by Brian Harmon
There was surprisingly little blood, but what there was of it was black and foul-smelling. And some of it had soaked into the back of his shirt.
“I knew you could do it,” he told her.
“I didn’t. I was too terrified to concentrate.” She slapped him hard on his shoulder. “That was stupid! You could’ve been killed!”
Eric took a step away from her and regarded her warily. “Is everything okay?” he asked her.
“No,” she snapped. “Nothing’s okay. Monsters are trying to kill us. Karen’s acting weird. Kevin’s blind. People are going to get hurt and I don’t know how to stop it. And that bitch at the bungalow…” She shot him a dirty look that made him take another step away from her.
“Sorry…” was all he could think to say. Now he felt bad. He was pretty sure it was a good sign that he’d screwed up when even sweet Holly was pissed at him.
He walked back to the doors, careful not to step too close to the creature—lest it should spontaneously return to life and reach out to grab him—and peered out into the gymnasium. It was still empty, still quiet. If anyone had heard the pounding on the doors or Holly’s screams, they didn’t come to investigate.
“I’m sorry,” said Holly, rubbing at her eyes. “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I don’t know what my problem is. I feel so emotional today.”
“It’s okay. I’m just worried about you.”
“I’m fine. Really. Can we just focus on this…” she gestured at the dead monster, “whatever that is? Why was it even here?”
Eric didn’t know. But it seemed odd to him that it should turn up here, of all places, and that they, of all people, were the ones to encounter it. It was too much coincidence for his liking. “It’s suspicious.”
“I know. Like it was here because we were here.”
“Like someone sent it here.”
She nodded. “Exactly. Were they trying to kill us?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. But he didn’t like it. The Goss Building was one thing. Most of the time there was no reason for anyone to be over there. But it was only by chance that there were so few people here. Just because school was out didn’t mean the building was deserted. Far from it. There was a chance someone might yet show up to use the practice field or clean out a locker or just use the gym.
He stood looking at the dead monster, concerned. “We’ve got to get rid of this thing,” he realized.
Holly looked up at him. “Huh?”
“We can’t let anybody see this. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?”
She looked down at the creature again. After a moment, she pointed at it. “Aren’t these things supposed to, like, disappear when you kill them?”
“Projections do,” said Eric. He’d seen them disintegrate into ash and smoke and blow away in the wind. He’d also seen some that popped like water balloons, splashing thick, black liquid that rapidly evaporated into nothing, leaving no trace of their existence. “Obviously, this isn’t a projection.”
“So…it’s real?”
He shrugged. “It’s not a projection,” he said again, which was as close as he could come to answering that question. The truth was that he had no idea what “real” even was anymore. Sometimes the monsters were only illusions. Sometimes they were flesh and blood. Sometimes monsters were people and sometimes people were monsters. And sometimes it was just a really cranky monkey throwing rocks.
He glanced out at the gymnasium again. It was still deserted. But if anyone did come down here, there would be no hiding a six foot tall, dead monster lying in the doorway of the boys’ locker room.
“Help me with this,” he said, grasping the corpse by one of its limp arms.
Holly blinked at him, as if unable to comprehend what he’d just asked of her. “Hm?”
“We have to move it before someone sees it.”
“I’m not touching that thing. It stinks.”
“Seriously? Do you want some kid to come in here and find this?”
She whimpered and pushed out her lower lip, but she did as he said and walked over to the dead creature. “Ew! It’s already cold!”
It was cold, as if it’d been dead for hours.
“Let’s drag it into the shower room.”
She let out a long whine and started pulling. “So gross!”
It didn’t help that the lower half of the thing’s body was only connected by a few inches of flesh and bone. Its lower abdomen and legs sort of fishtailed back and forth as they dragged it, making horrid, wet noises and smearing that foul, black gore across the tiles.
But soon enough the gruesome task was done and the lifeless monster was deposited on the shower room floor.
Holly immediately washed her hands. Eric didn’t bother. He still had plenty of dirty work to do.
He went to the supply closet and found the mop. It was as he was closing the door that he heard a familiar cry. He turned around, searching the room, but he didn’t see anything. Then he heard it again. A distinct mewing.
Spooky.
Finally, he looked up and saw him there, perched on the top the lockers, staring down at him.
“Has he been there this whole time?” asked Holly.
“I don’t think so…” He was pretty sure he would’ve seen him up there. But maybe if he was crouched down or curled up or…
He shook his head. The cat was the least of his troubles right now. He filled the mop bucket under one of the shower stalls and then went to work cleaning up the blood as the peculiar feline looked on.
Several times, he went to the door and peeked out at the gymnasium, half expecting to see someone headed their way. But so far, luck was on their side.
When the floor was clean, he handed Holly the mop and said, “Wait here.”
“What? Where’re you going?”
“Custodian’s closet. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Why can’t I come with you?”
“Just wait here.” He didn’t wait for a response. He left the locker room, crossed the gymnasium and walked out into the hallway.
Fortunately, he didn’t have far to go. The custodian’s closet was right around the corner. But he definitely wasn’t alone in the building. He could hear voices from the office down the hall. At any moment, someone could walk out into the hallway.
He hated this. Sneaking around deserted rec centers and mystery bungalows was one thing, but this was where he worked. This was his job. If this went wrong…
It couldn’t go wrong. That was all there was to it.
He made it to the custodian’s closet without running into anyone and ducked inside. After a little bit of rummaging, he found what he was looking for. Trash bags. Extra-large, extra-durable, for the big trash bins, like the ones they used in the lunch room. All the better for stuffing a corpse into.
God, this was weird.
He also found duct tape.
He was halfway back to the gymnasium when Peter Lornis, the art teacher, came around the corner ahead of him and walked straight toward him.
Eric imagined that he couldn’t have looked more like he was up to no good. He had the trash bags and tape tucked under his arm. There was monster blood on his clothes. It was mostly on the back of his shirt, out of sight as long as he didn’t turn his back on anyone. But there was no hiding the stench. And he probably looked like hell after the day he’d had.
He only barely resisted the urge to dive through the nearest doorway. A move that, admittedly, would’ve probably seemed a lot more suspicious than merely walking down the hallway with some trash bags.
But if the art teacher noticed anything out of the ordinary, he didn’t show it. He merely said, “Afternoon, Mr. Fortrell,” and kept walking.
“Afternoon,” Eric replied, trying hard to sound normal and not at all like he was in the process of getting rid of a body.
He made his way back to the locker room without incident. Holly and Spooky were still waiting for him. Holly was standing in front of the s
hower room, twisting her lower lip nervously. Spooky was still perched atop the lockers, still looking bored.
“What took you so long?” she asked. “I was about to freak out in here.”
“Sorry.”
“What’re we doing now?”
“We’re getting rid of this thing,” he told her. “Here.” He handed her the trash bags. “Help me with this.”
She shook open the first bag and looked at it. “Is it going to fit in here?” she asked.
“I think we’ll manage.” He knelt down and seized the creature by its shoulders, intending to lift it up so she could slip the bag over its head, but the gaping chest wound became problematic. The corpse tried to fold backward on itself. There was a horrific sound of squelching flesh and popping bones and it slithered out of his grasp, thumping hard on the tiles.
Holly gagged and turned away. “Oh my God!” she cried.
He didn’t blame her. If he got through this without vomiting, he’d consider himself extremely lucky. (And possibly a little deranged…) But he didn’t have time for that right now. He took hold of the monster again, this time slipping his hands under its clammy armpits, and lifted its head and shoulders off the floor. “Bring me the bag.”
Holly looked pale, as if she might actually pass out, but she brought him the trash bag without hesitation.
“I need you to slide it over.”
“I’m not sure I can…”
“You have to. If I let go, it’ll flop back again.”
Again, she gagged. “Okay…just…don’t say anything else like that. I swear I’m going to throw up.” She slipped the bag around the broken corpse, gagging twice in the process, and somehow managed to slide it over the monster’s head.
It wasn’t big enough to completely contain the creature. Its oversized feet stuck out the bottom. But that was why he brought several bags.
He used the duct tape to secure the bag around the monster’s legs. Then he slid a second bag over its feet, pulled it up over its waist and secured that one with tape. Then, for good measure, he put the third trash bag on over the first one, so that its upper half was double-bagged.
The trash bags did nothing to conceal that there was a body in there. If anything, it only concealed the fact that the wrapped corpse was not, in fact, that of a human. If anyone were to walk in on them now, it was going to look considerably worse than it would’ve looked when it was clearly a dead monster lying on the floor.
Eric turned on the shower and mopped up the last of the black blood, taking care to rinse off the makeshift body bag, too, so they didn’t make any more messes as they dragged it out of the locker room. Then he washed his hands thoroughly. Twice.
“Okay, so what do we do with it now?” asked Holly.
“I asked Isabelle to have Paul pull the car around to the practice field entrance.” He walked back to the doors and peered out at the gymnasium again. Amazingly, the coast was still clear.
“So where’s the practice field entrance?”
“It’s on the other side of the gym.”
He didn’t blame her for the look that crossed her face. It pretty well mirrored his own feelings.
“Let’s just get it over with,” he said.
It was too heavy to sling casually over his shoulder, so he grasped the plastic on either side of the thing’s head and lifted, while Holly held its feet. Then they made their way out of the locker room and across the gymnasium, dragging the thing’s heavy butt along the floor as they went.
Spooky tagged along behind them, as if supervising.
Eric hated the way the plastic squeaked on the floor. It seemed to him like everyone within a two mile radius must be able to hear it. And his ridiculous imagination insisted that it sounded exactly like a dead body in three layers of trash bags being dragged across a gymnasium floor by an English teacher, an ex-stripper and a cat.
Because that’s just the kind of logic his imagination worked on.
“Just for the record,” grunted Holly. “This is not my idea of a good time.”
“Noted.”
When they were halfway across the room, they heard voices approaching outside in the hallway.
“Oh no…” whimpered Holly.
The voices came right up to the gymnasium door. Two people. One of the voices was unfamiliar to Eric, but the other clearly belonged to Patricia Normay, the school principal.
Eric and Holly froze. They were out in the open, completely exposed, with absolutely no idea how to explain why they were dragging a suspiciously corpse-shaped object in duct taped trash bags through the gymnasium.
Spooky took the opportunity to bathe himself.
The door clicked open. The voices grew louder.
Holly made a small, shrill whining sound in her throat.
Then, abruptly, the doors clicked closed again and the voices grew fainter.
Eric let go of the breath he was holding and relaxed. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he gasped.
They made their way to the far corner of the room to the exit. When Eric opened the door, he found the PT Cruiser parked just outside. Isabelle had instructed him to back the vehicle up to the door and the lift gate was already open.
“What the hell have you gotten yourself into this time?” demanded Paul as he regarded the thing in the bags.
“Shut up and help us,” snapped Eric as he looked to make sure no one was around.
Paul took Holly’s place and helped him hoist the stuffed garbage bags up over the bumper. “Jesus that’s heavy.” He took a step back, wiping his hands on his shirt and regarding it warily. “Shit that’s freaky looking. Is it really what Isabelle said it is?”
“If she said it was my laundry, then no.”
Spooky jumped up into the vehicle and settled in beside it.
“Wait… Where’d he come from?”
“No idea,” said Eric as he slammed the lift gate closed. “You’ll have to ask him.”
“Ask who?” said Kevin as Holly climbed into the back seat next to him. “Who’s there?”
Eric and Paul sat in the front.
“Where’re we going?” asked Paul.
He looked around to make sure they hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention and then pulled away from the school. “Somewhere we can get rid of this thing without anybody seeing us.”
He glanced over at him, uneasy. “You…uh…know a place like that?”
“I know a lot of places like that.”
Paul fixed him with a suspicious gaze. “You know a lot of places you can hide a body?”
“I do.” He pulled onto the street and headed north.
“Where nobody’ll find them?”
“Uh huh.”
Eric noticed him staring at him and said, “What?”
“I was just thinking. Back when we were kids… You remember that time when we were at the lake and saw a snake in the water? And then I pushed you in, just to see how fast you’d get back out?”
Eric’s jaw tightened. It wasn’t an easy thing to forget. He’d had nightmares about snakes for years after that. “Yeah,” he replied. “I remember that.”
Paul turned and looked forward again. “Sorry about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eric pulled into the crumbling, weed-choked parking lot of the unseen motel as Paul and Holly stared at the building, amazed. Only a moment ago, there was nothing here. And yet the long, ugly structure that stood before them had obviously been here a very long time.
“Where are we?” asked Kevin. “What’s going on?”
Paul ignored him. “So it’s like those other places? Nobody but us can see it?”
“Not many people,” replied Eric. “Some agents, I guess.”
“Wait…” said Kevin. “We’re at one of those unseen places? That is totally unfair! I want to see the unseen places! I’ve never seen anything unseen!”
“You’re not missing much,” Holly assured him, wrinkling her nose at the dirty little motel.
Eric sat staring at the building. Specifically, he was staring at the one door that stood open. That one had been kicked in by a very angry cowboy last time he was here. “We have to be quick about this,” he said. “Most of these places have some sort of alarm. There’s a good chance that as soon as we step inside, the agents will know we’re here.”
“But the agents already know you’re here,” reasoned Paul.
“Yeah, but they don’t necessarily know that we know about the unseen.”
He nodded. “We’ll be showing more of our hand. Right. Good point.”
The unseen weren’t just invisible. Nor did they disappear and reappear. They were always there, but for reasons unfathomable to Eric, everyone simply ignored these places. They didn’t even notice the space they were taking up. They were oblivious to the extra time it took to walk around one when it stood in their way. People even ignored them in pictures and on film. They ignored them on maps. Even news articles, land records, deeds—anything that could identify the existence of an unseen location—seemingly disappeared whenever that place turned unseen. It was impossible for most people to find.
The whole thing was terribly difficult for Eric to comprehend. It gave him a splitting headache if he thought too hard about it.
“Wasn’t there an unseen place right next to the school?” asked Paul. “Why’d we have to come all the way out here?”
“The old high school is more unseen than the others,” he replied.
“How can something be more unseen?” asked Kevin.
“Even a seer like Aiden can’t find it without a piece of that looking glass.”
“Which, apparently, this steampunk weirdo has,” said Paul.
Eric nodded. “Yeah.” He’d always assumed that Aiden’s glass shard was a one-of-a-kind thing, but if Steampunk had one too, then how many others might still be out there? “But I don’t need anything like that to find this place. This one’s the easiest for me to see. I don’t know why.”
