The Unseen (9 page)

Bright headlights flooded the bridge.  The approaching car slowed at the sight of the wreckage, then stopped and flashed blue lights.  Police.

A heavyset black officer emerged from the car, shined his flashlight inside Peyton’s car, then shook his head and spoke into his radio.

More flashing vehicles arrived, ambulances and a fire truck.  The three creepily human shadows faded entirely as the scene grew, but the little worms and crawling bugs continued their nibbling, unseen by anyone but Cassidy.  Some of the creatures swam over to the newly arrived police and emergency workers and attempted to fasten themselves to their bodies, succeeding occasionally.

The medics loaded Cassidy and Peyton’s bodies into ambulances, entirely unaware that transparent wormy, spidery things were trying to eat their faces.

Cassidy floated along behind the ambulance like a balloon on a string.  She wondered what was happening inside, and instantly found herself there, watching the emergency medical workers trying to stabilize her.  She wondered whether she might live or die, and was surprised she didn’t feel more fear.

Grady Memorial Hospital was twenty-one stories high, the largest hospital in the city.  Cassidy lost interest in her body in the emergency room and floated around, exploring.  The hospital struck her as a kind of multi-story theater, each room a stage where a different drama played out—families clustering in the visiting rooms, waiting for someone to die or be born; nurses gossiping at their stations; massively injured individuals slowly dying as the ER staff worked to save them; sick old people slowly dying alone in their beds.

The hospital was heavily infested with the odd transparent creatures that only Cassidy could see.  Long, lumpy bugs with nine or ten legs scrambled unseen along the walls and ceiling.  A few of the decaying skeletal vulture-birds perched over terminal patients, watching intently with their dark eye sockets.  Coiled worms drifted in the air, their slug-like antennae protruding from their blind faces.  Occasionally she glimpsed a low, skulking dog-like shadow fading in and out of view, but it vanished whenever she tried to look directly at it.

Cassidy entered the huge burn ward.  The sight of so many badly injured people in their beds wore down her feeling of distance from all she observed.  These people needed help.  What had Cassidy ever done to help anyone else?  She was a self-absorbed brat, chasing only her own pleasures.

These thoughts made her feel heavier, and she sank toward the floor and moved more slowly. 

She remembered Peyton had been injured and started to worry about him.  She found him in a bed in the intensive care unit, with a doctor and a nurse attending.  She overheard the doctor say that Peyton had fractured several ribs but did not appear to suffer any internal bleeding.

Cassidy felt something pull her out of the room and out into the hall.  She floated invisibly past an elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair and over a gurney holding a gunshot victim, racing its way into an operating room.

The pulling sensation, which reminded her of the undertow she’d felt when swimming in the ocean, sent her out into a crowded waiting room.  It drew her to the two people slumped in worn wooden chairs in the corner—her mom and her brother.  Cassidy’s mom held an old Maeve Binchy paperback, which she ignored in favor of staring nervously into space.  Her brother Kieran hunched over his phone, thumbs flying.

Cassidy looked at her mother, taking a little bit of a childlike pleasure in spying on her family while invisible.  Her mother wore a dark blue blazer, the uniform of the Pleasant Evening Inn hotel franchise where she was the night manager.  Her eyes were dark green like Cassidy’s.  Her hair, with its short no-nonsense cut, was naturally red, but she’d dyed it a deep brown as long as Cassidy could remember.  She was forty-two years old and developing wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. 

Kieran was seventeen now, and his look had changed since Cassidy had last seen him.  He’d shaved off about half his hair and dyed the rest green.  A steel chain ran from his nose ring to a matching ring in his left ear.  His jeans were baggy, black, and low-slung.  His black t-shirt featured some kind of goblin made of flames.  A few of the transparent coiled worms floated around him.

Cassidy saw a kind of theme in their family that she hadn’t noticed before—everybody wanted to alter their identity somehow.  Cassidy’s mother not only ritually dyed the red out of her hair, she had also long suppressed her native Irish accent in favor of a flat Midwestern voice copied from American television.

Her mother’s apartment contained no pictures or other reminders of Ireland, and she never liked to discuss her childhood.  She only said that she and Cassidy’s father had met nothing but misfortune at home and wanted to make a fresh start in America.  Cassidy’s mother had been nineteen and pregnant when they’d immigrated, Cassidy’s father a couple of years older.  Cassidy herself had been conceived in Ireland and born in America.

Kieran had been born five years later.  Their father had died when Kieran was only twelve months old, and Kieran did not remember him.

Cassidy had been six, and she did remember—bright, golden memories she kept like secret treasures.  Her father swinging her in the air, kissing the freckles on her nose, making her favorite sandwich (peanut butter with grape jelly), sitting on the floor of her room to join in her games of stuffed animals and dollhouses.

She remembered, and she still filled up with ache and grief when she thought of him.  Everything she had lost, all the years with him that could have been.

Cassidy felt an intense urge to reach out to her mother and comfort her, to embrace both her remaining family members.

In order to do that, she had to return to her body and all its pain.

Her body lay behind a curtain in the emergency room, hooked up to monitors and seemingly stable at the moment, since no doctors or nurses were bothering with her.  Her right leg was raised in traction.  She drifted close and looked into her own face, or what she could see of it—much of her face was swaddled in bandaging, and she remembered bashing her head against the windshield.

She felt a deep chill radiating from somewhere behind her.  She turned around.

The three shadows were back, like tall, elongated men draped from head to toe in the darkest black, their shapes stretched and thinned, not clearly in focus at all, as if they were tuning in from somewhere else. 

They stood in a semicircle at the foot of her bed.  The long shapes she believed to be their heads were all facing Cassidy’s unconscious body.

She froze where she was, looking back at them from just above her own head.  She wondered whether they could see her floating there, despite her lack of any physical body.

She willed herself to move away from her body, past the beeping heart monitor, to settle somewhere in the corner of the room, near the window.  She watched for any reaction from the three black shapes.

One of them, the one in the middle, may have turned his head to follow her.  It was difficult to tell, because their shapes were so vague and out of focus, but just the possibility that it was watching her make Cassidy feel cold and afraid.

Reality hit her and sent her reeling in terror—she’d been in a bad car crash, her body was mangled, and the waking nightmares were back.  The transparent little monsters that seemed to feed on humans were bad enough, but there was something much worse about these three tall, indistinct, extremely dark shadows.

The three figures moved in around her bed, and she suddenly felt very protective of her body.  She needed it to get back to her family and her life.

The figures bent forward like black candle flames, coiling over her. 

The heart monitor reacted with rapid beats, her pulse rising into the danger zone as her fear grew.

She didn’t know what they were doing, but she couldn’t leave her body defenseless.

She rushed down toward her unconscious form, her speed powered by longing and fear.  Her rapid heartbeat drew her in a like a beacon, a kind of lighthouse made of sound.

She passed through her skin and into the chambers of her own heart, and then her eyes opened.

Cassidy awoke in a dark hospital room.  The dull red of very early morning had begun to glow through the window.  She was sweaty and clammy, and her leg was elevated, which made her feel trapped.

She looked toward the foot of her bed, expecting to see something horrible, monsters pursuing her out of her nightmare, but there was nothing there.  Two heavyset nurses dashed into the room, drawn by the rapid-fire beeping of the heart monitor, but Cassidy could already feel her heart beginning to slow.  The bad dream was over, though real life wasn’t looking much better.

“I’m okay,” she told them as they hurried to check her out.  The monitor’s alarmed beeping returned to normal.

“
Tell Dr. Spiegelman she’s up,” one nurse told the other, who nodded and left.  To Cassidy, she said, “The doctor wants to see you before your family comes in.  How are you feeling?”

“
Terrible,” Cassidy replied.  As she awoke, she realized she felt sick to her stomach.  Her broken leg radiated a deep, dull ache.  Cassidy glanced at her IV, wondering how much painkiller she was taking, and whether she could ask for more. “My leg really hurts.  It’s broken, isn’t it?  Do you have any morphine?”

“
You’ll have to ask the doctor about that.  And here she is...”  The nurse spoke quietly to the doctor, who nodded.  Dr. Spiegelman had frizzy black hair and an overworked, exhausted look on her face.  She flipped through a stack of folders to find Cassidy’s.

“
Cassidy Dolan?” the doctor asked.

“
Yep.  I was just asking about painkillers—”

“
Some concussion, bruised bones, and you’ve noticed the broken femur by now.” Dr. Spiegelman looked up.

“
Yeah, how bad is it?” Cassidy asked.

“
Most patients ask about their injuries
before
they ask for painkillers,” Dr. Spiegelman said. “You have a transverse fracture of the femoral shaft.  You’re lucky.”

“
Really?”

“
It was one clean break, away from the joints, no extra fragmentation.  It can be repaired with standard i
ntramedullary nailing.”

“Nailing?” Cassidy’s stomach felt a little more ill, and the blood drained from her face.

“As there’s no infection or other complications, I wanted to wait until you were a little more stable before we took you into surgery.  We can start prepping you now that you’re awake.  But the leg break is not—”

“I don’t have any insurance,” Cassidy said.

“Then you came to the right hospital,” Dr. Spiegelman told her. “The leg break is not what concerns me, Cassidy.  I’m concerned about what we found in your blood work.”

Cassidy felt a sinking, frightened feeling, immediately thinking of sexual transmitted diseases and every questionable encounter she might have had.

“Your blood...” Dr. Spiegelman shook her head. “It looks like something scraped off the floor of the DEA crime lab.”

“Oh.” Cassidy’s eyes dropped to her hands, which rested on her stomach.

“Opioids, MDMA, cocaine, THC...I don’t even have time to read the list.” She closed the folder and looked up at Cassidy. “You need drug rehabilitation therapy, too.”

“Are you calling the police?”

“Not my job.  ”

“How is Peyton?”

“Who’s that?” Dr. Spiegelman riffled through her folders.

“My boyfriend?  He came in with me.  Right?”

“Oh.  I can’t divulge specific medical information if you’re not family, but he’s going to be fine.  Do you have any other questions?”

Cassidy had tons, but couldn’t pick which one to ask.  The pocket of Dr. Spiegelman’s white coat buzzed gently, and the doctor glanced inside.

“I’m sorry to rush, but we’re over capacity.  Friday night, lots of other people getting high and crashing their cars, too.” Dr. Spiegelman hurried out.

Cassidy wondered how long she’d been unconscious and dreaming.  It sounded like they’d already done X-rays.  She looked at her right leg, suspended and useless, and wondered how long it would be before she could walk again. 
There, that would have been a good question for the doctor
, she thought.

“You ready to see your family?” the nurse asked her.

“Yeah.” Cassidy remembered seeing her mother and Kieran in her dream, out in the waiting room. Though she’d been knocked out, some part of her mind must have picked up on where she was.  She remembered the strange experience of floating bodiless through the hospital, drifting from floor to floor like a ghost.  Naturally, there had been monsters everywhere. 

She shivered when she remembered the three thin, tall shadows leaning over her bed, though she couldn’t see them now, thankfully.  The worst days were when bits of nightmare followed her back to the waking world, as if some part of her brain believed she was still asleep and dreaming.