The Season of Passage

  'That's what I hear. Are you a reporter?'

  'I was a reporter when Dr Wagner left for Mars. I'm not a reporter now.'

  'You understand that no one is to know Dr Wagner is staying at Edwards?'

  'Yeah. Don't worry, I know when to keep my mouth shut. Have you seen Dr Wagner yourself?'

  'No. Why?'

  'Just wondering,' Terry said. 'Do you know when their quarantine ends?'

  'That's classified information. Do you want me to tell her that you called?'

  'Yeah. Oh, when I was at Edwards I met an elderly major. I can't remember his name, but he had a terrible sunburn. Do you know who I'm talking about?'

  'Yes. That would be Major Thompson.'

  'Could I speak to him, please?'

  'I'm afraid not. He's in the hospital.'

  'Is he all right? What's wrong with him?'

  The man hesitated. 'How well do you know the major?'

  'Like I said, I just met him. We had a nice talk. I was just wondering if it was serious.'

  'Major Thompson had a heart attack last night. It is serious. The doctors don't think he's going to make it.'

  'Oh,' Terry said, for lack of something better. 'Give him my best.'

  They exchanged goodbyes. Terry got up and locked all the doors and windows in his apartment. Then he sat at his desk in front of his word processor and asked himself a difficult question.

  What next?

  He could not 'tell some people' that Lauren and Gary were sick. At the space station they had undoubtedly been subjected to every physical test known to man. Whatever Mars had put inside them, a laboratory didn't reveal it. He had no facts. He had only subjective reactions from people of questionable character. He was a writer of books about cockroaches and clones, and, therefore, immediately suspect - never mind his well-known drunkenness. Kathy was young and impressionable, and had been involved with Gary. Even reporters for the Enquirer probably wouldn't buy Herb's story, not if they met him for a drink and got kicked under the table by one of his twitching legs.

  But what the hell was wrong with Lauren and Gary? Aliens, monsters, devils - they were just words. They didn't say anything. And he would have to have something to say if he hoped to seek out the help of others.

  Terry turned on his word processor and began a file called unusual characteristics. He began to list the strange things he and Herb had noticed about Lauren, along with Kathy's impressions of Gary.

  1. Appearance: Pale. Exceptionally long hair and nails. Deep red lips and tongue. Foul odor. Powerful hypnotic eyes. Constant smiles.

  2. Manner: Cold, mocking.

  3. Remarks: A little pinch and then, sweet. Jim was a fool. You are mine now. Thick laughter.

  4. Overall impressions: They inspire terror and nightmares, but appear in pain themselves. Their presence

  brings streams of perverted thoughts, and difficulty in breathing. They can move quickly. There is something very cold about them.

  Terry studied his list. He had a fine description of a monster. He worried that he wasn't getting anywhere. He also felt as if he was leaving a crucial point off his list. He tried as best he could to remember what Lauren had said or done that tied her strange behavior together. For some reason he kept thinking of Jennifer. Yet Lauren hadn't commented on her sister.

  Terry got up and paced his apartment. The day was getting on. It would be dark soon. He popped a few capsules of bee pollen in his mouth and chewed them, trying to relax. He was back at his word processor a minute later, starting a second list. He had no trouble constructing it. He'd made it up two years ago, for an article he'd written about the missing Russians - why they hadn't come back.

  1. Mechanical failure.

  2. Natural calamity.

  3. Alien infection.

  4. Alien monsters.

  5. Insanity.

  The first two theories Terry discarded for obvious reasons. The other three ... he saw a new relationship among them. A serious enough infection could have driven the Russians insane. It could have made them act like monsters, and kill one another. He was surprised none of his readers had written into the paper and pointed that out to him. They were always writing him nasty letters. It was no wonder he had gotten fired.

  So the reasons relate. So what happened to Lauren and Gary on Mars? Why did Lauren talk about devils in her letter? That's all that matters. Did something there clone them and send back pre-programmed copies to Earth? No? Too farfetched? Well, what if something on Mars ate them, and after it finished digesting them, it looked like them? It's possible, anything's possible. It happens all the time in the movies.

  Terry thought about the bottle of Scotch in his desk drawer. For a moment he seriously considered taking it out and draining it and letting the government worry about the problem six months from now when half the world was dead. He had never been hero material. He just had to look at himself in the mirror to know that.

  He didn't even need the mirror.

  He could feel the tears on his face.

  Good God, he was talking about Lauren. She was his girl. She was his life, or she had been his life. He wanted her back. A hard pain broke in his chest. His tears thickened. He couldn't just sit here and dissect her as if she were an alien specimen that had no feelings. She had to still have feelings. She had Lauren's memories. How could anything remember without feeling something?

  He had too many memories of his own. He felt too much. His mind began to play tricks with him. His thoughts kept leaping from the horror of the situation to the days before the mission when the three of them had been together. He had a persistent memory of their last Halloween together, when they had gone out trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. Only it was clouded. He remembered Jennifer's costume, and his own. Jennifer had dressed up as a fairy, complete with transparent wings and magic wand. He had been the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He had constructed

  the hump out of small sofa pillows and masking tape. But he could not figure out what Lauren had been, only that she had worn a long black wig and dress. He remembered how they had prowled the blocks with their pillowcases, collecting goodies. It had been a warm night for late October. A sweet smell of drying leaves filled the air. There had been jack-o'-lanterns everywhere, their candlelit grins glowing on dark house ledges. Those candles that had been snuffed out by earlier tricksters were always relit by Jennifer, who carried with her a lighter as well as a pillowcase. Lauren, devilishly wicked in her black clothes, had said Jennifer was a master at bringing the fire ...

  I see you brought the...

  There was something here he was missing.

  Was it a clue?

  Enough! He had to concentrate on Mars!

  But what if she was serious when she said Mars could put a devil in a person? What if she's possessed? It would be like Halloween all over again, except in a much more serious way. Where am I going to get a priest for an exorcism? I couldn't even get a priest to come to Jenny's funeral.

  Terry wiped away his tears. He was freaking out. He couldn't think straight. Again and again, his mind kept returning to Jennifer, to the funeral. What had happened back then that related to right now? Daniel had said that Jennifer blamed herself for what was happening to Lauren on Mars. Stephen Floyd had them read prayers. Then Terry had asked Stephen to open the coffin and take off Jennifer's...

  Terry got what had been bothering him. At least a part of it.

  Lauren wore a silver ring. A ring identical to the one Professor Ranoth had given Jennifer. All right, that was a

  coincidence, but what did it mean? Professor Ranoth could have had two of the same ring, and given one to Lauren after they left for Mars. But why would he do that? The rings didn't make great gifts. Neither had been anything to look at.

  Yet there were a couple of odd things about the rings. Jennifer had said her ring enabled her to write her story. Lauren had acted as if her ring weighed down her arm.

  He shook himself. None of this had anything to do with Mars.
>
  Hold on a second. What about Jenny's story? There were rings in her story. There were monsters in it, too.

  The story was in a cardboard box. Where had he put it? Terry got up and searched his apartment. Ah - it was at the back of his closet. He did not know why he wanted it, he just did.

  He started reading sitting on the floor.

  He did not get up until he was finished.

  In the Garden, on the edge of the vast ocean, and the borders of the tall mountains, lived the people of Sastra, the first and greatest of human beings. Because they were from the beginning, they were untarnished, beautiful and wise, of fair form and kind desire. Their King was Rankar, mightiest of the Sastra, and their Queen, Chaneen, loveliest of the offspring of the gods...

  It was dark when he finished the tale. It had not solved any of his problems. It had just made them worse.

  When he had first read Jennifer's story, the day of her funeral, he had marveled that a fourteen-year-old girl had written it. Besides the solid quality of the writing, the tale had impressed him as a fascinating metaphor for a number

  of Biblical concepts. First off there had been Rankar's sacrifice, which paralleled Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Simply by giving up his life, and showing that death was not something to be feared, Rankar had ruined Kratine's curse. Then there was Kratine himself, and Chaneen's Garden. Each bore a striking resemblance to the chapter in Genesis when Satan entered the Garden of Eden. Indeed, Jennifer described Kratine as a serpent, and called him a devil. Finally there was Jennifer's concept of original sin, Janier's betrayal, with Kratine as the tempter.

  What made all these parallels so amazing to Terry was that Lauren had never taken Jennifer to church, or read the Bible to her. Of course, it was possible Jennifer had read the Bible on her own - she always had had her nose in a book - but Terry doubted it. She had never mentioned the Bible to him, and she almost always talked about what she was reading.

  But now, after his second reading, he realized that was only the beginning of the story's mystery.

  Terry owned a copy of a thick book called Words and Their Roots. He was fond of taking old names and words and sprinkling them in his own stories. But Words and Their Roots was a book he kept in the drawer of his desk. He was confident Jennifer had never browsed through it, or even seen it. But Terry had reached for it immediately after reading Jennifer's story - once again, not sure why he did so. The names of her characters - Chaneen and so forth -were not listed under any religious or mythological traditions. Yet the names of her two races, the Sastra and the Asurians, were both in the book. They were Sanskrit words, the oldest language known to man. The definition of 'Sastra' was 'the Vedas - the holy books of India.' 'Asurians' were 'the demons of Vedic literature.'

  How had Jennifer stumbled upon such obscure words? But that wasn't all. Professor Ranoth had not told Jennifer where he had got her ring, except to say he had found it while traveling. Of course, a famous archaeologist like James Ranoth had been around the world. Yet Terry remembered Lauren commenting, a few months before they had left for Mars, that Ranoth had gone off to hike in the Himalayas. That fact by no means proved that Ranoth had found the ring in India; nevertheless, it was a curious coincidence. Not knowing where Ranoth had obtained the ring, Jennifer had instinctively used ancient Indian words in her story.

  And Jenny said that the ring helped her write her story. The more he studied it, the more disturbing the coincidences in the story kept getting. Jennifer had written of two lands at war eons ago, only revealing toward the end that Asure was actually another world. In fact, it was only in the last pages of her story that she explained how Asure was destroyed by Chaneen's mighty flame.

  Another world. Burnt to a crisp. Burnt red.

  Mars was red. According to most accepted theories, it had possessed an atmosphere as little as a million years ago. But, the scientists believed, a cosmic catastrophe blew it away. Just wasted the whole fucking planet, they said.

  But Jenny might have known that. She could have worked it into her story. It doesn't mean anything. It's only a story!

  The scientists didn't know what the catastrophe had been.

  Had Jennifer known?

  Terry returned to his word processor and made up a third list. It contained the characteristics Jennifer had given to her Asurians that matched with the qualities on his first list, the one that described Lauren and Gary.

  1. Lauren's long nails resembled the Asurian claws.

  2. Their foul smell of decay appeared identical.

  3. Jennifer repeatedly emphasized the power in Kratine's eyes.

  4. Lauren even spoke like Kratine.

  Jennifer had mentioned a number of other Asurian characteristics that did not appear, at first glance, to relate to Lauren and Gary. He typed those down next.

  1. Kratine could take on the illusion of humanity, his ancient form.

  2. Chaneen swore that those possessed by Kratine would be burned by sunlight, that fresh waters would bind their steps, that they would always thirst no matter what they drank.

  3. The Asurians wished to live forever.

  4. The Asurians feared fire.

  5. The Asurians drank human blood.

  6. Kratine said his curse would spread when those possessed by his spirit feasted upon the blood of their fellow men, even as the latter slept.

  Terry turned off his word processor. He was getting sick of his lists. They were beginning to describe vampires. He did not believe in vampires. Major Thompson developing a sudden inexplicable allergy to the sun did not mean there were goddamn vampires.

  Of course, she had been a vampire on Halloween. You remember that now, don't you, you old drunk? She had wanted to be a vampire. She liked being one. Halloween was just practice for things to come.

  Why had he blocked out her type of costume? He would have assumed his subconscious had been trying to spare

  him if it hadn't brought up the memory of Halloween in the first place. What the hell, he could remember that night now, and how it had ended. At the last house on the last block they had gone to, they had knocked on the door. The lights had been out. No one had answered. They had been about to walk away when Jennifer had noticed an unlit jack-o'-lantern sitting in the dark corner of the dusty porch. Naturally she had wanted to light the candle, and when she had done so, they had turned to leave. Just then the front door had burst open and an old woman had started screaming at them. She had looked like such a stereotypical movie hag that at first Terry thought she wearing a costume of her own.

  But such was not the case. She was just ugly and mean. She had been upset that Jennifer was trying to burn down her house. Lauren had interrupted quickly and pointed out that there was no need to be nasty, that Jennifer had simply relit a candle that the woman herself had set out along with her pumpkin. Hearing that, the old woman had hissed angrily. Pointing a long bony finger at Jennifer, she had said: 'There is no candle in that pumpkin.'

  But the jack-o'-lantern had been grinning with fire between his teeth. A mystery, to say the least. Lauren had stepped across the porch and peeked inside. Being a Halloween vampire, she had a ton of white makeup on her face. Yet the instant she looked inside the pumpkin, she turned even whiter. She didn't say a thing, though. She tried to blow out the light, and when it didn't go out right away, she grabbed Jennifer by the arm and quickly led the three of them away.

  Lauren never did tell him what she saw inside the pumpkin, nor did Jennifer explain. But Terry thought

  he knew now what the jack-o'-lantern had been holding.

  A flame burning without a wick. Without a candle. All by itself.

  'I see you brought the fire, the heart of the worlds.' Now he was getting down to the nitty gritty.

  Did he believe that Jennifer's story was more than a story? That it was in fact an accurate account of events that had occurred millions of years ago? That was the biggest question so far today. He would have congratulated himself for asking it if he had the answer t
o it.

  It's all bullshit, it has to be. If it was true, Chaneen would be here. She promised to come back. If there's no Chaneen, there's no Kratine. I have to go back to the drawing board. Lauren hates me because I couldn't give the multiple orgasms that Gary can. It all comes back to Freud.

  He hoped.

  What about an even bigger question?

  What if Jennifer had been Chaneen?

  Terry turned away from the empty screen of his computer and stared out the dark window. Jennifer had been an unusual child. Most people who came near her were affected in a positive way. People were happy around her - he always had been. As Lauren had said in her letter, Jennifer was like a bright light. She would walk into a crowded room and heads would automatically turn. Often in her innocence she appeared younger than other girls her age, yet, at the same time, she frequently gave the impression of deep wisdom. She was sensitive. She could fix someone with her clear blue eyes and know exactly what they were thinking. Her physical beauty was extraordinary. Of course, she'd suffered from nightmares - a lot of kids did. But even those nightmares had been unusual. They only came every couple of years.

  Yeah, the more Terry thought about it, her nightmares had been as remarkable as her beautiful face. They came every two years...

  Every time Earth came into conjunction with Mars.

  Then there was her uncanny ability to hold her hands in the middle of a fire and not get burned. And her power to light the inside of pumpkins that should never have been lit.

  Stop it! She was just a little girl. She could get burned. She burned to death.

  But Terry couldn't stop it. He felt as if he were on fire. The thoughts flared in his brain like the sparks coming off a pool of boiling lava. He couldn't block out Jennifer's story. It was as if the tale resonated with his soul, and awoke a deeply buried primeval fear. Kratine had predicted that a time would come when humans would come to his world, and be possessed. An uncannily accurate prediction in light of what Lauren had said in her letter about the devils on Mars, and how she now looked and behaved.

  You're talking about Lauren. You're not talking about the harlot who's supposed to give birth to the Anti-Christ. You can't talk about stuff like that to anybody. You'll sound as bad as Herb. You don't want to end up like Herb, do you? Afraid of the dark.