The Vanishing Point

Ellis Wren

Bellhaven, Oregon, has been dying since the mill shut in October, so when a bandaged stranger takes two rooms at the Wayfarer Inn in February, paying seven hundred a week in cash, Vera Pell counts him twice and lets him in. The man is Ivo Brandt, a research chemist who made himself invisible in a January experiment and cannot reverse it: not a ghost, not a metaphor, but a man in a coat with nothing under it, wearing bandages to hold the shape people expect. Word moves through town — the glove salesman, the delivery men, the boy who saw the snow moving on its own — and the stranger grows careless, then dangerous. When the First Baptist rectory is robbed of eleven thousand four hundred in new twenties, the county begins to look, and the man with no face begins to run. He hides with Dale Sedgwick, a bankrupt dairy farmer who wants what the invisible man can give him; he kills a man in the dark; he comes at last to Nathan Sayre, the physicist who once taught him, demanding help to make himself visible again. Sayre keeps him in the garage for nine days while the county cordon tightens and a letter drops in a sheriff's-office mailbox. The siege begins — until a Sunday dog, a padlocked door, and one night of fire bring the invisible man to a yard where forty people have gathered, and the mud, diesel and sawdust that hide him also make him, for the first time in four weeks, visible enough to hit. The man who could disappear is buried. The money comes back. And the three notebooks and the locked drawer of the Wayfarer Inn wait for whoever sits at the end of the bar on a Tuesday in February.

Adapted from H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man (1897). Published by TalesReborn.