The Spaceship Next Door

¹⁴ BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY

A drum sat in the corner of Desmond Hollis’s office, on a small stage, in a glass case. The drum was—depending on who was asked—either a smaller replica of the original, or the original itself, miraculously preserved for over three hundred years.

The latter claim was within the realm of the possible, only because the Hollis family could trace its bloodline back to the original Sorrowers, which was a statement pretty much nobody else in town could make. It gave the claim some legitimacy.

However, much like the spaceship up the road, most people thought the drum would be bigger.

The story was, when Josiah Sorrow’s followers picked this spot in which to settle (or Josiah did, when he decided to die nearby) they inadvertently wandered onto ground that was considered either sacred or cursed by five different regional Native American tribes.

There were enough competing historical claims on this particular detail that it was effectively impossible to tease out the real story. In some stories, it was the site of a great war between the tribes and was subsequently considered haunted by the natives. In another, there was no war, but the crops always failed, so it was cursed. A third had the tribes keeping away because of the wrath of an angry local god, although the expression of this wrath was unspecified. The most benign version held that the weather in this part of the valley was simply too harsh for people who lived lives which didn’t include modern winter gear. This one had merit for being the least condescending toward the belief systems of the regional native Americans—who were in most respects, quite practical—if it did somewhat discount the ingenuity of a people who lived year-round in New England.

What all iterations of the story did have was the drum.

The drum used to rest on a tree stump in the middle of a field a short walk from the shore of the river. That field was now a parking lot and the stump was long gone, but a plaque was erected—by the same committee that funded Josiah’s mural—and that plaque was still standing at the edge of Main in front of the parking lot.

As it went (in most of the stories) when there was an inter-tribal dispute, any one of the elders from any of the tribes could travel to the stump and bang on the drum, which would signal all of the tribes that a meeting was required. The other elders would show up shortly after, and the matter would be resolved peacefully, with no bloodshed, due to the sacred/cursed nature of the land on which the drum sat. It sounded like a great way to avoid a war in an era before telephones and treaty organizations.

Given this description it was reasonable to assume the drum was larger than the one in Desmond’s office, because the real thing had to be something big enough to be heard throughout the valley. This was a very modern idea, though, because in truth, Main Street ran through a midpoint in a natural concavity. If one took away all of the buildings and the cars somehow, added some more trees and got rid of the parking lot, it was possible that the sound of a drum could carry pretty far if one faced in the correct direction. Even a small one.

In the early going, it was to the Sorrowers’ benefit that the locals—who surely would have otherwise slain them for their encroachment—were afraid to shed blood on the ground they’d elected to call home. Sorrowers were also considered cursed people by a couple of the tribes, not specifically because of where they were living but because when they arrived the first thing they did was shed blood (Josiah’s) in a place where that was taboo.

The tribes mostly left them alone, then, and figured it was okay so long as none of the Sorrowers did something stupid, like touch the drum.

Then came winter.

Josiah’s cult had some experience with winter, certainly. All of them were born and raised in the Americas, and they’d toughed out two prior winters isolated from the larger settler populations to the southeast. But half their summer was spent in canoes, which left almost no time for preparing the sorts of things a community needed to survive a winter in this climate: shelter, adequate provisions, and so on. They also had no horses and hardly any weapons, and half of them were dying from what turned out to be syphilis. (The Sorrowers called the disease the God’s Wrath Plague, and in this instance that was probably accurate.)

One evening in the first winter, with a quarter of their number already dead, a young man decided, on his own, to trudge through a foot of newly fallen snow to the drum, which he banged furiously for an hour. His name was Oliver Tempest Hollis.

Young Hollis likely had no idea what the drum was for and just wanted something to hit, although later it would be said this was a divinely directed action, and who was to say?

Assuming his goal was to alert the neighbors that the tribe of white men residing on cursed soil was about to perish, he succeeded. Within two days multiple representatives of each of the five tribes arrived at the stump.

Pretty much nothing was known about what happened in the conversation that followed, between the elders and their clansmen and Oliver Tempest Hollis. As the banger of the drum, the natives took Oliver to be the man who spoke for all of the Sorrowers, and so he did. He had no authority to do so, but the deal he struck ended up being one that saved the lives of everyone else living in Sorrow Falls, so the others had little choice but to roll with it.

One thing that came out of the talk was that young Hollis was promised to an age-appropriate woman from one of the tribes. This was in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter, and a long-term co-existence between the Sorrowers and the Natives, so the implication was that Oliver Tempest Hollis was one hell of a catch.

This also may have been true, in that the elders appeared to have considered him a great man to survive on cursed land and to bang the drum without being struck dead by their gods for this impertinence.

There was an accompanying Disney version of this tale that held that the woman Oliver wed—her name was Aquena in most of the texts, and the daughter of one of the elders—was there the day they found him at the drum, and they fell in love on sight.

This was probably not true. But it was a neat idea, and neat ideas almost always made for better stories.

HOLLIS’S OFFICE took up a third of the top floor of the mill, which made it about level with Main Street out of one window. Another window presented a terrific view of the Connecticut River, and the sudden disappearance of said river over Sorrow Falls.

Annie had been in the office a half-dozen times, and liked to imagine the view from there wasn’t all that dissimilar to the last one Josiah had.

“I’m glad we finally had a chance to talk,” Desmond was saying to Ed as everyone took their seats.

Desmond Hollis was the youngest of the three brothers. Desmond, Richard and Louis, and their sister Katherine, were the children of Allan Hollis and his wife June. Allan was, in turn, the only living son of Calvin Hollis, the founder of Hollis Paper Goods. Calvin’s great-great-great-grandfather was Oliver Tempest Hollis, meaning the Hollises were one of the oldest families in America, and certainly the oldest that virtually nobody knew a thing about.

They seemed to like it that way.

“Well, I don’t know what you heard,” Ed said. “It’s not a big deal, really.”

“Nonsense, a reporter in town to write a big story on our special visitor? I wouldn’t turn you away. We want everyone in Sorrow Falls to feel welcome, isn’t that so, Annie?”

“It certainly is.”

“How’s you mother, hon? You know if you need anything at all…”

“I know, Desmond. Thank you. I’ll tell mom you said hey.”

“You better.”

Desmond was approaching sixty and had plans to hand over the business to whichever son he felt would do right by the town. That was how he ended up running the mill over his elder brothers, although word was they showed little interest one way or the other.

There were a lot of bad stories about industry in New England, but the Hollis paper mill was one of the few consistently good stories. It remained a family-owned company with its own way of doing things. Sometimes that way of doing things was contrary to what was most profitable, which was why choosing the right successor was so important, to Allan Hollis before and to Desmond now.

Ten years ago there was a fire, which gutted a large part of the factory beneath them. Desmond could have been made whole for the loss by insurance and kept the mill closed indefinitely at no additional cost. It was the profitable thing to do. Instead, he nearly bankrupted his entire family by using most of the insurance to rebuild and compensate all of the employees while rebuilding. Anything other than that would have ruined most of the town, and he knew it.

Annie was pretty sure he was paying for the care her mother was receiving in Boston, too. Their health insurance was good, but it wasn’t that good.

“So what is it I can do for you, Mr. Somerville?”

“Well, Mr. Hollis, I’m talking to as many people as I can around town who were here back when the ship came down.”

“Yes, so you told Missie. I’m happy to talk about that, but you know, I’ve told these stories a hundred times. If you’ve done your homework, you already know I didn’t see it happen. Wish I had! I’m a restless sleeper.”

“He’s trying a new angle,” Annie said.

“Oh, is that so? Well good, I’m tired of my own stories.”

“The people who’ve been around as long as we have…” Annie caught herself, because she realized she was about to compare life stories with a man who had almost fifty years on her. “I mean, those of us here since the ship landed, how we never left… The idea is, maybe we have a better perspective on…”

“On anything new,” Ed said, finishing the thought. “Anything you may have noticed that’s different. Ear-to-the-ground stuff. Annie says you like to keep well-connected.”

“Anything at all? That’s a pretty broad question, Mr. Somerville. Annie, is this a fishing expedition?”

“Kind of. But this time’s different.”

More than one reporter had blown through town looking for a tiny thing to exaggerate up into a huge story that ended up not being true. This was how it was reported, a year earlier, that birth rates had fallen in town because the ship was making everyone sterile. Another time, no lesser entity than the New York Times claimed the residents didn’t celebrate Halloween, and the cars in Sorrow Falls no longer required gas.

“How’s it different?”

“Because something’s actually happening this time, Desmond.”

Ed shot her a panicked look, which she ignored.

“Well all right, that’s new,” Desmond said. “What is it that’s happening?”

“Why don’t you tell us first, and Ed here will tell you what he can.”

“I actually can’t…”

“Just what you can, Ed, don’t have an attack.”

Desmond fixed her with a long stare. “Don’t be mad at her, Mr. Somerville, she’s more shrewd than all of us combined. She knows I knew you weren’t a reporter before you even walked in. Now she’s playing my curiosity against me.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “So have you noticed anything, Desmond?”

“Broad question, young lady, as I said.”

“But you have.”

He shrugged.

“Maybe. Productivity’s been down a lot lately.”

“That’s a cyclical thing, isn’t it?” Ed asked.

“It can be. Middle of summer, people are on vacation in their heads already, sure. We still use a punch clock around here, did you know that? It’s computerized, but it’s still a punch clock. People come to work, punch in to record their arrival time, then hit the floor and get to work, or hit the break room and start their coffee. We’re not real strict about most details because by now, people know how to do their jobs and we expect them to answer to themselves about it. Just the same, I know what time every one of my mill employees checks in, and I know when each of them is supposed to check in. What I’m seeing is, in the past six weeks, people are punching in late by an average of six minutes.”

“That’s unusual?”

“Compared to any other time of year, it is. Average is two minutes early all except during winter storms. They’re coming in late, they’re not sleeping well, and they’re groggy half the day. If it was one or two folks, I’d maybe sit them down, ask if everything was okay at home. But it’s everyone. We’re also seeing a lot of people down with the late-season cold everyone seems to catch toward the end of summer, but that’s an annual thing. You probably want real numbers.”

“I… sure, whatever you think you can share.”

Desmond awakened his desktop computer with a wiggle of the mouse and began tapping away at it. “I can give you numbers, I just need to strip the employee information off the sheets. Probably all of this is confidential, but what the hell, I own the place.”

“That’s great.”

“It’ll give you an idea of what we’re looking at over here. It’s not much but it’s something. Reminds me of farm animals before storms, to be honest. Those of us around long enough to be attuned to the changes in the atmosphere know something’s coming.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Ed said. “But what’s coming?”

“Unless I miss my guess, that’s what you’re here to answer, Mr. Somerville. Now give me a few minutes and I’ll run this to Missie’s printer. Annie, has the man seen the drum? Show the man the drum.”

Desmond’s gaze, and all his attention, went to the computer screen. He was two-finger typing, so this was likely going to take a few minutes.

Annie walked Ed over to the display with the drum.

A plaque was on the podium, describing it as the actual drum of the five tribes. So far as the Hollis clan was concerned, there was no dispute regarding whether this was the real thing or a replica.

“He’s being awfully helpful,” Ed whispered.

“Of course he is. He’s as curious as anyone. I bet he’s been wondering about those numbers for days.”

The window behind the drum faced the river, which was a view a lot more interesting, to Annie, than the one in the display case. The sky had clouded up over the course of the afternoon, and now they were looking at what could be a rain shower rolling in from the east. Sunset wasn’t for another two hours, but it already looked dark out.

“This isn’t the real thing, is it?”

“What?” She got lost in the weather for a second. “The drum?”

“Yes, the drum. It’s much too small.”

“Could be.”

She could see it, not resting in a case but in a recess in the stump.

When people talked about the stump what they thought of was the kind of dead tree stump of the current times, a flattened base making a tiny stage just above the earth, but the real thing was wide and as tall as a man. The tree, when it existed, was enormous and ancient, maybe the oldest thing in the valley before it fell. The drum fit in a knot that was eye-level.

The snow was deep that day, when the tribes rode to the stump. The wind blew hard over the river, the clouds were thundering, and the piles of white held everything down, including sound and warmth. It was unwise to go anywhere as long as the gods were raging like this, but still they went, because the drum called them, and they had to answer it.

The little pale man curled up in the stump with the drum was not what anyone expected. One of them mistook him for a tree god and nearly bolted in fear. When the little man spoke he used words none of them knew.

But then a little girl stepped forward.

“Annie.”

Annie shook her head, and the room spun a tiny bit more than it was supposed to. Ed had her by the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay? Where’d you go?”

“What?”

“I was talking to you and you just sort of checked out, are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, sorry. What were you saying?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re probably tired; it’s been a long day. I should get you back.”

“No, I’m okay.”

It had actually been a very long and largely fruitless day. With only the Desmond interview officially on a calendar that was supposed to be much more full, she and Ed ended up walking the length of Main, popping into stores along the way both to speak with long-time residents so Ed could ask his usual reporter-ish questions (a new one was whether anyone had been sick recently, since he seemed to think this was relevant) and to get out of the heat and into some air conditioning.

When she was at Violet’s house, she imagined herself to be missing all sorts of amazingly important stuff. So far, all she’d gotten out of the day, though, was a few interesting chats with people who all wanted her to know they’re praying for Carol, one very entertaining conversation with Pammy, the racist hairdresser who wanted Ed to know that reggae music was an alien invasion, and—apparently—an extended hallucination from Desmond’s drum.

Desmond wasn’t at the desk any more and the door to the office was open.

How long has he been missing?

Ed saw her confusion.

“He said he had to fetch it from the printer. You didn’t hear that either, huh? Maybe paper mill employees aren’t the only ones losing sleep around here.”

“I said I’m fine.”

Desmond walked back in the room with a Manila folder. “Here we are,” he said, handing it over. “If you know how to read a spreadsheet, it should be pretty obvious what this is saying. I put my business card in there too if you have any questions. Private line, skips right past Missie. You call me any time.”

“Well thank you, Mr. Hollis, that’s incredibly helpful.”

“I have selfish motivations. I want to know what’s going on, and I’d rather I heard about it beforehand instead of during. Hard to game-plan in the middle of it all.”

“You make it sound like something big’s about to take place,” Ed said.

“Isn’t it? Sure feels that way to me. But maybe you know more than I do.”

Ed looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“We don’t know a lot more than this, Desmond,” Annie said. “Just rumors right now. But you knew that too, didn’t you?”

“Seemed like a good bet. You know my number too, Annie. If the apocalypse arrives and I haven’t received a call, I’m going to be very disappointed in both of you.”

WITH THE CAR still parked behind the diner, Annie and Ed had a hike ahead of them, because everything from the mill to Main was uphill. The best way to approach it was to reach the approximate same altitude as the parking lot and then taking the nearest side street running parallel to Main. It was far less scenic, but a good deal more efficient, and the humidity was just not getting any better. The weather reached that point where everyone caught outside was hoping it would just rain and get it over with.

The clouds indicated it was about to do just that.

The streets between the river’s edge and Main were almost entirely residential or were a building belonging to Hollis. There wasn’t much else. The residences were row houses—tall, three family buildings with a small footprint and almost no yard—that from Hollis’s window looked like a series of stairs for a giant. On the street level, the buildings blocked out the sun and made the roads seem narrower.

Annie’s preference was to drive through this area if possible. She hardly ever walked it. She did bike it a couple of times, but the climb back was brutal enough to discourage her from making it a habit.

They mostly climbed in silence. Ed was preoccupied with whatever he had going on in his head, stuff he annoyingly hadn’t bothered to share with her yet. She was still trying to break down whatever it was that happened when she was looking at the drum.

Overactive imagination, she thought. That was what the teachers used to accuse her of, as if a vivid imagination was a bad thing. She would have been okay with the idea that that was all it was, but it felt different.

It felt like a memory. The problem was, it wasn’t her memory.

Who else is in my head?

In any other town, the idea that something appeared in her mind that didn’t also begin there would have been entirely non-literal, but Sorrow Falls had an alien ship that put terrible thoughts in the heads of anyone who came too close to it. Also, if Ed was in any way correct, the entire town was behaving civilly to a statistically impossible degree. If the ship could reach out and make people unusually law-abiding, it could reach Annie’s head and put someone else’s memory in it. That wouldn’t necessarily even make the list of top five screwed up things going on.

Ed stopped.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?”

“I thought I heard a scream.”

“Maybe one of your zombies…” she stopped talking, because then she heard it too.

It was a woman’s scream, it came from directly ahead of them, and Annie thought she recognized the voice.

“That’s from the lot behind the diner,” she said. “And it sounds like Beth.”

They were already running by the time they heard a third scream—the quite clear “HELP ME!” in a voice that was unquestionably Beth’s.

The street they were running down took them to the lower back side of the lot, which was blocked off by a chain link fence that was too tall to get over.

Beth drove a Jeep with gold trim—Annie used to joke that Beth should paint it in pink so it would look just like the one in the Barbie playhouse set. It was memorable enough to identify quickly.

Through the fence, they could see Beth lying on her side next to the Jeep. She wasn’t moving.

A man was briskly walking away from Beth. Annie could only see his back, but he looked familiar.

“Hey, HEY! You leave her alone!” Annie yelled. He was, to that point, already doing so.

“How do we get in?” Ed asked.

Annie grabbed him by the elbow and pulled them back the way they’d come, up a side street, to a spot where there was no fence in their way.

Just then, the skies opened up.

It was not the polite kind of storm, which started with a light drizzle and worked its way up to something serious before pulling back and settling in on a decent rain-to-not-rain ratio. It was the angry kind; dumping all the water it had as fast as it could as if the clouds had someplace to be.

It completely destroyed their visibility. The fleeing man, the Jeep, Beth and all but the nearest parked cars vanished in the downpour.

The Jeep was at the far end of the lot, a courtesy parking job so the customers had the spots closest to the restaurant. Annie raced straight to it, her biggest fear, strangely, being that her friend was about to drown in the middle of the lot. She lost track of Ed.

“Beth, Beth! Hey!” Annie knelt down and lifted Beth from the pavement. She was breathing, and once Annie pulled her off the ground, her eyes fluttered and opened.

“Annie, run! We have to…” then she started crying. “Oh, it’s awful, it’s so awful.”

“What is it? What happened to you?”

There was blood on the pavement. Beth had an open wound on her head, but most of the blood was coming from the keys in her hands.

“It’s his blood,” Beth said. “I stabbed him. Maced him too, but he… Annie, I sprayed mace right in the eyes and he didn’t care.”

“Who was it?”

Ed ran up.

“I can’t find him. I can’t see anything out here. I called Pete, she’s on her way.”

“She needs an ambulance,” Annie said.

“They’re on their way too. Did she say who it was?”

“No, but…”

Beth squeezed Annie’s arm tightly.

“It was Mr. Blake, Annie,” she said. “I think he wanted to kill me.”

“Blake? Okay, I’ll tell Pete,” Ed said.

“Put away the phone,” Annie said.

“But Pete can send someone to pick this guy up.”

“Ed, he lives in Peacock Cemetery. George Blake has been dead for five months.”

Ed stared at Annie for a five count. Then he put the phone away.