The Unseen Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  T.L. HINES’S NOVELS

  “Hines excels at writing gripping supernatural thrillers with plenty of twists and turns; he’ll pull you in from page one.”

  — Library Journal review of The Dead

  Whisper On

  “A wonderful debut, by a prodigiously talented writer!”

  — Michael Prescott, New York Times

  best-selling author of Mortal Faults,

  on Waking Lazarus

  “Provocative from the first line, intriguing to the last. Waking Lazarus is a thriller of strategic pacing, colored in tones of mystery and wonder. Don’t miss this exceptional debut.”

  — Brandilyn Collins, author of Violet Dawn

  and Amber Morn

  “[Hines] plays some clever bait and switch games with the good and the bad guys, and creates an excellent genre-mix that’s reminiscent of Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, and Stephen King.”

  — Infuze Magazine review of The Dead

  Whisper On

  “Waking Lazarus is going to have people talking. It’s a rare novel of perfectly executed suspense . . . T.L. Hines has himself a new fan; I’ll be picking up all his books.”

  — Colleen Coble, author of Anathema and

  Lonestar Sanctuary

  “The plot twists like the mine tunnels under Butte and made it difficult to stop reading. Nothing is as it first appears. [Hines] raises troubling questions that tie in with our current fears and apprehension. Who, or what, is really our enemy?”

  — TitleTrakk review of The Dead Whisper On

  “Sharp, finely drawn and compelling. Waking Lazarus is a supernatural suspense on steroids.”

  — Alton Gansky, author of Angel and

  A Ship Possessed

  “. . . Waking Lazarus is the smart, stylish, compassionate, life-affirming thriller I’ve been waiting for . . . a page-turner, and a remarkable debut.”

  — C.J. Box, author of Blood Trail

  and Blue Heaven

  THE UNSEEN

  OTHER BOOKS BY T.L. HINES

  Waking Lazarus

  The Dead Whisper On

  © 2008 by T.L. Hines

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Page design: Walter Petrie

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hines, T. L.

  The unseen / T. L. Hines.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59554-452-0 (hardcover)

  1. Supernatural—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.I5726U67 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2008019839

  Printed in the United States of America

  08 09 10 11 12 QW 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY- TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For cancer survivors everywhere

  ONE

  PERCHED ON TOP OF THE ELEVATOR, LUCAS PEERED AT THE WOMAN BELOW and created an elaborate history in his mind.

  Elevators and their shafts were easy places to hide. Easier than utility chases. Much easier than ductwork, popularly portrayed in movies as cavernous tunnels through which a man could crawl. Lucas knew better; most ductwork was tight and narrow, and not solid enough to hold 150 pounds.

  But elevators. Well, the film depictions were pretty accurate with those. You could indeed crawl through the small access panel in the ceiling, sink a sizable hole with a hand drill, and then watch the unknowing people below as they stepped through the bay doors all day long. Provided you bypassed security, of course. And did your drilling outside of regular office hours.

  Most of the time he preferred to work in DC proper, but with height restrictions on the buildings, he never got much of a chance to do elevator surfing; for that, he had to move farther away from the city, where skyscrapers were allowed.

  He returned his attention to the dark-haired woman who was currently inside the car with four other less interesting people. In his history, she was a widow. True, she was probably in her early thirties, if that, but her stern look, her rigid posture, suggested overwhelming sorrow in her past.

  Lucas recognized such sorrow.

  So she was a widow. She had moved to Bethesda from her rural home in Kansas after losing her husband, an auto mechanic who had been crushed by a car in a tragic mishap.

  Below Lucas, the dark-haired woman moved to the side for another person entering on the eighth floor. As she did so, the overhead light in the elevator car flickered a moment, then returned to full strength.

  Puzzled, the dark-haired woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and looked at the light. It happened. For a moment, she stared directly at him, directly at the secret peephole he’d carefully drilled in the ceiling, directly at the constricting pupil of his own eye.

  Then she dropped her gaze back to the other people in the elevator with her, offering a little shrug of the shoulders.

  She had looked, but she hadn’t seen. Like so many others.

  When she had looked toward the ceiling, his heart had jumped. He had to admit this. Not because he was worried about being discovered, but because the knowing had started—the long, taut band of discovery that stretched between his eyes and the eyes of a dweller, then constricted in a sudden snap of understanding.

  The Connection, he liked to call it.

  Once he’d spent several weeks holed up in an office center on Farragut Square; during that time, his favorite target had been the reception area of an attorney’s office. A one-man show named Walt Franklin, the kind of attorney who chased ambulances. And so, Walt Franklin was chased by people with grudges.

  Lucas’s observation deck in that office was one of his most brilliant ever: the lobby coat closet, a small cubicle not much bigger than an old telephone booth—something, unfortunately, he didn’t see much of anymore. The closet had an empty space behind its two-by-four framing and gypsum board, leaving enough room for him to stand. An anomaly in the construction, one of many he’d seen over the years.
>
  But what had been so wonderful about this space, this anomaly, was its perfect positioning between the reception desk and the lobby waiting area. By drilling holes on two opposite sides of the small space, he could simply turn and view the woman who usually sat at the front desk—a large, red-haired woman with a genuine smile—or the people in the reception area. No need to change positions; he could simply turn his head and watch whoever seemed the most interesting.

  Over the several hours he’d spent cramped in that space, he’d seen dozens of intriguing dwellers—people with complex, magicfilled histories, he knew—sit in the lobby’s molded plastic chairs and wait to speak with Walt Franklin. Their savior.

  Once he’d experienced a Connection with the large, red-haired woman who sat at the desk. One minute she was working away, doing some filing. The next moment she simply stiffened, then looked nervously around the room.

  “Whatsa matter?” he heard a man’s voice ask from the lobby area. Lucas turned quietly and looked through the peephole at the man. White hair. Too much loose skin under his chin.

  Back to the redheaded receptionist. “I . . . don’t know,” she stammered. “I just feel like . . . someone’s watching.”

  The jowly man in the reception area half snorted, half laughed. “Wouldn’t doubt it, the kind of stuff old Walt’s involved in. Either the mob’s watching him, or the CIA. Or both.” He offered another snort-laugh.

  The receptionist didn’t share his humor, obviously, but she smiled at him. Except, Lucas could tell, this wasn’t her usual smile. Her normal smile. Lucas was a student of the smile, and he knew this particular one was forced; it barely turned the corners of her mouth.

  She hadn’t seen Lucas. But she had sensed something of his presence, and his mind kept returning to that. Returning to all the people, maybe a dozen in all, who had made the Connection and intuited his presence in a closet. Under a floor. Above a ceiling. Hers was all the more special because she hadn’t actually seen any evidence of him. She’d only felt it.

  I just feel like someone’s watching.

  As Lucas left his daydream and returned his attention to the dark-haired woman in the elevator below, now staring at her feet, he wanted her to make that Connection too. He liked this woman; he wanted to feel something more than the typical subject and observer relationship. He wanted the Connection.

  Instead, she lifted her face toward the doors, caught in midyawn, as they chimed and opened on the twenty-third floor. She slipped through and into the offices beyond.

  So much for Connection.

  Still, he would wait. It was early morning, and he’d have another half hour of steady traffic. If no other interesting dwellers stepped on the elevator before then, he’d choose the dark-haired woman. She was, after all, the only one who had inspired a secret history in his head all morning. That had to count for something.

  Maybe, just maybe, this dark-haired woman with the full lips and the eyes like bright marbles and the overwhelming grief at the loss of her husband would pull him back to the twenty-third floor. Maybe she would make the Connection after all.

  He could wait.

  LATE THAT EVENING, WHEN THE DARK-HAIRED WOMAN HAD LEFT THE office and returned to her modest home in her Ford Taurus (this is what he imagined she drove), when the entire office building had emptied, Lucas let himself into the company offices where she worked and began to search.

  This building didn’t have much security. A few cams, but those were on the building’s exterior. And the janitors here weren’t all that attentive. They often left their industrial vacuums or their carts filled with cleaning supplies sitting alone in the hallways, rings of master keys jangling loosely from them. So really, it was easy to take master keys and make copies—he even knew of a key machine he could use after hours just a few blocks away from the building—then return the keys, safe and sound, to their carts or vacs.

  So the dark-haired woman’s office space was only a key turn away.

  He slipped the key into the front door of the office and turned it. He pushed open the door, listening for the telltale click or buzz of an armed alarm system. Nothing. Alarm systems weren’t common in these kinds of office parks, because the tenants seemed to rely on the buildings’ inept security guards. But he’d run into a few.

  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.