Short Story: The Unseen

Short Story: The Unseen

1.

Dear Julia,

Please don’t destroy this letter!

I beg you!

Oh Julia … if only you knew how difficult it’s been for me to write this letter. How many painful days of misery I’ve spent hiding my medication – the drugs that make me an immobile, silent, mass of pain-free flesh – in the hope of becoming lucid enough to put pen to paper; you might suspend your disbelief, if only for the few minutes it will take you to read it.

My beloved sister… after the crash, while I lay in a coma, you sat at my bedside for weeks; always the quintessential older sister ... my doting sibling. You were still sitting there when I opened my eyes, so I owe you this explanation.

Have you ever wondered how close we are to other realms of reality? How thin is the veil that separates us from the others? Well ... it’s far thinner than you would expect.

As soon as I opened my eyes I knew something had changed, the light was different, the colour of the world had changed, it was almost turquoise … a deep sickly turquoise. I blinked ... and blinked again but it stayed the same. The world looked as if it had been plunged underwater during my unconsciousness. The specialists told me the impact must have damaged my optic nerve, leaving me with an extreme form of colour blindness, but the term seemed wrong somehow, my senses seemed accentuated.

Did you know that the human eye only sees a tiny percentage of the spectrum of light all around us?

I saw the spiders first, hundreds of them; they traced strangely recognisable geometric patterns on the ceiling. Each of them no larger than a nickel, they scurried collectively as if they were being etched on a giant canvas by an invisible hand. I spent hours watching them; at first fascinated by these small creatures I’d seen all my life acting in an unrecognisable fashion that was so new to me. Then I saw they were not your average house Spiders, the ones I was so accustomed to. In the new light, with my new perception I could see they had wings, tiny little wings, and instead of hairy little legs and bodies they were smooth, like amber ... no, not amber... they looked wet; like a newly tarred road on a hot summer afternoon.

I called the nurses but they saw nothing on the ceiling ... no spiders, nothing. My first silent thought was that I‘d gone insane, the crash must have shaken my marbles so hard that many were lost on the junction next to my bike. I lay for the rest of the day trying not to look at the ceiling, but how could I avoid it?

*

Mr. Shiny appeared the next day.

I use “Mr” in a presumption of gender ... “It” would be more appropriate. To keep my sanity I stuck with the first name that came into my head.

Monsters are supposed to come out in the dark. They’re supposed to be under your bed or in your bedroom closet. He appeared in the bright blue-green daylight in the corridor outside my room, it was the first real day of summer we’d had, so the light that shone through the large barred widow was the strongest and clearest we’d had.

I was sitting in a wheelchair having just returned from an MRI scan, when I saw him standing in the middle of the busy bright corridor not moving, yet flickering as if he were a picture on an old television with poor reception. I sat transfixed, unable to say a word. He was invisible to the people in the corridor, but they stepped out of his way, as if unconsciously they were aware of his form and shunned it.

They were right to spurn his form; it was no more than terrifying, but beyond revolting. He... it, wore clothes—that made the vision worse, showing some kind of intelligence existed inside what served as a head—trousers that seemed to be made of small fur pelts no larger than that of a cat. He bore the shape of a human; two arms, two legs, but each were strange and tentacle like, seemingly devoid of any bones and fingers finishing in a diamond sharp point. His chest was bare, it displayed several pinkish gill-like flaps, which quivered and dripped with moisture, as the creature appeared to breathe.

A huge lipless, vertical, slit like mouth, filled with needle sharp teeth had evolved at the bottom of his face beneath a hundred ... no, a thousand tiny yellow pinprick eyes.

I was sure all of them looked at me.

His Slug shaped head finished in a point, like all his other limbs, and like his smaller friends on the ceiling of my room he was the colour of a dark grey slug. Yet, its back ... Ohh, its back shone like a shell of black onyx, I saw the bright greenish blue light of the corridor reflect my eyes in the back of its left arm just before I screamed.

*

The darkness came as a welcome relief as I awoke alone in my room. I looked at the ceiling and there was nothing, tentatively I looked around the room ... again, nothing. I’d already connected the strange light to the appearance of Mr Shiny and his little friends, and his absence in the darkness only served to reinforce my theory. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I could hear movement, the darkness blinded me; but I could still hear them.

The consultant came to see me that afternoon; I’d had the curtains pulled tightly shut, and the blinds brought down. It helped slightly, leaving only the spider-like creatures visible.

He explained in laymen’s terms the results of my Scan. The area that processes vision—the Occipital Lobe he called it—showed little sign of activity, “It’s almost as if you’re blind” he paused “... but, your Temporal Lobe seems to be twice as active as it should be, it’s almost as if it’s filling in the gaps. “Any hallucinations?” He didn’t know the half of it ... I wanted to tell him, yet I was sure they were real; I didn’t just see them. I heard them. I smelt them.

He left me alone to ponder his diagnosis. The Temporal Lobe; he’d told me it governed ... perception that was the word, perception. Wasn’t that what had changed, my perception of the universe around me?

I hadn’t noticed that the consultant had left my door slightly ajar, and a beam of light was crossing the room towards the bed. I was still staring at the ceiling when the light touched the bed and made a bridge across the darkness. By the time I noticed the light, Mr Shiny was entering the room. The door was only open the slightest of gaps, but his whole shape seemed to turn into the consistency of treacle and pour through. He moved towards me, never stepping into the dark, always remaining in the aquamarine light, at one point his form stretched almost four feet wide as his claw-like hand stretched towards me. His malformed face looked down at me with alien eyes, from a head that was squeezed to fit within the finest tip of the light, he raised his hand to his mouth and with an expression so perfectly human put a sharp ebony finger to his vertical lipless mouth and said, “Shhhh,” Then he was gone into the dark.

*

The light spectrum is huge ... are we blind to most of it, or are we too un-evolved to perceive the things that live with us ... or, maybe that stand right next to us?

The day arrived to leave the hospital, ever since the warning from Mr Shiny I’d seen very little of the creatures, only the bug’s remained, they however had started to get larger... much larger. A nurse packed my bag as a dog sized, cockroach like insect nuzzled up to my leg, I shivered as his antenna touched my arm in gratitude before opening his back an flying through the door. The nurse said.

“Are you alright sir?” I looked at the young man, and nodded. Insane or not I wasn’t going to be trapped in this room forever—best laid plans I can hear you thinking Julia.

The journey from my room to the hospital reception was unearthly. The light had intensified and deepened in colour, it gave the effect of looking through a prism and even doorways I had travelled many times looked wildly uneven, “A carnival hall of mirrors,” I silently thought to myself.

Mr Shiny was conspicuous in his absence, he wasn’t lurking in any of the corners, but a few of the shadows could have rendered him invisible.

The Hospital doors slid open and the London air hit me, tinged with the stale smell of the Thames in summer was a welcome relief after months in the hospital. A black Taxi was waiting for me, door open and with obligatory chirpy driver offering to help me into the back. I told him the address to Mother's house in Swiss cottage and we left.

As the cab sat in traffic waiting to join the flow round the cinema at the south side of the Westminster Bridge, I started to notice the faces of the commuters, in the direct sunlight they—like the doorways inside the hospital—were wrong ... uneven somehow. The cab moved north towards the bridge and I started to see more outside the cab. As if, my eyes were starting to focus for the first time. As if a veil lifted.

The bridge was bustling with people, as it always was, but in the turquoise light that now illuminated my world I saw what walked with the businessmen and women as their silent partners. The being I called Mr Shiny wasn’t a lone animal, his form was replicated a thousand times on the bridge, people danced in a silent, macabre ballet as they unconsciously avoided each other in their almost liquid flow of life. The revelations weren’t limited to the ground; the skies swarmed with giant, sleek, octopus like creatures that swam in the air as if they were at the deepest point of the ocean. I could hear a voice in the distance as I fixed my eyes on the alien world outside.

The largest of all the flying monsters that seemed to have spawned from the same womb as Mr Shiny had wrapped itself around the very top of the Big Ben, hiding—from me only—the clock face. It opened a gigantic ebony beak and let out an unearthly scream timed to the chimes of the bell, I sat in the back of the cab, the driver wittering away, whilst I was teetering on the edge of the abyss that is madness.

I jumped from the slow moving cab, rolled, and sank to my knees on the pavement. Commuters stopped and looked at my pitiful body lying at their feet. I cried and screamed for them to look...begged for them to look; the humans looked at me with pity; their alien partners looked at me with malevolence; they knew I could see them.

*

Alice went through the looking glass, however, she came back ... I’m here forever.

The isolation room helped for a while, but the veil gets thinner and now they enter at will. I used to think I was going insane...creatures were coming from another universe to take over ours. Now I know the truth, this world belongs to them; we’re the aliens.

Anyway, it’s time for me to go. I’m staying on this side of the turquoise looking glass, and my partner Mr Shiny has just arrived.

Look for me in the light at sunrise; I’ll be with you.

Love Rich....