5
Night had fallen by the time Gerard returned to Regina’s armed with holy water, rosary beads, and a new force of will.
He’d spent several hours talking with Father Daniels and several more hours ambling around town, psyching himself up.
At whatever cost, he had to expel the spirit.
They’d have to drag him kicking and screaming from this island before he’d let anyone or anything set him off his plan.
But as soon as he opened the door to the apartment, his determination flew away like his clothes had flown off their hangers.
In the kitchen, a green robe and a pair of glasses with thick lenses hung in midair as if hoisted by fishing wire attached to the ceiling. Gerard didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t even breathe, despite his impulse to rub his eyes, which he assumed were playing tricks on him.
At his back, the door swung closed, causing him to jump and the robe to move. On the counter, a steaming mug of tea sat steeping. The fragrance of primrose peppered the air.
Should he yell for help or flee for the mainland?
His voice was caught in his throat, and he had already fled once. If he had a single shred of pride left, he was going to fight to keep it.
Aiming for bravery, he held up the rosary as if it were a knight’s shield.
“Don’t you dare scream,” said a deep, disembodied voice that Gerard felt in the very tips of his toes. Where a neck should be, all he saw was the far wall. Where hands should be, all he saw was cluttered counter.
His knees knocked together in fright. If he moved quickly enough, could he open the holy water and spray the robe with it? If it was a fallen angel as Father Daniels had suggested, the water would burn it, right? Send it back to wherever it came from?
“G-ghosts ca-can wear cl-clothes?” he asked senselessly instead. His fear maximized and his arm hairs stood on end.
Silence was a giant’s palm on the roof pressing all the air out of the room. The belt on the robe unknotted, but only for a moment, giving Gerard a glimpse of the nothingness housed inside the silky fabric. He shuddered at the unexplainable sight, or rather, lack thereof.
“Ghosts do not exist,” the voice claimed, clearly aggrieved and with ample superiority. “Scientifically, they are nothing more than misinterpretations of sensory input. Only a fool would believe in them.”
“Th-then what are y-you?” Gerard asked, bypassing the obvious insult. The internet had already called him worse—untalented, ugly, egotistical—too many times to count. Fool couldn’t hurt him.
“That’s none of your business,” the voice snapped.
“Y-you’ve made it my business. You’re in m-my apartment, and you’re drinking my tea!” Gerard protested. Though he had to second-guess himself there, because how could one drink without a mouth?
“You’re disrupting important scientific work with your mere presence!” the voice barked.
Gerard reared back, a smidge of his fear morphing into anger.
His whole life he’d been the youngest of three—the baby, the tagalong, the nuisance.
Not to mention his atypical qualities, which only made him feel more othered.
He refused to be an outcast on Iping. In the apartment he paid the rent for.
“What are you?” Gerard demanded to know by straightening his spine and matching the floating robe’s volume and cadence. Mimicry came naturally after a lifetime of adopting the mannerisms of others in desperate attempts to fit in.
“I,” the voice continued in a lower, slower tone, “am a man.”
“You can’t be…” Gerard marveled.
“I’m an invisible man.”
“Im-impossible,” Gerard said. Logic lost all potency.
The robe floated closer, pulled as if by a hidden puppet master. Behind those hovering glasses, Gerard couldn’t see a face, which made the scene more menacing and surreal.
“Here—touch me if you don’t believe me,” the so-called invisible man dared.
Gerard pressed his back to the door, hand frantically reaching behind him for the doorknob, which seemed to have disappeared right when he needed it most. “No, I— No!”
The enchanted sleeve inched closer. It was hollow, tubular as if something were truly inside, holding it up. “Do it! Touch me. Then try and tell me my discovery is impossible.”
Droplets of spit flew from an imperceptible mouth and landed on Gerard’s cheek. Saliva without a mouth. Glasses without eyes. Someone had to be there, and Gerard had clearly struck a nerve with that someone.
Seeing no other option but to appease the unseeable for fear of its wrath (he’d witnessed what it had done to the bathroom mirror), he waved his hand in front of him, expecting to swipe his palm through thin air. Instead, he smacked what felt like invisible flesh.
“What the—” Gerard shrunk away even more, muscles tight and mind in pieces.
He shut his eyes against the room, squeezed the beads of the rosary still in his hand, and prayed—something he hadn’t done in many years—that the robe and glasses would vanish. That this would be nothing more than a nightmare.
God left him on read.
Uncertain what else to do, Gerard reached out again and was met with the undeniable feel of human skin and solid bone. A small sound akin to a gasp emanated from the invisible person. Gerard swore he felt sudden goose bumps.
Gerard believed the world to be a study in opposites. Hot had cold. Day had night. Saints had sinners. If fame had made Gerard Wells hypervisible, then by that same line of thought, invisibility should’ve been possible.
It was possible.
Proof—as fantastical as it might be—levitated before him.
“Who are you?” Gerard asked, unwilling to waste time cycling through the stages of denial. For too many years, he’d fought against his own brain. This time, he trusted his unique intelligence.
The robe danced backward before the voice rang out again, throwing itself around the room like a well-practiced ventriloquist. “Don’t concern yourself with that. Just pack your things and get out.”
Gerard noticed the notebook he’d tucked away in the desk was pulled out again and splayed open. FROM THE DESK OF EMORY GRIFFIN.
“Emory?” he asked.
“I said don’t concern yourself with that!” The sleeve swung in apparent frustration and knocked the tea mug over into the sink, shattering it.
Better the mug than Gerard’s face.
“So it is you.” The robe went very still when Gerard said this, which made clear that the mug breaking had been an accident. The invisible man was transparently scared. Gerard asked softly, “What did you do to yourself?”
“Nothing nearly as bad as what I’m going to do to you if you don’t keep your mouth shut about this,” he said. The unseeable threat hung in the air, but the careless words were devoid of malice. Like Emory Griffin couldn’t even hurt a mouse if offered a million dollars.
“Regina said you weren’t mean.” Gerard appealed to the scientist’s humanity.
“Mean? Why shouldn’t I be mean?” Emory asked, voice caught a bit at the end. That slight hitch in breath was an audible crack in Emory’s forced bravado. Gerard sought to wedge his fingers into that crack and break through to this unbelievable person.
“Look, I don’t know what all went down before I got here,” Gerard said, gaining some confidence, “but clearly something has happened to you, and now you’re scared and taking it out on me.
” He paused for a moment, waiting for a reaction he wouldn’t be able to see.
“I get it. I’m scared, too, but you don’t need to threaten me. ”
“I wouldn’t have to threaten you if you’d just do as I say and leave,” he said. There was something about Emory’s voice that didn’t match his words, that made Gerard want to open his arms and invite the invisible man in. But he restrained himself.
“I’m the one who should leave?” Gerard asked. “Where do you expect me to go?”
“Anywhere else but here,” Emory said.
Gerard sputtered. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“I know that’s not true,” Emory rasped.
Gerard crinkled his brow. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Yes, I do,” Emory said, “Gerard Wells.”
The sound of his real name from this disembodied man made his skin crawl, his heart race, and his pits sweat.
“I’m not him, but I get that all the time,” Gerard said, playing it off as he often did when he got stopped in coffee shops or stores. Sometimes people would press and frighten him. Other times people would let it go, yet still, it would take him hours to decompress afterward.
Incorporeal Emory did not let it go. “I found this.” Emory pulled a book out from under the lumpy mattress. It was Gerard’s journal. There was no denying that.
Emory reading the journal meant that he didn’t just know Gerard’s real name.
It meant that he knew Gerard’s secrets, too.