“And I read it all. That was when I first knew—really, really knew—the UFOs are real. Them and the invisible ships. The disappearing people. How you get a ship, or a person, or anything you want to vanish. Yourself included.”
Rosa . . . how worried she must surely be getting . . .
“And the different kinds of UFO beings!” Rochelle said. “The ones that are more or less harmless, and the . . . others. Antigravity. How they travel to the stars and back, faster than that ship got from Philadelphia to Norfolk. Go up by going down . . . You sink into the earth, and there’s the moon below you—”
“Down, down, down,” I said. “Underground, to the caves of the dero.”
It was as if the words were inside me and just forced themselves out, in a voice that sounded strange even to me. The others sat and stared.
In the silence that followed I listened to the clock ticking.
“Listen, Rochelle,” Tom said finally. “Suppose Jessup was murdered, by the three men in black or whoever—”
“I never said it was the men in black.”
“Or the three Gypsies or whoever—”
“I never said it was the Gypsies either.”
“Well, whoever,” said Tom. “Why did they leave the book in the car for you to find? If the annotations were so important. Doesn’t it stand to reason they would have taken it with them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know about the annotations. Probably they thought it was just one more copy of The Case for the UFO. I didn’t know about the annotations when I took it. I just took it because—well, it was Morris’s book. How proud he always was of having written it.”
“Where is it now?” I asked.
Silence.
“You don’t have it, I gather?”
Again silence. Julian seemed to be smiling to himself, and that made me more uneasy even than the finger across the throat. Jump up from this chair right away, I instructed myself. Demand to be led to the telephone. Call Rosa. Tell her to find some way to get me away from here, right now.
I didn’t move.
“The police came for it the next day,” said Rochelle. “They’d noticed it was missing. They knew Daddy and I had been there. The deputy came out to our house. At first I lied about it, but then he said he was going to arrest Daddy, so I broke down. He took the book.”
“What did the police do with it?”
“Nobody knows,” said Rochelle. “They say they have no record.”
“So it’s gone now? Lost?”
Rochelle looked me full in the face. Her smile had turned strange, crafty. A lot like Julian’s. “Maybe lost,” she said. “Maybe not. Hard to find, maybe. But maybe not impossible.”
She had a plan; I was part of it. What I was supposed to do I didn’t yet know. I would not be the same after it was done. I had the feeling a crevasse was opening before me in the earth, or possibly the sky, and I was about to fall in.
“Not all that’s hard is impossible,” she said. “There are things people call impossible that people like us really ought to try. That’s what the SSS is about.”
I tried to speak. No sound came out.
“That’s why I’m here right now,” she said. “Not out parking with some twelfth-grade boy, listening to him talk about his college board scores while he’s trying to unhook my bra. That’s why we took for our emblem the trisected angle.”
And the winged horse? I wanted to ask. I might have been relieved, heartened by the contempt with which she spoke of those boys. If the crevasse in front of me hadn’t just opened about a hundred yards wider.
“When do you get your driver’s license?” she said. “No, I don’t mean when you’re sixteen. Julian’s already told you what we do about that.”
She looked toward Julian. He nodded. I must have been blushing. I wished I could hide somewhere until the blush subsided.
“Get your license,” she said. “Get it as soon as you can. Then we can head off for Coral Gables and vicinity. We’ll see what we can find, you and I.”
“It might mean missing a few weeks of school,” Julian said to me. “You can live with that, can’t you?”
Oh, yes, I could manage. A few weeks less of tedium, of mockery. Of feeling there was no one else like me in the world. Rochelle stood up, stretched. She arched herself back, her hands clasped high over her head. I turned my eyes away from her pushed-out breasts, even while knowing that was precisely where she wanted me to look.
“I can’t do all the driving myself,” she said.
CHAPTER 10
THE TOWER ROCHELLE HAD MENTIONED, WHICH WE WERE SUPPOSED to go up to for “observing,” was the silolike structure I’d seen when we first drove up to the house. A spiral staircase led up through it from the second floor. There weren’t any lights in the staircase; Julian had to go before us with a flashlight. The steps were high and narrow, and there were no landings. By the time we reached the top and stepped out onto a circular platform under the sky, I was completely out of breath.
Good thing there’s a railing, was my first thought as I looked about the moonlit platform. You could walk right off otherwise on a darkish night.
I was so disoriented, so distracted by my surroundings that it took me a few moments to realize the others had disappeared somewhere and I’d been left alone. I began to panic, to be afraid they’d locked some door behind me and I was trapped here in the moonlight. I was about to call out. But just then a light flashed from within a small domed hutlike structure at the center of the platform. From inside I heard laughter.
I started toward the doorway of the hut. I caught a glimpse, inside, of two bodies twisting against each other. I thought I heard clothes softly rubbing. There was another laugh. A gleaming white hand appeared, pressed against the back of a neck, amid short blondish hairs.
Julian stepped around the hut. Evidently he’d been outside too, on the other side of the hut from me. “Tom’s setting it up for you,” he said. “On the northwest quadrant.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. At that moment I could not have cared less. All I felt was my stomach clutching with grief and disappointment, at the knowledge that she was Tom’s after all.
Rochelle and Tom stepped out through the doorway. The entrance was low; Rochelle, but not Tom, had to stoop to come out. They held hands. Tom’s hair was mussed, and one strap of Rochelle’s evening gown had fallen off her shoulder. Tom gave a loud, harsh laugh and went back into the hut.
Rochelle replaced her strap and smiled at me.
“Isn’t it awful,” she said. “There’s only room in there for two people, one at the telescope and one at the table. Some nights you could just freeze, waiting out here.”
I looked up at the moon. I didn’t trust myself to say anything.
“All right, Danny,” said Julian. “You can go in now. Go in, and see what you can see.”
Tom sat at a wooden table, a large notebook in front of him. A kerosene lamp burned on the table. From the telescope came a loud ticking sound.
“See where the eyepiece is?” Tom said. “I’d adjusted it for myself. You may have to bend over a little.”
I put my right eye—or, more exactly, the right lens of my glasses—to the eyepiece of the telescope. I saw only a featureless lunar glare.
“Take your glasses off,” said Tom. “It’s better that way. Focus with the eyepiece. That’ll make up for your not having the glasses.”
I took off my glasses and tried again. I could feel my eyelashes brush against the eyepiece when I blinked.
“Try to relax your eyes,” said Tom. “You’ll see better. I can cover the lamp, if that’s disturbing you.”
I turned the eyepiece first counterclockwise, then clockwise. Craters and ridges seemed to emerge from the blur, then sink back into it. Finally I hit the right spot. The features stood out with almost uncanny clarity. I had no idea where on the moon I was.
“I think I’ve got it,” I said.
“Good,” said Tom. “What do you see?”
“There’s two big craters. The one on the left looks a lot deeper than the one on the right. There’s a lot of little pockmarks around them, particularly the one on the left.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Something kind of like—like a W shape, I think. Underneath the crater on the right. If the whole thing were upside down, it might be kind of like a curved eyebrow. With the two craters as two eyes.”
“Good,” said Tom. “Damn good. That eyebrow, or W, is Schröter’s Valley. The crater it’s under is Herodotus. The one off to the left is Aristarchus. And actually the whole thing is upside down. Everything you see through a telescope is upside down, did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“See anything inside Aristarchus?”
“Something right in the middle of it, I think. Looks very bright.”
“That’s the mountain peak in the middle. Lots of craters have them. You’re a damn good observer, you know that?”
“Thank you,” I said, and felt myself blush with unwished-for pleasure at the compliment.
“Anything else there?”
“Some lines, or stripes, I think, running from the middle of the crater to the outside. And there’s—wait a minute.”
Something was happening in Aristarchus that even I could recognize as extraordinary. Just inside the crater’s rim, on the upper left, a pinpoint of bright red had suddenly appeared. As I watched, it blossomed into a shining red globe, very much like the drop of blood that had welled up from my fingertip earlier that evening. I waited for it to burst, to run, to wash the crater floor with blood. But nothing happened. The drop, or whatever it was, remained stable.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”
“What? What?”
“A shining red spot. Or maybe a sphere, I’m not sure. It just sprang up out of the side of the crater. Want to take a look?”
“No. By the time I get the eyepiece adjusted it may have changed, and you need to see it. Just be damn sure you remember what you see.”
“It’s starting to fade now.”
“OK, OK.” I heard his ballpoint pen scribbling in the notebook. “Goddamn it, I forgot to write down when you first saw it. How long have you been looking at it now?”
“I’m not sure. Not much more than a minute, I don’t think.”
“And it’s fading, you say?”
“It’s practically gone now.”
“Show’s probably over then.”
I stood up from the eyepiece and stretched. “There’s a chair over by the wall,” said Tom, “if you want to sit down.”
I slumped into the chair. I felt drained, as if I’d just seen something the watching of which demanded all my strength. Bathed in moonlight, Rochelle stood in the doorway. “Danny had a sighting?” she said.
“A real doozy,” said Tom.
“What was it?” I said to her.
I don’t know why I expected her to know.
She shrugged. “ ‘The earth hath bubbles,’ ” she said, “ ‘as the water has. And these are of them.’ ”
“What?”
“Macbeth. Act One, Scene Three. We studied it in English class last month.”
“And the moon has them too?”
She didn’t answer. She looked off into the distance.
“Why don’t we take a walk?” she said to me. “In the moonlight.”
She walked toward the railing. I began to follow her. Then I stopped.
“Come on,” she said. “What are you afraid of? That I’ll push you over the edge?”
The thought had crossed my mind. I plucked up my courage and walked to the railing. She was leaning on the railing, and I leaned there too, beside her. I imagined we were standing together on the deck of a ship sailing through a midnight sea, only this was the middle of the air. I didn’t dare look down toward the ground.
“What did you mean,” she said, “at the dinner table when you talked about going down to the caves of the dero?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know. I think it was just a joke. It just came out of me. I don’t know why I said it.”
“It’s not a joke. You know that.”
Everything inside me turned cold. I clenched both my hands around the railing, for safety.
“The dero caves are not a joke,” Rochelle said. “Richard Shaver’s welding gun—or whatever was talking to him—was telling him the truth. Mostly the truth anyway.”
“The dero are real. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Them. Or something like them. I wouldn’t want to swear to the name. Shaver sometimes calls them the abandondero, you know. The abandoned ones.”
Richard Sharpe Shaver. The Pennsylvania metalworker, his name so comical, his messages from the subsurface world so relentlessly horrid. The world of those left behind when the Elder Races—
“Left for the stars,” said Rochelle. Without realizing it, I must have spoken my thoughts aloud. “They knew they were being poisoned by radiation from the aging sun. They were withering; they were dying—”
“ ‘They seemed to age quickly,’” I said. Like a certain woman I knew: prematurely aged, withered, though I seldom noticed unless I looked at old photos. “ ‘Girls of twenty soon appeared to be old women.’ ”
Rochelle nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You know more than you let on, don’t you? You know the Shaver literature; you can quote it by heart. So you know that’s why the Elder Gods left earth in their spaceships. They left the dero behind them here to absorb the radiation poison. That’s how the dero got so weird. But you knew all that already.”
I thought: I didn’t know it was true.
“I won’t swear to the details,” said Rochelle. “Or exactly what kinds of things these . . . things . . . are. There’s a continuum. We still don’t know the—what’s the word?—taxonomy of what lies along it. We get only glimpses here and there. I doubt if Shaver really understands it. I’m sure he doesn’t, actually. He’s not a great thinker. I know; I’ve met him.”
Where? How? But these people seemed to go everywhere, know everybody. “And the things they do?” I said. “To the ones they kidnap—into their caves—”
“Yes. It’s true. The thirst, the burnings, the impalements—all of that’s true. But don’t ask for details. Please. You really don’t want . . .”
Her voice trailed off. Her features twisted in pain and sorrow. I thought I saw her trying to frame the word No! with her mouth. But no sound came out. Her face wrinkled and withered and fell away, like an old woman’s, so that at last only her eyes, huge and unblinking, remained her own, staring at me through a layer of unshed tears.
Shaver was wrong, I thought. It isn’t the sun that poisons us. It’s the moonlight.
“We’re going back down,” Tom called out. “Anybody who wants to come is welcome.”
The light in the hut was off. Julian, carrying the flashlight, had already disappeared down the spiral staircase. Tom followed.
“We’d better go,” said Rochelle. I looked back at her and was relieved to see once more the beautiful girl who’d sat beside the chessboard.
“They’ll leave us here,” she said. “That’s just the way they are. And I don’t have a light.”
CHAPTER 11
THE STAIRWELL WAS DARK WHEN WE FOLLOWED TOM AND Julian through the door. Their flashlight was small and faint beneath us. I couldn’t see, and hadn’t remembered, the high step at the very beginning.
“Danny!” said Rochelle. “Are you all right?”
“Twisted my ankle, I think. Why aren’t they stopping?”
“Don’t worry about it. Hold my arm, and lean on me. We don’t need their flashlight. I’ve been up and down this staircase a couple of hundred times.”
So I hobbled down step by step, in total darkness, for what seemed like half an hour. When she led me at last into the second-floor hallway, it no longer felt like the same house we’d left earlier in the evening.
“Where are Julia
n and Tom?” I asked.
She peered carefully to her left. “Not here, it doesn’t seem like. And not here either,” she said, looking to her right. “Where do you suppose they are?”
“I really wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Then I wouldn’t know either.”
She stood facing me, very close. She smiled, warmly, enticingly. It was as if her weird transformation hadn’t happened at all.
“You know,” she said, “you didn’t have to let go of my arm.”
I tried to lift my hand, to take her arm again. It would not move.
“I’ve been wondering all evening,” she said, “how you’d look without your glasses.”
She reached up and took them off. “Oh, nice,” she said. “Very, very nice.” She raised her left index finger to my eyebrow and lightly traced the outline of my eye socket. “Marvelous socket. And a scrumptious curve here,” she said, moving her finger up the bridge of my nose and then down to the tip. “And you cover it all up with glasses. Why do you do it?”
“I can’t see without them,” I said.
“Ever hear of contact lenses? Ever read the Bausch and Lomb brochures? My glasses are twice as thick as yours, I’ll bet, when I’m not wearing my contacts.”
“I’ve worn glasses since I was almost six,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean you have to keep on wearing them.”
I don’t know where she laid my glasses. She didn’t move her one hand from my face, yet the other was behind my neck, pressing me gently toward her. Something furry, which after a moment I recognized as Mehitabel the cat, rubbed against my leg. I didn’t look down, didn’t kick it away. I stroked Rochelle’s smooth, shining hair and bare shoulders, down to the edge of her evening gown.
“There’s a zipper there somewhere,” she murmured. “Might be worth pulling on, just to see what happens.”
She began to kiss me, delicately running her tongue over my lips, back and forth against my teeth.
“ ’Bout time you learned to unhook a bra,” she said.
“Aren’t you Tom’s girlfriend?”
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