” she said. “Please, follow me. All of the remainder of the show will be you,” she added.

  “Well, we have a lot to talk about,” he kidded, but she didn’t understand his humor. Instead, she nodded understandingly.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No thank you.”

  “I caught you on Carson the other night. How could you tell which woman was the divorcee with three children? That was amazing.”

  “It was in her eyes,” he said. He moved closer to the assistant director and looked intensely into her eyes. She blinked nervously. “You would be surprised at how much people reveal of themselves in their eyes. Of course, reveal only to me, I mean.”

  “Of course,” she said, bringing her hand to the base of her throat. She could barely talk. It was like being under a spell. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends what it was like to meet him and be alone with him. She would tell them about the aura around him and the way his eyes penetrated her very soul. “I felt naked,” she would say. “All my inner thoughts and secret feelings were exposed.”

  When it was time, he walked onto the sound stage and took his seat beside Merv’s big desk. They shook hands and quickly reviewed how he would proceed. The director signaled the end of the commercial, and the center camera lit and moved in for a close-up of Merv.

  “Well, here we are, approaching New Year’s Eve, 1986,” he began, “and the future has got to be on everyone’s mind. Well, the future is never on anyone’s mind more than it’s on the mind of my next guest. You all know him as one of the most amazing men of our time.”

  Camera number one lit, and the director called for a two shot as Merv reached across the desk to shake David’s hand.

  “Thank you,” David said.

  “I don’t want to ask you how you’ve been,” Merv asked. “How will you be?” he quipped. The audience laughed.