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  Sight Unseen

  Andrew Neiderman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1987 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition May 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-793-7

  Also by Andrew Neiderman

  After Life

  Duplicates

  The Maddening

  Perfect Little Angels

  Deadly Verdict

  The Magic Bullet

  The Solomon Organization

  Guardian Angel

  Teacher’s Pet

  Child’s Play

  For Art, Gene, Gussie, Rosalie, and Trudy, teachers who had Gypsy Eyes.

  Preface

  In the beginning there was always that high-pitched ringing in his ears. It didn’t last long, but that didn’t matter. It forced him to close his eyes, and when he did, the visions would come. Pictures would flash on the inside of his eyelids. It was like going to the movies.

  He wanted to open his eyes and put an end to it; he wanted to ignore the visions because most often they were terrifying. But at the same time, they were fascinating. It was as though his eyes had been glued shut. He couldn’t open them if he wanted to; at least, not until the sequences were finished.

  Usually the people in the visions were strangers. He had no idea why he would see them walking, driving, or talking to one another. In some of the more violent visions, he would see someone get hit by a car or someone slip on a stairway and fall violently to the bottom.

  Once he saw a long scene in which a man was folding clothes in his bedroom and putting them in his dresser drawer. Suddenly the door opened and another man came in, walked right up to the first man and stabbed him in the stomach. The killer had a dark face with gray eyes, but he knew neither him nor the victim. It was a particularly vicious murder because the killer kept turning the knife in the victim’s chest. He didn’t want to watch it, but he couldn’t open his eyes until the blood had started pouring out over the attacker’s knife and hand.

  He first thought they might be pictures from comic books he had read or from movies he had seen, but gradually he realized there was something different about his visions, something more realistic. Sometimes he felt like he was a human radio receiving transmissions from far away. He even imagined his face glowing like the dial when the visions occurred. His face always felt hot afterward, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he was always flushed.

  He was only ten and in the fifth grade the first time it happened. It was a beautiful spring day, and the class had gone out for recess. There was a small playground just behind the school. Even though all it had were swings, a sliding pond, a monkey bars, and a five foot square sandbox, the class couldn’t wait to get out to it.

  Mona Benson was on the swings, going higher and higher. Mrs. Schoonmaker wasn’t watching her, although he had heard their teacher repeatedly warn Mona about going too high and not holding on tightly.

  He turned from his game of marbles to look at her. It was as though someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Mona was a chubby girl with eyes that reminded him of fish. She wore an ecstatic smile as she kicked her feet toward the sky. Her teeth glittered in the sunlight. For a moment he was jealous of her obvious pleasure, and he returned with less interest to the game of marbles. He was half tempted to go to the swings himself.

  But then the ringing started, and he closed his eyes. In the vision that followed, he saw her swinging and then saw Ralph Beekman pointing at her, making fun of the way her dress went up over her knees. She turned to shout something back, and when she did, she released her grip on the chain. A moment later she slipped from the swing and started to fall, but in his vision it was a slow descent. She fell like a kite whose string had snapped.

  He was able to open his eyes before he envisioned her hitting the ground. Bobby Smith was telling him it was his turn to shoot a marble, but for a few moments he couldn’t remember what he was doing. He could see Bobby talking, his face animated, but he couldn’t hear him, and he didn’t understand what he wanted. Then the screaming began. They all turned toward the swings. Mona was sprawled on the ground.

  Afterward, they found out that Ralph Beekman had been teasing her. She lost her balance when she turned abruptly on the swings and slipped off. She had broken her arm. When they went back into school, Mrs. Schoonmaker lectured about safety to the class. All of the children had become frightened and quiet, but none were as frightened and quiet as he.

  He couldn’t help feeling guilty about what had happened. He was afraid Mrs. Schoonmaker would look at him and know that he could have warned Mona. She would see just how flushed and excited he was, and then force him to tell her why in front of all the others. Fortunately, she attributed his look to the general excitement caused by Mona’s accident. When it came time to leave for home, he said nothing to any of his friends. He rushed out of the school as quickly as he could.

  He couldn’t wait to get home to tell his mother what had happened. She was in the kitchen doing a crossword puzzle and didn’t want him to interrupt her concentration, but he was persistent. Finally, she looked up, and he told her about the ringing and the vision and Mona Benson. For a moment she said nothing and did nothing. Then she tilted her head and smirked.

  “Did you read about such a thing in one of your comic books?” she asked. “I told you not to buy those scary ones.”

  “No. I didn’t read it,” he said indignantly. “And I’m not making it up. It happened.”

  “Did you tell anyone else this story?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t ever tell people things like that. Who knows? In this crazy world, someone’s liable to hear and believe you.” She went back to her crossword book, signaling an end to such a discussion.

  “So what?” he asked. Couldn’t she see how important all this was and how much of a dramatic effect it had had on him? Sometimes his mother made him feel invisible.

  “So what? So then they’ll kidnap you and try to get you to do it for them.” She leaned toward him and made her eyes big the way she always did when she wanted to frighten him away from doing something. “Someone will take you to a racetrack and try to get you to tell which horse will win so they can bet on it and make a lot of money.”

  He thought for a moment. Did what happened in the playground mean that he could do such a thing?

  “Maybe we should do that,” he said.

  She shook her head and sat back.

  “I’m going to tell your grandmother to talk to you. She knows more about what can happen to someone if he plays around with ideas like that. She’ll tell you how dangerous it is to tell such stories. She’s seen terrible things happen to people in Europe.”

  “I’m not telling stories,” he said. “I’m telling the truth,” he added, but with much less enthusiasm. References to his grandmother’s knowledge of terrible things done in Europe did drive fear into him. He understood that his grandmother had lived through horrors, even though the details were always kept well hidden from him. If any discussions ever wound their way back to the past, he was asked to leave the room.

  “Hopeless,” his mother sa
id, opening her crossword puzzle book again. “You’re getting to act more and more like your father every day.”

  “Could Daddy see things happen before they happened too?” he asked excitedly. He knew so little about his father as it was. He thought it might make things better if he and his father shared something. Maybe this was why his mother kept his father such a mystery.

  “Your father? He couldn’t see the future if it was right before him. He couldn’t see the present. That’s why he was a bum. The best thing I did for us was get a divorce from him and send him packing.”

  “Then why did you say I was acting more like Daddy?” he asked with disappointment.

  “Because he was stubborn and stupid, just the way you’re acting now. Go do your homework and leave such stories for the comic books and the radio.”

  She went back to her crossword book, and he asked no more questions. Instinctively, he understood that she couldn’t give him the right answers anyway.

  As far as he knew, she didn’t tell his grandmother. He wanted to tell her himself, but his mother had made him afraid to do so. He said nothing more about it, and she never brought it up. He kept it all to himself for as long as he could, no matter how many times the ringing occurred and the pictures flashed before him.

  He kept the visions locked away until one night, when his grandmother came into his room and looked at a picture he had drawn. He was really just doodling, but the images had appeared so quickly on the paper that he was surprised by them himself. He had drawn the face of a boy, not unlike himself, but he had made the eyes extra large and had drawn lines out from them as though they radiated sunlight.

  She looked at the picture and then she looked at him. Their gaze locked, and in that moment he knew she understood his secret. And she was afraid for him.

  1

  David sat on the ground by the side of his house, keeping himself in the shadows so he could remain unseen. He leaned back against the egg-white stucco wall and stared into the night. From the outside looking in, the lights in his house looked yellow, yet when they spilled their illumination through the slightly opened venetian blinds on the windows, they drew irregular, pale-white fingers over the small lawn that sloped downward to the driveway.

  As the breeze blew through the large maple tree beside the house, the shadows cast by the branches shifted and stirred like sleeping beasts, unhappy with anything that disturbed their nocturnal peace.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds coming through the wall. He heard the audience laughter emerging from the cathedral-shaped RCA radio in the living room. When he closed his eyes like this, it was as though he could see through the wall into the small living room. The radio was on a square wooden table under the front window, so if they wanted to sit out on the front porch during warm summer evenings and listen to music, they could do so.

  But right now his grandmother was sitting in her soft cushioned, maple-wood chair. Her feet were up on the small, brown hassock, and her hands were pressed softly against each other in her lap as if she were getting herself ready to applaud. She was settled comfortably in the warm sounds that came from the glowing radio dial, staring at it as if she could not only hear but follow the sounds back through the radio, through the wires and airwaves to the studio to see the scenes being vocalized.

  She was listening to the “Jack Benny Show,” and David could easily envision her grinning. Usually, he sat with her, intrigued with her reactions almost as much as he was with the magic of sound effects and being able to hear people speaking hundreds of miles away.

  Actually, he was fascinated with his grandmother. She embodied the entire mystery of his family. Through her and her memories, the ones she was willing to relate, he had traveled back in time, moving over the stories and images like a blind one touching stones of different sizes and textures. His fingers groped for an understanding. She was weaving the fabric of his identity, and he longed for it to be completed.

  Because of the vivid way in which she described their relatives, he felt as if he knew them all: his great grandmother and great grandfather, their fathers and mothers, and their grandparents. Some of them had been captured in the sepia photographs that were pasted in the yellow cloth-covered album. They stared out at him with what he thought were expressions of curiosity and wonder. He imagined that they had been fascinated by the camera, but he also fantasized their having an extrasensory experience through which they could look into the camera lens and see him looking at them years and years later.

  All of them gathered within him, spoke to him in a myriad of whispers, tugged on his imagination, and forced him to wonder and to question. He listened for answers.

  He had come to believe that the blood of his ancestors commingled within him to form a unique descendant. Their passions clashed; their emotions did battle, and the result was what and who he was. He told no one about these ideas, not even his grandmother, although he was tempted to do so many times because he believed she would understand.

  Perhaps he was a new kind of creature. That idea tormented him. He believed that he was different from all his friends, even though the differences were not immediately visible. He was afraid that some of them had begun to sense it. This idea was giving him nightmares. Maybe there was a werewolf in his past or even a vampire. One day he might be transformed into something horrible. There were nights he awoke abruptly and sat up to actually feel his face and body to be sure it was all the same.

  He couldn’t imagine telling his mother these things. If anything, he was growing further and further away from her. In fact, he was beginning to think that his mother was merely a surrogate for his true maternal parent. He had camped within her for nine months, been born, and now grew into something so alien he could barely converse with her. Rarely did he feel the need to tell about his deeper feelings anymore, and as long as he didn’t tell his grandmother, there was no one he could talk to about them. It was something he had to deal with alone.

  And that was why he was often alone; why, as he had done so many times before, he had gone out of the house tonight to sit in the darkness and think. Wasn’t there anyone out there like him? Someone who felt and saw the same things? Loneliness made the shadows deeper. It distorted sounds and made the car horns he heard coming from the village seem like the dying moans of metallic beasts.

  Their house was located about halfway up a long hill that rose above Centerville proper. Until the summer tourists came to stay at the two bungalow colonies above and beyond them, the street was relatively quiet. Tonight it seemed even more subdued than usual. The warm, strong breeze played on the branches of trees that rustled leaves and scratched the face of the moon. Across the street two bats, seemingly tormented by the streetlight, flew madly around the pole. Even though he couldn’t see them, he heard the murmuring voices of the Novaks and Levines who were sitting next door on the porch of their two story apartment house talking themselves onto the threshold of sleep.

  It was an unusually warm spring night. The summer resort season in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York loomed just over the next month or so. Already, bungalow colony owners had opened water pipes and cleaned out their units. Everywhere, people were painting, washing, mending. The world was getting ready to change again. His quiet, rural community would soon become a bustling urban neighborhood.

  The approaching summer spread itself out before him. He could see every day, every moment. His mother would have to work longer hours at Rosenblatt’s drugstore, handling the sale of nonprescription items and sometimes working the soda fountain. They couldn’t afford to send him to summer camp, but his mother would make an arrangement with Mr. Kaplan so he could go swimming at the sulfur-spring lake just outside of town any time he wanted. He would enter the ring-toss contest and baseball games at the school, part of the recreational program run by the village. Last year he won the junior ring-toss championship.

  He and his friends would roam the village streets at night. Sometimes he would go
to the movies, but most of the time they would scrounge up some change to play the pinball machines or would just sit on the stoops by the corner stores and watch the older kids gather around their cars. There would be music and noise, and often he would feel a great excitement. He would believe in himself and fantasize many things.

  He was going to be fifteen years old this summer, and he felt it was going to be the most important summer of his life so far. He did not know why he had this belief. So many times lately, he would say things or think something and be unable to explain, even to himself, where it had come from. His mind, racing forward, reached the ends of stories before their beginnings were even completed. Mrs. Stang, his English teacher, stopped asking how the class thought a story would end. David’s hand would shoot up almost automatically, and he would rattle off the events as though he were the author. She said he must be reading ahead, but he denied it vehemently because it wasn’t true. But neither she nor his friends believed that.

  Now it was getting to be the same way with the movies. His friends hated to go with him. It did no good to swear he had never seen the pictures before. He tried to keep his knowledge to himself, but lately that was getting harder and harder to do.

  Things flowed and spilled too fast. He couldn’t stop them. His thoughts became words so quickly he barely had time to consider what they meant. It was as if—and this was what frightened him the most—as if someone else lived within him, and he had no control of this second self. He had nightmares about that, too. He even went so far as to stand before the mirror in the bathroom and open his mouth widely to see if he could spot someone.

  It was a weird idea. He would be the first to admit it, but his imagination had no boundaries. It was as if thoughts and dreams, and especially nightmares intermingled. All he had to do was stare at something for a while, just the way he was staring at the fingers of light on the lawn, and something would come to him.