2012 (18 page)

He read it. Read it a second time. Then he grabbed his phone. “I gotta make a call.”

Matt was off his cell, so he called him on the official line.

“Police emergency.”

“It’s me.”

“Not on this damn line!”

“Then turn on your cell, damnit!”

“I don’t want to turn on my cell, you’ll call me and call me and bother me with trivia while I’m trying to work.”

“This isn’t trivia.”

“I’m out there gettin’ that drunken shit Joe Wright to stop going after his sainted wife with a cheese grater of all the damn things, and you call. Happens every time. Or I’m trying to eat. Then, for certain, it’s gonna be you.”

“Speech over?”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I have a police report.”

“If this is about a skunk, possum, or coon, please call the FBI.”

“It’s about a possible UFO attack down in Melrose County.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Call down there and then call me back, can you do that?”

” ‘Course not. It’s not police business.”

“A man has disappeared. That’s police business.”

“The fact that this tragedy is of interest to you is what isn’t police business. Now, I’ve gotta go, seriously. I’ve got a call out on Mr. Leonard’s god-for-damned-big fuckin’ snake got away again.”

“Don’t hang up, damnit, do this! Hello? Shit!” He slammed down the phone. “He has to go catch a snake.”

“That thing. Who in the world would want a fifteen-foot python for a pet?”

“I thought about a python at one point.”

“And then I had children.”

The phone rang. Brooke picked up. She listened, handed it to Wiley. “Look, the truth is I got an assignment down there, and I’m leaving in a few minutes and I guess you can tag.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, and I’m not waiting, either. They want me to look over the dogs, the dogs are acting up and I’ve run a fair number of ‘em. So I’ll pick you up in fifteen.”

“What about the snake?”

“Screw the snake. A man’s life is at stake here. I’ll pick you up in fifteen.”

He hung up the phone. Brooke looked at him. “And?”

“I’m going down there with Matt.”

For a moment, she returned to the paper. Then she looked up. “You know that I love you very much,” she said. “Never forget that.”

He reached out to her and took her hand. “I’ve thought-lately, you know…it’s been hard. I know I’ve been tough to live with.”

“You have yet another book that’s making you crazy and I’m a writer’s wife. My skill is to keep you from going around the bend until it’s finished and we’ve got our money. Then you can go around the bend until I miss my guy, then you have to come back.”

“Do I come back?”

She squeezed his hand. “You come back.”

He looked up, looked at Brooke. “Where are the kids?”

“The kids are in their rooms cowering.”

“Oh, yeah.”

She put her hand on his forehead. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re on fire.”

Matt honked.

“I’ll take a couple of aspirin, I’ll be fine.”

“You’ve been up working almost continuously for days, and a couple of aspirin aren’t gonna do it.”

Matt came in. “Hey, Wiley, I haven’t got all day!”

Brooke went between them. “He’s sick as a dog, he’s not coming.”

“Jeez, musta come on all of a sudden.”

“He’s exhausted, he won’t sleep!” She took him under the arm. “You’re taking a pill and going to bed, and that’s final.”

“Sorry, Wiley, feel better.”

He shook her off.

“Wiley, you can’t do this!”

“I have to! HAVE TO!”

“You don’t belong getting mixed up in this.”

He gestured toward the computer. “I need to look into it. It could be related.”

“YOU LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE!”

Silence. The faint sound of plaster falling from the ceiling. And a decision of stunning intensity. “I have to do this,” he said quietly, “or it will be my soul.”

She wept, shook away the tears, and nodded. “Good-bye,” she said in a whisper.

“Brooke-“

She shook her head, stepped back, then suddenly turned to the sink and started in on the dishes.

As they rolled out, he heard them clanking, and saw her in the window and thought to himself that something, indeed, was being lost between them. It was like a quicksand pit had appeared in the middle of the marriage. Everything you did to save yourself made you sink a little deeper.

He rode in silence beside Matt, who also said nothing. They’d been friends a long time, and there are times when friends just don’t talk.

They drove through Harrow, then into the cropland to the south. “Storm’s comin’,” Wiley said, “look at that mutha.”

The western sky was choked with great towers of clouds, and Wiley knew that, if there was a storm in this universe, then in the other universe there would be one ten times worse, and he felt for them, he worried about the wanderers out there in the rain and the wind, he wondered about Martin on his desperate quest, a brilliant archaeologist who sensed that he could save his dying world if only he could connect a few more dots, who now wanted only to reconnect with his son, and somehow save them both.

The worst of it was that he couldn’t help them. He could know of their suffering, but could not lift a finger.

He could not warn Al North about Samson. He could not help Martin find Trevor. He could not give a single wanderer back his soul.

So why in the name of all that was holy was this happening to him?

They drove in silence. Matt followed the GPS onto more and more isolated back roads.

“Where is this place?”

“Middle of nowhere. I’ve got them figured for trailer trash.”

“Trailer people.”

“Still trash in my business, buddy, till I’ve actually pulled the knives outta the gizzards. Then they’re perps and vics.”

Wiley heard the voice, but only vaguely. He wasn’t interested in banter anymore. He was beyond banter. “The guy went up in a column of light?”

“And the dogs can’t catch a scent off anywhere except the seat of the four-by-four.”

“Which means it did happen.”

“Which means the dogs need checking out, which is what I am doing.”

They turned into a driveway.

“Here we are,” Matt said.

They pulled up in front of, not a trailer, but an exquisite, ultramodern house, an architectural gem. There were half a dozen police vehicles of various kinds parked in the yard, a couple with their light bars still flashing. Other than the clicking of their switches, the silence was profound.

“Nice place,” Wiley said.

“I’ll say.”

As they came to a stop, a woman appeared. She was as stark as her ultramodern home, reminding Wiley of one Andrew Wyeth’s immeasurably sad paintings of the model Helga Testorf.

Closer, Wiley saw that her face was a tear-stained shambles. A teenage boy appeared in the doorway behind her. He wore baggy jeans and a black T-shirt.

She came up to Wiley. She stood silently, so close to him that he could smell sweat and the sourness of her breath. She leaned into his chest and clutched him.

“I’m sorry for you,” Wiley said, “I’m so sorry for you.”

She looked into his eyes. “I know you.”

Holy Christ, this was not what he needed. “I’m from Harrow. You’ve probably seen me around.”

“No, from your book. You said they were good. In your book, you said they were.”

“I said they were very strange.”

“They are not good. No, Mr. Dale, they are not good. He had all your books, you know. He was trying to come into contact. He went up the ridge to meet them. And this is what happened.”

“Mrs. Nunnally, we have to understand that we have very little idea about what’s going on with the aliens-even if they are aliens. That’s why my book doesn’t give answers, it asks questions. Because we do not understand.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were like fire burning into his soul. “There was light,” she whispered. “Two nights ago, the whole house was surrounded by it.”

Oh, Jesus. “And this light,” he asked, “what did it do?”

“Lit up everything. Then suddenly it’s gone and there’s this clap of thunder but no clouds, see. When it went away he says, ‘It’s them,’ and the next afternoon he went up the ridge, and it came again, and he went up in it.”

This wasn’t the killing light, then, it was something else. But what? “And that’s what the farmers saw?”

She nodded. “You’re in touch with the aliens, it says so on your Web site. I want you to call them!”

Nick and his friends had created a Wylie Dale website. It was very slick, but he hadn’t seen anything on it about him still being in touch with aliens, and there had been many books since the one about the close encounter.

The boy came out. “Please, Mr. Dale, tell them to bring my dad back home.” He was perhaps seventeen, a gangling kid with anguish in his face. He looked like he was in physical pain-as, Wiley felt sure, he was.

Wiley realized that he’d been a damned fool to come here.

“Call them,” the boy hissed.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Don’t say that!”

At that moment, a state policeman appeared around the side of the house. He came up, his face grim. “Mrs. Nunnally-“

“No! NO!”

“Ma’am-“

“Oh, God…God…” She twisted as if at the end of a rope, and then turned and clutched her boy.

They came out then, from a wetland a thousand feet behind the house. Wiley watched the play of sunlight along the silver bars of the gurney, and the blackness of the body bag in the sun.

“Mrs. Nunnally, we need to get an identification.”

She heaved with grief, but made no sound, which made it more awful, somehow, this silent, gagging, shuddering woe.

A man in soaking jeans unzipped the bag, and Wiley then saw something so unexpected that he cried out. He saw the head of a man, but with black sockets where the eyes should be, and teeth grinning from a lipless mouth. “Can you recognize him?” one of the troopers asked.

“Dad,” the boy shouted. “What happened to my dad?”

“It’s rapid deterioration…because of the wetland he was in.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Nunnally shrieked, “it’s a mute, Mr. Dale, a mute! They mutilated my husband just like they do the cattle!”

Wiley was well aware of the mysterious cattle mutilations that had been going on for fifty years. Cattle would be found by farmers and ranchers with their lips, eyes, tongues, and genitals removed and their rectums cored out. Often, they looked as if they’d been dropped from above, and huge lights were seen in the fields the night before they were found. Between 1970 and 2010, over fifty thousand cases had been reported, all blown off by the government as coyote attacks, which was clearly a lie, and now here was this human being, killed in exactly the same way.

A hideous thought came tickling into his mind, I have a beautiful home in an isolated area. What if they were looking for me?

One of the state cops said, “Ma’am, you need to say if this is Mr. Nunnally.”

She nodded. Nodded harder. “I think so. I think so. Ohh God, God-” She clutched at Wiley. “Help me! Help me!” It was horrible to be near her, he could smell her sour sweat. He feared that he would throw up on her.

The boy, his face streaming with tears, said, “What if they come back, what happens to us then, Mr. Dale?”

What, indeed?

He could not be silent, but he had no idea what to say or do. He remembered the creatures he had seen, and the figure Al North had seen in his room, that delicate, hard face, and he knew what this was, what it must be: they were trying to cross the barrier into a universe that had not accepted them as real, and this was a side-effect of their struggle.

The boy leaped at him and suddenly he was on the ground being hammered by powerful fists. He tried to protect himself, but the kid got through his flailing, incompetent arms.

Matt and one of the state cops pulled him off.

“My dad wanted to meet them! Well, he sure did, he sure did, you bastard. Liar! Liar! BLOODY LIAR!”

“Get him out of here,” one of the cops said to Matt. “For God’s sake, get that freak out of here!”

“I thought it would help. He knows about this stuff.”

“Come on, Matt, please,” the state cop said. Then he confronted Wiley. “There’s no law against the kind of crap you dish out, Mister, but I have to tell you, there has to be a special place in hell for scum like you, lying scum! This man died we don’t know how, but it wasn’t little green men, God damn you!”

“No,” Wylie said, and the quietness in his voice drew the attention of all of them. “I am not a liar. And the real shame is, maybe if I had understood this better, or taken it all more seriously, this man would not have died.”

He went to the car, got in, and closed his door. For good measure, he locked it.

Matt drove them away. Wiley looked back at the fabulous house in the middle of nowhere.

“I saw somebody,” Matt said, “at your house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Last night, buddy.”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“You were downstairs.”

“But-where were you?”

“On the ridge. I was goin’ out to see if you were fuckin’ with the cigars, and I just happened to see this guy come across your yard. Came right up to the house, looked in the window at you, then went around the back, and a few seconds later your computer comes on.”

“When was this?” Wylie asked.

“About eight.”

“Eight! The whole family was up!”

“Nobody did a thing. He was quiet, man, and fast.”

“Was it an alien? Could you tell?”

“It was a person.”

He turned onto the highway. The storm was closer now. He punched a couple of buttons on his police radio, and a mechanical voice began to deliver National Weather Service warnings. High winds in Hale Center, roofs off houses in Holcomb, tornado sighted in Midwood County, fast moving, dangerous storm.

He increased speed.

“You think we’re gonna take a hit, Wylie?”

“That’s a big mutha out there, you got that right.”

The storm towered, its base black and flashing with lightning. “Matt, I’m so scared it’s beyond scared.”

“I hear ya.”