The Unseen

PRAISE FOR
T.L. HINES'S NOVELS

“Hines excels at writing gripping supernatural thrillers with plenty of twists and turns; he'll pull you in from page one.”

—
Library Journal
review of
The Dead
Whisper On

“A wonderful debut, by a prodigiously talented writer!”

—
Michael Prescott,
New York Times
best-selling author of
Mortal Faults
,
on
Waking Lazarus

“Provocative from the first line, intriguing to the last.
Waking Lazarus
is a thriller of strategic pacing, colored in tones of mystery and wonder. Don't miss this exceptional debut.”

—
Brandilyn Collins, author of
Violet Dawn
and
Amber Morn

“[Hines] plays some clever bait and switch games with the good and the bad guys, and creates an excellent genre-mix that's reminiscent of Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, and Stephen King.”

—
Infuze Magazine
review of
The Dead
Whisper On

“
Waking Lazarus
is going to have people talking. It's a rare novel of perfectly executed suspense . . . T.L. Hines has himself a new fan; I'll be picking up all his books.”

—
Colleen Coble, author of
Anathema
and
Lonestar Sanctuary

“The plot twists like the mine tunnels under Butte and made it difficult to stop reading. Nothing is as it first appears. [Hines] raises troubling questions that tie in with our current fears and apprehension. Who, or what, is really our enemy?”

—
TitleTrakk
review of
The Dead Whisper On

“Sharp, finely drawn and compelling.
Waking Lazarus
is a supernatural suspense on steroids.”

—
Alton Gansky, author of
Angel
and
A Ship Possessed

“. . .
Waking Lazarus
is the smart, stylish, compassionate, life-affirming thriller I've been waiting for . . . a page-turner, and a remarkable debut.”

—
C.J. Box, author of
Blood Trail
and
Blue Heaven

THE UNSEEN

OTHER BOOKS BY T.L. HINES

Waking Lazarus

The Dead Whisper On

© 2008 by T.L. Hines

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Publisher's Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Page design: Walter Petrie

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hines, T. L.
The unseen / T. L. Hines.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59554-452-0 (hardcover)
1. Supernatural—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.I5726U67 2008
813'.6—dc22         2008019839

Printed in the United States of America
08 09 10 11 12 QW 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY- TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For cancer survivors everywhere

ONE

PERCHED ON TOP OF THE ELEVATOR, LUCAS PEERED AT THE WOMAN BELOW and created an elaborate history in his mind.

Elevators and their shafts were easy places to hide. Easier than utility chases. Much easier than ductwork, popularly portrayed in movies as cavernous tunnels through which a man could crawl. Lucas knew better; most ductwork was tight and narrow, and not solid enough to hold 150 pounds.

But elevators. Well, the film depictions were pretty accurate with those. You could indeed crawl through the small access panel in the ceiling, sink a sizable hole with a hand drill, and then watch the unknowing people below as they stepped through the bay doors all day long. Provided you bypassed security, of course. And did your drilling outside of regular office hours.

Most of the time he preferred to work in DC proper, but with height restrictions on the buildings, he never got much of a chance to do elevator surfing; for that, he had to move farther away from the city, where skyscrapers were allowed.

He returned his attention to the dark-haired woman who was currently inside the car with four other less interesting people. In his history, she was a widow. True, she was probably in her early thirties, if that, but her stern look, her rigid posture, suggested overwhelming sorrow in her past.

Lucas recognized such sorrow.

So she was a widow. She had moved to Bethesda from her rural home in Kansas after losing her husband, an auto mechanic who had been crushed by a car in a tragic mishap.

Below Lucas, the dark-haired woman moved to the side for another person entering on the eighth floor. As she did so, the overhead light in the elevator car flickered a moment, then returned to full strength.

Puzzled, the dark-haired woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and looked at the light. It happened. For a moment, she stared directly at him, directly at the secret peephole he'd carefully drilled in the ceiling, directly at the constricting pupil of his own eye.

Then she dropped her gaze back to the other people in the elevator with her, offering a little shrug of the shoulders.

She had looked, but she hadn't seen. Like so many others.

When she had looked toward the ceiling, his heart had jumped. He had to admit this. Not because he was worried about being discovered, but because the
knowing
had started—the long, taut band of discovery that stretched between his eyes and the eyes of a dweller, then constricted in a sudden snap of understanding.

The Connection, he liked to call it.

Once he'd spent several weeks holed up in an office center on Farragut Square; during that time, his favorite target had been the reception area of an attorney's office. A one-man show named Walt Franklin, the kind of attorney who chased ambulances. And so, Walt Franklin was chased by people with grudges.

Lucas's observation deck in that office was one of his most brilliant ever: the lobby coat closet, a small cubicle not much bigger than an old telephone booth—something, unfortunately, he didn't see much of anymore. The closet had an empty space behind its two-by-four framing and gypsum board, leaving enough room for him to stand. An anomaly in the construction, one of many he'd seen over the years.

But what had been so wonderful about this space, this anomaly, was its perfect positioning between the reception desk and the lobby waiting area. By drilling holes on two opposite sides of the small space, he could simply turn and view the woman who usually sat at the front desk—a large, red-haired woman with a genuine smile—or the people in the reception area. No need to change positions; he could simply turn his head and watch whoever seemed the most interesting.

Over the several hours he'd spent cramped in that space, he'd seen dozens of intriguing dwellers—people with complex, magicfilled histories, he knew—sit in the lobby's molded plastic chairs and wait to speak with Walt Franklin. Their savior.

Once he'd experienced a Connection with the large, red-haired woman who sat at the desk. One minute she was working away, doing some filing. The next moment she simply stiffened, then looked nervously around the room.

“Whatsa matter?” he heard a man's voice ask from the lobby area. Lucas turned quietly and looked through the peephole at the man. White hair. Too much loose skin under his chin.

Back to the redheaded receptionist. “I . . . don't know,” she stammered. “I just feel like . . . someone's watching.”

The jowly man in the reception area half snorted, half laughed. “Wouldn't doubt it, the kind of stuff old Walt's involved in. Either the mob's watching him, or the CIA. Or both.” He offered another snort-laugh.

The receptionist didn't share his humor, obviously, but she smiled at him. Except, Lucas could tell, this wasn't her usual smile. Her normal smile. Lucas was a student of the smile, and he knew this particular one was forced; it barely turned the corners of her mouth.

She hadn't seen Lucas. But she had sensed something of his presence, and his mind kept returning to that. Returning to all the people, maybe a dozen in all, who had made the Connection and intuited his presence in a closet. Under a floor. Above a ceiling. Hers was all the more special because she hadn't actually seen any evidence of him. She'd only felt it.

I just feel like someone's watching.

As Lucas left his daydream and returned his attention to the dark-haired woman in the elevator below, now staring at her feet, he wanted her to make that Connection too. He liked this woman; he wanted to feel something more than the typical subject and observer relationship. He wanted the Connection.

Instead, she lifted her face toward the doors, caught in midyawn, as they chimed and opened on the twenty-third floor. She slipped through and into the offices beyond.

So much for Connection.

Still, he would wait. It was early morning, and he'd have another half hour of steady traffic. If no other interesting dwellers stepped on the elevator before then, he'd choose the dark-haired woman. She was, after all, the only one who had inspired a secret history in his head all morning. That had to count for something.

Maybe, just maybe, this dark-haired woman with the full lips and the eyes like bright marbles and the overwhelming grief at the loss of her husband would pull him back to the twenty-third floor. Maybe she would make the Connection after all.

He could wait.

LATE THAT EVENING, WHEN THE DARK-HAIRED WOMAN HAD LEFT THE office and returned to her modest home in her Ford Taurus (this is what he imagined she drove), when the entire office building had emptied, Lucas let himself into the company offices where she worked and began to search.

This building didn't have much security. A few cams, but those were on the building's exterior. And the janitors here weren't all that attentive. They often left their industrial vacuums or their carts filled with cleaning supplies sitting alone in the hallways, rings of master keys jangling loosely from them. So really, it was easy to take master keys and make copies—he even knew of a key machine he could use after hours just a few blocks away from the building—then return the keys, safe and sound, to their carts or vacs.

So the dark-haired woman's office space was only a key turn away.

He slipped the key into the front door of the office and turned it. He pushed open the door, listening for the telltale click or buzz of an armed alarm system. Nothing. Alarm systems weren't common in these kinds of office parks, because the tenants seemed to rely on the buildings' inept security guards. But he'd run into a few.