He got up.
“Going back to bed?”
He hardly heard her. He went out on the deck.
“Conner?”
The night was huge and hollow, the sky aflame with stars. It was cutting cold, but it felt good, somehow, as if the winter night belonged to his grief.
She came out behind him, and then Mom did, too. Mom brought his coat. He had big lamb’s wool slippers on already. “What are we doing at three A.M? May I know?”
Then, through the skeletal trees, there came a glow. It flickered and was gone.
“Is that a flashlight?” his mother asked.
But Conner was off, racing down the deck stairs and across the hard frozen yard. “You guys,” he yelled, his voice slapping the deep silence.
He plunged through the woods, pushing twigs aside, getting scratched by branches. Then he stumbled into the stubbly field and saw hanging there just a hundred yards away, the little ship that had started the whole thing.
It wasn’t glowing much now. In fact, there was just this flickering blue light playing across its skin. As he approached it, he saw that it was bigger than it looked.
“Conner! Conner, be careful!”
Take care of her, Lauren. Tell her I’m okay.
Are you?
I have no idea.
He went closer to the thing. It was making a sort of rattling sound, like ball bearings clicking together in something that was turning slowly, just ticking over. There was a round opening, not a hatch, just an opening. Inside, he could see the wooden framework that held the thin outer skin. He pushed at it, and it wobbled slightly in the air.
He peered in.
Then his mother was there. “No,” she said in a voice harsh with terror, “we have to get away!”
“Mom, hey.”
“Conner, Conner run!” She pulled at him, she started to drag him away.
“NO!” He shook her off. He lifted himself inside, and saw, sitting on a little bench, three very tattered and bedraggled grays.
“You guys?”
They stirred, backing away.
You guys.
Thank you, came a nervous reply in that innocent, mechanical-sounding voice of theirs. Thank you for our lives.
I brought you back to life?
Conner, we’re part of you.
“Conner! Oh, God, Conner!” Mom came pushing and crashing in. Her eyes were filmed with tears, glaring, her face pouring with sweat despite the cold. She bared her teeth like the wild animal Conner knew she had become. “I remember this thing,” she hissed, “and it’s terrible, Conner, it’s evil.”
The Three Thieves had backed against the wall. Inside his mind, they moaned and cried.
Stay calm, Conner projected to them. Then he said aloud, “Mom, I want you to sit down.”
There were two narrow black gurneys against the far wall.
When she saw them, she went practically rigid. The hands of the grays went up to their cheeks, the mouths opened. They pressed themselves against the wall as hard as they could.
“Conner, this place—this is where—” She looked at the narrow iron gurneys. “Oh my God.” Then her face changed. “It was always a sort of nightmare. I didn’t think it was . . . this.” She went to the gurneys, touched one of them. “I remember,” she said in a suddenly loud voice. “I remember it all.”
Conner saw her change and become a girl again, just as Amy had become a woman before his eyes a few hours ago. She was a beautiful, blond girl, freckled, in a white summer nightgown.
And then there were stars all around her, and he saw a boy on the gurney beside her, and the stars surrounded them both.
When the vision ended, Mom was sitting on the edge of one of the gurneys, stroking the ugly black metal. “Conner,” she whispered, “this is where your dad and I were brought together. Right here.”
He went beside her, put an arm around her shoulders.
“If they hadn’t done this, then my whole life . . . I never would have found Dad.” She shook her head. “Conner, they made us, they made our family.” She looked at him, and now her eyes were soft mother’s eyes. She hugged him to her.
Slowly, carefully, or rather, as carefully as the clumsy Thieves could manage, they came out of their hiding place and drew closer.
Conner heard the one say, Let’s touch her.
The Two replied, We can’t do that!
The Three asked, What do we do?
“Mom, put out your hand.”
She tried to, but it was shaking too much. Conner took it in his hand, and together they reached out to the Three, and their hands touched.
Mom snatched her hand back. “It shocked me!”
Don’t do that!
We’re scared!
“They won’t do it again,” Conner told her.
This time, she reached out and touched the face of the Three, and he, with his own hand shaking like a leaf, touched her face, and the One and the Two came close, and the five of them formed a circle.
A sound rose in Conner’s mind, the great humming song he had heard before, the voice of the collective raised in hope and joy.
Then there came ringing. The Three Thieves rushed to the far wall. The voice of the collective faded.
What’s going on in there? Lauren asked.
“Mom, answer your phone.”
The Thieves looked at each other. Katelyn fumbled out her cell phone, listened for a moment. “We’ll be there,” she said. She closed her phone. “Dad’s awake and he wants us.” She started for the hatch—and looked out on a field racing away, houses spinning in the starlight, then darkness. “Conner, they’ve kidnapped us!”
Then there was a thud outside, and light came in the opening. Another thud, and more light. Conner joined his mother at the edge of the opening. “You know what this is?”
“No, Conner! Is it another planet, because your poor father—”
“Come on, Mother.”
He helped her down onto the hospital helipad, which had been flooded by automatic lighting as soon as the Thieves’ craft landed on it. The thuds had been the switches turning on the floodlamps.
They had not gone two steps before the body of the craft blazed bright and the Thieves shot off into the night.
Conner heard faintly in his head, Where are you? Conner!
They took us to the hospital, Lauren.
An orderly came out of a door and trotted across the helipad toward them. “Where is your emergency?” he shouted. He looked around. “Excuse me, but what’s going on here?”
“We’re here to see a patient,” Katelyn announced. “Dan Callaghan.”
“But what? Uh, oh, okay. Did you come by medevac? Where’s the chopper?”
“He was in a hurry,” Katelyn said. “And so are we.”
They went down then, along a green-tiled corridor and into a room filled with equipment, and there in the bed was Dad.
Conner let Katelyn go to him. She bent and gingerly kissed him. His eyes met hers, and they kissed more. Then Conner went close, and the family was whole again.
High above, three others—people also, but of a very different shape—came together, also, arm in arm.
Lauren drove like a madwoman along snowy roads, skidding into the hospital emergency entrance. She left her car where it happened to stop against a curb and sprinted into the building.
She ran down a hallway, vaulted stairs, then turned a corner and burst into Dan Callaghan’s room breathing hard.
She stopped, stunned by what she saw.
The Callaghan family had come to the end of something. Instead of huddling together, perhaps weeping, cursing God and their fate, they were all asleep. On the bed, Conner lay beside his father, who snored softly. Katelyn sat in a chair beside the bed, her head back, her mouth open. Her hand lay along the sheets, her fingers touching her husband’s bandaged arm. His good arm was around his son.
As she stood in the doorway, she thought how very innocent they still were, even after all
they had done and seen. And that boy, with his dusting of beard just barely visible along his lip, what dreams must he be dreaming in the ocean of thought that he now contained?
She came into the room, went to the bedside, looked down at them. How extraordinarily resilient people were. Had she been asked before this, she would have said that they’d have needed sedatives or even straitjackets, but that underestimated the power of the human heart and the simple, central thing that is the family.
She bent over and kissed Conner’s downy cheek. He made no move, no sigh of awareness. She tried to make herself quiet in her mind. The Callaghans might be at peace, but in her mind there lived demons, the demon of fear-of-future, the demon of distrust, the demon of danger-of-deceit.
She got the one chair that was not in use and stepped across to the doorway. She sat down, angling the chair so that she could see both the Callaghans, the dark window behind them, and the gleaming, silent hallway.
“May I help you?” a passing nurse asked.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“His vitals are good.”
“I know.”
The nurse smiled slightly, then walked off, her footsteps clicking on the gray floor. Lauren watched, methodically, first the hall, then the window, then the Callaghans. For what, she was not sure. Perhaps for nothing. Perhaps the fight was truly ended, and Conner would be able to enter his training.
But where would it lead? What was she to do?
She laughed a little to herself. How absurd that question was. It would lead beyond imagination, past the edge of the known world.
Three o’clock, an alarm beeped in another room, and nurses hurried past. Half past, the wind came, rattling the window. Conner sighed and muttered words that brought to Lauren’s mind the tone of prayer. She prayed, then, to Conner’s favorite god—that is to say, whatever one happens to be real.
The spirit of man had triumphed this day. Ignition had been achieved. Now, the ascent.
She watched through the deeper hours, watched and waited for the dawn.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
Whitley Strieber, The Grays
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