Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  After the waiter left, the man extended his hand. “I am Giuseppe.”

  “Condi,” she said, taking his hand to shake it. Instead, he held tightly, then turned her hand upward, kissing the center of her palm.

  It was an oddly intimate gesture and it sent an involuntary shiver through her.

  “Condi,” he said. “Like your secretary of state.”

  “Former secretary of state,” Condi said, “and no, not like that at all. It’s a nickname that stuck early that has no real relation to my given name.”

  Which she wasn’t about to tell him. Condi was short for Constance D. Platte, which was, she always contended, a stupid name. Her family called her Connie D., which her friends mercifully shortened to Condi nearly three decades before anyone had heard of Condoleezza Rice.

  Condi didn’t take her hand back. She let him continue to hold it. She figured as long as he touched her, she had the right to ask him rude questions.

  “So tell me, Giuseppe, what I should have a true interest in.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six AM, you will be one of the few people on the Steps. We will all cluster around the same spot, waiting for him to return.”

  She suppressed a sigh. He suddenly sounded like a religious nutball. “Him?”

  “We do not know his name. We call him the Dark Man.”

  The Dark Man—L’uomo Scuro. She liked how that sounded in Italian. It was a much better name than the figure, as she had been calling him.

  “We?” she asked.

  “Ah.” Giuseppe let go of her hand, giving it a tender pat before setting it on the table as if her skin were made of glass. “Not until I know who you are working for.”

  “I’m a reporter.” One of the few conditions she had was that she couldn’t reveal the name of the Organization. Her boss told her the reason for that was simple: whenever anyone mentioned the Organization of Strange Phenomena Ancient and Modern, everyone assumed that it had bankrolled the specific result—which, her boss had reminded her, it had not.

  “For whom do you report?” he asked.

  “I got laid off from a Colorado paper, the Rocky Mountain News,” she said. “Like so many of my colleagues, I am going to write a book. Unlike most of them, I am not going to write about politics or America or some environmental disaster.”

  “You’re going to write about the Dark Man.”

  “Why not?” she said. “No one has published a definitive work in English.”

  “No one has published a definitive work,” he said.

  She slid her hand back as the waiter set the cheese plate down. It was large, on heavy bone china, with a dozen different cheeses. He set smaller plates in front of her and Giuseppe, then topped off their wine glasses, and flitted away, like a man who assumed people on a date needed privacy.

  She took some cheese and some bread, making a small sandwich for herself. She never bothered to learn the names of the European cheeses, but she had come to recognize several, including some tart enough to go with the wine.

  Giuseppe took some cheese as well.

  “What’s your interest?” she asked.

  “I protect him,” Giuseppe said simply.

  “Against what?” she asked.

  He smiled, only this time there was no warmth in his face. “Against people like you,” he said.

  She left shortly after that. Even though he said he would pay for the food, she left some euros on the table, ignoring his protests.

  He made her uncomfortable; she didn’t want to be beholden to him.

  She took the long route back to her hotel, taking the Via Sistina to the Via Barberini because there would be more people and more light.

  The wine she drank settled uneasily in her stomach, leaving a sharp aftertaste. When she reached the Piazza Barberini, she paused beneath an awning over a closed shop. The traffic—usually awful here—had virtually disappeared. The only sound was the water pouring through Bernini’s famous fountain of Triton in the very center of the road.

  Her heart was pounding. She waited ten minutes, stepping back into the shadows, but Giuseppe hadn’t shown up.

  Apparently he had stopped following her, now that he knew who she was and what she was about.

  She hurried the long block to the Via Purificazione, then walked up the narrow street. Everything had shut down. She had to use her key to get into the hotel. The interior lights were on low. The night man had stepped away from the desk. She walked to the elevator, which seemed to take forever to reach the main floor.

  As she rode upwards, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. She found the number for the Organization, but she didn’t activate the call until she got inside her room and turned the tiny television to CNN International.

  It was the middle of the afternoon in Colorado. Her boss answered, sounding surprised to hear from her.

  “I had a strange experience,” she said.

  Then she told him all about Giuseppe, the way the man followed her, the way he had talked about the figure, and the fact that he had known exactly what time the “Dark Man” would appear.

  “I need someone to look up the term L’uomo Scuro,” she said. “And see if there are any notes about protectors. And I need it immediately.”

  Her boss didn’t question her. He promised to have someone call her in fifteen minutes.

  Unfortunately, fifteen minutes later, the person who called her was Ross.

  She had never learned Ross’s last name. She had worked with him before and he was, hands down, the best researcher on staff at the Organization. Unfortunately, he knew it, and made everyone else feel stupid.

  “Haven’t read your Dan Brown, huh?” Ross said by way of introduction.

  Already irritation threatened to overwhelm her. “I read the source material long before Dan Brown ever thought of writing The Da Vinci Code.” Listening to her own tone, she wondered who was trying to make whom feel stupid here. “I didn’t meet a flagellant monk tonight.”

  “Not saying you did,” Ross said, his tone dry and amused. “But you should have expected a secret society. You are in Rome, after all.”

  “Just tell me what you found,” she said.

  “The Dark Man has been part of Italian mythology about that spot since the Spanish Steps were built,” he said. “I thought you knew Italian. You should’ve found this stuff on your own.”

  “I never heard it called the Dark Man before tonight,” she said.

  “Hmm,” he said in a tone that completely condemned her for a lack of intellectual rigor. She tensed, then made herself breathe out slowly.

  She was hot, she was tired, and she had to get up early.

  “What else?” she asked.

  “He has his own society,” Ross said.

  “What’s the society called?”

  “That’s a question,” he said. “Some kind of protectorate, the Order of Something or Other. Very Dan Brown-like.”

  “It would help if I knew,” she said.

  “No one knows,” he said. “It could be this order or that order. What everyone does know—”

  And he emphasized “everyone,” as if she were the only person on the planet lacking this knowledge.

  “—is that if you try to hurt the Dark Man, someone will hurt you.”

  “Great,” she said.

  “You’re not trying to damage it, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t suppose this Order has put its vast knowledge about the Dark Man on the internet.”

  “It hasn’t, but a bunch of conspiracy theorists have,” he said. “They all have different theories.”

  “I’m sure I’ve found most of those,” she said.

  “Probably not,” Ross said. “But I don’t think it matters. It’s all the expected stuff anyway.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant by expected stuff, but she was sure she could find out. “Which one do you believe?”

  “It doesn’t matter which one I believe,” he said. “It
’s which one do they believe.”

  She suppressed a sigh, but she did roll her eyes, catching her reflection in the mirror across the room. She looked as exasperated as she felt.

  “Which one do they believe?” she asked.

  “Aliens,” he said. “They think this is an alien invader, left behind.”

  “Just one?” she asked.

  “Just one,” he said.

  “Who tries to attack all by his little lonesome every ten years?”

  “I didn’t make up the theory,” Ross said, sounding defensive for the first time. “They’re your nutcases.”

  “They’re not mine either,” she said, frowning. She hadn’t expected that. This was Italy after all. Catholic, superstitious, filled with saints and relics and dark magic, not filled with little green men and misunderstood weather balloons like Roswell, New Mexico.

  This time, she did sigh out loud.

  “Will they hurt me?” she asked.

  “Hurt you?” Ross repeated as if the sentence did not compute. “Maybe if you try to shoot the thing with your raygun. How the hell should I know?”

  “You’re the researcher,” she snapped. “You should’ve found out if they’re a threat.”

  “I’m good on short notice,” he said. “I’m just not perfect.”

  “Oh, I never doubted that,” she said, and hung up.

  Aliens. UFOs. That fit into Strange Phenomena, Ancient and Modern. She almost wished it was a ghost, though, or a trick of the light, some kind of natural predictable familiar phenomenon.

  She set the alarm on her phone. Five AM didn’t seem that far from now.

  She closed the curtains in her room, cranked up the air conditioning, and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  The alarm brought her out of it a moment later—or so it seemed. Five AM looked the same as midnight had, same darkness, same feel. She got up, turned on the lights, and took a quick shower.

  Then she grabbed her equipment bag and headed back to the Spanish Steps.

  The morning was cool, comparatively speaking. It had to be about 80 instead of the 100 that had stifled Rome for the past few days. She wondered whether fall would ever show up—and if it did, whether or not she would recognize it as a brand new season.

  She trudged up to the Spanish Steps, noting as she went how many merchants were already up, cleaning the small sidewalks in front of their shops, and rearranging the wares in the window. She bought a pastry from a cart vendor she’d never seen before and ate as she walked, decided that the pastry was so good the vendor probably sold out long before she normally got up.

  The carts at the top of the Spanish Steps were still shuttered. The professional beggars hadn’t arrived yet. The restaurant tables, full and covered with food when she had left them, were stacked one on top of the other near the restaurant’s doors.

  A small group of people hovered near the top of the steps, staring at the city unfolding before them. The thin light of dawn seemed brighter than an average day in Colorado and made Condi feel like she was very, very far from home.

  She walked past the group, not seeing anyone she recognized, and headed down the Steps until she was only a few yards from the spot where the figure would turn up.

  She set up the video camera she brought, turning it on so that she would get the moment of appearance. She would also make a recording on her phone as a backup.

  The rest of the equipment remained in the bag. She would only remove it if she needed it.

  She sat on her perch, the travertine steps surprisingly cool through her khaki pants, and waited. She wanted the figure to appear. She needed it to appear. She didn’t want to wait several more days for some kind of phenomenon that, until this point (at least for her), had only existed in artists’ renderings.

  Then Giuseppe sat down beside her, too close as usual. He wore a cologne as peppery as the wine had been the night before and just as strong. Clearly he had just gotten up as well.

  “So,” she said, irritated that he was sitting so close, irritated that he had frightened her the night before, irritated that he continued to bother her, “you guys think this is aliens, huh?”

  He looked at her in surprise. She had a hunch that was the first unguarded expression she had ever seen on his face.

  “You think I can’t do research?” she asked. “I had simply thought you guys were a rumor until last night.”

  She didn’t want to tell him she hadn’t heard of his group until he had talked to her a few hours ago.

  He didn’t say anything. She pulled out her phone, cupping it in her right hand.

  “What do you think this is,” she asked, “some kind of portal and the aliens send one guy to it every ten years or so? Is this an invading army that hasn’t quite got the concept down?”

  She didn’t try to cover the sarcasm in her voice.

  “Not aliens,” he said. “Alien.”

  “So you think it’s alien. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  He shook his head again. “An alien.”

  “That’s what I said.” She looked at the spot. “The one-by-one invading army. What keeps them out? Some kind of force field?”

  “No,” he said. “We think it’s one single alien. The same alien. That it’s always been the same alien.”

  He had her attention now. She moved her head so that she could watch him and the spot. “Over hundreds of years?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Is this a projection?”

  He shook his head. “He’s out of phase.”

  “Out of phase with what?” she asked.

  “Us,” he said.

  It took some explaining. Giuseppe had to switch from Italian to English and back again, because Condi didn’t know the scientific terms. Twice he had to use some Latin cognates, and she had to guess.

  It came down to this: the Dark Man, the figure, moved at a much slower rate through time. He had fallen or was injured or had done something that put him in this particular spot, and made him phase into human time perceptions only briefly.

  In spite of herself, she got caught up in the theory. “How do you know it’s time? Why can’t it be something else, like an image or something?”

  “Oh,” Giuseppe said, “it could be a parallel universe that crosses into ours. But still there is some linkage, and time happens much slower in that other place.”

  “And you’ve decided that he’s an alien and not a ghost because . . . ?”

  “Because there were sightings of his ship,” Giuseppe said.

  “When?” she asked.

  “As the Steps were being finished,” he said. “I can show you the literature.”

  “I’d like to see it,” she lied. She wished he weren’t a crazy. She wished his theory was based in some kind of reality. But she should have known it wasn’t when she first saw him trailing her with that protectiveness only the truly obsessed had toward the object of their obsession.

  He continued to talk about it, and she asked the occasional question, surreptitiously glancing at the clock on her phone. She was experiencing time slowly, and she was convinced it was because of Giuseppe and the conversation.

  “Don’t you have an assignment? Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” she asked.

  “I am doing it,” he said.

  She looked at him sideways. “Babysitting me?”

  He gave an elegant shrug. “I must be able to report that you did not hurt him.”

  “Report to whom?” she asked.

  He gave her a baleful look.

  “I don’t see why you’re so secretive,” she said. “Do you have aliens in your organization or are you afraid they’ll find you out?”

  “We do not know what they know,” he said. “We do not know what they see.”

  She remembered her mother saying something very similar when Condi asked about God. How can he watch billions of people? Condi had asked. Why would he care?

  The Bible says
he does, her mother said.

  But people wrote the Bible. What if it’s wrong?

  In exasperation, her mother had said, We do not know what God knows. We do not know what he sees.

  “What do you mean, what they see?” Condi said to Giuseppe. They had five minutes until the figure appeared.

  “Time and space,” he said, “they are different.”

  “I know,” she said, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice.

  “The aliens experience time differently. So we do not know how they perceive the space around them.”

  She frowned at him. “So if the Steps were torn down tomorrow . . .”

  “It would be, perhaps, like an earthquake to him. A sudden change. We do not know.”

  She looked at the spot on the Steps, which was still empty. “So you think the aliens are all around us, like the ultimate tourists. They walk the Spanish Steps like we do and we can’t perceive them?”

  “Something like that,” he said, looking away from her.

  “Then why do we see him?” she asked.

  “Perhaps because he has not moved,” he said. “Perhaps because he has crossed a little into our time.”

  Then he lowered his voice.

  “Perhaps because he is dead.”

  She shuddered—and at that very moment, the figure appeared. Even though she had expected it, she jumped. He—and it was clearly a he—was sprawled along the steps like he had fallen there.

  He was as big as she was, thicker than she imagined, and glossy black. The blackness looked shiny, like some kind of metal. She wanted to touch him, but didn’t dare, not with Giuseppe next to her.

  She checked to see if her cell phone was recording this. It was. Then she moved the phone to her other hand and removed some of her equipment from her bag. She tried not to take her gaze off the figure.

  He didn’t move. He looked like he should move. He looked like he could easily get up. Two arms, two legs, a torso—very humanlike, except that she saw no features. No face, just a smooth surface.

  She couldn’t even tell if he had fallen (if he had fallen) face-down or face-up.