He stopped, looked down the draw. He had encountered them just there, just fifty feet down. It had looked like an old witch’s cottage that he’d never seen before. Glowing, infinitely sinister.
Curious, thinking maybe he had squatters in his woods, he’d walked up to it, and the next thing he knew, he was grabbed by scaly hands, he was being glared at by the most terrible eyes he had ever seen, he was being manhandled—and yes, the infamous rectal probe had taken place—and then he was on the ground, the little cottage was gone, and there was a crackling electricity in the air.
At least, that’s what he remembered in his conscious mind. His dreams were a different story. In his dreams, there were towering emotions of loss and longing, and Brooke was involved, but she had sworn that she’d seen nothing that night, heard nothing.
He moved up the dark path, shining his light ahead, looking for the cigar cave. A smoke was what he needed. He had a gargle station in the garage, which he’d use before he got in bed with Brooke. Cigar breath and he’d be on the couch, and he was way too tired for that.
He shone his light on the trees that loomed around him, the oaks with their golden leaves, the red maples, the gnarled pitch pines that began to appear as he climbed farther up the ridge.
He was maybe fifty yards from the cave when he became aware of a more solid shape up ahead.
He stopped, peered into the dark. Matt was on duty tonight, so maybe it was a deer. And yet, the form—it looked like a man standing real close to the trunk of that oak.
Oh, shit, what if the reptilians knew that he was writing about their invasion, and they didn’t like it?
Hardly daring to do it, his hands shaking so much he could barely manage it, he got the flashlight pointed in the direction of the figure.
—which did not move.
Was it a branch? What was that?
He stepped closer. “Hello?”
It leaped out at him.
He fell back, he lost the light, and then the figure was on him, glaring down at him—and laughing.
“Godddamn it!”
“Oh, man, Wiley, Wiley, oh Christ, this is rich! It’s rich!”
Wiley got to his feet. “You call yourself a cop? Out here wasting taxpayer money like this—what if there’s a lost kitten or something down in the town? What will you do?”
“That flashlight! How many batteries in that thing?”
“A few.”
“Beka says to me, who’s got a searchlight up on the ridge behind the Dale’s house? That’s what it looks like. I mean, they were concerned over in Holcomb, they thought we had a fire goin’ up this way.”
“Holcomb is fifteen miles from here.”
“I rest my case.”
“You saw my flashlight from your house?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you got out here in what—five minutes? I don’t think so. You’ve been out here for a while, because you’re raiding the Cubans, you shit.”
“You’re raiding ‘em, too, you shit. Otherwise, why would you be out here yourself?”
“Bastard.”
“You’re the bastard, because you can afford the damn things and they’re a precious luxury to a poor cop.”
“I’m hardly rich.”
“Your kids are in an exclusive private school in K.C. Not to mention the Jeepazine with which you convey them to said school daily.”
“It’s moderately customized.”
“TV in a Jeep is very froufrou for rural Kansas, buddy. Look, let’s go down to my wife’s roadhouse and get hammered. We can take cigars with us, the place is closed, nobody’s gonna know.”
“Brooke’s gonna get suspicious if I stay out here too long. And as for coming home drunk, that’s been done one too many times.”
“Man, I have to admit I’d like to be pussy-whipped by your ball and chain.”
“You think?”
They began to wander back, both of them planning future cigar raids, hopefully more successful ones. The point was to smoke more than half of the cigars. The guy who did that was the winner.
As they reached the ridge that overlooked Wiley’s house, he noticed, in his office, a light. It came, glowed bright, then went.
He stopped. “You see that?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Given that my family’s asleep, I’m concerned.”
The light came again, flickered, and was gone.
“Looks like you got a short workin’ in there.”
As he scrambled down the ridge to the house, Matt stayed right with him. He was a reprobate, but he was also a dutiful cop.
They arrived at the edge of Wiley’s yard. His pool stood still and silent. The light flashed bright, and there was a sputtering sound from the open window.
They went in through the screen door. Matt dug the fire extinguisher out of the closet while Wiley dashed up to his office.
He looked at the desk, at the cords running down behind it. Nothing was sparking.
“So what is it?” Matt asked, coming in.
Could it have been the reptilians, maybe here to wreck the book? They’d broken through before, for sure. Sort of broken through.
Matt bent down and brought up a frayed cord. He shook it and it sparked. “Sadie do this?”
Their Burmese cat was a notorious cord chewer. “I forgot to close the door.”
“She could’ve burned down your family, buddy.”
“Thanks for helping me, Matt.”
They said their good-byes, and Matt went clomping off down the stairs.
Wiley started to leave the office, but was stopped by sounds that should not be there. Footsteps. Somebody pacing in the bedroom. But Brooke was asleep.
He realized that he was hearing Lindy Winters.
Their world was not an inch away, not a millimeter. If the physicists were right, they were infinitely close, and yet it would take more energy than existed in both universes together to enable them to make contact.
Except…the physicists appeared to be wrong, didn’t they?
Wiley sat down in his chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes, and when he did, Martin’s universe seemed to settle around him, caressing him like a living, complex fog.
The lenses were hooks, and they had hooked into Martin’s world, and it would not be long before they hooked into this one, too.
When he opened his eyes, nearly two hours had passed. It was nearly one. He needed to sleep, but he felt kind of sick inside, like somebody in a crashing plane would feel, waiting for the impact.
They were coming. That’s what this was all about.
In the other human world, NASA had announced that UFOs were real. Apparently, that had changed the balance, enabling the reptilians to enter on a tide of belief.
So far, that did not seem like anything our NASA was likely to do.
Now he understood why the government denied the obvious UFO reality. Somebody down deep in its secret corridors must know that belief counts, that it is the oil in the hinges of the doors between the worlds.
He heard another sound, coming in from outside. Metallic. Very faint, though. What was that?
It came again, faded again. He went to the window, leaned against the screen, trying to hear more clearly.
And there it was again, more distinct this time, and this time he could tell what it was—the unmistakable ringing of church bells. On a good day, you could hear them from out here in the hills, but who would be ringing them at this hour?
Matt lived closer to town, maybe he could hear better.
He picked up the phone, then hesitated. It was late and he was going to make Matt mad. But how could he not? Matt was the police chief and, at the moment, the town’s only cop. If somebody was ringing the bell of one of the churches, maybe it was because he couldn’t make a call.
He dialed, listened.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, I wake you up?”
“I sit by the phone all night waitin’ for you, you stupid fuck. So
what in hell do you want?”
“Would you do me the favor of going to your window and tell me what you hear?”
“ ’Course not.”
“You’re a cop, aren’t you at least curious?”
“Not at all. Good night.”
“Matt! MATT!” And suddenly it wasn’t funny. He had to know.
“Yeah?”
“Just do it.”
There was a silence. It extended. Eventually, Matt came back. “Nothing.”
“You must have heard something.”
“The faint plink of leaves falling. Possibly, the snuffling of a possum, or it could’ve been a coon.”
“No church bells?”
“No, but I did hear something connected with church bells, actually. With belfries. Bats. In your belfry, squeaking like sonembitches.”
“Somebody is ringing bells down there, my friend.”
“You wake me up again, I’m gonna come out there and cuff your ass and put you in the tank.”
“The drunk tank’s rusted closed. You told me so yourself.”
“For you, I will apply Liquid Wrench.”
Wiley hung up. He flipped on his police scanner and watched the red LED race across the little screen. The scanner emitted a slight burp of static each time it crossed the county sheriff’s carrier wave.
Lonely sound. Lonely out here.
He’d damn well heard those bells.
Not in this version of Harrow, Kansas, though. If Matt had heard them, he would have gone down into town to check things out. He was too conscientious to dismiss something as odd as that. At best, it was going to be vandals, but at worst—well, maybe a fire, who knew?
If he could sit down at the laptop—if he dared to do that—he might find out. He turned it on. His hands stirred, moved. His fingers fluttered above the keys. Then they touched them. It was like watching a machine turn on. The hands were not his.
His fingers pounded keys. Stopped.
Then he looked down at what he’d written. “The masters of the sky were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.”
Was that a quote from the Bible? Or an ancient Hebrew text, maybe?
He googled the passage, came up empty.
But the masters of the sky had been the Nephilim, creatures who had come out of the air to rape and pillage, who had caused the devastating war portrayed in the ancient Indian Vedas, with their stories of sound-guided missiles, flying saucers, and nuclear bombs.
In legend, the coming of the Nephilim had marked the end of the last age.
As, indeed, according to the ancient Maya, December 21, 2012, marked the end of this one. The Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0.
All the new-age gurus were howling that it was going to completely blow the mind of man. Wiley figured it was another Y2K, when the coming of the year 2000 had been expected to cause an outbreak of chaos, but which had actually been a lot of overhyped nonsense.
When he closed his eyes, it seemed as if the office did not have his desk in it. Instead, there were two recliners with reading lights beside them. Where he kept his little TV, they had a bookcase full of science tomes, archaeology and physics. He saw the books so clearly that he could almost read the titles.
The bells were now joined by the long wail of a warning siren.
He found himself uttering a prayer for the other Harrow, and all whom she was losing on this night, right here, right now, December 1, 2012.
Near him, he could sense movement.
He tried to open his eyes, couldn’t. Really tried. Could not. He called Brooke, but nothing came out.
The room in Martin and Lindy’s house became more clear.
He could see a woman—Lindy. Kind of pretty. Scientific looking. Not gorgeous like Brooke.
She, also, had heard the bells ringing, and had come in to listen at the window. She was haggard and had a shotgun in her hands—not a good one like his, but rather an old ten-gauge that had seen better days—much better ones.
Then he noticed that he was typing. The damndest thing, he hadn’t even realized it. His eyes were closed, but he could hear it. Feel it in his fingers.
He tried to draw his hands away from the keyboard, couldn’t.
“Lindy,” he said. Sweet name. She drew her head back from the window and started out of the room.
The phone in her version of the room rang. Wiley couldn’t see it, but he heard it so clearly that he froze, his fingers stopping just above the keys. He could hear her breathing, gasping almost, between the insistent rings.
From down the hall, he heard a murmured sigh as his Brooke tossed and turned. Was she aware, at least dimly, of the sound of Lindy’s phone?
Lindy put her hand on it. She tightened her grip. Her face reflected a torment that was horrible to see. She picked it up.
THREE
DECEMBER 1 THE NIGHT WATCH
ON NOVEMBER 29, 2012, WHAT had started so strangely in Gloucestershire on the 21st had become a great terror that had, on that night, struck millions of cities, towns, and villages across the world, and expanded from there. Now, on December 1, the White House that Martin had visited was long since evacuated, Washington was in chaos, the world was in chaos. The stories from the great cities were beyond horror. Rather than face what was happening people by tens of thousands had gone out of windows in New York and Chicago, leaving heaps of untended bodies in the streets. The country’s communications had broken down, fuel and food had ceased to move along highways choked with refugees, and worse had happened, much, much worse.
Harrow, Kansas, however, had not been struck. All the towns in the area had organized themselves and were as prepared as they could be, but so far the problems had not affected Kansas—at least, not this part of it. However, with communications down, they really had very little idea what was happening past thirty miles away.
Martin was on watch in the steeple of Third Street Methodist when, just before one in the morning, he saw light flicker in the clouds that choked the dark west. As he looked more carefully, the clouds lit up briefly. But there were thunderstorms out there, so there would be lightning, of course.
Another flash slowly dwindled and was gone. He knew archaeology, not meteorology, but he had never seen lightning that lingered like that.
He turned on the little radio that he’d brought up with him, just in case there would be some signal from somewhere, but the world remained as silent as it had been these past three days. No radio, no TV, no Internet, GPS mostly not working. Landline telephones were sporadic, cell phones were local only, and then only occasionally. There was no TV, and even the shortwave radio consisted of static, and in the higher frequencies, endless streams of what sounded like some sort of singsong code, a machine language.
Another flash, this one going close to the ground, then expanding and getting brighter.
He became aware that his heart had begun to thutter. He faced the fantastic reality: They had come to Lautner County. That light was over Holcomb, not twenty miles away.
Nobody had ever seen them. The only thing known was that the fourteen lenses, when night fell on them, disgorged thousands of dully glowing bloodred disks, which fanned out spreading the most appalling and bizarre form of death ever known to man.
He picked up his cell phone and called the town’s police officer, his friend Bobby Chalmers. “Got some bad-looking flashes in those clouds, Bobby.”
“I’m lookin’ at ’em.”
Next, he phoned Lindy. Attempting not to alarm her, he kept his voice casual. “Hey, Doctor Winters.”
“Hey, Doctor Winters.”
“Sorry to rouse you from your beauty sleep, but, uh, why don’t you go ahead and get the kids ready? I think you need to come over here. Looks like we could have some activity coming in from the west.”
She didn’t get a chance to react before his phone started beeping in another call. He clicked over. “Hi, Bobby. Where are you, BTW?”
>
“On my way to you. Ron Turpin over in Parker—”
Parker was between here and Holcomb, a scattering of trailers and a tumbledown convenience store at a crossroads. “I know Ron.”
“Yeah. He’s sayin’ there’s a formation he can see in the flashes, moving with the clouds. And nobody’s answering the phone over in Holcomb.”
“But they’re working? The phones are working?”
“They’re ringing. No cops, no sheriff, no paramedics picking up, nothin’.”
“Dear God.”
“You better get down outta there, now, Martin.”
Immediately, he clambered down the four flights to the choir loft, glanced out across the dark church, and then went down the stairs to the entrance. Bobby had arrived and was going into the electrical closet as Martin reached the foot of the stairs. Bobby hit the power switches, lighting up the nave, then all the external lights.
Martin flipped open his cell phone and called the minister. “Reg, we could be getting hit tonight, looks like.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It looked like Holcomb was getting it a few minutes ago and now Bobby can’t raise them on the phone. Disks passed over Parker coming this way. We’re the only town in this direction for eighty miles, Reg.”
“I’m on my way.”
Martin stepped outside. “I called Dennis Farm,” Bobby said. “We—” His phone buzzed. He flipped it open, listened a moment, then closed it. “That was Larry Dennis screaming for help, they got Sally, the light’s coming down like rain—then the line—” He held out the silent cell phone.
In both of their minds was the same thought: it couldn’t be happening here, it was something you heard about, a big city thing, a European thing, a Chinese disaster.
“Wake ’em up,” Bobby said, “we’re under attack.”
Martin went back into the church and started the bell. There was a whirring sound as it began ringing, its stately tones trembling off into the night. His finger hesitated over the siren. It hadn’t been sounded since September, when it had been turned on for the tornado that had taken out the Conagra silo and the Kan-San Trailer Park.