Sight Unseen

by Andrew Neiderman

Overview

A boy is blessed with second sight—and cursed by what he sees—in this terrifying thriller from the bestselling author of The Devil's Advocate.
 
A little knowledge can be a deadly thing.
 
Everyone knows that David is a smart one. He can tell you the end of a story from the first sentence. The other kids won't even go to the movies with him anymore; he always spoils the ending. People begin to wonder about David. There is, after all, such a thing as being too smart for your own good.
 
David has learned the hard way to keep his thoughts to himself. But now David is growing up, and his gift is turning into a power. The power to read people's minds. To see the future. To know things—terrifying things—that he didn't want to know. Like who would live. And who would die . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626817937
Publisher:	Diversion Publishing
Publication date:	02/06/2019
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Andrew Neiderman was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York's scenic Catskill Mountains region. A graduate of the University at Albany, State University of New York, from which he also received his master's in English, Neiderman taught at Fallsburg Junior-Senior High School for twenty-three years before pursuing a career as a novelist and screenwriter. He has written more than forty thriller novels under his own name, including The Devil's Advocate, which was made into a major motion picture for Warner Bros., starring Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Charlize Theron, and is in development as a stage musical in London. Neiderman has also written seventy New York Times–bestselling novels for the V. C. Andrews franchise. He lives with his family in Palm Springs, California. Visit him on Facebook and at www.neiderman.com.

Andrew Neiderman was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York’s scenic Catskill Mountains region. A graduate of the University at Albany, State University of New York, from which he also received his master’s in English, Neiderman taught at Fallsburg Junior-Senior High School for twenty-three years before pursuing a career as a novelist and screenwriter. He has written more than forty thriller novels under his own name, including The Devil’s Advocate, which was made into a major motion picture for Warner Bros., starring Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Charlize Theron, and is in development as a stage musical in London. Neiderman has also written seventy New York Times–bestselling novels for the V. C. Andrews franchise. He lives with his family in Palm Springs, California. Visit him on Facebook and at www.neiderman.com.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

David sat on the ground by the side of his house, keeping himself in the shadows so he could remain unseen. He leaned back against the egg-white stucco wall and stared into the night. From the outside looking in, the lights in his house looked yellow, yet when they spilled their illumination through the slightly opened venetian blinds on the windows, they drew irregular, pale-white fingers over the small lawn that sloped downward to the driveway.

As the breeze blew through the large maple tree beside the house, the shadows cast by the branches shifted and stirred like sleeping beasts, unhappy with anything that disturbed their nocturnal peace.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds coming through the wall. He heard the audience laughter emerging from the cathedral-shaped RCA radio in the living room. When he closed his eyes like this, it was as though he could see through the wall into the small living room. The radio was on a square wooden table under the front window, so if they wanted to sit out on the front porch during warm summer evenings and listen to music, they could do so.

But right now his grandmother was sitting in her soft cushioned, maple-wood chair. Her feet were up on the small, brown hassock, and her hands were pressed softly against each other in her lap as if she were getting herself ready to applaud. She was settled comfortably in the warm sounds that came from the glowing radio dial, staring at it as if she could not only hear but follow the sounds back through the radio, through the wires and airwaves to the studio to see the scenes being vocalized.

She was listening to the "Jack Benny Show," and David could easily envision her grinning. Usually, he sat with her, intrigued with her reactions almost as much as he was with the magic of sound effects and being able to hear people speaking hundreds of miles away.

Actually, he was fascinated with his grandmother. She embodied the entire mystery of his family. Through her and her memories, the ones she was willing to relate, he had traveled back in time, moving over the stories and images like a blind one touching stones of different sizes and textures. His fingers groped for an understanding. She was weaving the fabric of his identity, and he longed for it to be completed.

Because of the vivid way in which she described their relatives, he felt as if he knew them all: his great grandmother and great grandfather, their fathers and mothers, and their grandparents. Some of them had been captured in the sepia photographs that were pasted in the yellow cloth- covered album. They stared out at him with what he thought were expressions of curiosity and wonder. He imagined that they had been fascinated by the camera, but he also fantasized their having an extrasensory experience through which they could look into the camera lens and see him looking at them years and years later.

All of them gathered within him, spoke to him in a myriad of whispers, tugged on his imagination, and forced him to wonder and to question. He listened for answers.

He had come to believe that the blood of his ancestors commingled within him to form a unique descendant. Their passions clashed; their emotions did battle, and the result was what and who he was. He told no one about these ideas, not even his grandmother, although he was tempted to do so many times because he believed she would understand.

Perhaps he was a new kind of creature. That idea tormented him. He believed that he was different from all his friends, even though the differences were not immediately visible. He was afraid that some of them had begun to sense it. This idea was giving him nightmares. Maybe there was a werewolf in his past or even a vampire. One day he might be transformed into something horrible. There were nights he awoke abruptly and sat up to actually feel his face and body to be sure it was all the same.

He couldn't imagine telling his mother these things. If anything, he was growing further and further away from her. In fact, he was beginning to think that his mother was merely a surrogate for his true maternal parent. He had camped within her for nine months, been born, and now grew into something so alien he could barely converse with her. Rarely did he feel the need to tell about his deeper feelings anymore, and as long as he didn't tell his grandmother, there was no one he could talk to about them. It was something he had to deal with alone.

And that was why he was often alone; why, as he had done so many times before, he had gone out of the house tonight to sit in the darkness and think. Wasn't there anyone out there like him? Someone who felt and saw the same things? Loneliness made the shadows deeper. It distorted sounds and made the car horns he heard coming from the village seem like the dying moans of metallic beasts.

Their house was located about halfway up a long hill that rose above Centerville proper. Until the summer tourists came to stay at the two bungalow colonies above and beyond them, the street was relatively quiet. Tonight it seemed even more subdued than usual. The warm, strong breeze played on the branches of trees that rustled leaves and scratched the face of the moon. Across the street two bats, seemingly tormented by the streetlight, flew madly around the pole. Even though he couldn't see them, he heard the murmuring voices of the Novaks and Levines who were sitting next door on the porch of their two story apartment house talking themselves onto the threshold of sleep.

It was an unusually warm spring night. The summer resort season in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York loomed just over the next month or so. Already, bungalow colony owners had opened water pipes and cleaned out their units. Everywhere, people were painting, washing, mending. The world was getting ready to change again. His quiet, rural community would soon become a bustling urban neighborhood.

The approaching summer spread itself out before him. He could see every day, every moment. His mother would have to work longer hours at Rosenblatt's drugstore, handling the sale of nonprescription items and sometimes working the soda fountain. They couldn't afford to send him to summer camp, but his mother would make an arrangement with Mr. Kaplan so he could go swimming at the sulfur-spring lake just outside of town any time he wanted. He would enter the ring-toss contest and baseball games at the school, part of the recreational program run by the village. Last year he won the junior ring-toss championship.

He and his friends would roam the village streets at night. Sometimes he would go to the movies, but most of the time they would scrounge up some change to play the pinball machines or would just sit on the stoops by the corner stores and watch the older kids gather around their cars. There would be music and noise, and often he would feel a great excitement. He would believe in himself and fantasize many things.

He was going to be fifteen years old this summer, and he felt it was going to be the most important summer of his life so far. He did not know why he had this belief. So many times lately, he would say things or think something and be unable to explain, even to himself, where it had come from. His mind, racing forward, reached the ends of stories before their beginnings were even completed. Mrs. Stang, his English teacher, stopped asking how the class thought a story would end. David's hand would shoot up almost automatically, and he would rattle off the events as though he were the author. She said he must be reading ahead, but he denied it vehemently because it wasn't true. But neither she nor his friends believed that.

Now it was getting to be the same way with the movies. His friends hated to go with him. It did no good to swear he had never seen the pictures before. He tried to keep his knowledge to himself, but lately that was getting harder and harder to do.

Things flowed and spilled too fast. He couldn't stop them. His thoughts became words so quickly he barely had time to consider what they meant. It was as if — and this was what frightened him the most — as if someone else lived within him, and he had no control of this second self. He had nightmares about that, too. He even went so far as to stand before the mirror in the bathroom and open his mouth widely to see if he could spot someone.

It was a weird idea. He would be the first to admit it, but his imagination had no boundaries. It was as if thoughts and dreams, and especially nightmares intermingled. All he had to do was stare at something for a while, just the way he was staring at the fingers of light on the lawn, and something would come to him.

Right now he was imagining the light lifting from the grass and worming its way through the night until it found a dark house to invade. Once inside, it soaked the sleeping inhabitants in the hot illumination, melting them into some dark liquid that would soak through the sheets. In the morning their friends and relatives would come looking for them and find only a grayish-black stain in each bed. He pressed his eyelids closed tightly in order to end the horrible images. Sometimes that worked; sometimes it made things worse. Tonight, it seemed to be making things worse.

"David?"

He welcomed the sound of his name. It helped rescue him from these terrible thoughts. He looked up at the kitchen window. His mother pressed her forehead against the screen to get a glimpse of him, but she couldn't see him. He knew it and he didn't move or respond. Her shadow was enormous on the lawn. He was fascinated by the size of it.

And then he thought, maybe our shadows are our real selves released only when light presses upon us. His mother was really that big. Her physical body was the illusion, only she didn't know it. Few people, if any, knew it. Maybe only he knew it. What he had to do was find someone else who saw and thought the same things. He always came back to that: the need to share, the need to find someone who could help him understand.

"David, are you out there?" She waited a moment. He held his breath. "I know you're out there, David. I want you to come in. It's late and it's getting cooler, and you remember what I told you about polio. David?"

He remembered what she had said. Her words were filled with warnings, but he didn't believe them nor did he fear them because he didn't see it happening to him. He was confident about it, even though three new cases had been reported in Monticello, a village only ten miles away.

"Oh," she said, "you're such a rotten kid. Get inside or I won't let you out tomorrow night. Did you hear me, David? I won't let you go anywhere with your friends if you don't come right in this minute." She spit her words out and waited, her face still pressed against the screen.

He closed his eyes and thought about her threat. No, she would let him out, he concluded. She was going to play Mah-jongg tomorrow night. All her friends would be over, and she'd want him out of her way. Her threats didn't matter.

"David, if I have to come out there, you're going to be one sorry child."

She waited; he waited. Then he heard her mutter and saw her pull back. She didn't come out. The "Jack Benny Show" ended. He could barely hear his mother and grandmother talking, but from the rhythms of their dialogue and the tone of their voices, he knew his mother had appealed to her for help. A few moments later his grandmother was at the window. Her shadow on the lawn was even bigger, but to him it was warmer.

"David. You should come in. Come."

He stood up. The darkness had been so comforting. He hated to leave it and was reluctant to go in to sleep. He was afraid of the dreams.

"David."

"I'm coming."

"Good. He's coming, Roselyn," she told his mother. "I'll make him some hot milk."

"You baby him too much," his mother said. "He's fourteen years old."

He avoided the reach of escaped illumination as though moving through it would be painful. He didn't trust the white light since he had just imagined the distortions and animations. He hovered along the house and walked to the door.

The bats turned into the streetlight and then flew off. And then he thought he heard someone whisper his name. He paused for a moment to listen harder. There was someone out there, someone like him, waiting. There had to be. Who was it? Maybe he was right about shadows being the true self, and maybe he had left his shadow in the darkness. Maybe shadows could be peeled away like snakeskins. Maybe he was getting closer and closer to discovering who he really was. But that possibility didn't excite him; it frightened him.

"I don't want to know who I am," he whispered into the night. He thought he heard laughter. The shadows knew he had no choice. He would have to know.

David was always fascinated by morning, by the beginning of a new day, by the opening of his eyes and the discovery that so much time apparently had passed so quickly. Night had to be an illusion. He had plans to stay up throughout the night so he could witness all of it and believe in the hours, but always, he became too tired and fell asleep, betraying himself.

But more disturbing, there were these new dreams. His fear of them was growing to the point where he would try to stay awake for as long as possible in order to stave them off. In these new and more intense nightmares, he would be walking through the village, moving in slow motion, turning and capturing everything like a movie camera. Usually, there was no one else around, but lately, people were looking at him from behind closed windows, their faces pressed into the glass so firmly they looked painted on. For some reason they were afraid to come out into the streets when he was there. He could see the fear in their faces. Why should they be afraid of him? he wondered.

After he awoke he would lie there and remember the dreams. This morning he was more frightened than usual. In last night's dream, he had walked to the center of town as usual. Only this time there was a coffin there, an opened coffin. There was no one around it. It looked as if it had slipped out of the back of a hearse, but the driver hadn't realized it. Although he struggled with himself to turn away, he couldn't stop his legs and his forward motion. Despite his efforts for a retreat, he went right to the coffin and looked in.

Mr. Hoffman was there, pale and waxy in his death. He looked nothing like the rosy-faced owner of the village bakery, the man with the heavy German accent who enjoyed giving cookies to little children. At night the aroma of his bread baking permeated the village. It was his best advertisement. His cousin Carl owned and operated the bagel bakery right behind his. Often, David and his friends would go down there and buy a string of bagels for a dime. They would get cream sodas in the quart bottles and sit on the hill by the railroad tracks, eating their bagels and waiting for the nine o'clock to go through.

The nine o'clock didn't stop at the station in his village. It was a freight train, and on bright moonlit evenings, David and his friends could read the boxcars and be fascinated by the names of the different states. To them it seemed as though the train connected all America. Usually, there was someone at the back of the caboose, someone to call to, a man with a dark face waving back at them forlornly, a prisoner of time and space, locked and submerged within the metallic snake. Where did he go? Where had he come from?

Once, in one of his dreams, David could see the man's face. It wasn't the face of a man, though; it was more like the face of a skeleton, the face of death. When the moonlight hit his chalky cheekbones, he smiled knowingly and nodded slowly. It was almost as though he and David were old friends. That dream left him in a sweat.

He and his friends could feel the freight train long before it appeared. The grassy knoll began to tremble beneath them. Tony Martin liked to run down to the tracks and put his ear on one, just the way they saw an Indian do it in a movie. Just before it came around the far turn into town, Tony would charge back up the hill. It was a steep little slope. Often, he, like any of them, would stumble and slide on the grass. There was a danger in that, and the danger filled them with additional excitement.

As the train rushed by and the cars rattled and thundered, they would all scream in unison, delighting in the way their voices were swallowed by the roar of the metal. It drove them back into a huddle of laughter and fear.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Sight Unseen"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Andrew Neiderman.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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