by Brian Harmon
There were nine unseen places in Creek Bend that he knew about. But this was the only one he’d always been able to see. He didn’t even realize that he was the only one who could see it until Aiden pointed it out to him.
“I keep expecting him to turn up,” said Paul.
Eric nodded. “I know. It’s weird.” Aiden just kept coming up. Was it only because he was the one who revealed the unseen to him in the first place?
“He’d better not pop out of somewhere and taze me again.”
“I’m sure he knows better than that now,” Eric assured him.
“He’d better. I’m still not over the first time.”
“I know.”
On one hand, Aiden’s only connection was his rare talent for actually seeing the unseen. He had nothing to do with the fire of 1881 or the gray agents of 1962. He wasn’t even born until 1991. But on the other hand, it was the events of 1881 that ultimately led to the old high school turning unseen. And Aiden’s mentor in all things unseen, the late Glen Normer, was himself mentored by the man responsible for the more “deeply” unseen state of the schoolhouse today that rendered it invisible even to talented seers like Aiden. This same man was also known to have once been in possession of the very looking glass from which Aiden’s shard (and presumably Steampunk Monk’s as well) originated.
It was all connected. But were those connections significant to what was going on today?
Now wasn’t the time to think about it. He had work to do.
“Give me a hand,” he said. He jumped out of the vehicle, walked around to the back and lifted the gate.
Spooky looked lazily up at him and yawned. He seemed perfectly happy back here, regardless of the bagged corpse.
Paul stepped up beside him and frowned down at the body. It shouldn’t have been any more disturbing than any other bag of trash, and yet it was. “That’s not right,” he said, looking at the shape of the creature’s twisted face staring back at him through the stretched plastic.
“Let’s just get it over with,” said Eric.
Together they pulled it up and over the bumper and let it thump heavily to the ground.
A car drove by on the road. Its driver was oblivious to the fact that they were there, oblivious to the very existence of the motel and even the parking lot, but they both looked nervously after it as it sped past.
“This sucks,” said Paul. “I really don’t like touching this thing.”
“It’s just a dead body,” said Eric. “Man up.”
“Pretend it’s a mannequin,” suggested Kevin, snickering.
Paul shot the boy a furious look. “I don’t like mannequins,” he growled.
“That’s not what I heard,” said Holly, looking back at him from over the seat, her lips curled into an impish smirk.
Kevin snorted laughter and held his hand up for a high five. But Holly wasn’t looking at him, so all he could do was fish blindly for a moment before giving up and making like he was only scratching his head.
Paul grunted, unamused, and grabbed the creature’s ankles.
Eric grabbed the other side and together they dragged the dead creature through the broken door and deposited it on the floor in the corner of the room.
“So how many corpses you got stashed around this town, anyway?”
“Only a couple.” He thought about the agents he encountered last year. The man in the pink shirt and the cowboy. Both of them lay dead and rotting in separate unseen places.
He looked around the room, remembering the last time he was here, when Aiden first brought him to this place.
Inside one of these rooms, as far as he knew, was Glen Normer’s skeleton. According to Aiden, his old mentor was murdered in this building, shot execution style by the agents he turned his back on years before.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Please,” grunted Paul.
But as they started for the door, there was a noise, as if something had fallen in the next room.
They stopped and listened. But the noise didn’t repeat itself.
“There shouldn’t be anyone here,” whispered Eric.
“Maybe it’s an animal,” suggested Paul. “Raccoon or something…”
Could animals see the unseen? He didn’t even know.
The intelligent thing to do, of course, was leave as fast as possible. After all, if someone dangerous was lurking somewhere in this building—like another agent, for example—they probably would’ve been heard when they drove up. Or perhaps there was another monster, just waiting to tear apart anyone stupid enough to go looking for it.
Yes, that would definitely be the intelligent thing to do…
“Isabelle…” said Eric, as he pulled out his phone and charger.
GOT IT
“What about Isabelle?” asked Paul. “What’re you telling her?”
“Just taking precautions,” he replied. He didn’t have to say anything to her. He barely had to think them. Isabelle always got his messages more quickly than he could put them into words. It was the best part of having her in his head. By now she was already on the phone with Holly, telling her to get behind the wheel and keep her eyes peeled for trouble. If something bad turned up, they’d have a fast getaway waiting for them. Or, as a last resort, another of Holly’s devastating thrusts. They’d stay in contact from now until they were done, with Isabelle relaying their every move to her.
“Okay, I know this is your thing, not mine,” said Paul, “but I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, and investigating the mysterious noise in a freaky-ass, deserted motel is never a good idea.”
He fumbled with the phone until the flashlight came on again and then walked toward the bathroom. For a while, Aiden and Glen lived here, hiding from the rest of the world as they carried out their research into the unseen of Creek Bend. Being the paranoid nutcase that Eric supposed was the only inevitable outcome for someone who dared to quit the nameless organization, Glen had made a number of less-than-state-of-the-art improvements to the building. Several of the rooms were sealed from the front and the only way to pass between them was through holes that had been knocked through the walls between the bathtubs and closets in adjoining rooms.
Peering ahead with the light, he stepped into the bathtub, through the gaping hole in the wall and into the tub in the next room.
“I’m telling you,” whispered Paul. “This is a bad idea.”
“I’m not making you follow me,” Eric whispered back.
“The only idea worse than going to investigate the scary noise is following the idiot who’s investigating the scary noise”
“Then why are you following me?”
“I have no fucking idea!”
There was nothing in the second room. It was empty except for some garbage strewn across the floor.
Eric made his way to the closet and peered into the next room. This one was darker than the others. The windows had been covered, blacked out so that a light could be turned on at night with no chance of even a seer noticing that someone was squatting here. It rendered the room utterly dark, even during the day.
Paul was right. What was he even doing? What did he expect to find in here? And how did he expect to protect himself when it turned out to be something terrifyingly dangerous?
He stepped through the hole in the closet and shined his light around the room.
Immediately he saw something that didn’t belong.
Sprawled on the floor was a dead body.
Chapter Thirty
Paul cursed. “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“I never said I disagreed with you.”
“Do you recognize this guy?”
He did. “It’s the guy who left me tied to that gate. Wire Ties.”
Paul leaned in for a closer look. “Oh. That guy.”
The man Eric had taken to calling “Wire Ties” appeared to have been shot several times in the chest. His shirt was soaked with blood.
He hadn’t been dead
long, because it wasn’t that long ago that he left Eric for dead in the old municipal tunnels.
Did he die here? Or was he murdered elsewhere and dumped here? The steampunk monk and Mistress Janet both probably knew about this place. But how would either of them have had time?
Eric checked his watch. It was already approaching six o’clock, though he wasn’t sure how it came to be so late. Was it about two hours ago that he was left in the dark? Or was it closer to three? He wasn’t sure. It’d been such a hectic afternoon. It all seemed to run together. And that business with Steampunk Monk’s hallucinogenic squirt bottle had fouled up his sense of time.
It wasn’t impossible for the woman to have ditched the body here either before or after their obscene conversation at the bungalow. Or for Steampunk Monk to have done it after losing Paul and Kevin in that alley. But it also wasn’t impossible that there was someone else involved in all this.
The only thing he could be sure of was that this guy wasn’t going to be a problem anymore.
Almost sure… “Check and make sure he’s dead,” said Eric.
Paul took a startled step backward. “What? Uh-uh. You check.”
“Don’t be a wimp.”
“You don’t be a wimp.”
Eric sighed. “Fine.” He knelt down and pressed his fingers against the man’s throat. His flesh was cool, but not cold. He wasn’t stiff. But neither did he have a pulse. He was definitely dead, but he hadn’t been that way long. He was no forensic scientist, but it seemed possible that they may have only just missed whoever it was who left him here.
Tell Holly to keep her eyes open, he thought.
DONE, texted Isabelle.
If anyone was still around, he’d expect there to be a vehicle in the parking lot, but he knew better than to make assumptions. For all he knew, these new agents could teleport.
He searched the man’s pockets before standing up, looking for any clues about who he might have been.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Paul, sounding revolted.
“He went through my pockets,” replied Eric. “I’m returning the favor.” On one hand, he supposed he no longer needed to know anything about the guy, being that he was dead and all, but he couldn’t leave without looking. Even a single clue could help. He had no idea where to go next.
He found Wire Ties’ gun still stuffed in the back of his jeans and tossed it aside. His Maglite was still clipped to his belt loop. In his pockets, he had a small wad of cash, some drive-through receipts, a single car key and a handful of those damn wire ties, but no wallet, no identification and no phone. The only thing that promised to be useful was a small notepad, which he took. He left everything else where he found it. Another person might’ve kept the cash and he wouldn’t necessarily blame them. It wasn’t going to do a dead man any good, after all, but there was something about the idea of taking money off a corpse that he found horrific.
He stood up and wiped his hands on his shirt. He felt dirty, although not quite as dirty as Mistress Janet made him feel, which he thought probably spoke volumes about that disgusting woman.
He glanced back in time to see Paul pick the gun up off the floor. “What’re you doing?”
“If whoever did that to him is still here somewhere, I don’t plan on ending up like him.”
“It didn’t do him much good.”
“And not having one at all isn’t going to do us any good.”
“Whatever. Do what you want.” He shined his light onto the notepad and began flipping through the pages. He hoped he’d just found a detailed journal containing the answers to all of his questions, a Rosetta Stone to help him finally understand this mystery, but the notes scrawled on these pages couldn’t have been more different from Hector’s carefully constructed, detail-rich letters. They weren’t written in complete sentences. They weren’t even complete ideas. It was just words and names, nothing more than random bits and pieces of Wire Ties’ obsession splashed haphazardly onto the pages. There were lists of places from all over the country, ranging from big cities to places Eric had never heard of to specific streets to generic places like “hotel,” “factory” and “pier.” Here and there he’d written down some person’s name. Most of it made absolutely no sense.
He’d been searching a long time for whatever it was he was looking for.
He turned the pages until he found the name “Rossetter” scribbled on a page by itself. That name again. What was so important about it? And did he mean the old psychiatric hospital Chad told him about? Or was he looking for some member of the family for which the place was named? Or was there no connection at all between the two things?
On the next page was a list of four places. Hospital, rec center, high school and tunnels. Places of interest? He assumed that he meant the hospital and high school here in Creek Bend. He’d obviously been investigating both the municipal tunnels and Goss. And something did seem to be going on at the high school. But why was the hospital on the list? Did he mean the psychiatric hospital? Rossetter? Either he wasn’t aware that it didn’t exist anymore, or he was interested in something that was connected to it.
He turned the page again and found his license plate number written there. The stranger must’ve recorded it as he stood inside Goss, watching him and Karen drive away.
The next page was written after their encounter in the tunnels. His name was scribbled here. It was circled, with a question mark beside it. Under that was his address, as the stranger had seen it on his driver’s license. Under that he’d written, “Who was the woman?”
Eric had refused to tell him about Karen. It looked as if he wasn’t willing to let the subject go. How far would he have gone to find out? What would he have done if he’d found her?
He didn’t have to worry about that anymore, but it still made him uncomfortable to think that he’d exposed his wife to any kind of danger. After all, there were always more weirdos out there somewhere, and it seemed sometimes that he was destined to meet each and every one of them.
The last words on the page were “red coat” and “monsters.” Another question mark was scrawled beside each of them. Those were the things that Eric had told him. He’d asked him if he was working with the man in the red coat and if he was responsible for the monsters at Goss. But he didn’t seem to know anything about either of those things at the time.
After that, there were no more notes. This seemed to be where his research came to an end. Eric wondered what he was looking for. Why was he so determined to find it? And what secrets might he have learned in the last moments of life, before he could jot them down in his notepad?
He tore out the pages with his name and license plate number and stuffed them into his front pocket. Then he slipped the notepad into his back pocket with his wallet and glanced one last time at Wire Ties’ body. He kept thinking about that last entry, about the man in the red coat and the monsters in Goss. Did that mean that after leaving him in the tunnels, he returned to Goss to investigate further? Was that where he met his end?
That’s what he would’ve done, he thought. If he didn’t have anything else to go on.
“We should check the next room,” he said. He gestured toward the bathroom. “There’s another hole smashed through the wall between the tubs.”
Holding the gun out in front of him, Paul crept toward the bathroom, ready to shoot anything that moved.
Eric followed him. As he entered the bathroom, his cell phone rang. It was Diane.
“Hello?”
“Are you guys staying out of trouble?” she asked.
Eric glanced back at the corpse. “Not even a little bit,” he replied. “How’s the research going?”
“Not very well. We can’t find anything on a Hector Conant. It’s like he never existed.”
That wasn’t necessarily bad news. If he’d gotten himself killed, there probably would’ve been articles about his death or disappearance. But that still left the big question of why, if he wasn’t dead, hadn’
t he shown himself. “What about the girls? Sherry Jolinger and Vera Graupner?”
“Nope. Nothing. And there’s no mention at all of anything happening in 1962, either. Is that good news? Like, does it mean everything turned out okay?”
“I hope so, but I honestly don’t know.” Paul stepped into the tub and peered through the gaping hole into the next room. Eric kept his light on him, not daring to let him out of his sight. “What about Gardenhour? Anything about that?”
“Lots. Too much. I found a bunch of articles about Robert Gardenhour and how the organization got started. There’s a ton of stuff about the Louisa Holoday Foundation and Otto Goss. There’re literally hundreds of articles on the place. I don’t know where to even start. And I seriously have my doubts that anything related to an evil secret society would show up on any records anyway.”
“That’s probably true,” he admitted. “Thanks for trying. How’s Karen doing?”
“She’s no help at all. I’ve never seen her act like such a space-case before. She’s building a house out of books right now.”
Eric frowned. “That’s not really like her.”
“I know. I don’t get it.”
Paul stepped out of the tub in the adjoining bathroom and stopped. “Do you smell that?” he asked, sniffing.
He did. A sweet, earthy smell floating on the air. It was a stark contrast to the dank and moldy stench of the rest of the building. He was quite sure he didn’t smell anything like that last time he was here.
“I just called to let you know that I’m taking her back to my place to keep an eye on her,” said Diane.
“Sounds good. Let me know if anything changes.”
She promised she would and hung up.
Eric didn’t like it. Karen was still behaving strangely? What was wrong with her? Was she going to be okay? Was she ever going to be the same again?
He forced the thought from his head. He couldn’t think like that. He just couldn’t.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
