Otherworld (4 page)

He closed the cabinet and walked to his car. The lump in his coat pocket swung against him on each step, and he felt strangely powerful, inflated, delirious.

 

Arms outstretched, tense and taut, a man sat alone in the dark room. All lights were extinguished. A candle, lit an hour before, had gone out. Despite the below-freezing temperature outside, the man wore nothing but his underwear. The circulation had long ago left his legs, the tingling of limbs asleep long passed. Now, his legs simply did not exist. The organ of life pulsed strong within his chest and seemed to hammer against his rib cage with every beat. Loud. He could hear it, but not like the people who say they hear their heart beating, when they really mean they
feel
it beating. He heard its
sound
. It was a bass drum steadily pounding on, like the rhythm kept by the man who conducts the rowing of a slave ship. And deep in the bowels of the ship, he drummed faster to produce his desired effect: to speed up the rowing. To speed up time itself. Breaths came short but quick, keeping time with his heart. He sweated profusely. Eyes wide open, bulging out and quivering every which way for a sign, adjusting to the blackness, seeing through it. All was eerily still, with the room draped in the quiet that accompanies darkness, a quiet that is a sound all its own. A silence so stark it
hums
. Dark, dark, all was dark …

And then the abyss crept in.

 

Morning came, and the sun brought no warmth with its reappearance. Temperatures were in the low twenties, and the overnight forecast called for the middle teens. But for the first time in weeks, a weather-related story did not make the top headline.

“Have you seen this?” asked Robbie Jensen,
Spotlight Magazine
's editor in chief. He was a short, skinny, balding, bespectacled man. He was perpetually on edge, and he further fueled this with an always-present and always-full coffee mug clutched in his left hand.

“What?” Mike asked. He had just arrived and had not even sat down.

Robbie held the morning paper's Lifestyle section. The headline read, CLOSE ENCOUNTER IN TRUMBULL.

“Is this for real?” Mike asked primarily to himself. He took the paper. “They could've at least tacked a question mark on the end to add some speculation.”

“Read it. You'd think I bought it in the grocery-store checkout line.”

Mike scanned the article. It gave the entire what's what and who's who. Pops Dickey. Sam Petrie. Lewis Driscoll. Police Captain Graham Lattimer (whose only statement was his name). In full color, to the right of the piece, was a photograph of Pops, Officer Petrie, and the dead cow. The caption stated, FARM OWNER “POPS” DICKEY AND TRUMBULL POLICE OFFICER SAM PETRIE WITH THE ALLEGED VICTIM OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL VANDALISM.

Hmm. At least they wrote “alleged.”

Mike looked at Robbie blankly.

“You got this, right, Mike? You never called me back. Did you get it?”

“No. Everybody was gone when I got there. I got lost, and then the sheriff or somebody told me to leave.”

All Robbie could say was, “Oh, man.”

“Robbie, by the time we print anything, this'll be old news. We're a monthly mag, you know. In two weeks, Goober the idiot neighbor will fess up. You know how this works. ‘It was just a pie tray hanging from fish line.'” Mike acted it out with his fingers. “Et cetera.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Robbie seemed to calm down.

Mike said, “I'm saving your life here, man. We woulda looked like morons.”

“Right,” said Robbie. “Okay, look. We can get the basics from the stuff already in print, but I want you to do a UFO story for next issue. Special Report: UFO Phenomenon, or whatever. Okay?”

“You're killing me.”

“It's special interest. Interest that is special. Suck it up. It's not like I'm asking you to find Bigfoot or something. Treat 'em like morons, I don't care. I just want to see the story. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Okay.”

It was a story. He began telling himself it might even be interesting. As a child, he was one of the many who read H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury and thought,
Maybe …

Science fiction or not, it was work, and, really, it was all he had left.

 

The Landon University library was hidden among the many buildings on campus. After numerous wrong turns, two slips on the icy sidewalk, and a few curse words, Mike discovered it nestled in its own section of forest on the west end. It was identical in structure to every other building at the college, and Mike wondered about the lack of architectural creativity. Its only distinguishing characteristic was the black letters, too small to read from the main sidewalk, that announced, LANDON LIBRARY AND RESOURCE CENTER. The inside was just as drab as the outside. All the shelves were metal, and no art hung on the walls, only school-related posters and flyers. One announced the theater department's latest production of
Our
Town
. Another invited all young Democrats to an organizational meeting. Others were for various clubs, seminars, or classes. No sculptures. No paintings.

He was surprised to find that Landon Library possessed a vast selection of offerings on UFOs, aliens, space travel, and the like. He noted that they rested between books on cryptozoology and books on the occult and witchcraft.
Interesting.

He laid a few titles on a table in a neat stack:
The Roswell Incident
,
In Search of UFOs
,
a few standard texts by Whitley Strieber,
Alien Impact
by Michael Craft, as well as numerous books on sightings and abductions. He recognized the name of Erich von Däniken, author of
Chariots of the Gods
,
Gods from Outer Space
, and
The Gold of the Gods
. He searched indices for references to animal mutilation and found information only in Craft's book. He skimmed and perused. After a few hours of mind-numbing reading, he replaced the books and, after finding nothing else of interest in the stacks, plunged into the periodicals subject catalog. He found a few articles on so-called close encounters, mysterious animal mutilations (these usually came hand in hand with stories of crop circles), and a relatively new trend in mutilation reports, the
chupacabra
, roughly translated from Spanish as “the goatsucker.”

The whole thing was utterly ridiculous. The photographs were blurry and completely ambiguous.
Pie trays on fishing line
, he thought as he looked at the grainy purported photos of UFOs. No real pictures of the
chupacabras
existed either, just crude sketches directed by alleged witnesses. On the Internet, there were countless grainy photos and videos and skeletal remains, most identified as coyotes with mange and the like.

Mike read for hours, beginning a process of fast-track education on the subject. He paused to look at his watch when his stomach growled. Half past two and time for lunch. He checked out two books to glance over at mealtime and returned them within the hour. He found his table still unoccupied, and he sat down to read some more. When he felt he'd exhausted all the academic offerings, he opened his laptop and began throwing key words into Google. Within the pages and pages of crazed ruminations documented in large fonts, all caps, and eye-scorching neons, he found only a few articles of interest, mostly from skeptics. The true believers' integrity was impugned by their incompetent design skills and lack of Internet savvy. But hours consuming hopeless videos and blog posts were hours he had not spent maddeningly clicking “Check Mail” in his email program, as if each next click would summon a message from her.

 

The clock alarm did not sound. If Mike skipped a shower and breakfast, he might make it to class on time. He was determined to do this since he had abandoned it halfway through his first day. He dressed speedily, grabbed his computer bag, remembering to put his borrowed library articles in it, and ran out the door. The ice on his windshield was thick. After turning the defrost on, he chipped frantically with a plastic ice scraper, a cheap giveaway from the insurance company. It was slow going, so he retreated to the house and emerged with a bowl of hot water, which he poured over the glass, hoping it wouldn't crack. The ice fell away, and the windshield escaped unscathed. He discarded the bowl in his backseat and revved the engine. It clanked mysteriously. As always, Mike became flush with nervousness, but he pulled into the university parking lot on time, ran frantically to the Smith Building, and seated himself in his desk with two minutes to spare.

It was the professor's first lecture. The man had seemed amiable enough on the first day of class, going over the syllabus and sending the class down to the resource center to begin the first exploratory stage in the papers that would become their final exam, but as Mike had been drawn away then by Robbie's call, he hadn't the chance to see the man in professorial action. He was a whirlwind of information. He was going on and on about the evolution of morality from culture to culture, spanning continents and centuries, summoning an electric winsomeness as if from the ether. He used no notes. He made none on the whiteboard. Nobody dared interrupt him with a question.

“What we are seeking—and by ‘we' I mean you—is gnosis. Special knowledge from the heavens. And by the heavens, I mean the nether regions of the universe, that point of original origination. The celestial crater that marks the big bang. Whatever constellation is made up by the stardust in your bones, people, whatever your DNA is silently summoning you to recognize, is the secret world unlocking all the secret worlds. If you want to know where mankind is going, you've got to trace it back, all the way back-back-back, to where it's been.”

Mike was sure as anything that nobody, including himself, had the slightest clue what the man was talking about, but he was just as sure they were all enjoying it. One young lady surreptitiously pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of the prof mid-gesticulation, undoubtedly destined for some quippy Instagram post.