It was dark in the underdeck, but the child was in the light of the moon.
Something struck Dan, then, hit him like an axe blow between the eyes. He was in a loud, echoing space looking down through a round hole, and there was a surface far below glistening silver just like this, in moonlight just like this. He felt in that moment a longing so powerful that it seemed to stop his blood, to cripple him with a sense of loss that might actually be larger than he could contain. For a moment, he was disoriented, as if detached from the ground, and he fell forward.
Then next thing he knew, somebody was calling him. Far away.
“Dad! Oh my God. Mom! Mom!”
Then footsteps, then he was aware that he’d fallen, and his head—his head hurt. That was it, he’d hit his head on a beam. Katelyn and Conner were there, they were terrified.
No problem, had to calm them down. “Oops,” he croaked.
“Dan, don’t move.”
He sat up. “I about knocked myself silly.”
“What happened, honey?”
“I was—” He looked around the cold, dark space. “I hit my head. One of the beams. I thought those kids had come back.”
“What kids?”
“Paulie and his buddies.”
“What were they doing in our yard?”
“It’s a long story, Mom. And there was somebody out there just now.” He pointed. “Something, anyway. It was an owl, right over there. A barn owl standing beside the pool.”
There was nothing in the backyard now except the pool itself, gray in the moonlight, and beyond it the strip of woods that separated all the houses from a cornfield that fronted on Wilton Road.
Nothing more was said about the incident. Katelyn spent some time, then, with her son. She already knew all that had happened. Maggie had called, full of apologies. The boys had overstepped. Paulie would resume the old friendship, she would make sure of that.
She left him listening to a Leonard Cohen CD, another of his private eccentricities. God forbid that any of the other children should ever find those CDs, or his audio books of things like James Joyce’s fantastically obscure and prolix Finnegan’s Wake, from which he drew some sort of equally obscure comfort. Maybe he even understood it, who could know?
She took a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses up to their bedroom, and drank some wine with her husband. No more Conner until the morning. They lay together, then, with the light of the westering moon falling on their naked bodies, and the wine in them. Dan said, “You want to give it a try?”
“With no diaphragm?”
“Clean and clear.”
She kissed him. “I do, I do.”
“Oh, wow, hey—” He reached over, got his wineglass and raised it. “To the next genius Callaghan. If we make it.”
“Okay, listen, you—I do want to, but this is not the right moment, Dan, and you know that.”
“The tenure will come.”
“The tenure may come. And when it does, we celebrate.” She laughed a little. “By doing this incredibly profound thing of making another child. But, Dan, if you do not get it, then—”
“The tenure will come!”
“Marcie is a complex, difficult human being.”
He threw himself back on the bed. She laid a hand on his head.
“You sure you’re okay, Dan?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, you know there’s no beam down there you could’ve hit your head on. So that’s not what happened.”
He knew it. He allowed himself to consider the possibility of a seizure. He’d had them as a child, he remembered them, they would start with an aura that involved seeing his planetarium lights, then progress to this bizarre, echoing room where there would be unspeakable things, human bodies with no skin, giant flies—and then it would be morning, and he’d wake up perfectly fine.
He had never told a soul about the seizures, and he didn’t intend to tell Katelyn now. They were, perhaps, one of the reasons that he had become a physiological psychologist. His own suffering had led him to a fascination with the mechanics and abnormalities of the brain.
They slept then, joined to the sleeping world of man, a place that is different by night, that is not at all what it seems.
They did not sleep alone, though. They were watched, and carefully watched. Minds very different from our own, with objectives and needs completely beyond the imagining of the Callaghans, drew conclusions about what they saw, and acted on those conclusions.
Deep in the night, they acted, and Marcie Cotton became the latest victim of a great and intricate terror.
And then things went wrong. Very, very wrong.
FOUR
OAK ROAD WAS SO QUIET at 3 A.M. that you could hear the whispering fall of individual pine needles as they dropped in the woods that separated the houses from the farmer’s field behind them. So when screams erupted, every human being and all the animals woke up instantly.
Marcie Cotton also heard the cries, and an expressionless voice repeating again and again, “What can we do to help you stop screaming?” Only when she felt herself suck breath, and realized that the narrow, black cot from which she could not rise was not her bed, did she connect with the fact that the screaming was coming from her. She thought: nightmare. And then she screamed again.
THERE WERE FOUR FAMILIES LIVING at the end of Oak Road, all Bell College faculty. The last house on the dead end was occupied by the Jefferses, Nancy and Chris, and their baby daughter. Beside them were the Callaghans, next the Warners, Harley and Maggie, Paulie and Amy. The house closest to the beginning of Oak Road belonged to the Keltons, two parents and two teenage sons.
At the Kelton house, Manrico, the family dog, sat up and snorted, then stood and commenced barking. The two teenagers leaped out of bed and started pulling on their pants.
Nancy Jeffers also screamed, and Chris, the youthful head of the physics department, jumped up as if there was a snake in the bed. Out the bedroom window, he saw a glow through the woods. “Dear God there’s a fire,” he shouted, pulling on a pair of rubber overshoes and an overcoat.
THE TRIAD HAD BEEN COMMANDED to bring Marcie Cotton to Dan Callaghan. The collective wanted them to bond her to him, so that she would do anything to make sure his tenure bid succeeded. There must be no chance that the Callaghans would leave Wilton, where every street, alley, basement, attic, and mind was known to the collective. An attack on the Callaghans was inevitable, and the collective’s plan to defend them had been constructed around their staying in the town.
Important work, certainly, but not all that they intended to do on this night. There was a reason this particular triad called themselves the Three Thieves . . . which was their imperfect ability to handle temptation. And Marcie was such very strong temptation.
PAULIE WARNER RAN INTO HIS parents’ room, shouting that the Keltons’ house was on fire. Harley Warner said to his wife, “My God, they might be trapped.”
Maggie went to the window. “Is that a fire? It’s very steady.”
“Somebody’s really screaming,” Amy said, coming in behind her brother.
“Let’s get over there,” Paulie said.
Harley was pulling on his jeans. “Not you kids.”
“Aw, Dad!”
“Paulie, not until I know what’s going on out there.” He did not want his children exposed to whatever might be happening over there, not given the agony he was hearing in those screams.
THE MORE MARCIE SCREAMED, THE more excited the Three Thieves became. They knew they were too low, they knew they should quiet her, they knew there was a dog nearby, and they could not control dogs. But they also knew that they could reach into her and taste of her emotions, and the taste would fill them with a delicious fire that their kind did not possess, the fire of strong feeling. Man might not be intelligent enough to save himself from the environmental imbalance overpopulation had caused on his planet, but his emotional genius was beyond compare.
They dug into her gushi
ng terror like wolves digging into the flowing guts of a deer . . . and the collective at first reacted with surprise. Then it raged.
Conner thought the female voice was his mother screaming, and she thought that it was him. They met in the living room, and threw their arms around each other. Then Dan said, “There’s a light in the field.” From their perspective on their rear deck, it was clear that none of the houses were involved.
Conner and Katelyn stayed behind while Dan, wearing slippers and a robe, went out onto the deck and down into the backyard. He carried a flashlight.
Their scraggly yard was quiet. The toys of summer—the slide, the swing set, the empty aboveground pool—were sentinels in the stark light of the setting moon. He moved toward the glow, which was in the field beyond the end of the yard, past a stand of narrow third- or fourth-growth pines.
Katelyn and Conner came out on the deck.
“I think it’s a fire in the field,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, God, somebody help me! Somebody help me!”
Katelyn clutched her son. “Conner, we’re going back in.”
Conner broke away from her and went racing down the deck stairs. “Look at that,” he yelled.
As he and Dan crossed the yard, hurrying toward the thin woods, a huge light loomed up from below the tree line. They stopped, stunned by this second moon rising.
Katelyn arrived beside them. “Conner, put this on.”
“Thanks, Mom!” He dug his arms into a jacket. “You know what that is?”
“No.”
Dan walked closer to the edge of the woods. “Can we help you?” he shouted.
“Don’t go too close, Dad.”
The thing seemed to wobble, then rise.
“It’s moving this way, Dan!”
It hung above the woods. Not a sound, now.
“I think it’s a balloon,” Katelyn said.
Then more screams whipped out, shrill to cracking.
“A balloon is on fire!” Katelyn shouted.
The three of them ran again, fumbling in the brush, guided by the light.
“Who in the world would be up in a hot-air balloon at night?” Conner asked. “And that’s not fire, that’s a piezoelectric effect of some kind. Look at it shimmer.”
“It’s a student,” Katelyn said. “Something’s gone wrong with some prank.”
It wasn’t anything to do with hazing, not in February, but it could indeed be a prank. Every house that backed onto the field was occupied by a Bell College professor.
THE THREE THIEVES LOOKED OUT across the electromagnetic haze that flowed off the wires with which humans surrounded their shelters. Sharp eyes watched Conner and Dan.
DAN PAUSED IN THE WOODS. “Maybe nothing’s gone wrong. Maybe the screaming is the prank.”
“I hope so,” Katelyn said, calmer now, embracing this most reasonable of probabilities.
“Come on,” Conner said.
Before them, as they left the woods, they saw people running toward the object from various directions, Harley Warner, but not Paulie or his mother or sister, Chris and Nancy Jeffers, and the entire Kelton family, robes flying, Manrico barking furiously, but hanging well back. Jimbo Kelton was using a video camera, and Nancy Jeffers held her cell phone out like some kind of shield, no doubt taking pictures with it.
Another scream pealed out.
Dan shouted, “DO YOU NEED HELP?” He hoped it was just a prank because Bell did not need adverse publicity, not with the sort of enrollment problems faced by a small college located at the burnt-out end of a bus line that only served what the college brochure gamely called “the sophisticated little city of Wilton.” What sophistication there might be in a row of closed stores and a grain elevator was anybody’s guess.
“Oh, God, God!”
The words seemed to ring in the trees, to leave their narrow trunks trembling.
“Can’t you see that she’s in real trouble?” Conner yelled. He took off toward the object.
THE ONE WATCHED CONNER, WHILE the Two and the Three regarded Marcie with the reverent cunning of boys in a candy store. The Two drew closer, now pressing his face into her churning aura. Angry static bounced around the tiny space—the collective was furious that they were not performing as directed.
Which made little difference. The thousand grays who were here were spread all over the planet, feeding in Brazil and Britain and China, mining gravitite in the iron deposits of New York, extracting Helium 3 fuel on the moon. They were linked to the great collective, yes, but it was moving toward Earth far more slowly than the lead group, so what could it actually do? Nothing, and they would carry out its orders . . . eventually.
The Three Thieves would have been more efficient with Marcie, but the luscious fears, the darting hopes, the bright, wet desires that filled her smooth flesh were just too much of a temptation. Dan Callaghan was awake anyway, so the whole expedition was a waste. They might as well make of it whatever they could.
The Two, as the negative pole of the triad, showed her a long needle. Her eyes widened as she saw the silver of it appearing out of the dark that surrounded her. She could not see the Thieves, of course, they were too careful for that.
He plunged the needle into her forehead and she shrieked and they gobbled her agony . . . for the moments that it lasted feeling as alive as their distant ancestors must have, before they had enhanced themselves with machine intelligence, and lost contact with the only thing that mattered, in the end, which was feeling.
Without it, life was ongoing death, and to find it again, crossing a galaxy was as nothing, not even if the journey took fifty generations, not even if it took a thousand.
From a billion times a billion miles away, they had seen Earth glowing with emotion. It had drawn them like excited moths to its mystery, first in hundreds, then in thousands, and soon the billions would come to drink the healing waters of the human soul . . . if all went well.
THE KELTONS WENT CLOSE, RUNNING low like actors on a movie battlefield. It occurred to Dan that Jimbo Kelton might be recording the prank for the later amusement of fellow perpetrators.
All the people in the neighborhood were not only known to each other, they counted one another as friends. Nancy and Chris were dear friends of Katelyn and Dan. Kelton was a historian, working at the far end of the campus from the Hall of Science, but still a member of the cozy little Oak Road crowd. The Warners and the Callaghans, were very close—or had been.
Nancy clutched her cell phone to her ear. Dan felt for his, miraculously found it in a pocket of his jacket. He punched in 9-1-1. “This is Dr. Daniel Callaghan, one-oh-three Oak Road. There’s a fire in the field behind our house that borders Wilton Road. Somebody’s trapped in it.”
The screams lost form, became a continuous roar of pain.
Dan closed his cell phone while the dispatcher was still talking. He was now convinced that this was serious. Those screams were real. He took off after Conner, going flat-out.
“Don’t let him near it,” Katelyn howled, passing him in her pursuit of her son.
As Dan ran, he looked for the basket, for the burning student, but he could see only the fearsome glare, like looking into a thousand car headlights or a flashbulb that would not quit. He shielded his eyes and struggled closer. “Conner! Conner where are you?”
“I can’t see him, Dan! CONNER! CONNER!”
Another scream came, trembling and high, desolate with agony, then the object wavered a little in the air. Far off, the thin wail of a siren could be heard, then more sirens, getting louder.
“Conner, oh thank God!”
He was with the Kelton boys, his small form hidden in the bulk of their teenage bodies.
“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” Katelyn said.
“Mom!”
“Come on!” She took him by the wrist, yanked him away, heading back toward their empty house.
“No!” He broke away.
And suddenly she was te
rribly afraid. Afraid for her son. He was vulnerable—to what, she did not know, but she knew that he was vulnerable.
“Conner, please, I am begging you. I am begging you right now to come back with me.”
“Mom, I think I know what this is!”
“Conner, no. You have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s not right and it’s dangerous.”
He threw his arms around her. “Mom, don’t worry.” In an instant, he had broken away and was running back into the light.
The Thieves were concerned now. Conner should not be here, and they could feel the fury and the fear of the whole collective. Of course everybody was scared: their survival depended on this child, who had been bred through fifty human generations.
Katelyn had the awful and frightening sense that the thing was somehow watching her son. She took off after him, her feet slamming into the winterhard ground, and she tackled him and brought him down.
It made him cry out in astonishment. Katelyn had never disciplined him physically. Such a thing was unthinkable, to humiliate a brilliant child in that way—or any child, for that matter.
She got up on all fours, crying, trying to keep herself between him and the thing. She had the hideous feeling that it would somehow suck him into its fire, and he would join the poor woman who was screaming there.
He stood up. Glaring down at her, he turned away from the object and strode back toward the house. Thanking God in her heart, she followed her son home.
FIVE
THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT HANDED COLONEL Robert Langford a sheet of paper. “My God,” he said as he read it.
“Sir?”
“This is under the blanket,” he said. The young man, who was not cleared to hear what was about to be said, left the room.
The glowboy that had been snooping around Wilton, Kentucky, had just done something that Rob had never seen, and that he was quite sure no monitor had seen from the beginning of this mission, which dated back to 1942.
The Grays Page 6