The Unseen

by Brian Harmon

  Eric wasn’t sure how to reply. He wasn’t aware of any natural talent for judging people’s character. “I guess you’re just naturally hard to trust.”

  Again, the man grinned. With those bizarre, golden eyes, the expression was indescribably creepy. He took a step toward him and pointed at them. “These aren’t just some silly contacts, you know. These are my eyes. They’re filled with aura plasma. They let me see everything my aura plasma sees. It’s in my ears, too. I can watch and listen to anyone from anywhere.” He took a step toward Eric. “And although I’m only able to manipulate my own aura, I can see everyone’s. I can see yours clearly right now. I can see how you feel, your fear, your apprehension, your concern for the boy…your burning dislike of me… I can read you.” Those queer, golden eyes burned into him. “You didn’t just not like me. You knew somehow that I was wrong.” He stood there and stared at him. “And I can see now that you had no idea you could do it. Fascinating.”

  Eric shrugged. “Happy to entertain. I guess.”

  “The only reason I’ve kept you alive is because I’m fascinated. There’s something about you, something in your aura… You have something inside you somewhere. Something I’ve never seen in anyone else…”

  “I swallowed a Smurf magnet when I was four. That must be it.”

  There was that creepy grin again. “No, there’s something special about you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I see you don’t.” He looked closer. “Or do you?”

  Did he? Eric decided it was best not to think too hard about it.

  “I think I’m getting bored with you, though.”

  “You want me to show you a magic trick or something?”

  Pink Shirt stood up straighter. “I’ll take the glass shard now.”

  “Not a fan of magic, I take it?”

  “Now.”

  Eric held those strange eyes. “Maybe I don’t have it anymore.”

  Pink Shirt smiled.

  “Seriously. Check my pockets.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  Eric stared at him, unsure what to say.

  “I saw you slip it into the corpse’s sleeve when you took back your phone.”

  Eric said nothing.

  “I told you. I already knew you didn’t trust me. Not for a second. You think I haven’t been watching you all day? I know about your little friend on the phone. I heard you ask the boy if he still had the Taser. And I saw you hide the shard when you thought I wasn’t looking.”

  “Well that just sucks.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So you’re through with me then?”

  “Almost. But just in case I need you again, I’ll make sure I know where you are.”

  The aura plasma dropped from the ceiling and encased Eric in liquid gold with startling speed, yanking him off his feet and dragging him out of the boiler room.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Eric couldn’t scream. He couldn’t even breathe. Although the aura plasma flowed freely and fluidly around his body, it bound his arms and legs as effectively as steel cables, preventing him from moving as it dragged him away.

  It didn’t burn. Instead, it was cold against his skin, like cool metal. It pulled him across the floor, through the soot and the ash, around the corner and up the stairs. He felt himself jolted from side to side, rolled across the hard, rubble-littered floor, raked over the steps and bumped rudely against the walls until he lost all track of which way was which.

  Then, as abruptly as he was snatched from the boiler room, he was deposited bodily onto a filthy, soot-covered floor and returned to the warm, smoke-tinged air.

  Disoriented and gasping for breath, Eric rose to his hands and knees and felt a hand on his back. Looking up, he found Aiden kneeling beside him.

  “You okay?”

  “Aiden… Thank God. Wasn’t sure what he did with you.”

  “I went out into the hallway to clear my head.”

  Ran away at the sight of an unexpected corpse, was more like it, but he decided not to say anything about it. He, himself, had made far less dignified exits after discovering something frightening lurking in the shadows.

  “That aura stuff grabbed me and dragged me away before I could warn you. I didn’t have time to yell. Next thing I knew, I was here.”

  Eric rose shakily to his feet and looked around. Burned bookshelves surrounded them, still lined with the molding remains of charred books. The library.

  Of course. Pink Shirt said he was somewhere quiet.

  This part of the building was badly burned. There was no roof over the corner of the room. Blue sky and sunlight shined down unobstructed onto the moldy remains of ruined tables and chairs.

  “What happened?”

  “Pink,” replied Eric.

  “Yeah, I figured out that much for myself. He’s after the secret, isn’t he?”

  “More than a secret. It’s some kind of monster.”

  “Monster?” Aiden looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What would he want with a monster?”

  It was a testament to the weirdness they had each endured in their lives that what they found shocking and unsettling was not the idea of a real monster lurking within the walls of this building, but that the man in the pink shirt wanted to find it.

  Eric looked down at his phone, which had miraculously remained clenched in his hand throughout his ungentle ride up to the third floor.

  “Did you know anything about a monster?”

  I DIDN’T, replied Isabelle. I TOLD YOU I FELT SOMETHING PROFOUND, BUT NOTHING I WOULD HAVE RECOGNIZED AS ANY KIND OF MONSTER

  Eric nodded. He figured as much. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t have much time.”

  HE’LL BE HEADED BACK TO THE JANITOR’S CLOSET

  “I know.”

  YOU HAVE TO BE GONE BEFORE HE GETS THERE

  “I know that too.”

  But a quick look around the library revealed only two doors and blocking each of them was a rippling wall of golden, metallic liquid.

  “He’s trapped us,” Aiden explained. “There’s no way out.”

  “There has to be a way out.”

  But the only other exit seemed to be an undesirable three-story drop from one of the large, shattered windows.

  Eric turned around, searching. There had to be something. He refused to accept that a creepy man in a stupid pink shirt was going to beat him.

  Besides… “Pink Shirt acts like he’s holding all the cards, but I know for a fact he’s not.”

  Aiden didn’t understand. “He’s definitely fooling me right now.”

  But Eric shook his head, adamant. “No.” He looked back at the doors. The walls of aura plasma hadn’t changed, but he was sure they were listening. They would be watching every move. But he didn’t have the luxury of keeping secrets. He needed Aiden to understand. “He has us, I’ll admit it. And with us in here, no one is coming to our rescue. That’s a given.”

  “You’re not making me feel better.”

  “But there’s one more person in this building somewhere, who doesn’t fit into his neat little plan.”

  Aiden stared at him. “You mean your mystery caller? I thought he was dead.”

  “The corpse in that room has been dead for years. He left the phone there to distract us. He’s somewhere else.” Again, he looked back at the walls of aura plasma blocking the doors. “And I’m sure if Pink Shirt knew where he was, he wouldn’t have bothered keeping us alive.”

  Both golden walls pulsed a little faster. Pinky heard that loud and clear, as Eric knew he would. It must have been driving the brightly dressed whacko crazy knowing there was one last loose end he hadn’t managed to neatly tie up.

  “Okay… So how do we contact him?”

  “We don’t have to. Pink Shirt isn’t the only one who can see and hear everything we do. Look around.”

  Aiden turned and searched the room. At first, he didn’t understand, then he did. He turned and
looked at Eric.

  Eric held a finger up to his lips.

  Aiden understood. He turned and looked around again. “Amazing… They’re like polar opposites.”

  They were. Pink Shirt’s aura plasma was flashy and bright. But the things that lurked all around them, always in their peripheral vision, were dark, elusive forms.

  Shadows.

  They were everywhere.

  Eric glanced back at the doorways again. Something long and snake-like was oozing from the barriers of aura plasma and creeping toward him. Pink Shirt was already suspicious. They didn’t have much time.

  He searched the room, looking for their way out, and caught sight of several shadows that were no longer keeping to the corners of his eyes. Faint, faded shapes slid across the shelves, converging into a single point, from which stepped a familiar black creature with eerie white eyes and bulging yellow teeth.

  “Those things…”

  “I know,” said Eric. “Compliments of a friend.”

  One of the aura plasma snakes reared up behind the bookshelf, peeking over at them, watching them. From its angle, it couldn’t yet see the creature that had materialized from the shadows.

  With a flick of its narrow head, the creature urged them to follow it and then retreated between two walls of burned bookshelves.

  Eric and Aiden followed it, stepping into the aisle just in time to see it disappear into the wall.

  Aiden was confused.

  Eric was not. “Turn around.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.” Gripping Aiden’s shoulders, Eric pointed him toward the wall, realizing as he did so that it was not unlike what Karen did to him in the hallway of their home that morning when she caught sight of his shredded shirt.

  God, he hoped it was still here!

  “What are you doing?”

  Eric flashed back to the cemetery and to Aiden’s reply when asked what he was doing with the shovel. “Looking for something I lost.”

  Aiden looked back over his shoulder. “What?”

  Behind them, a gilded, serpentine shape slithered around the corner, a vast chasm of a mouth opening at its end like a great, hungry worm in a science fiction novel.

  From inside Aiden’s hood, Eric withdrew the glass shard. “Stay close.” Holding it in front of his eye, he examined the wall where the creature disappeared. There, unseen until now, was a large, gaping hole, not unlike the ones that had allowed Aiden to pass between rooms at the motel.

  Seizing him by the elbow, Eric led Aiden through the wall and into the next room, where the black creature patiently waited for them to catch up.

  “Wait, hold on…” stammered Aiden, blinking around at the new room. “What just happened?”

  “I’ll tell you later, just keep up. We don’t have much time.”

  From somewhere behind them rose a terrifying shriek of rage.

  Aiden jumped. “What the hell was that?”

  That would be Pink Shirt, his voice likely reverberating right through his freakish aura plasma, filling the entire building. Clearly, he had just discovered that what Eric really deposited so secretly in the corpse’s sleeve was nothing more than the little piece of brass he gave to him in the front doorway.

  A little souvenir.

  Pink Shirt wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. Eric already knew the aura plasma was his before their confrontation in the boiler room. He’d suspected for a while, but he knew for certain the moment the evil bastard suggested that he try calling the mystery caller back and listening for the ring tone.

  Because he never told anyone that the caller was in the building.

  The only way Pink Shirt could have known that was if he’d heard the conversation himself. And the only way he could’ve done that was if he was the one using the aura plasma to spy on them.

  The best part of it all was that the man had gloated to him about knowing everything. He even bragged that he heard him ask Aiden about the Taser. And yet he hadn’t realized that the question was nothing more than an opportunity to allow him to deposit the glass shard safely into Aiden’s hood.

  Behind them, something crashed loudly in the library. A second, even louder crash followed. It sounded like the aura plasma was tearing the room apart, trying to figure out where they’d gone.

  The black creature led them through several more unseen holes and then back out into a hallway. Eric was careful not to lose sight of it, even as he kept his eyes wide open for ominous flashes of gold, and as he observed it from the corner of his eye, he finally understood what it was about these creatures that was so difficult to grasp. Being apparently comprised of the very shadows that haunted these buildings, they possessed the same strange properties. When not observed directly, the thing seemed to jump around in his vision, seeming as intangible as the shadows that spawned it.

  Eric found himself wondering if the thing might only exist inside his own eyes. It was a crazy thought, but no more insane than the very idea of a creature born of living shadows.

  Of course, the one on Hosler had been real enough to shred his pants leg.

  They reached an intersection and turned into a new hallway. The fire hadn’t burned as hot in this area. There was less damage. Even the doors were still intact.

  Now Eric could hear things crashing on the floors below him. No doubt, Pink Shirt’s aura plasma was on a rampage, spreading out, searching every room. If it found them, it was going to be extremely bad news. He had the distinct feeling that the man was done caring whether or not he still needed to keep either of them breathing.

  Still peering through the glass, Eric was able to spy an unseen door ahead of them. He ran straight toward it, not daring to let go of Aiden’s elbow. If they were separated, it probably wouldn’t be possible for him to follow. He’d end up stranded in the hallway and at the mercy of Pink Shirt and his aura plasma.

  As they neared the unseen door, Eric caught sight of a flash of gold on the stairwell at the far end of the hall. One of those long, serpentine shapes was rising up from the second floor and slithering toward them. Weird finger-like tentacles oozed outward, mutating the shape into a strange, gilded web.

  Pink Shirt had found them.

  Within seconds, another had appeared from the stairwell behind them and both were converging on them, intending to trap them.

  “Bad stuff!” warned Aiden. “On the stairs!”

  “I see it!” Eric reached the door and slipped inside, barely avoiding its burning touch as it swept after them.

  They couldn’t keep this up forever. Eventually, they would be found. Right now, they were only alive because Pink Shirt wouldn’t risk losing the shard. He’d want to corner them, not destroy them. Otherwise, he’d have already finished them off, and likely in an extremely messy fashion.

  Somewhere on each of their bodies, Eric had no doubt there was a single speck of aura plasma observing everything they did. This man wouldn’t have left them unmonitored, no matter how cocky he became. Someone like him would never miss an opportunity to relish that kind of power over someone, not even when there was no conceivable chance of escape. So he already knew where they were going at all times.

  The fact that these spying specks of goo hadn’t already swelled up and grabbed them suggested to Eric that Pink Shirt still believed he was in control, regardless of their continued evasion.

  Hopefully he was wrong about that.

  The one advantage they had was speed. By following this strange beast, they could move through the building quickly, and in ways that Pink Shirt was certain to find disorienting. Fortunately for them, he couldn’t see the unseen without the glass even through the aura plasma.

  The blue shard was revealing not just holes in the walls, but doors and even whole hallways that were unseen. The room they now found themselves in had no other doors. It was completely isolated from the rest of the building except for a gaping hole in the floor, visible only through the mysterious glass shard.

  The black creature trott
ed over to a metal extension ladder propped up against the side of the hole and then turned to face them. It looked from the ladder to Eric several times and then, satisfied that it had done everything in its power to let them know what to do next, vanished into the same fleeting shadows that had formed it in the library.

  “Where’d it go?” asked Aiden, who couldn’t see the hole or the ladder. “What’s going on? There’s no way out of here.”

  “Just follow me.” Eric walked over to the hole and looked down. Below them was an auditorium, complete with a sizeable stage. He could only imagine that it had been a magnificent addition to the school back when it was new, but now it was just an empty, burned-out shell of a theater that was also separated from the rest of the building by unseen doorways. It took up the entire first two floors and the ladder barely reached the distance between the hole and the scorched hardwood far below. The very idea of having to descend that distance on a wobbly extension ladder was terrifying. But they had no choice. This was the only way out except back into the clutches of Pink’s gilded snakes.

  These holes had been intentionally placed and purposely paired with the unseen doorways and corridors, creating a complex system of secret passages throughout the school. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to provide these escape routes. Eric wondered if his and Aiden’s flight from Pink Shirt had always been foretold or if these passages were already in place for some other reason.

  It was tricky getting onto the ladder and even trickier doing it without losing Aiden. Unable to see the hole or the ladder, he would also be unable to see Eric if he simply began to descend. But fortunately, holding onto the ladder seemed to tether them to it, allowing them to climb down one at a time while the other held it secure.

  Eric wondered what it was that made these things work. It seemed that forcing someone to interact with something that was unseen revealed it to them, just as seizing Paul’s arm from the doorway of the empty store had forced him to see the entire store.

  But these “deeper” unseen places disappeared much more easily after they stopped interacting with them. As soon as they stepped away from the ladder, it and the hole above them vanished again, until they looked at them again through the glass.