The Unseen (16 page)

Inside, Cassidy led Barb to her new, smaller room.

“
Whoa, it’s like a storage unit,” Barb said, looking around at the carelessly heaped cardboard boxes.

“
I know.  I should get the rest of my stuff out of this room so my mom can use it.” Cassidy eased herself down to the bed, her right leg jutting stiffly out in front of her.

“
She should move to a two-bedroom, save money.” Barb knelt in front of a cardboard box in the middle of the room and set her large patchwork purse beside it.

“
Yeah...” Cassidy knew why her mother hadn’t moved, but she didn’t want to bring up her father just now. “So, work your magic.”

Barb kicked off her sandals and set out four items on the box.  First was a clay saucer etched with a pentagram, into which she poured Diamond Crystal kosher salt from a small red cylinder.  Then she set out a stick of incense in a small holder that kept it upright, a red candle, and a little wooden chalice into which she poured water from a twelve-ounce Dasani bottle.

“Can I have the rest of that?” Cassidy asked.  Barb passed her the bottle, and Cassidy washed down a Valium with the remaining water.

Barb whispered under her breath as she lit the incense and the candle, probably some little chant that she didn’t want Cassidy to hear and laugh about. Cassidy wouldn’t have, though.  She was interested in watching Barb’s performance.

Barb took the saucer of salt and walked around the edges of the room, at least as far as the boxes permitted, sprinkling tiny pinches as she went.  She continued whispering under her breath.  When she reached Cassidy’s bed, which was against the wall, she simply stepped up onto the bed with her bare feet, walked along the wall behind Cassidy, and stepped down off the other end and continued her circle. 

She returned to the center and traded the saucer for the incense and started circling again.  When she walked up onto Cassidy’s bed, Cassidy looked up at her, smiling.

“Hey, aren’t witches supposed to be, what’s the word?  You’re not supposed to wear any clothes, right?”

“
Skyclad?” Barb raised an eyebrow, looking down at her. “You want me walking around your room naked?”

“
I didn’t make the rules.  Take it off, baby.” Cassidy slapped Barb’s rear end playfully.

“
Sh, let me concentrate.” Barb continued on, stepping off the bed and whispering something about “spirits of the air.”  Maybe it was better that Cassidy didn’t hear all the words, or she really might have been tempted to laugh.

Barb finished it off by circling the room with the candle, then the little wooden cup, sprinkling little droplets around the room.  Finally she sighed, blew out the candle and incense, and packed everything away quickly, her face flushed as though embarrassed.

“Thanks for letting me do that,” she said to Cassidy. “And not messing me up
too
much.”

“
Hey, thank you,” Cassidy said. “I don’t want any little demon creatures hanging around my room.” She wondered whether it might actually help with her transparent-bug infestation.  She couldn’t see any of them now, but she had the whiskey and now the early effects of the Valium to thank for that.

Barb sat on the bed next to Cassidy and chatted about the previous night at work, telling her about a drunk who’d been thrown out and how Kit and her crew had showed up wasted and snorted lines of crystal meth right off the bar, ignoring Barb when she quietly insisted they stop.  Barb hadn’t called for the bouncer, though, and nobody else had complained.

Barb eventually left after helping Cassidy back to the couch.  Cassidy watched an old vampire movie while the Valium melted her into the cushions.  Her finger was too heavy to change the channel, but her mind was blissfully free of shelled worms and transparent bugs.

Milton Hospital was a large private facility serving the software and financial professionals who populated the surrounding gated golf-course communities.  Peyton’s family lived in such a neighborhood, though they were neither bankers nor software executives.  They owned a dozen franchises of Pizza Village, which marketed to budget-conscious families with small children.  Each store offered lousy, buffet-style pizza and a couple of arcade games at the back to make it a “destination spot” for little kids.

Peyton had grunted his way through physical therapy in the hospital’s aquatic center, which included multiple pools and therapeutic hot tubs, warm bubbling mineral water illuminated by dozens of skylights above.  He was working to regain lost flexibility in his arms and torso.  His therapist was a sixty-year-old man with what Peyton considered a fairly impressive six-pack of abs for his age.

Later, a massage therapist would visit Peyton’s room.  He was hoping for someone Swedish and blond, but he’d been hoping for that with his aquatic physical therapist and been sorely disappointed.

Now, Peyton sat in his bed, raised to a sitting position so he could eat his lunch—brie and ham croissant, melon balls, and arugula salad, all of it fresh and delicious.  Milton Hospital did not fuck around with their catering. 

He flipped past an old vampire movie on his room’s large flat-screen TV and stopped on the History Channel, where he watched a documentary about mysterious ancient megaliths while he ate.  The show skipped over the obvious sites like Stonehenge and dug into more obscure corners of the world, like the stone statues and gates of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, a city more than a thousand years old and long abandoned.  The show panned over hundreds of ‘dolmens’ on a South Korean island called Ganghwa, each dolmen consisting of a capstone weighing hundreds of tons supported by two very thin, relatively feeble-looking stones.  Some of them had been standing for nearly three thousand years.

“Who built these mysterious cities, these haunting ruins?” the narrator kept asking, but never answering. “What ancient people gave rise to such wonders?”

“
Look it up on fucking Wikipedia, man!” Peyton finally shouted at the screen.

“
Oh, excuse me!” somebody said. “Are you upset?”

Two young women stood in his open doorway.  They weren’t wearing scrubs, but blouses and long skirts.  He didn’t recognize them, but they were around his age, and they were pretty.

“Oh, hey, sorry.  It’s the TV’s fault.” Peyton paused the DVR. “So, are you my massage therapists?”
Please say yes.

They looked at each other and laughed.

“Sorry, no,” said one, a pretty blond girl with a black eyepatch like a pirate concealing her right eye.

“
We’re the Cheer-up Crew!” said the other girl, taller and olive-skinned.

“
Yeah, what?” Peyton asked.

“
We volunteer through our church,” the first girl said, and Peyton tried not to roll his eyes.  He was rapidly losing interest in them, and he wanted to learn about Göbekli Tepe, an eleven-thousand-year-old stone temple in southern Turkey.

The second girl stepped back into the hall and pulled a cart next to the door.  It held a dozen vases of bright flowers, each with a different species of plush animal attached with a ribbon.

“We go out to hospitals and old folks’ homes once a month to cheer up the patients,” the first girl continued. “I’m Reese.  That’s Marnie.”

“
Hi-ey!” the olive-skinned girl waved.

“
And they let you do that?” Peyton asked.

“
If we ask the doctors nicely!” Reese said, and Marnie laughed.

“
Would you like a puppy?” Marnie asked.

“
No, not this guy.” Reese drifted closer to the bed, her single blue eye taking in Peyton’s face as though mesmerized. “He looks more like a tiger to me.”

“
Tiger!” Marnie cheered.  She brought a vase of flowers with a little stuffed tiger attached and set them on a shelf in his room. “It already looks nicer in here.”

“
What are you watching?  Ancient stuff?” Reese looked at the screen.

“
Stone Age monoliths.  Listen, thanks for the flowers, but I’m not interested in attending your church or whatever you’re going to try and sell me.  You can just leave the brochure.”

“
What brochures?” Reese held up her empty hands. “Marnie, do you have any brochures?”

Marnie pretended to check among the flowers and stuffed animals on her cart. “Fresh out!”

“We’re just supposed to cheer people up,” Reese said. “If talking about religion doesn’t, then we won’t!  Hey, is Machu Picchu on this show?  I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“
They might.  They’re talking about Göbekli Tepe.  In Turkey.”

“
Oh, this is hardcore.” Reese sank into one of the two guest chairs, uninvited. “Don’t you always wonder what went on at old places like that?  I mean, if a temple’s ten thousand years old, right, then what did they worship there? 
Who
did they worship?”

“
I’m guessing your church has a theory,” Peyton said.

Reese laughed and held up her hands, shaking her head. “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to go there.  So what happened to you?  Can I ask?”

“Car crash.”

“
Ow!” Marnie eased into the chair beside Reese. “Was it bad?”

“
Broke some ribs.”

“
Ohh!” both girls gasped as though in pain.  Peyton tried not to laugh at them.

“
How did it happen?” Reese asked.

“
It’s kind of a wild story.  You’re too innocent for some of the details.”

“
Who says I’m innocent?” Reese leaned forward until her cheek rested on the armrail of his bed, her one blue eye gazing up at him. “Come on.  We like wild stories.”

Marnie nodded vigorously and leaned forward in her chair.  Both girls watched him as though they couldn’t wait to hear, bathing him in the warmth of their complete attention.

Peyton began, hesitantly, to tell them a version of the events, leaving out the drugs.  They acted as though entirely fascinated by his DJ work, peppering him with enthusiastic questions, and he warmed up to them.  They leaned closer, as though enraptured, as he told them of the behemoth truck lined with smokestacks, charging toward him along
both
lanes, and how his car had spun.

The more the girls listened, the more Peyton wanted to talk.

“Maybe you should come around more,” Kieran said. “Fucking Class D license.  I can only drive with family members.  So, you know, just mom.”

Kieran was driving their mother’s Hyundai a bit unsteadily down the crowded interstate toward the center of the city, caught in three p.m. traffic.  Cassidy was on her way to the first of three physical therapy appointments she was receiving from the public health system.

Their mother had told Kieran to take Cassidy to her appointments, knowing he would never turn down a chance to drive under his restrictive provisional license.  Cassidy understood it was supposed to be her time to talk with her brother and attempt to be some kind of good influence.

“
So what have you been up to these days?” Cassidy asked. “You and your friends?”

“
Just hanging out.” He shrugged.

“
Sounds kind of lame.”

“
Whatever.  Everything costs money.”

“
You could get a job.”

“
I tried that,” Kieran said. “I got a job at the Burger Taco place for like a week.  But they stick you with all these hours you have to work, and they’re total dicks if you like aren’t there on time, or if you have to leave early or whatever.  I mean, I have stuff to do.”

“
What stuff?  You said you need money to do stuff.”

“
Right, but only until the band takes off,” Kieran said.

“
The band?”

“
I’m in a band now!”

“
You have to tell me about it.”

“
You wouldn’t like it.”

“
I know a lot of DJ’s at a lot of clubs,” Cassidy told him.

“
Okay, check it out.  We do like a costume thing—”

“
Like KISS?”

“
More like Gwar, with the big monster suits,” Kieran said. “Only not as elaborate, because that would be hard.  And then we do like a Swedish deathcore sound but then we
rap
the lyrics.”

“
So it’s like a novelty act?  It’s a joke?” Cassidy asked.

“
No,
no!
It’s for real.  Like we really want to freak people out, with fake blood and stuff. And make people scared and scream.”

“
Have you played anywhere?”