by Tim Lebbon
“What the hell is it?” Jackie said.
“Maybe a little gust of wind or something?” Carole offered.
“But there’s no wind here.” Allen wet an index finger and stuck it in the air, to confirm the point. “And how come there’s no sound?”
Carole giggled nervously. “It looks like something out of a Mr. Clean TV commercial.”
Then she gasped. The shape rushed toward them. Jackie shrieked but her voice was abruptly cut off as the vortex of sand consumed her.
“Jackie!” Carole screamed.
But Jackie had vanished. Not moving from the spot, the thing whirled and bobbed and still made no sound, just as it had when they’d first seen it ⎯ as if it were indifferent to its sudden prisoner.
Allen grabbed Carole’s hand and pulled violently: “C’mon, we gotta get away!”
Their eyes wide with terror, they ran across the flats. Then, after about fiffty yards, they looked back. The whirling thing had disappeared, but where Jackie had been lay a skeleton. A third skeleton.
“Oh, my God,” Allen breathed.
Carole burst into tears.
They ran again, their feet pounding as they rounded a bend in the shoreline where the fort side of the island ended and the westerly, civilian part began.
*****
Ten minutes earlier, Ed Gorman had been driving his golf cart back from the island’s pier, where he’d picked up some freight from the Casco Bay Lines ferry. Golf carts were standard transportation on the island, where motor vehicles were generally prohibited.
He stopped at a large iron door hanging on hinges set in a formidable, rectangular, concrete structure that extended out from a hill. He jumped out of the cart, unlocked the door, and pushed on it; the heavy thing reluctantly scraped across the concrete floor, its iron panels enhancing the noise like the sounding board of a piano.
When it was far enough open, Gorman grabbed his packages from the golf cart and carried them inside, where a tunnel led to a chamber that was serving as his temporary residence. The boxes were bulky but Gorman was a muscular six-footer and handled them easily. Nothing seemed amiss until he entered the chamber. There was movement at the left window: a young man was dropping from view.
“Hey, don’t go out there, come back!” Gorman ran to the window. “Come back!”
But three young people ⎯ the boy and two girls ⎯ were running down the sandy bank, through some bushes, and out onto the sand flats.
Then they stopped and looked down at something in the sand. Beyond them, Gorman noticed movement, a rising, twisting something pulling sand up inside it. At first he thought it was a waterspout, but there was no indication of a wind around it, and it wasn’t funnel-shaped. It rose and settled, as if floating on gentle waves. Parts of it sometimes expanded, sometimes contracted. Except for the eeriness of the thing, it was comical ⎯ a six-foot-tall, cucumber-shaped, twirling thing on a slow-motion pogo stick.
It remained over the same spot for about fifteen seconds, and then charged one of the girls and she disappeared inside it. The other two kids took off running. A few moments after the tube or whatever it was had swallowed the girl, it vanished ⎯ or evaporated, or just apparently stopped existing. Where it had been lay a skeleton, ribs up. That’s when Gorman noticed two other skeletons lying in the sand nearby ⎯ apparently the things the kids had stopped to look at.
Gorman grabbed his phone and dialed Fox Mulder. “We’ve got a problem. At least one kid, and I think two more, broke into the chamber.” He described the spinning thing that had attacked one of them. “I don’t know what happened to her,” he continued, “but I’d better go down there and find out. At the least, if that’s her skeleton I should bring part of it back for DNA analysis.”
“Do you know who the kids are?” Mulder asked.
“No, I haven’t looked at the security camera’s tape yet. But they ran toward the other end of the island, and it shouldn’t be hard to find them. It’s not like there’s a huge population here.”
“Do it. Let me know.”
Gorman ended the call, hurried to the far end of the tunnel where he’d stashed a ladder, carried it back, and slid it out the same window the young man had gone through. Climbing down, he crossed the beach to the bushes. The two kids were gone, but when he had time, he could follow their footprints in the sand.
First, he needed some bone for the DNA test. Walking to the new skeleton, he was about to kneel down when he noticed the whirling thing was back. He reversed direction, sprinted to the ladder, and shot back up to the room. But the moment he got through the window, his legs collapsed and he fell to the floor. It took him a while to realize his strength had abandoned him. Uncertain whether he could stand, he crawled to a nearby chair, hiked himself up, and called Mulder.
“I couldn’t retrieve any bone, and I can’t go after the two other kids. Don’t ask me to explain what’s going on. Get here ASAP.”
*****
Carole and Allen ran up some steps, around a beach cabin, and flopped down behind tall blueberry bushes. Carole was crying so much she could barely breathe, and panting so hard she could barely weep. Covered with sweat, Allen sat with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the ground.
Between sobs, Carole managed to ask, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Allen, who hadn’t moved. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Carole broke down again, and this time it got to Allen. Tears fell from his cheeks.
Several minutes passed; they said nothing.
Finally, impatience overcame his grief: “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s go to my camp ⎯ Dad will help.” He offered his hand to Carole and pulled her to her feet.
By “camp” Allen meant his family’s summer cabin, one of many at this end of the island, where the military had never laid claim. They hurried to the nearest road ⎯ barely more than a wide dirt path.
As they passed an old hydrant, Carole stopped. “Oh, my God!” She pointed to a human skeleton face down several feet off the road. “Not here, too?”
Allen took two steps toward it and discovered a second skeleton beyond it, at the bottom of a dip in the terrain.
Without a word he returned to Carole. “Come on, fast!”
On the straight line Allen took, his family’s cabin was about a quarter of a mile away through woods and across a field of tall grass. Neither of them saw anything else unusual ⎯ until they came around Allen’s front porch. There on the ground lay another skeleton.
“No!” Allen ran up to it. “Oh no, no, NO!” he screamed in anguish. He turned around with his hands covering his face.
At that moment Carole noticed some leaves begin to swirl above the skeleton.
“Allen!” she yelled. “Here comes another one!” She pushed him toward the porch, up the steps, and inside the camp. She slammed the door and locked it, and then closed and locked the window next to it. The whirling thing grew and spun, bobbing up and down just like the one that had taken Jackie.
Carole retreated to the middle of the cabin’s main room ⎯ kitchen and living areas combined ⎯ watching through the window as the thing twirled and continued to expand, picking up more leaves, twigs, and grit. Once again, it made no noise, and there was no wind to or from it that disturbed the grasses and bushes in its vicinity. It had no color and emitted no light; but for the vegetation and dirt it picked up, it would have been invisible. It raised itself onto the porch ⎯ how, Carole couldn’t tell ⎯ and hovered just outside the front door.
Then it started moving along the porch, across the front of the building, first to one end and then to the other. It seemed to be looking ⎯ “looking,” though it had no eyes ⎯ for an entrance into the cabin. Perhaps it was “smelling” the trace of its prey?
Allen was kneeling on the floor, sobbing.
Carole grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “C’mon, Allen, you’ve gotta help.”
&n
bsp; The vortex was crossing back to the far end of the porch and, suddenly, was off the porch and starting along one side of the building.
“Oh, god,” Carole cried. She locked the window on that side and ran into the bedroom in the left rear corner. The single window there, on the back wall, was shut; she locked it. She rushed to the bathroom, and then to the other bedroom, and then back to the main room, securing every window she found.
Carole’s frantic activity broke through Allen’s anguish, and by the time she reached the window over the kitchen sink he looked up. He noticed the curtains at the window and frowned ⎯ he didn’t recognize them. He peered at the other side of the room; a sofa stood under the windows ⎯ not against the back wall, where it always had been. It was upholstered with a flowery print he’d never seen. On the wall above where the sofa used to be was a picture of a lobster boat, not of the Portland Head lighthouse he himself had hung.
“Carole, this isn’t my house. I mean, it’s in the right place, it looks the same outside, the kitchen sink is where it’s supposed to be ⎯ but it’s different.” He stood and went into one of the bedrooms and quickly returned. “My baseball glove and fishing pole are missing, and there’s a bunch of books I’ve never seen.”
Carole said nothing. She was staring at the thing outside, which was back on the front porch by one of the windows.
Allen went into the other bedroom and returned with a revolver. “Guess what I found!” He strode to the window where the thing was “watching” them and yelled obscenities at it. That had no visible effect so he checked to see if the gun was loaded.
Carole intervened. “What are you going to do, shoot it through a window? And put a hole in the glass so maybe it can suck itself inside? You can’t shoot wind and leaves.”
Allen shook his head at her. “Dammit, Carole, you got any ideas?”
He looked back outside and aimed the gun. “You know who that son of a bitch reminds me of? Vice Principal Barton. Everywhere I went in school, there was Mr. Barton, watching me, waiting for me to screw up so he could screw me.” He bellowed through the window: “I’d love to shoot you now, you prick!”
Carole grabbed his arm and pushed it down. “You can’t, and you know it.”
Allen turned and hollered at Carole. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“How in hell do I know?” she yelled back at him. They stood looking at each other, breathing hard. Then Carole put her hands on his shoulders ⎯ to calm them both. “But it looks as though Mr. Barton can’t get inside. I think we’re safe for now, and it’s getting dark out. Maybe it’ll be gone in the morning.”
“What if it never leaves?”
“I’d rather die in here than let it eat me alive.”
*****
THURSDAY, 11:45 a.m.
At midmorning the next day Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were among a small crowd of people disembarking from the Casco Bay Lines ferry onto the Great Diamond pier. It was perfect summer weather; a front had come through the night before, leaving the sky clear and the air cool. There was a light breeze.
They were dressed casually. Mulder wore jeans, a tee-shirt that said “Maine is Cool” over a drawing of a moose, and running shoes. Scully wore long khaki pants, a polo shirt, tennis sneakers, and a baseball cap that covered much but not all of her auburn hair. Mulder had vacationed in Maine as a child but hadn’t been back since, and had never visited this island. Scully had never been to Maine and knew so little about it that she’d mistaken the moose on Mulder’s shirt for an elk.
The pier bisected a small harbor at the southwesterly tip of the island. A couple of sailboats were moored on one side, and a lobster boat on the other. An official-looking powerboat, with MAINE FISHERIES AND WILDLIFE lettered on the side of its pilothouse, was tied to the pier. Next to the boat a man in green fatigues with a pistol on his hip was bending over a dog, adjusting its harness.
Scully stopped beside him. “Mind if I ask what the dog’s for?”
The man straightened up. “She’s a tracker; we’ve got a report of some kids gone missing. It’d help us if you’d keep an eye out. Teenagers, two girls and a boy.” He reached into a backpack lying next to him. “Here’s a flyer with their pictures.”
“Of course,” Scully said, and hurried to catch up to Mulder.
“Did you hear that?” she asked him. “Three kids missing. Probably the ones Ed Gorman told you about.”
Mulder nodded somberly and kept up his pace.
Some of the crowd drove off in golf carts that had been left in a parking area; Mulder and Scully continued on with the rest, walking along a dirt road. As they reached other roads, forking off toward a variety of homes and summer cottages, the crowd dwindled. Finally Mulder and Scully were alone, and they kept going east another fifteen minutes toward old Fort McKinley.
“Pretty island,” Scully remarked.
“Yeah, but kind of bipolar,” Mulder answered with a chuckle. “All fishing and sailing and summer fun at that end” ⎯ gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder ⎯ “and up ahead nothing but the business of war.”
“Do you know the history of this place?” Scully asked.
“Yeah. Portland used to be a strategic military site because it’s America’s closest deep-water harbor to Europe ⎯ an ideal launching point for convoys. All the rocky islands in Casco Bay were good places from which to defend the harbor, so many of them were fortified. Starting during the Spanish American war, army engineers built artillery emplacements and bunkers, and barracks and mess halls and the usual stuff you find on military bases. They also built underground facilities and joined them together with tunnels.”
Mulder paused to pick up a stone and hurl it at a tree. He missed.
“Not a pitcher, I see,” said Scully. “Better try out for first.”
They walked again, and Mulder continued: “By the end of the Second World War, the fort was obsolete, so the army withdrew all their personnel, removed their weaponry and machinery, and abandoned the entire place.”
“Okay,” said Scully, “so what’s happened since then?”
“Nada. It’s been a ghost town ⎯ up until recently. Somebody bought it from the government, and he’s trying to turn it into a destination resort.”
They’d reached the fort’s entrance. It was marked by an open, rusted iron gate. Beyond the gate was an assembly of brick buildings ⎯ over a dozen in all ⎯ circling a quarter-mile-long parade ground.
“That building,” Mulder said as he pointed to an enormous structure straight ahead, “was the barracks for a company of a hundred men. There are four more like it. The buildings on the other side of the parade ground were one- and two-family quarters for the officers. It’s all a big condo project now.”
They soon reached the first barracks. Workmen were repairing its front porch and installing windows; the rest of the buildings were boarded up. If the fort wasn’t a ghost town, it was close. However, the parade ground looked good: a pleasant, recently mowed grassy space big enough for several football fields. The agents crossed it and then, following Ed Gorman’s directions, headed down another dirt road.
Mulder continued the story. “The new owner found the bunker we’re going to behind a heap of rubble. At first he thought of marketing it as a residence because it had two windows with a nice view of the harbor. But then he discovered that what should have been the same view looked different depending on which window you looked out of, and he got spooked.”
“He should have,” Scully said. “I’ve seen the pictures, and it’s real spooky.”
Mulder nodded. “That discovery led to some phone calls that led to me. So I sent Gorman here to take notes and photos of what he saw through the windows, and to guard the place. I’ve already told you what happened yesterday.”
They had reached an iron door hanging on hinges set in concrete walls ⎯ just as Gorman had described. Mulder rapped on it. Nobody responded. He pounded on it. At last there was the sound of a bolt disengaging. The door slow
ly opened inward.
There stood a man about eighty years old: wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, a flap of skin hanging loosely under his chin, forearms thin and hands mottled. The man gazed at Mulder, and then at Scully, but didn’t say anything.
Mulder stared back. “Have we met?”
“Yup.” The man gazed at the ground.
Mulder frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. Is Ed Gorman here?”
“Yup.” The man raised his eyes to meet Mulder’s stare. “I’m him.”
“You’re Ed?” The person before Mulder and Scully looked nothing like the robust ex-army major Mulder had sent here six weeks earlier. “What happened?”
The man frowned, as if pondering the question, and then said, “I came back.” He turned and shuffled down the tunnel.
Mulder and Scully exchanged shocked glances and followed.
Once he reached the chamber, Gorman flopped into an armchair.
Mulder pulled up a wood stool. “What do you mean, you came back?” he asked, concerned.
Gorman picked up the coffee cup from the table beside him. “I was doing what you told me to do, taking pictures and keeping a log. And nobody got in or out unless I let them, except for yesterday ⎯ those kids.”
“Has there been any sign of them?” Scully drew up a chair.
“Not that I know of. Haven’t seen the swirly thing either.”
“Tell us about that,” she said. “Could it be a natural phenomenon?”
Gorman snorted. “You kidding?” He put the cup back on the table. “You ever use a kitchen blender?” Before either of the agents could answer, he continued, “Imagine you fill it with clear water and turn it on. Except for the bubbles you don’t see anything. Now add rice or something that doesn’t dissolve and turn it on slow. You see the stuff whirling around. Now hit the pulse button a couple of times and see how the stuff goes up and down. Except for the fact that there wasn’t any glass holding the sand in, that’s what the damn thing looked like. Oh ⎯ there wasn’t any sound from it that I could hear, either.”
“What did it do?” Scully asked.