“What do you do?”
“With our little boy? Who is he? Who are we?”
“Let me give you a piece of advice,” Langford said, “you just take things as they come. Don’t worry about anything happening to your boy. He’s well protected.”
“He needs to be protected?” Katelyn asked. But then it seemed a rather obvious question. Of course he needed to be protected, and so did his secret. “I don’t want anybody told this.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. We tried to avoid telling even you.”
“This should be public knowledge. It’s immoral to hide it.” Chris’s face was alight with zeal and excitement.
Katelyn had a sudden, chilling thought that he might go on TV with that stupid video the Keltons had made. “Conner’s life probably depends on hiding it,” she told him. “Think about it. Think how many different fanatic groups would want him dead. How many governments would fear his power.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“Announcing the most amazing railway accident in the history of this or any other century!” There stood Conner, his shirt smeared with model paint and his tattered engineer’s cap on the back of his head. He glared at them. “Doom on the railways. Come and seeeee . . .” Then he saw the two strangers. “Oh. I’m so sorry.” He came into the room.
“This is our son, Conner,” Dan said. “This is, uh, Mr. Langford and Miss Glass. They’re from the, from, ah—”
“We’re from St. Francis Parish, Conner,” Colonel Langford said. “Soliciting for a fund drive.”
“I don’t guess this is the right moment for a train wreck, then. It’s quite amazing, though.”
“Conner has a train set,” Dan explained to the two wondering faces. “He often builds staged railroad accidents.”
“I guess Catholics wouldn’t approve, somehow,” he said. “We don’t actually go to church—or, oops, perhaps—”
“We know that, Conner.”
Conner took a step back. He had noticed a sense of winter that clung to them both. They were not pleasant people to be around. But all suspicions immediately dropped away when the colonel said, “We’d love to see the train wreck.”
“Great! I’ve been working very hard.”
“Conner, did you do my homework?” Chris asked as the adults followed him down into his basement room.
“Absolutment,” he said. “I’ve got a new way of integrating the calculus, boy-o.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have no idea! Look at it and see if it flies.” He crossed his room, picked up a badly tattered notebook, and thrust it into Chris’s hands. “And now, may I present, the Wreck of Old Ninety-seven.” He looked up at Lauren. “It’s a metaphor,” he said, “of my day.”
“Conner, this is beautiful,” she said, looking over the train board. “Oh my God, Rob, look at this. Look at the detail!”
“Glad you like it,” Conner said. There was something in his voice that Katelyn knew well. These two were going to get a surprise.
OUTSIDE, MIKE WILKES HAD BEEN forced to return to his car, which was hidden about a quarter of a mile away. The snow was getting more persistent, and he couldn’t risk it becoming immobilized. He had processed a few of the kids in the town, but he needed the night to finish his work. He wished the damn Keltons would go to sleep. He pulled the car out into the road and drove it for a distance in the giving snow, getting it onto the crown of the road. There would be no plow through here tonight. He decided that he had about an hour. After that, he was going to be forced to abandon this part of the plan.
Not good, possibly even fatal.
WHILE THE COLLECTIVE WORRIED ABOUT the president, the Three Thieves worried about the fact that Wilkes was still close to Conner.
Adam was with them as well, preparing himself for what would happen tonight.
He detected a familiar voice. Lauren was nearby. He shifted his interest away from Wilkes. The collective wanted to let him make his mistake, and that seemed a good idea. But Adam needed Lauren away from here, too, and soon. What was to be done required absolute privacy.
He sailed across the snowy fields and into the yard behind the Callaghans’ house. There he built a vivid picture of Lauren’s car being covered with snow. He sent this like a drift of smoke into her mind.
AS THE TRAIN MOVED AROUND the tracks, Conner made sound effects, screeching and huffing. Then he touched an edge of track, which sprung open.
“It broke,” Lauren shouted.
The next instant, the wonderful black-and-brass steam engine, spewing smoke, struck the sprung track and bounded off into the superbly modeled little town. It churned down the main street crashing into stores, snapping light poles, and sending figures flying.
“Wow,” Rob said into the silence that followed this remarkably realistic effect.
“Why did you do this?” Lauren asked the boy.
“So I can build it all up again a new way. Hey. I just got this flash. Are you people gonna want to get back to town tonight?”
“Well, yes, we live in town.”
“Then I see in my mind’s eye your car getting slowly buried. Or, actually, quickly.”
THOUGHTS HAD TO BE PUSHED into Lauren’s mind, but the child just sucked them up. Adam regarded him, a smiling, strutting little thing, the aura around his body vastly more complex and colorful than those around the others.
Adam prepared to die.
TWENTY-FOUR
CONNER WOKE UP—AND REALIZED instantly that he was not in bed. He could hear wind and he seemed to be standing.
He opened his eyes. White flying dots. Cold. A leathery thing beside him. This was all impossible, so he closed them again. He opened them for just a second, saw darkness and millions of white dots, and closed them again, tight.
He surveyed his situation. The strange church people had left, he’d gone to bed in his upstairs room. Mom had come in and stared at him and gone all eerie. She’d cried for no apparent reason and Dan had come and they’d hugged each other, then gone across the hall to their room. Sometime after that, he’d fallen asleep.
Without opening his eyes again, he tried to decide what was happening to him now.
Then he knew: he was going down the street in the snow, but he wasn’t walking, he was sort of . . . flying.
Which couldn’t be real, therefore he was asleep.
Again, he opened his eyes. He could see the house, which was drifting back behind him. This looked like a dream and felt like a dream, but it sounded and smelled like the real world.
Perplexing, in other words—not a dream, yet not possible.
For a second he thought he heard the living room clock chiming, but it was the wind clattering pine branches in Lost Land, which was what he had named the big woods across the street.
The woods were drifting closer, home farther away. There were three big leathery heads bobbing along around him.
He gasped, started to scream, then forced himself back under control. He had to stay calm, this was contact, it had to be handled with all the skill and intelligence he possessed. You’re up to this, he told himself.
But he was being taken.
Okay, this was bad, he was being kidnapped by these guys, no question, no way to get around it. Is kidnapping ever good? If you’re going to be straight, why not just ring the doorbell?
He realized that he was hearing something odd in his left ear, a sort of deep whine, if such a sound could exist. He reached up and touched an earbud. Then he saw that one of the big-headed creatures had an MP3 player. There was no music coming out, though, just this odd noise.
He ripped the earbud out and immediately fell down in a big puff of snow. For a second he lay trying to understand just how this worked. It was sound, sound that had caused him to defy gravity. Okay, there had to be some kind of harmonic—or, no, was he crazy, he’d figure the damn thing out later!
The creatures swirled around with their mouths open and their hands on their cheeks. They we
re not menacing looking. In fact, far from it. They looked scared, too. Then one of them thrust the earbud at him—not toward his ear but toward his hand.
He looked down at it. They hovered and wobbled their heads.
Please, came a sort of nice-sounding voice, the same one he’d heard in his head during the encounter with Paulie.
No, it wasn’t on, not out in the woods with no explanation. He ran back toward the house as fast as he could go.
What can we do to help you stop screaming?
He’s not screaming, you fool, he’s running!
He ran faster, his legs pumping. “Dad! Mom! Help me! Help me!”
The creatures buzzed around him like giant flies. The one with the earbud buzzed along ahead of him, face to face, holding out the earbud.
The house was farther away than he thought. It was hard to make progress in the snow.
Then the creature made a sort of thrust at his head. Sorry! Sorrrysorry!
The earbud was in again and he was all of a sudden running in midair. He yanked it out and hit the ground and got up and ran again, his feet crunching in the snow.
He got to the front walk, vaulted the gate, landed in the snow, fell and got up, then slipped on the icy stones and fell harder, rolling off into the drift-choked front yard. He went slipping and sliding up the walk, his feet stinging from the cold. He reached the door, pulled on the handle.
Locked. He rattled it. “Mom! Dad!” He dragged at it. “Oh, please, please . . .” He saw the doorbell under its little light, and moved to press it.
We have to!
We can’t!
Conner, come on!
Go in him, you idiot! NOW!
Conner then felt something that few human beings have ever felt. He experienced the sense of something moving inside his own body, slithering up from his gut as if alive.
OF COURSE, THE THREE THIEVES could have turned him off with a little whiff of gas, and taken him wherever they cared to take him, but that was not what this was about. The collective had known that Conner would need to be tamed.
HORRIFIED AT WHAT HE WAS feeling, Conner looked down at himself. His chest and belly were visible, his pajama top having blown open in the wind. Something glowed through his skin, and it was coming up from his chest toward his head. Bright light shone out of his body in the shape of the thing, a snake that twisted and turned inside.
He cried out, he clutched at his chest—and the thing shot into his head and the cry was stifled. His head glowed for an instant so brightly that the whole front yard was lit up. The icicles on the windows reflected blue light brighter than a flashbulb.
Then it was dark. Real dark. Because Conner was not anywhere anymore. He was not looking out of his eyes, it didn’t feel like. What it felt like was so odd that he could hardly believe it, but the truth was that he seemed to have been swallowed by his body, as if he’d gone down into his own stomach.
This was all so totally new that he could not even think about it, let alone explain it. In truth, he was being affected by a simple electromagnetic field that was being applied with great care to about two million specific neurons in his brain. It wasn’t magic. There is no magic. There is only the unknown—in this case, a very old and experienced science possessed of a great knowledge of how bodies and brains work.
Objectively, he recognized that it must be some sort of illusion. Even so, the fear was a claw clutching his heart.
He felt his body turn and begin to move away from the house. No amount of effort would get him back into his head or enable him to regain control of his movements.
He tried to call to Dad, then, in his rising panic, to the police. Nothing worked. He could not make his voice turn on. Despairing now, he thought of how very, very sad his parents were going to be, never knowing what happened to him like this.
Somebody help me. Please, somebody!
We are helping you.
He felt himself turn, felt his feet dip into the snow, felt it blow against his chest.
Now I will remove myself from you, the voice said. Do not run again.
In a moment, he began to go up through his body. In another moment, he was seeing through his eyes again.
The wind blew, the pines moaned, snow flew. He had been taken deep into Lost Land, so deep that there was nothing around them but pines. No lights, no houses, just the pale glow of the snow.
We’re the Three Thieves but we didn’t steal you.
Yes we did.
Shut up!
“Okay . . . I hear you.”
Nobody moved.
He was well aware of the mystery he was facing. Remarkable, indeed. Then he saw movement in the woods, and a fourth gray appeared. He was not squat and kludgy like these three. He strode on long legs and his head was more in proportion. Coming through the snow, he was as graceful as a dancer.
He stopped behind the three and raised a long, thin arm, sort of like an Indian chief or something. Conner noted: no muscles. Therefore the skin itself must contain millions of micromuscles.
He took a step toward him. Conner took a step back. He came closer.
Conner yelled as loud as he could: “Get away! Get away from me!” Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, actually surprised at himself. But there was more than one Conner in here, and the other one, the little child alone in the woods, was still really, really scared and did not care about the fact that this was contact, it was historical and damn awesome that it was him doing it or any of that.
The other Conner took over and ran, he just ran, he didn’t care where, deeper into Lost Land, past the great, frowning trees, into the tangled places where nobody ever went.
The more he ran, the more the panicked Conner replaced the curious Conner, and the wilder and more frantic his flight became.
Soon he began to feel his feet burning. He was getting cold. When he wasn’t around the grays, he needed more than just pajamas out in this blizzard. Something they did had been keeping him warm. Curious Conner thought, Heat without radiance or forced air or anything. I wonder how they do that?
And he slowed down a little. Now his breath was coming out in huge puffs and his feet were really burning and it was meat-locker cold.
Sobbing like an infant, he stumbled to a halt. He forced the tears down, and finally stood trembling from the cold, rubbing his shoulders.
The wind roared in the trees, and a big gust stung him head to toe with snow. Cold this cold felt just like being burned and he screamed into its howl, but his loudest cry was so small against it that he could hardly hear it himself.
This was idiotic. He was here to think, not cry like some idiot. So okay, he turned around and around, trying to get his bearings.
No bearings.
He hopped from foot to foot to keep the agony down. But it didn’t work, he was barefoot in the snow in the middle of a blizzard and wearing cotton pajamas. He was quite familiar with the dangers of hypothermia. If he’d known the temperature, he could probably have calculated to the second just how long before he lost so much reason that he could no longer hope to survive.
He had never thought much about dying before, but he thought about it now because it appeared that it was going to happen to him. He was already getting numb and that was a really bad sign, it was a sign of death coming, he knew that. The next step was the final sleep.
“Dad! Mom! Hey, I’m lost out here! Hey, HEY!”
Ridiculous, meaningless effort.
“Grays! Hey, I’m here! I’m willing to negotiate! HEY!”
Nothing.
How could such a smart kid turn into such a moron? He’d just blown contact, and probably frozen himself to death in the process.
When he tried to walk, his legs wouldn’t move. Muscle spasm due to advancing hypothermia.
He did not want to die before he’d kissed a girl or had a paper published, or even driven a damn car.
His pajamas snapped in the wind, his face got more and more caked in frost, and he prayed his usual praye
r, “Any God who happens to be real, this is Conner Callaghan and I could use some help. Thank you! Uh, really use it!”
The world around him seemed to grow quiet. He looked down at his right hand. He could see the snow hitting it and bouncing off, but he could no longer feel anything. But he did feel something really funny, a sort of jittering in his heels. It spread through his feet, and he noticed it in his hands, too. Then it went up his arms and legs, bringing with it wonderful warmth like a really good blanket would if he was cold and Mom came in and tucked him in.
Then a face popped out from behind a tree, huge eyes, tiny mouth communicating surprise, fear, concern all at once. Boy, Conner thought, do they ever look like bugs.
Oh, no.
“I won’t run, relax. As long as you keep me warm, consider us friends.”
What’s he saying?
I have no idea.
Striding out of the snow on his long, thin legs, came the tall gray. As he came closer, Conner could see that his body shimmered with light, as if he was swathed in flickering, ever-changing rainbows. His eyes gleamed with bright reflections of the trees around them even though it was night, almost as if they somehow enhanced light. Then he saw this beautiful figure in the creature’s eyes, a person blazing with light of a thousand different colors.
He looked around him, trying to see this person. Then he moved his hand, and saw that it was him. He looked down at his own arm, and the glow wasn’t there. Only in the eyes of the gray. He knew about auras, that they were a faint electrical field emitted by the nervous system. The gray’s eyes were somehow amplifying its visibility.
As the tall gray came closer, the three short, squat ones buzzed nervously around him.
Okay,” Conner said, “my name is Conner Callaghan and I’m going to do this. I hope.”
Talk to us in your head. Form the words in your mind, but don’t speak them aloud. We will be more easily able to hear you, then.
He sounded actually sort of okay. An ultra-precise voice that appeared right in the center of your head, as if you were wearing earphones. He felt for that earbud, but it was gone. “How are you doing that?”
I can’t hear you!