The Unseen by Hines Read Free Book Online Page A

in the empty spaces of his REM sleep, filling in the voids, the letters of the words creating backdrops of scenery everywhere he looked inside his dreams.
    Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.
    A scratching sound brought him back. For a few moments he was disoriented as he quickly stuffed all the memories back into their locked box. Where was he?
    Oh yes. Donavan’s apartment. And that scratching sounded very much like a key sliding into a deadbolt lock.
    He heard the front door open down the hallway. Then nothing for a few seconds. A glass clinking, maybe.
    More silence.
    He caught a flash of Donavan walking by—dressed in a suit, certainly not what Lucas had expected—then he moved out of sight into the closet.
    After a few minutes, Donavan returned and sat at his desk directly below Lucas, now wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt. More like it.
    Lucas noticed Donavan was wearing earbuds, the end of them disappearing somewhere in the pocket of his cargo shorts. An iPod listener.
    Donavan hummed an unrecognizable tune as he keyed in a Web address. The username and password screen appeared, and Donavan fingered the keys.
    Lucas studied, letting his mind record the scene as Donavan’s fingers tapped the board.
    A few seconds later, a simple white screen with black type appeared on the monitor, with CREEP CLUB in all caps at the top. Below it, a variety of forum threads spooled out.
    Donavan scanned the threads, checked his watch, uttered a curse, and closed the browser.
    Obviously, he was late for something.
    Seconds later he was out of view, and Lucas listened until he heard the front door close and the deadbolt slide back into place.
    He waited silently for five more minutes. Donavan struck him as the type who might forget something and need to come back—especially if he were running late.
    When Lucas felt confident Donavan had left for a while, he slid the tile out of its track and swung himself out of the hammock and to the floor. After wrapping his webbing and replacing it in his backpack, he sat down at Donavan’s computer and opened the browser once more. At creepclub.com, he watched the screen come up as before, asking for the username and password.
    Lucas sighed, cleared his mind, and rewound the images of the last several minutes. When he came to Donavan’s hands, poised over the keyboard, he let the image play in slow motion.
    He put his hands over the keys and mimicked the strokes that played in his mind. Username: DonavanRox. Password: HalleBerry.
    And with that, he was in.
    The main screen and its forums loaded on the monitor, and a post at the top of the forum said: August 23 Meeting, 8:00 p.m. ; Stranahan Building. He opened the thread and read four names and times: Donavan—15 minutes; Hondo—15 minutes; Clarice—10 minutes; Boomer—10 minutes.
    August 23. Today’s date. Lucas looked at his watch. 7:27 p.m. He smiled.
    He had a very good idea where Donavan was going in such a hurry. And after another quick visit to his old friend Google, Lucas had an address for the Stranahan Building.
    IT WAS IN THE NORTHEAST QUADRANT, IN THE MIDST OF A GROUP OF buildings likely built sometime in the 1950s and ’60s. Lucas immediately knew this because the architecture featured speckled granite offset by large turquoise panels. Every building erected in the fifties and sixties, it seemed, was required to use those turquoise panels, be they schools, hospitals, or office towers.
    This one wasn’t exactly an office tower; it was only three stories high. But it was obviously an office building of some kind. Or had been.
    Lucas started with a walk around the perimeter. He pulled a small spotting scope from his backpack of tricks and examined the front doors from a distance. It was starting to get dark, but he could clearly see the chains barring all the doors. A realty sign hung in the window of one.
    Next he scanned the front of the building, then walked around the back and