The Unseen (2 page)

Closing the door behind him, he looked for light switches and began to examine the space. His mind took in all the architectural details as he explored, looking for his first target: the break room.

He found it on the far end of a row of cubicles, a smallish office behind a glass wall, with a table, some chairs, and a soda machine. Casually, he strolled the floor to the break room and entered. Just behind the door he found an under-the-counter refrigerator and opened it.

No funky smells. Good. Often, when you opened these refrigerators, you were greeted by the whiff of month-old Chinese food or curdled milk, long forgotten by the office workers who had stashed them there. Usually he ended up cleaning out rotten leftovers from these office refrigerators, performing a crude service in return for the edible food he took.

That was his real reason for seeking out office break rooms and refrigerators: they always held whole lunches packed and brought from home, leftover pizzas from office parties, takeout orders left untouched. Lucas couldn't remember the last time he'd had to buy food for himself. Occasionally he liked to go to a restaurant or get a special treat, but usually he found more than enough in the many offices of the greater DC area.

For that matter, Lucas didn't need to spend money on much of anything. He was happy with clothing from Goodwill, and his home constantly rotated from office building to office building. No rent, no food, no clothing—without those expenses, Lucas had been able to stash away several thousand dollars over the last few years, all while doing menial cash-under-the-table jobs.

In this particular refrigerator he found a full wrapped sandwich (turkey and tomato), a couple unopened cartons of milk, and some apples. Dinner. The cupboard held a few bags of chips; he took one of the bags and put it in his backpack for later.

As he sat at the small table and ate, listening to the low rumble of the HVAC system deep within the building, he stared at the small metal refrigerator. He knew all about these office refrigerators, yes. But what about refrigerators in homes? Those had to be different, didn't they? Surely no one just put food in the refrigerator and forgot it, did they? Home refrigerators, well, they were like small gathering spaces. Always near breakfast nooks or dining tables where families congregated over cookies and milk, talking about their days at the office or their projects at school or their meetings at Junior League. Yes, the home refrigerator had to be more like . . . home.

Not that Lucas knew. Or would ever know, for that matter. He'd grown up in an orphanage, never known his parents, never known anything about the traditional ideas of a home. A real home. It was all so foreign to him, so
other
. That's why he preferred the institutionalized feel of offices and commercial buildings. They felt more comfortable. His forays into the dark, hidden spaces were always in public buildings, never private residences. He wasn't a Peeping Tom, or a stalker, or anyone sick and demented like that.

He was an artist.

An artist who worked in concrete and glass and fiberboard, creating menageries out of the colorful existences lived by the dwellers inside his monitored offices. Yes, they had existences outside of those walls, but Lucas wouldn't cross that threshold; his imagined existences for dwellers were always more interesting anyway. He didn't, couldn't, understand their private lives in private homes. His own sense of ethics told him it would be wrong, and so he didn't question it.

After finishing his last bite of turkey and tomato, he cleaned the table and threw everything in the garbage, noticing that the janitorial staff hadn't emptied the office cans yet. That meant he'd have to be on guard as he worked.

He wiped his hands on the front of his jeans, adjusted the pack he wore on his back, and went outside the break room, scanning the middle cubicles and looking for the space where the dark-haired woman sat. Was she a receptionist? He didn't think so. She didn't have quite that disaffected air, and she'd been entering the building later; most receptionists were among the first to arrive.

He stood motionless, studying and considering as he scanned the offices. If they could be called offices. They were small cubicles, partitioned by cloth dividers, filling a large, open space. The place had a boiler room feel to it. Lucas hadn't bothered to check the name of the business at the front, but he was guessing this was a telemarketing facility of some kind. Maybe a phone support center.

He began to work his way through the cubicles, a Minotaur winding his way through a maze, looking at individual desks.

Eventually he found her. Even in places such as this, especially in places such as this, people tried to bring a bit of themselves to their work spaces. Photos were common. Knickknacks and trinkets. Comics and cartoons clipped from newspapers.

It was a photo that identified the dark-haired woman, and when he saw it, he knew he had been drawn to a very special dweller indeed.

The framed photo that sat next to her computer terminal proved it. In it, she had her arms wrapped around two preteen kids—one boy, one girl—and a look of pure joy on her face, matched, amazingly enough, by the joy in the children's faces.

As he stared at this photo, Lucas imagined the family camping on the Kansas prairie, enjoying a long weekend together. This would be when the father was still alive, he decided. Just before snapping the photo, the father had made a particularly funny comment, an inside family joke they all loved—
everybody say ‘nubbins'!—
and then clicked the shutter.

He went to the desk, opened her top drawer. A time sheet for the next day lay neatly inside, the name Noel Harkins printed neatly at the top. Noel liked to be organized, he decided.

Of course, she would have to be organized, to bring her family through the tragedy of her husband's death. She would have to be strong, and steady, and an inspiration to her two beautiful children.

And that was why she kept this photo on her desk: it was a reminder of happier times, of together times. The photo was a totem for her, a bit of magic that could transport her to her Happy Place with one glance.

(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

Lucas closed his eyes for a moment.

These words were his own personal totem, of sorts, but an incomplete one. They were brief whispers of a past he couldn't remember, memories he couldn't bring to the surface. Haunted whispers of the Great Before, which was pretty much anything before the orphanage, anything before his sixth year. These words were, in fact, the only thing he had from the Great Before, and they were mere shadows of whispers, maddeningly brief.

(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

The orphanage. A cliché, really, the loner kid who never had close relationships with anyone because his parents had been killed when he was young and he'd been raised in an orphanage on the outskirts of DC.

Except he'd never known his parents. He knew they were dead—that's what the people at the orphanage had told him—but he'd never been told anything about his past, and so he remembered nothing of it.

Nothing about the Great Before except . . .

(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

Yes, except that, a nonsense line that came back to him at the strangest times, meaning nothing, doing nothing, representing nothing. And yet it leaked from the cracks of his memories even now, more than two decades later.

His memories, what fragile shells of them existed, began at about age six. Before that, there was nothing. Just a solid expanse of white, stretching from horizon to horizon. He had existed in that time, he knew, and yet he had not existed.

It wasn't bad, as orphanages go, he supposed. Certainly not like the fanciful orphanages of literature, where young children were whipped into silence by angry and sadistic nuns wielding leather strops. No nuns at all in his orphanage; in fact, Lucas hadn't even seen a nun until he left the confines of the orphanage at age eighteen.

Still, even his most vivid memories of the orphanage were painted in broad strokes. He hadn't formed any close friendships with anyone there, couldn't even really say the names of any other kids, now that he thought about it. He saw their faces in his memories, of course, but that's all they were: faces. Even the teachers and staff were little more than that.

Instead, he remembered the roof. From his room, shared with so many other children, he had a clear view of the window. And through that window, when he ventured to it, he saw a far-off land of light and magic. He would find out later that those lights were the Metro DC area, but in his six-year-old mind, they were simply a promise. A promise of something he didn't fully understand but wanted to find.

He spent many hours in the dead of night admiring the far-off lights, imagining himself in that mystical place. Later, when he was older, he would open the window, crawl through its narrow space to the asphalt-shingled roof, and lie on his back staring at the lights, reaching out now and then and imagining himself grasping those lights in his hands.

That's what had started his creeping. Staying outside on the roof for a few hours invariably led to searches by the staff, and Lucas would catch glimpses of them inside the house, looking for him. After watching them for a while, he would pick a time to climb back through the window, wander down the hallway with the wood-slat flooring, and innocently ask, “Were you looking for me?”

Why the other kids never said anything, he did not know. Maybe it was the bond of a shared secret. But it continued for several years, without his increasingly longer sojourns being discovered.

This, he knew, is what had awakened the Dark Vibration inside. And for the many years since, he had been feeding that Dark Vibration.

(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

These words weren't a totem that transported him to his Happy Place. They were cruel reminders that he had no Happy Place.

He slammed a hand against Noel's desktop, jarring the framed photo out of its place a fraction of an inch. He bit his tongue, kept his eyes tightly closed, blocked the uninvited words from his mind.

(Humpty Dumpty had some)

(Humpty Dumpty had)

(Humpty Dumpty)

When he opened his eyes again, he was in control. The door to uninvited whispers of his past had been shut, and he was firmly in the present. Here in Noel's cubicle.

To watch Noel, to see her at work, he would have to build an observation deck. And in the open like this, there was really only one place to do it.

He looked above him at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, calculating what he would need to do. Then he moved. Even though he'd spent several hours today lying motionless on top of the elevator car, when Lucas decided to move, it was smooth. Effortless. Liquid.

He boosted himself up onto Noel's desk, reached overhead, and pushed one of the ceiling tiles out of the way. He smiled at what he saw. Just as he'd hoped, the poured concrete floor of the next story was hidden a few feet above the tile.

More than enough room.

He unshouldered the dusty blue nylon backpack—his constant companion—and unzipped the main compartment. Inside were all his tools of the trade: a flashlight, a utility knife, some climbing rope, a few sets of webbed rigging he'd built himself, and several other items. He selected a small hand drill and set down the pack for a moment. He tested the divider between Noel's space and the adjoining cubicle, then stepped on the thin edge and balanced himself there effortlessly. His head was now in the space left by the removed tile, and he held up the hand drill just in front of his face as he began drilling into the concrete. It wasn't easy, and he knew he'd burn through a couple of bits, but he didn't mind the work. He enjoyed it. He had the whole night if he needed it.

Later, when he'd completed drilling three holes, he tapped anchors into them and turned the screws inside; they expanded to fit the holes and wedged themselves in place. Then it was just a simple matter of affixing his small hammock, handmade from several sections of climbing rope, to the anchors.

Finished, he stepped down from the top of the divider and admired his work. With the hammock in place up above the tiles, he could hang comfortably, facedown, to peer into Noel's world below. Not so much different from the elevator, really. But more intimate. And therefore more exciting.

He put all the acoustic tiles he'd pushed aside back into the track, save for the one that was directly over Noel's head and computer terminal. In this one, he drilled a small hole—so small it looked like the simple pattern of the tile—and then put it in its place as well. Now he had an observation deck, complete with a peephole.

He jumped down from Noel's desk, noticing the thick layer of concrete dust he'd let filter down. Sloppy, yes. He usually wasn't so. But no matter. He brushed the dust off the desk and chair, sweeping it to the floor. He left, found the janitor's closet on that floor (unlocked, of course, but no janitor around), and returned with some towels, cleaner, and a small hand vac.

Five minutes later, all evidence of his being there was gone. And Noel's cubicle was probably cleaner than it ever had been with the regular janitorial staff working. He'd worked up a bit of a sweat and could use a good cleaning himself, so he'd probably have to shower soon. The Y and the homeless shelters were always options, but Lucas knew more than a few offices in the neighborhood that provided workout areas and locker rooms with showers for their employees.

Mostly high-tech companies, pouring on benefits to keep workers healthy and happy. And in those places, the hot water never ran out in the middle of your shower.

Finished with the immediate work, Lucas readjusted his backpack and found himself staring at the photo of Noel and her kids again.

A beautiful photo, really.

He took it and added it to the items already in his pack.

TWO