“I don’t believe any of this,” he said, erupting into a coughing bout that took him nearly a half-minute to work out. Finally, he gathered himself and stared coldly at Zander. He was fully conscious again—thanks in part to the strain of his hacking—and his skepticism was properly aligned, particularly considering the magnitude of the revelation. “Demons? As in devil’s helpers from the ground sent forth to capture souls? Is that what you mean?”
Zander stayed quiet.
“I’ve lived in many places during my lifetime, Mr. Zander, and in each one of those places, there were always at least a few folks after my humanity. So, if you’re telling me there are demons in Garmella, I already know that to be true.”
Zander grinned, appreciating Winston’s tenacity, and then he moved in beside Winston and sat. “My tribe was always sensitive to stories of a certain leaning, where the details of the tale matched those in the ancient writings of my ancestors.” Zander was excited again, gesturing and speaking with the energy of a man reciting the details of a thing about which he has expertise. “There were patterns to the stories, and though there is no way to be certain that all the accounts were the Arali, there are simply too many similarities.”
Winston nodded silently for several seconds, quietly absorbing Zander’s explanation. “But let me guess: no one ever saw these Arali, right? Quick to blame them for every famine and pestilence, no doubt, but never catching a glimpse, I’m sure.”
Zander shook his head slowly. “That isn’t right at all. There are recorded sightings for nearly all the accounts. Visuals are an important part of the matrix; they are crucial in placing the Arali at the scenes of the massacres.”
Winston swallowed at the word ‘massacres,’ but he quickly shook off the discomfort, not yet ready to move beyond the fact that the Arali existed at all, let alone that they were responsible for a string of calamities around the globe. “But no proof, correct? No 8-millimeters? No iPhone recordings?”
“As I said, after the turn of the century, the narrative of the Arali was almost completely lost.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Yes, it might seem, but not entirely. Photography had been invented well before 1900, and there do exist pictures of the Arali; you can find most of them on the internet with very little effort.”
“I’m sure those are of premium quality.”
Zander shrugged. “No, it’s true, no one can say for certain what the pictures show. They are certainly fuzzy. Blurry and black.”
Winston frowned and rolled his eyes.
But,” Zander added, “that is how they appear to the naked eye. In the light of day. So our research would suggest.”
This addendum sent a chill down Winston’s spine, forcing a cough to emerge in his diseased chest once more. He brought the face cloth to his mouth to stifle it. Finally, he said, “What about the massacres? How many...how many died?”
“Disappeared, in fact.”
“What?”
“It is the one consistent piece of the story that has stood the test of time. Wherever the Arali arrive, the people of that town vanish.”
Winston waited for Zander to elaborate, and when he didn’t, Winston asked, “People disappeared? How could that be? How is it no one noticed that little detail?”
Zander shrugged. “I never made that claim.”
“Really? A bunch of neighbors in the village disappeared and everyone just went about their business?”
“People disappear every day, Mr. Bell, all over the world. Children, the elderly, men and women in the prime ages of their lives. They vanish from the largest of skyscraped cities to the most barren of jungles.”
Winston immediately shook his head, challenging the implied frequency of such a phenomenon. “No, no, no. People don’t disappear that often. Not like that. Not without a trace. Not without some evidence or clue as to where they’ve gone.”
Zander shrugged. “As I’ve said, the Arali always appeared in places where there were very few people. This is the type of place to which they are drawn. So—”
“So, you’re saying that no one noticed these disappearances because they don’t happen in the middle of Paris?”
“I am simply saying that in the more remote places of the world—many of which were in nations were mere survival was the goal of each day—verified, corroborated testimony is difficult to obtain. I referenced the Loch Ness Monster earlier. Do you know there have been over 1,100 sightings of the Loch Ness Monster? How many of them do you believe?”
“I’d probably believe a hell of a lot more of them if every time somebody saw the thing a couple of toddlers disappeared!”
Zander grinned. “Don’t think yourself wiser than the people of centuries past, Mr. Bell. The mind will go to great lengths to explain the unexplainable.”
Winston chortled, hesitant to continue with such an outrageous conversation. Yet he was held tightly by the story, and the burn of intrigue hovered in his chest. “Why are you telling me this? If all of what you’re telling me is true, why would you have you come to me with this information. Me of all people?”
Zander nodded solemnly, signaling that this was the correct question at this stage in the conversation. And then he began the story. “In 1973, in a town called Munstereifel, West Germany, three families—seventeen people in all—disappeared without a trace. Their homes had been entered from the outside, that was evident, but aside from that detail, there were few leads to follow, and subsequent investigations turned up nothing. They were never found.”
The fifty-year old account was innocuous on its face and proved nothing as it related to Zander’s earlier tale, but Winston’s throat tightened just the same.
“In the summer of 1985, in the Crimean Peninsula, another mass disappearance occurred, this time involving a total of forty-one people. And, just as in Munstereifel, no bodies were ever found, no cases ever solved.”
This time Winston frowned and squinted. “That can’t be right. Forty-one people? That story would be known.”
Zander cocked his head. “Your unfamiliarity of it would suggest otherwise. The Iron Curtain was a heavy shade. And when Chernobyl happened a year later, the incident in Crimea became a pebble in the Soviet Union’s mountain of secrets. And that mountain grew higher decades later, in 2009. One sunny morning during that year, one-hundred-and-ninety-three people disappeared from a town called Galenki on the east coast of Siberia.”
“That’s impossible.”
“The Curtain is down, Mr. Bell, but Russia still controls the land with the same iron fist. Just as China does. In 1997, in the Ghizou province, approximately one-hundred-and-twelve people vanished, though the exact number there is still unknown and likely never will be.”
Winston swallowed nervously, his eyes narrowing to slits now, trying to will his mind to disbelieve these unreported events. “How can this be true? Especially these last few accounts? That’s too many people.”
“A combination of prideful nations and fearful citizens, I suppose. That blend of sin has kept truth from the world for centuries. Millennia.”
Winston blinked several times and looked to the wall, searching for the next correct question. “But you know. How could you know? And why do you think the Arali are responsible?”
Zander smiled softly. “It has been my life’s work, Mr. Bell. Since I was a boy. I know the design of these disappearances.”
Winston gave a reluctant nod at the reasoning, suddenly feeling a mixture of fright and hope, though the latter sense he couldn’t explain. “Okay. Then why are you here?”
Zander nodded at Winston, his face grim and focused, indicating that a pact was being signed in that moment, that whatever was said from that point forward would bind the four of them forever. “You may have noticed a pattern in the years I mentioned: 1973. 1985. 1997. 2009.”
“Twelve-years, Winston whispered immediately, realizing the relationship of the numbers at just that moment.
Zander nodded. “That’s
correct.”
“That means they’ll be back this year.” The statement were words of discovery.
Zander flinched his eyebrows. “Yes.”
Winston let this possibility swirl in his mind for a moment and then asked, “They’re coming here to Garmella? Is that what you’re saying?”
Zander nodded. “That is what we believe.”
The desire to laugh at the absurdity of such a notion flooded Winston, but instead he asked, “Why?”
“All of the places I named—in Germany, Russia, and China—they all have something in common. One very big, unique thing.”
Winston was silent for several seconds as he searched his mind, and then the answer came to him in a burst. “A telescope.”
“A radio telescope, to be precise.”
Winston was confused by the connection, at least as it concerned the telescope and the arrival of ground demons; but the audit truck, as well as Zander’s reasoning ‘to move amongst them’, now made more sense.
“The telescope tracks sounds from space,” Winston said, shaking his head. “You said these beings come from the ground. What is the connection?”
Zander sighed and nodded, acknowledging the complexity of Winston’s question. “It is an interesting inquiry, Mr. Bell. And one to which we don’t know the answer exactly. Some combination of the signals coming from above, perhaps, the way they are received by the dish and then re-transmitted through the ground. That is what we can assume, but we really don’t know. It is something that is simply beyond our science at present—and perhaps always will be, much like God Himself.”
Winston appreciated the idea that everything in the universe couldn’t be answered by science, and though he found himself believing in Zander’s Arali, he was struggling with the explanation as it related to the telescope. “Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
Zander’s face sank hearing the rebuttal, and it was clear to Winston that this possibility had kept the man up many a night. “No. In all four of the occurrences I’ve described, there was a radio telescope within fifty miles of the town. And in most instances, twenty. It can’t be an accident.”
Winston agreed that would have been quite a fluke, but still, knowing what he did about the giant antennae—which wasn’t doctorate-level knowledge, but was still ample—he was skeptical about the explanation. “What about before? What about all the stories from before 1900. There were no radio telescopes then.”
“As I said, Mr. Bell, we don’t know all the answers, just where the next occurrence will be.”
Winston glared at Zander now, doubting the man’s science even more, and then he let his eyes drift around the room to the other two members of the trio, wondering if they had any different hypotheses on the pattern. But Tehya and Ouray sat silently, obediently. “How do you know it will happen here?” he asked. “There must be dozens of other telescopes around the world.”
Zander scanned the study, as if he’d anticipated the question, and he quickly locked on an antique-looking globe sitting on a bookshelf at the far corner of the room. The spherical model was the kind one might find in a nineteenth-century British library, where the Earth—land and sea—was represented in various shades of sepia rather than the colorful blues and reds of modern day globes, with a decorative wooden base that tilted the sphere on its axis. “There.”
Zander walked to the bookshelf and grabbed the globe, and then he carried it to Winston, placing it on the table in front of the elderly man.
“If you look at the places I’ve named and line them up with the years, you can see the pattern. 1973, Germany.” He put the tip of his index finger on the European country. “1985, Ukraine.” He moved his finger down and to the right until it was on the southern peninsula of the Eastern European nation, and then he continued in that direction—west to east—passing through China and then finally to the far edge of the Asian continent in the Russian town of Galenki. He looked up at Winston, his eyes questioning.
“What? I...I don’t get it.”
Zander was bemused. “They move from west to east. The Arali, they travel...through the earth I suppose, the world below the world.”
Perdition, Winston thought.
“Whatever their way, the pattern is indisputable. The distances between the pre-1900 events are very different from those of the last fifty years, but the directional pattern is the same. West to east.”
Winston shrugged. “Okay. I guess. But Garmella? How do you know Garmella is next? I don’t see it.”
“The Grieg Radio Telescope is the largest in America, which makes it a likely place for the Arali to visit. But more than that, the Grieg is the next major receiver in line as you travel East.”
Zander slid the tip of his finger southeast across the khaki-colored Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the United States, then across the expanse of California until his finger landed on the disfigured trapezoid of Arizona.
“They’re coming here, Mr. Bell. We know it with some confidence. But more than that, we know when. With some precision.”
Winston hesitated and then asked, “Precision? You know exactly when they’re coming? To the day?” Winston’s voice was almost a whisper, now enchanted by the story and the possibility of what he was hearing.
“Within a few days, yes.”
Winston waited for the unveiling of the mysterious date, but Zander said nothing. “When?” he asked.
Zander grinned. “June. As we get closer to the day, we will give you the details.”
Winston’s head was spinning now, both from the enormity of the story he was being sold, and from the fact that he now believed every word of it. The only thing left now was to review the offer that had yet to be made. But he knew that whatever proposition was forthcoming, he would never be able to decline it. “What do you want from me?” he asked finally. “And don’t tell me nothing. I was in sales for many years, and I know an overture when I hear one. What are you selling exactly, Mr. Zander, and, more importantly, what is the price?”
Zander gave a weary smile, as if relieved to have finally reached the point at which they were now. “The offer is a life that will not see an end for many decades.”
A well of tears filled the inside corners of Winston’s eyes, and then a single drop rolled down the left side of his nose to his chin, where it hovered there impossibly.
“And the price? Well, Mr. Bell, let us just say it is something you can quite easily afford.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“My brother was born almost eight months ago.”
Maria’s words came with volume and clarity now, spoken as if the girl were reading them from a teleprompter that had been hung on the wall in front of her.
“My parents didn’t tell anyone when my mom got pregnant though, and they made me swear not to either.”
Josh gave a sheepish look to the girl next to him and then asked, “Why not?”
Maria closed her eyes and sighed. “They tried for so long to have another baby. I’m almost thirteen, and I know they wanted me to have a brother or sister that was close to me in age. So, they had been trying for that long, I guess.” She raised her eyebrows and frowned. “But every time my mom got pregnant, the baby died. It never lived past the third month.” She paused and took a gulping breath. “They kept trying though.”
Ramon and Allie sat at separate desks listening to Maria, while Josh retained his seat on the desk next to his classmate, staring at the floor as he listened to the tale.
“But then it happened. I don’t even know if they were trying or not, but my mom got pregnant again. Last year. But instead of telling everyone, this time they kept it a secret—from everyone, even my abuelos and abuelas. They said they didn’t want to jinx it, but I know it was because everyone was getting tired of hearing about it. The pregnancies, I mean. Everyone got so happy at first when they heard the news, and then later my mom would have a miscarriage and have to tell everyone. It was...I don’t know...weird for them. For everyone. Sometimes we’d se
e people on the street that we hadn’t seen for a couple weeks, and they would ask how the baby was doing, and my mom would just start crying. After, like, the third time, people would just avoid us. They would cross the street or look away when they walked by. They didn’t know how to ask about the baby anymore, so they just stayed away.”
Maria paused, appearing to reflect on the number of losses over the years.
“But the last time was different. My mom was different. Right from the beginning. She was so excited. I never saw her like that before. She had that glow that people always talk about. And she was right. The baby was still alive inside her after four months. We even went out and had a celebration dinner. I mean, it was still possible that something would go wrong, and my mom and dad tried not to get too happy, but you could see it in their faces. They really thought it was going to live. And the doctors did too.”
Maria swallowed and her face grew suddenly grim. She closed her eyes, holding back tears.
“And then my mom went for a checkup one day and found out the baby was...sick.”
Josh turned slowly toward Maria. “What was wrong with it?” he asked, his words soft, delicate.
Maria swallowed and took a deep breath. “It’s called anencephaly.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a birth defect. A bad one. Most babies die before they’re ever born.”
Josh shook his head. “I never heard of it.”
“I didn’t either. And my parents were...” Maria shook her head slowly, her eyes distant and distraught. “I can’t even explain how sad they were. My mom was like, crippled. She cried every night. For hours. Every night it was like she was hearing the news for the first time. And my dad...my dad just stopped talking completely.”
“There was no chance it could get better?” Josh asked. “Or that the doctors were wrong?”
Maria shook her head. “No. They were sure. I saw the sonogram. His head was...” She closed her eyes, clearing the memory. “They all said the same thing. There’s no cure for anencephaly. There’s no way to fix it. The baby was going to die. Either before it was born or right after. So, my mom and dad decided they were going to stop seeing doctors. There was nothing they could do anyway, so what was the point of getting the checkups?”
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