“Wait…” Clark said, looking around to make sure no one was listening. He raised his eyebrows. “Them?”
“We have to go back,” Dan said.
Clark stood perfectly still. Dan had always had his quirks, but he had never, ever, been violent. He had never done anything close to poking Clark in the eye or kneeing him in the groin, as he had last night in his single-minded pursuit of the plaques. “Walker’s cornfield?”
Dan nodded, very slightly.
“Okay,” Clark said. “Let’s go.”
D plus 46
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Clark drove nervously along the quiet road to Richard Walker’s house, seeing it all in daylight for the first time.
Dan stepped out of the car first. He stood frozen on the spot.
“Talk to me,” Clark said, hopeful that Dan was still lucid.
Dan’s eyes turned towards him, less blank than they had been the night before. “You can’t hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Clark… don’t mess with me.”
“I’m not. I can’t hear anything! A little bit of wind, some birds…”
Dan put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes.
“You alright?”
He took his hands away. “It’s not in my head. I can’t hear it when I cover my ears.”
“Hear what?”
Dan turned towards the cornfield. “Whatever is in there.”
“What does it sound like?” Clark asked, suddenly rushing his words. “The noise we heard on the video from Walker’s room? That sort of modem noise?”
“Softer. Like… I dunno… crystal.”
Clark tried to steady his breathing and slow his heart rate in an effort to make out whatever faint sounds Dan was hearing. However hard he tried, he heard nothing.
“I’m going in,” Dan said, committing to a decision he had barely finished making.
“I’ll lead,” Clark said.
Dan didn’t object.
Clark entered the field at the visible path he had spotted the previous night. As then, and even in the daylight, it soon became less clear.
“It’s getting louder,” Dan said.
“I still can’t hear shit.”
They kept walking. “It has to be close,” Dan yelled over a sound that only he could hear.
Just a few steps later, Clark stopped. “There.”
Dan stepped beside him and looked into the perfect circle of flattened corn. He stood with his hands on his ears, disbelieving that Clark wasn’t bothered by the near-deafening sound.
“You going in?”
Dan nodded and reached for the notebook and pencils that Clark was carrying. He then stepped across the threshold and into the circle. As soon as he did, his expression changed; no longer wincing at the sound, Dan was once more a picture of serenity.
Clark walked into the circle after a few second’s of deliberation, ultimately reasoning that it had held no power over him last time so surely wouldn’t now. He sped up until he was in front of Dan and saw the same glazed-over look he’d seen the night before.
Dan sat down at the same edge of the circle where Clark had found him in the pouring rain. He looked directly into the centre of the circle and began to draw.
Clark got his phone out of his pocket and snapped several photos before beginning to record a video. He stayed silent and walked around, taking care to capture the scale of the circle as well as the utter blankness of Dan’s expression.
Dan drew extremely slowly and deliberately, without so much as glancing at the paper. His eyes remained fixed in the centre of the circle, staring close-mouthed at something that wasn’t there.
Clark could only liken it to something he’d seen in his first girlfriend’s living room: one of those pianos that played itself. Still recording the video, he walked over to Dan and stood behind him to focus on the drawing.
As far as Clark had always known, Dan couldn’t draw for shit. But this… this was incredible. Dan, or whatever was controlling his hand, had almost finished the drawing of a picture perfect landscape of clouds, hills, clearings and trees. The foreground trees looked like actual trees, not like a child’s drawing as Clark would have expected. The clouds were incredibly detailed, too; floating in an unusual formation. The gently sloping hills in the background were expertly shaded. Had Clark not seen this drawing come from Dan’s hand, he would never have believed it.
Dan moved his hand away from the page. Clark ended his video and took two clear pictures of the drawing in case Dan destroyed it; it wouldn’t make much sense for Dan to do so, but Clark had given up on sense a long time ago.
“Is that for me?” Clark asked.
Without speaking or moving his gaze from the centre of the circle, Dan slowly tore out the page and placed it on the ground.
Clark carefully picked it up. “Is that it?”
Dan answered by putting pencil to paper once more and commencing a new drawing.
“Okay,” Clark said. The last thing he wanted to do was get in the way.
On this new sheet, Dan drew a winding vertical line with occasional gaps in it. He then drew another line parallel to the first, creating a narrow path which Clark quickly realised was a road. When this was complete, Dan added other river-like lines emanating from the main road at various angles. In the extreme lower right corner, Dan drew a neat square. Finally, he added a small circle to the left of the page, around three quarters of the way up. He went over this circle time and time again.
“Dan,” Clark said, noticing that Dan was pressing harder and harder on the paper while still staring at the nothing straight ahead of him.
Like a stuck robot, Dan kept drawing over the same circle.
“Dan!”
Just when Clark was ready to snap him out of it with another slap to the face, Dan stopped drawing. He placed the notebook on the ground and kept staring silently ahead.
“Is that it?”
Dan didn’t reply.
“I’m going to pick you up now, okay?” Clark said, expecting no reply. When none came, he snapped a few pictures of the map and lifted Dan as promised. As before, Dan didn’t struggle.
At the edge of the circle, Dan came to. “What happened?” he asked.
Clark put him down after a few steps. “You drew something.”
“What was it?”
Clark handed Dan the first drawing of the landscape and walked into the circle to recover the notebook while Dan looked at it.
“I drew this?” Dan asked, incredulous. “I drew this?”
“Yup.”
“Where is it?”
Clark held the second drawing — the map — towards Dan. “Here,” he said, pointing at the small but heavy circle. “Or maybe this box. I think one of them is where we are and one is where we’re supposed to go.”
“It’s the circle,” Dan said confidently.
“Okay. We should be able to look at maps online and see if anything looks like this. There’s no scale or anything, though.”
“If we needed a scale they would have given me one,” Dan said.
The syntax of Dan’s statement gave Clark pause. He had just watched Dan do a perfect landscape drawing and make a map for a journey he was evidently supposed to take, but the blunt reminder that “they” had given Dan the information he needed was sobering.
It was one thing to know that Dan wasn’t in control of his hand when he made the drawings; it was another thing to wonder who was.
D plus 47
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Are you hearing yourself?” Emma said, incredulous at Clark’s suggestion. “You think they abducted Walker and blew up DS-1, but you also think it’s a good idea to follow a map they magically sent into Dan’s head?”
“I didn’t ask you to come,” Clark replied. He sat in the kitchen with Emma while Dan excitedly watched the people from the pet store assemble his new aquarium.
The installers’ arrival coming before Dan and Clark’s return had surprised Emma; now that she knew that the delay resulted from a detour to the cornfield, surprise had given way to disbelief.
Emma took a long sip of her fancy lemonade. “If you’re really going through with this,” she said, knowing full well that Clark wouldn’t be swayed by logic, “I’m coming with you.”
“I thought it was stupid?”
“It is. But if I let you take Dan without me and something happened…”
“Nothing bad is going to happen. I had this talk with Dan and he says that if they wanted to harm us, they would have. But they haven’t. They took Walker, but they called Dan. See the difference? And he said it was the same with the Límíng module; they didn’t want it to reach orbit, but they let it get close enough so that no one got hurt by the blast. They’re not hostile.”
“When did we decide that they were definitely real?” Emma asked. The kitchen door was closed, so she didn’t lower her voice. “Last night you were talking about how crop circles aren’t real. There’s a box full of fake evidence literally under your bed. I’m having a hard time flipping this switch in my head back to “oh yeah, aliens are real” just because someone with a history of sleepwalking drew a map.”
“You weren’t there. He wasn’t even looking at the paper and he drew a detailed road map. How do you explain that? And this wasn’t sleepwalking; he walked into the circle wide awake.”
Emma sighed. “I’m going to play devil’s advocate, okay? If someone else told you they’d gone through everything we have in the last 48 hours, you wouldn’t believe aliens had anything to do with any of it.”
“So? We have gone through it.”
“Just hear me out,” Emma said. “Point one: whatever happened to Walker, someone could have messed with his camera feeds to add the flash. Point two: I could show you a hundred how-to videos of people hoaxing crop circles. Point three: Rooster might just be acting strange because his owner is gone and he’s in a weird house with people he doesn’t know. Point four: Dan’s in a bad place. We might think this has been hard, but we have no idea what he’s gone through. He wants to believe there’s still some truth to hold onto. He needs to believe. And sometimes when people need to believe, their subconscious mind gives them reasons to. It doesn’t mean he’s lying, but—”
“I don’t get you,” Clark interrupted. “Last night you were the one trying to convince me that they might be real! You were the one who said “maybe there really is a bear” and “sometimes lies come true” and all that other stuff. Now we come home with more evidence and you change your mind?”
“I’m trying to keep an open mind here! You want to know what I think, deep down? They’re real. There: I said it. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to try and meet them or initiate contact. You really think we’re the right people for this?”
“Not us,” Clark said. “Dan. They chose him.”
“You totally believe this,” Emma said, still struggling to adjust to Clark’s sudden and complete U-turn. “What happened to once bitten, twice shy?”
“You gonna help me with the map or not?”
Emma lifted her phone from the table and sighed. “Pass it here.”
* * *
Dan entered the kitchen to get a drink. “Montana?” he said, responding to Clark’s statement that they had identified the roads on Dan’s map and found their destination. “That’s not too far. Could have been worse, right?”
“West Montana,” Emma added. “A thousand miles from here.”
“The thing says it’ll only take seventeen hours,” Clark chimed in.
Dan thought for a few seconds. The distance itself didn’t bother him, but he wondered how precise the marked circle could be given the thousand-mile scale. “How much have you narrowed down the actual location?” he asked, sitting down beside them to look at Emma’s phone and Clark’s scribbled notes beside the original hand-drawn map.
Clark pointed to the box Dan drew in the bottom right corner. “This is us,” he said. “But it’s a pretty big area; everything between Pueblo and Colorado Springs.”
“I know where we are,” Dan said impatiently. He pointed to the circle, which was smaller than the box. “Where’s this?”
Emma handed her phone to Dan. “Lolo National Forest. We’ve narrowed the exact centre of your circle to within a few miles, and it’s pretty near the main road. Not far from Missoula.”
“What does the forest look like?” Dan asked.
Emma swiped her phone’s screen to bring up some images of the area.
As soon as Dan saw the gently sloping hills sparsely dotted with trees, he knew. “That’s the place. It matches perfectly.”
“Matches what?”
Dan turned to Clark. “You didn’t show her the first drawing?”
“We were concentrating on the map,” Clark said, lifting the drawing from his pocket and unfolding it. He handed it to Emma.
She studied it for several seconds, taking in the details.
“Are you coming?” Dan asked.
Emma handed the drawing back to Clark. “We would have to bring Rooster.”
Dan smiled, glad that the team was back together.
“We leave in two hours,” Clark said firmly. He rose to his feet. “Ready or not.”
* * *
“Have a good trip,” Mr Byrd said as Clark loaded the blue box, covered by two blankets, into the back of the car.
“We will,” Emma said, committed to the agreed-upon lie that Dan and Clark were kindly driving her to a family gathering. Her known dislike of flying made this plausible, and Clark’s stated desire to “get away from everything for a few days” made it believable.
Dan didn’t like the idea of lying to Mr Byrd. But in the context of everything else, he knew that a lie like this was nothing. A handful of secondary lies were also necessary: Dan had been sleepwalking the previous night, Emma had recently adopted Rooster from a local shelter, and the aquarium’s glass had been cracked by a stray ball during a careless game of fetch.
Mr Byrd readily agreed to stay inside until the aquarium installation was complete, a task which had already taken longer than Dan or Clark expected but still had several hours to go. He would also check on the fish regularly.
Just after 5pm, Clark set off from Birchwood in search of whatever lay a thousand miles north west in Lolo National Forest. Emma sat next to him while Dan and Rooster shared the back seat.
“You’re not opening those in the car,” Emma said as Clark reached for the long tin of sardines in his cup-holder.
“Do you have a list of things I’m allowed to eat?”
“I’ve got a list of things you’re not…”
While they argued half-heartedly like an old married couple, the drive-in passed by outside Dan’s window. He looked back to read the sign: “Welcome to Birchwood, proud home of Dan McCarthy.”
Maybe yet he could give everyone a real reason to be proud, Dan thought.
Maybe yet.
FRIDAY
D plus 48
Interstate 90
East of Billings, Montana
Clark pulled up in a rest stop just after 6am, at the end of his second four-hour shift. Emma, now due to retake the wheel, was fast asleep. Clark stepped out to stretch his legs and let Rooster do his business. Rooster quietly climbed out without waking Dan. He was a good dog, Clark grudgingly acknowledged; it wasn’t his fault he used to belong to Richard Walker.
This was the third and final planned stop on the way to Lolo National Forest. Clark had been spotted filling the tank during the second stop four hours earlier, but the two truckers who saw him were respectful in their surprise and didn’t take any photos. Clark stuck to the story about visiting Emma’s family when asked what they were doing so far from home, and the truckers left it at that.
With no one to talk to, the four hours since the end of Emma’s shift had passed slowly for Clark; though he hadn’t slept at all during
his break, Emma made the most of hers and Dan had been out for the count since they left Colorado.
The radio kept Clark company. He listened to music for a while, until the country song about the old man and his boots came on. Clark almost woke Emma and Dan to tell them how weird it was that this obscure song was playing again, but he shook it off and changed the station.
Late-night talk shows filled the rest of his time. Clark didn’t know these kind of call-in shows still existed, but apparently there were as many talkative insomniacs now as ever. The show Clark listened to — Gary Simon’s Graveyard Shift — unsurprisingly focused on the DS-1 launch disaster and its immediate aftermath.
Some of the callers spoke of being kept awake by the fear of a hostile alien return, while others were more concerned by the prospect of a full-scale societal breakdown caused by fear itself. Whatever the details, every call boiled down to fear.
From playing around with Emma’s SMMA app while she’d been driving, Clark knew the latest figures: 43% of users believed the launch had failed due to extraterrestrial sabotage — down from a peak of 61% — while 6% believed human sabotage was to blame and the other 51% accepted William Godfrey’s suggestion of an unfortunate accident.
Another set of statistics that caught Clark’s eye focused explicitly on users’ primary fears. Given three options, 31% were most concerned by the prospect of an asteroid colliding with Earth before sufficient defensive measures were in place, 41% primarily feared a hostile alien return, and the remaining 28% saw international conflict as the greatest threat to their personal safety.
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