My Cousin, the Alien

by Pamela F. Service

  Ethan wanted to keep going, but I stopped at the next floor. “Look, that guy probably caught an elevator to the bottom. Let’s duck in here. He’d never think of looking for us just one floor down.”

  “He won’t think of looking on the fire escape either.”

  I stayed put. “How come you’re scared of getting on a horse but you don’t mind scrambling around dozens of feet off the ground?”

  “Maybe my planet has lots of mountains, but we don’t ride on big snorting animals.”

  Okay, I could think fast too. “So, what if that alien guesses we took the fire escape and starts climbing up from the bottom?”

  “Then I’d pull out my pendant and see if I can make it work as a weapon.” He yanked at the chain until the weird metal disk was swinging against his chest. “I keep thinking that if I press the bumps in the right order, the crystal will fire a death ray or something. But I haven’t found the order yet.”

  I looked at the shimmering pendant. The bumps seemed scattered with no pattern at all. “Have you tried drawing lines between them to see if they make a picture, like connect-thedots?”

  “Yeah. It just makes a mess.”

  A raindrop bounced off the disk, and several more off my head. “Let’s go in. If we’re soaked at lunch, our folks will know we didn’t stay inside like they told us.”

  The rain was getting more serious as we struggled to open the window. Finally we forced it up in a shower of dust and dry paint flakes. Dramatically, Ethan scanned the empty corridor, then gestured for us to slide in. If I could just get over feeling overprotective, I admitted to myself, this game could almost be fun.

  After lunch, which fortunately had no bald waiters, the adults went to play tennis in the indoor pavilion. Ethan and I just sprawled on the plush couches in the lobby, feeling a little heavy after our triple-decker sandwiches, fries, and large chocolate sundaes.

  Even so, sitting out in the open like this, Ethan made us take turns being on guard. One of us would sit up watching for enemies while the other lay back in an overfed stupor and stared at the fancy ceiling. It was painted with cupids and with people wearing flowing bed sheets and riding chariots. They were surrounded by stars connected by gold lines forming constellations.

  “You know,” I said lazily from where I was slumped amid big squishy pillows. “That pattern of stars over there looks sort of like the dots on your pendant.”

  Ethan swiveled his gaze from suspicious doorways to the ceiling. “It does! Maybe that’s the secret of the pendant? It’s not only a weapon, it’s a map showing where I’m from! What constellation is that?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe there’s a star guide in the gift shop.”

  In seconds, Ethan was off to the hotel gift shop, where he snapped up a nature guide on stars. Back on the couch, we began thumbing through the book comparing the constellation patterns with the dots on the pendant. None quite fit.

  I had to look at everything sideways, because he was hogging the book. “You know,” I said as he turned another page, “if you look at that one sideways and count all those little dots too, that might be it.”

  Ethan stared from the pendant to the page and back again. “That’s it! If the crystal is where the book shows the star Rigel, then the pendant’s pattern is Orion. Maybe I come from some planet of Rigel’s? I’m a Rigelian!”

  Ethan practically glowed with happiness. His belief in this alien thing was contagious. “Okay,” I said. “Tonight we’ll go out and look for Rigel. It’s stopped raining.”

  Sunlight, having finally torn free from the clouds, was slicing through the lobby’s tall windows. Others had noticed the weather change too. A couple guys were already marching through the lobby toward the front door, golf bags over their shoulders. I wished they weren’t fat and bald—and that they hadn’t stared at us like we were littering the lobby.

  As they looked our way, Ethan hurriedly palmed his pendant and stuffed the star book into a pocket. “Right. More evasion. Let’s duck out the back way. Plenty of exploring to do outside.”

  The newly appeared sun was turning the rain-soaked gardens into a giant steam bath. Funny how you don’t notice air-conditioning until you’re away from it.

  The gardens were certainly fancy. One had masses of rosebushes and smelled like, well, masses of roses. Another had hedges cut into animal shapes, and beyond that sprawled a Japanese garden. Near the Japanese place we noticed a peculiar, nasty smell, kind of like rotten eggs. It wafted from a small round building, if you can call something with only pillars for walls a building. I remembered the picture in the brochure.

  “There’s the Vulcan Wasser Pavilion.”

  As we walked closer, the smell got worse. Inside the circle of pillars, a brick patio surrounded a tiled basin. We looked into it. Bubbles rose through brownish water, each one bursting with a new little stink.

  “You mean, people actually took baths in that?” Ethan said. “Of their own free will?”

  I nodded. “And drank it to cure stuff. Probably it just made people sick so they had to buy medicine the hotel sold.”

  The only other person in the pavilion just then was a white-haired lady sitting on a bench reading. She looked up and laughed. “Vulcan Wasser was supposed to be good for everything from cancer to arthritis. People can talk themselves into believing some pretty crazy things.”

  “They sure can,” I said firmly as I watched Ethan drop pebbles into the pool. I wished I could find some cure for him—something so he’d know he was an okay kid without having to pretend he was an alien.

  I had a sudden urge to talk with the white-haired lady about it. She gave off this glow of being kind and wise. But that was stupid. She was a total stranger. And anyway, a family came into the pavilion just then. Two giggling little kids ran in holding their noses and making noisy jokes about the stink. The lady smiled at us like we three were mature adults sharing a joke. Ethan and I left, feeling far superior to those crude rugrats.

  We headed back to the Japanese garden with its ferns and miniature temples. Crossing an arched bridge, we watched humongous goldfish cruising through the shallow green water.

  “There must be a fortune down there!” Ethan said excitedly.

  “Goldfish are expensive?” I said, confused.

  “No, dummy, the coins.”

  He was right. The scattered pebbles sparkling in the sun were really coins. Pennies mostly, but silver ones too.

  Ethan turned to me, eyes glittering like the coins. “Suppose we sneak out here at night and kind of clean up their pond for them? I mean, the people already got their good luck when they threw the money in.”

  The coins glinted temptingly like lost Spanish doubloons. “Could work,” I admitted. “Both our rooms have separate doors to the hall.”

  “Done! A major nighttime adventure, then wealth beyond our wildest dreams!”

  Probably not. I have some pretty wild dreams. But at least this adventure was firmly planted on Earth. Lost pirate treasure. Nothing to do with aliens or ever-present fat, bald guys.

  You’d think warning bells would go off when I think comfortable thoughts like that.

  That night it was too cloudy to go looking for Ethan’s supposed home star. But the treasure hunt was still on. I’d been pretty sleepy after dinner, but the idea of a forbidden nighttime adventure woke me up. And, of course, it would have been forbidden, had we asked—which is why we didn’t.

  It took forever to get the adults upstairs and into bed. I crawled almost fully dressed into the canopy bed in my own room, then lay there listening to my parents’ water running and toilet flushing. When things finally quieted down next door, I gave them fifteen more minutes, then donned shoes and jacket and slipped into the hall.

  Ethan was already there, sitting on a cold radiator. “My folks always check on me once before they go to bed. But now we’re clear.”

  We headed down the stairwell at the end of the hall, plain cement stairs, not like the wide carpeted ones in the cent
er of the building. We didn’t meet anybody.

  Once we passed through the door at the bottom, the air-conditioned quiet of the hotel gave way to warm, damp air full of sound. Things chirped and chugged rhythmically from the darkness—darkness lit by a fairytale sprinkle of fireflies.

  Places look different at night, but we managed to sneak around the rose garden, past the hedges, and to the Japanese garden and its arched bridge. Overhead, a nearly full moon sailed behind shredded clouds, and trees stood like dark cutouts against the sky. Shifting through the branches, silver light glinted on the coins scattered below us. Taking off our shoes, we stepped into the water.

  It wasn’t very cold, but the bottom of the pool was slimy. Hoping there wasn’t anything too yucky down there, I began picking up coins, slipping them into a pocket. Soon my jeans were soggy but nicely heavy and jingly.

  I almost yelled when something brushed past my feet—a huge, ghostly pale goldfish. Moments later, Ethan thrashed a foot and squealed, “Something tried to eat my feet!”

  “Relax,” I said smugly. “It’s just goldfish.”

  Finally, instead of the excitement of the hunt, I began noticing how heavy and cold my legs felt and how my eyes ached from staring through the moonlight.

  “I think that’s enough,” I said.

  “Almost. Looks like a quarter over here.”

  Climbing out, I sat heavily on a mossy bank. When Ethan joined me, he said, “Should we count our take now?”

  “No. A gardener might come by.”

  “A gardener? At night?”

  “Well, maybe a security guard,” I answered. “Anyway, if someone catches us, they’d probably tell our parents.”

  “Right. We’ll count later.”

  We’d just pulled our socks and shoes onto our wet feet when we heard footsteps on the gravel path. My heart jumped, and I rolled under a sticker bush. Ethan disappeared under a bush beside mine.

  The footsteps stopped not far away. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend I wasn’t there. Not useful. Instead, I peered between leaves to see if we had any chance of running.

  Two dark, portly figures stood on the other side of a low hedge. Moonlight glinted off their bald heads. They weren’t looking our way, instead pointing to something high up on the hotel building. I caught a few stray words in their whispered talk: “At the end” and “eliminate” were among them. So were “won’t be traced.” I thought I heard something about “baiting a trap,” but I wasn’t sure.

  With more gravel crunching, they moved farther along the path and out of sight.

  When we finally crawled from our hiding places, Ethan looked pale, even for him. “They were bald—fat and bald,” he whispered.

  “So are lots of people,” I said, wanting desperately to stay with the pirate-treasure game instead of the alien game. But everything seemed a little less gamelike now.

  We stood up and, like deer and things on nature programs, peered around to see if danger had passed. I looked up at the building to see where the men had been pointing. I stifled my gasp, but Ethan had seen it too.

  That’s where our rooms were. On the top floor at the end.

  We didn’t speak until we were back in the stairwell, climbing to our floor. “They’ve found me,” Ethan said bleakly.

  “They’re probably just guys working on fixing up the building,” I said firmly.

  “At this time of night?”

  “So maybe one of them got an idea about something and wanted to show the other? Who knows? Just forget them.”

  Once back in my room with wet jeans peeled off and hidden, I couldn’t take my own advice. Those fat, bald guys were starting to seem sinister. This was stupid—I was letting Ethan’s games get to me again.

  If they were games.

  No! Of course they were! It wasn’t aliens he needed protection from. Somehow I had to protect Ethan from his own imagination, just like I’d tried to protect him from bullies.

  I groaned and rolled over. There I was again, trying to protect things! Stray cats, lost baby birds—I’d even spent hours picking worms off rain-washed sidewalks and putting them back in the grass. Adults thought that made me a “good citizen.” I thought it made me a chump. But I did it anyway; I couldn’t help it.

  Somewhere in all this thinking, I fell asleep. By morning, everything, even weird guys in dark gardens, seemed less sinister. I pushed their disturbing bits of conversation aside.

  Over breakfast, everyone had different ideas about what to do that day. My dad wanted to go to Sunken River Caverns. We had found brochures about it stuck under our doors that morning. Uncle Paul opted for golf, while Mom and Aunt Marsha were all for visiting antique shops. I wanted horseback riding, but Ethan was set on swimming.

  After much wild gesturing with buttery toast, we compromised. It was supposed to be sunny today, but rainy tomorrow. So today we’d do outdoors stuff, then visit underground caverns the next day. As for Ethan and me, we’d swim in the morning and in the afternoon head to the stables.

  The swimming was okay and so was our pizza lunch, but the afternoon went from bad to worse. A great deal worse. As we headed along the wooded path to the stables, we didn’t see a single fat, bald guy, but Ethan walked like it was to his execution.

  “Come off it,” I said at last. “You’re acting as if horses are saber-toothed tigers. A real alien prince would have to get along with different species. Some alien species are a lot odder than horses, I bet.”

  “Sure, but I wouldn’t have to climb on top of them. It’s beneath my dignity.”

  “Dignity, ha! You’re just scared.”

  His pale face flushed red, and I wished I hadn’t said that. “Scared has nothing to do with it. I just know the limits of my species. We do not ride other creatures. Period.”

  I dropped the subject. If he were an alien, I decided, his would be the most pig-headed species in the universe.

  When that wonderfully exciting horsey smell greeted us, I left Ethan to gripe about the stink and sit on a bench studying his star guide. Leaning over the fence, I watched the horses and bubbled with envy as a family mounted up for a trail ride.

  I’d learned to ride one summer at camp and longed for more chances. So why not now? I slammed a defiant fist against the fence. Ethan could sit around moping over his supposed star home, but I could go riding.

  My happy surge of independence fizzled. I couldn’t just go off and leave him any more than I could not put out food for stray cats. True, Ethan’s parents probably wouldn’t care. They seemed to love him, in a vague kind of way, but they usually acted like having a kid was a bother. My parents, though, would chew me out. And even if they didn’t, I’d chew myself out.

  Efforts to interest Ethan in trying a short, calm-looking palomino failed, so we headed back to the hotel. I stomped along grumpily, imagining myself on the big black stallion I’d seen.

  Ethan’s thoughts were in their usual orbit. “I still think this pendant has got to be more than just a star map. It must be some sort of weapon. My people would have given me something to protect myself with. Maybe that flying cat was a guardian from my home planet, but maybe he got killed before he could teach me how to use the pendant.”

  I just grunted. He went on.

  “Maybe if I made a big model of all the bumps on the pendant, I’d see a pattern easier. If we do it outside, I could try punching different combinations of bumps on the real pendant and not risk blowing up the hotel if I get it to work.”

  I didn’t even grunt.

  We were passing through the woods beside the golf course. Suddenly, Ethan jogged off into a pine grove and started brushing away pine needles with his feet. Reluctantly I helped. I figured I was building ammunition to make him go horseback riding later.

  The pine needles gave off a sweet, spicy smell, and dust caught in the shafts of sunlight like flecks of gold. Ethan’s pendant glinted fiercely as he set it in the center of the clearing and began arranging rocks and pine cones on the ground, co
pying its pattern.

  I kind of let the angry springs inside me loosen. Sitting back against a pine, I listened to the afternoon woods—a mourning dove calling, insects buzzing, the distant voices of golfers. The air felt warm and drowsy.

  With a sudden thump, a white golf ball bounced into our clearing, knocking aside one of Ethan’s pine cones.

  He stomped over to replace it, then spun around at the sound of crashing.

  Two men stepped out of the bushes. Fat, bald men.

  Agent Sorn crouched behind a flowering bush, talking hurriedly into her sender.

  “I tapped into meetings and communications, going to great lengths to get our Agent and his family to a new location. To no avail. The Gnairt are here and seem to have identified him.”

  “Under no circumstances are the Gnairt to capture or injure the boy,” Zythis’s gargly voice ordered. “His mission is too important to that planet and the Galactic Union.”

  “Understood. I will attempt to keep him in sight at all times, but these young ones have more energy than Arcturian jiggle bugs. They’re hard to keep track of.”

  “Do whatever is necessary, Agent Sorn.”

  The connection ended. Still crouching behind the bush, she returned the sender to her satchel, then reluctantly pulled out her silvery laser gun.

  “Looking for something, ma’am?”

  “Yeek!” The gun arched out of her startled hands, landing deeper in the bushes. She looked up at the gardener, her mind racing though its language implants. “I’m just looking for my . . . my . . . my hair dryer.”

  “Whatever. Just don’t you hurt the rhododendrons.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of hurting anything, sir.”

  Maybe I’d been playing too much of this alien stuff, but suddenly our sunny little woods felt a lot colder.