The Grays

by Whitley Strieber

  “You are so fired, Chris. You will never, ever get back there. My God, you made a public idiot of yourself on national television.”

  “I told the truth!”

  He had appeared on Dateline as an advocate for the reality of UFOs, and his status as a CalTech professor had been used to give him credibility. Within a year, he was out. At U. Mass, it had been an article in the Boston Globe that had quoted his Dateline statements. He lasted six months that time.

  Dan told himself to keep out of it. But then he thought that the poor woman was just so vulnerable, with that little baby, and, as much as he liked Chris, he was way off base on this one. “Alien abduction is seizure-related folklore. Did I ever tell you that I suffered from waking nightmares when I was a child? Which is why I know what this is. I saw these little figures. Yeah, me, Chris. I’m an abductee, by your rather dubious—excuse me—standards. But because I also happen to possess a little professional knowledge of the brain, I know where the aliens come from—” He pointed to his own head. “The same place that ghosts and demons and—whatever—goblins come from. And not from some damn field on the outskirts of a one-horse town in Kentucky.”

  “Officially, I believe that Wilton is classified as a half-horse town.”

  “Whatever, we saw a prank, it was terrifying, and now the Air Force is involved, and there is likely to be hell to pay for these students and this institution, and that is a damn crying shame! Although they do deserve it. The students, not poor Bell.”

  “The Air Force said they weren’t there.”

  “Dan,” Nancy asked, “are you concerned about your tenure bid? You must be.” She turned to her husband. “Because he won’t involve you. That I will not let him do.”

  “All the witnesses—”

  “Don’t even start, Chris, my dear love. Dan and Katelyn did not see this. And Kelton, look at him, he’s on thin ice as it is, the history department’s a basket case. Don’t involve them, Chris. Don’t you dare.” She looked at Dan. “How’s it going, by the way?”

  “Marcie is how it’s going.”

  “Marcie is your referee? You’ve got to be kidding. She hasn’t voted yes on a tenure since Clinton was in the White House.”

  Now Dan went for the bottle, poured a glass, sucked it dry. “This is pretty bad,” he said, looking at the label.

  “Six dollars at Kroger, don’t knock it,” Chris said. “Now, listen to me. I don’t want to set you off again, but you do realize that this is a historical event. A large group of witnesses, armed in some cases with video equipment, have observed, and, I hope, recorded a UFO on the ground up close. Exhibiting every evidence of the presence of an abductee inside. Which I intend to proclaim to the world.”

  “Chris, shut up!”

  He looked at his mild-mannered wife in open astonishment. “Excuse me?”

  “Just you shut up! Are you hard of hearing or something? Okay, look, you do this and you do it without me and Jillie, because we will be gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “Nancy, this is proof!”

  “Oh, Jesus. Junior college, here we come.” She stood up. “I think I’m leaving.” She picked up Jillie in her carrier.

  What Katelyn feared was that there had been a murder out there, involving God only knew what sort of bizarre method. A murder, and, perhaps, if the shadow Dan had seen was really somebody, a murderer who was still nearby.

  “If you get yourself fired,” Nancy told Chris as she pulled on her coat, “expect divorce papers, mister.”

  “Let’s approach it from the direction of each of our specialties,” Chris suggested.

  He seemed unbothered by his wife’s outburst. And indeed, Nancy did not actually walk out the door. Katelyn thought, It’s a real marriage, then. They’re long-haulers like us. She knew where this kind of fight took you, in the end. It took you to bed. “Well, certainly,” she said, attempting to move things to a somewhat calmer level, “from the standpoint of the sociologist, we witnessed a real, physical event that I fear was tragic. We all do, or we wouldn’t be here huddled together in the back of the proverbial cave in the dead of the night.”

  Dan said, “I’m in agreement that it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a prank and possibly somebody was injured. I agree there. Unless some genius actress has just recently emerged here at Bell, which I very much doubt.”

  “I thought Death of a Salesman was pretty good,” Chris said.

  Dan smiled. “Death of a Salesman is not working when you find yourself pulling for Willy Loman to commit suicide.”

  “What we didn’t see was an alien spacecraft taking somebody on a rough ride,” Nancy said. “I want that established, Chris. Admitted.”

  “So, what did we see?” Chris’s question was softly put.

  Silence fell.

  Katelyn said, “My concern is the injury issue. And frankly, getting awakened in the middle of the night. It is the middle of the night. I am outraged and I am scared.” She told herself it was mostly outrage. She knew that it was mostly fear. “I think somebody might be badly injured, hidden in some dorm basement right now, trying to tend her burns with Bactine or something.”

  “Don’t say that,” Nancy said, shivering

  “What’s the enrollment picture looking like, Nance?” Dan asked. He was well aware that the psychology department was overstaffed. If Bell had another bad enrollment season, he could not only be passed over for tenure, he could see his professorship dissolved. Obviously, a campus death would not be helpful.

  “Iffier than last year, actually.”

  “Maybe the idea that we’ve had an alien visitation would actually help,” Chris said.

  “Excuse me, guys,” Nancy asked, “but who’s in the kitchen?”

  “That would be nobody,” Katelyn said. Except she had also heard a sound—a chair scraping against the kitchen tile floor. “Excuse me,” she said, standing up. “Is that somebody there?” she asked as she headed across the dining room.

  The kitchen was empty, but as she walked in, Katelyn thought she might have seen the back door closing. She called, “Dan, come in here.”

  Dan got up, sucking in breath as he did so. He came into the room. Nancy and Chris followed close behind.

  “I don’t want to alarm anybody,” Katelyn said softly, “but I think someone just went out on the porch.”

  Dan opened the door. The tiny side yard was bright with moonlight, and clearly empty. He peered along the driveway, then stepped out and looked at the street. Cold, quiet, that was all.

  “What gives?” Katelyn asked as he returned.

  He shook his head. “All quiet on the Oak Road front.”

  “I heard the chair, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

  “It must have been the wind.”

  “There is no wind.” She put her hand on a chair, dragged it. “It was somebody doing this.”

  “There’s nobody,” Dan said. He locked the back door. “At least, not anymore.” He had the odd feeling, though, that this was not right. He shuddered. The room seemed somehow—what? It was clean enough, but it seemed—well, there was no way around it: the place felt . . . occupied. “Does it seem—” He shook his head. How could he explain what he felt? Watched, when there was obviously nobody else here.

  Chris lunged suddenly, slapped the kitchen table with his open hand.

  The sound silenced them all.

  “I—uh—there was a fly.”

  “In February?” Nancy asked.

  “No, there wasn’t a fly. Something moved. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. A cat—maybe a cat . . . over there by the pantry. Could a cat have gotten in here?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Dan said.

  “Obviously,” Katelyn said as she got a bottle of wine from the cabinet where they were kept, “just an hour ago.” She looked at the bottle. “Will our five-dollar cabernet beat your six-dollar merlot?”

  Dan checked the pantry. The famili
ar neat rows of canned goods stood untouched on the shelves, there if they ever got snowed in. He shook a box of cereal Conner had left open, re-rolled the wax paper inside, and closed it.

  As he turned away, he felt something—like somebody’s hand had brushed against his left ear. He fumbled for the light, turned it on.

  There was nobody in here but him.

  Then a pain like a blowtorch flashed through the ear. He gasped, cried out, stifled the cry.

  Katelyn had the chair in her hand. He staggered toward it.

  “Dan?”

  “I’m okay!” He fell into the chair. He could do nothing else, he was in agony. “Jesus, Jesus,” he said, trying not to gasp, trying not to seem to be in pain and failing utterly.

  “What the hell?” Chris said.

  “It’s my ear,” he breathed. “Oh, Jesus!”

  Katelyn looked at it.

  “Whoa, that smarts. Christ.”

  “It looks fine.”

  “Oh, man. It must be—” He tried to get up, failed. He was too dizzy. “Am I having a stroke? Does anybody know the symptoms?”

  “Is it a headache, honey?”

  “My God, it’s my ear, it’s killing me.”

  “Perhaps a visit to the health center,” Nancy suggested.

  “Dr. Hamner’s on senility leave,” Dan said. “Anyway, it’s closed at night because people might need it then.”

  The pain began to get a little less. Dan managed to come to his feet. Still dizzy, he staggered a step. “Better,” he said.

  At that moment, everything in the room rattled, there was a loud whoosh, and the back door opened and slammed itself.

  “The wind,” Nancy shrilled, then knocked back a full glass of wine and poured another.

  Katelyn did not tell them what she had just seen, which was a sort of light flickering along the back porch and into the yard, a light like a narrow searchlight beam from somewhere over the house.

  In her most private self, in places inside herself where she almost never went, there were vague memories from childhood, memories that had drawn her to watch a TV documentary here and there about alien abduction, and to wonder. The memories were very unformed and very strange, but the fact remained that when she had first seen one of those big-eyed alien faces depicted on the cover of some stupid book, she had been transfixed, literally unable to move, and unable to stop the tears.

  She would never tell Dan this, not with his childhood seizures. He needed to leave apparitions, demons, and all of that sort of thing behind him.

  She could only think now of one thing: Conner, because, in her heart of hearts, she worried that he might be seizure-prone, too. Or worse, what if it was true? Even more than a criminal or idiot pranksters, if there were aliens out there right now, her place was with her little boy. She stepped back toward the living room.

  “Katelyn?”

  “Sorry, Dan, I thought I heard Conner.”

  “Help me, here.” He went toward her.

  She strode over to the freezer, rummaged for the blue cold pack, thrust it at him. He took it with thanks, pressed it against his head. “Better,” he said. “Somewhat.”

  She went downstairs. On this night, she would sleep on the floor beside her son.

  “Hi,” he said as she came in.

  “Not asleep yet?” She sat on the bed. “It’s terribly late.”

  “Three twenty-eight. I guess that qualifies.”

  “Conner, I’m so sorry I knocked you down like that. I was just—oh, honey, I was so scared. I’ve never been that scared in my life!”

  “You want to know a secret, Mom?”

  “Sure.”

  “That you swear you will especially not tell any Warners?”

  “Sworn on the old heart.”

  “I’ve never been that scared in my life, either. Mom, you know what I felt like? I felt like it was watching me.”

  She did not—dared not—tell him of her own feelings.

  No matter all the elegantly dismissive conversation above, the dumping on Chris with his silly ideas, down here in the dark with Conner, she found a truth that she could not deny. Whatever had happened out in that field, it had nothing whatsoever to do with any pranks, and murder was even more far-fetched.

  The truth was, it had everything to do with the night and the unknown.

  She took Conner in her arms, and prayed to the good God that she be granted the right to never, ever let go of him again. Soon, his breathing grew soft and steady, and she, also, closed her eyes. With her boy safe beside her, Katelyn slept.

  It was then that the shadows came, stealing in from the dark place under the deck where they had been hiding.

  PART THREE

  THE SECRET OF THE GRAYS

  Late at night, when the demons come,

  I want my pillow to push between them,

  So they can’t get on my skin.

  I cry they rub my head I cry.

  —SALLY, AGE 9, FROM HER STORY,

  “Beings Come to Our House”

  EIGHT

  ROB LANGFORD HAD NOT BEEN called by Lewis Crew in months, but he was not surprised to receive a summons on this night, when a glowboy had acted up like this. He had driven hard up from the Mountain, and now moved carefully along Lost Angel Road in the Boulder foothills, trying to find the address Crew had given him. He’d never met the owner of the house, Dr. Peter Simpson, but he’d heard Crew mention him often enough. In their field, need-to-know was so extremely strict that this kind of compartmentalization was normal. They all knew the reason, too. In fact, once you were told, it became the center of your life, the one thing you never forgot.

  Back in 1954, long before the empath program existed, there had been a brief, fumbled meeting between President Eisenhower and a triad of grays at an air base in California. The president had come away shattered, saying that if we revealed that they were here, the aliens would destroy Earth completely.

  This extraordinary threat had built the absolute wall of secrecy and inspired the intricate labyrinth of need-to-know that surrounded the reality of the grays.

  Bob and Adam had never responded in a coherent manner to questions about it, either, which had made the threat seem more dire.

  Rob found the house, set well back from the road, and turned in the driveway. As per regulations, he was in civilian clothes. Even the license plate on the car he was driving was registered to a civilian. He carried both false and real identification. The false ID, provided by AFOSI, would hold up under police scrutiny—say, if he got stopped for speeding.

  Simpson’s house was dark in front, but the door opened before he rang the bell. There stood the imposing Mr. Crew, looking a bit older, his white hair even more white.

  As Rob entered the tiled foyer, a compact man appeared behind Lewis Crew. “Rob, this is Dr. Pete.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet a legend.”

  Simpson laughed a little. “I wish the circumstances could be more pleasant. Come on back.”

  They went along a hallway, then through a room cluttered with books. Surprisingly, Dr. Simpson read a great deal of poetry. He unlocked a door into a small office. There was some damaged equipment there. Rob asked what it was.

  “A quantum communications device,” Dr. Simpson said. “It passed signals between entangled particles, and thus was capable of instantaneous transmission across the entire universe. But no longer.”

  “Things have been at crisis for some time now,” Crew said. “And we’ve reached a very serious point. A flash point, we believe.”

  Given the threat they were under and the absolute inability of the Air Force to offer any defense against the grays, those words made Rob feel a little sick. “What sort of a flash point?”

  “We need to take you to another level, Colonel,” Simpson said. “I’ve revised your job description and your need-to-know.”

  “You can do this?”

  He laughed a little. “Colonel, you’re talking to your boss—for the first time in you
r whole damned career. Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”

  Rob shook his head. “Maybe we’re a little too bound up in need-to-know.”

  “I’m a Defense Intelligence Agency specialist and chairman of the Special Studies Sciences Committee.” Special Studies was the umbrella euphemism for all the scientific groups that worked on the problem of the grays.

  The Sciences Committee, Rob knew, oversaw the whole operation, including his own Air Force mission. The poetry man was indeed his boss.

  “How has my mission changed, sir?”

  “We’ll get there. First things first. I brought you here for the specific purpose of showing you this device, because you need to understand exactly what it did, why it’s been destroyed, and by whom. Because you are about to be tested, Colonel, more rigorously than you have ever been tested before. I cannot stress this enough. In a few moments, I am going to ask you a question. Your answer will be crucial.”

  “If I answer wrong?”

  Simpson gazed at him. The man’s eyes were rat-careful. “This machine gave us communications access to Mr. Crew’s species,” he said. “Which we very much needed, because they were generating questions for Bob and Adam that were, frankly, a lot more subtle and a lot more effective than anything Michael Wilkes has ever come up with himself.”

  Rob realized that he’d just been told that his old friend Crew was an alien. He looked at him, pale in the dim light that filled the room. He appeared human enough. But then again, Rob had read enough UFO folklore to know the stories of a tall, blond race from a planet somewhere in the direction of the Pleiades. “You’re what the UFOnauts call a Nordic.”

  “Ours is a very stable agricultural world with as much land mass as Earth, but barely a million people.”

  “But you look so much like us. What are the odds of that?”

  “We’ve done DNA studies,” Dr. Simpson said. “We and Crew’s line split from one another about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”

  “But we—we’re the same species? On two different planets?”