Crawlers

by John Shirley

  He wanted to quote Thoreau. We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled. He wanted to talk about the idea of a higher nature and a lower nature. He wanted to ask them when they’d last looked beyond the digital landscape; when they’d really opened up to the sky and the sea and the forests, and to one another—and ask if it were possible that their obsession with the technology of distraction was deafening them to the message of God’s creation.

  But Bert kept quiet. He kept his mouth shut because he knew he’d just come off pompous, and because teenagers justly despised self-righteous lecturers. Too, teenagers knew that if they were addicted to all these things, it was because they’d been conditioned to them by adults who were just as bad, or worse; who reduced them to a consumer demographic.

  So Bert just smiled and nodded and said they did well to hone their skills.

  After dinner, it was just getting dark when they drove to the Quiebra waterfront park for a view of the predicted meteor showers. As the sun moved toward the ocean, they walked along the sandy path between clumps of muck-reeds and stiff spare beach grass, watching for the legendary green flash in the otherwise neon-tangerine sunset.

  When the teens had walked on ahead a little ways, Lacey asked, “Bert, you know that metallic stuff we saw the other night, that seemed . . . like it was moving by itself ?”

  “Well, yeah. I remember. It did sort of seem—I’m not sure.”

  “Have you seen any more of it? Or anything else strange?”

  “Lots of strange things. Well, that night when my car died on us, there were some things. I thought we were being followed a couple of times. Just a feeling of being watched. But my imagination was working overtime out there.”

  She chuckled. Then she became thoughtful, her voice hushed as she went on. “You know, the Bank of Quiebra was looted. I heard a weird story about it. Something someone saw out their window. And Adair . . .”

  She told him about Adair coming to her with stories of her parents’ strange behavior. Mom’s behavior in the garage. Reinstall? Reinstall.

  “I told her that it was probably something perfectly normal going on—and she was just, you know, misinterpreting. That she should talk to her parents about it. She said she was . . . scared to. Not uncomfortable talking to them—scared.”

  “Scared to talk to them? Why?”

  “She said it was hard to explain. She seemed so sincere. And it’s not like I didn’t notice a lot of strange things lately about Suzanna and Nick myself. I did. I feel like I let Adair down. Like I turned my back on her when she needed me, Bert, by not taking it seriously enough. Now I wonder if it could be to do with all this other stuff.”

  “All what other stuff, exactly? What do you think it is?” Privately wondering if the other shoe was dropping here—if he was finding out Lacey was actually a bit crazy. That would be his luck with women, all right.

  “What is it? I don’t know. There’s so much secretiveness around here. I don’t think it was like that last time I was here. And weird things stolen all over town, and a woman at the café this morning said that someone was torturing animals around here. I asked her what made her think so, and she said she saw a bird with machine parts in it, like someone had shoved these things into its body and let it go.”

  “Jesus! What a grotesque—” He broke off, thinking. “Unless, maybe it was some kind of tracking device. Zoologists use them.”

  “The way she described it, I don’t think so. I guess I just think . . . there’s a story in this town. There’s something going on. I keep getting the feeling that people are hiding something. I’m going to look into it. Either it’s my journalist’s intuition, or I need to see a doctor.”

  Bert considered. “I have felt as if some people seem—weirdly distant. Like they’re doing something together, and they’re not including me—and I’m glad to be out of it. I mean, beyond my usual alienation. But . . .” He shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. Nothing, really.”

  “Maybe it’s more than nothing. But if you see anything—”

  Cal dropped back to them. “Hey, I saw that green flash thing! That flash that’s in the sunset sometimes.”

  He pointed and they peered at the setting sun, but the flash had passed; no one else saw it. They watched the seabirds, small black coots bobbing on the water; the coots were contrasted by elegant white seabirds vanishing into the surf, to come up half a minute later with small crabs in their beaks. The ever-present gulls rose and dipped.

  When the sky darkened enough so they could see the evanescent blue-white streaks of the meteor shower, Bert found himself reciting, “ ‘Who falls for love of God shall rise a star.’ ”

  Cal looked around. “Yeah, it’s all pretty and stuff.” Deliberately teenagering it up. “It’s sav CGI.” He grinned at his sister. “It’s good graphics.”

  Bert thought, The kid knows how a guy like me thinks even when I don’t say it out loud. It’s a mistake to underestimate these kids.

  Still, tell them the story. “When I lived back east,” Bert said, “I went to an art museum in Concord where they had a touring exhibition of the greatest impressionists. Some people came down to see it and they videotaped it. And they looked at the van Gogh through the camera lens—never once looked at it with their naked eye. Though they were there in the room with the original.”

  Lacey laughed and shook her head. “Yeah. I hear you.”

  Cal shrugged and looked annoyed. Sensing he was being lumped in with those clueless tourists.

  They walked on, and suddenly Lacey said, “Ben Jonson?”

  “What?” Bert said. “Oh, that line I quoted. Yes. You get a gold star,” and he patted her head.

  “Ha, ha, a gold star,” Cal muttered. “Fonn-ee.”

  Lacey took Bert’s arm, then, and for a while, after that, he felt that all was right with the world. So what if she might be a little crazy.

  She watched the falling stars. “They say meteors brought life to the earth—amino acids, proteins, or something that life is built up from probably came from some other world, and dropped into the ocean.” She looked out at the sea. “But was it by accident or design?”

  “I’ve always wondered. Maybe when you look close enough there’s no difference. There’s that whole ‘intelligent design’ controversy. But who knows.”

  Bert watched another blue-white scratch appear on what seemed the dark surface of the sky, another meteor. It seemed to him, for a moment, that the heavens were dramatizing the oneness of things, the above taking part in the below, the sky unifying with the earth. Below among the wet rocks a gull tugged at the decaying remains of a small manta ray, death cycling back into life again; the usual duality, separation of the individual from the whole, seemed removed for a moment.

  Was Lacey his last chance, and would she treat him, finally, as Juanita had done? Was he stuck, mired in his work? Had he made one too many fatal missteps in his life?

  Those doubts were always with him and had become part of him. Yet for a moment, feeling connected to some immeasurable wholeness glimpsed in the sky and horizon, stars and stone, he was set free.

  Lacey looked at him, as if sensing it. Her eyes were shadowed, but he could feel her regard.

  Then Adair broke the spell. So quietly Bert could barely make it out, she said, “Falling stars can be something else, too. Planes crashing or—satellites.”

  “There’s a great mystery about a fallen satellite,” Lacey explained, seeing Bert’s puzzled look.

  “Oh?”

  “They’re not supposed to talk about it. Something to do with their dad’s salvage work.”

  “Everything’s been fucked up since then,” Cal said suddenly, stopping to stare angrily up at the knitting clouds.

  Lacey looked at him but said nothing, and after a long, pensive moment they walked back to the car. Bert wondered what wasn’t being talked about; what hung in the air lik
e a meteorite, refusing to fall where it should.

  They drove back to the Pinecrest area without talking much, slowing now and then to look at the Christmas lights shining in strings of blinking charismatic colors against the houses. Car culture was big in Quiebra, and at one house a classic 1940s Plymouth was outlined in Christmas lights; just the car, not the house. And here was the O’Haras’ house, Adair said. It was like a starburst of lights—and as they stared, Bert realized it wasn’t just overdone, it was strangely done. The Christmas lights seemed randomly strung, or like the scruffy webs of black widows, lacking beautiful spiral symmetry but with their own arcane design. And the same strings of lights looped from the O’Haras’ to the house next door, which was completely dark, the blinking light-chains crisscrossing like scribbles. Yet almost in a recognizable pattern, a cryptic message of some kind, like the mutterings of a lunatic.

  Bert felt increasingly uneasy, looking at the patterns in the strings of lights. It was just as if a message was written there, in some language he couldn’t quite read.

  “Better get you kids home,” Bert said.

  He drove them right there, without any more delays.

  December 6

  Half an hour after school, Waylon found Mr. Morgenthal at his workbench in the electronics shop tinkering with some kind of radio receiver, it looked like.

  Waylon stepped in close to look at what Mr. Morgenthal was working on—curious about what he’d managed to salvage after the vandalism and theft. And then stepped back again. It was the smell. Mr. Morgenthal had a harsh smell about him, which wasn’t usual. It was like he hadn’t bathed. There was also a burning smell, like a toy train transformer that’d been left on too long. But maybe that was from the project—looked like he’d done some soldering.

  Waylon realized that Mr. Morgenthal was staring at him. But smiling. What was that look, like, all ironic? Had he forgotten some assignment?

  “So,” Waylon began, “you got a new project going after all, there?”

  “After all? It’s a satellite dish. It’s modified.”

  Waylon saw that it was one of the smaller satellite dishes that people put up, but Mr. Morgenthal had changed it, had soldered a lot of little parts to it in a mesh of wires. Hella sketchy, he thought.

  Mr. Morgenthal went on. “Modifying a satellite dish for greater power. There was a diagram in Popular Science.”

  He said it with that smile and that stare, as if testing to see what Waylon would think of the explanation.

  Waylon just nodded.

  “Was there something you needed, Waylon?”

  It really was like the guy was mad at him or something but had made up his mind not to say so. “No, I didn’t need anything special. Um, I guess you got some of your stuff back?”

  “My stuff ?”

  “That was stolen?”

  “Stolen?”

  “Uh, yeah? You know, the vandals and the stuff that was stolen?”

  “Nothing was stolen.” Mr. Morgenthal turned back to his tools. “That was just . . . a misunderstanding. I had given permission for the materials to be used and forgot about it. I have everything I need. However, class is going to be suspended for a while.”

  “Suspended? This one? Where do I go when I used to go to shop?”

  “Wherever you like.”

  “Yeah, well—” Waylon laughed. “—the principal might have some different ideas.”

  “Oh, you’ll find that Mr. Hernandez is completely in agreement. Now if you will excuse me.”

  “Sure.”

  No one would care where he went? That was cool. But then again, it sucked.

  Every kid he knew had picked up some sense of what you needed, to grow up healthy. How could you not get that, when they talked about it all the time in sitcoms and shows like Boston Public and TV movies and HBO specials and all that shit? “Yo, man, I got no role models, my uncle is all I got and he’s always fucking up and at home we’re all stayin up till three in the morning and shit, knamean? What? I’m sorry, I mean he’s always screwing up.”

  But, whatever. No electronics class, that was one more hour a day he could use for his investigation. Maybe it was all, destiny and shit.

  But still, it was fucked up.

  Waylon turned and walked slowly to the door of the classroom. Looking around as he went. Almost nothing was left in the room except the workbenches. All the students’ tools were gone along with the electronics.

  He looked at Mr. Morgenthal—and he got a feeling. Just a sad feeling.

  He went into the hall. Yes, definitely feeling sad and not knowing why. Like somebody had died but he didn’t know who.

  But then again, he did know: Mr. Morgenthal had died.

  12

  December 6

  Adair was almost home from school on that same clammy, overcast afternoon, with the sun seeming crabby and ungenerous behind chimney smoke and mist, when she saw old Mr. Garraty pull himself up onto the roof of his house.

  She stopped and stared, watching him dangle from the metal gutter along the edge of the roof, and thought his ladder must’ve fallen, somewhere, though she couldn’t see one. A cat poised on the roof, a tabby cat, as startled as Adair was. Maybe he was trying to get to the cat, and then the ladder went down.

  But there was no ladder.

  And the old man was doing a brisk pull-up, grabbing the corner of an eave to draw himself up onto the roof in a second, as easily as a cartoon superhero.

  “Mr. Garraty?” she blurted.

  He stood up and turned to look at her, his head turning remarkably far around on his shoulders. “Adair, isn’t it?” His body turned toward her, to match his head—or that’s how it seemed to her. It reminded her of Mason—that same illusion. His tool belt clacked as he turned, screwdrivers bumping into wrenches.

  He seemed to be leaning toward the ground a bit and should have pitched headlong to the grass, but he didn’t. He just stood there a little crookedly, smiling at her. A peculiar look in his eyes— though there wasn’t anything definitely wrong with that look.

  She cleared her throat. “You okay, Mr. Garraty?” She was dimly aware that there wasn’t much sense in asking if he was okay. In fact, he seemed unusually okay. He had just done something more suited for an Olympic gymnast than an old pensioner in Quiebra. “I mean, is your cat okay? Are you up there after your cat? Do you need . . . a ladder? Or anything?”

  He turned to look at the cat, and the instant he looked at it, the cat backed away hissing and vanished over the crown of the roof.

  “No, that particular parasite—that cat—is not my property. That’s a stray or a neighbor’s cat who’s been acting like he owns my roof. No. Not my cat. No.” He turned to look at her, and his expression was exactly the same as it had been. The same smile. The same appraising eyes that seemed to be weighing her up. “You’ve grown,” he said. “In the last few weeks.”

  She blinked. “I have?”

  “Yes. About an eighth inch.” Then he turned to look at his wife, Mrs. Garraty, who was clambering up the roof from the back of the house, something in her hand. She came to stand with the confidence of a circus performer on the peak of the roof. Just stood there, with a sort of satellite dish thing in her hands, a contrivance about the size of a garbage can lid. The comparison to a lid seemed natural because it looked to Adair like it had maybe been made partly from a metal garbage can lid, but with a lot of wires spread over its surface, radiating from the center.

  Then it registered: Mrs. Garraty hadn’t been out of her wheelchair for a couple of years at least. And now she was standing up on the roof of a house.

  Mrs. Garraty looked at Adair balefully, and then it was as if she remembered to smile, but the look stayed in her eyes.

  What a look it was—she had to be forty or so feet away and way above her on the roof, Adair decided, yet somehow that look came down at Adair like someone throwing a lawn dart at her head. Adair felt like sidestepping.

  “We’re putting up a sat
ellite dish,” Mrs. Garraty said. “My husband found it in Popular Mechanics. Do-it-yourself. Homemade. They’re quite popular. You’ll be seeing quite a few of these. Save a lot of money. Free satellite TV, young lady. And you can’t beat free, can you?”

  The whole conversation was taking place between the people on the roof and Adair on the ground, and Adair was getting a crick in her neck, but she couldn’t turn away, couldn’t help staring up at them. She felt someone else nearby, and turned to see Mr. Than, that nice old Vietnamese guy who lived next to the Garratys, standing in his yard with his rake in his hand, staring up at Mrs. Garraty, too. His mouth was open. He was as surprised as Adair.

  Mr. Than and Adair exchanged a look of mutual confusion: neither understood it, but neither one felt quite right about asking.

  “Chinese medicine,” Mr. Garraty said. “You should appreciate that, Than. We went to a Chinese doctor. He’s given us a marvelous . . .”

  He looked at his wife. She stared back at him.

  Then he nodded and turned back to Mr. Than.

  “. . . ginseng,” Mr. Garraty said. “He gave us a marvelous ginseng.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Than said. “This ginseng I must try! I take some, too, but nothing that—my goodness, do you think she is safe up there?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, Mr. Than.” Mrs. Garraty laughed. “As you can see, I’m more than fine. Glad to be out of that chair. Feeling much better now. Ever so much better. Here you go, dear.”

  She handed her husband the homemade satellite dish, as if she were handing him a box of tissue.

  Then she turned and walked confidently down the far side of the roof. She was out of Adair’s line of sight.

  And Adair heard a thump. It sounded exactly like Mrs. Garraty had fallen! “Oh, Mr. Garraty, was that—”

  Mr. Than had heard it, too. “Your wife—she is all right? I hear maybe something fall? Hey, Garraty, she okay?”