“Boys, can you slo-mo the last little part?” Chris asked. “The figure?”
Terry stabbed a couple of times at the remote, and the figure appeared again, frozen, its back to the camera.
“Let me juice the contrast,” Terry muttered.
The scene became lighter, the figure more clear.
“Is that a balloon?” Katelyn asked.
“It’s the head, Mom.”
As Terry shuttled the image forward frame by frame, the figure turned in short jerks, until its face was visible in a blurred three-quarters view.
Total silence fell as every person there reacted to the image. It was not clear, far from it, but anybody could tell that this was no disguise and no inflated toy. The one fully visible eye was black and slanted, gleaming. It gave the creature a breathtaking look of menace. The lower part of the face was complex with wrinkles, like a very, very old human face might be, the face of a man deeply etched by the trials of his time. There was the tiniest suggestion of a mouth, little more than a line.
With another flick of the shuttle control, another frame appeared. Now the mouth had opened slightly, and the sense of surprise it communicated was so vivid that it was eerie.
Another flick of the shuttle and the figure was gone.
Dan found himself feeling his ear and remembering what Conner had said. Dear heaven, what if this was real?
His mind rebelled. It just could not be true, because if it was, then he was involved and so was Marcie. But why? In the name of God, why?
“Look at that,” Paulie said as he returned. He went to the glass doors and stepped out on the deck.
Conner followed him. “It’s them,” he said softly, his voice trembling.
“Jesus, it might be,” Jimbo said.
A glow rose behind the stand of pines that separated the house from the field beyond.
Dan went onto the deck. The glow was smaller, but it was still very damn bright, and was indeed out in the field.
Were they in contact? Aliens had chosen to land in a little college town?
It just did not seem possible. No matter what was happening, that was not the whole story.
Then he saw stars slowly wheeling around him—an aura, another one, the third in two days. Maybe if he could get to the couch, they wouldn’t notice the staring emptiness of petit mal. Hardly able to navigate through the sea of stars that now surrounded him, he somehow found the couch, nearly sitting on Maggie’s lap.
“Slow down, buster,” Katelyn snapped.
“Sorry! Sorry!”
He slumped back. Before him was not the gleaming sliver he usually saw, but a room. There was a person there—a child. She was exquisitely beautiful . . . and recognizable.
He cried out and the seizure was over.
“Dan!”
“Sorry!”
“Dan, aren’t you hearing me? Stop the boys!”
Then he realized that Paulie and Conner were outside and running like two mad things toward the field, flashlights bobbing.
The world seemed to stop. Harley and Maggie looked up at him, their expressions identical, eyebrows raised, slight smiles playing on their faces.
Chris said, “This could be it.”
Katelyn burst out the door and went running down the stairs. Dan followed.
“Come on, Conner,” Paulie yelled.
“Calm down,” Conner yelled back. “Stay together!”
Dan was aware that the Warners had come out onto the deck, and were quietly standing and watching. Then he saw Chris beside them. “You better come down here,” he shouted.
It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, as Chris came across the deck and down the stairs.
Dan ran after Conner and Katelyn, moving more slowly through the woods because he had only the light of the object to guide him.
When he broke out into the field, he saw an extremely bright light, but it appeared to be more of a pinpoint. He could see the silhouettes of the two boys close to it, and Katelyn coming up behind them.
“We mean you no harm,” Conner yelled. Then, “Nous vous voulons dire aucun mal.”
“Conner get back,” Katelyn shouted.
“Come to meet us,” Paulie cried. His voice almost bubbled.
Dan ran harder. The children should be very damn afraid.
“Wait! I’m getting a mental communication,” Conner said. “They want us to come closer.”
“Hold hands, buddy!”
The two boys went forward—and suddenly the light went out. “Run, boys,” Dan shouted.
Then he heard laughter, a lot of young laughter. There was more laughter behind him, and he turned to see the Warners breaking out of the woods. They were laughing, too.
“Aw, shit,” Chris said from the dark. “I never win.”
There were flashlights up ahead, and as Dan arrived, he realized that he was surrounded by kids, and they were laughing and jeering and shining flashlights on Conner, who was trapped in the center of a circle of derision.
It had been a prank, and it looked as if most of Conner’s classmates were here.
Conner put his hands over his head as if he was being stoned by the voices. Katelyn ran around the outside of the circle, trying to part it, to get to her boy.
Harley and Maggie Warner came up chuckling amiably. “That’s our gasoline lantern,” Harley said. “It came back from Neptune just in time.”
Dan closed his fist, pulled back—and just barely managed to stop himself from decking Harley.
“He-ey,” Harley said. “It’s a joke. An innocent practical joke. They’ve been planning it all day. We need something to cut the tension, man!”
“At my son’s expense!” He was not as careful as Katelyn, who was still trying to gently push kids aside. He grabbed a fistful of somebody’s jacket and hurled what turned out to be a girl to the ground. As she screamed and cursed at him, he waded in and reached his son.
“Get out of here,” Conner shrilled, “please just get out of here!”
“Conner, come home,” Katelyn said, joining them. She looked around them. “You’re pitiful, all of you!”
“Asshole!” came a muffled yell from the dark. “Bitch!”
Their arms around their boy, Katelyn and Dan headed for home. As they passed the Warners, Dan said, “You stay away from our place and keep that fat troll of yours away from our son.”
“Dan?” Harley called after him. “Hey, man, stay loose.”
When they returned to the house, Chris was already back. He and Nancy were replaying the video.
“It’s real, you know,” Chris said.
Conner started to run downstairs.
“Hey, wait.” Chris caught up to him. “Hold on. We have historic footage here. Come on back, take another look.”
“Dr. Jeffers, I really can’t right now.”
“Forget those kids, Conner. The Warners are idiots, and the Keltons haven’t got the faintest idea what this actually is. This video is one of the most precious records ever created by the human hand.”
Conner was silent. Dan saw why. Tears were pouring from his eyes. But he raised his head. He said, “Could I possibly be homeschooled?”
Dan’s heart almost broke, but he said, “You have to learn to face it, Conner. To gain control.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Katelyn said. “He does not! And the fact that Harley and Maggie keep letting these things happen is a big part of what’s wrong with child-rearing these days. They’re passive, they believe in the mythical wisdom of the child, but children are savages and they need boundaries or they turn mean.” She threw her arms around Conner. “You’re the exception, love. You are a miracle, and if they can’t handle that, then they’re scum. That’s all.”
Conner sighed. “Mom, they happen to be people I have to spend every day of my life with.” He moved away from her. “So, Dr. Jeffers, what have we got?”
“Come on. We’ll go frame by frame, from the top, making a note whenever a new point of proof is
present in a frame. Hey, you could count the rivets in this thing if it had rivets. There’s a lot here. This is wonderful, convincing footage.”
Dan hardly listened. He was in a state of complete turmoil. He had to understand about Marcie, and he did not. He just did not get it.
Then he did. “I remember,” he said.
“What?” Katelyn snapped.
Dan got out of there. His stomach felt as if it had just filled with a foamy storm of acid. He dashed upstairs and into the bathroom.
“Dan,” Katelyn called, following him.
She found him on his hands and knees over the toilet, barfing like a sick dog. He rose to his feet and started yanking paper off the roll to clean up the considerable quantity of yellow froth that had missed. He worked furiously, perhaps not yet aware of her presence.
“Dan,” she said as she went down to him. She took the paper from him and flushed it away. They knelt there awkwardly, face to face.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “It has to be impossible.” How could he tell her what he thought he was remembering? He had not only been in some way connected with Marcie two nights ago, it was worse than that. His childhood seizures hadn’t been seizures at all, they had been memories so extremely strange that it hadn’t been possible to recognize them for what they were. “We’re lab rats,” he said, then got sick again.
As she nursed him through it—rather bravely, she thought—he gasped, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and it meant a whole lot of things, and she wasn’t real sure what all of them were. He got up, shook his head.
“Are you okay?”
“We’re in some sort of trouble.”
“Oh, yes.”
He took her in his arms and held her. “This goes deep,” he whispered, “real deep.”
She wasn’t sure she should, but she remained in his embrace.
“No matter how bizarre and how impossible it may seem, it had something to do with them.”
“Something to do with whom?”
“Them! It was Marcie screaming in that thing.”
She leaned back, looked at him.
“I recognized her voice—it was all crazy with fear, but it was her yelling, it was certainly her.”
Katelyn could not think of how to react. She wasn’t even sure exactly what he was trying to say. And yet the screaming had sounded vaguely familiar to her, too. She knew that he was right. It had indeed been Marcie—in the thing, with the alien, and absolutely terrified.
“How did she . . . seem?
“ ‘How did she seem?’ My God, that’s too small a question! ‘What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here’ just begins to approach it. When I walked into her office, that sour, rigid woman was—oh, Lord, totally changed, love. All soft and steamy and really, really sold on me. That cold fish. As if her personality had been totally revised overnight.” He paused. “Which is exactly what did happen, in my opinion.”
“Aliens did something to Marcie because—why? What does this have to do with the price of beans, Dan? Because you are an Irishman to your core and you might be a dull lecturer, but you can sing a song to a lady, and I think I’m hearing a damn clever one now.”
“I’m telling you the truth!”
She backed away from him, looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You’re telling me aliens—which you have always until ten minutes ago thought were utter bullshit—made you do it. I don’t think I’m going to buy it, Danny-O. Nice try though. On the fly like that, very impressive.”
Inside herself, though, she was much less sure. It seemed to her that she’d had more than a glimpse of an alien down there on that video. She’d seen, ever so vaguely, into an aspect of life that she had never even dreamed existed. There was somebody behind the scenes, it appeared, stitching things together, and they were taking an interest in this neighborhood and most specifically, she thought, in this family.
“Katelyn, I have to tell you something. I believe that I was brought into that thing. That I was with Marcie in there. Because I have memories of that.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I have memories!”
“Okay, don’t have a cat. So, when did this happen? While I blinked my eyes, maybe? Remember, I was there most of the time. And you did not go into that thing. In fact, if you had, it’d be on the video.”
“Do you remember that you went to sleep with Conner afterward?”
“I was scared and so was he. I didn’t want him left alone down there.”
“And when you woke up, you were up here. In bed up here . . . and we saw those marks, that strange water. What if they were tracks, Katelyn?”
“Holes in the ground?”
“After we came back and went to sleep, that thing returned. It brought her back after they’d knocked her out or whatever they did to her. And for whatever reason . . .”
“No, Dan, the aliens did not make you do it. That will not fly.”
“OKAY!”
“Keep your voice down!”
He pushed on, because a lot rode on this, his whole life with her rode on this. “The thing is—”
“Dan—”
“Listen to me! You listen, because this is bizarre and impossible but it is real, and you need to wrap your mind around it.”
“I need to wrap my mind around your infidelity and I will not be talked out of it! Come on, Dan, at least respect my dignity as a human being.”
“Katelyn, that’s your melodrama showing and I accept that. Self-dramatization is a characteristic of people scarred by traumatic childhoods.”
“Analyze yourself why don’t you, my self-obsessed little boy.”
“I take that. And I accept that what I did was wrong no matter what the explanation.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Now will you listen?”
“All right. The star people made you do it. I’m fascinated.”
“I remember seeing her on a sort of black frame cot, and we were—something was happening.” He shuddered, then went to the sink and slugged water.
“What would that have been? Alien foreplay?”
“It was horrible! Katelyn, horrible! They—I remember some kind of sparks, and we were—oh, God—some sort of arcane thing where I kept seeing these sparks and hearing, like, her inner voice, her memories, her—like some kind of inner scent . . . the smell of her soul.”
“Was there a rectal probe involved, or is this even kinkier?”
“I deserve that. Sure I do, but—”
“What, Dan? Don’t talk in riddles, please.”
“When we were kids . . . I saw another girl under the same circumstances . . . with them. A girl that was you.”
“We didn’t even know each other.” And yet, she did have certain disjointed memories that were really strange, that she had always thought involved child abuse by one of her mother’s many boyfriends. She did not mention these memories to him, though, not just now.
“We knew each other, but not in normal life. We knew each other very well . . . because they made sure we did. They made this family, Katelyn. We’re damn lab rats is what we are.”
“Oh, come on! Look, we have guests, I’m going downstairs, plus the ever-alert Conner is going to figure out that we’re fighting again and do you really want him involved?”
“He is involved! He’s heavily involved. Katelyn, don’t you get it—why he’s so brilliant, so off the charts—he’s theirs, Katelyn.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I really don’t think so at all, because I seem to remember something about an epidural and a hell of a birthing struggle and he is mine! MY DAMN SON!”
“Shh!”
“Don’t you shush me! First the aliens made you fuck that slut for your tenure, professor prostitute, then you dare to tell me my son is some kind of pod person? You’re fucking certifiable, is what you are.”
“I didn’t say that. Of course he’s our son. Our flesh and blood. Who sweated through that labor with you,
who spent seventeen hours, breathe, breathe, who kissed your sweat and prayed with you? Who was there, Katie Katelyn, and is still here and will always be here, if you let me—and if you don’t, will live still, yes, but will also be dead?”
She looked at him. He looked at her. In that moment, something, perhaps about the vow of marriage itself that is sacred reasserted itself, and the union decided to continue on . . . at least for the while. “Was that a question?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows. She raised hers. He opened his arms. She went in.
“Something so complex has happened—it’s like I’ve glimpsed a level of life that’s normally hidden, where there are other motives and meanings, that never normally come to light. And somehow, Marcie and I—and you and I, Katelyn—are connected on that level . . . and it’s all to do with our boy, somehow, I know that. I know it and I love him and I love us, Katelyn, oh my God, so much.”
“We’ve got to be with him,” she said.
They walked together from their dark bedroom. Out the east window, which overlooked the field where the thing had appeared, an enormous moon was rising. By its light, silver with frost, she could see the whole field, wrapped now in the familiar mystery of an ordinary night. She looked up toward higher space, the glowing dark of the deep sky. There were stars, a few, battling the flooding moonlight.
Perhaps he was right. Maybe his struggle was, in some way, true. Maybe a shadow was there, one that you couldn’t see, but that was nevertheless very real, the shadow of an unknown mind from a far place.
He came beside her, put his arm around her. “They’re watching,” he whispered.
She leaned against him, wondering what the future would bring. He might be going mad. It happened to people in middle age, and for a psychology professor to become psychologically abnormal had a certain irresistible irony to it, did it not?
Then again, maybe aliens were the answer. Certainly, the video was odd and disturbing. It had provided him an inventive excuse, she had to give him that.
“Come on,” she said. She pushed away from him, and went back downstairs to rejoin the tormented odyssey of her son.