The night Savior had gained his name was a Friday, and Lemmet had been walking back to school having left his gym shoes behind. The Cale boys were coming up the other way, pissed at being kept late, their wrists smarting from a caning one of the masters had given out privately. Expecting an empty road, Lemmet had come rushing around a corner and run right into them. He had struck Ben flush in the stomach with a full body blow, then, to avoid getting grabbed and beaten, Lemmet had swung a terrified punch at Ben’s chest and made his getaway.
He ran for the only place he felt safe: the forest. The boys raced after him and would have caught him had Lemmet not used his last strength to leap up Savior’s trunk and pull himself out of sight.
Huffing and puffing, Ben and Jim Junior had stumbled past, still hollering insults. For days afterward, Lemmet had been terrified of running into them again, but by the time he went back to school their resentments had redirected elsewhere.
That evening, perched in Savior’s highest branches where he seemed like a fly at the end of a fishing rod overlooking the whole world, he had seen the glory of his small town for the first time. The sun dipping beyond the hills, the shadows stretching like fingers through the valley, the chirping of the roosting birds in the trees, the lights of the cars moving like shiny beetles back and forth along the road.
It was kind of like an oil painting, he thought. There was one in the hallway of his school of a field of cows in summertime. When you looked too close all you could see were little spots of color, some good, some bad, but when you stepped back it all merged together into a single masterpiece. Muirford, close up, had its pretty colors: the promenade along the side of the river, the modern-art sculpture that was the new town library, and its dirty ones—the hollow-cheeked, skinny guys who hung around at the back of the supermarket, the arcade near the bookshop which had burned down last year—but from a distance it was a picture. Lemmet had never been anywhere else and had no intention of ever leaving. It might not be the Heaven Mom often evangelized about, but it was good enough.
Tonight, with Dad and Mom involved in a heated debate about something they had seen on TV, Lemmet really needed Savior. The sun had just set and the forest was shadow between the trees, but he could have walked this way in the dark. He knew the knots and boughs of every tree in this section of the forest, touching them as he went as though greeting long-lost brothers. Finally, Savior appeared in front of him, tilted up through the foliage of the other trees, claiming the night sky for itself.
Lemmet broke into a run. His feet felt sure and solid on the ground, the placement of each step ingrained in muscle memory. Eight steps from his jumping point, seven, six, five, four, three—
As he bent his knees, he struck something hard and stumbled forward. He stuck out his hands to parry himself and found them full of dry, spiny pine needles. Both shins stung from the impact and he twisted over and pulled his legs close, rubbing his shins furiously as he tried to ward off tears.
It was difficult to see in the gloom what the thing was, but in the last light through the trees it shone like a kind of metal. It was a stretched oval shape and was lodged in the space where Savior’s roots were exposed, with one end pointing up like a submarine returned to the surface.
Although he couldn’t see how far it went into the ground, it appeared to be about seven feet long and three feet wide, although the end was pointed like a plane’s nose cone.
Lemmet glanced up at the sky, wishing it was dawn instead of dusk. Unless he went back to the house for a flashlight, soon he wouldn’t be able to see it at all. Worried that his mind might actually be playing tricks on him, he reached out and put a hand on its surface.
It was hard and grainy, like stone.
And it was warm.
He jerked his hand away as if it might bite him, but when he tentatively touched it again he found the heat was slowly dying away. Whatever the thing was, it had just appeared. With his nerve slowly growing, he ran his hands over the top surface, looking for markings.
“Lemmet!”
The call jerked him around. It was only Dad calling to him from the house, but the tension was like a string that had snapped taut. His heart started to race, and feeling a sudden knot of fear, he hurried back through the trees to where Dad was standing out on the back porch.
“Inside, boy,” Dad said. “It’s getting late. What have I told you?”
There was an extra tension in Dad too, and when Lemmet ran inside, he saw his mother sitting in front of the television, one hand playing with her lip as she keened forward to watch some political broadcast. An old man in a grey suit was reading out something about constitutions and segregations and a whole bunch of other stuff that Lemmet didn’t really understand, so he ran on up to his room. There, as he tried to read books or play video games, the possibilities of the thing in the woods chewed at him, refusing to let him relax, sucking out the fun of everything until he turned off his light and sat by the window, staring out at the dark as if he might start seeing flashing lights descending from the night sky.
He wanted to slip out early in the morning to see if the thing was still there, but his mother was waiting in the kitchen for him with breakfast already made. As his parents crowded and clustered him, asking him inane questions about his wellbeing as if he had been diagnosed with cancer in the night, he started to wonder what was wrong. The television was on—one of Mom’s big no-nos over breakfast—although the sound was down low.
“Good luck at school today, son,” Dad said, as Lemmet grabbed his bag and headed for the door. Again, he thought about cutting through the woods, but both his parents walked him to the door, something they never did. Something was definitely up, and it was hard to believe that it was coincidence.
There were four empty seats in his classroom. One of them belonged to Timothy Lane, Lemmet’s best friend. He had agonized during the walk to school over whether to bring Tim into the circle about the thing in the woods, finally deciding that a partner in decision-making might be a useful choice. Now he was back to going solo. Tim had never been absent before, though, yet when the roll call was done at the beginning of his first class, Tim wasn’t mentioned as being sick.
After lunch there was a special assembly. Lemmet stood in line with the rest of his class and was able to pick out at least thirty kids who had disappeared overnight. Both the Cale boys were still there, but Johnny Miggins, whose father was the town dentist, was gone, as was Beth Tanner, the pretty girl in the class above Lemmet who was rumored to have kissed a boy at last year’s school Christmas fair. Lemmet didn’t know what her father did, but whenever he saw him around town he was wearing a grey suit, as if every time he bought something with color the world would suck it straight out.
“You may be wondering what has happened to some of your classmates,” intoned Mr. Preswich, the principal. “I’m afraid they won’t be coming back to the school. Some students have been withdrawn and sent to a new school out of the county. At this time, we don’t have any more details than that, but I’m sure you’ll all benefit from the additional teacher-time and enjoy the challenge of making new friends . . .”
He droned on for a few minutes longer about values and school traditions and a whole bunch of other official stuff that had the kids around Lemmet shuffling their feet. When they finally went back to class, Miss Stephens, Lemmet’s homeroom teacher, looked flustered and a little awkward as if expecting a barrage of difficult questions, but everyone was so bored from the principal’s speech that they were happy to just get on with whatever lessons were left in the day. Lemmet had begun to daydream about what might be inside the thing in the woods when the bell rang, cutting through his thoughts like a big, lumbering bus.
Some kind of protest was going on when he left, a group of people with placards on sticks they were banging against the road. Lemmet was forced to take the promenade along the riverfront to get past them, but even when they were out of sight he could still hear the sounds of unrest: people chanting, the
tinkle of glass shattering, the wail of a distant siren.
Most of Muirford’s small commercial district sat nestled in a sweeping arc of the river, so by the time Lemmet had managed to circle back around to his road, people from the outer suburbs had begun to converge on the town to see what all the fuss was about. Lemmet recognized Ben and Anders Stapleton from Stapleton Farm, Jenny and Burke and Lee Simpkins from the stables out near the waterworks. They all looked pretty mad, their faces red, their eyes focused on some place in the distance. Lemmet figured that whatever was going on, the safest place to be was probably the forest, so he turned off the road as quickly as he could and climbed up through the trees until he saw the irregular angle of Savior poking out of the canopy further up the slope.
He half-wondered if the thing would be gone, that he had imagined it, but as he climbed up over the crest just below Savior’s angled trunk, he saw it was still there, glinting a kind of dark alloy color like the wheels on Tim’s dad’s Mercedes.
With sunlight still streaming down through the trees, Lemmet was able to get a better look at the thing than he had last night. It looked like a metal coffin, slightly rounded at each end, a little longer and thinner than the ones his grandparents had been buried in. His first assessment was that Savior had shifted in the night and exposed something buried beneath, but there was no sign of any newly disturbed earth around the tree’s roots, and in fact while the soil looked packed up where it had allowed the coffin to fit, it didn’t look fresh either, as if this thing had appeared years ago and Lemmet had failed to notice it before now. In fact, the only thing that suggested it had appeared recently was the black scorch marks in the wood where it had nestled against Savior’s protruding roots.
He reached out a hand to touch it, no longer afraid while it was daylight, but it was as cold now as anything else made of metal. His confidence growing, he clambered up and over it, looking for the creases and joins he had tried to find the night before. Unlike other coffins he had seen, it was perfectly smooth, as if it had been cast in a single form rather than closed and sealed.
Only on the bottom corner was a shape that differed from the rest of it, a circle about the size of his hand with ten smaller circles inside. They were also made of the same steel material but moved slightly when he touched them.
Buttons made out of cast iron. He had never known of such a thing.
Lemmet climbed up on Savior to look down on the metal pod from above. The mystery was now twofold—where had it come from, and what was inside? Could it be some kind of bomb, perhaps a nuclear missile that had gone off course? Had it come out of the sky there would surely be some kind of impact crater, so that meant it couldn’t be a UFO, but anything else was still possible.
Lemmet was just wondering if he could get a hammer and prise out one of the buttons when an explosion came from down in the town.
Around him, the pine needles shook with the shockwave. Lemmet crawled up along Savior’s bough until the town opened out below him.
One of the buildings in the business district was on fire. He could still hear the murmur of the crowd, but the roar of the fire was louder. He couldn’t be quite sure, but he thought it was the council offices. Why would anyone want to blow that up? It was just a bunch of fat old people in suits who made speeches on television. Dad used to shout at them when they came on, but after a few minutes he would huff off into the kitchen, get a beer, and then turn the TV over to a baseball game, so what they were talking about couldn’t be that bad.
The crowd seemed to be angry though, and the sirens that were coming from both ends of the town suggested that the police weren’t too pleased either.
Lemmet shimmied back down to the pod. He only had half an hour before dinner, and with all the upheaval going on in the town, he might not have a better chance to get the thing open and find out what was inside.
He ran his hands over the surface again, looking for an opening, but, as before, he found not a crack anywhere on the pod’s casing. There was only the strange metal-buttoned keypad. Frustrated, he dug a rock out of the soil and slammed it against the side, but it just made a dull clump, like a hard nut being cracked against wood, and when he ran his finger over the point where he had struck it, there was not a single scratch.
The keypad was the only answer. It made sense that they were digits from zero to nine like on a regular keypad. And if the keypad was the only external feature on the pod, it made sense that the correct code would open it.
Lemmet tentatively pressed a button. It was hard, like a stiff piano key, but it depressed a clear half a centimeter before meeting resistance. He tried what he guessed would be 1-2-3-4, and then stopped.
What if it actually opened?
Another explosion sounded down in the town, and Lemmet lost his nerve, jumping down off the pod and dashing away through the trees, not stopping until he had broken through the bushes at the end of his parents’ garden.
The house was empty. The television was still on, showing a local news station that was broadcasting a live feed of the riot in the town. Lemmet sat down to watch. A reporter stood with the riot at his back, shouting to explain over the noise about how some new policy of segregation had divided the town. There was that word again. Lemmet really ought to look it up.
Then the scene cut to an aerial shot taken he guessed from the roof of the town hotel, looking down on a smaller building that was gutted with fire. Lemmet stared as he recognized Johnny Miggins’s dad’s dental clinic. Lemmet involuntarily put a hand up to touch his mouth. His parents dragged him there every six months for a checkup. Did this mean that he wouldn’t have to go to the dentist anymore?
He jumped up as Dad came stomping in, closely followed by Mom. Lemmet gasped. Dad had a gash on the side of his face that was streaming blood down to his jaw.
“Oh, Carl, don’t let him see it,” Mom said, steering Dad towards the kitchen. To Lemmet she said, “Don’t you have some homework to do?” Then, seeing the TV, she marched over and switched it off with one savage jab of her finger. “Upstairs, Lem. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
“They’re going to tear the damn place apart,” Dad was saying from the kitchen. “We should go up to your mother’s for a few days.”
“We can’t just take Lemmet out of school—”
Dad’s hand slammed down on a worktop. “Didn’t stop the Greens, did it? Or Michael James? You want my opinion? Miggins got what he asked for by putting his name to that paper—”
Mom pulled the kitchen door shut, and Lemmet headed for his room as the argument continued behind the closed door. He hated it when his parents argued, but this was different from the usual type—he could tell that this time they were united against a common enemy. He wondered if he ought to tell them about the pod in the woods. Perhaps they’d let him join their club.
When Mom called him down for dinner an hour later, Dad wasn’t there. Mom gave an absent wave of her hand and said he had gone out to see what was going on. Then she marched off to the kitchen, retrieved a plate of beans and rice, and then lowered it to the table with a sudden show of tenderness, even pausing to smile at Lemmet, as if just noticing he was there.
“I imagine you’re wondering what’s going on,” she said, sitting down across from him and steepling her hands under her chin. She had, apparently, already eaten.
“Not really,” he answered.
“Well, things have to change a little,” she said, continuing as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s all okay, though. Your dad still has his job, you’re not going to change schools . . . everything will be all right.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She stared at him for a few seconds longer, but he really just wanted her to go away. Whatever was going on down in the town was adults’ stuff. His priority was the kids’ stuff—the metal pod that had appeared in the forest.
What could be inside? His heart hoped it was gold or some other kind of treasure, but his head said it was probably something nasty, like rad
ioactive waste. The material looked strong enough to contain the center of a star, but if he never got it open, he would never know.
Mom had gone to the sofa. Lemmet ate in silence while she pretended to look through yesterday’s newspaper. Finally, he sensed the resolve in her snapping with a sudden shuffle of movement, and she snatched up the remote and switched on the TV.
A segment about the riots had just finished, and Mom groaned, as if it was the only thing in the world she had wanted to see. The news switched to some feature from across the state on a factory closure, then it came back to the closing section, the Oddballs segment. It was the only part Lemmet liked, so he shuffled his chair across to see it better. Yesterday it had been about a family of goldfish found in a stream that had mutated to have two tails each. Lemmet wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but apparently the extra tail had made them too fast for predators to catch them, and as a result, their population was getting out of control.
The reporter, Mal MacKinlay, was picking his way through a field with a microphone in hand, the shoes out of shot hopefully less impressive than his snappy black suit as he made his way across a muddy section. As usual, his ultra-smug grin seemed to take up half his face.
“Have you checked your backyards recently, folks?” he said, turning to peer into the camera, the microphone poised beneath his grin. “Might be a good idea. You don’t want to get a shock like the Filmers of Martinswood had this afternoon.” He stepped around a thicket of long grass, and Lemmet’s eyes went wide.
“There it is,” Mal said, pointing at the dark cobalt of the pod lying in the mud. “What’s this, you’re wondering? A pot of gold? The lair of a very modern vampire?” He turned to the camera and flashed another award-winning grin. “Well, the truth is, the Filmers have no idea. Donald Filmer was out doing his rounds this morning, and practically tripped over this thing.”
The camera cut to an overweight redneck in a plaid shirt, fat forearms crossed over a sloping stomach. “I came around to check on the heifers and it was just sitting there,” the man said. “Now, what’s a thing like that showing up in my field for? You know what I first thought?”
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