The Spaceship Next Door

¹⁶ THE NIGHT THE SKY FELL ON ANNIE

Annie had been crying.

Her face was a mess. The eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were all puffy, as if swollen after absorbing moisture from her tears. She sort of wondered what would happen if she pinched one of them: would water come out of the pores?

Anyone looking at her would know what she’d been doing, so it was a good thing she was alone in her bedroom, because it wasn’t something she wanted anybody to know about. Not even her parents, not even when her parents knew why she was crying and that she was probably supposed to be crying. She refused to do it in front of them, even though it was their fault.

Not fair. Cancer isn’t anyone’s fault.

That wasn’t always true, though. Some cancers really were the fault of someone. Like the tobacco industry. They could give people cancer. So maybe that was what it was: someone had given her mother cancer and they were the person Annie should be mad at.

Except according to mom, it wasn’t that kind of cancer. It wasn’t because of the way her mom lived her life: not in anything she ate or drank or smoked or wore or breathed. It was just something happening in her mom’s body, and that was who to blame. Not her mom; her mom’s body.

This didn’t work either.

Blaming her father showed a lot of promise, initially. He was away more and more, and if he’d been away less instead, he could have stopped the cancer from getting to mom, like a rancher with a shotgun guarding cattle from poachers. It was an impossible thought, but these were impossible times. Annie just learned she was going to be motherless by the time she turned twenty, and dammit if there weren’t people who should be held responsible for that.

This isn’t your fault, Annie was one of the things her mother said, so of course Annie had to at least consider blaming herself. She couldn’t imagine how it could be her fault, and the entire line sounded more like something you said to your child after informing her of an impending divorce—which was honestly what she thought the serious conversation she’d been sat down for earlier was going to be about. But maybe there was only one playbook parents had for when they delivered bad news to their kids, and the line came from there. Either way, Annie couldn’t imagine how it was her fault, couldn’t conceive of any way in which she either caused cancer in her mother or stood aside as the cancer was allowed in. She could sort of imagine her mother standing bravely in front of Annie and shielding her from it, as if cancer were something fired from a gun, but that notion dissipated quickly.

She could blame God.

Annie left the mirror, which hung on the back of the door to her bedroom, to sit on the bed. The bed was near the window. From it she could see a good portion of the valley and a whole lot of sky, because there weren’t any houses across the street and they lived on the crest of a bowl canyon that bottomed out at the river several miles down the hill. Her room was on the second floor directly above the front door/porch entrance, and the view from the window right over the porch roof was routinely spectacular. On nights in which she hadn’t been notified of her future orphan status, she liked to sit on the roof and look at the stars. Sometimes she was especially lucky, and a clear night and a meteor shower would coincide. That happened the prior year with the Perseids, which were coming up again in a few days. She hoped to have another good view, and also hoped she cared enough to watch.

Annie didn’t think she believed in God, or if she did, the idea she had of what God must be like didn’t correspond with anyone else’s. It was incredibly annoying in a time like this, because He (or She) would be an excellent being to pin the blame for her mother’s cancer on. She could yell at Him for it instead, and then maybe go through the steps of doubting Him, wondering if He existed at all, working out for herself whether it was worth it to even continue using upper case letters when thinking about Him. She had to believe in Him/Her (or him/her) before questioning that belief, though, and that seemed like a lot of effort.

Besides, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a thing that was now true. Her mother was dying, where yesterday she wasn’t.

She opened the window and sat on the sill, her feet on the roof.

The text was to Rodney, who probably wasn’t. He’d just begun working at the shake place in the Oakdale Mall, which was weird for her because she didn’t have any other friends who were holding down jobs, part-time or otherwise. He was her oldest friend, though—in terms of his actual age, not how long she’d known him—so it was appropriate he be the first to enter the work force.

He also lived right up the street, had a car of his own, and didn’t have a problem using it to go places in odd hours. She tried to take advantage of that whenever she could: it was only a matter of time before he decided he didn’t want to hang around with the little kid down the road any longer. Once he started dating girls his own age, she’d be a hindrance, surely.

Annie sort of wished she were older, because she sort of wanted to date him herself sometimes. Only sometimes, though. She had reached a peculiar age where about half the time the idea of having a boyfriend was the greatest thing in the world, and the other half of the time it was the most terrifying thing she could imagine considering. She decided that meant she wasn’t ready to start dating anyone for real. Fake-dating, sure. She’d been fake-dating Dougie off and on for eight years, but that was just playing. They kissed once, but that was just playing too. Although he might have offered a contrary assessment of their relationship if pressed.

Neither she nor Rodney knew more than a couple of constellations, and exactly zero star names (she wasn’t counting the sun, because it was the sun and because she couldn’t see it at night anyway), so they made up names. It was another one of those things she expected him to grow tired of, especially on nights when he had an early milkshake shift to get up for.

A meteor came streaking along the horizon. Her first thought was it was an early sign of the Perseid shower, but she knew from the previous year which direction to expect those from, and it wasn’t coming from that direction. (The constellation Perseus was one of the ones she could identify, specifically because of the Perseids.)

I should wish upon a star, she thought. Would that work?

Jiminy Cricket was now singing in her head, and that was unfortunate.

Meteors flamed out pretty fast when they hit the upper atmosphere. This one wasn’t, which made it a compelling surprise for about ten seconds, until it occurred to Annie that a meteor that made it all the way to the surface could cause a lot of damage, and this one was headed right for Sorrow Falls.

Or so it seemed. It was hard to judge real distance when looking up in the sky.

Just like every other kid—she assumed—when she reached a certain age she went through a UFO phase. Hers lasted maybe a year, which was long enough to absorb a few ideas on the matter of objects that flew in the night sky but could not be readily identified by the observer. One idea was that it was incredibly hard to distinguish between small and nearby, versus large and far away. Something a few hundred feet in the air and tiny, if misapprehended as something a mile in the air and large, could look like a vessel moving faster than a commercial airliner instead of, say, a firefly caught in a breeze.

She was pretty positive the thing in the sky at this moment was actually falling from outer space, but the illusion of it bearing down on Sorrow Falls specifically was probably just that: an illusion.

It was hard to shake, though. From her angle it hadn’t moved left or right, but it had gone from high in the sky to lower in the sky, and it had gotten brighter. That really did give the impression it was coming her way.

It held position for another three-count, then zigged to Annie’s left, which was to say its descent angle clarified itself by heading northward. It was now traversing the sky from her two o’clock to her ten o’clock.

It wasn’t going to come near Sorrow Falls. It was headed for Vermont or Canada.

It was still coming down fast, though, which she was calculating based on how bright it was.

It was at this moment Annie realized she was looking at something other than a meteor. First, there was the thought:

I shouldn’t still be able to see this.

If it was a meteor, it should have flamed out or slowed down enough by friction to stop causing the air around it to catch fire, which was what made them glow in the first place. This one was still glowing, somehow.

Second, and far more importantly, it turned.

She nearly fell out of the window when this happened. It was on its right-to-left trajectory, going down at about a fifteen-degree angle, when it maneuvered into a descent that was straight down. It did that for five seconds.

Her phone rang.

“Did you see that?” Rodney asked. “Holy crap, what is it?”

“I saw. And… I think it stopped moving?”

It looked like it stopped, but it was still getting brighter somehow.

“It didn’t stop, it’s heading straight for us.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Annie, that’s a spaceship. It has to be.”

She didn’t know what to say. Rodney was right, but he couldn’t be right.

For about five seconds, Annie thought the ship had plans to land right on her house, which would have been something of a capper for the way the evening had gone so far. It did come close, but once it was about two hundred feet up (probably?) the trajectory clarified again.

It was looking for a place to land. It was an alien spaceship and it was looking for a place to land.

The ship reached a spot down the road to her right, stopped dead in the air, and disappeared from view.

“Rodney, how soon can you be here?”

“We should call the sheriff.”

“We should get in your car and go meet the aliens. Then we can call the sheriff.”

“I’ll be outside in ten.”

ANNIE SNUCK out of her house on a semi-regular basis, either to go on a walk by herself or to drive somewhere with Rodney and whoever else he had tagging along. Getting out was easy enough, because the drop from the porch roof was only about ten feet.

Getting back in was a little harder. If she wanted to use the bedroom window she had to climb onto the roof, either by using the trellis on the side of the house or the tiny tree growing beside the porch. Neither of those things was built to support her, nor were they very good at it. More than once she ended up dangling from the edge of the roof and wishing she had sufficient upper body strength to pull herself up from that position. Twice, she succeeded in swinging her legs around and up, but it wasn’t a super pleasant experience because the roof tiles were like sandpaper.

Most times, she just snuck in the front door.

She hopped down from the roof and walked up the street to the standard meeting point, a large tree with a big enough trunk to hide a thirteen-year old girl behind. This was so Rodney wasn’t picking her up right in front of the house. Her parents probably knew she snuck out and were implicitly okay with it, but there was no point in treating them like idiots.

It was twenty minutes before Rodney pulled up; headlights off and rolling slow to keep the noise down.

She jumped in on the passenger side.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

Rodney pointed his thumb to the back seat.

“Hey, Annie,” Rick Horton said.

“Jesus… hi Rick.”

Annie shot Rodney a look he chose to ignore.

“He called as soon as we hung up, for the same reason. He was on the way.”

Rick was, in Annie’s estimation, a creep, but he was a creep Rodney called friend, and she couldn’t do much about that. He was also only on the way to Annie’s house if Rodney took a roundabout way to get to her, which was contrary to the urgency she felt was required when it came to first contact with aliens, and she didn’t like at all the idea that Rick would be one of the humans they would meet, either initially or at any subsequent point in their stay on Earth.

But, it was Rodney’s car.

“What do you guys think it was?” Rick asked. He was unbelted, leaning forward and talking through the gap in the front bucket seats. It was a totally creeper move because his face was next to Annie’s left shoulder and his eyes could look right down her shirt. There wasn’t much to look at down there, so far, but there wasn’t nothing. Rick’s understanding of personal space was discomfiting. Also, he had alcohol on his breath.

“I think it was an alien ship,” Annie said. “I watched it park.”

“Me too! This is the balls!”

“Sit your ass back,” Rodney said. “I don’t want to brake and send you through the windshield. I like this windshield.”

Rick sat back, and Rodney looked to Annie. “Where you thinking?”

“The Dewey farm, pretty sure.”

The Dewey family farm was a couple of miles away, set back off Tunney Road a few hundred feet. Bob Dewey had ten acres across three fields. Pastureland was as good a place as any to set down a starship and the angle seemed about right from her perspective.

“Just look for the lights, yo,” Rick said.

“It turned its lights off before touching down,” Annie said. “I saw it happen.”

“They gotta put out a porch light or something to see where they’re walking. Imagine, you come from planet whatever, land here, and step in a cow chip right away. They’ll probably blow the whole planet up for that.”

“So they’ll have lights, you’re saying,” Rodney said.

“I don’t think they do,” Annie said. “We’d see it through the trees.”

Rodney took his Chevy down the dirt road leading to the Dewey farm, cut the lights, and rolled to a stop at their property fence. Only one of their fields was visible from this spot. The other two were hidden behind the homestead.

“I don’t see anything,” Rodney said. “You?”

“No, but it was right around here.”

Annie got out and climbed onto the hood of the car, and when that didn’t get her high enough she stepped to the roof.

Just barely, she could see the tree Rodney fetched her from. It obscured her bedroom window from view, but close enough. This was the line she’d looked down when the ship landed. The car was pointed right at it.

“What do you think, Magellan?” Rodney asked.

“Straight that way,” she said, pointing in a direction that was, legally, trespassing. “We’ll have to walk it, unless you want to take out that fence.”

STUMBLING through muddy cow pastures lit only by a half moon, with Rick Horton, wasn’t anything close to Annie’s idea of fun, but Rodney seemed aware enough of her discomfort to keep himself between them as they all stumbled along. Annie marked a tree as a destination point and kept that in front of her while they meandered, wishing she’d thought to bring a compass and a flashlight.

Rick would not shut up, and his volume control was wanting. He seemed to be a connoisseur of every movie involving aliens ever made, and was using this knowledge to draw conclusions regarding what they might find.

He was behaving like the kind of idiot nobody would seriously consider bringing along for an endeavor like this. Annie was still pissed at Rodney about it.

They reached the tree she targeted without discovering anything alien. On the other side of it were more trees.

“Keep going?” Rodney asked.

“It’s around here somewhere,” she said.

“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO!” Rick shouted.

“Shut the hell up, Rick,” Rodney said.

“It’ll bring ‘em out.”

“Seriously, man. I’m gonna make you wait in the car, keep it up.”

“How deep do you think these trees go?” Annie asked.

“Never been through here,” Rodney said. “Couldn’t say.”

Annie was trying to pull up a map of the town in her head.

“Tunney loops, right? If we keep walking straight we’ll hit it. There’s gotta be a clearing or two between us and that.”

“You sure it came down anywhere around here at all?”

“As sure as I can be. Let’s keep walking. We could spread out a little.”

“Good way to get lost.”

“Or eaten,” Rick said.

“Shut up, Rick.”

THEY DECIDED on a plan that kept them ten feet away apart, as a means to cover more ground while not being eaten by predatory aliens.

Every few feet they’d do a call-and-response (“Marco!” “Polo!”) to keep from getting too spread out. They walked through the woods like this for about twenty minutes.

Then they found it.

Rick was the first to the scene. He was on the left-most flank of their search perimeter, and the ship had come down in a field to his left.

“Guys…” was all he said at first. It was the most subdued thing to come out of his mouth all evening, so Rodney and Annie knew right away something was different.

They reached the clearing in a couple of minutes. Rick hardly moved in that time.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I was kidding around, but it’s here.”

The squat black ship was sitting in a ring of crisped grass. The ground was still smoking a little. There was no impact crater.

“I kind of can’t believe it either,” Rodney said. “What should we do now?”

Annie was equally dumbfounded. It was one thing to actively pursue something like this, but another entirely to actually discover it. She hadn’t been thinking about the consequences of their quest because she was too caught up in its execution.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think this far.”

Rick cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he said.

“Hey, c’mon,” Rodney said.

“What? It’s what we’re here for, right? We come this far.”

Rodney looked at Annie, who shrugged.

“Hello?” Rick said again. “Maybe they’re in cryo-sleep or something. We should just go up and knock.”

“It’ll be hot,” Annie said. “From re-entry.”

“Doesn’t feel hot to me,” Rick said, holding his hands out. He was about twenty feet away.

“Hot to the touch, dumb-ass,” Rodney said.

“No, he has a point,” Annie said. “He should be able to feel it from there. We all should.”

“See? Come on, let’s go knock. Maybe we can open it up.”

“That seems like a super bad idea,” Rodney said. “Someone more qualified and, like, with a Geiger counter should do that.”

“Rod, there’s nobody else here. We’re the first, so man up and let’s do this.”

Rodney looked dubious, but Annie had to agree with Rick. There was really no turning back at this point. If it was radioactive, they’d already been exposed.

“I’m with him, Rodney,” she said.

He sighed.

“All right, together. We do it together. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Annie said.

“Agreed,” Rick said. “C’mon.”

He waved them forward, and then they walked, slowly, in a matching pace, in the same order they’d walked through the woods: Rick, Rodney, Annie, left-to-right.

“Should we hold hands?” Rick asked. “Red rover, red rover, send E.T. on over.”

“Cut it out,” Rodney said.

They were ten feet out and standing on smoking earth, when Rick lost it.

It was subtle at first. Annie was preoccupied, because at around that same point she began thinking about her mother again, and she’d been trying very hard to bury those thoughts. The ship was probably the best distraction the universe could have shunted her way, and yet, ten feet from it, she was dwelling on the cancer again.

There was no telling what was going through Rick’s mind.

“Hey, guys?”

“What is it?” Rodney asked. His expression made it clear he was wrestling with his own issues in that moment.

“I just… I… are you seeing…?”

“You all right?” Annie asked.

“No. No.” Rick was trembling. “I gotta go. I gotta…”

Then he turned around and ran off into the woods as fast as he could.

Rodney looked at Annie and shrugged.

“Bathroom?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Leave him be. He’s probably not our best ambassador anyway.”

They continued forward another three paces.

Rodney made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a choke.

“Hey, you good?” Annie asked him.

“I think I have to check on something.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. It’s really important.”

“My mother’s dying.”

“What? What?”

“I said my mother is dying. Of cancer.”

“That’s terrible, Annie, that’s… I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll wait for you at the car or I’ll come back or… I have to go.”

There were tears streaming down his face. Something awful had just happened to him, or he was remembering something awful, or something awful was about to happen and he had to go prevent it. Awful was definitely a part of what was upsetting him, one way or another.

“Okay, but…”

She didn’t get to finish the sentence. He spun around and ran hard for the tree line. In only a second, she was alone.

Annie looked at the ship.

“Well then. Just you and me now. So, hi, I’m Annie? If there’s anyone inside, come on out, let’s talk or something.”

She was maybe five paces away.

Clearly, the others encountered some sort of defense mechanism. That was the only thing that could possibly explain Rodney acting so strangely, because he would never have left her alone, here, in this moment, for any reason other than that he was compelled to somehow. (Rick, on the other hand, was behaving like Rick always behaved, and this was no surprise. She would never understand why anyone liked hanging out with him.)

“Okay, so I’m next, what do you have for me?” she asked the ship.

The ship didn’t answer in any direct way.

Maybe it targets the most likely threats first, she thought.

Another two steps forward, and she was thinking about her mother again. It was the same thoughts she’d been working through an hour earlier, only so very much worse.

I killed her, she thought. It was me. She’s dying because she’d rather do that than stay, because of me.

It was an absurd notion. She was positive it was completely true. It was followed by the idea that she still had time to fix it. She could go back, right now, and hug Carol and tell her she loved her and it was okay, and she didn’t have to have cancer.

She just had to deal with this spaceship first.

Two more steps.

Mom’s going to die tonight.

“I won’t even get to say goodbye,” she said aloud. She emitted something like a sob when she spoke, and realized she’d been crying this whole time, which was how she was before she saw the ship in the first place. She didn’t want to be back in that place, where cancer was taking away her idea of what the future was supposed to be. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to cry.

It was the ship that was doing this to her.

“STOP IT!”

She took another step forward, now in reach of the hull, and just like that the grief went away.

“That wasn’t nice, Shippie,” she said, naming it on the spot. “I’m just a little girl. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

Silence.

She reached out and put her hand on the side of the ship.

It was warm, but not hot to the touch. Her understanding of physics, while somewhat entry-level, was sufficient to convince her there was no way this should have been possible, not for something that was in the upper atmosphere less than an hour ago.

“You absorbed the heat, didn’t you? That’s clever.” She took her hand back. “Is there anyone in there?”

Then the ship did respond. It wasn’t verbal, it was visual. More exactly, a series of images appeared in Annie’s head. Images from space—nebulae and neutron stars and patterns of light and gas she had no names for.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t speak this language.”

The images stopped.

It was waiting for her to respond in kind, but she didn’t know how.

“Use words.”

New images popped in her head: bolts of electricity, and rips in space, and impossible geometric patterns.

“No, I don’t understand.”

The images stopped again.

More silence. She could hear her own breathing, a few cicadas, and that was all.

Then the ship started to scream.

It was a high-pitched squeal, barely noticeable at first, but rapidly growing in volume, until Annie had to cover her ears.

“NO STOP IT HURTS!” she shouted, but this time the ship wasn’t listening to her. She told it to use words, and this was the word it was choosing: EEEEEEEEEEEE!

Annie didn’t remember running away from the ship. The sound was so painful it wasn’t likely a decision she made consciously at all. Her feet decided it on their own, more or less. And the sound stopped once she made it to the trees, so it was probably the right call.

Then she was alone in the woods with the greatest discovery in human history, uncertain as to how to proceed.

Call the sheriff, she thought. Call him and wait here.

But when she pulled out her phone she saw it was dead. Either the battery ran out or the ship killed it (it would turn out to be the latter, as the cell phone never worked again). She couldn’t tell anyone, and her ride was gone.

She decided to push through the woods in the direction of the car. Rodney would be waiting. Of course he would be.