The Unseen (8 page)

Cassidy slid into the brown leather seat.  Peyton dropped in beside her, and her MDMA-filled brain was ready for some serious kissing—or anything else he wanted to do to her—but Peyton was more interested in the powder inside his little metal box.  He cut out four lines on a small hand mirror.  They took turns snorting.

“A lot of pretty girls in there,” Cassidy commented.

“
Nobody’s as pretty as you are, Cass,” he said.

“
Ha.  I’m glad they didn’t freak out with your, you know...”

“
My what?” Peyton gave her a look, his eyes dark and serious.

“
Uh, your movie devils and rotting gazelles and evil clowns...”

“
It all has a purpose, you know,” Peyton insisted.

“
I know.”

“
I’m trying to pull things apart for people.  I want to show them it’s all bullshit.” He snorted another small spoonful of coke. “People don’t understand.  It’s all words, it’s all stories we tell ourselves—religions, countries, societies...it’s nothing, just words.  Take away the words and we see what life really is, just a series of moments, just sensations and experiences, and none of that shit means anything.  I want to strip away the stories and show everyone the truth.”

“
I know,” Cassidy said again, fidgeting in her seat.  Her heart hammered inside her chest.  She wanted to stay and make out with Peyton, but not as much as she wanted to get back into the club and dance.  She felt jittery and nervous, knowing that she had to act soon, to go get pounded by the music now, while all the good feelings lasted.

“
Take away the words, and we’re all just apes in search of meat. Nothing else,” Peyton said.

“
We’re not search of anything else?” Cassidy moved her hand up his arm, feeling the muscles beneath his shirt.  She caressed the back of his neck.

“
Meat and sex,” he said, his eyes burning into hers now.

“
Pure poetry,” she whispered with a smirk.

“
The poetry of meat and sex,” he said, and then he kissed her hungrily, mashing her lips back against her teeth.  His hands went to her breasts, and she kissed him back, her fingers exploring his face and skull.

It felt good, but her body insisted there was a missing ingredient—music, thrumming through every cell and pore of her, bringing the billion fibers of her body to life.

“Let’s go dance,” she breathed.

They returned inside, and the night became a white-hot blur.  Gunterwolf had a fast, deep sound and his own bizarre video clips, black and white film of faceless marionettes moving at freakish speed.  Cassidy danced in the crush of the crowd, enjoying the pulse of the music and the touch of so many steaming bodies.

She found herself dancing with Kit and her friends, and one of the guys tried to pull Cassidy aside.  She realized that the exact cuddle-puddle scenario she’d wanted to avoid was beginning to develop.  Cassidy jerked away, found herself facing Barb, and the two girls laughed on eye contact.  Cassidy felt bubbly and pink inside.

“
You’re so pretty,” she told Barb, touching her face. “You have the cutest...nose.”

“
You’re being a dork,” Barb snickered. “It’s pretty obvious my nose began its life on a rat before migrating to my face.”

“
Aw, don’t say...” Cassidy began, and then she lost her train of thought entirely.  Peyton drew her aside and she danced tight against him.  Suddenly she wanted to be out of there, somewhere alone with Peyton where they could strip off their clothes and melt into each other.

“
Let’s go,” Cassidy whispered into his ear.  She waved at Barb as they left.  Barb was dancing close with Kit and one of Kit’s guy friends and barely noticed.

Back in the car, Peyton fed more cocaine into his nose and hers.  Cassidy’s head buzzed and spun, and she felt intensely eager to do
something
but couldn’t focus her whirling thoughts at all.

“
It’s such a great night,” Cassidy said. “I don’t want it to end.”

“
Maybe it won’t.  Maybe it’ll just go on forever.” Peyton punched the accelerator and roared out onto the road.  Cassidy gazed at him, thinking he was the most gorgeous thing in the universe.

“
Midtown,” Peyton snorted as they zoomed down Thirteenth Street at three a.m., in time to see the well-dressed young crowds spill out of the closing dance clubs. “What a bunch of fakes.  Plastic people, man, just pure unalloyed plastic.”

“
But you still want to play out here, right?” she asked, feeling an irrational sense of rising panic.  If he turned down the good gigs for aesthetic reasons, he would get mired in the tiny night spots, his career would die, he would become depressed and withdrawn, and finally self-loathing...all this flashed across her coke-fueled imagination in about half a second.

“
Yeah, why not?  More money, big crowds...what choice do I have?”

Cassidy smiled and felt momentarily relieved, but her brain flailed around for something else to worry and obsess about. 

“The crowd liked you,” Cassidy said. “Don’t you think?”

“
Yeah, a monkey with an eight-track would entertain that yuppie-ass crowd.  I just wonder if this isn’t all a waste of time, you know?  Will I ever make anything worthwhile?  Am I making art or trash?  Does my meaning reach anybody, or are they all a bunch of drunk wasteoids?  Is there any real meaning there in the first place?  I feel lost.”

“
Where are we going?” Cassidy sat up, disoriented.  They were racing down a narrow, deserted street with small unlit houses on one side and dense woods on the other.  Atlanta was an urban forest, and even downtown, you were never too far from narrow streets twisting away under the shadows of tall old trees.

“
My place,” Peyton said.  He owned a big loft in the trendy, gentrifying Old Fourth Ward area—his father owned it, actually.  Peyton’s dad had bought it as an investment when it became apparent that he would still be providing for Peyton’s basic expenses for the foreseeable future.

Peyton accelerated through the empty streets, taking back roads through the city that curved behind brick strip malls, through small neighborhoods, and then past leafy, overgrown cinderblock buildings.

“I want to do more,” Peyton said. “I don’t know what that is yet, but I feel like I was meant to do more.  I mean, you too, right?”

“
Meant to do more?  Who ‘means’ us to do something more?”

“
I don’t know.  The...universe?”

“
The same absurd, empty, meaningless universe you’re always talking about?  That one?” Cassidy asked.

“
I don’t know.  Something just feels wrong.”  He put on more speed as they reached a concrete bridge over railroad tracks, just wide enough for two lanes flanked by narrow, crumbling sidewalks. “Something has to change, though.  We can’t go on like this.”

“
Like what?” Cassidy asked, not at all sure what he meant, and then she saw the hearse.

She would remember it as a hearse, though it could have been other things—a black limousine, possibly, or a black station wagon.  It was a long car, as black as the late-night shadows from which it emerged, its faint headlights a pale blue color.

The car barreled right down the center of the bridge, taking up half of each lane, leaving them nowhere to swerve.  Peyton was driving towards it at sixty or seventy miles an hour, as though playing chicken.

“
Peyton, watch out!” she screamed, pointing. 

Peyton yelled, as though finally seeing the oncoming black car for the first time.  He wrenched his wheel to one side, then the other, panic and confusion rendering him dangerously indecisive.

“Peyton—!” Cassidy screamed again, and then Peyton’s car spun.

Cassidy was slung out of her seat, because she’d forgotten all about buckling her seatbelt.  Her spine jammed against the passenger-side door as the car whirled around, and she grimaced, her hands pawing uselessly for something to grasp.  If the door behind her decided to spring open, she’d be flung into the road.

The Demon’s tires screeched as Peyton stomped the brakes and wrestled the steering wheel, fighting for control of the fast but antiquated machine. 

Cassidy turned her head and saw the guard rail rushing toward them through the windshield.

She screamed, not even bothering with Peyton’s name this time.  The Demon bounced up onto the sidewalk.  Its grill and headlights smashed into the guard rail.  The hood bent upward and folded in half, just in time to shatter the oncoming windshield.

Cassidy flew up out of her seat.  There was a moment when the world seemed stretched out into slow motion.  She saw Peyton rising from his seat, his torso hurtling towards the steering column, horror spreading across his face.  He wasn’t looking back at her.

Cassidy’s femur shattered against the dashboard, filling the world with intense white pain for a portion of a second.  Then her head bashed against the broken windshield and her eyes closed.

Cassidy continued on through the windshield, over the sharp tent of the crunched hood, past the buckled and bent metal of the bridge’s guard railing.  She flew out over the twin sets of railroad tracks below, lined with weedy gravel.  High, kudzu-ridden trees and a few crumbling houses and wooden fences overlooked the tracks, which curved away toward the full moon.

It occurred to her that the night scene was rather pleasant.  She drifted along over the tracks as though riding a cloud.

She wondered distantly how that terrible car crash had turned out.  She reversed course and drifted back toward the bridge, approaching the vintage Dodge Demon smashed into ruins against the splintered guard rail.

She looked down through the broken windshield and saw Peyton slumped over the steering wheel.  He let out an occasional soft groan.  Beyond him, crumpled on the passenger-side floormat, lay Cassidy’s body, her right leg twisted beneath her at what looked like an excruciating angle.

Cassidy felt no pain, nor any particular shock at the sight of her mangled body.  It felt no different than seeing one of her dirty shirts on her bedroom floor.

She felt concern for Peyton, though.  He was still trapped down there, locked inside his body and feeling all its pain.  She tried to speak his name, but she could not hear her own voice.

She rose from the wreckage and looked around for the elongated black car.  She didn’t remember actually colliding with it at all.

The black car was not smashed against either of the guard rails, nor anywhere else on the road.  It had somehow slipped past and fled on into the night, leaving Cassidy and Peyton to their fate.

She watched Peyton’s groaning form, wishing she could reach out and comfort him, but she had no hands, no body.  This made perfect sense at the moment, she thought, because her body was over
there
, while she was over
here
.  Simple as that.

The air around their unconscious bodies seemed to wriggle.  Her nasty old friends, the transparent things that floated in the air, were back.  Some resembled thick, horned millipedes, their heads swollen with three or four sets of mandibles each, while others looked like worms encased in coiled shells.  The transparent things swam toward Cassidy and Peyton’s bodies as though the air were full of some invisible jelly.

They began to feed, the millipede-things biting at their necks and chests, the worms chewing at their guts and fingertips.  Cassidy tried to wave them away with hands that didn’t exist.

She couldn’t see any obvious damage to either of their bodies from all the biting and chewing, but it was obvious that the creatures were greedily devouring
something
.  They made no sound, and they remained transparent as they fed.

A large one arrived, seemingly drawn by the small wrigglers.  It looked like a vulture, half-decayed, its dark feathers turned to filth.  Its body was so rotten she could see holes straight through its abdomen.  Sharp plates and spikes grew out of the bird’s skeletal skull and neck.  Its eyes were sunken out of sight in their bony sockets. 

The bird was also transparent, but less so than the dozens of little vermin.  It perched on Peyton’s shoulder and dipped the sharp hook of its beak into his forehead.

In her mind, Cassidy shrieked at it to stop, but she could make no sound.  She was a floating viewpoint in space, not breathing, not blinking, entirely formless.

She felt a deep chill, and then three shadows appeared by the wrecked car.  She couldn’t see them clearly at all.  They were tall and thin, their shapes suggesting distorted and elongated human beings, as though she were seeing a funhouse reflection of faceless monks in black robes.  If they were people, then they’d draped themselves in the darkest cloth she’d ever seen.  They faded in and out of view, three narrow stripes of a darkness much deeper than the night around them.  They didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, just staring at Cassidy’s body.  They didn’t seem substantial, but they gave her a creepy, unsettled feeling much worse than the disgusting, transparent critters munching on her boyfriend’s body.