Trinity

by Kristin Dearborn

  Smiley stood up and pulled his gun on the doctor. Its expression never changed, not even as Smiley silently fired his weapon. The doctor held up its hand with those three knobby fingers and froze the bullet. It clattered to the floor without a noise. Smiley let his gun slide out of his fingers and it dropped to the floor, discharging a bullet which began to ricochet. The doctor stopped that one as well, and then stopped Smiley, too. He stood dead still in his khaki officer’s uniform, like something out of a wax museum, albeit not a very interesting one. The stain where he’d spilled his coffee earlier stood out in the harsh lighting and Val felt embarrassed for him.

  The doctor pointed at the next man, a red arrow appeared, and a door opened. The man went, all the fight gone from him.

  Val was last in line. Only Val, the doctor, frozen Smiley and dead Zeus remained. The doctor walked right up to Val and the little black smile expanded. It said something in its native tongue, and the original black door opened. Two more Sangaumans cautiously entered the room. They looked from Zeus to Smiley, then to Val. They crowded around him.

  The same as many felt no remorse in slicing open rats in the name of science, neither did the Sangaumans from the planet Ye’Tunatal, feel remorse at the things they did to their prisoners from the Chaves County Correctional Facility. All except for Val. Val they nodded at, took a blood sample from, all the while chattering at him and one another in their own mental language. They measured him, weighed him, removed his cuffs and leg irons as if they were made of tinfoil, looked in his mouth, in his eyes, and in his ears, treating him with respect and gentle, cool, dry hands, and all of a sudden the hum disappeared and the hot white room vanished, and Val was on his hands and knees, bringing up the remainder of his dinner in a ditch on the side of 380. He rocked back onto his haunches and plopped onto his ass, covering his face with his hands and rubbing at his eyes. My god it seemed quiet. The crickets sounded so far away…someone was saying his name. He turned and peered though his fingers like a child, and there was Smith, a wet stain on his pants, Val noted with some amusement, calling to him, looking horrified. Moments later a Chavez County Sheriff cruiser rolled in, followed first by an unmarked army car, and then by a simple navy blue Crown Victoria.

  27

  Val felt as though he were sinking into the Crown Vic’s plush gray seat.

  “That didn’t happen,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and said it again, with meaning this time. “That didn’t happen.”

  Felix, not having been there on the alien craft, could only tell Val the parts he knew. That Val and seven other men had been taken onto the ship, and Val alone had returned. That Val had only been aboard for four minutes.

  “They altered your memories. Now I told you it should all come crashing down. You should remember everything, in time.”

  “White,” Val said. Like the dreams. Val felt like he was talking through a mouthful of cotton. His temples throbbed. Jail had seemed much simpler, and he rather wished he was back there. Maybe his incarceration here would be as simple.

  White. It gnawed at him. He hadn’t really gone up into a spaceship…

  Except he had. He remembered blood on white. A white so polar pure it made the blood look black.

  “Do you have water?”

  “There’s water inside.”

  “They’re going to lock me up?” he asked, feeling very young. “You’re going to lock me up?”

  Felix looked at the gray leather steering wheel, with its rubber grips, black and gray. Like a certain smile. “For a while. Until it’s safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Just safe. Come on.”

  Val followed, thinking of running, knowing he’d never make it past the fences and the guards, knowing even if there were no fences and guards he wouldn’t run. Because he was a coward? He preferred to think of himself as an opportunist.

  Inside he might as well have been in a hospital. A vacant looking pretty blonde with cherry red lipstick took his information and admitted him. Felix got him a glass of water in one of those conical paper cups.

  “This snow cone sucks,” Val said, drinking it all. “Can I have another one?” He knew he wouldn’t get another one because his legs were buckling under him. They had drugged him. Felix caught him, slowed his descent to the floor, and as his cheek lay against cool white linoleum, his vision began to white out and Val’s last memory was of being very, very afraid.

  Excerpt #4

  from Trinity by Judd Grenouille ©1988

  The next time I saw Adrienne, she was in quite an uproar. Her doctor said, not bothering to hide his disdain, that allowing her to see me was quite unusual, and it was only because she had had no other visitors that he acquiesced to her request to see me. She was not in a rehab this time, but a psychiatric ward.

  I was searched before I went in, for she was on suicide watch, and they didn’t want me smuggling in anything that she could use to hurt herself. She’d tried to end her life, but failed.

  She looked dangerous when I saw her, but more self-possessed, like a Gorgon from mythology. She wore a shapeless white shift.

  “There are triangles everywhere,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear it. We met in a dark room because the light, she said, hurt her eyes. The single bulb from a lamp cast long shadows across her face, like when children tell stories by a campfire. “The Irish have their shamrocks. The Arabs have trifecta as a fertility symbol. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But the real trinity is us and them. Humanity, the Sangaumans, and the Tylwyth Teg.”

  I didn’t speak, waiting for her to go on. What could I say? The glittering in her eyes that the doctors took for madness, I took for her unwavering certainty.

  “One of them is in Cal’s school. I can tell by the way Cal described him on the phone. You know what they are?”

  Again I said nothing, content to let her talk.

  “They’re nothing. They’re worms. Little parasites, who take over bodies. They can’t have a world of their own until they make someone who can give it to them. And I gave it to them.” She started to cry.

  I stroked her wrist, feeling the texture of her scabs.

  “They had nothing until a race with ships was unfortunate enough to land on their swamp planet. Then they gained hands, and that species’ knowledge of ship building. They destroyed their home world, and then moved to another, then another.”

  She paused, turning away from me, facing into the darkness.

  “Until I gave them what they needed to build a new race for themselves.”

  “A new race? How do you mean?”

  ‘The Sangaumans can move things with their minds. Stop time, control the weather, all sorts of stuff like that. They can float me up to their ship, the Tylwyth Teg have to come down a ramp and carry me up. The Tylwyth Teg can’t use the Sangaumans as hosts, so they’ve been looking for a species that can breed with them. They keep their Sangauman donors inert, frozen. They milk them like cows, and have been trying to find someone who can carry their babies to term.”

  She started to cry and I offered her a tissue. She took it. While she talked, she’d scratched open one of her scabs.

  “They said because I was on so much drugs I’d altered my chromosomes, and that’s why they got two babies out of me.”

  ‘Why didn’t they take Cal the way they took your daughter?”

  “She didn’t work out.”

  “What do they need these children to do?”

  “Act as hosts. They can use the Sangaumans control over matter to build their new bodies and transfer their consciousness.”

  “And then what?” I asked. “I’ve never spoken with someone who knew this much…”

  “The Sangaumans told me. They wanted me to know why it was important they not get to Cal.”

  “You said Cal was being watched.”

  “One of the girls in his class. I can tell by the way he described her. They’re using her as a host to watch him.”

&n
bsp; I did some research on this girl, we’ll call her Amelia. I could find no conclusive evidence, one way or another, that she was inhabited by the Tylwyth Teg. I am inclined to believe Adrienne because Amelia’s parents moved to a new town a year and a half later, and the girl fell into a stream and drowned. A case of the Tylwyth Teg covering their tracks, or coincidence? I honestly don’t know. I discovered there are two strains of Tylwyth Teg inhabiting humans on earth, there are Alphas and Betas. The Betas are disposable, used for scouting missions, etc. They have less defined social skills, and are often confused by unfamiliar objects. They only have their host’s knowledge to pull from, and cannot form inferences based on new information. The Alphas are able to blend almost seamlessly with the hosts consciousness. They have personalities, and can leave a host once they inhabit it. The host will usually die at that point (it is my theory that the Alpha left the little girl when she was no longer useful, and they discarded the body—just a useless husk at this point—in a stream.)

  “If they grow their own bodies, they’ll be unstoppable. They’ll take over resources even faster than they do as parasites.”

  Based on Adrienne’s description, which she received from the Sangaumans, in their natural form, the Tylwyth Teg are about two inches long, and look like mottled, brown slugs. The Alphas and the Betas are indistinguishable. They reside in the sinus cavity of their hosts—the human hosts, anyway. They seem to be able to inhabit most any creature, except the Sangaumans. They then release two long nerves which tap into the host’s brain.

  “I have to get out of here so I can help my son,” she said.

  “It makes sense to them,” I said. “Imagine, a vast intelligence, but with no way to implement it. No thumbs, no hands, not even paws. How long did they simply languish in the mud of their home world?”

  “You’re taking their side?” Adrienne asked, her voice like daggers.

  “We can’t know anything about them. We can’t know what their motives are.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them. You don’t know what you’re saying. I want you out of here! And leave my son alone. All of you! Nurse! Nurse!”

  An orderly came in and asked me to leave. Adrienne spit at me as I left. That was the last time we spoke. I shouldn’t have said those things to her, as she was in a delicate mental state. But the way our three species, humanity, the Tylwyth Teg and the Sangaumans interact has made me really do some thinking on the nature of the universe. It is not a simple thing that we can ever hope to learn. All I know, as I look up at the sky, is that there are more vast wonders out there than there are twinkling stars.

  28

  The sun wasn’t right. The thought vaulted Kate from a peaceful half-asleep state into full wakefulness. She lay on the couch, in the living room, still dressed in the clothes from the night before. The patches of sun on the floor were right under the windows, as though the sun was directly overhead. Noon. Really?

  She rubbed at her eyes and tried to run a hand through her hair, but it got caught up in the tangles, and she decided to leave it alone. Where was Val? Where was Felix? Again, she looked at her phone, not at the time but seeing if she’d missed a call. She hadn’t. So they went out for breakfast. Without asking her to come? Not likely.

  It gnawed at her. Val was irresponsible and immature, yes, but not so much so he would vanish after a night like last night.

  Although maybe he would. He’d gone through so much, between his mother and the boy, why shouldn’t he be allowed to flake out?

  Because there was a dead body baking in her car for the second day, that’s why. The car was done. The next step would be to think of a way to trash it, to burn it up, before anyone could see the decomposed mess resting on the carpet in the trunk. And to do it in a way that wasn’t suspicious.

  Kate turned on the coffee maker, going through soothing morning tasks. It was hard to think about things like hiding bodies when you were doing something as mundane as making coffee.

  She added sugar from a bag that looked like it had been there for a very long time. On a cursory inspection there didn’t seem to be any critters lurking in it, so she dumped it in the coffee. There was no milk or cream. The fridge was empty except for three bottles of ketchup, a Tupperware container she would never open, and a few beers she’d brought over. When they found a place in Santa Fe—they could start looking today—they’d have a real home. With food in the fridge, they’d get jobs, and it would be blissfully mundane. No arrests, no monsters, no bodies.

  She looked at her phone again while she waited for the coffee to cool. 12:20. Should she call the sheriff’s office? To make sure he left…or he was still there? She could take the truck and see for herself. The Daytona in the yard kept drawing her attention. She expected to see flies swarming around the trunk, or blood pooling in the gravel under its tail pipe. But it looked like her car; her normal, shitty car.

  Pulling the outdated phone book from its place under the house phone, she used her cell phone to call the sheriff’s office. A prerecorded message picked up. If this was an emergency, she should hang up and call 911. If this was in reference to a parking violation or a traffic fine, she should press two. She mashed the zero button until a disgruntled woman answered.

  “Otero County Sheriff’s Daphne Maze how can I direct your call.” The words spilled out in a monotone void of punctuation.

  “Is Spence around?”

  “He’s on nights this week.”

  Of course, considering he was the one who came to the house in the wee hours.

  “Can you tell me if Valentine Slade is still there?”

  “This Kate?”

  “Yeah.” It was stupid to come to this town and hope for even a prayer of anonymity.

  Daphne rattled some papers around on her end of the line. Kate wanted to ask her if she’d forgotten what she was doing, forgotten what she was looking for, but she figured as long as she could hear something on the other end of the line, Daphne probably knew what she was doing.

  “He’s not here.”

  Fuck.

  “Do you know when he left?”

  “You know it ain’t my job to keep a tail on your boyfriend for you. Says here he left around five with one-a them boys from Immigration.”

  “He left with them?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Did they say where they went?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  Daphne hung up without saying goodbye.

  Kate stared at the phone in her hand for a moment then flipped it shut. She should have asked for a number to contact Immigration. She didn’t even know where to begin looking that one up. If only there was a computer here, she could Google it for sure.

  How would Felix have found him if he was out with Immigration? Val didn’t have a cell phone; there was no way to get in touch with him. Did that mean he wasn’t with Felix after all?

  She would call Spence at home. Back to the phonebook, digging through the “S” section. That had to be him. God, did he still live in that same old place he grew up in? The desire to leave Lott welled up in her throat like acid reflux. It crossed her mind to go. Leave a note explaining where Val could find her. She couldn’t take her car, though. If only there was a swamp somewhere where she could ditch the whole thing. It worked for that creepy guy in Psycho. He was only in California. That wasn’t too far...

  The phone rang in her ear after she punched in Spence’s number.”Hullo?”

  Was that his mother?

  “Hi,” she said, stuttering a bit. “Is Spence around?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “May I leave him a message?”

  “Yup, hold on, I gotta get a pen.” Spence’s mom sighed as if Kate was really putting her out. “Go ‘head.”

  “My name is Kate Fulton.” She gave her phone number, repeating it three times, and making the woman spell it back to her. “Have him call me as soon as he gets up.”

  The line went dead.

&nb
sp; What a charmer.

  Now what?

  She looked out at the zinc-yellow car in the driveway, then drew the shade so she wouldn’t have to look at it any more. She could drive into town; see if they were at Woodstone’s Saloon.

  It seemed to make more sense to stay here and wait. She peered around the shade out the window. If she kept it drawn, then she couldn’t see them (or anyone else) if they came down the driveway. She lifted the shade, and sat down on the couch, scooting over to the far side. She lay her head on her arm, settling in to watch.

  When she woke up the phone was ringing, a popular R and B song playing next to her ear.

  An unfamiliar number. No, Spence’s home number.

  She answered it, wondering how long she’d been asleep.

  “Hi, my mom said you called.”

  It was like a flash back to middle school.

  “Yeah, I was wondering if you’d seen Val.” Her mouth tasted like the coffee she’d drank. But in a foul, stale way, and she needed to brush her teeth before she made contact with another person, missing boyfriend or not.

  “Yeah, he left around five with the guy from USCIS. Vargas, I think he said his name was.”

  “He didn’t come back?”

  “Guy said he’d run him home.”

  “He didn’t.” Kate struggled to kick the afternoon nap cobwebs. “Was he one of Rich’s guys?”

  “I hope not. Val seemed a little weird with him. I asked if he was okay, but he said he was just tired.”

  Kate exhaled into the mouthpiece. “You have any clue where they might have gone?”

  “None. It’s too soon to do a missing persons. Man, since Val’s been back there’s a lot of folks we can’t quite keep track of.”