The Unseen

CHAPTER ONE

The hall ahead is dark, a tunnel of black.

She is in bare feet, wearing just a T-shirt, her steps slow and reluctant on the polished hardwood floor.

The warm Southern California breeze breathes through gauzy curtains at the windows, wafting the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine… but the smell is cloying, gagging, and dread rolls like black waves around her as she approaches the door, their door.

The sounds are louder, now… the grunts and moans are like physical blows. She wants to scream, wants to run… and she can’t breathe, can’t breathe, something is wrapped around her chest like a vise.

In the night outside, a dog breaks into hysterical yapping; somewhere far away a siren wails. Beside her, the Art Deco clock on the wall clicks to 3:33. She steps past the ghost of her own reflection in the large gold-framed mirror… takes a jerking step forward into the doorway.

And stops, sways at the sight—

They are in the bed, their bed, Matt and—

I don’t even know her name, what’s her name?

Tracey.

She can hear their breathing, Tracey’s soft moans, Matt groaning, “Baby… oh baby…” She can smell them, feel their frantic writhing—Matt’s quickening thrusts, Tracey’s legs flexing and tightening around his thighs…

Every move, every thrust, every sigh, is like being stabbed, all over her body. She can feel the jabs, feel the blood pouring from her flesh, the coppery stink of blood… she is wrapped in barbed wire and it is tightening, tightening…. Matt and Tracey cry out together on the bed….

Inside her mind, she is screaming, her cries echoing against the walls…

Please… please no…

And behind her, the mirror shatters….

Laurel awoke with a shuddering gasp, felt her heart pounding crazily against the mattress, shaking the bed. The room around her was blindingly sunny, white and high-ceilinged, with crown molding and a ceiling fan.

Ceiling fan???

Where am I???

She lay against the pillows in total disorientation, waiting for the dream to subside, to regain some kind of reality.

Then she sat up slowly, in the bedroom of her house in—her mind scrambled briefly for it—Durham, North Carolina.

She had been there for three weeks and four days, after living all thirty-one years of her life in California.

And she had moved in a blind rush of escape, after finding her fiancé in bed with his graduate assistant, in exactly the scenario she had dreamed, down to the very last detail.

She swung her feet out of bed and stood, reached for a robe, avoiding looking at the mirror on the wall.

She belted the robe around her as she walked out into the hall, past the door of the spare bedroom with its unopened moving boxes stacked against the walls, and down the stairs of her house—her house!—her feet bare on the cool of the polished wood stairs, her left hand gliding down the satiny curve of railing. So different from the right-angled, modern condo in West Hollywood, with its recessed lighting and skylights, and stainless steel, granite-countered kitchen.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m as far away as I could get.

The dream had followed, and it never felt like dreaming; it was always the same, like walking into the living past, into a parallel world that existed intact and constant, with her trauma captured, her silent screams echoing forever on the walls.

But it was less frequent, and she no longer awoke from it with barbed-wire welts in her flesh. That’s some kind of progress, right?

It was the dream that had told Laurel that Matt was cheating on her. She’d jolted awake in her Santa Barbara hotel, where she was staying the weekend at an American Psychiatric Educators conference, with raised welts in her flesh and a shattered feeling in her chest. She didn’t believe in psychic flashes, had never won so much as two dollars in the California lottery, didn’t know who was on the other end of the phone when she picked up; she never even read her horoscope in the newspaper or online. She had a doctorate in psychology, for heaven’s sake; she lectured on personality and theories of the self at Cal State L.A.; she had multiple job offers at universities in various parts of the country (all of which she’d turned down to stay in Los Angeles with Matt…)

But the dream had been more than a dream. She’d known.

At 1:23 A.M. she left the hotel, got in her car, and drove two hours back to their condo in L.A… and it was just as in the dream, every detail: the smell of jasmine, the blowing curtains, the yapping dog, the clock clicking over to 3:33 as she walked down the dark hall through waves of black dread, toward the sound of moaning coming from their doorway, their bedroom, their bed…

And the mirror…

In her mind she heard the shattering and halted on the stairs, gripping the banister, squeezing her eyes closed to shut it out…

Matt had moved out immediately, they had never even talked about it. It was almost as if he’d staged the scene for Laurel to find, to spare himself the awkwardness of an actual conversation. He was out of her life, shacked up with Tracey. Just like that—unengaged.

Stop it, Laurel ordered herself, clenching her nails into her palms. What’s the point? You were living in a dream world.

She had no illusions about what the real problem was. Los Angeles was a 24/7 candy store. Beautiful young people came in droves from all over the country, hoping to make their faces their fortune. Laurel knew she was pleasant enough to look at in a sexy librarian kind of way: glasses and braces long gone, and her unruly mane of red-gold hair less of a disaster than it had been in her coltish adolescence. And of course there were the legs that had stopped Matt in his tracks the night they met at a faculty Christmas party—or so he’d said at the time. But Laurel knew she didn’t even register on the Hollywood scale.

She’d never really understood what Matt had seen in her, other than the fact that she simply listened well; she’d been sympathetic and available when he was shattered and mooning over being dumped (By a model, no less—and shouldn’t that have been your first clue?).

No, she’d been an utter fool, blindly trusting, delusional, stupid in every way.

Better to know now, Laurel’s friends, colleagues said. Of course she would heal, of course she would move on, laugh again, find someone new, someone worthy of her. We love you, you’ll be fine. All the things that well-meaning people say.

Laurel had nodded and thanked them and gone home and given notice on her condo, then called the Duke University psychology department to accept a tenure track professorship that she hadn’t even been considering, in the middle of North Carolina, a whole continent away.

She said all the right things to her dismayed friends: she couldn’t stay an associate professor at a state college forever, tenure track jobs were almost nonexistent in California, she was doing the best thing for her career.

All true, and all lies. The truth was she ran—ran away from Matt, away from L.A., away from everything she’d known. She wanted to be someplace that no one knew her, where there was no place that she could run into people she knew, where they could ask, brightly oblivious, about the wedding—or worse, look at her with pity, even edge away from her as if she had a communicable disease. The cheated fiancée, the abandoned bride…

She became aware that she had reached the bottom of the staircase and was just standing, unfocused, at the foot of the stairs.

She looked around her, breathing in, letting her present surroundings chase away the memories of L.A.

The house was bright, airy, and empty, two stories of old Southern charm, with a wide wraparound porch, ten-foot ceilings, heart-of-pine floors (the realtor had said “heart pine”), a screened back porch, a walk-in pantry (with a window!), and curious small square doors in the walls of the master bedroom and hall and kitchen, which to Laurel’s utter amazement turned out to be functioning laundry chutes. The windows were hung on counterweights and had thick glass that rippled like water; the front and back yards overflowed with wisteria and honeysuckle. The quiet of it all still astonished her—not just of the house, but of the surrounding blocks and the whole town.

Laurel had been looking for a rental but she’d gotten lost on the way to an apartment appointment and found herself driving through a quaint and timeless neighborhood with gently curving streets and wide porches with white Southern rockers, a haphazard collection of bungalows and Victorians and barnlike Cape Cods. When she saw the OPEN HOUSE sign in front of a gingerbread house with eight-paned windows, she stopped on a whim. The house was captivating and the price so surreally low (compared to the still-stratospheric prices of Southern California) she’d found herself writing a down-payment check on the spot (stunning the chatty realtor into silence), and moving into the place two inspections and a scant two and a half weeks later. It was a huge and outrageous decision that she’d made in a matter of minutes, unlike her in every way.

But she was not herself; she had no sense of what “self” meant anymore. And buying meant it would be harder to ever go back.

She walked now like a white-robed ghost through the empty rooms—literally, empty: she’d spent her entire savings on the purchase, therefore furniture was not really an option. She maxed out a credit card on a bed, a kitchen table with chairs, and a very large desk for her upstairs study. The kitchen boasted a refrigerator, a stove, and an eating alcove. The rest of the house was entirely bare—but then, so was Laurel, so the emptiness suited her.

She moved across the empty hallway and turned the latch of the door.

She opened it and looked out, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—and felt the familiar wave of unreality to see, instead of flat, sunny West Hollywood, the curved, tree-lined street, regal houses with their own wraparound porches with rockers and ceiling fans and hanging baskets of ferns, and yards with huge and lushly flowering trees. A car might pass once every ten minutes or so, and then the thick silence would descend again, laced with the subdued twittering of birds, the low hum of cicadas, wind chimes, an occasional faraway train whistle, even the tolling of church bells.

A white-and-orange kitty with luminous gold eyes sat on the porch, centered exactly halfway between the doormat and beginning of the stairs, and looked up at Laurel expectantly.

“Still here, hmm?” Laurel said to it wryly. “You’re a trouper.”

The cat waited beside the door while Laurel fetched the newspaper and then walked, flowingly, in front of her into the house, through the center hall, straight to the kitchen, where it sat beside the pantry door, waiting to be fed. The morning after Laurel had moved in she’d opened the front door and the cat had walked in as if it owned the place. The cat was light years ahead of Laurel in confidence, and she figured she could learn something from it, so they had been cohabitating ever since, the cat on one pillow of the new bed, and Laurel on the other. Laurel had yet to name it, but felt certain that the cat would let her know in its own time how it wished to be addressed.

She tried not to think what it meant to be so vulnerable that a strange cat could dictate her life.

She reached for the coffeepot that she’d programmed the night before, and her eyes fell on the window.

She looked out on her lovely, alien neighborhood and thought for the millionth time, What am I doing here? What have I done?

But it turned out to be the day that she found out.