SIGHTED Page 2

  I stood on the curb waiting for the driver for a cold and uncomfortable thirty minutes. At any moment, my landlord could have come dashing out the door to badger me about the missing rent, hurtling insults and threats of eviction. Thankfully, he didn’t.

  I felt the constant gaze on my back, though, even as my Uber rolled up and came to a stop with a piercing shriek from the brakes. I was sure someone was watching me from the windows, hidden behind the safety of a drawn curtain. I climbed into the backseat. The driver had a patchy beard and a man bun. The car started moving, and I watched the block of townhouses I called home fall away behind us.

  I usually spend my mornings checking my notes, writing, editing manuscripts, and following up on contacts. Hell, sometimes, that process extends into the late afternoon. Most of my interviews took place at night - something about the cover of night makes people far more likely to divulge the details of their paranormal experiences - so, it was very unusual for me to be out in the world in the middle of the afternoon. My body lurched forward, I heard the brakes shriek again, and I felt the car come to a stop.

  The driver turned around. “Here we are, dude.”

  “I know you guys usually get a tip,” I said, while I dug around in my pockets for loose change.

  “Don’t worry, tip’s already worked into your fare.”

  “Oh.”

  “But, can you give me a good review?”

  “Sure?”

  “For sure, man.”

  The air was extremely crisp; I should have brought a damned jacket! I cursed under my breath, and walked up to Caden’s door. Caden lived in a fairly nice suburban neighborhood, in a two-story town house, though in recent years it’d fallen into disrepair; the grass was uneven and overgrown in spots, there were old tires in the front yard, and the paint was beginning to strip from the front of the house. Still, it was his, which was more than I could say at the moment. I had to admit that I was a bit envious of his success, even if he had lost everything but that house in the divorce.

  I rang the doorbell. A few seconds later, Caden opened the door and waved me on in. The air was stuffy inside, and I could tell that he hadn’t dusted in a very long time. I smiled wryly at how similar we were, despite his successes.

  “Well, let’s have this out.” He stopped at his bar - which was also covered in a thick layer of dust - and grabbed for a bottle of Scotch. “As I said before, I don’t have all day.”

  He poured us both a drink and handed one to me. “No thanks, it’s too early.”

  “You’re not a Scotsman if you turn down twelve-year-old Scotch.”

  “Fine.” He seemed to be challenging my manhood; I wasn’t Scottish, as he knew damn well, but I took the glass anyway. “Have you remembered anything since we spoke on the phone?”

  “No,” he said. “But since then I’ve had a splitting fucking headache.”

  “From trying to remember?” I asked.

  “No… I just sat at my computer and started to work on the current chapter, and my head started to hurt. I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe Scotch isn’t the best remedy?”

  He swallowed the whole thing in one gulp, then wiped his mouth. “To hell with that.”

  I paced around his den, eying the pictures he had framed on the wall of his ex-wife and son, the trophies he had kept from his childhood, and the pile of documents on his coffee table, knocked askew in no identifiable pattern. I picked up a manila folder and scanned over the document it held inside. It was a rough report on an object spotted over the Roanoke Air Force Base.

  “Let’s start with your work,” I said. “Is there anything that you might have seen, or learned, that could have led to an encounter with them?”

  Caden grabbed the file out of my hand and closed it up. “Maybe. The report contained in this folder is mine.”

  “Yours?”

  He nodded. “I spotted two glowing orbs over Roanoke. I just wrote this for the book, couldn’t find my original.”

  “I can only imagine why.” I grinned, gesturing at the mess of documents.

  “Fuck you. I’ve seen your apartment, you’ve got no room to talk.”

  I chuckled and leaned against the dusty shelf above his fireplace. “Was it a fireball, or an energy orb?”

  “Energy. Based on my research, it seemed to be emanating a plasma like aura around its hull.” He paused and walked over to his laptop, started poring through his files. “I caught a video of it from my cell…”

  He searched through his files for a few minutes, scratched his head, and moved to his desktop to begin the search again.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  He turned around in his chair, his face twisted, fingers digging in his beard. “I can’t find it…”

  “The video?”

  He shook his head, and looked through his cell. “It’s not in my phone, either.”

  The air felt cold and heavy; goosebumps spread across my arms. Could that have been the reason for the visitation? Did the man in black return to erase the video as well as Caden’s memory? If that was the case, would they be after me too?

  “From the look on your face, you’d think you were the one who just got visited by the MIB,” Caden said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He leaned forward and extended his hand. “Let me see your cell phone.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You’ve got my attention with this,” he said. “I want to make sure those messages are from me.”

  I nodded, fetched my phone from my pocket, unlocked it, and handed it over. He took a few minutes to read the messages, and handed the phone back to me.

  “Damn,” he said. “I was really hoping that this was all just an elaborate prank.”

  “Seriously? You know me better than that.”

  He stood up and paced back to his dusty bar, poured himself another glass of Scotch, this time a double, and downed it even faster than the first one - then poured himself another. I was about to remind him why Connie left him, but stifled it. His brow was furrowed, his back hunched, and his forehead was covered in a thick sheen of sweat. In all the time I’ve known him, I’d never seen him so shaken.

  “I think I need to be alone,” he said.

  I nodded. “You have my number.”

  “I’ll let you know if anything else happens.”

  He showed me to the door, we exchanged goodbyes; there was an agitated quality to his voice. I called for another Uber. He arrived within five minutes of placing the order.

  I reached the car door, my shaky hand around the door handle.

  “Lucas?”

  I turned around. “Yeah?”

  “Shadow People Memoirs,” he said. “You recall the chapter you wrote on them being fragments of repressed memories?”

  “Yeah? What about it?”

  He stared down at his drink. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Did you see one?”

  He seemed far away, glassy-eyed.

  “Caden?”

  “What?” He shook his head. “No, seeing you just got me thinking about the book, that’s all.”

  I nodded; it was true for me as well.

  “Hey, bro,” the driver said. “We staying or we going?”

  “Right.” I turned back to Caden. “I gotta go, man, we’ll talk more about this later!”

  He waved. I climbed into the back seat of the car and shut the door. I watched him close the door to his house as we started to drift down the street.

  I was lost in thought; the rain started to fall again, drumming against the roof of the car and creating rivulets on my window. I could barely feel the car’s movement, or hear the squeaking from the windshield wipers. It was an odd thing Caden had brought up, not so much our book, but the specific chapter. Caden used to laugh at the idea that shadow people were ghosts, or demons. He had no taste for the occult, and most of his chapters were devoted to the idea that they were time travelers, or dimensional travelers, if anything at all.


  I leaned against the glass to ease my nausea; butterflies attacked the walls of my gut.

  “Yo?” The driver said. “You awake, dude?”

  “Huh?”

  “You wanna stop somewhere, or we just gonna keep driving till you pay my tuition?”

  I hadn’t even realized we’d arrived back in Lake Ridge. I didn’t really want to go home, but I also didn’t feel like taking another chance on a potentially rambunctious club.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do you know of any quiet bars?”

  He nodded. “It’s two in the afternoon, they’re all quiet.”

  “Ah, then any will do…”

  The driver dropped me off on the next corner, at a dive bar with blacked out windows. I said goodbye to him, apologized for zoning out, and entered the establishment before I could get drenched by the rain. The smell of cigarette smoke burned my nostrils almost instantly; I wasn’t aware there were any bars left in the state that still had indoor smoking sections. It was practically empty, save for a few older men sitting at the bar, watching a football game. The two older men gave me a strange, almost suspicious look, before a middle-aged woman with a streak of gray running through her hair came out to greet me. I asked to be seated in the non-smoking area. She nodded, and guided me to a more secluded part of the building. I sat down and ordered a beer.

  The men at the bar kept tossing me looks. I tried to distract myself from my thoughts by watching people through the bar’s windows, and failed. All I could think about was Caden’s predicament, and possibly my own. The thing that bothered me the most was the fact that I had read a story the night before about someone claiming to have lost their memory after an MIB encounter. The parallels to Caden’s story made it feel as if a cephalopod had taken residence inside my stomach. I accessed my bookmarks, and went back to that story, started reading. The waitress came by to deliver my drink. I thanked her, and went back to reading.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” She asked, her hands on her hips.

  I looked up at a rather attractive ebony skinned woman with straightened hair; her face was twisted into a scowl. “I did say thank you… that wasn’t just in my head, right?”

  “You don’t recognize me at all?”

  She did look familiar. “I guess…”

  She busted out in hysterical laughter. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. The look on your face!”

  Her smile brought it all back. “Ah! I met you last night, you were the one in the cat costume!”

  She took a seat at my table, and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Yeah, that’s me. Guess, with the lack of whiskers, I can’t blame ya for not recognizing me.”

  “It did throw me off,” I said. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Zoe.” She lit her cigarette.

  “This is the non-smoking section.”

  “It’s cool, the owner doesn’t give a shit.”

  She exhaled a large puff of smoke, and I leaned back in my seat in an attempt to avoid it. She laughed, took another puff, then blew it in my face. Normally, I’d be more irritated, but I was far too on edge to chastise her.

  “What are you looking for?” She grabbed my phone and laughed when she saw the article I’d stumbled on. “Men in Black stories, Top Ten Scariest Men in Black Stories, Rick Nedfern’s The True Men in Black. Man Claims MIB Erased His Memory! You actually believe this crap?”

  “It’s my job,” I said.

  “So, what, were you visited by aliens?” She grinned, and thumbed through the article.

  “Not me, a colleague of mine.”

  “You must be really gullible.”

  I managed a nervous grin. “I’m actually known as a skeptic in my field.”

  “Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s written all over your face, you believe it.”

  I took my phone back from her. “Is it?”

  She nodded, and an awkward silence passed between us. I ordered another beer, she didn’t leave though, just passed the order off to another waitress at the bar.

  “So,” she said. “It must be fun.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Being a Ghost Buster? I bet you get to see all kinds of cool places, people, touring around doing research for your books?”

  “Paranormal Investigator, and, yeah, it can be.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be a Ghost Buster!”

  “Paranormal Investigator.”

  “Whatever.”

  I chuckled. “Just like that?”

  “Yeah, why the hell not? It sounds like fun.”

  “Well, do you have a degree in journalism?”

  “It’s the paranormal, Lucas, not exactly shooting for a Pulitzer.”

  Ouch, that one hurt more than a little bit, but I felt emboldened, and grinned. “Well, I might be able to take you under my wing, if you give me your number.”

  She laughed, and stole my phone again, then handed it back to me. “There, now you’ve got my info.”

  She finished her cigarette, got up, winked, and got back to work. I asked for the check shortly after that, and used my GPS to figure out how to get home. I bore the rain and walked, of course; my bank account would be pretty dry if I took another Uber.

  I returned home to find a note taped to my sliding glass door, basically reminding me that I had twenty-four hours to get last month’s rent together. I slammed the door closed and immediately collapsed on my couch, without bothering to change into dry clothes. I sat silently for a while: listening to the rain, feeling my wet clothes soak into the fabric of the couch, contemplating how I might be able to come up with the money to pay my landlord. Even if I could somehow get my book finished by the deadline, I wouldn’t see a dime of profit for at least a month. Even with impending eviction looming, I found myself thinking over Caden’s predicament. Almost as if on cue, the bells tolled; I opened my phone, and the message. It was an image taken from Caden’s phone; an ambulance and several other emergency-response vehicles were lined up around one of the houses in his neighborhood.

  Caden: Headaches are getting worse, and now this.

  Lucas: What happened?

  Caden: One of my neighbors just got rushed off to the hospital. It might be connected.

  Lucas: That’s crazy, don’t do that to yourself.

  Caden: People in other MIB reports sometimes have tragedies strike all around them, I can’t ignore it. What if it’s all my fault? My neighbors already hate me.

  Lucas: You’re going to drive yourself insane with questions you can’t possibly find answers to.

  Caden: Maybe you’re right…

  Lucas: Are you experiencing any other symptoms, other than headaches?

  Silence.

  Lucas: Caden, tell me.

  Caden: No, I’m not.

  Caden: The ambulance just drove off. My neighbors are staring.

  Lucas: For what? They can’t possibly think there’s a connection.

  Caden: Probably think I’m some sort of devil worshiper. Bunch of Bible-thumping jackasses.

  Caden was a very outspoken atheist. There was one particular scandal I remembered well; Caden was invited to speak at a UFO conference in Seattle, and one of the audience members told him that UFOs weren’t real. That they were some sort of satanic illusion. Caden lost it, he lit into the poor bastard until he was ready to climb onstage and try to physically fight him. Security had to break things up and escort the guy out of the conference. Caden still received hate mail and death threats for that. He reveled in it.

  I had to try to get him focused on the MIB.

  Lucas: Is there anything else that you can tell me? Why would the man in black have wanted the video files themselves?

  Caden: You can’t repeat anything I’m about to tell you. It’s supposed to go in my book.

  Lucas: This is a little more important than a book, but okay, I’ll keep quiet.

  Caden: It’s just my personal theory, but I think ther
e’s a war going on between our boys and theirs.

  Lucas: A war? Wouldn’t we know?

  Caden: Not necessarily, especially not if it’s not really being fought here.

  Lucas: Not sure I follow.

  Caden: The UFOs I filmed seemed to be different from each other, one of them had a blue aura and moved at sharp right angles, while the other one had an orange aura and seemed to move more gracefully. Then the orange one vanished. Just. Gone. The blue one hovered for several moments, almost like it was confused, before descending into the hills. I think the aliens, maybe the ones these MIB work for, are dimensional travelers.

  Lucas: You think they’re trying to invade?

  Caden: I think they already have. Think about the stories, they come from all over the globe, man. Humanoids that almost pass for normal, who seem to come and go as they please.

  Lucas: Not this guy, you said he had no face.

  Caden: Could have been a mask?

  Lucas: Maybe he’s an enforcer, or one of the aliens?

  Caden: I don’t know. But, maybe I was onto something, maybe that video could have blown the whole thing wide open?

  Lucas: Lots of people have claimed to have a smoking gun before.

  Caden: Yeah, but they weren’t visited like I was.

  Lucas: Or, maybe they were, and they just don’t remember…

  Caden: I need to lay down, try to get rid of this headache.

  Lucas: Keep me updated.

  Caden: Will do.

  I turned on some music, and laid back down on the couch. It wasn’t long before the entire couch was soaked, but, somehow, I didn’t mind. In a way, it was almost soothing.

  III

  My eyes snapped open, but took in only darkness. I’d fallen asleep while trying to relax. Breathing was difficult; there was something heavy in the air. My hair stood on end, and I felt a tingling numbness wash over my shoulders and spread down to my toes. I had the sense that I wasn’t the only one in the room, like there was a pair of eyes focused directly on me. I remained still, pretending to still be asleep; a million paranoid thoughts ran through my head. My landlord and his wife were the only ones with a key to the basement apartment. Maybe he’d had enough?