Pink Shirt parked the SUV in the empty high school parking lot and the three of them stepped out into the warm, early-evening sunshine.
“Creek Bend High School,” said the nameless man in pink. “That’s one school. So where’s the other one?”
Eric and Aiden looked at each other. There was nothing here that shouldn’t be. But they both knew all too well that the eyes could be fooled.
Eric withdrew the blue shard of glass from his pocket and held it up in front of his face. Peering through it, he saw that there was now another building in addition to those that were supposed to be here. A tall, narrow tower rose up behind the flat, square shape of the gymnasium.
He passed the shard to Aiden.
“I can’t believe it.”
Eric couldn’t either. It had been hard enough to believe that all these things were happening in his own hometown, but that the endgame was taking place right here at his own school? He’d been teaching here for years. Before that, he’d been a student here. He saw this building almost every day.
And yet here was the most unseen structure of them all, towering over him. His classroom overlooked the damned thing!
Pink Shirt took his turn looking through the glass and then looked back at Eric. “Excellent job, gentlemen.”
“Not yet, it’s not,” said Eric. “We still have to see what’s in there. For all we know, it’s crawling with monsters.”
“That would figure,” said Aiden. “After daydreaming about video games in class all those times, I’m probably going to die dungeon crawling right outside the cafeteria doors.”
“Irony’s a bitch,” agreed Eric.
Aiden shook his head. The irony was deafening. He still couldn’t believe this epic journey he began six years ago had led him to teaming up with his old English teacher of all people, much less that it would lead him right back to the very same high school where they first met.
Eric didn’t blame him. It seemed even more absurd to him.
Pink Shirt lowered the glass shard and examined it. “Interesting.”
“I know,” said Aiden. “I wonder how it works.”
“It was obviously a part of something larger at one point,” he observed, turning it over in his fingers. “It sounds crazy, but I hear a lot of stories in my line of work. Apparently, there are a lot of strange things out there.”
“Any stories about a glass that lets you see hidden things?” asked Aiden.
“None come to mind. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I did hear about a curious photograph of a pale-faced woman who keeps turning up in the pockets of brutally murdered men.”
“Let’s hope that remains completely unrelated to what we’re doing here,” said Eric.
“Seconded,” said Aiden.
“Agreed.” Pink Shirt handed Eric back the shard. “Let’s go.”
“Who put you in charge?” Aiden demanded.
“Nobody. But you two are just standing there.”
“Mr. Fortrell’s in charge,” Aiden decided. “I still don’t trust you. It was your people who killed Glen.”
“Fine. Understandable. Please lead the way, Mr. Fortrell.”
“It’s Eric.” He looked at Aiden. “I’m not your teacher anymore. That ship’s long gone.”
“Yes, I get it. I’m a dropout. I’m also probably legally dead by now. Get over it, already.”
The three of them set off across the campus, circling around the gymnasium to the back.
As they walked, Eric withdrew Karen’s phone and looked down at the screen.
HE STILL FEELS WEIRD TO ME
Eric nodded.
HE HAS THE SAME FEEL TO HIM AS THE COWBOY DID. AND THE FOGGY MAN LAST YEAR
Eric didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. Isabelle read his thoughts perfectly.
FATHER BILLY WAS DIFFERENT SOMEHOW
Was that because Father Billy had abandoned the organization? Had he turned out to be fundamentally good, unlike these other agents who felt no remorse at killing? Or was it because he’d been in hiding for so long, separated from the whole of the group?
THESE GUYS ARE A LITTLE BIT LIKE THE PEOPLE I WAS TRAPPED IN ALTRUSK’S HOUSE WITH, ONLY A LOT WORSE. THEY SEEM TO HAVE BEEN TOUCHED BY SOMETHING VERY, VERY DARK
Eric wasn’t sure he understood what this meant, but it was disturbing, nonetheless.
As they rounded the back corner of the gymnasium, Eric lifted the glass and peered through it again. The old schoolhouse was much smaller than the sprawling high school, but it was still pretty massive. Looking through the glass, it was impossible to fathom that anyone could possibly miss it, but without the aid of the glass, it simply wasn’t there. And neither was all the space that it occupied. It was bizarre. Even going back and forth between the two views, Eric couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
“What’s it doing here?” Aiden asked. “Why the high school?”
“It was burned at some point,” observed Eric. Almost the entire structure was charred. Half of the roof was missing. The only part that still looked untouched was the tower.
“It must have been the original high school, built back in the mid to late nineteenth century,” guessed Pink Shirt. “A fire at that time would’ve been extremely destructive. It would’ve required a new school to be built. As long as there was room for it, it’d make sense to build it in the same area.”
Eric supposed that was true.
“At some point, the old one was forgotten. People around here might think it was destroyed in the fire. More likely, I think, no one even knows that it ever existed.”
“New add-ons and renovations over the years would’ve caused the new buildings to crowd around the old one,” Eric agreed. In fact, this wing of the high school had been built right up against two sides of it, effectively fusing the new and old buildings. Knowing what he now knew, if he looked into the building’s plans, he’d probably notice some irregularities in the building’s details in this corner that no one else had ever thought twice about.
“Not so different from the asylum,” added Pink Shirt. “That building was used as offices and storage for a while after the institution was closed down, then emptied out and left unused for years. It was probably finally forgotten when the new hospital wings were added and the grounds remodeled in the eighties.”
Eric was impressed by this guy’s knowledge of Creek Bend. He’d obviously done his research.
The front doors of the old schoolhouse hung open and useless like the gaping jaws of a corpse. Although it was impossible to even see without the blue glass, there was nothing to keep out anyone who could actually find it.
It really is a key of sorts, Eric thought.
“How does it work?” asked Aiden as he took another turn peering through the glass.
“I couldn’t even begin to speculate,” replied Eric. It looked like nothing more than a piece of blue-tinted glass. It could have come from anywhere in the world. Yet it had the inexplicable ability to reveal even these deepest unseen things.
“There are countless things in the world we can’t explain,” said Pink Shirt. “It could be almost anything from true magic to extraterrestrial science.”
Eric wasn’t sure he believed in either of those things, but he did agree that the world was a vast and unpredictable place. “Whatever it is, it’s not normal.”
He led them through the doors and into a wide, gloomy hallway.
For a moment, both of his companions were disoriented by the sudden change from outside to inside, but it passed quickly as they stood together in the shadows, looking around them at the flame-gutted interior of the old schoolhouse.
“So is this officially the weirdest place either of you have ever been?” asked Aiden. “Because I think it definitely tops my list.”
Eric recalled the Altrusk house where he first met Isabelle, where the doorways didn’t lead where they should have and the building itself grew angry when things didn’t go as they were supposed to. He also remembered the cathedral with its long, winding stairs that seemed to carry him down into his own personal insanity as he struggled against the physical and emotional weight of two worlds and two timelines all struggling to occupy the same reality.
Thus far, this was nothing more than an old burned-out school that just happened to be invisible to everyone else in the world. It was remarkable, but it wasn’t the strangest place he’d ever been.
So far.
Not caring to discuss those things, he merely nodded and remained quiet.
Pink Shirt also seemed more or less unimpressed. “I’ve seen things with my own eyes I can’t believe. After a while of doing the job I do, you grow a little numb to any kind of fantasy. I can’t read a book or watch a movie. It always pales in comparison to the reality I already know.”
“What kinds of things have you seen?” Aiden asked, intrigued.
“Too many things to recount.”
“Then pick just one.”
“Fine. I encountered a demonic possession once.”
“Really?”
“I thought most of those had been explained by conditions like Tourette’s and dissociative identity disorder,” said Eric.
“Most are just that,” agreed Pink Shirt. “But the one I saw was real.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she barfed up a live squirrel that infected my partner at the time with rabies and then crawled across the ceiling, slit open her belly and pulled out her own lungs.”
“Jesus,” sighed Eric. “That’s awful.”
“The awful part was that she still refused to die.”
But Aiden was easily as fascinated as he was shocked. “What did you do with her?”
“Fed her into a crematory.”
Eric felt sick at the thought of feeding a living person, possessed by a demon or not, into a crematory. The very idea was terrible. Even worse was the casual way he said it, as if it were as natural as taking the garbage to the curb.
This wasn’t the first he’d heard of such disturbing things, either. When he met the man who called himself Father Billy, he told him about a real-life witch of some sort who also refused to die.
He didn’t know who these people were, but they sounded more and more like the most terrifying group of people on the face of the planet. They were the people who made the world’s nightmares their business. And for reasons he couldn’t help but think were likely nightmarish in their own right.
“Really quiet,” observed Pink Shirt.
It was quiet. Unnaturally so, now that Eric was listening. The sounds of the traffic and the birds outside were strangely muted, in spite of the wide-open doors and the broken windows.
The old man told him that everything became twisted when you went deeper. Perhaps they, too, were twisted now, slightly wrenched away from the reality that existed outside these burned walls.
“No visible sign that anyone’s been here in a very long time,” added Pink Shirt as he knelt down and picked a small, twisted piece of brass up off the floor.
Leaves and litter from the busy campus had blown in through the open doorway and collected in the corners and along the walls. The subtleties of the scene were powerful. Eric saw no vandalism, no soda cans or bottles. Only the things that were light enough to be carried in on the wind. It was what wasn’t here that spoke the loudest, just as Aiden had described.
He looked down at his cell phone again. Without having to speak his question, Isabelle gave him the answer he was looking for: IT’S THE SAME AS ALL THE REST, BUT A LOT STRONGER. AND I DON’T FEEL THE DARK PRESENCE I FELT ON HOSLER
Pink Shirt glanced over at Eric at the sound of the incoming text message, but said nothing.
THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE THERE, INSTEAD. SOMETHING A LOT MORE…
Profound? Thought Eric.
YEAH. I THINK SO
Eric pocketed the phone, not wanting to talk about who was texting him, and looked ahead. They were standing in front of a wide, tiled stairway. A short flight led up to the fire-damaged second floor on the left. A longer flight led down to the much darker ground floor on the right. More stairs waited above these, leading to a third floor. “Where do we go first?”
“Split up?” suggested Aiden. “Each take a floor? Cover more ground?”
Eric glanced at Pink Shirt. He still didn’t trust this man. He wasn’t convinced it was wise to let him wander unsupervised. What if he found what was hidden here? Would he then turn on them?
But the man in the pink shirt said, “Spreading out would definitely speed this up, but we probably shouldn’t get too separated. We still don’t know what we’ll find here.” Standing up, he held up the piece of brass he was studying. “These doors were blown open in the original fire. Hard enough to shatter the hardware. Here.” He tossed Eric the item. “A little souvenir.”
Eric examined the item. It was a little sliver of brass from the doors, twisted and partially melted. He hadn’t paid them much attention as he walked in. It was clear they’d been burned, but now he saw that they had indeed been torn open, as if in a blast. “It’s like a bomb went off here.”
“It’s been my experience,” said Pink Shirt, “that in situations like these, it’s rarely something as simple as a bomb.”
Aiden looked around at the debris surrounding the doorway. There were many such slivers of brass, now that he was looking. “If not a bomb, then what?”
“Hard to say. But nothing else in this area is as damaged as the door.”
He was right. Flames had ripped through this area, but only the door seemed to have been blown apart.
“I suggest we stick together and be careful.”
“We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up then,” decided Eric.
Pink Shirt nodded and began walking down the steps ahead of them.
Aiden followed close behind him.
Eric lingered for a moment at the landing, his eyes washing over the empty building around him. Something about this place felt strange. It was more than just an unseen structure. He had the distinct feeling that something about this place was very meaningful somehow…
But he couldn’t quite grasp what it was…
He turned and looked behind him. For just an instant there, he thought he glimpsed a shadow moving.
His imagination.
Nothing more.