The Grays

THREE

DAN CAME INTO THE KITCHEN while Katelyn was washing spinach and nuzzled her neck. She moved her head back, enjoying him. In their case, not even thirteen years of marriage had been enough of a honeymoon, and she was very far from being used to this guy of hers.

They had met here at Bell, two days after he arrived. Bizarrely, it turned out that they’d both grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from each other. He’d been crossing the campus in that aimless way he had, looking here and there, smiling even though there was no reason to smile. He was a strikingly handsome man, the last person you’d pick for a professor, let alone a specialist in physiological psychology. But that’s what he was, and he’d just snared a provisional professorship when they met. Now Bell had reached a point of no return with him. This was, at last, his tenure year, and in a few days, his career here—and their pleasantly settled life—would either continue or it would end.

“What’s Conner up to?” she asked. “Is he downstairs?”

“He’s in the living room.”

“Too bad, he’d hear us if we went upstairs.”

“Mmm.” He continued nuzzling.

Their son was more than a genius. A well-constructed, handsome tow-head, gentle of eye and so smart that he was a de facto freak. His IQ of 277 was, as far as anybody could determine, the highest presently on record.

Dan came up from nuzzling and said, “He’s in a funk.”

“Symptoms of said funk?”

“Staring miserably at the TV pretending not to stare miserably at the TV.”

“He’s eleven. Eleven has stuff.” She arched her back, drew his head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of his lips.

“He’s watching 2001.”

Which meant that it was a serious funk and he needed Mom. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“In the first place, I wanted some love.”

She went into the family room, stood for a moment looking at the back of her son’s head. On the ridiculously huge TV Dan had unveiled at Christmas, the apes were howling at the monolith.

She sat down beside him. “Can I interest you in—” She glanced at her watch, picked up the TV Guide. “A Mork and Mindy rerun? The McLaughlin Group?”

“Invasion of my space, Mom.”

“Point taken, backing off.” But she didn’t do that. She knew to stay right where she was.

“And just because I’m watching 2001 does not mean that I’m sad.”

What could she say to the misery in that voice? “Conner, a genius does not an actor make.”

“Mother, could you consider dropping that label? You say that all the time and it does not help.”

“That you’re not a good actor?”

“Okay, let’s do this. Would you care to come out on the deck with me?”

“On the deck? It’s twenty-six degrees.”

But he’d already gotten to his feet and slid open the door. He gestured to her, and she saw the anger in it. She went out with him.

The air was sharp with smoke, the western sky deep orange beyond the black skeletons of the winter trees. One would have thought that a winter silence would prevail, but instead she heard the shrill voices of preteen boys.

When she looked down toward the Warners’ house, she saw streaks of light racing around in the backyard.

“You’re not invited?”

He went back in the house, sat down, and jammed the button on the remote. The bone sailed into the sky, the “Blue Danube” started.

Paulie and Conner had been friends effectively from birth—Conner’s birth, that is. Paulie was a year and a half older.

“Conner, what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something happened.”

“Mom, I’ve asked for space.”

“Honey, look, you’ve got one place you can go. Here. Two people who are one hundred percent on your team, me and Dad. And I want to know why you aren’t at that party.” And why, moreover, was it unfolding outside where Conner could watch from a distance? That was real hard, that was.

Conner was ten months younger than the youngest child in his class at Bell Attached, the school that served the children of Bell College’s professional community. He was nowhere near puberty, in a class where half the boys were shaving at least occasionally.

“Conner, would it make you feel better if I told you that puberty turns boys into monsters?”

“Thank you for that little dose of sexism, Mother. Girls have trouble with puberty, too.”

“But boys really do.”

She could hardly believe that Maggie and Harley would allow Paulie to leave Conner out like this. “What’s really wrong?”

“All right. Fine.” He got up, crossed the room, and went downstairs.

She heard him shut the door to the basement that Dan had finished for him when he was five. It was boy heaven down there, with an X-Box and a TV/DVD combo and a hulking but powerful Dell computer, plus his dinosaur collection, all of them painted with the utmost realism, and his train set, HO-grade, which had lighted houses, streetlights lining the streets, and lighted trains. He would play trains in the dark down there by the hour, muttering to himself in the voices of a hundred train men and townsfolk, all of whom he had invented, all of whose lives evolved and changed over the years. Katelyn thought of the train set as a sort of ongoing novel, and that her boy was a word genius as much as he was a math genius.

The care he lavished on everything he modeled came from his ability to concentrate. Even when he’d been little, he hadn’t been clumsy. When he was eight, she’d discovered while cleaning up one day that the tiny human figures in his train set all had different-colored eyes, they had been that carefully finished.

She had loved him so, then, looking down at a tiny suited figure with a tie so small that you had to look under a magnifying glass to see the design he’d painted on it. And then you would hear him deep in the night talking to himself, and you would realize that he was reciting a book he’d read, maybe even years ago, all from memory, just to enjoy it again.

Conner and Dan had celebrated the completion of the room by putting a plaque on the door: THE CONNER ZONE.

She and her husband had celebrated in quite a different way, later that night. This was your garden-variety tract house, as isolated as it and its three neighbors were, and the walls were tract-house thin. They did not feel that this extremely sensitive child needed to overhear the sounds of sex in the next room. And on that night, at last, they had been able to use their bed the way a bed was meant to be used, instead of being as still as possible, wincing at every squeak, and keeping their cries to a whisper.

“Dan,” she said, walking into the kitchen where he had begun trimming ribs, “there’s something kind of ugly going on. Paulie’s having a party and Conner’s not invited.”

“Jesus.”

“They’re actually outside playing with flashlights, which I kind of have the feeling is on purpose.”

“Kids are cruel.”

“Listen, incidentally, I had an e-mail from Marcie Cotton about you.”

“Oh?”

“They’ve reached the point of asking general-faculty opinion.”

“Oh, God.”

“I gave you a great report.”

“What a relief.”

“Come on, what else would I do?”

“Tell the truth like everybody else. I’m dull as dishwater in the classroom.”

“No, you’re actually interesting. It’s physiological psychology that’s dull. In the hands of most profs, it causes birds to die in the trees outside their classrooms. At least yours just fly off.”

“Dull is dull. I should’ve used puppets or worn costumes.”

“I would have preferred almost any other referee, frankly.”

“Yeah, you and me both. But I can handle her… maybe.”

“Not too much.”

Dan went to her, embraced her. “You’re my girl.”

There came a sound from below—a crash.

“He just kicked the wall,” Katelyn said. “Like father, like son.”

“Maybe a mano a mano would be good.”

One of the most precious things about this Dan Callaghan whom her heart had whispered to her to marry was that he was a genuinely good father—not an easy thing to be for a boy as challenging as their son. But Conner’s brilliance and demanding personality also made him fascinating, and she thought that the rewards for loving their boy were substantial. “Maybe a mano a mano would be very good,” she said.

As he went downstairs, he noticed that the Conner Zone sign had been removed from the door, leaving some areas of peeled paint that would have to be repaired. But not right now. He started to open the door, thought better of it, and knocked.

A moment of silence was followed by a grudging, “Okay.”

The room was dark and the trains were running. Conner loomed over the board like some kind of leering godlet, an image that Dan found oddly creepy. In fact, he found Conner, in general, oddly creepy—a great kid, he was crazy about him… but there was something sort of fundamentally creepy about somebody who was probably smarter than Shakespeare, and certainly smarter than you—way smarter.

“Hey there, I see you’ve abolished the Conner Zone.”

“It’s stupid.”

A streetcar, wonderfully modeled, shot around on the tracks, racing through intersections, wheeling out into the forest and then returning to the town, passing Andy’s Garage and Sill’s Millinery and Carter’s Groceries, racing along as crossing guards whipped up and down and the figures inside sat as still as if frozen in terror.

“Isn’t it going a little fast?”

“I’m exceeding the speed limit and maybe they’re all going to die.”

“It hurts, buddy. It’s meant to. Only, we need to get in front of it. Figure out what we’re doing wrong and not do that anymore. That way, we don’t lose our friends.”

Conner turned the transformer up a notch and the streetcar shot off the tracks, tumbled through the woods, and crashed to the floor. The roof broke off and half the figures came out. Conner leaped around the table, grabbed the remains of the car, and smashed it to pieces against the tiles.

“Hey. Hey! You’re killing the floor, here.” Dan went down to him, but he was up again and off across the room.

“I’ve gotta get rid of this whole kid setup,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m an asshole, Dan. I’m a little boy. In fact, I’m the little boy.”

Dan went over to the bed where Conner had thrown himself. “Conner, your mom and I both felt you needed to skip grades. You were bored silly in third grade. You could do all the problems, you could read all the books.”

“I can still do all the problems and read all the books. Only the difference now is, I’m the class freak, Dan. The freak!”

“You’re not a freak. You just happen to be somewhat smarter than most people.”

“You know who I really relate to? I really relate to Junior Hamner. Do you know who that is?”

Dan thought that the Hamners had a little boy with Down syndrome. “He’s that mentally disabled child, isn’t he?”

“Exactly. Another freak. We should be joined at the hip.”

“Except that your mind—who knows what it might do one day? And Junior Hamner’s always gonna be eleven years old.”

“Actually, he’s four. Mental age.”

“Okay, let’s get down to it. What, exactly, happened to cause you to get ditched?”

“I told you, I’m a little boy. Little boys aren’t allowed.”

Dan had, to be honest, been one of the bullies. He’d had a childhood full of nightmares, so many and so intense that he now speculated that he might have been an abuse victim. He’d often been taken night fishing by an old man who lived down the block. Most of the time, his uncle Frank had been with them, and Frank was to this day as straight an arrow as had ever been carved, but there had been times when he and Mr. Ehmer had been out there alone all night, and he wondered what had transpired then.

He remembered strange violence. Screaming. Being swarmed by flies. And maybe those were screen memories for things Mr. Ehmer had done, that should not have been done.

Dan had been angry and big, so he used to push the little kids around—whip their butts, take their money, you name it. So he could understand the ugly frustrations of Paulie Warner and the other boys as well as he could his own boy’s hurt. He put his arm around Conner’s shoulders, gave him a friendly squeeze. “This was not like this a week ago. Two days ago.”

“Let me tell you what they’ve done. They have created a club called the Connerbusters. Clever name, do you get it? Everybody in the seventh grade is supposed to be a Connerbuster except me, of course—” He stopped, his voice cracking.

Dan looked over to see the young face twisted in pain. Agony.

“I’m sorry, Dan, here I go being a little boy.”

“Look, I was a class bully. I would’ve been a Connerbuster. For sure. But I cried, too. And you can be sure that Paulie Warner and the rest of them are just as vulnerable. You’re a little behind them physically, Conner, but mentally, you’re on another planet. In another universe.”

“Aye, and there’s the rub. So listen, my friend, and you shall hear, of the careful humiliation of Conner the queer.”

“You’re not gay?”

“I have no idea, I’m prepubescent. And incidentally, without hurting her, you have got to tell Mom to stop bragging about me to the other mothers.”

Now, that was a stunner. Katelyn was hardly your braggart mama. “That doesn’t sound like her, somehow.”

“She refers to me as a ‘genius.’ ‘My son is a genius,’ she says. And do you know that Mrs. Warner resents this? And Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Fisk and probably every other faculty wife with a kid at B.A. Because they all want geniuses, Dan. This is a college! These are college people! And I really am a genius and they resent me. So you give a kid ammo like that—the parents can’t stand some classmate with an unfortunate disability like mine—and that poor cripple is fair game.”

Dan could certainly see, from Conner’s standpoint, why he might view his intelligence as a deformity. It was ugly, though, to see him driven to feel that way about a gift so rare.

The thing about Katelyn was, if you were going to love her and you were going to be her husband, you were going to have to accept that Conner was the center of the universe for her. He was, indeed, a professor’s dream child and she was, indeed, a professor. “She’s always bragged, Conner.”

“She’s really messing me up.”

At that moment, flashlights began appearing in their yard, swarming over from the Warners’. There were also voices making low howling sounds. “Great,” Conner muttered as he turned out his bedside light.

For a few more seconds, Dan hoped that this was something nice, but when he heard them calling Conner’s name, he knew that it was more cruelty, and he, perhaps unfortunately, got mad. He headed for the glass door that opened out onto the underdeck and the yard.

“Dan, please just go upstairs.”

“Conner, those kids don’t have any business in this yard.”

“Dan, please!”

Dan opened the door. Behind him, Conner pulled his bedspread over his head. Then Dan heard cracking sounds. He realized that somebody was hitting the aboveground pool with what sounded like a board or even a hammer.

“All right, that’s enough,” he shouted as he strode up to the shape that was hacking away at the pool. It was a kid he didn’t recognize, but when the boy saw him, he tried to run. Dan got him by the collar of his jacket.

The kid swung and managed to land a crooked blow on Dan’s thigh. And the rest of them didn’t run. He heard Paulie Warner say in an almost bored voice, “Let ’im go, Dan.”

Dan carried him across to the fence and dumped him over. “Get out of here, all of you.” He grabbed Paulie as he was leaving. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

Paulie snorted—laughter. Only a miracle from above prevented Dan from smacking him. Instead, he brushed past him and strode across the Warners’ driveway. “Get off my property,” Paulie shouted from behind him.

He hammered on the front door. A couple of seconds later, Maggie opened it. He was so furious that for a moment he was at a loss for words, and the two of them just stared at each other. Finally, he spoke. “Keep those vandals out of my yard, Maggie, or I’m calling the cops.”

“Dan?”

“Paulie had his gang out there busting up our pool, damnit! It’s not on, Maggie. If I have to, I’ll see you guys in family court. Paulie might not like Conner anymore. That’s his privilege. But when he starts vandalizing our stuff—that I am not going to allow.”

She turned around, called into the house, “Paulie?” Then, “Paulie!”

He came, not looking afraid in the least, Dan noted. He was growing up, Paulie Warner was. The peach fuzz was getting dark, the eyes getting hard.

“Did you bust up their pool?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you did—or your friend did. I think they have a little gang, Maggie. What’s your little gang called, Paulie?”

“I don’t have a gang.”

Maggie shoved his shoulder. “Where’s Conner, Paulie?”

“He couldn’t come.”

“They cut him out and the gang is called the Connerbusters, and they invaded our yard with the intention of vandalizing us, and I’m not gonna stand for it, Maggie.”

“Okay! Hey!” Maggie called into the house. Boys began to appear, just young enough to be a bit wide-eyed with worry. “Party’s over, fellas. Call your parents and tell ’em to pick you up. You can wait on the front porch, I don’t want you in here anymore. I’ve already had a shelf busted in my fridge—”

“That was an accident, Mom!”

“—and now the neighbors are complaining and I’ve had it. You go up to your room, young man.”

Paulie started to speak, but she cuffed him in the back of the head. “Learn how to choose your friends, dummy,” she said.

He went upstairs, his face red, fighting tears.

As Dan left, the other boys filtered out behind him. They crowded together on the front porch, blowing on their hands and waiting for their rides. He walked across the yards, feeling the cold now through his cotton chinos and his light sweater. The kids sure were growing up, and it was sad. Last July, he supposed, had been the high summer of Conner’s childhood. He remembered those days of his own life. He’d been like some kind of water creature, like all the kids who lived along the lakes of Madison.

He went over to the pool. The moon was rising, and in its light he could see that the little creep had done a fair job on the fiberglass.

As he was walking back to the house, something caught his eye—a flash, he thought, coming from somewhere to the west, in the direction of the town. An explosion? There was no following rumble, so he supposed not. Nothing ever happened around here, anyway… except for kid trouble. Kids were a problem in any college town. Bored, affluent, smart, faculty brats were a notorious irritant on every campus he’d ever worked.

He went in and gently explained to Conner what had happened. “Son, there will be no fallout from this. You’ll see, Monday morning in school it’ll be as if none of it ever happened.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Count on it. They went a step too far, that’s all. They’re testing, trying to figure out who they want to be—and they’re not like you, they’re much simpler, to be honest. So even though they’re older, in many ways they’re less mature.”

“Dan, do you think you could find out about the Wilton public schools for me, since I really can’t return to B.A? I think the, uh, middle school—what’s it called, Colonel Saunders Memorial or something—has a rather good reputation in shop. And, of course, the football team is the stuff of local legend. Who knows, maybe I can try out for back end.”

Dan saw that there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him. He’d go up and report to Katelyn.

As he left, Conner said, “Promise me, Dan. Call Wilton.”

“I’ll call them first thing Monday.”

“And that boot camp in Lockridge. I could commute, actually, on the Louisville bus. I wouldn’t have to live in the barracks or anything.”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.” Dan turned to leave and, to his surprise, saw a boy standing just beyond the deck. His shape was clearly visible in the moonlight. He was not one of the gangling creeps from Paulie’s party. This kid looked even smaller than Conner. Which was very strange, because Conner himself was the youngest child on Oak Road, not counting six-month-old Jillie Jeffers.

It was dark in the underdeck, but the child was in the light of the moon.

Something struck Dan, then, hit him like an axe blow between the eyes. He was in a loud, echoing space looking down through a round hole, and there was a surface far below glistening silver just like this, in moonlight just like this. He felt in that moment a longing so powerful that it seemed to stop his blood, to cripple him with a sense of loss that might actually be larger than he could contain. For a moment, he was disoriented, as if detached from the ground, and he fell forward.

Then next thing he knew, somebody was calling him. Far away.

“Dad! Oh my God. Mom! Mom!”

Then footsteps, then he was aware that he’d fallen, and his head—his head hurt. That was it, he’d hit his head on a beam. Katelyn and Conner were there, they were terrified.

No problem, had to calm them down. “Oops,” he croaked.

“Dan, don’t move.”

He sat up. “I about knocked myself silly.”

“What happened, honey?”

“I was—” He looked around the cold, dark space. “I hit my head. One of the beams. I thought those kids had come back.”

“What kids?”

“Paulie and his buddies.”

“What were they doing in our yard?”

“It’s a long story, Mom. And there was somebody out there just now.” He pointed. “Something, anyway. It was an owl, right over there. A barn owl standing beside the pool.”

There was nothing in the backyard now except the pool itself, gray in the moonlight, and beyond it the strip of woods that separated all the houses from a cornfield that fronted on Wilton Road.

Nothing more was said about the incident. Katelyn spent some time, then, with her son. She already knew all that had happened. Maggie had called, full of apologies. The boys had overstepped. Paulie would resume the old friendship, she would make sure of that.

She left him listening to a Leonard Cohen CD, another of his private eccentricities. God forbid that any of the other children should ever find those CDs, or his audio books of things like James Joyce’s fantastically obscure and prolix Finnegan’s Wake, from which he drew some sort of equally obscure comfort. Maybe he even understood it, who could know?

She took a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses up to their bedroom, and drank some wine with her husband. No more Conner until the morning. They lay together, then, with the light of the westering moon falling on their naked bodies, and the wine in them. Dan said, “You want to give it a try?”

“With no diaphragm?”

“Clean and clear.”

She kissed him. “I do, I do.”

“Oh, wow, hey—” He reached over, got his wineglass and raised it. “To the next genius Callaghan. If we make it.”

“Okay, listen, you—I do want to, but this is not the right moment, Dan, and you know that.”

“The tenure will come.”

“The tenure may come. And when it does, we celebrate.” She laughed a little. “By doing this incredibly profound thing of making another child. But, Dan, if you do not get it, then—”

“The tenure will come!”

“Marcie is a complex, difficult human being.”

He threw himself back on the bed. She laid a hand on his head.

“You sure you’re okay, Dan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, you know there’s no beam down there you could’ve hit your head on. So that’s not what happened.”

He knew it. He allowed himself to consider the possibility of a seizure. He’d had them as a child, he remembered them, they would start with an aura that involved seeing his planetarium lights, then progress to this bizarre, echoing room where there would be unspeakable things, human bodies with no skin, giant flies—and then it would be morning, and he’d wake up perfectly fine.

He had never told a soul about the seizures, and he didn’t intend to tell Katelyn now. They were, perhaps, one of the reasons that he had become a physiological psychologist. His own suffering had led him to a fascination with the mechanics and abnormalities of the brain.

They slept then, joined to the sleeping world of man, a place that is different by night, that is not at all what it seems.

They did not sleep alone, though. They were watched, and carefully watched. Minds very different from our own, with objectives and needs completely beyond the imagining of the Callaghans, drew conclusions about what they saw, and acted on those conclusions.

Deep in the night, they acted, and Marcie Cotton became the latest victim of a great and intricate terror.

And then things went wrong. Very, very wrong.

FOUR

OAK ROAD WAS SO QUIET at 3 A.M. that you could hear the whispering fall of individual pine needles as they dropped in the woods that separated the houses from the farmer’s field behind them. So when screams erupted, every human being and all the animals woke up instantly.

Marcie Cotton also heard the cries, and an expressionless voice repeating again and again, “What can we do to help you stop screaming?” Only when she felt herself suck breath, and realized that the narrow, black cot from which she could not rise was not her bed, did she connect with the fact that the screaming was coming from her. She thought: nightmare. And then she screamed again.

THERE WERE FOUR FAMILIES LIVING at the end of Oak Road, all Bell College faculty. The last house on the dead end was occupied by the Jefferses, Nancy and Chris, and their baby daughter. Beside them were the Callaghans, next the Warners, Harley and Maggie, Paulie and Amy. The house closest to the beginning of Oak Road belonged to the Keltons, two parents and two teenage sons.

At the Kelton house, Manrico, the family dog, sat up and snorted, then stood and commenced barking. The two teenagers leaped out of bed and started pulling on their pants.

Nancy Jeffers also screamed, and Chris, the youthful head of the physics department, jumped up as if there was a snake in the bed. Out the bedroom window, he saw a glow through the woods. “Dear God there’s a fire,” he shouted, pulling on a pair of rubber overshoes and an overcoat.

THE TRIAD HAD BEEN COMMANDED to bring Marcie Cotton to Dan Callaghan. The collective wanted them to bond her to him, so that she would do anything to make sure his tenure bid succeeded. There must be no chance that the Callaghans would leave Wilton, where every street, alley, basement, attic, and mind was known to the collective. An attack on the Callaghans was inevitable, and the collective’s plan to defend them had been constructed around their staying in the town.

Important work, certainly, but not all that they intended to do on this night. There was a reason this particular triad called themselves the Three Thieves… which was their imperfect ability to handle temptation. And Marcie was such very strong temptation.

PAULIE WARNER RAN INTO HIS parents’ room, shouting that the Keltons’ house was on fire. Harley Warner said to his wife, “My God, they might be trapped.”

Maggie went to the window. “Is that a fire? It’s very steady.”

“Somebody’s really screaming,” Amy said, coming in behind her brother.

“Let’s get over there,” Paulie said.

Harley was pulling on his jeans. “Not you kids.”

“Aw, Dad!”

“Paulie, not until I know what’s going on out there.” He did not want his children exposed to whatever might be happening over there, not given the agony he was hearing in those screams.

THE MORE MARCIE SCREAMED, THE more excited the Three Thieves became. They knew they were too low, they knew they should quiet her, they knew there was a dog nearby, and they could not control dogs. But they also knew that they could reach into her and taste of her emotions, and the taste would fill them with a delicious fire that their kind did not possess, the fire of strong feeling. Man might not be intelligent enough to save himself from the environmental imbalance overpopulation had caused on his planet, but his emotional genius was beyond compare.

They dug into her gushing terror like wolves digging into the flowing guts of a deer… and the collective at first reacted with surprise. Then it raged.

Conner thought the female voice was his mother screaming, and she thought that it was him. They met in the living room, and threw their arms around each other. Then Dan said, “There’s a light in the field.” From their perspective on their rear deck, it was clear that none of the houses were involved.

Conner and Katelyn stayed behind while Dan, wearing slippers and a robe, went out onto the deck and down into the backyard. He carried a flashlight.

Their scraggly yard was quiet. The toys of summer—the slide, the swing set, the empty aboveground pool—were sentinels in the stark light of the setting moon. He moved toward the glow, which was in the field beyond the end of the yard, past a stand of narrow third- or fourth-growth pines.

Katelyn and Conner came out on the deck.

“I think it’s a fire in the field,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, God, somebody help me! Somebody help me!”

Katelyn clutched her son. “Conner, we’re going back in.”

Conner broke away from her and went racing down the deck stairs. “Look at that,” he yelled.

As he and Dan crossed the yard, hurrying toward the thin woods, a huge light loomed up from below the tree line. They stopped, stunned by this second moon rising.

Katelyn arrived beside them. “Conner, put this on.”

“Thanks, Mom!” He dug his arms into a jacket. “You know what that is?”

“No.”

Dan walked closer to the edge of the woods. “Can we help you?” he shouted.

“Don’t go too close, Dad.”

The thing seemed to wobble, then rise.

“It’s moving this way, Dan!”

It hung above the woods. Not a sound, now.

“I think it’s a balloon,” Katelyn said.

Then more screams whipped out, shrill to cracking.

“A balloon is on fire!” Katelyn shouted.

The three of them ran again, fumbling in the brush, guided by the light.

“Who in the world would be up in a hot-air balloon at night?” Conner asked. “And that’s not fire, that’s a piezoelectric effect of some kind. Look at it shimmer.”

“It’s a student,” Katelyn said. “Something’s gone wrong with some prank.”

It wasn’t anything to do with hazing, not in February, but it could indeed be a prank. Every house that backed onto the field was occupied by a Bell College professor.

THE THREE THIEVES LOOKED OUT across the electromagnetic haze that flowed off the wires with which humans surrounded their shelters. Sharp eyes watched Conner and Dan.

DAN PAUSED IN THE WOODS. “Maybe nothing’s gone wrong. Maybe the screaming is the prank.”

“I hope so,” Katelyn said, calmer now, embracing this most reasonable of probabilities.

“Come on,” Conner said.

Before them, as they left the woods, they saw people running toward the object from various directions, Harley Warner, but not Paulie or his mother or sister, Chris and Nancy Jeffers, and the entire Kelton family, robes flying, Manrico barking furiously, but hanging well back. Jimbo Kelton was using a video camera, and Nancy Jeffers held her cell phone out like some kind of shield, no doubt taking pictures with it.

Another scream pealed out.

Dan shouted, “DO YOU NEED HELP?” He hoped it was just a prank because Bell did not need adverse publicity, not with the sort of enrollment problems faced by a small college located at the burnt-out end of a bus line that only served what the college brochure gamely called “the sophisticated little city of Wilton.” What sophistication there might be in a row of closed stores and a grain elevator was anybody’s guess.

“Oh, God, God!”

The words seemed to ring in the trees, to leave their narrow trunks trembling.

“Can’t you see that she’s in real trouble?” Conner yelled. He took off toward the object.

THE ONE WATCHED CONNER, WHILE the Two and the Three regarded Marcie with the reverent cunning of boys in a candy store. The Two drew closer, now pressing his face into her churning aura. Angry static bounced around the tiny space—the collective was furious that they were not performing as directed.

Which made little difference. The thousand grays who were here were spread all over the planet, feeding in Brazil and Britain and China, mining gravitite in the iron deposits of New York, extracting Helium 3 fuel on the moon. They were linked to the great collective, yes, but it was moving toward Earth far more slowly than the lead group, so what could it actually do? Nothing, and they would carry out its orders… eventually.

The Three Thieves would have been more efficient with Marcie, but the luscious fears, the darting hopes, the bright, wet desires that filled her smooth flesh were just too much of a temptation. Dan Callaghan was awake anyway, so the whole expedition was a waste. They might as well make of it whatever they could.

The Two, as the negative pole of the triad, showed her a long needle. Her eyes widened as she saw the silver of it appearing out of the dark that surrounded her. She could not see the Thieves, of course, they were too careful for that.

He plunged the needle into her forehead and she shrieked and they gobbled her agony… for the moments that it lasted feeling as alive as their distant ancestors must have, before they had enhanced themselves with machine intelligence, and lost contact with the only thing that mattered, in the end, which was feeling.

Without it, life was ongoing death, and to find it again, crossing a galaxy was as nothing, not even if the journey took fifty generations, not even if it took a thousand.

From a billion times a billion miles away, they had seen Earth glowing with emotion. It had drawn them like excited moths to its mystery, first in hundreds, then in thousands, and soon the billions would come to drink the healing waters of the human soul… if all went well.

THE KELTONS WENT CLOSE, RUNNING low like actors on a movie battlefield. It occurred to Dan that Jimbo Kelton might be recording the prank for the later amusement of fellow perpetrators.

All the people in the neighborhood were not only known to each other, they counted one another as friends. Nancy and Chris were dear friends of Katelyn and Dan. Kelton was a historian, working at the far end of the campus from the Hall of Science, but still a member of the cozy little Oak Road crowd. The Warners and the Callaghans, were very close—or had been.

Nancy clutched her cell phone to her ear. Dan felt for his, miraculously found it in a pocket of his jacket. He punched in 9-1-1. “This is Dr. Daniel Callaghan, one-oh-three Oak Road. There’s a fire in the field behind our house that borders Wilton Road. Somebody’s trapped in it.”

The screams lost form, became a continuous roar of pain.

Dan closed his cell phone while the dispatcher was still talking. He was now convinced that this was serious. Those screams were real. He took off after Conner, going flat-out.

“Don’t let him near it,” Katelyn howled, passing him in her pursuit of her son.

As Dan ran, he looked for the basket, for the burning student, but he could see only the fearsome glare, like looking into a thousand car headlights or a flashbulb that would not quit. He shielded his eyes and struggled closer. “Conner! Conner where are you?”

“I can’t see him, Dan! CONNER! CONNER!”

Another scream came, trembling and high, desolate with agony, then the object wavered a little in the air. Far off, the thin wail of a siren could be heard, then more sirens, getting louder.

“Conner, oh thank God!”

He was with the Kelton boys, his small form hidden in the bulk of their teenage bodies.

“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” Katelyn said.

“Mom!”

“Come on!” She took him by the wrist, yanked him away, heading back toward their empty house.

“No!” He broke away.

And suddenly she was terribly afraid. Afraid for her son. He was vulnerable—to what, she did not know, but she knew that he was vulnerable.

“Conner, please, I am begging you. I am begging you right now to come back with me.”

“Mom, I think I know what this is!”

“Conner, no. You have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s not right and it’s dangerous.”

He threw his arms around her. “Mom, don’t worry.” In an instant, he had broken away and was running back into the light.

The Thieves were concerned now. Conner should not be here, and they could feel the fury and the fear of the whole collective. Of course everybody was scared: their survival depended on this child, who had been bred through fifty human generations.

Katelyn had the awful and frightening sense that the thing was somehow watching her son. She took off after him, her feet slamming into the winterhard ground, and she tackled him and brought him down.

It made him cry out in astonishment. Katelyn had never disciplined him physically. Such a thing was unthinkable, to humiliate a brilliant child in that way—or any child, for that matter.

She got up on all fours, crying, trying to keep herself between him and the thing. She had the hideous feeling that it would somehow suck him into its fire, and he would join the poor woman who was screaming there.

He stood up. Glaring down at her, he turned away from the object and strode back toward the house. Thanking God in her heart, she followed her son home.

FIVE

THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT HANDED COLONEL Robert Langford a sheet of paper. “My God,” he said as he read it.

“Sir?”

“This is under the blanket,” he said. The young man, who was not cleared to hear what was about to be said, left the room.

The glowboy that had been snooping around Wilton, Kentucky, had just done something that Rob had never seen, and that he was quite sure no monitor had seen from the beginning of this mission, which dated back to 1942.

He pulled up a satellite view of Wilton. The glowboy was bright, its plasma fully deployed. The thing was ready to move out of there fast. He zoomed in on the image. Disbelieving, he zoomed in on it again. What in hell were people doing crowding around the thing? The grays considered their secrecy essential, and they had threatened dire consequences if it was ever compromised. But they themselves were breaking it.

And also breaking a fundamental policy of the United States of America, which was to keep their secret until and if something could be said to the public other than, “We know they’re here, we know that they come into your bedrooms and kidnap you in the night, but we don’t know why and we are helpless to stop them. And yes, some of you disappear, and some of you die.”

He stared at the image, watching the figures move, trying to form some sort of a rational explanation of what might be happening.

Rob spent too much time in the Mountain, or so he’d been told by practically everybody who worked with him. Because the grays operated at night and tracking their movements was his duty, over the years he’d gradually become a night person.

Mike Wilkes had negotiated a treaty with the grays, using the interface between Bob and Adam and Eamon Glass. The agreement was that they would limit their abductions in number and region. In return, the United States had guaranteed to protect their secrecy.

It was Rob’s job to keep track of the abductions, and, in the most extreme cases of treaty violation, to put up a show of force.

This was not to be done lightly. The grays would not stand to be fired upon. That had been tried back in the forties, and the reply had been horrifying. The grays had caused six hundred plane crashes in the year 1947. Shortly thereafter, President Truman had ordered that they were not to be interfered with in any way. Nobody cared to challenge the grays, but now was one of those dreadful moments when something had to be done.

Early on, there had been a fear that the Soviets would find out how the collective minds of the grays worked, and announce to the world something like, “We have seen the future and it is Communist.” However, nobody except the United States Air Force possessed a gray. Therefore the rest of the world—including the remaining U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the government—was at best minimally informed. Within the Air Force, fewer than twenty people knew about this project.

He put his hand on the phone. There was nobody else in the world who could make this decision, or even offer advice. If he was wrong, there was just no way to tell what the grays would do.

Could he bring about the end of the world when he picked up that phone?

He lifted the receiver, punched in some numbers. “Jimmy, Rob. Do you have my glowboy coordinates?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been ground bound for a while, sir.”

“I need a scramble out of Alfred moving on it instamente.”

“Yes, sir!”

He paused, then. Took a deep breath. “God be with us,” he said into the phone. His next step was to inform Wilkes of what was happening, and that required setting up a listening device on the call. Mr. Crew expected all contacts with Wilkes to be logged, recorded, and sent to him.

Personally, Rob was convinced that Crew was right to be suspicious of Wilkes. He believed that the man was using the empaths to discover new technologies, and selling them to the private sector. Also, Wilkes’s pathological hatred of the grays was inappropriate. He believed that they were bent on invasion. They scared him and that’s why he hated them. But hate does not win wars, knowledge does, and that’s what Wilkes’s empath unit was supposed to be gaining from the one remaining gray in captivity. But damned little useful information came out of the new empath.

Rob did not understand the grays but he didn’t hate them. In fact, he found them incredibly interesting. They’d been here for fifty years and they hadn’t invaded yet, so that didn’t seem to be a very real concern. What they did to people was weird, but you didn’t see folks disappearing or being injured, at least not physically. Obviously, though, whatever the grays were doing to the people they abducted was damned important to them. Otherwise, there would not be threats. They were taking something from us, no question of that, but in the way a farmer takes milk, not meat.

The information flow, Rob believed, was being shunted to Wilkes’s real buddies, the quiet companies who fed off the United States’ one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar annual black budget. In Rob’s opinion, there was a pipeline that led, through Wilkes, from Adam right back to the industry. It would certainly explain why an Oklahoma orphan boy, who had nothing to live on but his soldier’s pay, called a multimillion-dollar house in Georgetown home… and why an officer whose work was in a hole two hundred feet below Indianapolis, Indiana, even needed a presence inside the Beltway.

“Mike, it’s Rob. Sorry about the late hour, but I have a situation. There’s a glowboy on the ground near Wilton, Kentucky. I know, it’s very odd and very disturbing. What’s even more of a concern is that there are civilians in the field around him. He’s got his plasma deployed and he’s ready to run, but he ain’t running. There have gotta be video cameras down there, all kinds of trouble. I’m doing a scramble, I’ve got to get that guy out of there. Do you think you could get Glass in the hole with Adam? Let’s reassure him that it’s just a friendly warning that they might spill their own secret. And let’s please find out what we can about what in sam hill they’re up to.”

He waited until he heard Wilkes’s grunt of assent. The good colonel did not like to be dictated to, which is why Rob did just that whenever he had a chance.

ALFRED AIR FORCE BASE WAS a training facility. It was still up and running largely because Kentucky’s senior senator was a member of the Armed Services Committee and powerful enough to hold onto his bases.

Whatever, Rob was damned relieved that the place was still operational. He widened the image on the overhead satellite, punched a couple of keys, and saw a white outline of the base superimposed over its location. The base was barely thirty miles from the unfolding incident.

IN THE FIELD IN KENTUCKY, they were standing in helpless amazement, watching the object. Nancy Jeffers had gone home, because she and her husband had no wish to leave their baby alone with something like this taking place. Katelyn and Conner were also gone, and Dan was just as glad. A child had no business out here, and he thought that Kelton was letting his boys get way too close with that camera of theirs.

Without warning, a clap of thunder hit. Dan cried out, they all did. Chris Jeffers covered his head with his hands. Dan saw a double star wheeling in the sky. Then he heard the shriek of a jet and realized that what he was looking at were afterburners. “It’s the Air Force!” he shouted.

Its underside glowing in the light being given off by the object, the fighter howled past so low that a hot stench of burning jet fuel washed over them.

The object turned purple. It moved, wobbling, above the ground.

The voice in the thing cried out, “Help me, help me, oh God, no! NO NO NO!”

The light rose into the sky. It hung there, still wobbling slightly. The jet’s glowing afterburners turned and started back.

“Stop it! Stop that!” came the voice. Then more screaming. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh aaaaaa…”

Maggie Warner screamed with her, crying into the agony of it.

In that instant, the object rose a hundred feet or so, then shot off to the north literally like a bullet. It went faster than Dan had ever seen anything go.

The jet passed over again, its engines screaming. It turned and followed the object. They watched the afterburners creep away into the sky.

Into the silence that followed, Chris said, “God help her.”

“That was a UFO,” young Jimbo Kelton announced.

Maggie asked, “Was that a UFO?”

“Dear heaven,” Harley Warner said, “I think so.”

Dan was looking at a small shadow in the field standing where the glow had been. “Folks,” he said, “uh, I don’t think we’re alone here.”

But when he shone his flashlight toward it, there was nothing there.

SIX

LAUREN GLASS WAS ENJOYING TEDDY Blaine’s lovemaking, powerful and persistent from this sweet, rough guy. As a fellow Air Force officer, he was carefully disinterested in Lauren’s classified work, and that made this particular affair very fun and very easy. As long as she was involved in heavily classified work, Lauren’s plan was to keep the lovers moving through her life. Nobody deep, because it made it too hard to keep her secrets.

When Colonel Wilkes called her, she tried to ignore it. She pushed the chiming out of her mind, concentrated on the warmth under the covers, and the fabulous young man who was loving her.

The warble became a whine.

“Oh, Lauren,” Teddy whispered, sinking down onto her, burying his face in her neck, kissing her now gently, pressing his prickled cheek against her soft one.

“My love,” she said, and thought that she really did kind of mean it. Which meant—should she ditch him on the never-get-too-close theory?

The whine became a wail.

He jerked like he’d been stuck with a pin. “I don’t believe this.”

“My cert’s up,” she said, referring to the security certification system on her computer, which started automatically when she began receiving a classified message.

But why was he after her now, at—what—jeez, it was 3 A.M. She’d been in the cage for six hours yesterday waiting without result for Adam to at least take a breath, and she was most certainly not ready to return to his dark, claustrophobic hole.

Throwing off the covers, she went over and typed her password. Code came up, four lines, which she sight read. “They’ve got a virus,” she muttered, striving not to reveal to him her true horror. The message communicated extreme urgency. Something was wrong. Real wrong.

“Let somebody else fix it.”

“I have to go,” she said, going to her closet and starting to dress.

“Miss Indispensable.”

“Unfortunately.” Zipping her jeans, she went over and kissed him. “I’ll be back, love,” she said.

He drew her toward the bed. Briefly, she sat down. They kissed. She looked into his eyes. She sighed. “You know the rules.” And she realized how much she hated what she did—how deeply, profoundly twisted it felt… but she loved the perks, and, quite frankly, she was also sort of okay with Adam. The facility was a hole, but at the bottom of that hole was a most extraordinary being.

The thought that Adam might not be well crossed her mind. That made her hurry even more. She threw on a sky-blue cashmere sweater and her black jacket. After a perfunctory brush of her hair, she strode across her large living room and out the door.

She did not look back toward Ted. When she returned, he might well be gone. Fine, she’d rustle up another roll in the hay, maybe a civilian this time.

She had a lot for a girl of twenty-six. But she did a lot. As far as anybody knew, there was only one person on this earth who could do what she did. No doubt there were others, but how to find them? The Air Force had never been able to succeed at that, which was fine by her, since it meant that she could name her price, which had been promotion to full colonel. So now Mike’s orders were requests… but this was one she would certainly meet.

In the elevator, she turned her mind to her work. What could be wrong? She wished the elevator would go faster. She arrived in the condo’s garage, strode to her car, and sped off to the facility. It wasn’t far. She couldn’t live far from Adam.

She turned two corners onto Hamilton, and made her way down the tree-shaded street to the old house.

Wilkes met her at the door, which was unusual in the extreme. “A glow-boy kiped a newbie in the forbidden zone and there were civilian witnesses,” he said all in one breath. “I want you to query Adam on it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s so extremely unusual, obviously.”

“You understand, they don’t have the concept of treaty. They don’t know what that is. And they futz with newbies all the time. You just don’t see them do it, because they stay in the approved zones.”

“You know this?”

“What if I told you that they’re a rambunctious, fun-loving bunch of extremely brilliant but weird people? How would that sit?”

“First, they are not people. Second, they are not only extremely brilliant, they are extremely sinister and they have no emotions.”

“Adam showed grief when Dad got killed.”

“He was faking it.”

“Plus, he—I don’t know how to put it, it’s not human emotion, not at all, but he does care about me.”

“You’re projecting. End of story. Now, let’s go down. We have work to do.” As they waited for the elevator, he added, “We have a scramble running on the glowboy, incidentally.”

“Oh, great, how do I explain that?”

“Communicate that it’s a friendly warning. The civilians are liable to have cameras. There could be a security breach that’s beyond our control.”

“Wunderbar.” She was annoyed when Wilkes got into the elevator with her. She did not like him around when she and Adam were together.

A few moments later, the doors opened onto the control room and, beyond it, the huge door that sealed Adam’s space.

As Lauren stripped, Andy began opening a fresh prep kit. She dropped her sweater to the floor and rubbed her temples. “So I need to find out why this triad is off-station?”

Lauren threw off her clothes in front of both men. Let them see. She was proud of what she was.

“Lauren, I need concrete information from you on this.”

She let Andy cover her body with the emollients that would protect every inch of her skin. Over the years, she’d gotten drier and drier from the zero-humidity conditions in the cage. At twenty-six she had the skin of a forty-year-old. She caked her face in Vaseline.

Andy’s hands felt only clinical to her, but she was aware that she did not feel clinical to him. She knew because of the way he would turn away when he was finished, his cheeks burning, poor guy.

She pulled on her orange coverall, zipped it, and wrapped the neck shield tightly. Andy fitted her cap. Then she rolled her heavy latex gloves onto her hands.

She faced the steel door.

Andy pushed up the sleeve of her coverall and injected her. “Sorry,” he said, as always. He kissed her then, very quickly, on the place he’d just pricked.

She opened the door, stepped into the airlock, and waited. The inner door hissed and slid aside.

She entered her secret heaven and hell, the world of love and terror that she shared with Adam.

SEVEN

AS A SOCIAL SCIENTIST, KATELYN Callaghan understood the impulse to congregate after a tragedy, which was why the Jefferses had returned, baby in carrier, and now sat before the Callaghan fireplace. The Keltons had rushed home to study their video, the Warners to keep their excited kids from doing anything rash.

Hell’s gate had opened for somebody tonight, and now there must be congregation—the ancient holy act that was intended by deepest human instinct to declaim the persistence of life.

Chris and Nancy sat with straight backs, methodically sipping wine. Six-month-old Jillie slept in her carrier between them, her little mouth open, her pacifier in her hand.

Katelyn wanted only to go downstairs to Conner. As irrational as it probably was, she was nevertheless experiencing an urge to guard him, and this urge was growing by the minute.

Nervously, she paced in front of the fireplace, drinking rather than sipping. She feared that Conner might go back out there on his own. That was why the Warners were staying home, to keep Paulie in. Conner could easily leave via the door that led from his basement room under the deck, and out into the yard.

She stepped onto the deck and looked out across the yard. No movement. Total silence.

It had seemed like half the campus police department, the entire volunteer fire department, County Emergency Services, and the state police had come.

None of the official types had seen the light, but the Air Force jet had still been maneuvering around when they came, at least. Police Chief Dunst had called Alfred AFB, only to be told that there were no fighters in the air at that time. No planes at all, in fact. He’d closed his cell phone in disgust. “Guess that was a privately owned F-15 on afterburners,” he’d muttered.

The emergency crews had combed the field with infrared detectors. It had all been very impressive, but it would have been more impressive if they had found something resembling human remains, or even a shard of debris of some sort.

“Well,” Nancy said at last, “what do we think?”

“We think some damned kids are in big trouble. I mean, I saw the Air Force out there,” Katelyn said.

“Dan. Danny Dan.” Chris laughed silently.

“No, Chris,” Nancy said.

“No? With regard to what?”

“With regard to the fact that you think it was a flying saucer.”

“With an abductee aboard, yes, I do think that.”

Now it was Nancy’s turn to drink deep. She glared at her husband. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“It’s true, though.”

“Maybe and maybe not, but I do know one thing, we’re here because of this UFO stuff! Shunted off into this backwater with barely enough of a salary to raise our baby—and it’s because you side with the trailer trash instead of your fellow physicists. Excuse me, folks. Family stuff.”

“No, it’s true,” Dan said, “everybody here is a failure somewhere else.”

“They’re real, they’re here, and my colleagues are wrong. If that video—”

“Don’t you dare go on TV about this, Chris. Don’t you dare!”

Chris raised his hands defensively. “Be it far from me, unless—”

“Unless nothing! No more, Chris. I have gone from CalTech to U. Mass to this because of your damn UFOs. Below here, we are looking at the junior-college pit.”

“I reserve judgement until I have seen the video. If it’s as good as I think it’s going to be, it might just get us back to CalTech.”

“You are so fired, Chris. You will never, ever get back there. My God, you made a public idiot of yourself on national television.”

“I told the truth!”

He had appeared on Dateline as an advocate for the reality of UFOs, and his status as a CalTech professor had been used to give him credibility. Within a year, he was out. At U. Mass, it had been an article in the Boston Globe that had quoted his Dateline statements. He lasted six months that time.

Dan told himself to keep out of it. But then he thought that the poor woman was just so vulnerable, with that little baby, and, as much as he liked Chris, he was way off base on this one. “Alien abduction is seizure-related folklore. Did I ever tell you that I suffered from waking nightmares when I was a child? Which is why I know what this is. I saw these little figures. Yeah, me, Chris. I’m an abductee, by your rather dubious—excuse me—standards. But because I also happen to possess a little professional knowledge of the brain, I know where the aliens come from—” He pointed to his own head. “The same place that ghosts and demons and—whatever—goblins come from. And not from some damn field on the outskirts of a one-horse town in Kentucky.”

“Officially, I believe that Wilton is classified as a half-horse town.”

“Whatever, we saw a prank, it was terrifying, and now the Air Force is involved, and there is likely to be hell to pay for these students and this institution, and that is a damn crying shame! Although they do deserve it. The students, not poor Bell.”

“The Air Force said they weren’t there.”

“Dan,” Nancy asked, “are you concerned about your tenure bid? You must be.” She turned to her husband. “Because he won’t involve you. That I will not let him do.”

“All the witnesses—”

“Don’t even start, Chris, my dear love. Dan and Katelyn did not see this. And Kelton, look at him, he’s on thin ice as it is, the history department’s a basket case. Don’t involve them, Chris. Don’t you dare.” She looked at Dan. “How’s it going, by the way?”

“Marcie is how it’s going.”

“Marcie is your referee? You’ve got to be kidding. She hasn’t voted yes on a tenure since Clinton was in the White House.”

Now Dan went for the bottle, poured a glass, sucked it dry. “This is pretty bad,” he said, looking at the label.

“Six dollars at Kroger, don’t knock it,” Chris said. “Now, listen to me. I don’t want to set you off again, but you do realize that this is a historical event. A large group of witnesses, armed in some cases with video equipment, have observed, and, I hope, recorded a UFO on the ground up close. Exhibiting every evidence of the presence of an abductee inside. Which I intend to proclaim to the world.”

“Chris, shut up!”

He looked at his mild-mannered wife in open astonishment. “Excuse me?”

“Just you shut up! Are you hard of hearing or something? Okay, look, you do this and you do it without me and Jillie, because we will be gone.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere!”

“Nancy, this is proof!”

“Oh, Jesus. Junior college, here we come.” She stood up. “I think I’m leaving.” She picked up Jillie in her carrier.

What Katelyn feared was that there had been a murder out there, involving God only knew what sort of bizarre method. A murder, and, perhaps, if the shadow Dan had seen was really somebody, a murderer who was still nearby.

“If you get yourself fired,” Nancy told Chris as she pulled on her coat, “expect divorce papers, mister.”

“Let’s approach it from the direction of each of our specialties,” Chris suggested.

He seemed unbothered by his wife’s outburst. And indeed, Nancy did not actually walk out the door. Katelyn thought, It’s a real marriage, then. They’re long-haulers like us. She knew where this kind of fight took you, in the end. It took you to bed. “Well, certainly,” she said, attempting to move things to a somewhat calmer level, “from the standpoint of the sociologist, we witnessed a real, physical event that I fear was tragic. We all do, or we wouldn’t be here huddled together in the back of the proverbial cave in the dead of the night.”

Dan said, “I’m in agreement that it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a prank and possibly somebody was injured. I agree there. Unless some genius actress has just recently emerged here at Bell, which I very much doubt.”

“I thought Death of a Salesman was pretty good,” Chris said.

Dan smiled. “Death of a Salesman is not working when you find yourself pulling for Willy Loman to commit suicide.”

“What we didn’t see was an alien spacecraft taking somebody on a rough ride,” Nancy said. “I want that established, Chris. Admitted.”

“So, what did we see?” Chris’s question was softly put.

Silence fell.

Katelyn said, “My concern is the injury issue. And frankly, getting awakened in the middle of the night. It is the middle of the night. I am outraged and I am scared.” She told herself it was mostly outrage. She knew that it was mostly fear. “I think somebody might be badly injured, hidden in some dorm basement right now, trying to tend her burns with Bactine or something.”

“Don’t say that,” Nancy said, shivering

“What’s the enrollment picture looking like, Nance?” Dan asked. He was well aware that the psychology department was overstaffed. If Bell had another bad enrollment season, he could not only be passed over for tenure, he could see his professorship dissolved. Obviously, a campus death would not be helpful.

“Iffier than last year, actually.”

“Maybe the idea that we’ve had an alien visitation would actually help,” Chris said.

“Excuse me, guys,” Nancy asked, “but who’s in the kitchen?”

“That would be nobody,” Katelyn said. Except she had also heard a sound—a chair scraping against the kitchen tile floor. “Excuse me,” she said, standing up. “Is that somebody there?” she asked as she headed across the dining room.

The kitchen was empty, but as she walked in, Katelyn thought she might have seen the back door closing. She called, “Dan, come in here.”

Dan got up, sucking in breath as he did so. He came into the room. Nancy and Chris followed close behind.

“I don’t want to alarm anybody,” Katelyn said softly, “but I think someone just went out on the porch.”

Dan opened the door. The tiny side yard was bright with moonlight, and clearly empty. He peered along the driveway, then stepped out and looked at the street. Cold, quiet, that was all.

“What gives?” Katelyn asked as he returned.

He shook his head. “All quiet on the Oak Road front.”

“I heard the chair, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

“It must have been the wind.”

“There is no wind.” She put her hand on a chair, dragged it. “It was somebody doing this.”

“There’s nobody,” Dan said. He locked the back door. “At least, not anymore.” He had the odd feeling, though, that this was not right. He shuddered. The room seemed somehow—what? It was clean enough, but it seemed—well, there was no way around it: the place felt… occupied. “Does it seem—” He shook his head. How could he explain what he felt? Watched, when there was obviously nobody else here.

Chris lunged suddenly, slapped the kitchen table with his open hand.

The sound silenced them all.

“I—uh—there was a fly.”

“In February?” Nancy asked.

“No, there wasn’t a fly. Something moved. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. A cat—maybe a cat… over there by the pantry. Could a cat have gotten in here?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Dan said.

“Obviously,” Katelyn said as she got a bottle of wine from the cabinet where they were kept, “just an hour ago.” She looked at the bottle. “Will our five-dollar cabernet beat your six-dollar merlot?”

Dan checked the pantry. The familiar neat rows of canned goods stood untouched on the shelves, there if they ever got snowed in. He shook a box of cereal Conner had left open, re-rolled the wax paper inside, and closed it.

As he turned away, he felt something—like somebody’s hand had brushed against his left ear. He fumbled for the light, turned it on.

There was nobody in here but him.

Then a pain like a blowtorch flashed through the ear. He gasped, cried out, stifled the cry.

Katelyn had the chair in her hand. He staggered toward it.

“Dan?”

“I’m okay!” He fell into the chair. He could do nothing else, he was in agony. “Jesus, Jesus,” he said, trying not to gasp, trying not to seem to be in pain and failing utterly.

“What the hell?” Chris said.

“It’s my ear,” he breathed. “Oh, Jesus!”

Katelyn looked at it.

“Whoa, that smarts. Christ.”

“It looks fine.”

“Oh, man. It must be—” He tried to get up, failed. He was too dizzy. “Am I having a stroke? Does anybody know the symptoms?”

“Is it a headache, honey?”

“My God, it’s my ear, it’s killing me.”

“Perhaps a visit to the health center,” Nancy suggested.

“Dr. Hamner’s on senility leave,” Dan said. “Anyway, it’s closed at night because people might need it then.”

The pain began to get a little less. Dan managed to come to his feet. Still dizzy, he staggered a step. “Better,” he said.

At that moment, everything in the room rattled, there was a loud whoosh, and the back door opened and slammed itself.

“The wind,” Nancy shrilled, then knocked back a full glass of wine and poured another.

Katelyn did not tell them what she had just seen, which was a sort of light flickering along the back porch and into the yard, a light like a narrow searchlight beam from somewhere over the house.

In her most private self, in places inside herself where she almost never went, there were vague memories from childhood, memories that had drawn her to watch a TV documentary here and there about alien abduction, and to wonder. The memories were very unformed and very strange, but the fact remained that when she had first seen one of those big-eyed alien faces depicted on the cover of some stupid book, she had been transfixed, literally unable to move, and unable to stop the tears.

She would never tell Dan this, not with his childhood seizures. He needed to leave apparitions, demons, and all of that sort of thing behind him.

She could only think now of one thing: Conner, because, in her heart of hearts, she worried that he might be seizure-prone, too. Or worse, what if it was true? Even more than a criminal or idiot pranksters, if there were aliens out there right now, her place was with her little boy. She stepped back toward the living room.

“Katelyn?”

“Sorry, Dan, I thought I heard Conner.”

“Help me, here.” He went toward her.

She strode over to the freezer, rummaged for the blue cold pack, thrust it at him. He took it with thanks, pressed it against his head. “Better,” he said. “Somewhat.”

She went downstairs. On this night, she would sleep on the floor beside her son.

“Hi,” he said as she came in.

“Not asleep yet?” She sat on the bed. “It’s terribly late.”

“Three twenty-eight. I guess that qualifies.”

“Conner, I’m so sorry I knocked you down like that. I was just—oh, honey, I was so scared. I’ve never been that scared in my life!”

“You want to know a secret, Mom?”

“Sure.”

“That you swear you will especially not tell any Warners?”

“Sworn on the old heart.”

“I’ve never been that scared in my life, either. Mom, you know what I felt like? I felt like it was watching me.”

She did not—dared not—tell him of her own feelings.

No matter all the elegantly dismissive conversation above, the dumping on Chris with his silly ideas, down here in the dark with Conner, she found a truth that she could not deny. Whatever had happened out in that field, it had nothing whatsoever to do with any pranks, and murder was even more far-fetched.

The truth was, it had everything to do with the night and the unknown.

She took Conner in her arms, and prayed to the good God that she be granted the right to never, ever let go of him again. Soon, his breathing grew soft and steady, and she, also, closed her eyes. With her boy safe beside her, Katelyn slept.

It was then that the shadows came, stealing in from the dark place under the deck where they had been hiding.