The Unseen (6 page)

Half an hour later, with the chair safely returned to the dining room, Lucas was cocooned in another webbed hammock, hanging directly over Donavan's desk with a clear view of the screen through a pinhole in the tile.

He went still, silent, listening as his heart rate slowed.

Now all he had to do was wait.

But sometimes, waiting brought unwanted memories. Memories of who he once was, who he once wasn't. He thought of the orphanage, which had nursed his early inclination for infiltrating because of his bedroom near the window in the converted attic. He remembered the many long nights, after being sent to bed; opening the window, crawling onto the roof, and listening to the sounds of dogs barking and cars humming. Most of all, watching the lights of the city—just across the Potomac, yet also across the universe.

Even then, so many years ago, the demonic mnemonic, wherever it had come from, had haunted him:
Humpty Dumpty had some great
falls.
Even on the nights when he lay out on the roof of the building, his arms splayed behind his head, his subconscious would eventually take over as he dozed, repeating the maddening, yet somehow comforting, phrase. He didn't know why. He only knew that he couldn't scrub it from his head, no matter what he tried.

Even his dreams were filled with the demonic mnemonic. Not images of the nursery rhyme character, but of the words themselves. They floated in the empty spaces of his REM sleep, filling in the voids, the letters of the words creating backdrops of scenery everywhere he looked inside his dreams.

Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.

A scratching sound brought him back. For a few moments he was disoriented as he quickly stuffed all the memories back into their locked box. Where was he?

Oh yes. Donavan's apartment. And that scratching sounded very much like a key sliding into a deadbolt lock.

He heard the front door open down the hallway. Then nothing for a few seconds. A glass clinking, maybe.

More silence.

He caught a flash of Donavan walking by—dressed in a suit, certainly not what Lucas had expected—then he moved out of sight into the closet.

After a few minutes, Donavan returned and sat at his desk directly below Lucas, now wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt. More like it.

Lucas noticed Donavan was wearing earbuds, the end of them disappearing somewhere in the pocket of his cargo shorts. An iPod listener.

Donavan hummed an unrecognizable tune as he keyed in a Web address. The username and password screen appeared, and Donavan fingered the keys.

Lucas studied, letting his mind record the scene as Donavan's fingers tapped the board.

A few seconds later, a simple white screen with black type appeared on the monitor, with CREEP CLUB in all caps at the top. Below it, a variety of forum threads spooled out.

Donavan scanned the threads, checked his watch, uttered a curse, and closed the browser.

Obviously, he was late for something.

Seconds later he was out of view, and Lucas listened until he heard the front door close and the deadbolt slide back into place.

He waited silently for five more minutes. Donavan struck him as the type who might forget something and need to come back—especially if he were running late.

When Lucas felt confident Donavan had left for a while, he slid the tile out of its track and swung himself out of the hammock and to the floor. After wrapping his webbing and replacing it in his backpack, he sat down at Donavan's computer and opened the browser once more. At creepclub.com, he watched the screen come up as before, asking for the username and password.

Lucas sighed, cleared his mind, and rewound the images of the last several minutes. When he came to Donavan's hands, poised over the keyboard, he let the image play in slow motion.

He put his hands over the keys and mimicked the strokes that played in his mind. Username: DonavanRox. Password: HalleBerry.

And with that, he was in.

The main screen and its forums loaded on the monitor, and a post at the top of the forum said: August 23 Meeting, 8:00 p.m. ; Stranahan Building. He opened the thread and read four names and times: Donavan—15 minutes; Hondo—15 minutes; Clarice—10 minutes; Boomer—10 minutes.

August 23. Today's date. Lucas looked at his watch. 7:27 p.m. He smiled.

He had a very good idea where Donavan was going in such a hurry. And after another quick visit to his old friend Google, Lucas had an address for the Stranahan Building.

IT WAS IN THE NORTHEAST QUADRANT, IN THE MIDST OF A GROUP OF buildings likely built sometime in the 1950s and '60s. Lucas immediately knew this because the architecture featured speckled granite offset by large turquoise panels. Every building erected in the fifties and sixties, it seemed, was required to use those turquoise panels, be they schools, hospitals, or office towers.

This one wasn't exactly an office tower; it was only three stories high. But it was obviously an office building of some kind. Or had been.

Lucas started with a walk around the perimeter. He pulled a small spotting scope from his backpack of tricks and examined the front doors from a distance. It was starting to get dark, but he could clearly see the chains barring all the doors. A realty sign hung in the window of one.

Next he scanned the front of the building, then walked around the back and checked the rear.

Off the alley he saw three small basement windows, one of which looked to be open a crack. He paused a few minutes to watch for activity, then quickly walked to the window. Just above the window, he saw a symbol he'd seen at the Creep Club Web site: a large M with rounded tops, looking much like a McDonald's logo.

He leaned down to push the window open, and now, as he was leaning into the window and looking at the M sideways, he realized it wasn't an M at all. It was two capital Cs, turned on their sides. CC. Creep Club. Evidently, the folks in the Creep Club believed in signing in—leaving marks for other infiltrators to see.

Hearing or seeing no activity on the other side of the window, Lucas pushed it open and slipped inside. He dropped to the basement floor without a sound.

He pushed the window closed behind him again, lit his flashlight, and began walking.

Everything in the building smelled like mothballs, although he doubted mothballs had ever been used here. That would mean someone cared about something in here, wanted to preserve it, and that obviously wasn't the case. Maybe he was just smelling mold and rot.

He fell into a regular pattern. Ten steps, stop and listen, ten steps, stop and listen. Soon his light swept over an elevator shaft and, to the left of it, crumbling stone steps.

Lucas went up the first two sets of stairs to the propped-open door of the main floor. No activity. He continued to the second floor and checked. Down a long corridor, light spilled out of a room. Voices, and occasional laughter, filtered toward him.

After memorizing the location of the room, he went up the next two sets of steps to the third floor. The floors were solid poured concrete, so he had no worries about creaking or groaning boards as he walked down the hallway until he came to the room directly above the one the Creep Club occupied on the second floor.

Some of the windows in this room were broken, and the weather had seeped in. Dark rust stains smeared the walls by the broken windows. Lucas checked the room. No utility chase attached. Not that he'd expected one. A water fountain out in the hallway; he could maybe work with that, hear some of what they were saying, if he had to. But he was hoping for something more promising. He didn't bother to lie on the floor and try to listen; a couple feet of concrete would insulate the sound too much.

Okay, he'd have to try an adjacent room on the second floor.

He retreated down the stairs again and walked quietly down the tiled hallway toward the room where light came spilling out. As he approached, the sounds of the voices grew louder.

They were meeting in room 227; the door on room 225, just to the south of them, gaped open. Good.

He crept into 225 and looked around. No broken windows or leakage in this room, but that was about the best you could say for it. A couple of rickety old wooden chairs, a steel desk, some papers littering the floor. Above him the familiar acoustic tile. Whoever invented that stuff must be retired in the Bahamas, living off billions of dollars of income.

He grabbed one of the chairs and set it by the wall adjacent to room 227. Because this was a poured concrete building, with several beams supporting the weight of each floor, he knew this wall wouldn't be load-bearing. That meant it probably didn't even go all the way to the ceiling; instead, it was most likely a partition built of two-byfour framing.

As Lucas pushed aside the tile, he saw exactly what he wanted: the wall stopped about eight inches from the subfloor of the next story. Some electrical wiring and cables snaked across the space.

He kept a roll of duct tape in his backpack, and he pulled off a length of it, looped it around his hand, then stretched across the top of the wall to an acoustic panel on the adjacent room. When the tape stuck, he lifted it ever so slightly, being careful not to shake loose any dust. No good. It was wedged tight.

So be it. He'd just have to listen.

Right now, he only heard one woman speaking, sotto voce, at odd intervals. As if she were whispering a secret conversation on a phone.

“Huh? Of course he's here,” the voice said. “Why wouldn't he be?”

Pause.

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

Another pause, then a stifled giggle.

“Okay, okay. Just this once. I'll tell him . . . I'll tell him I'm running to the store for milk.”

Lucas heard a click and saw cracks of light coming up through pinholes and cracks in the acoustic tile. Someone had turned on the overhead fluorescents.

Now a man's voice spoke, much clearer and louder. “And that is the latest chapter in the Kiernan family saga.”

Scattered chuckles, followed by applause.

Lucas realized that they had been watching a taped phone conversation. On a TV, maybe? Or a projector? That's why the lights had come on after the woman finished speaking.

“Yeah, Hoffman,” the man's voice said below.

“What'd you shoot that with?”

“I knew you'd ask that.” A few more chuckles. “I shot it with an M10 Minicam, using night vision settings. It's tiny, and it shoots well in low light. Adds some grain, but I think that goes nicely with the story line, don't you?”

What was this? The Creep Club was screening foreign movies or something? They were an amateur video club? A group of
America's
Funniest Home Videos
enthusiasts?

A new voice. “Okay, thanks, Hondo. Next is Clarice, who's working on an interesting project up in Georgetown.”

Clarice began to speak, and Lucas realized, finally, what he was listening to. These weren't just your garden variety creepers who broke into public buildings and office spaces. They'd taken it a dangerous step further, creeping into private homes. And on top of that, they were recording the residents of those homes, then sharing the recordings with other members of the group.

Lucas shuddered. “Creep” Club suddenly seemed all too accurate.

And yet.

As repulsive as it was, it was somehow also fascinating. Even now, part of him wanted to be in the room below, vicariously creeping into the homes of others with the assembled group watching. The unquestioned line that had always been drawn in his own mind was now wavering like a mirage. What did that say about his code of ethics, that he suddenly had this thirst for something he'd always found unthinkable before? He was like a pacifist who had killed for the first time and found he liked the sight of blood.

Lucas shuddered.

Suddenly he needed very much to get away, far away from this place. He backed out of the ceiling, off the chair, and quietly slipped down the hallway and stairs into the fresh air outside.

He took a couple deep breaths, feeling as if he'd just barely escaped being swallowed by something gigantic and terrifying. And yet, he longed to be swallowed.

He needed more answers, but he couldn't be this close to the Creep Club right now; it was radioactive, at once exciting and dangerous, and he wasn't equipped to handle it.

Without consciously deciding, he began moving toward the Metro, planning a return trip to Donavan's apartment.

FIVE

THE YOUNG BOY FEELS THE STRAPS ON HIS WRISTS AND ANKLES AS HE
awakes, but he makes no effort to free himself. It's useless, he knows, as he
lies still with his eyes closed. More than once he's managed to work his way
free, but always finds himself unable to escape the large room of steel. There
is a seam on the wall where a door opens into his room, but no handle of
any kind; the door has to be opened from the outside.

And the giant mirror on the adjacent wall is there too. Behind that mirror,
he knows, are eyes that are always watching him. Studying him.

Knowing this, the boy lies quietly. Waiting. Listening. Trying to sift his
mind for memories of his earlier childhood. It's something he always does,
this attempt to remember. He never finds anything. Every fiber of his exis
tence, it seems, is tied to this giant room; his only past recollections involve
long sessions listening to odd sounds and sequences played on a brand-new
record player while images from a slide projector play on the mirrored wall
in front of him, grueling tests filled with odd questions and statements fol
lowed by shocks he can feel in his brain and his bones.

And, of course, the needles.

The needles have been a constant companion for so very long. He's been
injected everywhere: his arms, stomach, thighs. He's been subjected to liq
uids of every color inside those large syringes.