The Unseen

by Brian Harmon

  The iPhone sang as he turned and looked around. That would almost certainly be Karen. It’d been a while since she last checked in. But Eric let it go to voicemail. He hated to test her patience by not answering one of her calls, but this was simply not a good time. Pink Shirt would already know that they’d returned to the first floor. He and his aura plasma were almost certainly lurking just outside, trying to find their way in.

  “What now?” asked Aiden.

  But before Eric could reply, a group of shadows converged again into a helpful black creature that made its way eagerly to the far corner of the room, where it sat on its haunches and stared at the wall.

  When he peered through the glass, Eric saw that there was a door here, too, well-hidden in a little niche beside the stage, even without being unseen.

  Lowering the glass shard, Eric looked down at the creature. “Good boy.”

  The creature looked immensely pleased with itself, its tail swishing back and forth on the soot-covered floor.

  “They’re so weird-looking,” observed Aiden.

  They were, at that. They looked almost like they’d been purposely constructed from a menagerie of different animals to create something intentionally otherworldly.

  Remembering something Aiden had told him earlier that day, Eric asked, “Did you say you’d seen these things before?”

  “I did. I’ve caught glimpses of them at a lot of places. All over the country. Glen never mentioned them to me, but my theory was that maybe these places spawned these things somehow.”

  It was an interesting theory. He could think of a few creationists that would love to know about something like that. But somehow, he found it hard to believe that these things just randomly appeared in unseen locations for no apparent reason. They seemed very purposeful right now.

  Eric looked down at the creature. “What I want to know is why these things attacked me when I went over to Hosler the first time.”

  The strange creature abruptly hung its head and made an odd, strangled whimpering noise in its throat.

  “I think it’s sorry,” said Aiden.

  Before Eric could say anything more on the subject, a strange, rumbling noise filled the room.

  Looking back toward the inner wall, he was startled to see the bricks crack and distort. Blossoms of liquid gold bloomed across the blackened surface from these cracks and converged into a giant, rippling disk.

  Pink Shirt, obviously frustrated with the lack of visible doors leading into the auditorium, was simply making his own.

  Cursing, Eric grabbed Aiden’s elbow again and rushed him into the unseen door, where a set of dark steps led down into a dank and muddy tunnel.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Again, Eric was struck by that same earthy, stagnant stench he detected back in the boiler room. It was coming from this tunnel, which meant that the two areas must be connected.

  Pink Shirt told him that the fire started through the boiler room, not in it, suggesting that the actual point of ignition was in an adjoining space. Given how much he wanted the glass shard, it stood to reason that the door into that space was unseen, just like the doorway leading into this tunnel from the auditorium. If this was the case, then they were now in the very place that the pink-clad psychopath was searching for.

  Eric wasn’t sure that was somewhere he wanted to be.

  Using his cell phone to light the way, he trudged through the squelching muck that covered the floor, trying to ignore the unpleasant feel of it oozing up around his shoes and soaking into his socks.

  “Why is there a creepy tunnel under an old high school?” asked Aiden.

  Eric had no idea. “Maybe it was the cool thing to do at the time.”

  “There weren’t any creepy tunnels under our high school, were there?”

  “No.” He swept the cell phone’s light over the blackened wall next to him. “At least, I don’t think so…”

  “It’s just…creepy.”

  Eric squinted into the darkness around him. The fire had left every surface down here as black as coal and it swallowed the light before it could reach more than a few inches.

  This was extremely unpleasant. In this darkness, anything could be lurking. And yet, those creatures had brought them here. Without their help, they’d still be locked in the library and now facing the wrath of a very angry man in a very cheerful shirt.

  All Eric could do at this point was hope that this was where he needed to be.

  The phone announced an incoming text message and he turned it so that he could read the screen.

  I STILL DON’T FEEL ANYTHING DIFFERENT

  Eric was surprised. “Pinky sounded pretty confident that there was a monster here. We’ve got to be getting close to it.”

  IF THERE IS, I CAN’T FEEL WHERE IT IS

  That was definitely not ideal. He’d feel a lot better if Isabelle could give him some kind of heads-up about what might be down here. But then again, maybe Pink Shirt was wrong. Maybe the jinn had moved on. Maybe all those patterns he’d described were simply leftovers from its initial appearance all those decades ago.

  Better still, maybe they were all in his head.

  But monster or no monster, they were in trouble. Pink Shirt knew where they’d gone. In the auditorium, he bore right through the wall to get at them. What kept him from burrowing straight down into the floor?

  Turning the light outward to illuminate the way again, Eric continued forward, grimacing at the feel of the cold muck beneath him. This adventure was going to ruin his clothes. That much was indisputable. At this point, all he could hope for was to return home with himself in one piece.

  Aiden broke the heavy silence that fell over them: “Hey, Mr. Fortrell?”

  “Eric. Seriously, I think we’re way past the teacher-student relationship thing.”

  “Right. That still sounds weird…”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say I was sorry. You know. For tasing you back in the apartment.”

  “Couple of times, as I recall.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That really hurt.”

  “I know.”

  “And you stomped on my foot, too, remember?”

  “I did. That’s right.”

  “That hurt a lot, too.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And then you just kind of abandoned me in that rail car…”

  “Okay! I get it!”

  Unseen in the darkness, Eric grinned.

  “That’s my point! I’m sorry. That’s all. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused.”

  Eric squinted into the darkness. There were no black creatures to guide them now. It would do them no good if there were. They’d be invisible in this relentless gloom. “I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault you had to run from those killers. It’s not your fault they’re back now. You and me, we’re just caught up in whatever was going on between them and Glen Normer.”

  “I’m starting to think that Glen caused more trouble than he helped.”

  “He might have. That doesn’t mean he meant to.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So forget about it.”

  “Right,” said Aiden.

  “I can tell he meant something to you.”

  “He was the first person who ever looked out for me. It doesn’t really matter what he kept from me. He was more family to me than anyone I left behind.”

  “He’d have been proud of you,” Eric assured him.

  Aiden was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Just…one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  He sounded uncomfortable. “I… Thanks. For everything.”

  Eric glanced back at him, surprised. “You’re welcome.”

  “You know, I was real scared when you started snooping around. I remember thinking, ‘Oh shit…they’ve even got my old teachers involved!’ It was like a nightmare. But then I watched you take on that cowboy… I saw you trying to protect me. I just�
�� I can’t say how relieved I was to not be alone anymore.”

  “Well, I was only supposed to teach you how to write a decent term paper, but I like to go that extra mile.”

  Aiden gave a soft laugh. “I finally realized why I liked you so much.”

  “Because I’m such a badass?”

  “Because you’re what Glen was: my teacher. My mentor, I guess.”

  Eric was taken by surprise. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me.”

  “I’m not sentimental,” insisted Aiden, sounding embarrassed. “I just thought I should let you know. I wanted to say thanks. That’s all.”

  “Well… You’re welcome. And that’s all.”

  The cell phone chimed at him. Squinting into the bright screen, he read Isabelle’s text: AWWW

  “Shut up, you.”

  “What?” asked Aiden. “What’s she saying?”

  “Nothing.” Eric turned the phone away from him again, but now he was left blinded by the afterimage of the screen. The strain of trying to see through it made his head hurt even more than it already did.

  The mud was gradually getting deeper as they went. He could feel his feet sinking deeper now, almost covering his toes. Each step churned up more of that awful, stagnant stench.

  But it was the silence that bothered him the most. What was Pink Shirt doing up there? Why wasn’t he ripping up the floors in search of them?

  The walls on either side of them abruptly opened up and they found themselves standing in a soggy, reeking emptiness.

  “Where are we?” asked Aiden.

  But Eric wasn’t sure. They were in some kind of open chamber. It was impossibly dark. The cell phone was useless. It revealed nothing but the ghostly, disembodied shape of his hand. After just a couple of steps, he became completely disoriented.

  The silence went on and on.

  “This is creeping me out, man…” said Aiden.

  Unseen in the darkness, Eric nodded. Him too. The cell phone held out in front of him, illuminating absolutely nothing, he walked forward, the mud oozing around his feet, making loud, squishing noises that sounded deafening in the eerie silence.

  He was starting to have a seriously bad feeling about this. What was this place? What was it doing under a high school? And what did it have to do with the fire that ravaged Creek Bend in the late nineteenth century?

  For that matter, what did it have to do with the lost seventeen-year-old boy that started all this. How did he get from there to an ancient, monstrous force, unleashed more than thirteen decades ago?

  He felt as if he’d become lost somewhere along the way and stumbled into a completely different adventure. His encounters that morning now felt like days ago.

  He pushed forward into the ominous darkness, wondering if he’d finally gotten himself in too deep to ever return, and a blackened wall of rough stone materialized before his eyes.

  He’d reached the far end of the chamber.

  Now what?

  He turned and swept the light around, but it revealed nothing more than a flash of Aiden’s young, worried face.

  He tried the glass shard, but it revealed no secret doorways in this area. He was going to have to follow the wall around to find the way out of here. But as he dragged his fingertips across the wall to the right, he felt a curious, hot breeze touch the palm of his hand.

  A closer examination revealed no origin for the phantom breeze, but when he felt around with his fingers, the breeze came again.

  He tried peering through the glass shard again and this time he saw it, a long, narrow crack running all the way up the wall. Near the filthy floor, it was wide enough to fit his hand through.

  He didn’t, of course. But he could have. If he’d wanted to.

  He held his hand in front of the crack instead, feeling the breeze that blew from it. It came in long, slow waves, rising and falling. Almost like…

  “Breath…”

  Aiden bent over him. “What?”

  “He was right. There’s something down here. I can feel it breathing.”

  Eric could hardly grasp the enormity of it. His heart was racing again. His skin was crawling. Somewhere behind this wall, something was alive. His imagination was instantly in overdrive, a high-speed slideshow of awful things flashed through his mind. It was easy to picture an enormous, scaly, dragon-like beast curled up in there, its enormous body sunk deep into the earth. Or one of Lovecraft’s great, tentacled beasts. More likely it was something far more foul and maddening than anything that had ever been described by any sane man or woman in the history of mankind.

  Aiden was silent for a moment as he absorbed the enormity of the fact. Then he whispered almost into Eric’s ear, “Holy shit that’s terrifying.”

  “You’re not kidding it is.”

  If Pink Shirt was telling the truth, then whatever was behind this wall was responsible for the biggest fire in this county’s history. It was a massively destructive, supernatural force the likes of which they could not possibly hope to fully comprehend.

  And somehow, it was simply slumbering on the other side of a crack in this wall.

  “So what are we supposed to do about it?”

  That was a very good question. How exactly did one deal with a jinn, anyway? It wasn’t something one learned in graduate school.

  He tried to remember all that Pink Shirt had revealed, but the only information he could recall was that these things needed to be summoned, and that the summoners were almost always slaughtered the moment it arrived.

  His eyes swept the unseen muck beneath him. Were there charred skeletons littering the floor of this chamber? Unrecovered remains of the fools who thought they could control a force like this?

  The very thought made him feel ill deep in his stomach.

  “Can we destroy it?” asked Aiden.

  “I don’t see how. It’s not like it’s a slumbering vampire. We can’t just stake it and be done with it.” He turned the phone’s glowing screen back to his face, squinting into the painfully brilliant display. “Isabelle, do you know anything about this jinn thing?”

  I’VE NEVER ENCOUNTERED ANYONE WITH ANY KNOWLEDGE OF A JINN, PER SE, BUT THERE WAS A DEMON HUNTER TRAPPED AT THE ALTRUSK HOUSE

  “A demon hunter? Really?”

  Aiden peered over Eric’s shoulder, curious.

  HE WASN’T A PARTICULARLY GOOD ONE. HE THOUGHT THE FISSURE WAS A PORTAL TO HELL

  Eric didn’t find this at all surprising. He wasn’t really all that far off.

  HE GOT IN WAY OVER HIS HEAD

  “I’ll say.” Isabelle had told him before that a lot of the people trapped in that place were like that. It was how she knew so much about the weird things in the world. The fissure had a way of luring in people with special knowledge of the unknown, people like demon hunters, who no doubt would have looked into something like the appearances of strange, otherworldly creatures and unexplained disappearances. Altrusk’s nightmare house sat straddling the fissure, like a predator lurking at a watering hole, waiting to snatch up anyone caught unaware. As a result, it had captured a number of so-called supernatural experts and monster hunters over the years.

  Ironically, it was only Isabelle who managed to retain her sanity after being captured there. Everyone else sank into irreversible madness within months. Neither of them knew why she was different. It was a mystery. One of a great many, it seemed.

  BUT BEFORE HE ENDED UP THERE, HE DID HAVE NUMEROUS EXPERIENCES WITH DEMONS. AND ABOUT TWO MONTHS AFTER I LEFT THERE, I ENCOUNTERED A LADY WHO’D BEEN HAUNTED BY A DYBBUK.

  “Dybbuk. That’s some kind of Jewish demon, isn’t it?”

  Aiden chuckled. When Eric glanced back at him, he said, “Sorry. Just… Funny image. Pitchfork and that little hat…”

  SOMETHING LIKE THAT. I DON’T KNOW IF THERE’S EVEN SUCH A THING AS A DEMON. MAYBE IT’S JUST AN EASY WAY TO CATEGORIZE EVERYTHING PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND

  “A lot of people think everything that doesn’t neatly fit into their narr
ow religious beliefs is demonic,” agreed Eric.

  EXACTLY. MAYBE THEY’RE RIGHT. WE DON’T KNOW. BUT THIS JINN THING HAS A LOT IN COMMON WITH MOST OF THEM. PINKY SAID IT HAD TO BE SUMMONED BUT THAT IT COULDN’T BE CONTROLLED. THE DYBBUK WAS LIKE THAT. AND THE SLAUGHTERING OF THE SUMMONERS WAS SOMETHING THE HUNTER WAS FAMILIAR WITH

  “So did either of them have any idea how to send one back?”

  NOT WITHOUT SOME PRETTY CONVOLUTED RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES. AND I’M NOT EVEN SURE THOSE ACTUALLY WORKED, TO BE HONEST

  “Figures. So what are we going to do about it?”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” hissed a familiar voice in Eric’s ear.

  He jumped and turned around, sweeping the darkness with the light. But all he could see was the afterimage of the bright screen from reading Isabelle’s texts.

  “What was that?” Aiden asked, his voice panicked.

  “The jinn won’t go back,” Pink Shirt taunted, his voice remarkably calm. “It’s too powerful. You gentlemen are out of your league.”

  “Where is he?” shouted Aiden. “How’s he talking to us?”

  “The tiny droplets of aura plasma he hid on our bodies so he could spy on us,” replied Eric calmly. “I was wondering when he’d get around to using them.”

  “So clever,” contemplated Pink Shirt. “As much as I’d love to be there in person, you’ve locked me out, and I can’t risk burying the chamber by forcing my way in. This building is too old and damaged, too far gone. I collapsed an entire wall just looking for you two in the library.”

  “What do you want?” demanded Eric. “You can’t control this thing. If you let it out, it’ll kill us all, you included.”

  “Oh, I don’t intend to let it out. I’m not stupid.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s a gift, of course.”

  Of course. For the bosses he hoped to impress. “You can’t be serious. What would they do with something like this?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe I will know. Maybe they’ll let me in. Maybe they’ll share their secrets with me. But first…I need that key.”