The Light

by Francis CoCo

  “No, no,” Max assured her, putting his hand over hers and trying to calm her down, “no, don’t worry about that… it won’t...”

  “You don’t know! You don’t know any more than we do! How do you know what it might do? How do you know?”

  Max pulled his hand away. Angrily he said, “You’re right. I don’t. How do I fucking know what it might do? I don’t have a clue…It could do anything. I’ve never seen anything like that before- I don’t know.. I don’t know.”

  I got up and made myself a cup of coffee. Angela was crying.

  “Why are you crying?” I said, looking over my shoulder at her, “It didn’t do anything to us. It could have done anything to us and it didn’t...We were alone out there, if it were going to do anything to harm us, it already would have.”

  She wiped at her eyes and said, “I don’t know how you can be so calm...”

  “I’m not,” I said, “I just don’t think it’s time for us to freak out. Not yet.”

  Truthfully, I was as freaked out as she was but it’s what you did, in situations like that, you tried to make the other person not so upset, you tried to make the situation not seem as big of a deal as it was. And this was a big deal. I couldn’t even tell you how big of a deal, because I didn’t know yet. It wasn’t even on the charts really, and I had no clue as to what might happen now. Anything might happen, good or bad, but we would have to wait and see. Maybe, hopefully, nothing would happen at all.

  “I’m not gonna lie, I’m freaking,” said Max. He stood up and paced around for a minute. He mumbled something about needing to eat something and then opened the pantry.

  “Anyone want raisin bread?” he said, his back to us at the counter. He was putting pieces of bread in the toaster- getting the butter from the refrigerator, holding a knife.

  “No,” said Angela.

  He looked to me. I shook my head. Food was the very last thing I was thinking of. I didn’t know how he could eat.

  When his bread popped up from the toaster oven and he’d spread it with butter, he sat back down at the table.

  “Listen,” he said, turning to Angela, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t know what happened and I don’t know what’s going to happen. But we need to try and stay calm. Maybe that was it. We just saw, whatever that was, and that’s it…”

  “You know what’s weird?” I said, “we didn’t take a video or any pictures. Why didn’t we get our phones out? Take a picture?”

  “I didn’t even think of doing that,” Max said, “I was just trying to keep it together- to get out of there.”

  “I didn’t have my phone,” said Angela. Suddenly, I remembered, at work that day, she’d complained about forgetting her phone at home. So I guess that left me. Angela didn’t have her phone with her and Max was trying to drive, I was the one who should have pulled out my cell phone and at the very least, snapped a picture. But, for whatever reason, I didn’t think of it.

  “I don’t want to be alone.” Angela said.

  Max reached over and put his arm over the back of her chair, “Why don’t you stay here a few nights?”

  He looked across the table at me, “Why don’t you both stay here a few days? Until we know that we’re okay. Just until we know it’s not going to… I don’t know, I guess, just until we know we aren’t going to see it again.”

  I nodded.

  “What about work?” I said.

  “I can’t,” Angela said, looking at me, panicking,“I can’t… I can’t go in...”

  We couldn’t both miss work. Everyone had seen us leave together. People had seen us at the bar. If we both missed work it would look like we’d been out drinking or partying, they would never believe we were both sick on the same day.

  “Okay,” I said, “It’s fine. If I can just get some sleep, at least a few hours, then I can go in and you can call in sick...”

  “Thank you,” she said, relieved. She was a nervous wreck.

  I asked Max to point me in the direction of the guest room.

  Ten minutes later, I was lying in Max’s bed. Max and Angela were in the living room, watching a re-run of Jimmy Kimmel that had aired earlier in the evening. Probably around the time we’d had our fateful encounter. I lay in the dark room and listened to him deliver jokes and heard the laughter from the audience. Max and Angela sat silent. They didn’t laugh. Not one time.

  _____

  I told everyone at work that Angela had food poisoning. Morlen’s cooking, everyone joked. I told them the chili was bad.

  Getting through the day was not as hard as I thought it would be. I was actually, okay. I don’t think anyone even had the slightest idea that I’d been through something – I didn’t even know what to call it – an ordeal? I thought about what we’d seen, of course, I thought about the Light all day and wondered what it was and why we’d seen it, and a few times I felt a shiver up my spine when I really concentrated on it, really thought about it, but, for the most part, I was fine.

  On my lunch break, I went to Max’s and found him and Angela, on the back deck, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. I was as shocked as anything to find Angela smoking. I couldn’t believe it.

  “You’re smoking?” I said, when I saw her sitting at the wrought iron table, her blonde hair tangled around her head, no make-up, still in the clothes she’d worn to work the day before. She just shrugged and said, “I don’t know what to do. I feel like I need something.”

  Max said, “I’ve got work in a few hours...”

  Angela looked at him like she didn’t want him to leave. I told her I would be coming back from work when he went in.

  “We have to stick with our normal day to day,” Max said,“go on back to work, do our daily thing- and in the meantime, maybe we’ll figure this out. Find out what it was that we saw- and why we saw it.”

  I agreed. We couldn’t just sit here staring at each other and babysitting one another. We had to go to work, go back home.

  “You’ll have to return to work soon,” I said, sitting down beside her, “right? You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Not today. Probably not tomorrow either. What did you tell them?”

  “I told them you had food poisoning.”

  She nodded and exhaled smoke, “That’s good. I can miss at least two days for that.”

  “But after that?”

  She looked at me. She was really a mess. She was taking this encounter we’d had harder than any of us.

  “Listen,” I said, “something truly bizarre has happened- no getting around that- it was probably the craziest thing we’ll ever see in our lives, but, I think we’ll be okay...plus, it’s not doing you any good to miss work, sitting and thinking about it is only going to make you more scared.”

  I glanced at Max and he said, “I agree. I’ve been thinking about it and, you know, it’s weird, that’s for sure but, it’s alright, everything’s going to be fine.”

  Angela sat quiet.

  “Nothing happened last night,” Max said, optimistically, “when we came home, right? So, it’s not like something’s after us… if anything, we just seemed to have stumbled upon something, something strange, something we can’t explain.”

  “That’s true,” I said, more for Angela’s benefit than anything else, “some weird thing but there are a lot of weird things in nature. They’ve always been there. My grandmother’s friend once said she saw a flying cow- when she was a child- she swears it happened- and she’s a normal lady who taught second grade and goes to church, all kinds of things have happened that are unexplainable and now something has happened to us. Those things have existed since the Bible days. But, we’ve made it this far. The only difference is, that now we know about… about...” I couldn’t finish my sentence because I didn’t know what this was. But, whatever I was saying (and I didn’t even know because, really, I was just spouting nonsense- whatever came to mind) seemed to make Angela feel better as she perked up a little and said, “My mother saw a UFO once, when sh
e was a little girl. She swears she did. And, that was it. Only that one time and never again.”

  “See?” said Max, reaching for the pack of Lucky Strike’s sitting in the middle of the table and lighting one, “See? Just a one time deal. This was our one time deal.”

  He looked at me and winked. I didn’t like that wink. It made me feel like he didn’t trust what he was saying. I didn’t want anything else to happen, either. But I smiled back at him.

  “Can I have one of those?” Angela said, looking to the pack of cigarettes.

  “Sure,” said Max, pushing the pack towards her,“but if you keep up at this rate, you’re going to have to buy your own pack.”

  Chapter 4

  A week went by. Nothing happened. Angela missed two days and then she returned to work. She was still timid, still shaken from the experience but, for the most part, she handled it fine. No one would even have any clue that anything at all had happened, except, that she’d taken up the habit of smoking. When she returned to work, no one could believe that. Angela had grown up with the girls in our office- they had known her since Kindergarten and had never seen her so much as utter a curse word. She never drank, had never smoked, and here she was, going out on smoke breaks and chain smoking her way through lunch.

  “What in the world?” Tracy Whalum, said to me one day as we stood outside by the brick wall and Angela sat, a few feet away, by herself, staring at the ground and puffing away on her cigarette.

  I tried to act like it was no big deal, “Oh, that,” I said, glancing at Angela and shrugging my shoulders, “Uhm… well, she smoked one of Max’s cigarettes one night at Stitches and I think she liked it.”

  “Apparently,” Tracy said, smacking her gum and looking at Angela with disgust, “She was my son’s Bible School teacher a few years ago...”

  “So what?”

  “It’s just, you know, odd, that’s all, she used to be such a teetotaler.”

  She glanced over at Angela who didn’t even seem to notice she was being talked about.

  “A what?”

  “Nevermind,” said Tracy, “I just can’t understand why all of a sudden, she’s taken up smoking. What a gross habit.”

  I looked over at the eight or nine other girls from our office huddled together in the cold, sucking down nicotine. She didn’t seem to have a problem with them.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s disgusting.”

  _____

  “I think we should go back.”

  “What?” Max and I said in unison, looking at Angela.

  “I think we should go back there… to the road… see if anything happens.”

  “I thought you were terrified,” I said.

  “I am terrified, but… I don’t know… I feel like we should go back.”

  We were at Stitches. Max was behind the bar and Angela and I sat on the bar stools. We’d just ordered some appetizers and were drinking beer from the tap. I hated beer but Max had set it in front of me and I was trying my best to drink it. Why? I have no idea. I guess because, that’s what everyone else was doing. The football game was on and the bar was crowded, smoky- guys yelling at the television that hung in the corner and girls we knew from work sat all around us, drinking and laughing and having a grand time. It was a Sunday and it had been almost a month since our encounter. Three weeks exactly. We’d all gone back to our normal routines but we weren’t the same. We were a bit shell shocked, although, the only one who made it obvious to everyone else was Angela. Max and I had been able to mask it- but Angela had been noticeably different ever since that night. Besides smoking she now drank alcohol and cursed- things that may not sound like such a huge deal, but for her, were enormous changes.

  “What would you do, if we saw it again?” I said, picking up one of my chili cheese covered french fries and biting into it. I looked around, made sure no one was listening to our conversation.

  “Probably die. But I have to know. I can’t sit around worrying that it’s going to come get me. If we go back, and nothing happens, then at least maybe, I’ll agree with Max, that it was just a one time thing. Hopefully.”

  I looked across the bar at Max. He was placing clean glasses in the glass rack above the bar. He was thinking. He didn’t say a word- When he’d put up the last glass, he brought his hand to his face and dragged it along the stubble on his chin.

  “She might be right,” he said, “maybe we should go back.”

  “Really? You think we should?” Angela said, looking at him like she couldn’t believe that he agreed with her.

  “Probably not,” he said, “in all honesty, it’s likely to be a very bad idea. But, I guess I can see what you’re saying. I’d like to know if it were a one time thing, or if something is out there.”

  “We already know something’s out there,” I said, “why do we have to go back?”

  They both sat looking at me and so I said, “Fine. Let’s go back. I guess if it gets us, it gets us.”

  _____

  We went back. And the Light was there- waiting for us on the road. It was not a one time thing. This is what happened:

  A few days later, on Friday night, at about nine thirty, we rode in Max’s car towards Irondale. We were nervous, of course, but we also felt a little excited. Actually, a lot excited. We didn’t listen to the radio in the car, as we normally did, we just sat on the edge of our seats, anxious to get to the road, which was named Inferno Way. Angela and Max smoked constantly until we saw Inferno Way up ahead and then they both threw their cigarettes out and leaned forward in their seats. This time I was in the back seat and I pulled forward, holding onto Angela’s seat, my head poking between the two of them. I had my cell phone on my lap, ready to take a picture if I saw anything. We all stared at the road up ahead. Max was driving so slow. I looked behind us, to see if there were any other cars on the road. There weren’t.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said, “are we sure about this? Are we sure we want to do this?”

  “Not really,” said Max cautiously, but he kept driving.

  All of a sudden, I had the feeling like, if you get on a roller coaster and you’re excited about it- but then, once you’re in the car full of people, sitting at the top – about to drop down a hundred feet and suddenly, you don’t want to, but there’s nothing you can do. You can’t go back. You have to take that drop.

  I closed my eyes- tight- and placed my forehead on the back of the drivers seat. My heart felt like it was going to come out of my chest. It was an awful feeling.

  Angela looked back, placed her hand on my shoulder and kind of nudged me and said, “No, Paige. Don’t close your eyes. You’re in this just like we are.”

  I opened my eyes. “Okay, okay, let’s just do this quick,” I said. I held my cell phone, tight in my hand.

  Max was at the entrance to the road. He asked us if we were ready- we said we were.

  He pulled down the road.

  At first, it looked just as it had once the Light had disappeared, the first time- like a long dirt road with nothing but cornfields and the farm house at the end, and for a minute, I felt like, Okay, this is it, just an empty road, but once Max had driven about halfway down and we were in the same exact spot we had been when we saw the Light the first time- It (whatever It was) stepped out of the cornfields and stood in front of our car.

  “Oh goddammit!” Max blurted out, like he had not expected that to happen. Angela and I also screamed, but not words- just screams. Angela got down into the floor board of the passenger seat and began to lose it. She started screaming, “No, No, No! Go, Max!! GO!”

  I stared at the Light. It was a white light- brilliant- and not in the shape of anything, really- just a white brilliant light- standing (for lack of a better word,) in front of our car.

  Angela, cowered in the floorboard, her knees to her chest and her hands gripping the sides of her head. Again, she said, “Max, Go!”

  Now her eyes were closed. That wasn’t fair. I was staring at this thing and she was hiding in
the floorboard of the car with her eyes closed! And this whole thing had been her idea.

  Max seemed stuck- staring at the Light- frozen. He said, “I can’t- I, I can’t … turn around!”

  “You can!” she screamed back at him, “you can! Just do it!”

  She was looking up at him, pleading with her eyes for him to turn around. The road was narrow, it wasn’t easy to turn around in the middle of the road.

  Max said, “I’m going to have to pass it- I have to, so I can turn around in the driveway up there...”

  “You can’t!” I screamed, “no Max! You can’t pass it!!”

  I don’t know why, but suddenly, I was terrified of passing the Light. I was terrified to be sitting face to face with it, but I was more terrified at the idea of passing it. I looked at Max, in the driver’s seat. His knuckles were white. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard. I looked down at my phone. I knew I should snap a photo but I was petrified. What would happen if I did? Could I upset whatever this was? Did I have the nerve to try?

  “Can you drive in reverse?” I asked, meekly. All the energy was being drained from my body. I was cold with fear. Why in the world had we gone back? Were we insane? I just wanted off that road at that moment. The Light stayed where it was. It felt like some kind of stand off.

  Max put his arm up on the seat and looked back at the road. He turned his head back around, threw the car in reverse and put his foot to the floor. We began to go down the road, backwards. But, here’s the strange thing- Even though Max had his foot pressed to the floorboard- the car was going so slow.

  “Are we moving?” Angela said, looking up at him.

  Max, frantically looked down at the floorboard, “Why are we going so slow?” he said.

  The car felt like it was floating down the street backwards. In hind sight, this was probably a good thing because otherwise, I’m sure we would have wrecked, probably gotten stuck in a ditch and then we’d really be screwed. But, it was maddening- going so slow- and having this thing still in the middle of the road- in front of our car.