THE SECRET

by

M.B. Manteufel

My father never donned a military uniform. He never stood onstage before thousands. He never ruled a nation nor won an international award. To the world, he was unseen and unspoken of. But to me, he was a hero.

I used to wait up for him on those nights. Nights when he’d slip from our modest suburban home after dinner, a finger to his lips as he winked at me. “Our secret, Jamie,” he’d whisper in a voice that made me feel like the most important person in the world. “I’m going out to make the world a little safer.”

Dad was a scientist, brilliant but unrecognized. During daylight hours, he worked at Meridian Pharmaceuticals, where his colleagues viewed him as competent but unremarkable. None of them knew that his true genius bloomed in our basement laboratory, which he’d constructed bit by bit over the years. The space was filled with peculiar equipment cobbled together from salvaged parts and custom designs: centrifuges humming beside modified spectrometers, computers running calculations on algorithms he’d written himself, and glass containers filled with liquids that shifted colors under different lights.

The laboratory had its own particular scent—a mixture of ozone, alcohol solutions, and something vaguely metallic that I couldn’t identify. When I was younger, Mom used to complain about the smell seeping up through the floorboards. “Whatever you’re cooking down there, Richard, it’s giving me a headache,” she’d say. Eventually, Dad installed a sophisticated ventilation system, and Mom stopped noticing.

She never fully understood what happened in that basement. I don’t think she wanted to.

The night of my tenth birthday changed everything. After Mom had gone to bed, exhausted from hosting my party, Dad beckoned me downstairs with an excitement I rarely saw in his normally reserved demeanor.

“I’ve wanted to share this with you for so long, Jamie,” he said, his hazel eyes bright behind wire-rimmed glasses. “But I had to wait until you were old enough to understand both the miracle and the responsibility.”

The laboratory lights made his face look ghostly as he carefully unlocked a refrigerated cabinet hidden behind an ordinary-looking tool shelf. Inside was a rack of small vials containing a phosphorescent blue liquid that seemed to pulse with its own inner light.

“What is it?” I whispered, mesmerized by the glowing substance.

Dad’s hands trembled slightly as he withdrew one vial. “Something that shouldn’t exist yet, according to most of my colleagues.” His voice carried reverence and pride. “When I was in graduate school, I became fascinated with how certain compounds interact with light. Everyone thought I was wasting my time, but I kept experimenting after hours, combining disciplines that nobody else thought to connect.”

He paused, looking at me intently. “What I’ve created is a serum that, when injected, temporarily alters the molecular structure of human tissue to bend light rays around it rather than allowing them to reflect off it.”

I stared blankly, not comprehending.

“Invisibility, Jamie,” he clarified, a smile spreading across his face. “Not the stuff of comics or movies, but real, tangible, and mine alone.”

My jaw dropped. “Like... like you’d disappear? Completely?”

“I don’t really disappear. I don’t go anywhere. But I become completely undetectable to the human eye. For approximately four hours after injection, I can move through the world unseen, unheard if I’m careful, and able to observe without being observed.”

I thought he was joking—an elaborate birthday prank—until he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a map of tiny puncture marks along his inner arm.

“Some people use their gifts for fame or fortune,” he told me that night, preparing a syringe with practiced precision. “I use mine to protect the innocent.”

I watched, wide-eyed and disbelieving, as he injected himself with the pale blue liquid. It took effect almost immediately. Dad’s flesh shimmered like heat rising from summer pavement, then simply vanished, leaving empty clothes standing impossibly upright. One by one, they dropped to the floor. Only his voice remained.

“See, Jamie? Now I can go where others can’t. I can stop the bad people before they hurt someone.”

I reached out a trembling hand toward where he had been, feeling nothing but air. Then I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder from invisible fingers.

“Don’t be afraid,” his disembodied voice said gently. “I’m still me. Just... improved.”

For years, I believed him completely. I collected newspaper clippings about mysterious events in our city and surrounding towns: thieves found unconscious, their pilfered goods returned unexplainably; rapists found naked, gagged, and zip-tied to public benches; and drug dealers turning themselves in, stammering about ghosts.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” I’d ask excitedly over breakfast, sliding the newspaper across the table. Dad would just smile, neither confirming nor denying, but the pride in his eyes told me everything.

I kept his secret faithfully. At school, when other kids boasted about their parents’ accomplishments, I bit my tongue until I tasted copper, knowing my father was greater than all of theirs combined. A real-life superhero who asked for no recognition, no parades, only the satisfaction of justice served. On nights when he went out, I’d lie awake listening for his return, the soft creak of the basement door his only announcement. Sometimes he’d stop by my room after, still smelling of night air, to ruffle my hair and whisper, “Made someone safer tonight, kiddo.”

When I turned fourteen, Dad started training me. Simple things at first—how to move silently, distributing weight from heel to toe to minimize sound; how to observe without being noticed even when visible; how to remember minute details about people and places that might later prove important.

“Just in case,” he said, after I successfully navigated our entire house in complete darkness without making a sound. “Someday, you might carry on my work.”

Those words made me stand taller, filled me with purpose. I threw myself into the training with everything I had, desperate to prove worthy of his legacy.

The night everything changed was ordinary in its beginning. November air seeped through window frames, carrying the scent of decaying leaves and wood smoke from distant chimneys. Mom was working the night shift at Memorial Hospital, where she served as a charge nurse in the emergency department. Dad prepared for his evening patrol, and I helped him set up the injection, a ritual I’d observed countless times but only recently been allowed to assist with.

“You’re getting good at this,” he said, ruffling my hair as I swabbed his arm with alcohol. His eyes crinkled with approval. “Think you’ll be ready to join me out there soon?”

I nodded eagerly, heart leaping at the possibility. “I’m ready now, Dad.”

He laughed. “Soon, Jamie. But not tonight. Tonight I have... special work.”

There was something in his tone I’d never heard before, a tremor of excitement that seemed different, darker somehow. But I dismissed it, too devoted to question him.

“Hand me the syringe,” he said, and I watched as the blue liquid disappeared into his vein, followed by his body fading from view seconds later.

“Don’t wait up.” His voice came from empty space as clothes rustled to the floor. “Might be a late one.”

After he departed, I went to my room but couldn’t sleep. Something kept nagging at me, an uneasiness I couldn’t identify. Dad’s voice had contained an unfamiliar edge, a tension that didn’t match his normal purposeful calm. I decided to check his laboratory for clues about this “special work,” and perhaps discover when he might finally let me join his nighttime missions.

I had been prepared to only go through his handwritten notes and journals, as his computer was off-limits, a hard and fast rule he had told me numerous times. Even if I’d been so inclined to ignore his command, I’d knew I’d never figure out his password. So imagine my surprise when I found the laptop’s screen brightly lit and the drive humming invitingly. I accepted the invitation. What I found wasn’t police scanners or crime reports as I expected, but meticulously organized folders with women’s names.

Curious, I clicked on one labeled “Angela_M.” It contained photographs—surveillance photos taken from afar showing a woman in her twenties with auburn hair. There were notes about her daily routines, her address, her work schedule at a downtown coffee shop. Another section detailed her social media accounts, friends, and dating history.

Another folder held video files. With trembling hands, I opened one time-stamped from three weeks earlier.

The video showed the auburn-haired woman in her apartment, alone, unaware she was being watched. She moved around her kitchen holding a glass of wine, occasionally glancing at her phone that lay on the counter. Then came the sounds—my father’s voice, disembodied, taunting her.

“Hello, Angela. Don’t bother screaming. No one will believe you.”

Her wine glass crashed to the floor as she spun around, eyes wide with terror.

“Who’s there? How did you get in here?”

Objects around her began to move—the phone flew off the counter, a chair slid across the floor, and a knife rose from the butcher’s block. Her terror escalated as invisible hands seized her and pinned her against a wall, the hovering blade now pressed cold and steady against her neck.

My father’s voice, disembodied but unmistakable, narrated what was happening in clinical detail. “Subject exhibits expected fear response. Pupil dilation consistent with previous observations. Heart rate likely exceeding 150 BPM based on carotid visibility.”

I watched to the end, frozen in disbelief. Robotically, my fingers opened another folder, then another, then another. The videos were shockingly similar—different women, different locations—but all ending in savagery at odds with my father’s eerily placid narration.

My stomach heaved. I barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting, acid burning my throat as my entire world collapsed around me. This couldn’t be real. My hero, my father, was a monster who used his gift to terrorize and kill. The newspaper clippings on my wall now seemed like cruel mockeries. Those weren’t his good deeds; they were his alibis, stories he’d encouraged me to collect to mask his true activities.

I heard the garage door open. Dad was home early. Panic seized me as I quickly closed the files and shut down the computer. I slipped back to my bedroom, mind reeling, heart shattered, and lay awake until dawn broke, trying to reconcile the father I adored with the predator in those videos.

The next morning, I couldn’t look him in the eye across our breakfast table. He noticed.

“Something wrong, Jamie?”

“No, Dad. Just tired.”

He studied me for a moment as I suppressed the urge to scream. Then he nodded and dug back into his eggs.

For weeks, I lived in silent horror, watching him prepare for his “patrols,” knowing what he was really doing. I considered telling Mom, the police, anyone—but who would believe me? A story about an invisible serial killer would sound like the desperate fantasy of a troubled teenager.

Then came the night Dad didn’t return. The police found his car abandoned near the river, his clothes, wallet, and keys on the bank nearby. The official ruling was suicide, though they never recovered his body.

But I knew better. Something had gone wrong during one of his hunts. Perhaps the serum had failed at a critical moment, or he’d encountered unexpected resistance. Or, he knew that I knew and simply left. Whatever happened, Dad was gone.

At the funeral, I stood stoic beside my sobbing mother, my feelings a twisted knot of grief, relief, and something else I couldn’t name. The mourners spoke of his brilliance, his quiet nature, his devotion to family. None knew the truth. None except me.

Months passed. Mom slowly rebuilt her life, taking extra shifts at the hospital to keep herself busy. I helped her clean out Dad’s laboratory, quietly taking for myself his journals and several vials of the serum. “Just keepsakes,” I told her when she asked. “To remember his work.”

I told myself I was preserving evidence, that once Mom was gone, I’d finally expose the truth about him. But at night, alone in my room, I read his journals obsessively. At first, they sickened me with detailed accounts of how his victims’ terror manifested physically, notes on which techniques prolonged their fear response, meticulous records of their final moments.

Then something changed. I began to appreciate the precision of his observations, and the care with which he selected his subjects. I found myself studying the photographs of his victims with growing interest, imagining myself there, invisible, watching their fear bloom. Experiencing the rush.

I began to understand.

In his later journals, Dad wrote about genetics, about certain appetites passed from father to son. “Perhaps Jamie will understand someday,” he’d written. “I see myself in him already, that same watchfulness, that same fascination with fear.”

My father was nothing if not an astute observer. I had buried some memories deep—the neighborhood cats, the rabbit I caught in Mom’s garden—convincing myself they were isolated incidents of curiosity gone too far. Normal childhood exploration, I’d told myself. But now, reading Dad’s clinical descriptions of his own evolution as a predator, I recognized the pattern. He had started small too: insects, then rodents, gradually working his way up.

There was one entry that made my blood run cold: “Found a shoebox in Jamie’s closet today while looking for his baseball glove. Inside were several bird wings, meticulously arranged. The cuts were surprisingly clean for a twelve-year-old. He’s beginning to experiment, though he doesn’t understand it yet. I should guide him, but Sarah would never understand. For now, I’ll watch and wait.”

He had known all along. The training he’d given me—how to move silently, how to observe unnoticed—took on new meaning. He hadn’t been preparing me to continue his fictional heroism. He’d been grooming me to embrace our shared nature.

Something unlocked in my mind, and I remembered the thrill I’d felt watching the life fade from those small creatures, the power that surged through me in those moments. But those experiences paled compared to what Dad had achieved—the sustained terror, the intimate dance of predator and prey played out over hours instead of minutes.

On my eighteenth birthday, I finally admitted the truth to myself. The horror I’d felt upon discovering Dad’s secret wasn’t moral revulsion. It was recognition. Those videos hadn’t disturbed me because of their cruelty but because they’d awakened something inside me that I’d always tried to suppress. Something hungry.

Tonight, I’m going out for the first time. The serum sits ready in its syringe beside me as I write this. I’ve chosen my first subject carefully, a young woman who lives alone in an apartment three blocks from here. For weeks I’ve watched her, learning her routines and her habits. She looks a bit like Angela. When she makes tea before bed, standing in her kitchen in flannel pajamas, I imagine her cup crashing to the floor as she hears my voice for the first time.

Dad’s invisible legacy flows through my veins even before the chemical does. As I prepare to disappear, I forgive my father for the lies. He had no choice. But I do.

As I slip from our modest suburban home, I whisper to the empty air, “Our secret now, Dad. I’m going out to make the world a little more afraid.”

#

M.B. Manteufel is a former federal law enforcement agent who has always been drawn to things dangerous, deviant, and disturbing. In her current incarnation as a writer, she now enjoys indulging those interests worry-free of being shot, stabbed, maimed, or sued. Her work has been published in Disturbed Digest, Dark Fire, Niteblade, The Frost Zone, Mystery Weekly, Yellow Mama, and Ethereal Tales, among other magazines and books. She makes her home on the dry side of Washington State.