Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

“Is it still here?” Katrina whispered. Laurel knew exactly what she meant. It felt exactly as if they were chasing a presence from room to room, as if a child were playing hide-and-seek with them.

“Let’s see.” Tyler lunged for the heavy round table with the lazy Susan built in, and knocked his knuckles sharply on the wood surface. The sound was very loud in the room.

There was a pregnant silence… then the knocking started again, on the far side of the house.

“Goddamn it,” Tyler swore. He turned to the library door and took off running.

“No!” Laurel called behind him, but he was out the door, footsteps pounding in the hall.

Brendan and Katrina followed, and again Laurel found herself a beat behind, trailing, as they ran into the upper hall of the main house.

Running down the hall she was very aware of the pitches and tilts of the floor. It rolled, a feeling like a wave, like seasickness. One moment she was running down it and suddenly she was tripping, flying, and sprawled on the floor—right in front of Brendan’s room.

The door was closed again, though she knew it had been open when they left it. She stared up at it, and felt chills start from the base of her spine, a feeling of pure, black terror. She scrambled away from the door, and up to her feet, and bolted after the others.

They all arrived in the servants’ kitchen, breathless, to find Tyler standing in the middle of the floor. The knocking had stopped.

Tyler kicked the table.

A skillet jumped off the hook where it hung on the wall and crashed to the floor behind him. Katrina gasped; they all spun, staring… and waiting…

The knocking began again in the dining room, below.

Tyler tore out of the kitchen like a madman and pounded down the back stairs. The others hurried behind… down the stairs, through the house office. They had just bolted into the downstairs kitchen when the knocking stopped, followed immediately by a cry of rage from Tyler in the next room.

Laurel and Brendan dashed for the doorway. Tyler was in the dining room, shouting at the walls, at the ceiling. “Show yourself! Come on! Come out!”

There was silence… and then knocking began from all the places they had heard it before, except the one they were standing in.

“You made it mad,” Katrina said to Tyler breathlessly. The knocking grew louder, waves of it, pounding around them.

“It’s trying to get in,” Katrina said, and the blankness in her sweet, light voice was chilling.

“It is in. Isn’t that the point?” Tyler said roughly.

Brendan spoke, and his voice was very distant. “No—it’s trying to get over . Over, or through.”

He had his clipboard out and was writing down the numbers from the EMF meter, which had gone off again, beeping frantically. Now he strode to the doorway to the great room. “I’m checking the audio…”

He stopped just inside the door.

Laurel came up behind him to look, and felt her stomach drop, a vertiginous jolt.

The paintings hung on the walls in the great room were not crooked, but upside down.

“Whoa,” Tyler said behind them.

Laurel felt a sudden pressure in the air. She gasped for breath. Katrina cried out beside her, a strangled sound. “Oh my God!” The girl raised a trembling hand. And then Laurel and Brendan saw what she was pointing to. The screens of the monitors were shattered. Glass glittered on the table and floor around the table.

Brendan ran to the monitors.

“Did it record?” Tyler demanded.

At the monitors, Brendan’s back stiffened. He checked the power cords, jiggled switches. “ Damn it. The equipment’s off. Completely off.”

Tyler strode to the monitors and checked.

“Look.” Katrina pointed again. The lamps on the mantel of the fireplace were shattered—the glass bowls lying in heaps of glass on the marble.

Laurel felt a wave of disorientation. But they weren’t broken when we walked in. I know they weren’t. And I didn’t hear any crashing, either….

Brendan started forward, holding up the EMF—but something had changed. The device was silent. Brendan stared down at it, flicked at the switch. “It’s gone dead.”

Tyler hefted the camcorder, checked it, and paled. “Camera’s dead, too.”

“But—that’s not electrical,” Laurel heard herself saying.

“It fried the equipment?” Tyler muttered, and Laurel thought in that moment that he looked more confused and vulnerable than she had ever seen him.

Brendan strode toward the archway. The rest followed. “Watch out!” he cautioned. There was more broken glass on the floor, and on the butler’s table under the lamp. Laurel could see bits of broken glass under the sconces on the stairs, and gleaming shattered pieces in the hallway. When did this happen? she thought wildly. Why didn’t we hear it?

And then all around them they heard the sounds—like lightbulbs popping and bottles shattering and glass cracking—all at once, a prolonged destruction… and completely aural. There was no movement, no sign of anything stirring or breaking, just a reverberation of sound. Katrina pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block it out.

And then silence.

They chased it for hours, on and off all day, until they were exhausted and shaking. It seemed like an hour… it seemed like three days. But wherever they were in the house, the knocking was somewhere else. They never saw anything move; whatever it was they were chasing was always a step ahead of them, as if deliberately taunting them.

They were being played with, completely. Several times they tried waiting in a room, not following the knocking. And the knocking would start in one room, then move to another, then back to the room it had just left. Slow, leisurely, taunting, until at one point Katrina screamed at the ceiling, “What do you want?”

There was a silence… then the knocking started in another room.

It was like being under siege. But by what?

There was a force of personality there, undeniably.

It’s the randomness that feels so insane, Laurel thought. It does seem to be communicating, trying to communicate, but what? Or at least—it seems to have intention.

There was no further assault of sound after the glass breaking; in fact, the knocking slowed down considerably after that auditory blowout.

When finally it stopped, Katrina had curled up and fallen asleep on the couch in the great room, like a fatigued child. Brendan found the digital camera was working, and they had no idea if it had been working all along, as they had not thought to use it. He went around the house clicking off photos of the damage, which was really nothing more than some upside-down paintings, broken lightbulbs and lamp fixtures, a few shattered bowls. Whatever It was, it seemed not to like glass; or perhaps it only wanted to leave them in the dark

And no one thought of leaving.

While there had been pockets of terror throughout the day, there had been nothing at all like an assault, or physical threat. They were all spacey from the adrenaline rushes and crashes but they were also raw with impatience for something else to happen.

They all drifted in the house: Brendan prowled relentlessly with the digital camera and the EMF reader, checking and rechecking levels. Tyler disappeared into his bedroom, and when Laurel went to get a broom from the narrow closet by the servants’ kitchen, she could hear soft snoring from his room. There was glass everywhere and she wanted to get it up before dark, or at least pushed into corners.

She started in the servants’ kitchen and the back part of the hall, and when she stepped through the lounge into the central part of the hall, the door to Brendan’s room was still closed. She hurried by it, putting as much distance between herself and the room as she could before she resumed her sweeping.