The Unseen by JL Bryan Read Free Book Online Page B

ruins.
    She ambled half a mile along the tree-shadowed sidewalk of McLendon Avenue toward her house, which faced the grassy green of Candler Park across the road.  It was one of many attractive old houses in the area, and like many of its neighbors, it was crumbling and rickety enough to rent out to groups of poorly-paid young people.
    The house was canary yellow, two stories plus a basement, with a broad front porch that wrapped around one side of the house, heavily shaded by the mossy old trees in the small yard.
    Cassidy clambered up the creaky front steps and through the front door.  Inside, the lights were dim and the music was loud, repetitive thudding house music.  Her roommate Allie sprawled on the threadbare sectional couch between two guys, both of whom Allie considered her “boyfriends,” and she was engaged in some pretty heavy petting with both of them. 
    Cassidy snorted a little as she climbed the steep, sagging stairs to the second floor.  She liked an occasional tab of ecstasy, but Allie was a religious disciple of the drug, constantly trying to get everyone around her to take it.
    The house had four bedrooms.  Cassidy and Barb had the two upstairs rooms—when they’d first moved in, they’d had little money and shared one room.  Barb eventually landed the bartender job and rented the second upstairs room for herself when a former roommate moved out.
    Downstairs lived Allie, the ecstasy princess, and Stray, who was a drummer and spent most of his time down in the leaky, dirty basement doing band rehearsal with his friends—which typically involved getting drunk and smashing out incoherent sounds that rattled the house for hours each night, until the band members started passing out. 
    Cassidy didn’t even know Stray’s real name, but he’d lived here longer than any of them and collected their rent on behalf of the landlord, who lived in Florida.  He was in his early thirties, much older than his current female roommates—far from sexually harassing them, though, Stray seemed mostly unaware that they even existed.  He was usually in either the basement or his room, smoking pot and growing out his waist-length hair.
    Cassidy pushed open the door to her room, stumbled over her dirty laundry, and flopped across her bed.  Her room was a mess of sketchbooks, paintbrushes, and laundry, but she blamed the laundry on sharing a small washing machine and a barely-effective dryer with three roommates, including one who had two boyfriends.
    She lay there for a moment, the lights off, streetlights pouring in through the window. Her phone, which she’d forgotten in her rush to wake up and get to work by noon, beeped on her cluttered drawing table in the corner.  A few seconds later, it beeped again.  Then again.  She knew it would annoy her until she pacified it, so she sighed and pushed herself to her feet again.  She stumbled to the drawing table.
    It was a voice mail from her mom, probably another very aggressive invitation to dinner.  Cassidy groaned.  The timing was bad tonight, but her mom just didn’t care.  Once again, she felt a twinge of guilt about missing her brother’s birthday, but she really couldn’t imagine he cared very much.
    I should call him , she thought.  She lay back on the bed, clutching the phone.  Just rest a second first.
    Then she was asleep.
    In her dreams, she floated in a thick fluid, brown as whiskey and thick as gelatin.  She could barely breathe.  The light was dim, from somewhere very far above her.  At first, she saw nothing, then her eyes seemed to adjust and she discerned shapes swimming in the brown fluid around her, shadowy things shaped like serpents and bristly worms.  They burrowed toward her through the thick liquid.
    Little unseen things slithered over her feet, like fish with oily skin and sharp, bony spines.
    She tried to look down, but the thick fluid wouldn’t allow her head to move.  She felt the little fish-things crawling up her