Eric pulled into the crumbling, weed-choked parking lot of the unseen motel as Paul and Holly stared at the building, amazed. Only a moment ago, there was nothing here. And yet the long, ugly structure that stood before them had obviously been here a very long time.
“Where are we?” asked Kevin. “What’s going on?”
Paul ignored him. “So it’s like those other places? Nobody but us can see it?”
“Not many people,” replied Eric. “Some agents, I guess.”
“Wait…” said Kevin. “We’re at one of those unseen places? That is totally unfair! I want to see the unseen places! I’ve never seen anything unseen!”
“You’re not missing much,” Holly assured him, wrinkling her nose at the dirty little motel.
Eric sat staring at the building. Specifically, he was staring at the one door that stood open. That one had been kicked in by a very angry cowboy last time he was here. “We have to be quick about this,” he said. “Most of these places have some sort of alarm. There’s a good chance that as soon as we step inside, the agents will know we’re here.”
“But the agents already know you’re here,” reasoned Paul.
“Yeah, but they don’t necessarily know that we know about the unseen.”
He nodded. “We’ll be showing more of our hand. Right. Good point.”
The unseen weren’t just invisible. Nor did they disappear and reappear. They were always there, but for reasons unfathomable to Eric, everyone simply ignored these places. They didn’t even notice the space they were taking up. They were oblivious to the extra time it took to walk around one when it stood in their way. People even ignored them in pictures and on film. They ignored them on maps. Even news articles, land records, deeds—anything that could identify the existence of an unseen location—seemingly disappeared whenever that place turned unseen. It was impossible for most people to find.
The whole thing was terribly difficult for Eric to comprehend. It gave him a splitting headache if he thought too hard about it.
“Wasn’t there an unseen place right next to the school?” asked Paul. “Why’d we have to come all the way out here?”
“The old high school is more unseen than the others,” he replied.
“How can something be more unseen?” asked Kevin.
“Even a seer like Aiden can’t find it without a piece of that looking glass.”
“Which, apparently, this steampunk weirdo has,” said Paul.
Eric nodded. “Yeah.” He’d always assumed that Aiden’s glass shard was a one-of-a-kind thing, but if Steampunk had one too, then how many others might still be out there? “But I don’t need anything like that to find this place. This one’s the easiest for me to see. I don’t know why.”
There were nine unseen places in Creek Bend that he knew about. But this was the only one he’d always been able to see. He didn’t even realize that he was the only one who could see it until Aiden pointed it out to him.
“I keep expecting him to turn up,” said Paul.
Eric nodded. “I know. It’s weird.” Aiden just kept coming up. Was it only because he was the one who revealed the unseen to him in the first place?
“He’d better not pop out of somewhere and taze me again.”
“I’m sure he knows better than that now,” Eric assured him.
“He’d better. I’m still not over the first time.”
“I know.”
On one hand, Aiden’s only connection was his rare talent for actually seeing the unseen. He had nothing to do with the fire of 1881 or the gray agents of 1962. He wasn’t even born until 1991. But on the other hand, it was the events of 1881 that ultimately led to the old high school turning unseen. And Aiden’s mentor in all things unseen, the late Glen Normer, was himself mentored by the man responsible for the more “deeply” unseen state of the schoolhouse today that rendered it invisible even to talented seers like Aiden. This same man was also known to have once been in possession of the very looking glass from which Aiden’s shard (and presumably Steampunk Monk’s as well) originated.
It was all connected. But were those connections significant to what was going on today?
Now wasn’t the time to think about it. He had work to do.
“Give me a hand,” he said. He jumped out of the vehicle, walked around to the back and lifted the gate.
Spooky looked lazily up at him and yawned. He seemed perfectly happy back here, regardless of the bagged corpse.
Paul stepped up beside him and frowned down at the body. It shouldn’t have been any more disturbing than any other bag of trash, and yet it was. “That’s not right,” he said, looking at the shape of the creature’s twisted face staring back at him through the stretched plastic.
“Let’s just get it over with,” said Eric.
Together they pulled it up and over the bumper and let it thump heavily to the ground.
A car drove by on the road. Its driver was oblivious to the fact that they were there, oblivious to the very existence of the motel and even the parking lot, but they both looked nervously after it as it sped past.
“This sucks,” said Paul. “I really don’t like touching this thing.”
“It’s just a dead body,” said Eric. “Man up.”
“Pretend it’s a mannequin,” suggested Kevin, snickering.
Paul shot the boy a furious look. “I don’t like mannequins,” he growled.
“That’s not what I heard,” said Holly, looking back at him from over the seat, her lips curled into an impish smirk.
Kevin snorted laughter and held his hand up for a high five. But Holly wasn’t looking at him, so all he could do was fish blindly for a moment before giving up and making like he was only scratching his head.
Paul grunted, unamused, and grabbed the creature’s ankles.
Eric grabbed the other side and together they dragged the dead creature through the broken door and deposited it on the floor in the corner of the room.
“So how many corpses you got stashed around this town, anyway?”
“Only a couple.” He thought about the agents he encountered last year. The man in the pink shirt and the cowboy. Both of them lay dead and rotting in separate unseen places.
He looked around the room, remembering the last time he was here, when Aiden first brought him to this place.
Inside one of these rooms, as far as he knew, was Glen Normer’s skeleton. According to Aiden, his old mentor was murdered in this building, shot execution style by the agents he turned his back on years before.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Please,” grunted Paul.
But as they started for the door, there was a noise, as if something had fallen in the next room.
They stopped and listened. But the noise didn’t repeat itself.
“There shouldn’t be anyone here,” whispered Eric.
“Maybe it’s an animal,” suggested Paul. “Raccoon or something…”
Could animals see the unseen? He didn’t even know.
The intelligent thing to do, of course, was leave as fast as possible. After all, if someone dangerous was lurking somewhere in this building—like another agent, for example—they probably would’ve been heard when they drove up. Or perhaps there was another monster, just waiting to tear apart anyone stupid enough to go looking for it.
Yes, that would definitely be the intelligent thing to do…
“Isabelle…” said Eric, as he pulled out his phone and charger.
GOT IT
“What about Isabelle?” asked Paul. “What’re you telling her?”
“Just taking precautions,” he replied. He didn’t have to say anything to her. He barely had to think them. Isabelle always got his messages more quickly than he could put them into words. It was the best part of having her in his head. By now she was already on the phone with Holly, telling her to get behind the wheel and keep her eyes peeled for trouble. If something bad turned up, they’d have a fast getaway waiting for them. Or, as a last resort, another of Holly’s devastating thrusts. They’d stay in contact from now until they were done, with Isabelle relaying their every move to her.
“Okay, I know this is your thing, not mine,” said Paul, “but I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, and investigating the mysterious noise in a freaky-ass, deserted motel is never a good idea.”
He fumbled with the phone until the flashlight came on again and then walked toward the bathroom. For a while, Aiden and Glen lived here, hiding from the rest of the world as they carried out their research into the unseen of Creek Bend. Being the paranoid nutcase that Eric supposed was the only inevitable outcome for someone who dared to quit the nameless organization, Glen had made a number of less-than-state-of-the-art improvements to the building. Several of the rooms were sealed from the front and the only way to pass between them was through holes that had been knocked through the walls between the bathtubs and closets in adjoining rooms.
Peering ahead with the light, he stepped into the bathtub, through the gaping hole in the wall and into the tub in the next room.
“I’m telling you,” whispered Paul. “This is a bad idea.”
“I’m not making you follow me,” Eric whispered back.
“The only idea worse than going to investigate the scary noise is following the idiot who’s investigating the scary noise”
“Then why are you following me?”
“I have no fucking idea!”
There was nothing in the second room. It was empty except for some garbage strewn across the floor.
Eric made his way to the closet and peered into the next room. This one was darker than the others. The windows had been covered, blacked out so that a light could be turned on at night with no chance of even a seer noticing that someone was squatting here. It rendered the room utterly dark, even during the day.
Paul was right. What was he even doing? What did he expect to find in here? And how did he expect to protect himself when it turned out to be something terrifyingly dangerous?
He stepped through the hole in the closet and shined his light around the room.
Immediately he saw something that didn’t belong.
Sprawled on the floor was a dead body.