They pulled onto Milwaukee Street and Eric began looking for anything that appeared deserted.
He still wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The lot on Hosler had been abandoned for decades, while the apartment might have only sat unused for a few years.
They drove all the way past the city limits and then turned back, but still they saw nothing. On their third pass, Paul said, “Maybe it’s on one of the side streets.”
“Could be,” agreed Eric. But then he saw it. “Wait… Park right there.”
“Where?”
“Right there.” Eric motioned at several empty parking spots.
Paul nodded, but for some reason he drove past the empty spots and parallel parked between two minivans in front of the next building.
Eric stepped out of the truck and looked back. Empty windows, no signs or lights. It was obviously empty. How did he miss it the first two times they passed it? “Think that’s it?”
Paul walked around the front of the truck and stood beside him. “What, the jewelry store?”
Eric looked at him, confused. “No. The one next to it.”
Paul craned his neck and squinted at the building on the far side of the jewelry store. “That’s that Thai restaurant, isn’t it?”
Eric gestured in front of them. “This one.”
But Paul looked up at the building right beside them. “‘The Creek Boutique,’” he read. “Doesn’t Karen know the owner?”
“Are you serious right now?”
Paul looked down at him, confused. “What?”
“The empty store?”
“What empty store?”
“You seriously don’t see… You know what? Never mind. Let’s just go.” Eric started walking toward the building. “And yes, Karen knows the owner of the Creek Boutique.”
“Karen knows a lot of people.”
“She does.”
Paul looked around at the brightly lit streets around them, “What are we looking for again?”
Eric stepped into the doorway of the deserted store and knocked. No one answered, but he didn’t expect them to. He tried the handle. Just like the apartment and the asylum, it was unlocked. The door creaked open. “I think this is it.”
Paul had walked past the doorway and continued on past. Now, as he approached the corner of the jewelry store, he stopped and looked back. “Hey, where’d you go?”
“I’m right here. Come on. Be careful, I don’t know wha—”
“Eric?”
Eric turned, confused and looked back. “What are you—?”
“Seriously, where’d you go?”
“I’m right in front of you…”
But Paul walked right past him without looking at him.
What was he doing? Was this supposed to be some kind of stupid joke? Eric stepped out of the doorway and walked after him.
When Paul turned around, he nearly collided with him. “Jesus!” he cried. “What the hell? Where were you?”
“I was right there.”
“Well say something! That was freaky.”
“I… You seriously didn’t see or hear me?”
Paul stared at him. He looked completely baffled. “What?”
“Nothing. Just come on.”
Eric stepped into the doorway again.
Paul had taken a few steps more and then stopped. Again he was looking around, perplexed. “Eric?”
Eric reached out and seized his arm. Paul jumped and turned to look at him. Then his eyes drifted up to the building around them, widening with wonder. “What the…? How did…? Where did that come from?”
Eric looked up at the building. “What do you mean? It’s been here this whole time.”
“No…it hasn’t.”
“Seriously?”
“Dude, until just now, there was The Creek Boutique and there was the jewelry store. They were right next to each other. There was nothing in between them. Now… Well…” He gestured up at the previously unseen building. “Just what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, but come on.” He led Paul into the building and they stood looking around the empty, dust-covered room.
Things were finally beginning to fit together. First an apartment that just disappeared into thin air, then the hospital building that wasn’t there, then was there, then simply wasn’t anymore. Now this. It wasn’t that they were disappearing at all. It was just that he couldn’t see them all the time. But what the hell kind of sense did that make?
Karen’s phone began to ring again. It was Isabelle.
“I just remembered something. I totally never thought much about it until just now, but I heard a rumor once. I thought it was just nonsense but… Well… Maybe not…”
“What is it?”
“Apparently, there’s supposedly a huge, Victorian mansion standing in the middle of downtown Seattle that nobody can even see.”
“Really?”
“So they say.”
Eric nodded. “Hidden places...” Naturally something like this wouldn’t be limited to just Creek Bend.
“Right.”
“What do they say about that mansion?”
“Nothing. Only that it’s there. Nobody knows why or why nobody can see it.”
“Weird.”
“Not very helpful, I guess…”
“It might be. It’s worth considering. I mean, if there’s one place like that, there could be more.”
“Exactly.”
“But why?”
“Maybe that’s what you’re there to find out.”
Eric considered this. That seemed very similar to what was going on here. But how was it that he could see these places when Paul couldn’t? What made him different?
He wondered now if this had something to do with the nonsense Pink Shirt was saying back at the institution. What was it he said? Everybody had forgotten?
And now that he thought about it, perhaps this explained why Aiden was so surprised to see him looking back at him as he stood in the alley. He’d probably slipped between those two buildings countless times and watched everyone walk right past him, completely blind to him, exactly the way Paul had walked past him just a moment ago.
It also explained why Paul completely ignored those empty parking spots right out front. If he couldn’t see the building, he probably couldn’t see the parking spots in front of it.
“Be careful,” said Isabelle, then hung up without waiting for a response.
Eric lowered the phone from his ear but didn’t return it to his pocket. He was probably going to need its light soon. While it was plenty bright enough to see here at the front of the store, the shadows quickly grew deeper toward the back, and whatever he’d come here looking for obviously wasn’t in this room.
Somehow, the wide-open space of the empty sales floor was even more unnerving than the narrow corridors of the institution. He felt exposed and vulnerable.
Paul looked up at the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. “So this is your thing you do, now? Creepy-ass, impossible places? Weird mysteries?”
“I guess so,” replied Eric as he made his way toward the back.
“Never pegged you for the Scooby Doo life.”
“Never asked for it.”
“Not saying it’s a bad thing. Just… You know. Unusual.”
“That’s putting it mildly, I think.”
Paul agreed that it was.
There was an open corridor at the back, leading into a storage room. Except for some changing rooms on the left side of the sales floor, it was the only place to go but back out the way they’d come.
“I mean, doesn’t some of this stuff scare the shit out of you?”
Eric recalled the old woman with her all-wrong, shadowed face and wicked claws. “You have no idea.”
There was a small restroom and an office on the left and a break room on the right. At the end of the corridor was a swinging door leading into an empty storage room and a back door that served as an emergency exit. There was also a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor, not unlike the one that took him from Aiden’s empty apartment down to the tavern. Except this one was not hidden behind a door. It spiraled up from one corner of the store room.
The place was completely emptied out. No sign remained of what used to be stored here. The changing rooms suggested a clothing store of some sort, but it could have been anything from kid’s clothes to tuxedo rentals. The passage of time was evident everywhere he looked, yet the past itself was wiped clean.
Karen’s phone sang again and Eric glanced down at the name on the screen. Penelope Whitter. One of Karen’s cousins. That was not likely for him. He let the Spice Girls play on. Penelope could leave a voice mail.
“So what’s the deal, anyway?” asked Paul. “Why are you so determined to see this thing through?”
“I don’t know. It’s Aiden, I guess. That note I found. I’m worried he’s in trouble.”
“I get that. But Aiden’s not your problem. You’re not responsible for him. He’s not even a kid anymore. What’s he now? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
Eric shrugged. He was right. It had nothing to do with him. And yet, he felt compelled to push on.
“I mean, I get why you went last time. You had that weird, recurring dream that you couldn’t stop thinking about.”
Eric started up the steps. “Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Besides, I learned the dream might drive me crazy if I didn’t keep going.”
“Reason enough.”
“This isn’t so different. When I saw Aiden, I just couldn’t drop it. It’s like I have to know what’s going on. I have to know why he disappeared. How he disappeared. Where he’s been all this time. What he’s doing back now. And I just keep going. It’s like I need to know.”
“Maybe it’s whatever it was you found last time, down in that cathedral.”
Eric shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t remember what I found. It was…significant. I remember that. But I couldn’t tell you anything else. It’s just gone. After all I did, I don’t know what it was I discovered in that God-forsaken hole in the ground.”
“You told us when you first came back that you still remembered it in your dreams.”
“That’s what I was told. But… I don’t really remember my dreams anymore. All I ever seem to remember in the mornings are vague little snippets.”
“You know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“I think maybe that place did something to you. I think it made you special somehow. I think it made you the kind of person who does these kinds of things. Maybe you have some kind of greater purpose now. And maybe this Aiden kid is a part of that.”
“What, like some kind of strange destiny thing?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
Eric laughed. “Sounds like a bad book series.”
“I just said ‘maybe.’ It wouldn’t be any more unbelievable than that thing I hit with my truck a little while ago.”
“True,” agreed Eric. “Maybe you’re right.” Now that he thought about it, maybe that was why he could suddenly see these places. Maybe this was a part of what he found at the cathedral that day. Maybe that journey left him with this fantastic ability to see things that were hidden. Or… “Or maybe I’m just too stupid to know when to take my dumb ass home and stay there.”
“Or there’s always that.”
The second floor was mostly open, like the sales floor below. It seemed too large for only storage, yet it had not been turned into an apartment and was not readily accessible to customers with the stairs leading up from the back corner of the store room. Eric wondered what the point of such a space was.
There was an exit in the rear and windows on both sides, lending enough light to the space that he no longer needed to rely on the light of his cell phone.
“This kind of reminds me of Badgers,” said Paul as he emerged from the steps behind him.
Eric glanced back at him. “Really?”
“Yeah. Kind of the same layout.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“You should go sometime. I bet Karen would like it.”
“I think she does, actually. I think she and the girlfriends like to go there.”
Madge Badgers was a trendy art shop and gallery with a jazz bar on the second floor. It was one of Creek Bend’s little hidden treasures, a favorite social place for sophisticated locals. It was a frequent gathering place for many of the other teachers in the district, too, but Eric was never all that interested in spending his evenings there. He’d rather stay home and read.
“So only you haven’t been there.”
“Seems that way.”
“You’re really boring. You know that?”
Eric raised an eyebrow.
“You know… When you’re not adventuring into strange worlds and fighting golems and shit.”
Eric turned his attention back to the empty room in front of them. He supposed he couldn’t argue with that. He never was very good at socializing. Lecturing, he could handle. He didn’t mind running a classroom. He liked talking with the kids. But he never felt all that comfortable mingling with his own peers. It was a miracle he ever managed to get married, when he thought about it. But when he met Karen…
Well, Karen was practically a force of nature. She completely derailed his life. She was so beautiful, so enchanting, so thrilling. He lost himself. He fell in love in a way he never imagined, almost literally, like Alice plummeting down the rabbit hole. She showed him things he never knew existed.
He started across the floor, focusing himself. There would be plenty of time to reminisce on that magical autumn once he’d sorted out this business with the hidden places.
And right now, he saw something familiar.
There was no furniture up here. Nor was there any of the litter that had been strewn about the apartment over the tavern. But there was plywood nailed up over the window in the far left corner. Already, he could see the light shining through a hole in the board.
It was the same setup he found inside the apartment. Two pieces of plywood, each with a hole drilled into it, and about an inch of empty space between them so that one could only see through at a fixed angle. Just like before, peering through these holes revealed the same strange, rectangular tower rising over the rooftops of the stores on the other side of the street.
Again with that mysterious building… Eric still didn’t recognize it. And clearly it was important.
But why? What was so special about it?
“Come look at this,” he said. “What building is that?”
Paul bent and peered through the hole. “I…don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it before. Is it part of the courthouse or something?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I guess that would be more in that direction, wouldn’t it?” He gestured toward the northwest. “Library, maybe? No… I don’t think I know. That’s really weird.”
“It is.”
“Maybe it’s like this place. Hidden.”
It was certainly possible. He’d already found three such hidden places. If he drove back to Hosler, he’d probably even find that he’d been to four. Apparently they weren’t that uncommon.
“I saw this same setup at the apartment, too. And there was a similar one in that asylum. It has to mean something.” He walked over to the next window, but from here the mysterious building was obscured. He looked down at the street outside. People drove by. Two teenage girls were walking past on the other side of the street. No one glanced in the direction of the empty store. Could they really not see this place? It was hard to imagine that he was actually invisible to everyone out there.
But as he considered it, he wondered how many of the world’s greatest mysteries might be explained by such places.
“What’s that on the wall?”
Eric turned and looked. It was another of those strange, spiraling symbols, drawn between two of the windows. Looking around, he spied another one on the west wall.
There always seemed to be two of them.
“What does it mean?”
But Eric didn’t know. He took a quick picture of each of the symbols and then realized that the battery was running low. He didn’t like the idea of losing the phone. Most of the time he hated these things, but today was a massive exception. Without the phone, he’d be left without Isabelle. And he needed Isabelle. If only for emotional support.
“Do you have a good charge on your phone?”
Paul withdrew it and looked at the screen. Like Karen’s it was an iPhone. “Yeah, mine’s pretty well full. I charged it last night.”
That was good.
He bent and examined the symbol between the windows. Just like the ones in the institution, it was a spiral of numbers. The last five digits were the same again. Two, three, two ones and a six. He still had no idea what these numbers meant, but they were clearly important in some way.
He needed to get back into the apartment and look at the symbols over there. Maybe once he had them all, he’d be able to discern a pattern of some sort.
He wished he’d had the foresight to take pictures while he was in there the first time, but it hadn’t yet occurred to him. Besides, unless he’d also thought to send them promptly to Karen, they would’ve been lost along with his phone anyway.
“Is this what we were looking for in here?”
“I think so. I don’t see anything else.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I think I need to go back to the tavern.”
“There’s a plan I can get behind. It’s a little early yet, but you know. I’ll do what needs to be done.”
Eric chuckled. “Right.”
The two of them turned and walked back across the room toward the stairs. As they approached it, they were surprised by someone hurrying up from the storeroom below. At first, Eric thought that it must be Pink Shirt again, but when the person came into view, he saw that it was Aiden, who immediately froze at the sight of the two of them standing there.
For a moment, all three of them stood that way, startled and uncertain. Then Aiden cursed and bolted back down the steps.
Immediately, Eric set off after him, with Paul right on his heels. “Wait! Aiden!”
But Aiden had no intention of waiting. He ran down the steps as fast as he could go, which was considerably faster than Eric was able to navigate the steps.
When he finally neared the bottom, Aiden turned and withdrew a handgun from the pocket of his hoodie. Surprised and left with nowhere to run, Eric ducked and covered his face just as the weapon went off. He heard the report, felt something sail over his head, and then Paul let out a startled grunt and fell back onto the steps behind him.
Eric turned, terrified as Aiden fled through the fire exit and vanished for the second time that day.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t care about Aiden or about the mysterious symbols or about those damned hidden places. None of that mattered.
All that mattered was that his brother had just been shot.