Seeing Around Corners Novels & Stories

I am kicking myself for not paying more attention to the cellar while there was still light. I bounce up and down in the seat, as I try to spin myself around to see what is behind me. The chair bounces an inch to the left and a rush of excitement fills my chest. I can do this. I can get out of here. Pushing my feet hard off the ground I bounce the chair a little more to the left and I am able to turn my and almost see what is behind me. One more bounce and I should be able to see what is behind me.

He wondered as he clutched onto his stomach which didn't stop making annoying noises. Guess, as a ghost he still had tastes. The bus stop!. It clicked. He had seen something like that on his way here. Maybe he could use it. Since no one could see him, he knew he could use anywhere but still he had tastes. Holding onto his butt, he ran out of the shop.

He had been here and had left in the time it had taken us to cross the floor and reach the stairs. I activated the vision I had used in the bedroom, bringing it into the space without making the change visible, and scanned the upper section from end to end. The entrance at the far corner. A figure moving through it, the hood still up, the pace of someone who had timed their exit precisely. “Entrance,” I said. “Far corner.” We ran. Down the section stairs and along the concourse and across the main foyer with the dispersing crowd around us, and we reached the far corner entrance in time to see it still settling on its hinges.

One second I was standing there and the next I was sprinting down the alley with four wolves behind me and exactly one thought firing through my head on a loop. “Corners. Lose them in the corners.” I knew this town in my bones by now. Three months of mapping every exit and shortcut and gap between buildings had been building to exactly this moment. I cut left where they'd expect right. Squeezed through the narrow passage behind the bar on fourth. It was barely wide enough for me, absolutely not wide enough for men that size. I took two more turns hard enough that my shoulder screamed. But, I could still hear them.

Oblivious to my surroundings, I failed to notice the approaching collision course I was on. Suddenly, in the split second before impact, my peripheral vision detected a blur of movement. I instinctively halted, but it was too late. I collided with an unseen obstacle, stumbling backward and dropping my phone in the process. It clattered against the tiled floor, the music abruptly cut off.

As it falls back, the cord misses the brackets and the projectile clatters onto the concrete. In my peripheral vision, something shifts... a brighter patch in the darkness. "Someone's coming." Freezing hard back against the wall, at the last moment, we turn faces away from the betraying beam as a figure comes around the corner... Two figures... Matched silhouettes, behind the glare of a torch, accompanied by floating red embers and the scent of cigarette smoke. "What d'you think it was? I didn't hear anything..." "Well, I did. Some sort of clanging noise."

I feel the shift before I see it—slow, precise, anchored in focus. "What narrows?" he asks quietly, almost clinical. "Vision? Hearing? Smell?" "All of it," I answer. "At least for me." He nods once, like I've just given him a data point he needed. "Context?" "Crowds. Scent drifts. Doors behind me I can't see." The answers come too quickly—automatic. Like my body's been waiting for someone to ask. He processes that, not staring—thinking. "Front corner then," he says after a beat. "Left side. Two exits visible. Minimal airflow from the hall."

Jax said. Panels along the walls slid open with mechanical precision, revealing dark recesses. The recesses hummed. “Run,” Corvin snapped. “Zigzag. Don’t touch the walls.” We sprinted. The first volley of spikes shot out of the recesses a split second later. They weren’t slow. They weren’t hesitant. They were a blur of gleaming metal that ripped through the air where we’d been half a second before. I veered left, then right, trying to make myself as unpredictable as possible. A spike whistled past my ear close enough that I felt the rush of displaced air. Another grazed my sleeve, snagging fabric.

Horror blooms inside at not being able to tell whether my eyes were open or closed. ​I turn quickly and Sassy follows. I round the corner and light fills in a few spots of the darkness, retaking its place as shops and small homes come into sight. I lean against the wall, shielding myself from an attack from behind as my lungs fill themselves once more with the air they'd been deprived of in that moment. I look around, desperate to reassure myself that I could see things around me. There was light here; it was okay to be here.