The Unseen

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Everything was moving. The wind played hide-and-seek through the trees outside, a constant rushing swirl of motion; bushes scraped their branches across the windows, screeching and scratching, nails on the glass. The draft breathed through the chimneys, and curtains stirred in front of the windows.

She woke and did not know where she was, or who. She was very still in the dark, listening to the moving and scraping.

And something else… the piano. A single note, over and over, then dropping a third, then back to the original note.

She sat up and looked around her.

She was in the indistinct white room that she’d been in with Tyler during their testing. The Zener card table was there, and instead of Tyler, another young man sat in one of the chairs: broad shoulders, round and ruddy face, Carolina blue eyes… only she only sensed their blueness, because he and the whole room were in black and white; it had the faded, grainy quality of a newsreel. She stared at the young man.

I know him.

He reached to the table in front of him and picked up a card, a Zener card, and held it up so she could see: a card with a thick, black circle on it. He looked intently across the white room at her, holding the card…

She stared back at him.

So familiar, those eyes.

And she stared at the card, trying to glean the message…

A circle.