SIGHTED Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  About the Author

  Other Works by Allen White

  Call to Action

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Elise, James, Phoenix, Katie, Livi and Freddy. And to Ryan, you know why.

  This novelette is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  SIGHTED

  Copyright © 2017, by Allen White

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Allen White

  Sighted logo by Stephanie Mindzak

  Photo of Allen White by Sean Mahoney

  By Allen White

  I

  The music and voices merged into an incoherent mess. The bartender slid me a glass of beer from across the bar; I sulked back to my chair, attempting to avoid contact with dancing monsters and fumbling-drunken-superheroes. When I sat down, beer spilled over the lip of my glass, making a fresh stain on my vest. I grabbed for a napkin and cleaned myself up as best as I could. After a few sips of my beer, I decided to stick it out a bit longer.

  It occurred to me that I fit in well with the crowd, something I could rarely say. It was a costume party at a local bar, in Lake Ridge, Virginia. Halloween had been on Monday, so it must have been a late celebration. I was wearing black dress pants, brown dress shoes, and a vest and violet scarf that was probably out of fashion. All I needed was a deerstalker hat, a cob pipe, and a magnifying glass, and I was sure to be mistaken for literature and TV’s most famous detective.

  I peered down at my phone, trying to ignore the sight of sex-crazed twenty-somethings rubbing against each other to the awful sounds of today’s most popular, and least talented, “artists.” I pretended to scroll through messages, and even pretended to reply to a few of them.

  “Seriously?” A soft hand found my arm. “You’re pretending to text? That’s so sad!”

  A brown-haired cat, with a chocolate complexion and straightened hair, took the seat across from me; I struggled to keep the beer from spraying out from my mouth.

  “You okay?” She asked.

  I nodded, and wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

  “Don’t talk much, huh?” She crossed her legs; her cat suit pulsed with the music and the strobe lights.

  “Most people talk too much,” I said.

  “I like your costume, what are you supposed to be?” She asked.

  “It’s not a costume,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow at me, revealing a Celtic looking piercing. “What’s your name, guy, what do you do?”

  “Lucas. I’m a paranormal investigator.”

  “Like a Ghost Buster?” She slapped the table and laughed. “You’re funny!”

  It wasn’t a joke. “No, not like a Ghost Buster. I investigate stories and individuals involved in paranormal events, and report on them in my books.”

  “What are you doing here then? You don’t look like you’re having fun!”

  I smiled wryly. “I guess I’m not really sure.”

  “Let me guess.” She waved her hand in the air and hiccupped. “You’ve got writer’s block!”

  I nodded and sipped at my beer. Drunk or not, she was surprisingly perceptive. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Why?”

  “I kind of made a huge mistake.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  “I announced that my book would be out by the end of the month.”

  She slapped both hands on the table and almost toppled my drink. “That’s great!”

  I shook my head. “Not when you don’t have it finished.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yeah.”

  I let out an exaggerated sigh and stared down at my half-finished drink. An awkward silence passed between us and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Normal conversations were outside my comfort zone.

  “Well, tell me what the book is about,” she said. “Maybe I can help!”

  “I really don’t think-”

  “Do it! I’m good at this stuff, I swear!”

  I finished my drink in a large gulp and set the empty glass on the table. “It’s a collection of stories from individuals who are the alleged victims of violent hauntings. I’ve interviewed over fifty witnesses and have collected extensive notes surrounding each event that I planned to report on. But, I’ve been stuck re-writing the same paragraph for the last three months and haven’t been able to finish the manuscript.”

  “You should order another drink!” She raised hers and laughed hysterically.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, because I’m sure that’ll solve it.”

  Some obnoxious racket came from the dance floor; I turned around to see a group of women waving at the girl who’d decided to sit with me, and turned back to her in time to see her raise a middle finger and stick her tongue out at them.

  “Well, listen,” she said. “My friends are being assholes, so I gotta get back to them before they come over here and embarrass the hell out of me. It was nice talking to you.”

  She got up, and stumbled back to her friends.

  I let my back sink into the chair and propped my feet up where the cat lady had just been sitting. The waitress passed, and I ordered another beer, but when it arrived, I just sat and stared at it, watching the bubbles rise to the top. I wasn’t even sure why I’d decided to stay in the first place; the noise and the beer weren’t helping alleviate my writer’s block at all; the music, and the smell from the fog machines, had given me a serious headache. I quickly finished my beer and grabbed my ash gray trench coat from the back of the chair, paid my tab, left a less than generous tip, and darted through the door before guilt could set in.

  A bitter wind stabbed needles into my face; I buttoned up my coat, my fingers numb and fumbling, and raised my scarf to cover my face. Even that couldn’t keep the cold from sinking into my bones.

  I didn’t want to spend money on an Uber, so I shoved my bare hands in my coat pockets and took the opportunity to walk home and organize my thoughts.

  I stopped at the edge of the street, and peered up at the full moon; clouds were reaching out to strangle what little light there was left in the night. The wind swept out and grabbed at my clothes, and the pressure changed. I checked the temperature on my phone, barely above freezing. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing, walking home drunk, when it was sure to start raining ice and sleet, but I did it anyway.

  Three hours passed before I arrived at Clipper Dr, and began the final uphill trek up to my basement apartment. A violent ache had spread through my legs, and my head was swimming with fatigue. It finally started to rain, and I tried to shield myself with my arms for the final length of the journey. I started down the hill that led to my basement apartment, and almost slipped on wet grass. Bells tolled from my phone as I fumbled for my keys, stumbled through the sliding glass door, and tracked mud into my living room/kitchen. I sat my phone down on the table, turned on a light, and peeled my wet clothes off. It was a cold start to November, so I didn’t want to catch pneumonia and die; my health insurance wasn’t going to cover that. I put on a pair of pajama bottoms and found a hoodie to wear, then searched for something to eat in my, mostly empty, fridge.

  I settled for a potpie and some leftover box Mac N’ Cheese that probably hadn’t spoiled; sat down on my couch, began to nibble away at my dinner and tur
ned on the TV. I scrolled through several channels and found a show I could get into. The bells tolled again. I cleared a few TV dinner boxes off the coffee table and sat my plate down, then stood up and fetched my phone from across the room.

  There were two messages, one from my landlord, demanding that I pay him for the rent that I’d owed him from last month, or face eviction, within forty-eight hours, and one from a friend I’d collaborated with once on a book about shadow people. It was an image… I opened the image in my gallery, and the blood rushed from my face. There was a man in a black suit, tie, and a fedora, standing next to a street lamp in the middle of the night. His face was featureless, with soulless dark eyes like two black holes that could swallow stars, and no other discernible facial features. Escalated heart rate aside, my better senses told me that the grainy image could have been photoshopped.

  I immediately replied to Caden’s message.

  Lucas: Umm, what is that?

  I didn’t get a reply, so I sat back in my chair, pressed play on my remote, and tried to forget about it. Several minutes later, I got another message.

  Caden: They’re here.

  A chill passed through me; my skin prickled.

  Lucas: Who’s there?

  Caden: He came to my door, asked me if I’d seen anything strange lately, and asked me if he could come in… Why’d I let him in?

  Lucas: What are you talking about, Caden?

  Caden: He sat down on my couch and stared at me. I still feel that weird buzzing, it’s like a pressure building up in my head - and those eyes…

  They couldn’t have been human. He said that if I knew what was good for me, I’d find a new career.

  What he was describing - it sounded like a man in black. We’d talked about them while working on the shadow person book. He always seemed convinced that men in black were just a shadow arm of the government.

  I’d researched a few stories, where someone would witness a UFO, over a military base, or on the way home from work, and then immediately get an ominous phone call, or a knock at the door, and there they’d be, black suit, fedora, and all, ready to threaten the individual into remaining silent about what they saw.

  Lucas: You’re telling me you got visited by a man in black?

  Caden: I’m not really sure, it all seems like a blur.

  Lucas: Did you notice anything else? Any visual cues, smells, sounds?

  Caden: There was a smell…

  Lucas: Go on.

  Caden: You’re going to laugh.

  Lucas: I won’t, I promise.

  Caden: He smelled like sulfur.

  Lucas: Very much like the stories you told me about.

  Caden: Except for his face, he didn’t seem to have a nose or mouth, and his eyes, they’re black! Nothing like that’s ever been reported!

  Spiders crawled down my back, I almost tried to shake them off.

  Lucas: Okay, what did you tell him when he told you to stop your research?

  Caden: I told him I’d sooner give up the bottle than that. He seemed to snake away… I wanted to follow him, but my legs wouldn’t let me.

  Caden: Before I knew it, he - it - was gone.

  I made my way over to my computer, booted it, and sat down, waiting for the OS to load.

  Lucas: How long ago did this happen?

  Caden: Hold on…

  Lucas: Did he come back? What’s going on?

  There was no reply. My OS loaded, and I immediately downloaded the image he’d sent me to my desktop. I cross referenced it with several search engines to see if it was a stock image. It wasn’t. I suspected that Caden had taken the image himself.

  Caden was a known Ufologist, and had several fairly popular books on the subject, so it wasn’t such a stretch that something like this could happen to him. I opened up several tabs on my browser and began researching any events with parallels to what Caden had claimed to experience.

  My eyes scanned over several articles. The first was about a man - one the article called an “obvious crackpot” - who claimed that these men in black erased his memory. The next was about an older woman who got a visit in the middle of the night by a man who smelled like brimstone. He, apparently, told her that she should find something else to do with her time - much like Caden. She told him to go to hell, and he vanished, never bothering her again. Then there was another story, about a man who claimed he was abducted by little green men - technically, gray - and swore that the little guys told him that the men in black were agents of another race of dimension-hopping aliens who wanted to take this world for themselves, all while they sat him in a large white room and had tea and biscuits with him. The last story was hard to swallow, but I saved the other two as bookmarks for later reference.

  Hours passed, and the storm finally let up outside. I was beginning to grow worried.

  Lucas: You okay? Want me to stop by?

  Several minutes and no reply, again. My Uber app was loading when-

  Caden: I am fine.

  Lucas: Are you sure? I can still come by…

  Caden: I am fine.

  Lucas: Seriously? I’m going to call for an Uber.

  Caden: No. I am going to sleep.

  I stared at the message for a few minutes; something seemed off. I set my pickup location, and was just about to call a driver, when the thought hit me… I couldn’t afford it, not if I wanted to pay my rent in forty-eight hours like my landlord demanded.

  I sat the phone down on my desk, and just stared blankly through my monitor. I kept checking over my shoulder, through my window, across my landlord’s lawn and beyond the gate, where the forest loomed; tree branches swung and shadows danced with the force of the storm wind. My imagination ran wild, placing shadowy figures among the things out in the night, vile, long armed, and evil things - the ones that tormented me as a child. I cursed Caden’s name, locked the door, and closed the blinds. Sleep was an elusive bastard that night, and Caden didn’t reply again.

  I decided to sleep with the lights on, and to call him in the morning.

  II

  An irritating chirping dragged my eyes open. I sat up, turned the alarm off, and immediately checked my messages. Nothing new from Caden. It was only ten in the morning. I stumbled into my kitchen area, prepped a batch of coffee that would probably give any normal human being caffeine poisoning, and stuffed my face with a toaster pastry.

  I sat on the couch, turned on some music, and scrolled through news sites with my phone as I slowly sipped my coffee. I resisted the urge to call Caden… as hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. My more rational self tried to pass it off as a prank, but the part of me that had seen shadow people and full body apparitions as a child was terrified. I found myself looking at the image and over thinking the whole thing; even with daylight creeping through the blinds, the photo sent cold shivers snaking down my spine.

  My thumb hovered over Caden’s contact information. It was almost noon. I finished my coffee, poured myself another cup.

  I pressed call; the phone rang.

  “Hey!” Caden said. “How’s it going, Lucas?”

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved by his energy, or extremely angry. “You must be real amused with yourself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The conversation we had last night? You scared the crap out of me!”

  “Conversation?”

  My heart drummed against my ribs. “You don’t remember?”

  “Lucas, the last time we talked was over a month ago.”

  I opened up my recent messages, and scrolled over the ones Caden sent me the night before. “I’m looking right at them, Caden. You sent me an image of a man in a Fedora and a black suit without a face! You said he visited you, asked you if you’d seen anything strange, threatened you to stop investigating ufology and then left. Then you told me to hold on-”

  “-are you fucking with me, Lucas?”

  “No, I’m not fucking with you, damn it!” I r
ubbed my temple. “You came back an hour later, and said that you were fine. But you didn’t sound like you.”

  Caden sighed. “Text doesn’t have sound.”

  “Not what I meant. You didn’t use contractions, you said, I am fine, twice, and then said you were going to bed. Here, I’ll send it to you.” I took screenshots of the whole conversation and began sending them to him.

  I heard the sound of multiple dings and beeps on Caden’s end, and waited for his response. His breathing got heavier.

  “Caden?”

  “This has to be some kind of prank,” he said.

  “I’m telling you-”

  “I don’t remember sending you a single text last night… I came home from an investigation and went straight to bed.”

  “Check your messages, maybe they’re still there?”

  I waited for him to look.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  My gut felt heavy; I let my head bang against the back of the couch.

  “Either you’re doing a convincing job of messing with my head,” I said. “Or, you’re missing time.”

  “Are you serious?” he said.

  “Well, you have been in Ufology for nearly ten years.” I got up and started to pace the length of my apartment. “If aliens did exist, it’s not such a stretch that you’d get a visit eventually. God damn it, now I sound crazy.”

  He fell silent for a while.

  “Caden,” I said. “If you are missing time-”

  “I don’t remember any of this shit-”

  “-you should go to the doctor.”

  “And tell them what, exactly? I’m fairly certain telling them that I just got abducted would go over amazingly.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “No, you’re not. I have a very important set of interviews to conduct for my book, I have no time to spend on…”

  “I don’t care! This is important, and something you can’t just ignore.”

  He went quiet again. “Fine, come over.”

  The conversation devolved into the usual formalities before hanging up. I decided the rent could be short again and called for an Uber. I got dressed and bolted out the door. The remnants of last night’s storm loomed to the east, stealing the sun’s fire and casting a shadow across the city. I took a deep breath of petrichor through my nostrils and came to the top of the hill. There’s something special about the way the air smells after a storm, something that always puts me at ease.