The Shimmer

by David Morrell

  “Mommy, I’m hungry,” the little boy said.

  “Okay,” the father told them, sounding defeated. “I guess we’d better go after all. Nothing’s out there anyhow. Tomorrow morning, maybe we can see where they made that James Deacon movie. The set’s supposed to be around here, and I hear the big old ranch house is still standing.”

  As the parents carried the fidgeting children to the car, two other vehicles pulled in. One was a pickup truck, and when it stopped, three teenagers got out. The other, to Page’s annoyance, was a bus labeled TEXAS TOURS, from which about thirty people emerged. A clamor arose as they all felt the need to say whatever flitted through their minds.

  Who are all these people? Page wondered. He had come here hoping to talk with his wife and to find out what had possessed her to leave. With every new arrival, a quiet reunion became more and more impossible.

  To the woman on the bench, however, none of the other people seemed even to exist. She just kept staring at the horizon, never once moving her head toward the growing distractions.

  Page realized that he was hesitating, that despite his effort to get here and his impatience with Costigan for making him wait, he was actually afraid of the answers he might get.

  Bracing his resolve, he walked through the darkness toward his wife.

  18

  She had her head tilted back so that it was leaning against the shadowy wooden wall. Her gaze was straight ahead.

  Page stepped up to the side and watched her.

  “Tori.”

  She didn’t reply.

  In the background, the jabbering conversations of the people who’d gotten off the bus filled the night.

  Maybe she didn’t hear me, Page thought.

  “Tori?” he repeated.

  She just kept staring toward the horizon.

  He stepped closer. The reflected headlights from another car showed him that her eyes were wide open, and she didn’t even seem to be blinking. It was as if she were spellbound by something out there.

  Again he turned in the direction she was looking, but all he saw were the dark grassland, the brilliant array of the stars, and another set of headlights off to the right on the road from Mexico.

  “Tori, what are you looking at?”

  No response.

  Stepping closer, Page came within five feet of her and noticed in his peripheral vision that Costigan moved protectively closer, then leaned against another post. The smoke from his cigarette drifted in the air.

  Suddenly Page heard her voice.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Tori asked.

  “They?” Page turned toward the dark grassland and concentrated. “What do you see?”

  “You can’t see them?”

  “No.”

  With the noise of the annoying conversations behind him, Page almost didn’t hear what Tori said next.

  “Then you shouldn’t have come.”

  Baffled, he sat beside her.

  Corrigan shifted again.

  She still didn’t look at him.

  “What did you expect me to do?” Page asked, working to keep his voice calm. “You left without telling me. You disappeared for two days. I was afraid something had happened to you. When I found out you were here, surely you didn’t expect me to stay home.”

  A half-dozen people stepped onto the observation platform, their feet thunking on the wood, their voices echoing in the enclosure.

  “Don’t see a thing,” one of them said. “What a crock.”

  “Wait!” someone in the crowd at the fence shouted. “There!

  “Where?”

  “Over there! Look! Four of them!”

  “Yes!” a woman exclaimed.

  “I don’t see a friggin’ thing,” a teenager said.

  “There!” someone said. With each exclamation, the crowd shifted and turned. The murmur died away as people focused all of their attention, then rose again when some-Page among them-saw nothing.

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me. There’s nothing out there,” another teenager complained.

  The crowd’s comments went back and forth. Some people were rapt, while others were frustrated. A few became angry.

  Page heard Tori’s voice next to him.

  “The interruptions go on for a couple of hours,” she said.

  Bewildered, he studied her. They sat silently for a while, and as some of the onlookers began to leave, the headlights of their cars showed how intense her eyes were as she gazed at the darkness. Her red hair was combed back behind her ears, emphasizing the attractive lines of her face. He wanted to touch her cheek.

  “Then it gets peaceful,” she said, “and you can really appreciate them.”

  “Why don’t I sit here, and we’ll wait for the rest of the crowd to leave? Then you can show me.”

  “Yes.”

  Page felt an ache in his chest. His mind raced with questions that had nowhere to go.

  Leaning against the nearby post, Costigan dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot, all the while continuing to watch carefully.

  “When I was ten, my parents took me with them on a car trip,” Tori said, staring toward the darkness. Her voice drifted off.

  Page didn’t understand why she’d told him that. Then she seemed to remember what she’d started to say.

  “We lived in Austin back then, and we didn’t reach this section of west Texas until dark.” She tilted her head toward something in the distance. “My father wanted to visit a cousin of his who’d just gotten a job on a ranch out here. The cousin was only going to be in the area for a couple of months.” Again Tori paused, then seemed to remember what she’d started to say. “As you know, all my father’s relatives were wanderers.”

  Including him, Page thought, but he was careful not to interrupt. Her father had deserted the family when Tori had been sixteen.

  “Anyway, we drove through here,” Tori said.

  The exclamations of delight in the crowd contrasted with com- plaints about the increasing chill and the impatience some felt when they didn’t see what others claimed they did. The noise made it difficult for Page to hear what Tori said, but he didn’t dare ask her to speak up for fear of having the opposite effect.

  She continued, “I needed to go to the bathroom. Even back then, the county had a couple of outdoor toilets here. When I saw them in our headlights, I yelled for him to stop, but my father was in a hurry to see his cousin. He wouldn’t have stopped if my mother hadn’t insisted. I rushed into one of the toilets, and after I came out, my father was waiting impatiently by the car. Something made me look toward the grassland, and I saw them.”

  “Saw what?”

  Tori seemed not to have heard the question.

  “I couldn’t help walking toward the fence and staring at them. My mother always took me to church on Sunday, and I thought that when the preacher told us about heaven, this is what he must have been talking about.

  “My father ordered me to get in the car, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t bear to stop looking at what was out there. He wanted to know what the hell I thought I was seeing. I tried to explain, but all he said was something about a damned fool kid’s imagination. I remember trying to push him away when he picked me up and carried me to the car. I shouted and pounded him. He literally threw me into the back seat.”

  “I’m sorry,” Page said. “Maybe it was a good thing that he eventually left.”

  When Tori didn’t continue, Page regretted his interruption, but then he realized that she’d stopped only because she’d renewed her attention on the darkness.

  “There!” a woman at the fence shouted.

  “Yes!” a man joined in.

  Another woman pointed. “Five of them!”

  “I don’t see anything!”

  Disgusted, the teenagers got into the pickup truck and drove away. A half-dozen people wandered toward the bus, but a surprising number remained, staring toward the darkness.

  “There’s one on the
left!” someone exclaimed.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” someone else asked.

  Page wondered the same thing.

  Again Tori spoke, still not looking at him. “I’d forgotten about this place until two days ago.”

  “The day you started to drive to your mother’s house,” Page said. The words he almost used were, The day you left me.

  “I’d gone a little beyond El Paso. It was six in the evening. I was at a truck stop, studying a road map while I drank a cup of coffee. I still had a long way to drive to get to San Antonio, and I wondered if I might need to stop somewhere for the night. Interstate 10 goes south east along the Mexican border until it gets to a town called

  Esperanza, where the highway cuts directly east to San Antonio. I figured Esperanza might be a good place to stop.” She paused. “Interesting name for a town.”

  “‘Esperanza’?” Page had lived in the Southwest long enough to know that the word was Spanish for “hope.”

  Tori smiled at something in the darkness. Page waited, beginning to feel afraid. A minute later, she continued. Her voice was so calm that it was as if she were reading a bedtime story to a child.

  “I looked toward the bottom of the map to find the inches-to- miles scale and figure out how much farther I needed to go. But as my eyes drifted past the names of towns, one of them caught my attention: Rostov. It must have been tucked away in my memory all these years. Amazing.

  “Suddenly that night came back to me as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. I remembered that the roadside toilet had a sign on the door: ‘Property of Rostov County.’ I remembered coming out of the toilet and seeing what was in the darkness past the fence. I remembered how angry my father got when he didn’t understand what I was talking about and threw me into the car. I could feel the tears in my eyes and how I wiped them and stared through the back window to- ward the darkness until I couldn’t see anything out there anymore as we drove away.

  “We drove so long that eventually I fell asleep in the back seat. Even then, I dreamed about them.”

  “There!” someone at the fence exclaimed, pointing.

  “So I finished my coffee and folded the map and got in the car,” Tori said. “When I reached Esperanza, instead of stopping for the night, I kept driving, but I didn’t turn east on Interstate 10 to go to San Antonio. Instead I took a county road and kept following it southeast along the border. The sun went down, but I kept driving until I got here. This observation platform didn’t exist back then-there were just the toilets. I was afraid I’d discover that my memory had tricked me, that what I’d seen that night had been only a damned fool kid’s imagination, exactly as my father had insisted.”

  “There’s another one!” someone exclaimed.

  Tori smiled toward where a man pointed, and she fell silent again. In a while, she continued, “It was late. Hardly anybody was around. I can’t describe the relief I felt when I stepped out of the car and looked past that fence and saw that what I’d remembered-and what I realize now I’ve been dreaming about all these years-was real. I came over and sat on this bench, in the same spot where I’m sitting now and the same spot where I sat last night, and I didn’t want to do anything but stay here the rest of the night and look at what I’d seen when I was ten.

  “My life might have been so much different if my father had just allowed me to watch a little longer.”

  “Different?” Page asked. “How?”

  Tori didn’t answer. That sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the night air.

  “Watch as long as you want,” Page said.

  “I will.”

  “I didn’t come here to stop you,” he tried to assure her.

  “I know. Besides, you can’t.”

  Page looked over at Costigan, who continued to lean protectively against the nearby post. He spread his hands as if to say, Are you starting to get the idea?

  But Page didn’t get anything, not anything at all. He was mystified.

  And afraid. He worried that Tori was having some kind of breakdown.

  If so, he realized, looking around silently, apparently a lot of other people were having the same breakdown.

  “Tori…”

  She continued smiling wistfully toward the darkness.

  “I love you,” he said. The words came out before he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said them. He didn’t get a reaction.

  “Tori, tell me what you’re seeing. Help me see it, too.”

  “I don’t think you can,” she said.

  “But how do you know?”

  “For the same reason I left.”

  The stark acknowledgment of what Page had been dreading made him feel as if a fist had struck his stomach. He remained silent for several long minutes, trying to recover his equilibrium. Trying to think of something he could say that would make things better.

  “If you teach me, I can learn,” he said. “Whatever it is I’ve done wrong, I can correct it.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no blame in being what you are. Or in my being who I am.”

  Page turned toward the darkness, desperate to understand what Tori was talking about. Even though many of the people in the crowd pointed, all he saw were the night-shrouded grassland, the brilliant stars in the sky, and the isolated headlights on the road to the right.

  Which of us is crazy? he wondered.

  He strained his eyes, trying to adjust to the night and decipher the darkness. He was reminded of something his father had shown him when he was fifteen. Because of his father’s skills as a master mechanic in the Air Force, the family had been relocated to numerous bases over the years, including some in Germany, South Korea, and the Philip- pines. One of those had been MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

  On an August Sunday, Page’s father had made a rare effort to spend time with his family by taking Page and his mother to the famed Tampa aquarium. They wandered from tank to tank, peering through thick glass walls at various exhibits: sharks, manta rays, moray eels- his father enjoyed looking at anything dangerous-and various schools of brilliantly colored exotic species. But the space behind one glass wall appeared empty except for water, sand, rocks, aquatic plants, and part of a replica of a sunken ship.

  “I guess the aquarium’s getting ready to stock it with something,” Page said, quickly bored, turning away.

  “No, it’s already stocked,” his father replied.

  “With what? Nothing’s moving in there. It’s empty.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of life in there.”

  “You mean the plants.”

  “No. I mean cuttlefish.”

  “Cuttlefish?”

  “They’re not really fish. They’re in the squid family.”

  “Cuttlefish?” Page repeated.

  “With tentacles that project forward. They can be as little as one of your fingers or as long as your arm, sometimes bigger.”

  “There’s no fish in there as long as my arm,” he scoffed.

  “Squid,” his father corrected him.

  “Okay, there’s no squid in there as long as my arm.”

  “Actually, there are probably a dozen of them.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  His father gestured toward the glass. “Take a look. A real close look.”

  Page had long before learned that his father prided himself on an amazing assortment of knowledge about all kinds of unusual subjects. When his father spoke that authoritatively, there was only one way the conversation could end. So Page concentrated on the water in the huge tank.

  “Sometimes we see only what we expect to see,” his father explained. “Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way.”

  That made even less sense than the imaginary fish. “I don’t know what you…”

  At once one of the rocks seemed to move a little. Hardly enough to be noticed. Barely a fraction of an inch. But he was certain he’d seen it move. He stepped
closer to the glass.

  “Ah,” Page’s father said, apparently detecting his sudden attention. “I think you’re starting to catch on.”

  “That rock. It…”

  “But it’s not a rock,” Page’s father emphasized.

  The object moved another fraction of an inch, and Page realized that his father was right-it wasn’t a rock.

  Page saw a head then, and a tentacle, and another. Not that the object moved any more noticeably than before. But Page’s vision had changed-or else it was his mind that had shifted focus.

  His father said, “Sometimes we see only what we expect to see.”

  He was beginning to understand. If the only things that were apparent were sand, rocks, underwater plants, and part of a replica of a sunken ship, then the mind took those shapes for granted and didn’t bother to recognize what the eyes were seeing.

  Amazingly, another rock moved. A patch of sand shifted slightly as well. A section of the sunken ship turned to the side, and one of the plants started walking across the bottom of the tank. The green spikes on it were actually tentacles. Years later, when Page was being trained at the New Mexico police academy, he thought back to that afternoon when he’d realized that there could be a huge difference between what the eyes saw and what was truly before them, that the world was not always what it seemed. Unfortunately, he later discovered, ugliness too often was the truth of what was before him.

  But not that afternoon. Excitedly, he began counting the creatures he suddenly noticed. They were everywhere, it seemed.

  “One, two, three.”

  “Four, five, six,” his father said.

  “Seven, eight, nine,” his mother joined in, laughing. That was the summer before she was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her.

  His father predicted that there were a dozen cuttlefish in the tank, but in the end Page counted eighteen, weird, ugly-looking creatures with a strange name for a squid, who’d learned to conceal their ugliness and after a while began to seem beautiful. Within minutes he wasn’t able to see the sand, rocks, underwater plants, or replica of the sunken ship because so many cuttlefish were in the way.

  “How do they hide like that?” he asked his father, grinning in astonishment.