“I dunno,” Emma said. “It looks like more than that. We could pace it out?”
Clark shook his head. “No way. What if there’s another barrier or something? I can’t get in there to pull you out.”
“It’s safe,” Dan insisted.
“Safe? Dan, it literally made my ears bleed. It knocked me down. And if it can knock me down, it—”
“Yeah,” Dan interrupted, “but you weren’t invited. I was, and so was Emma. We’re shielded from that thing, whatever it is.”
“So what about the dog?”
“Maybe it doesn’t affect dogs,” Emma said; this made as much sense to her as anything else.
At first Emma had taken Dan’s wandering to the cornfield as his subconscious mind’s desperate reaction to the soul-crushing revelation that the IDA leak was a hoax, but now there was tangible proof that the “messages” Dan had received were real. After all, his map had already led the group to this middle-of-nowhere clearing where Clark had just walked straight into an invisible barrier which defied explanation.
“We didn’t come all this way to give up,” Dan said. “There might be an inner circle where I’ll get a new message or where something will be visible.”
Clark thought in silence.
“I’ll walk in front of Dan,” Emma suggested, trying to ease Clark’s concerns. “If I hit something and fall like you did, he can pull me back.”
“Okay,” Clark said. “I’ll walk in line with you, at the edge.”
Emma set off towards the centre of the circle and beyond, counting her paces as Dan and Rooster followed a few steps behind.
“Almost half way,” Clark called. He was still in line with them but now a fair distance away thanks to the curvature of the barrier.
“Sixty so far,” Emma replied.
Clark gave a thumbs up in acknowledgement.
As Emma put her foot down for the seventieth step, Rooster lowered his body to the ground and began to bark aggressively.
“Stop,” Clark shouted.
They already had.
“What is it, boy?” Dan asked the agitated dog. Rooster’s barking wasn’t the frightened kind they’d all heard when Ben first took them to Richard Walker’s house, and he wasn’t trying to run away like he had then.
Emma crouched to the ground and patted Rooster. He quickly calmed down.
“Come over here,” Clark yelled. “Mark the ground where you are and walk towards me in a straight line.”
They walked over.
When they arrived, Clark had some questions. “How do you feel?” he asked.
Dan shook his head. “Just… normal.”
“You didn’t sense anything when the dog did? Nothing at all?”
“No.”
“Emma?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Maybe Rooster just knows that they’ve been in that spot before,” Dan said. “Like at Walker’s when he wouldn’t go in the bedroom because that’s where they’d been. It doesn’t mean it’s not safe.”
“I’m happy to keep going,” Emma chimed in.
Clark felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. “But if you do hit something like I did, and you fall too far forward, then either Dan won’t be able to reach you or he’ll try to reach too far and end up hitting it, too. And I can’t even get past this stupid line, so you’d both be—”
A quiet but sudden movement in the shrubbery behind Clark startled him. His head shot round like a deer’s, hoping to see anything but snooping hikers. Two grey birds appeared.
“Do you still have your lunch?” Dan asked abruptly.
“Yeah,” Clark said, lowering the backpack from his shoulder. “Why?”
“Bait.”
Emma and Clark shared a confused glance.
“I don’t think aliens eat bread and sardines,” Clark said.
Dan rolled his eyes. “I meant for the birds. Remember how all the birds fled the cornfield at Walker’s when the cameras flashed and he was taken? We could throw food ahead of where we stopped and see if they pick it up.”
“Might as well try it,” Clark shrugged. He took a foil-wrapped tub from the backpack and laid it on the ground.
Emma stepped across the outer barrier, picked it up, and stepped back in. She unwrapped the foil. “Two tins of sardines and eight slices of bread? Eight? For lunch?”
“I’m a big guy,” Clark said, patting his stomach.
“No wonder!”
Dan clapped his hands together. “Who cares? We’re burning daylight.”
“Right.” Clark said. “Rip the bread into hundreds of pieces then scatter the pieces and the sardines as far as you can without stepping past the spot where you stopped. Not one step further until I say so, understood?”
Emma nodded.
“Dan?”
“Make sure you get this all on video,” Dan said, setting off towards their marker with Rooster close behind. “I put the dash-cam in my bag. There’s a power bar in there somewhere.”
Clark connected the dash-cam to the power bar and clipped it onto his waistband. He watched as Emma ripped the bread into tiny pieces and threw them forward. Rooster showed no aggression this time, wholly focused on the tin of sardines Dan was about to open.
“Hold one near his nose then throw it in,” Clark shouted.
Dan did as Clark suggested, giving Rooster the scent then throwing the sardine out of reach. Rooster moved towards it but stopped short.
“Throw another one, more to the side.”
Dan threw another sardine. Rooster kept his eyes on the prize and ran towards it in a curved line. He devoured it in one bite.
“I overshot,” Dan yelled. “He ran round instead of straight to it, so there’s definitely another circle, but it’s pretty small.”
A hungry bird made a bid for the bread. Rooster scared it off.
“Bring him back to me,” Clark suggested. Dan hurried over, using the sardines to tempt Rooster into following.
Clark put a sardine on the ground for Rooster and treated himself to one at the same time. Rooster sat politely, waiting for the next one.
Back at the edge of the second circle, Emma had run out of bread. Dan opened the second tin of sardines and threw them inside the rough area of the second circle. Nothing happened for a few minutes until the same hungry bird from earlier swooped and landed on the other side of the circle from Emma and Dan. The bird picked up two sardines and several pieces of bread, then moved towards another sardine. It stopped moving and began to squawk.
“That’s the edge,” Dan said. He ran round in a cautiously wide arc, scaring the bird in the process, and picked up all the pieces of bread that lay beyond the point where the bird had stopped. He threw them all further in.
“More birds,” Emma said, pointing to the sky. Sure enough, several other birds were approaching from further afield. “Come back round.”
From their aerial position, the coming birds saw one precisely defined circle — the outer threshold, detected by Clark’s phone and marked by his heel — with another inside. The inner circle was less clear but still discernible.
Dan returned to Emma’s side and watched as a small group of birds fought over their free lunch. Slowly but surely, the shape of the inner circle grew clearer as the birds hoovered up everything on the outside and left the rest. This breadcrumb circle — a truly surreal sight — looked to be only ten or so paces across.
One bird straddled the line, carefully picking up the final accessible sardine. Another bird caught sight of this and flew over, barging the first bird well into the circle and fleeing with the sardine.
The bird that fell in flew away without so much as pecking at the feast on the ground.
“There’s something in that circle they seriously don’t like,” Emma said.
Dan scratched his chin. “Yeah, but it didn’t get hurt.”
Clark saw Dan’s pensive stance and knew instantly what was going through his head. “No! Emma, get him away
from there.”
“Ignore him,” Dan said. “They didn’t invite him.”
Emma looked over to Clark then back down at the near-perfect circle of untouched breadcrumbs in front of her. “Just because the bird didn’t get hurt, that doesn’t mean we won’t,” she said.
“Nothing is going to happen unless we go in,” Dan said. “And nothing bad is going to happen if we do. They’re not hostile. I promise.”
“Emma,” Clark yelled. “I’m warning you!”
Dan opened his hand and held it out at his side. “Are you with me?”
Emma looked deeply into Dan’s eyes and took his hand.
“Emma! Dan! No!”
Together, they stepped forward.
* * *
Clark didn’t flinch; his eyes didn’t squint, and his hands didn’t shoot up to cover them. For one long moment, all of his instincts were suspended by the brilliant light.
The light emanating from the inner circle was a total light, obscuring the entire area.
Somehow, Clark felt like he could hear it, too. The sound wasn’t high pitched or low pitched; it wasn’t sharp or dull. It was just… there. Blocking out everything else — as the light did visually — the sound was just there.
The sound and the light were so total that Clark’s functional senses were not so much bombarded as suspended.
After a wholly unknowable but stressless amount of time, the light and the sound subsided. Birds squawked as they fled nearby trees.
Though Clark’s senses were now clear and fully functioning, his body was momentarily frozen in place by an unspeakable sight in the circle of breadcrumbs.
There were no competing instincts in Clark’s mind. There was no thought of the debilitating pain that had come from his first accidental step across the outer threshold.
In short, there was no decision to be made.
As soon as the initial paralysing shock wore off, Clark McCarthy dropped everything he was holding, covered his ears, and sprinted towards the inner circle.
D plus 51
???
???
“Tell me this is real,” Dan said.
Emma squeezed his hand even more tightly than she already had been. “It’s real.”
Dan McCarthy and Emma Ford stood in the shadow of a gargantuan alien craft. Their circle of breadcrumbs was dominated by a metallic cylinder, roughly three times Dan’s height, upon which the impossibly large craft rested at a gravity defying angle. The cylinder was open at one side and not entirely unlike the elevator in Timo Fiore’s SETI observatory.
Dan turned towards Clark to tell him what they saw, but the view was obscured; nothing outside the inner circle was visible. Dan felt like he was looking through thick stained glass. He could make out differences in light, like the line between the hilltops and the sky, but no details.
“How the hell is the whole thing standing on this?” Emma thought aloud as she studied the cylinder, carefully walking around it. “It doesn’t even look like it’s touching the ground; there’s a gap. Look.”
Dan crouched down and ultimately lay flat on his stomach to look underneath the cylinder. Just as the entire craft was supported by the cylinder, the cylinder was in turn supported by a still smaller beam that looked to be no wider than Dan’s waist and no longer than his forearm. “This is insane,” he said as he stood up.
Emma returned to his side and looked up at the craft above their heads. “Tell me about it.”
The level of shock they were both feeling left no room for fear.
“I’ve read a lot of books about this,” Dan said, “and when an alien craft shows up, the people who go in first are always a carefully selected team of scientists and psychologists and linguists. It’s never, you know… people like us.”
“That’s the kind of team the government would send in if they knew about it, but they don’t. Besides, you were invited, remember?”
Dan nodded slowly. “We’re the contact team,” he said, savouring the sound of the words.
“After you,” Emma said with a slight smile. “I’ll be right behind.”
Dan extended his hand again. Emma took it.
“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” she said, one step from the cylinder.
They stepped inside. Immediately, a tall horizontal panel slid closed to seal the cylinder shut.
“Don’t worry,” Dan said. “We’re safe.”
A feeling of warmth enveloped Emma’s body and mind as everything around her turned a comforting shade of white. She squeezed Dan’s hand and whispered: “I know.”
* * *
After a brief but gentle ascent, the cylinder’s front panel reopened. Everything Dan saw was white. This was no blinding light, however; Dan saw white curved walls, a white floor, and a white ceiling. The room was smaller than the craft had looked from outside — much smaller — but a barely perceptible rectangular outline on the far wall suggested a door which led deeper inside.
“It’s like the inside of a snowflake,” Emma said.
Dan couldn’t have put it any better. Still holding Emma’s hand, he stepped out of the cylindrical elevator and looked more intently around the room. To the right he saw another outline, this one around head height. He looked left and saw the same thing. “Do you think we’re supposed to touch one of the boxes on the wall?” he whispered. “Or knock on that door?”
“What door?”
Before Dan could reply, Emma had her answer.
The white portal rose like a blind being pulled up by an invisible hand. A quiet but surprisingly mechanical whirr filled the otherwise silent room.
Though the floor beyond the door was as white as everything else, the frame cast a slight shadow and made the doorway more discernible than before. This enabled Dan to better judge the distance between his position and the doorway: somewhere in the region of thirty feet.
Emma moved closer to Dan, hiding most of her body behind his.
“They’re not hostile,” he said. This was no mere platitude nor an attempt at self-convincing; every fibre of Dan’s being knew the statement to be true.
But however much Dan knew about the aliens’ benevolence — and for however long he had accepted their existence as fact — nothing could have prepared him for this moment.
Emma wrapped her arms around Dan’s waist in an instinctive display of fear. Because however long the road to this moment had been — with its false starts and setbacks and secret-lie-truth progression — and however much she had trusted Dan’s gut, nothing could have prepared her for this sight.
Dan’s mouth fell open. Ten steps away and as real as the pounding of his heart, two alien beings stood side by side in the doorway.
* * *
Two legs, two arms, two eyes.
One nose, one mouth, no ears.
Shorter than Emma, but not by much.
Their smooth skin a bluish silver, bodies entirely covered by a seamless and patternless skintight white fabric but for their bald heads and slender hands.
Faces neotenous; oversized eyes, bulbous crania.
Unnervingly humanoid.
Strikingly unhuman.
Expressionless.
Approaching.
* * *
The aliens stopped at arms length.
Emma’s head was buried in Dan’s shoulder; Dan’s eyes were locked on the alien directly in front of him. Its were far from the empty black eyes of a textbook extraterrestrial and more like the thoughtful eyes of a large primate. Of all of the being’s physical features, the eyes were by far the most striking.
Dan struggled to take in the spatial layout of the alien’s face. His eyes and mind were so used to identifying human faces that the sight of something so cursorily passible but fundamentally peculiar — of something so almost-but-not-quite human — sparked a moment of confusion. Aside from the otherwordly skin, Dan’s subconscious pattern-recognition abilities baulked at the subtle differences in ratios and distance between the alien’s fea
tures, not to mention the surprisingly disconcerting lack of eyebrows.
The alien in front of Dan slowly raised its hand and turned its head towards the marked box Dan had already noticed on the wall.
“It’s okay,” Dan whispered to Emma. When she mustered up the courage to look, she saw that the alien before her was signalling to the box on the other wall.
“We’re not splitting up,” she said, meaning it for Dan but saying it more firmly than intended.
The alien in front of Emma turned its head slightly towards the other and addressed it verbally in a melodic tone, rising and falling like birdsong:
“Yeee oak… naa. Hoon poatsnik… taa.”
The most distinct feature of this vocalisation was the abrupt fall in tone before the final sound of each sentence-like phrase. Though Dan had no preexisting interest in nor knowledge of linguistics, he made a conscious effort to remember every syllable of these utterances.
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “I promise.”
“How can you promise?” Emma asked, wondering all the while whether the aliens could understand her speech any better than she could theirs.
Dan turned to Emma and spoke gently: “Because they brought us here for a reason, and it wasn’t to hurt us.”
Emma’s alien walked the few paces to the box on the left wall. If it had knees, they didn’t bend much. Dan’s alien walked likewise to the right.
“Ladies first,” Dan said.
Emma couldn’t help but laugh. “Why don’t we both go first?”
Dan nodded and took half a step away from Emma. She hugged him tightly.
“I’m telling you,” he whispered, “we’ll be fine.” When Emma hugged ever tighter he kissed her on the top of her head, as though she was his frightened little sister rather than the stop-at-nothing PR guru whose guidance had kept his head above water for so long and whose temerity had gotten them both this far.
When they parted, Dan walked swiftly to his right and stopped beside the alien. By way of a rising panel similar to the door’s, the outline on the wall revealed itself as an inlet storage area. Dan’s alien reached inside. As it did, Dan got his first good look at its hands. They were divided into three parts: two double-wide “fingers” and what could only be described as an extending and remarkably dextrous thumb. There were no lines on the palms and no visible joints on the fingers or thumb.
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