The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  Violet’s place was completely secluded, and until midnight, looking out into the dark woods and listening to alarmingly loud insect and animal sounds, Annie didn’t entirely appreciate what true seclusion really was. This was Stephen King-level isolation. Cujo was surely about to emerge from the brush.

  No sooner did she have that very thought when something large moved in the trees on the other side of the clearing in front of the porch. In a mild panic—mild because she was pretty safe where she was—she ran through all the obvious options from wolf to deer, then drifted to less obvious ones, like bear, moose, and (on loan from one of the cryptozoology books in the study) Bigfoot.

  Then a man emerged from the trees, and Annie’s heart stopped for a solid five seconds. He stood at the edge of the clearing, this man: motionless, like statue-motionless, like she couldn’t even see him breathing.

  The terrifying possibilities regarding who he was and what he was doing there were only beginning to churn through her already-over-imaginative brain when he moved again, two steps, enough for his face to be seen in the moonlight.

  It was Todd, Violet’s dad.

  Why he was wandering around in the woods at midnight was only one of a hundred questions. Another was, what was he even doing in Sorrow Falls, when as far as Annie knew he traveled for his job? And where was his car?

  She turned away from the window and went back to staring at the ceiling again.

  “I take it back again, Violet. Your family is really weird,” she said.

  12

  A Few Good Men

  “It happened like we told you,” the corporal said, with a trace of irritation. This wasn’t the best attitude to have when being questioned by a general, but he looked like he wasn’t working on a lot of sleep. General Morris didn’t seem too put off by it.

  “We have your statement,” Morris said. “And you’re not in any kind of trouble here, son. Mr. Somerville just wants to go over it. Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s just what people say before they start accusing people of things.”

  Ed stifled a laugh. He decided he liked Sam Corning, and could understand why Annie spoke well of him.

  Sam turned to Ed, but spoke to the general.

  “Has Mr. Somerville read our reports, sir?”

  They were sitting in Morris’s office, which had a surprisingly understated and temporary feel to it. The table in the center of the room and all the chairs were of the collapsible variety, and the room itself was the interior of one of the temporary-to-permanent trailers the base had. He wasn’t sure if this meant Morris thought this was only a brief assignment for him, or if he just didn’t have any things.

  They already questioned the other men who were a part of the incident, most recently Corporal Louboutin. Dillard Louboutin stood at attention the entire time and refused to comment on any element of his original statement other than to affirm the words contained within it. If it hadn’t been obvious from the behavior of the other four men they’d already spoken to, Dill’s attitude drove home the point: they all thought the army was looking for someone to blame for Hank Vogel’s death, and Ed was the man with the power to make that accusation.

  The men were closing rank and backing each other up. Usually, with something like this, at least one person would start in with dark hints that maybe someone did something they weren’t supposed to, but that hadn’t happened. It spoke to the six men having a strong leader at their center. Ed was pretty sure he was looking at that leader.

  “I’ve read the reports, yes,” Ed said. “Can I walk through your statement with you?”

  “You can do whatever you want to, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, I’m not an officer. I’m not even army.”

  “My mother raised me to be polite to my elders regardless, sir.”

  Ed caught Morris stifle a laugh of his own.

  “Son, you can relax,” the general said.

  “Yes sir, thank you sir,” Cornell said, visibly not relaxing.

  Ed sighed.

  “According to… well, everyone, Corporal Vogel was sleep-walking,” Ed said. “Had he ever done that before?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

  “You knew Vogel for some time, didn’t you?”

  “Knew of him, sir. We were neither friends nor foes. It’s a large base. I knew him by sight.”

  “Did he know Louboutin?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that.”

  “We did that, yes. As I’m sure you know.”

  “Not sure what you mean by that, sir.”

  “I only mean Dill Louboutin thinks highly of you and would confide if given the opportunity. So Vogel was sleepwalking, and nobody remembers him ever doing that before. Does anybody else have that problem?”

  Corning hesitated. It wasn’t a question he’d been expecting. “In the world, sir?”

  “On the base. In the barracks. Has anyone ever sleepwalked before?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, sir. That might be a question best asked of the doctor.”

  “You’re right, it is. I’ll take it up with her. What I’m getting at, corporal, is that I’d like to know just how unusual it was, seeing Vogel walk around like that.”

  “Not sure what you mean, sir. People get up and down all through the night. We roll three eight-hour shifts, people are always about. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to tell if one of them was sleepwalking or running to the toilet or heading off to guard duty. I was trying to get some sleep myself.”

  “Yet there was something different about Vogel that night.”

  The corporal looked as if he was about to deny this, then thought better of it. His testimony and Louboutin’s were united on this point: Dill Louboutin thought something was wrong with Hank Vogel and attempted to engage Vogel because of it. Sam Corning couldn’t very well turn around and claim otherwise.

  This was the line of questioning that had been missing from the original testimonies.

  The statements from the six men were pretty straightforward. Four only reported on what happened after Vogel began choking Louboutin, because before then those soldiers were uninvolved. The two other statements—from Sam and Dill—were so nearly identical they sounded like they’d been memorized ahead of time…, which was probably exactly what happened.

  “Not sure how to answer that, sir,” Sam admitted.

  “According to both of you, Corporal Louboutin tried to get Corporal Vogel’s attention by touching Vogel on the shoulder. Vogel responded by attempting to murder Louboutin. What I’d like to know is why Dill wanted to get Vogel’s attention in the first place. As you said, people were up and down all the time, and you wouldn’t necessarily know if one of them was sleepwalking or running to the bathroom or going out to howl at the moon. But Pickles knew something was up with Hank Vogel.”

  Corning blinked at Ed’s use of Louboutin’s nickname. It implied a level of familiarity with the soldiers Sam was perhaps not expecting.

  “You’d have to ask him,” Corning said.

  Ed met Sam’s gaze and considered the best way to proceed.

  “General,” Ed said, “this is a little unorthodox, but I wonder if I can speak to Sam alone for a few minutes? I know it’s your office, but—”

  “Not at all.” Morris stood, which made Sam stand. “Remain at ease, corporal.”

  “Sir.”

  “I mean sit down.”

  Sam sat.

  “Answer the man’s questions,” Morris said.

  “Yes sir.”

  The general left, and an uncomfortable silence took his place.

  “Just you and me, Sam,” Ed said. “There aren’t any listening devices in here, you’re not on camera, and my word holds no particular weight with the brass.”

  “Yes sir. But if I can ask… all that being true, what are you doing here? Seems to me you just ordered a general to vacate his own office.”

  Ed laughed.
“I guess I did, at that. Annie can pick ‘em, can’t she?”

  He looked confused, which was perhaps the first non-soldierly, human emotion Ed had seen him register. “How do you mean, sir?”

  “I mean, she speaks well of you, and she has high standards.”

  “Well I appreciate that, sir.”

  “Look, I just want to know what Dill noticed about Vogel. I’m asking you, because I think you noticed too, and because Annie told me I could trust you.”

  Annie told him no such thing, but he had a feeling if he asked, she would. He also wished she were there with him, but bringing her to a military interrogation—for, as informal as this was, it was still an interrogation—would have been impossible. Plus, she had enough to deal with.

  She’d have gotten an answer by now, though.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Somerville?” Sam asked.

  “Well, some of that’s confidential.”

  “Which part isn’t?”

  Ed smiled. “The part that really needs to know what happened to Hank Vogel isn’t. At least, not yet. Look: I think something’s going on in Sorrow Falls. Or maybe not some thing, so much as a lot of little sort-of somethings that add up to one big something, only we don’t know what things to add together yet. I’ve got a lot of pieces that don’t make sense yet, and this is one of them. Nobody here did anything wrong. Hank Vogel died of a brain aneurysm, and medically speaking everything that happened in his skull that night would have happened if he’d remained in his bunk. But he didn’t remain in his bunk, and I’d like to know why, and what his last few minutes of life on Earth looked like to someone who was there. Can you help me with that?”

  Sam didn’t answer for long enough that Ed was ready to give up.

  “He looked empty, sir,” Sam said. His eyes, which had been directed either straight-ahead or locked with Ed’s, had fallen to the floor.

  “Call me Ed, please. What do you mean, empty?”

  “Empty like he wasn’t in there.” His eyes drifted back up. “Nobody home. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, sir.”

  “Ed.”

  “Ed. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I… I can’t stop seeing his face sometimes. It wasn’t that he was sleepwalking. He was moving wrong. That’s what Pickles saw. Up close you could see…”

  He trailed off.

  “Sam, trust me when I tell you, there isn’t anything you could say here that I haven’t already heard. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people around town and I’ve heard a lot of pretty out-there things. At this point I’m willing to take all of it at face value. What could you see?”

  Sam fidgeted uncomfortably in the folding chair.

  “It’s hard to be honest about something like this. Not sure now if what I think I saw is something I’m just remembering wrong. But thinking about it now, it was like… like he was already dead. Like he wasn’t in there any more, and someone else was driving.”

  “A zombie.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “He didn’t want brains, either. I mean, if we’re going with zombie.”

  “How do you… did he speak?”

  “…yes. We didn’t want to tell anyone, it was too weird.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said ‘are you’.”

  “The letters? R and U?”

  “No, like it was part of a question but he couldn’t say the rest of it. I mean, it was flat. He said it flat, but he was asking, I think. It was almost as if he couldn’t figure out how to make more words than that.”

  “I wonder what he was trying to say?”

  “I don’t know. But I think he was looking for somebody.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It was what Dill noticed. Hank kept going bunk-to-bunk and staring at people. That’s what was happening before Dill called him over.”

  “Somebody and not something?”

  “That was my take. I don’t think it was Dill he was looking for though.”

  “And he responded to his name? When Louboutin called him?”

  “He responded to someone looking at him and making a sound. Everyone else was asleep or trying to be, pretty much. Could’ve been like with a bull. Wave a red blanket in front of him, and it’s not that he’s reacting to the color red, he’s reacting to the movement. Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “A lot of the guys are thinking what happened to Hank is… you heard of the space flu, right?”

  “You want to know if I think the space flu was what killed Corporal Vogel? Sam, I don’t think the space flu is real. The effect the ship has on people when they get close to it is real enough, but I don’t believe that has a long-term impact, and I don’t believe it harms at a distance. What’s happening now is the same thing that can happen in any situation like this. For every malady or accident, someone’s going to wonder if the big unexplained phenomenon at the bottom of the hill is the culprit. But at the same time, I’m here to piece together that phenomena, because at the end of the day there actually is a spaceship down there, and we still really don’t know what to expect from it.”

  “So maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Which means what happened to him could happen to us.”

  “I didn’t say that. Vogel died of an aneurysm. Those are pretty rare in healthy adults under forty.”

  “Sure, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Someone dies of something they shouldn’t have… that’s what gets people worried.”

  “Are you worried, Sam?”

  “Of course I am. But if you want to know what’s keeping me up nights, other than the memory of Hank’s face, it’s that I don’t know when the aneurysm killed him. Either it was before he got out of bed or after we tried to wake him up, and to be honest, I’m not sure I like either answer.”

  * * *

  Having involved himself in the army’s investigation of Vogel’s death, Ed ended up pulled into a series of meetings with higher-ups that lasted the entire day. He had no say in what was to become of the six men, or what the report Morris was supposed to file on the incident would look like. He had thoughts, though, and if there were people in uniform who wanted to hear them, he was there.

  Those thoughts were disjointed, and hardly involved Sam and Dill and the other four. Ed was starting to put pieces together, and now he had a word to use when talking to people. It was a preposterous word, but that was exactly what gave it value.

  It wasn’t until Monday that he had a chance to employ it. That was in the Sorrow Falls sheriff’s department.

  One of Ed’s first top-secret papers on Sorrow Falls leaned heavily on data from the sheriff. Even then, he was trying to prove something was amiss with the town by pointing out what was missing, and in this case what was missing was criminal behavior.

  Crime statistics before the ship landed and after the ship landed remained essentially the same in Sorrow Falls, which was just not possible. For one thing, the number of people inside the town line doubled. A concomitant doubling of criminal acts would have been too much to expect, but an increase was appropriate, and it hadn’t happened. For another thing, reported criminal acts in every town outside Sorrow Falls had gone up, and not just in Massachusetts. It was a nationwide phenomenon.

  Those numbers alone were enough to convince Ed something subtle was happening in the town, but they didn’t convince anyone else. The army’s presence is discouraging criminal behavior, he was told. When he pointed out that even when he added the reports of local peacekeeping actions to the sheriff’s statistics, the totals were still too low, he was told that the existence of a military force was a natural deterrent.

  Ed had mountains of evidence from every police action and war zone in history that said this wasn’t the way the world worked, but nobody would believe him.

  All that research meant he was very familiar with the sheriff’s department, even if they didn’t know him at all.
He knew they remained in the same spot as always, just a half block from City Hall on the northern end of Main, in a small set of offices with a parking lot roughly the same size as the building beside it. They had only two cells, ten desks and two offices. The total number of deputies was the same. They worked in rotating day/night twelve-hour shifts, and for the most part they handled minor area complaints like vandalism and domestic disputes. A tremendous amount of scholarly legal work had been performed by a number of very smart people to settle the question of who might investigate a murder in Sorrow Falls, but none of that work had been applied because in the three years since the local suspension of Posse Comitatus there hadn’t been a murder in the town.

  Yet somehow, Ed was the only one who thought this was weird.

  The sheriff’s name was Pete, which was short for Patricia Gallardo. Nobody called her Sheriff Gallardo or even Sheriff Patricia. She was Sheriff Pete.

  This began as a joke. Whether it was because the sheriff when the ship landed was a male (he retired only six months later, wealthy from a succession of speaking engagements, a book advance and a movie deal,) or due to some innate sexism which interpreted the title ‘sheriff’ as belonging to the male gender, everyone assumed the sheriff was a man. People coming into town—journalists, typically—kept asking to speak to ‘him’, so the deputies started calling her Pete and telling whoever was asking that “Pete will be right with you”, specifically so they could appreciate the look on their faces when they met her.

  Unlike the discovery that there was no Joanne behind Joanne’s Diner, Ed was aware that Pete was a woman. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons he didn’t get the runaround when showing up at the office Monday morning asking for her.

  “Mr. Somerville, is it?” She met him at the small waiting area, having only arrived a few minutes earlier with a large coffee from the donut shop up the street. “Come on in.”

  Her office was one of the two the building had, the other being for interrogations and private waiting and whatever else they could think to use it for. His research led him to the conclusion that it was barely used for much at all. On this morning it held two boxes of donuts.