“Lauren, listen to me. You’re going to meet him in a moment. Sort of meet him. What you’re hearing is coming through a six-foot-thick tempered steel wall that is further protected by a high-intensity electromagnetic field.”
“Then how can we possibly be hearing it? Because it’s perfectly clear. And the man is in agony.”
“I can’t hear it.”
“But that’s crazy. Listen to him, he’s wailing!”
“The fact that you can hear his thoughts is why you’re here.”
“What thoughts? He’s crying!”
“You need to go in there,” Andy Morgan said. The same tone, she thought, that he might have used if he had told her it was time for her to do her wingwalk, or perhaps go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Behind him was a steel door, armored and locked with great, gleaming bolts. Why in the world would anybody be that locked up? What did they have in there, some kind of deranged superman? She tried to conceal her total and complete mystification, not to say her fear, and to concentrate on what she needed to know, here, on a practical basis. “Now, is this person going to be violent?”
“Baby, he is flyin’ in there! He’s been bouncing off the walls ever since the colonel bought it. Excuse me! Since your dad passed away.”
“Before I go in there, I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened to him.”
He lowered his head. “Nobody told you?”
“They did not.”
“Okay. Your dad got a scratch.”
“A scratch?”
“That caused an allergic reaction so intense that he bled out.”
She did not need to think very long about that. She sat down in one of the two chairs that stood before the control panel. “I’m not doing this.”
He was a gentle-looking guy, more than a little overweight, with sad, sad eyes. “They sent you all the way down here without telling you a damn thing, didn’t they?”
“That would be correct.”
“Okay, I’m going to level with you. Have you ever heard of aliens?”
“Yeah. No green card.”
“The other kind.”
“Oh, that stuff. I have no interest in that stuff.”
“Perhaps you had better see your dad’s office.”
“God, I’d love that.”
Across the small room was a door. The nameplate holder was empty. He unlocked the door and she saw a small, windowless space that had a steel desk, a couple of chairs, and a cot. There was a bookcase, also, and it was filled with books on electromagnetism and, of all things, UFOs. She read the titles, Intruders, Communion, UFO Condition Red, UFOs and the National Security State, and dozens more.
“You can pick what you’d like to keep. We’ll ditch the others.” He lifted a picture that was lying facedown on the desk. “I knew you’d want this.”
It filled her heart and her eyes, the picture of the two of them taken when she was twelve. They were at Cape May, New Jersey, she was wearing her new bathing suit, and her Boston terrier, Prissy, was still alive. For a moment she smelled the salt in the air, remembered a radio playing down the beach, and heard the breeze fluttering in their cabana.
He took the picture and set it on the desk. “This is your office, now.”
“There’s an alien down here.”
“And your father was his empath, and you will be his empath.”
“Meaning?”
“You are going to find that you can see pictures he makes in his mind, and describe what you see to us.”
Her father had kept quite a secret. “I should have been trained.”
“Your dad wanted to wait until you’d had a little more Air Force. You know, you sign up and you wear a uniform, but really becoming part of this crazy organization takes time. Your dad wanted you to have that time.”
“I’m an Air Force brat down to my toes.”
“He knew that. He respected that. But duty is something different. I mean, our kind of duty. Keeping a secret so big that it is a kind of agony. Above all, knowing every time you go in that room over there, that you might die. Every time. But doing it like your dad did, on behalf of the Air Force, the country, and future of man.” He took the picture from her, looked at it. “We need you to get in there and calm Adam down. If we can’t get him to pull himself together, he’s going to literally be busted apart by knocking into those walls in there. Considering that he’s been doing this since your dad passed, we’re desperate, Lieutenant.”
Either she took up her dad’s sword or she let it lie, and let the meaning of his life lie with him in his grave.
There was no real choice here. Never had been. She took a deep breath. “Okay, what do I do?”
He drew her through a steel door into a tiny dressing area. She stood naked in a shower with nozzles on the ceiling and walls, turning slowly as instructed with her hands raised over her head while green, chemical-stinking liquid sluiced over her.
Still wet, she donned an orange isolation suit and what felt like asphalt gloves, they were so thick. “He’s electromagnetically active,” Andy explained. “If you touch him, he’ll extend into your nervous system and take over your body. You don’t want that.”
“No.”
“Cover your face with Vaseline. And here’s an epinephrine injector. If you get the least feeling of even so much as a tickle in your throat, press it against your leg and get out of there.”
As she dug into the Vaseline container, she reflected that her father’s hand was probably the last one to do this. She could almost feel him beside her right now, telling her not to be scared, to remember her duty, that he was with her every step of the way.
Then something changed. The room, the guy—everything around her disappeared. She was suddenly and vividly in another room. It had stainless-steel walls, a black floor, and a fluorescent ceiling. There was a man on a table, naked, surrounded by people in full protective gear, sterile suits, faceplates down, the works. The man was purple, his chest was heaving, and blood was oozing out of his eyes, out of his nose, down his cheeks like tears.
The hallucination, or whatever it was, was so vivid that she might as well have actually been standing in the place. She could even hear the air-conditioning hissing, and the muffled voices of the doctors behind the masks, who were trying to save the man on the table.
He gasped, gasped again as they set up an IV. A nurse intoned, “BP 280 over 200, heart rate 160, basal BP rising, glucose 320 rising, we have another infarction—”
There was a high-pitched whine and blood began spraying out of his skin, spraying their face masks and their white sterile suits, beading and running down to the floor as he bled from every pore, a haze of blood pink and fine, like it was being sprayed from a thousand tiny high-pressure nozzles affixed to his body.
Then his head turned and she saw his face, and an ice cold spike stabbed her straight in the heart.
In that instant, the vision of her dad’s death ended.
She realized that she was still in the basement room she had entered in the first place, and Andy was supporting her under her arms.
“Sorry,” she managed to mutter, regaining her footing and stepping away from him, “I—uh—I think it’s the . . . depth.”
“If you say so.” He put an arm around her.
“Back off!”
“Hey, okay! Okay. I’m just trying to help, here.”
She blew out breath, then shook her head. That had been vivid. That had been real vivid.
Andy watched her. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m not okay. No.”
“Uh, was that a seizure, because—”
“It’s my business, okay!”
“Okay! Sorry.” He paused, then, and when she said nothing more, continued. “I’m going to open up the cage itself. When you enter, you’ll see a chair and a table. Sit in the chair.”
“That’s it? That’s all I get to know?”
“It’s all any of us know. Frankly, what you
r dad did, and what we know you can do, is not understood. You just have to do it.”
“And what if I can’t?”
“You’ve passed the test.” He went to a small keyboard and keyed in a combination. “I’ll be in the control room. You’ll be able to see and hear me, and vice versa. If you get into trouble, I’ll pull you out. But obviously things can happen fast in there.”
He left the dressing room, closing the heavy outer door behind him. A moment later, his voice returned, tinny, coming out of a ceiling speaker. “You reading me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, the door’s opening now.”
There was a loud click, then a whirring sound, and the wall of the little chamber slid back. She saw before her a room lit by what appeared to be ultraviolet light. It reminded her of the Animals of the Night exhibit at the Cleveland Zoo, where the vampire bats and things were deceived into thinking it was dark during the day. “Are there any lights?”
“Don’t worry about seeing him. You won’t. If you get so much as a glimpse, count yourself lucky. Pay attention to the corners of your eyes.”
“The corners of my eyes . . . you mean use my peripheral vision?”
Then the air hit her. It was dry—real dry. She could feel her face shriveling, it was so dry, feel her lips starting to crack. The function of the Vaseline was now clear, and she grabbed another handful of it right in the glove and slathered it on.
The room open before her was not large, maybe twenty by twenty. It looked like it had rubber walls. There was a window on the far side, and Andy could be seen sitting there at a control panel. His face glowed green from the instruments before him.
Suddenly something shot past so fast she lurched back waving her hands. It felt like nothing so much as being buzzed by a fly—but not a small fly, no. More like the size, say, of a buzzard.
There was also a voice: groaning, howling, wailing, and it was the strangest voice she had ever heard, because of the way it echoed in her ears and her mind at the same time, as if she was hearing both sounds and thoughts that were the same as the sounds.
A thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, shot around the room, and with it the wailing, mourning voice, its howl thin and pitiful now.
She saw something—a flash of something that gleamed black. It was big, the size of a hand, and slanted. It was also brilliantly alive—a big, gleaming eye. A sound came out of her that she knew, objectively, was a scream. Sharp, intense, made of pure fear.
The wailing at once increased. Now it was desolated, like he’d been instantly aware of her revulsion and her fright and it was making him feel really, really miserable.
“Hold on,” she said. Dimly, she was conscious that Wilkes was now standing beside the tech at the control panel.
Suddenly, the buzzing stopped. There was no sound now but the hissing of the powerful air-conditioning.
“Sit down in the chair,” Wilkes said over the intercom.
“Where is he?”
“He moves with your eyes, so he appears totally still. The eye doesn’t see anything that’s totally still.”
“Yeah, like a rock or a mountain.”
“No,” Wilkes explained, “when you look at anything at all, you’re in motion, so you see it. Since Adam is constantly making micromovements to match your eyes’ own natural flickering, he doesn’t register in the optic nerve at all.”
“What in hell is this about?”
“Tell you what. If you want to see him, make a very sudden move. As you do that, concentrate on the corners of your eyes, not your central vision. You’ll see him.”
She sat, took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on her peripheral vision, and leaped to her feet.
Not a foot away, there was a shadow. Then it was gone again.
“He’s right here! He’s right on top of me!”
Then he started wailing again, and she could feel him whizzing around the room. More and more, he was racing past her face at the distance of what felt like about an inch. Dad had gotten scratched. She sat frozen, terrified.
“Stay with it. You’re doing marvelously.”
She could see Wilkes nodding and smiling at her. “This is one hell of a sucker play,” she yelled. “False damn pretenses!” She got to her feet. Adam whizzed past so close she was forced to sit back down. She jumped up again. Same thing happened.
“He likes you, Lauren,” Wilkes said.
It felt a lot like getting a bat in her hair or something. How had Dad ever stood this, it was just way, way too weird.
“So what are we doing with an alien?” she screeched. “How in the world did we capture an alien?”
“We got two of them in a crash in New Mexico. They may have been given to us, we’re not sure.”
Bzzzt! Whooosh!
“Get away!”
“He wants to touch you. Let him touch you.”
She began waving her arms around her head. “No way, I’ll bleed out!”
“Remember, that was an accident. He’s in an agony of grief, that’s why he’s like this. Now you settle down, young woman, and follow your orders.”
Pictures of Dad kept flashing through her mind like photographs. With them came emotions of grief and the most acute regret. It was clear that they entered from the outside, although she could not say how she knew that. It was sort of like breathing a kind of emotional smoke.
“Shh,” she whispered, “now, baby . . .” She looked toward the control room. “The buzzing stopped again.”
Something brushed her cheek.
“I think he just touched me. I know you’re sorry,” she whispered, “I know . . .” She looked again toward the figures in the control room. “What am I supposed to do now?”
No response.
So she comforted him. She went through her mind, seeking for the words of some song from childhood, some sort of comforting song. Dad had not been a big singer. Mom had her Elvis, but this did not appear to be your basic Elvis moment.
Then a sort of hallucinatory flash took place. In it, the light in the room was deep red and there was a man at the table, sitting across from Adam. On the table, a bright green light like a laser that hopped up and down in the air. The man was her dad.
It was so real, it was so good to see him again, that the tears were immediate. And then she heard inside her head, oohhhhh, and she knew that Adam had realized who she was.
“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”
Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh!
“Oh, yeah,” she managed through her own tears, “I miss him, too, I miss him bad.”
She saw next a glowingly beautiful woman, her face surrounded by a halo of golden light. It was, she knew, herself as Adam saw her.
Empath. One who empathizes. Turned out it was in the blood. No training needed. Genetic thing, she supposed. Maybe their ancestors had been psychics or witches or something. Dad’s grandfather had come from Ireland, that was about all she knew of their bloodline.
In the control room, Colonel Wilkes and Specialist Martin exchanged looks. “He’s got her wrapped around his little finger,” Wilkes said.
“For sure, sir.”
“He knows how to handle ’em, the little bastard. That is one smart piece of work in there.”
They said no more. Lauren Glass had been captured. She would not escape, never, not until she followed her father and his predecessor, both of whom Adam had killed with a scratch.
PART TWO
THE THREE THIEVES
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
—WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
“The Fairies”
THREE
DAN CAME INTO THE KITCHEN while Katelyn was washing spinach and nuzzled her neck. She moved her head back, enjoying him. In their case, not even thirteen years of marriage had been enough of a honeymoon, and she was very far from being used to this guy of hers.
They
had met here at Bell, two days after he arrived. Bizarrely, it turned out that they’d both grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from each other. He’d been crossing the campus in that aimless way he had, looking here and there, smiling even though there was no reason to smile. He was a strikingly handsome man, the last person you’d pick for a professor, let alone a specialist in physiological psychology. But that’s what he was, and he’d just snared a provisional professorship when they met. Now Bell had reached a point of no return with him. This was, at last, his tenure year, and in a few days, his career here—and their pleasantly settled life—would either continue or it would end.
“What’s Conner up to?” she asked. “Is he downstairs?”
“He’s in the living room.”
“Too bad, he’d hear us if we went upstairs.”
“Mmm.” He continued nuzzling.
Their son was more than a genius. A well-constructed, handsome tow-head, gentle of eye and so smart that he was a de facto freak. His IQ of 277 was, as far as anybody could determine, the highest presently on record.
Dan came up from nuzzling and said, “He’s in a funk.”
“Symptoms of said funk?”
“Staring miserably at the TV pretending not to stare miserably at the TV.”
“He’s eleven. Eleven has stuff.” She arched her back, drew his head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of his lips.
“He’s watching 2001.”
Which meant that it was a serious funk and he needed Mom. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“In the first place, I wanted some love.”
She went into the family room, stood for a moment looking at the back of her son’s head. On the ridiculously huge TV Dan had unveiled at Christmas, the apes were howling at the monolith.
She sat down beside him. “Can I interest you in—” She glanced at her watch, picked up the TV Guide. “A Mork and Mindy rerun? The McLaughlin Group?”
“Invasion of my space, Mom.”
“Point taken, backing off.” But she didn’t do that. She knew to stay right where she was.