by Brian Harmon
These were the very things that he’d found curious about the asylum. “I’ll be damned.”
“You have to be observant. You have to train your mind to be open to what you can’t always perceive. I’ve gotten better with practice, but even I don’t see every unseen place every time.”
This was why the places kept disappearing on him, he realized. It took practice. He likely only found the first two by chance. Something about his current mindset allowed him to glimpse them. Perhaps he was particularly focused those times. Although he hadn’t felt very focused. In fact, he’d actually been fairly distracted all day, beginning with those damned daisies and Aiden’s unexpected appearance…
“So what can you tell about this place?”
Aiden walked over to him and examined the foundation. “I’ve never seen an unseen structure this far gone.”
“It doesn’t make much sense,” agreed Eric. “A place like this doesn’t have to be unseen. Nobody’s going to see it anyway.”
Aiden looked out at the dense woods around them. “That’s true.”
Eric didn’t like this. It reminded him of the Hosler lot. There were no clues back there, or so he’d been told. Aiden was adamant that it had nothing to do with the rest of the unseen locations around town, which had made sense at the time because each of the other places were intact structures, with walls on which the spiraling number clues had been drawn. There were no walls here. There were only trees.
Aiden stepped over the crumbling concrete and walked over the ruins, looking around. “There’s nothing here. No clues. Nothing.”
Eric stood up. “Isabelle, are you sure we’re in the right place?”
YOU’RE SOMEWHERE NEAR IT. I’M SURE OF IT
He didn’t understand this strange connection she had with him or why it would extend to his environment so that she could sense things about the people and places he interacted with, but he trusted her. If she said they were close, then they were close.
But maybe they weren’t actually there yet.
Looking back toward the creek to check his bearings, Eric walked on past the ruins and past Aiden, his eyes open for anything that was out of place.
Somewhere in the nearby woods, a branch snapped.
Eric and Aiden both turned and looked, their eyes wide open, but they could see nothing through the trees.
“I don’t like this,” said Aiden in a loud whisper.
Eric didn’t like it either. Almost everywhere he’d gone today, someone he wanted to avoid had turned up. And as Paul had pointed out earlier, the bad guys had access to all the same clues. They almost certainly knew about this place.
Aiden squatted down on the ground and tried to peer under the leaves.
Eric turned and scanned the area, but still nothing stood out. He hated this. His heart was pounding. If the cowboy found them again, it was a good bet he wasn’t going to waste time conversing. Back at the motel he was clearly determined to shoot first and ask questions later.
Not that it mattered. He had no answers even if he was given the chance. He had no idea what he was doing out here.
There must be something he was missing…
Think!
But his thoughts were scattered as a monstrous form crashed through the brush and rushed straight toward him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eric felt his heart leap into his throat as the beast broke from the cover of the trees, snapping branches in its wake and uttering a loud, guttural snort. He staggered backward, his voice a shrill shriek of fear, and fell into a thorny thicket as the creature’s hooves stamped the ground before him.
Aiden threw himself to the ground with a similarly unheroic shout and fumbled for the Taser in the side pocket of his backpack.
The deer cornered sharply, startled as much by the two comically terrified humans as they were by it, and raced off into the woods to the north, leaving Eric and Aiden to stare after it with identical expressions of bewilderment.
“Just a deer…” sighed Aiden.
And not even a very large one…
“Jesus…” groaned Eric. “That scared the hell out of me.”
THAT WAS TERRIFYING, agreed Isabelle.
Eric stood up, brushing the thorns from his clothes and hair, and stared into the woods where the deer had disappeared back into the foliage. For a moment, he tried to understand where the creature could have gone, but then he remembered that they were on the far northern edge of the city. These woods probably went on for a good distance and then gave way to endless miles of farm fields.
Aiden was looking the other way, back in the direction from where the deer had come. “Do you think something back there spooked it?”
That was a good question. But Eric didn’t have time to consider it. Something in the woods had caught his eye, a low, black shape slinking through the trees, a pair of unearthly white eyes staring back at him.
Another of those strange, black creatures.
Or maybe it was the same one. It was impossible to tell.
He walked around a cluster of trees to see better, but the thing had vanished as quickly as the one he’d followed through the creek.
More importantly, he now saw something else, something that was completely invisible from every other angle. It might not have been “unseen” by Aiden’s definition, but it was certainly hidden, swallowed by the growing forest, almost completely gone. A narrow path lay carved through the landscape, the faint outline of an old road of some sort.
Eric stepped to the side, examining this odd optical illusion, and felt his foot come to rest on something hard protruding from the ground.
He bent and brushed aside the leaves. “Aiden…”
Aiden hurried to his side. “Find something?”
“Look.”
A long strip of metal ran along the ground at his feet, almost entirely buried by leaves and dirt.
“A railroad track?”
Eric nodded toward the north. He could just see the gap through the forest where these tracks ran. “Didn’t you say that when people forgot something was here long enough, it became hidden?”
“That was one of Glen’s theories. We never proved it.”
“Well, maybe this counts.”
“Maybe so.” Aiden looked back the other way. “But how do we know which way to follow it?”
Eric wasn’t sure. The tracks ran in both directions. To the south, they seemed to veer left, back toward the industrial park. They probably couldn’t go far in that direction.
“Should we split up?”
“No. We should stick together.” Eric still didn’t know what Pink Shirt and the cowboy were after, but he didn’t want to let Aiden out of his sight. He pointed north. “Let’s go this way. If we’re going the wrong way, Isabelle will probably be able to tell us soon enough.”
Small trees and brush had begun to grow up between the rotting ties, crowding out the path, making it difficult to see very far ahead and threatening to wipe the already almost invisible track completely off the face of the earth.
“Are we sure this is the right way?” Aiden asked when they’d walked at least half a mile of nearly buried track.
Eric glanced at his phone.
I STILL FEEL IT
“It must be the track itself, then,” Eric reasoned.
I THINK YOU’RE RIGHT
“That’s a new one to me,” declared Aiden. “An unseen railroad track.”
“This would be a hard one to find,” said Eric. “It’s almost invisible anyway.” A few more years and the forest soil would swallow every trace of the track. It was amazing that it hadn’t already.
“Isabelle thinks it’s an energy of some sort?”
“That’s what she keeps telling me.”
Aiden considered this for a moment. “I never thought of these places as having any kind of energy, but I guess they must, now that you mention it. They have to radiate something that makes people ignore them, a signal of some sort.”
&n
bsp; “It’s odd,” agreed Eric. “To do something like that it’d almost have to be…intelligent.”
“I’ve thought the same thing before. It’s like it’s intentional.”
“Doesn’t seem natural.”
“It doesn’t.”
But what did it mean? Was there a conscious force at work here? A purpose? What could possess such a power?
Eric pushed aside a limb and peered forward. “There’s something up there.”
“Where?”
“Do you see it?”
Aiden followed his gaze. “What is that?”
But it was impossible to tell through the trees and brush. It was nothing more than an unnatural shape hovering behind the leaves.
Cautiously, the two of them pushed on, moving closer and closer, until the curious thing began to take form out of the camouflage of the forest greenery.
“Huh…” was all Eric could say when he finally realized what he was looking at.
Aiden ducked under another branch and then stopped. “Cool.”
It was cool. There, standing before them, was an old, abandoned passenger car. Almost completely covered in rust, with leaves piled up around its long-frozen wheels, it was a remnant from a bygone time, an eerie reminder of years past.
How long had it been sitting here like this, unnoticed, unseen, lost to everyone?
Aiden approached the car and peered around the side of it. “There’s two.”
Eric saw that he was correct. There was another car in front of this one. They must have been identical when new, but now time had taken its toll on each of them in its own, unique way. “Graffiti,” he observed.
“A lot of it,” agreed Aiden. “But none of it fresh.”
He was right. Looking closer, it was clear that all the paint was faded and rusting through. He doubted if any of it was less than ten years old.
“All the windows are broken, too. But there’s no litter. No sign at all that anyone’s been here in years. As far as I know, nothing starts out unseen. These could’ve sat here for decades before they were forgotten. Plenty of time to be vandalized. All the pieces are here. We just have to figure out if this is what we’re looking for.”
Eric had to admit, the boy’s observational abilities were impressive. He’d come a long way from the bored kid that sat in the back of his classroom and turned in half-hearted essays. But this was hardly the kind of life he wanted for his students.
He gazed at the abandoned cars for a moment, distracted. All those years Aiden was missing… Like everyone in this city, he’d wondered what happened, but he never dreamed he’d ever find out. If the police couldn’t solve the mystery, a high school English teacher certainly couldn’t. It never crossed his mind that he could even try. Now, however…after all he’d seen…
He remembered the motel, how he already knew it was there before Aiden showed it to him. Had he always possessed the ability to see these places? If only he’d known… Could he have found Aiden? Could he have saved him from this harsh existence?
He wondered…
Then something caught his attention. “Aiden…?”
Aiden was leaning over the ladder, peering into the passenger car. Now he turned to face him.
“What were the next three numbers on those clues?”
“Two, three, one,” Aiden recalled. He’d studied the numbers so many times over the years that he knew each one by heart. “Why?”
“I think we’re in the right place.”
Aiden walked around to Eric’s side of the rail car and peered up at the numbers printed there, almost obscured by rust and paint. “Son of a bitch…” He turned his gaze back to Eric. “It must be inside.”
“Well, let’s have a look.”
Energized by the new find, Aiden jumped up onto the back of the rail car and peered inside.
Eric glanced around the quiet woods one last time and then climbed up after him.
Aiden took a step into the car, then stopped. He turned, looked at Eric as if about to say something, then turned and looked into the rail car again.
Eric was surprised to find that he was already getting used to this spastic behavior.
“I can’t believe it. I walked all over these woods, but I never came this far north. It was too far from where the clue pointed.”
“You were supposed to follow the tracks.”
He took a tentative step inside, as if afraid to believe that he was finally here. “I don’t even know how you found the tracks. They were almost completely buried.”
Eric didn’t try to explain that he was helped by the strange, black creatures. It was hard enough trying to explain Isabelle. “Let’s just find whatever’s here before company shows up again.”
Invigorated by this thought, Aiden started forward.
There wasn’t anything in the first rail car. A quick search revealed nothing but empty seats and rotten upholstery. There were no luggage compartments or storage areas to hide anything of any size.
The second car appeared to be the same. Eric was beginning to think there was nothing here, that there must be some other clue they were missing. But then they found it sitting on one of the seats near the middle of the car. It was an old, metal ammunition box.
Aiden picked it up and examined it. Half covered in rust, the box looked like it had been sitting here almost as long as the car. Eric could even see the outline of the box on the faded green leather of the seat where it had been sitting. How many years had it been here, waiting for them?
“This is it…” sighed Aiden. “This is what we were missing all this time. I can’t believe it was this easy.”
Eric glanced out the windows at the surrounding forest. “Hurry up and open it.” He still didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they were alone.
Aiden gripped the lid of the box and pried. It groaned in protest, the rust resisting him, but after a moment’s struggle, it opened.
They both peered inside.
But Eric didn’t understand what he was looking at. “What is that?”
Aiden didn’t speak. He stood silently, staring into the box.
It was a smooth, gray stone, a little bigger than a softball in diameter, but flatter. On the top, someone had scrawled two letters: AG.
Aiden uttered a foul curse.
Before Eric could ask what this was, he was distracted by a flash of gold from Aiden’s backpack.
It was the same, strange fluid that surrounded him back at the asylum, but now it was boiling up from inside the bag, reaching for the ceiling of the car with long, flame-like tendrils and filling the car with the strong stench of burning fabric.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Uttering a startled cry, Aiden dropped the box with the mysterious stone back onto the seat and shrugged off the backpack. It appeared to be ablaze, except there were no flames. Instead, the strange, golden liquid seemed to mimic a fire, eating through the vinyl and producing a dense, acrid smoke. Unlike a fire, however, it produced no heat.
“What is this?” shouted Aiden.
Although it was the second time he’d encountered the stuff, Eric had no adequate answer. He had no idea what it was. He didn’t understand how it worked, how it could be so alive.
It spilled from the “burning” backpack like molten metal as Aiden pulled his arms free of the straps and pooled onto the floor between them. Eric watched as long, snake-like ribbons raced out from the shimmering, gold puddle, carrying the mysterious substance to the walls of the car, where it defied gravity by racing upward, fanning out in gleaming branches as it reached for the ceiling.
It was strangely beautiful.
But Eric felt sure that it was also quite deadly.
Aiden turned the backpack upside down and shook it, trying to douse the liquid flames, but he only managed to spill the contents across the floor of the rail car and splash the strange liquid onto the nearby seats where it sizzled and smoked on contact.
The clothes and snacks he’d packed for himself before
fleeing the apartment were engulfed. Plastic wrappers shriveled and disappeared. A chocolate cupcake melted into a dark brown puddle. Tee shirts and socks disintegrated before their eyes.
“Throw it down!” shouted Eric. “Get rid of it!”
But Aiden was fumbling with the front zipper, struggling to tear it open.
“What are you doing?”
“We need it!”
Eric stepped back as a pool of golden liquid crept across the floor toward his feet.
With a grunt of effort, Aiden managed to withdraw the plastic bag he’d retrieved from the motel’s moldy wall. Then he gave the bag one final shake and tossed it aside, cursing as he snatched his hand out of the way of a spray of golden droplets.
“We have to get out of here!” shouted Eric, taking another step back to avoid the approaching liquid. In another few seconds they were going to be completely separated.
But instead of running, Aiden knelt down and began searching through the spilled contents of the bag.
“Come on!” Eric’s eyes were drawn to the ceiling. Above them, a large pool had gathered and was expanding at a startling rate.
Aiden snatched up the Taser and then stood up and ran back the way they came. At the same instant, the golden liquid began to pour down from the ceiling overhead in a dense rain, completely separating them.
Eric backed away, startled, and looked behind him. He was going to have to go the other way. He paused long enough to grab the stone from the box and then turned and fled.
But as he approached the end of the car, the golden fluid oozed down over the door, dripping onto the floor with a disturbing sizzle.
Eric stopped. Both doors were blocked. There was no way out.
The acrid stench of smoke caught in his throat, making him cough and threatening to strangle him.
Covering his mouth and nose, he looked behind him and saw that it was oozing across the ceiling, a burning, golden rain showering the seats as it crept closer to him.
Eric saw no other choice. Tucking the stone tightly beneath his arm, he jumped onto the nearest seat and hurled himself headlong through the window and out of the passenger car. The move might have been worthy of an action hero scene, if not for the slightly-too-high-pitched cry and the graceless, shoulder-jarring landing that left him flat on his back for several agonizing seconds, unable to move, his entire body racked with pain.
