Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  Jim splashed down into the water and rolled around. It was at its deepest about three feet, so he couldn't exactly hide. Kath fell on top of him and they rolled over and over, each acutely aware of the sexual presence of the other. Jim became knowledgeable about the extraordinary beauty of a woman's skin in the wet and dark. He slipped his hands again and again down her breasts, rubbing the nut-hard nipples with his palms.

  They sat in the shallows like two babies playing with each other. They splashed and giggled and squirmed at one another's tickles and most intimate invasions. He came to know by feel the clam within her pudendal thatch, and she stroked the rod of him and hefted his scrotum again and again, playing with his balls, rolling them between her babyfat fingers.

  Red light reflected on the pond. First it brought Kath to her senses. She was horrified: There was a radio car at the curb with its lights flashing. A policeman with a flashlight was hurrying along the bank toward them. He was followed by a small crowd of citizens.

  They had cavorted their way almost to the middle of the pond. The crowd was going to come between them and their clothes. "It's naked kids," shouted a voice as tight as wire.

  That was what collapsed the fairy-fort of their dreams.

  They stood up.

  "Run, Kath!"

  They could not go toward their clothes. There was no choice but to get out of the pond on the far side.

  Leaping like dolphins they surged from their water, their young limbs carrying them across the pond much faster than the bulging cop and his tow of inquisitors could make it around.

  The hedges and shrubs afforded some protection. But they dared not go back in the direction of their clothes lest the garments be discovered before they could put them on.

  Kathy was scared but she was also still excited. She was beyond concepts like fear. A creature of the night had emerged from the depths of her soul, an ancient maenad, the mystical being at her core.

  Jim was just plain scared. As he ran along, hopping in the thistles and briars, he kept thumping his penis and making little whistles of pain.

  "Why are you doing that?"

  "Gotta get it down, man! I don't want to go to jail like this!"

  They ran then like the wind. They fairly sailed out of the hedges and onto the wide meadow that surrounded the bandstand. Wind swept past their bodies and rushed in their hair; they flew as the witches must once have flown and suddenly they were in the street.

  A car caught them in its lights but the driver was so startled that he killed his engine. As they sailed down Dexter Street they could hear behind them the rattle of his starter turning over.

  "The oak! Follow me!"

  Kathy clambered up an oak, managing to get to the bottom most branch. Jim saw her plan: they could cross its branches and get onto her roof that way. The window to her room was right there.

  The car had started. It turned on two wheels and came roaring down Dexter. "Hurry, Kath!" '

  "Help me!"

  They were whispering as best they could. The O'Mallys were right in the front room listening to The Hour of Charm.

  He put his palms against her buttocks and shoved. She was so light, dear Kath! Then he came up behind her. One of his legs was caught square in the lights of the car. It screeched to a stop at the end of the walk.

  A man in suit and hat got out and came marching into the yard. Behind him in the car a woman could be heard bawling hysterically.

  "Get down out of that tree! What do you mean running around like that, you kids! How dare you!"

  The Hour of Charm turned off. Kath slipped into the open window of her room. Jim froze against the trunk of the tree. He prayed, "Dear blessed Virgin Mary I will offer up ten rosaries if you let me get away with this."

  Seamus O'Mally came onto his front porch. "What gives?" he said in his mellow brogue.

  The driver's attention was diverted for just a moment. It was all Jim needed. He crossed to the roof and was in the window in an instant.

  Kath was there. She pulled him into her closet and closed the door behind them.

  "Thank you," Jim breathed. Ten rosaries it would be. After a hell of a confession, of course.

  "Don't even breathe. Oh, Jimmy, what about our clothes? They'll find our stuff."

  "We'll say something, some lie. We were robbed and we got scared."

  "And took off all our clothes?"

  "People do crazy things when they get scared."

  "I've got it. They made us take off all our clothes! The robbers!"

  "Don't whisper so loud, somebody's coming!"

  Angie O'Mally's voice drifted up from below. "Be sure and check the attic. Don't forget the attic." Jim found his hand touching her breast again. It was just so beautiful!

  "It was a naked man! Possibly two naked men!"

  Her fingers squeezed the tip of his penis. She barely breathed, "I don't think I like that man."

  Seamus O'Mally's voice drifted up. "An odd thing. You're sure you saw this? And they climbed my tree?"

  Jim put his finger into her thatch, driving it deep. She groaned.

  Light burst in under the door. Jim gritted his teeth. Kath held her breath. He probed deeper and she tickled and they both almost fainted with the pleasure of it all. "Nobody in here," Seamus said.

  The light went out. Kath kissed Jim. She smashed into him and forced his lips open and jammed her tongue into his mouth. He felt as if he had become an electric fire of nerve endings.

  And then they were coupled together. "Oh it hurts," she breathed.

  "Sorry!"

  "No, it hurts and feels good at the same time!"

  Distantly they heard voices in the street and then the grinding of a starter. That was the signal they needed.

  They leaped to one another and their bodies pounded like two pile drivers, thundering against the floor.

  Downstairs there was absolute consternation. The Hour of Charm went off again and both elder O'Mallys looked in horror at their living-room ceiling.

  The chandelier was swaying, the plaster was thundering as if somebody was literally leaping up and down on it.

  "Burglars," Angie shouted.

  "The devil! It's squirrels, woman!"

  "The naked burglars, and they're in our baby's room!"

  "There ain't any naked burglars. Couldn't you see that man was daft? It's squirrels or it's rats!" Seamus went clumping back up the stairs, his pipe between his teeth.

  He got a tiny .410 shotgun out of his closet and went into his daughter's room to dispatch the varmints that had gained entry.

  The closet door was shaking like the boiler in the machine shop where he was foreman. "Must be a 'coon,"

  he muttered as he snapped a shell into the gun.

  He threw the door open. ,

  At first he did not understand what he was seeing. Wallowing like savages in a heap of dresses were two completely naked human beings. They were obviously doing what he always referred to as "their business"

  together.

  "The hell, that loony was right!"

  Such was the extremity of their passion that they moved in a blur. It never even occurred to him that his beloved daughter lay abnegated before him, not until they expended themselves and became suddenly as quiet as thieves.

  "Katherine O'Mally, oh Lord! And you, you Army tramp!"

  Jim couldn't think. So mad had been his pleasure, he had almost forgotten his own name. It took him a long time to notice that there were lights on. He burrowed up to the surface of clothes, pushing a girdle and a couple of slips away from his face.

  "Mr. O'Mally," he said in what sounded to him like the voice of a twelve-year-old, "I can explain."

  "Explain! Get out of my house, you home wrecker! How dare you sully my only daughter! Oh, Katie Kate, are you hurt, my dearest?"

  Mrs. O'Mally came in behind her husband. Jim had leaped to his feet. Now he grabbed the brassiere that had been tangled around his head and held it to conceal his still rigid penis. Why wouldn't the t
hing go down, anyway? Wasn't it supposed to, now?

  Mr. O'Mally had knelt down, seeking toward his daughter, who was barely visible in the pile of clothes. "My baby, has he hurt you, precious? Shall I kill him for you, beloved?"

  "Oh, Daddy," she gasped. "Daddy." He reached his huge hands into the clothes and lifted her out. She swooned in his lap. Her eyes opened, and she looked up at Jim. "Oh Daddy, I like to fuck!"

  That was enough for Seamus O'Mally. He fell back in a dead faint, dropping his daughter as he toppled.

  "We're getting married tomorrow," Jim shouted.

  "Yes! Oh, yes! And we're going to make love forever!"

  Angie O'Mally began keening. She knelt to her husband. "Oh, why did you die?" she moaned. One eye opened. He lifted his head. Very methodically, as if he hadn't fainted at all, he picked up his shotgun. "Young man, get out of this house. Katherine O'Mally, go and bring me my razor strap!"

  Jim heard the smack of the strap as he climbed down to the lawn. Twenty or not, she was getting it. He was furious but he was also helpless. He stole back to the park and found their clothes. By the time he had dressed he'd come more or less to his senses. Rather than appear again at the O'Mallys' door, he stuffed Katherine's things in their mailbox.

  He then went home to his own family.

  The next morning a very perplexed postman found the clothes.

  James Thomas Collins and Katherine Mary O'Mally were driven by their parents to Maryland where there was no waiting period, and married before a justice of the peace on July 14, 1947.

  The issue of their first night together miscarried exactly three months later, and I got another piece of this most extraordinary puzzle.

  I do not believe that the baby died. My strong suspicion is that it was taken from the mother, most probably by three fragile creatures in the dark-blue coveralls they tend to wear on night missions to populated areas.

  Undoubtedly they did their work with precision, following a tradition many hundreds of years old. I have found records of this sort of activity in the folklore of many human cultures. The women of Northern Mexico call them campeches and welcome their coming.

  Why would they be doing this, and why would it take so long? To more than one witness they have described themselves as "God's workers."

  It takes many generations to create the gold of a new species out of the clay of the old.

  The tiny spark of a child was delivered up a shaft of golden light to the one who would be its mother.

  She was a superb surgeon, and she operated immediately on the eyes and the skull. The rest of the child she did not touch, but bathed it rather in a pink fluid made from the blood of its natural mother.

  It prospered and lived and grew in a few months to its strange maturity.

  Katherine O'Mally Collins called it in her secret heart Seamus, and in tears she told me that she knew that it lived, and whispers love to it still when the night wind might carry her words to heaven.

  From the very heart of the mystery I believe—I hope—that her child listens.

  His encounter with the others had put Will Stone in a very awkward situation. The problem was that his experience was spectacularly strange, even irrational. It was no doubt intended by them to challenge his comfortable model of reality, to communicate the notion that they were not what he assumed.

  But all it really did was serve the psychosis of suspicion that underlay his personality.

  He said to me, "How could I possibly tell what I remembered—flying through the air and such? It was so totally absurd. I I'd have lost the most extraordinary job in the world." For a 'romantic and an adventurer, Will Stone was surprisingly cautious.

  The others' actions must have seemed spectacularly irrational, but I think rather that they were the result of very large-format thinking of a kind we have not yet developed.

  That possibility never occurred to Will. How could it have? He simply did not have sufficient intellectual scope.

  As far as he was concerned, the possibility that the "aliens" were working according to an irrational plan left him feeling very vulnerable indeed.

  Did it mean that reason was so flawed that they didn't use it? If so, then reason was actually irrational, and people who used it could never hope to outwit those who had surpassed it.

  If only Will had possessed the courage to sit the others down and say the truth: We do not understand.

  They were wedded to the straightforward assumption that the so-called aliens had a scout ship and that the larger body of aliens would be along soon. And yet Will's original intelligence estimate indicated that they had been here for at least sixty years prior to 1947. A search of folklore and legend would have turned up suggestions that their presence was much older.

  So the Roswell crash might not have been a scout ship from another planet on an initial reconnaissance mission. For the same reason that Will wouldn't admit the strangeness of his own experience, none of them would address that possibility.

  They preferred to pretend that they knew what they were dealing with, and invasion was something they could understand.

  In his own defense Will told me that he was too frightened to think clearly, that the screams of the poor sentry who disappeared into the sky were echoing day and night in his head. And that sneering voice: "We're gonna take you for a ride."

  Had they ever! There is something so wonderful about the idea of that dignified, serious man gliding over the streets of Roswell with an overseas cap in his hand—and then finding, to his horror, that the cap he'd taken to prove to himself that the incident had really happened had somehow come from the head of the very sentry who was missing!

  He has never thought that the others have a sense of humor. Of course not: victims never think that practical jokes are funny.

  There was also the sad side of it, the terrible side.

  They had searched what remained of the night for their lost comrade. The base sent up six helicopters with powerful searchlights and they crisscrossed the desert for miles around. Will watched them like stars gliding in the dark, and then saw the silver light of first sun on their Plexiglas cockpits.

  "No joy," the radio would crackle, "no joy, no joy."

  They organized themselves and set out on foot. Men linked arms and scuffled through the brush trying to find a button, a bit of cloth, anything more than his cap to tell them that PFC Flaherty had existed.

  No joy.

  By nine it had become obvious that they weren't going to find him.

  Even so the entire MP company turned out to search, and began bouncing off in all directions in their jeeps.

  Right on schedule at nine hundred hours the flatbed truck Sally Darby had sent down from Los Alamos arrived. It was huge and extremely well built, used for transporting experimental atomic weapons.

  Will noticed a profound change in the men of the detachment. They were sullen and silent. He was glad that the disk and bodies would be removed today. It was not clear to him that the AAF would let its men remain another night out here.

  They set about getting the disk onto the flatbed.

  The thing was so light that thirty men standing around the edges could with effort lift it off the ground. Their problem was that they couldn't move it more than a few feet, much less haul it onto the flatbed.

  Will was worried that they were going to have to bring in a crane and waste at least another forty-eight hours.

  He was considering bringing a CIG crew down from Washington to guard the disk if the Air Force withdrew its personnel.

  Then a very odd accident took place.

  The men had the disk and were moving slowly toward the truck. Lieutenant Hesseltine was calling out like a rowing master. "Step! Step! Step!" Each time the men would all make their prescribed movement, some stepping backward, others sideways, others forward, depending on their position around the circle. It was almost as if the disk had a gyroscope running somewhere inside. Every time they moved the thing it would resist and heave.
<
br />   Again Hesseltine shouted, "Step." Two of the men who were supposed to go forward went backward instead.

  They lost their grip on the underside of the smooth surface. One of them toppled back and fell.

  In an instant ten men were down and the disk was sliding out of the hands of the others. The fallen ones scrambled to get out from under.

  The disk did not drop like a rock. To their amazement it settled softly to the ground—a result of the semifunctional gravity motor. They soon learned to take advantage of the thing's subtle resistance to gravity.

  They would lift it and push it a distance.

  It would slide to the ground a few feet from where they had started.

  In this way they got it to the huge flatbed.

  As the men worked to lash it down, Will and the lieutenant turned their attention to the three alien bodies.

  They'd had chests of ice brought, but in those days they didn't possess decent insulation and nothing but slush had survived the desert heat.

  They opened the bag containing the freshest body, intending to check it before icing it down as best they could.

  The smell was dreadful. But more disturbing by far to Will was the degree of deterioration that had set in overnight. The flesh was sunken, the eyes shriveled and collapsed. There was a considerable amount of thick, maroon liquid in the bottom of the bag.

  "We've got to get this embalmed," Hesseltine said.

  Will looked at it in horror and amazement. Unless he did something fast there wasn't going to be anything left for the scientists. And this one—this body was the strangest of the three. The other two were obviously alien.

  But this one: Unless he missed his bet this was something very close to a human child.

  He acted with his characteristic decision and commandeered a helicopter, his objective being to get the body to Los Alamos as soon as he could.

  He gave Hesseltine instructions to wait with the disk, and then radioed Joe Rose to come up from Roswell and take command of the loading and transport process.

  They resealed the body in its rubberized bag and got it strapped onto the runner platform of the chopper. He got in beside the pilot and in a moment was on his way back to the base. Leaving the disk made him nervous, but he saw no alternative. He was by then deeply mired in the absurd and wasteful interservice rivalry that characterized the MAJIC project all through the forties and fifties. The Air Force had already created its Blue Team to organize recoveries of crashed disks, bodies and debris. Air Force and CIA would work in competition along parallel tracks for years. Unfettered by any congressional oversight, they lavished their energies on wasteful competition while the others—as always—proceeded with clear direction and careful method.