Close Encounters of the Third Kind (9 page)

His accent bothered Laughlin: smooth, Oxonian English. The young man wore well-shined chukka boots, pipestem-thin trousers of white muslin, and a collarless jacket of the same fabric. He looked too urbanized for this place, his smooth flow of talk too glib. But even the holiest of men, Laughlin thought, needed managers.

The sadhu himself moved not a muscle. By not even the flicker of an eyelid did he acknowledge anything around him of this world. Lacombe stood in contemplative silence for a moment, then lowered himself to a lotus seat near, but at a respectful distance from, the sadhu.

The microphones were ready now, each in its parabolic reflector. The Arriflex was to be hand-held. Lacombe had insisted that it not be mounted on a tripod. He wanted the technician to keep it on his shoulder, to have the mobility to photograph . . . whatever there was to photograph.

His eyes closed, the Frenchman seemed to relax, although his back was stiffly erect. Out of the corner of his mouth, in French, he murmured an order to Laughlin, who turned to the audio technician.

“He wants to make sure you shield the Nagra.”

“Why?” the man wanted to know. “We’re nowhere near any electrical interference.”

“He’s had bad luck before with tape recordings. The capstan motor usually conks out and the recording heads lose magnetism.”

“No kidding,” the technician said. “Well, if he says so.” He produced a large, copper-mesh, boxlike affair, a shield that he placed over the small precision Nagra recorder. Then, shoving copper spikes into the earth, he grounded the shield carefully. “Does that suit the mother?”

Laughlin wondered, and not for the first time, what they were doing in this strange place, with all these thousands, waiting . . . waiting for what? The report spoke of an event strictly unbelievable, but Lacombe had shown him how to suspend disbelief, to open himself to the incredible.

Laughlin turned away and watched the bloated disk of the sun as the hills to the west began biting a chunk out of its lower rim. In a moment only half the sun was visible. The sadhu stirred slightly.

What happened next seemed to be in slow motion to Laughlin. He watched the sadhu’s outturned elbows pull in toward his emaciated brown ribcage. The palms of his hands, still pressed together, began a slow separation until only the fingertips still touched.

The sadhu’s eyelids slowly rose, like shutters on temple windows. Open, his eyes were enormous, jet black, ringed all the way around by white, the white then ringed by glossy black lashes.

The sadhu’s body stirred. Slowly, without apparent effort, he began to rise from the lotus to a standing position. The sleek city Brahmin sank to his knees, Laughlin found himself sitting down abruptly, as if the only person who had any right to be on his feet was the sadhu. Out of the corner of his eye, Laughlin could see the audio technician and the camera operator fall, incredibly, to their knees. He was sure they had no idea what they were doing.

With grave deliberateness, the sadhu’s bare arms spread out from his body like the powerful wings of some great land-locked bird ready to take the skies. Behind him, all that was left of the sun was the thinnest edge of rind. As Laughlin watched, the sun snuffed out. Darkness fell instantly.

The sadhu’s long arms swung up at his sides to shoulder height. They paused, then continued their upward sweep until the gnarled backs of his hands touched each other high over his head. They paused again. Then he brought the arms down in one great sweep—a conductor cueing a mighty orchestra.

From ten—twenty—thousand throats came a low, melodious note. They sustained it with such power that it began to eat its way into Laughlin’s brain. He noticed Lacombe’s eyes snap open and swing sideways, cursing the technicians. Laughlin gestured. The audio man started the Nagra. Laughlin could see its reels turning through the copper mesh.

Now the sadhu brought his arms up and cued another note, an interval above the first, higher on the scale. His worshippers filled the world with the two tones, alternating them, sounding them separately and together—a minor interval, Laughlin thought, less than a third. A minor third? Not quite.

The sadhu produced another note and then another and another. Now Laughlin began to lose a sense of the melody in the harsh cacophony of many voices. The ground beneath him seemed to vibrate with the intensity of the notes, unmelodic, strange to Western ears, notes the report had stated had come down from the stars four nights ago and that the sadhu and his followers had been sounding each night since.

The intervals were never whole, Laughlin felt. They were quartered, halved, bent slightly into micro tone steps. Each singer changed the notes slightly, making a raw, elemental howl. It soared skyward in a great chant, somehow ominous. It shook the earth beneath Laughlin but it also made the air itself vibrate.

The tropical twilight was now night. Damp blackness had descended upon them all. And even though they could no longer see their sadhu, the many thousands continued their chant, forcing it to grow to an almost unbearable intensity.

The stars had come out overhead. Laughlin gazed upward, shaking with the fierceness of the singing around him. He watched the star at the end of the Big Dipper’s handle. It grew brighter, waned, brightened again. There was a frequency to it, like a message in Morse code. And then it . . . exploded.

A bright crimson flash illuminated the upturned faces of the multitude. Lacombe was on his feet now, standing beside the sadhu. The cameraman had swung his shoulder-braced Arriflex upward.

The crimson light elongated into a rolling pillar, turned orange. Then yellow. Then pale green. It hovered in the sky, and suddenly the heavens were filled with the same five notes. The same chord, played on something that was not human. Pure. Melodic. Clean. The worshippers below fell silent. And once again the sky sang down to them.

“Goddamn!” the cameraman said.

The pillar of fire winked out The song ended.

The worshippers below sank back, faces pressed to the earth. The sadhu turned to Lacombe.

“The sky,” he said in a thin voice, “the sky sings to us.”

The two men embraced. Tears ran down the Frenchman’s cheeks. His voice was thick with emotion.

“It sings to all of us, my friend.”

12  

S
everal hours later that morning, Saturday, Neary stood bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to organize enough of himself to at least get the shaver working. Eventually, Roy took the can of Rapid Shave and nozzled a mound of white lather into the palm of his right hand. He automatically lifted the cream mountain toward his face when something mind boggling stopped him.

Neary began to stare at the stuff in his hand. He cocked his head and brought the lather mound eye level, then vaguely began to shape some of it with the middle finger of his left hand.

“No, that’s not right.” Neary said to himself, not really conscious of what he was doing or saying. But this image was reminding him of something—something maddeningly out of mental reach—he knew this shape so well and yet it felt as if the connection was a million miles away. Neary blinked, a little distressed. Everybody experiences something like this he thought—a moment that feels so familiar, a face you think you’ve seen before but really never have, a place you think you visited once but knew you never did. These were flashes that some psychoanalysts like to call
déjà vu;
they always pass in a few seconds. This flash was sure taking its time passing. It lingered for minutes, and so did Neary’s eyes, on that sloppy mound of Rapid Shave. Then . . .

The appearance of Ronnie—in the mirror—standing in the bathroom doorway brought Roy partway back.

“Ronnie,” he said. “What does this remind you of?”

She totally ignored the lather mound, and said firmly, “We’re going to tell people at the party tonight that you fell asleep under a sunlamp on your right side.”

“What? What for?”

“I don’t want to hear you talking about it at the party,” she said. “Not till you know what you’re talking about.”

“If I don’t talk about it,” he said, essaying logic, “how am I gonna find out what’s to know?”

“Talk about it with your buddies in the Department, not at parties.”

“What does the Department know?”

During this meeting of the minds, Brad and Toby had wandered into the bathroom.

“Dad, are they for real?” Brad asked.

“No, they’re not for real,” Ronnie snapped.

“Don’t tell him that,” Neary said.

“Mom . . . I believe in them,” Brad persisted.

“No, you don’t.”

“Dad says so.”

“He does not,” Ronnie said. Then, pleadingly, “Roy?”

“I just want to know what in the world is going on,” Neary admitted, the mound of foam still balanced in his right hand.

“It’s just one of those things,” Ronnie said, matter-of-factly, as if that resolved everything.

“Which things?”

“I don’t want to hear about this anymore.”

“Do they live on the moon?” Toby asked.

“They got bases on the moon,” Brad said, really getting into it, “so at night they can come in your window and pull the covers off!”

Ronnie shut her eyes. “I’m not listening to this. I don’t hear it.”

“Last night,” Neary said, as calmly as he could, “I saw something I can’t explain.”

Her fierce blue eyes snapped open and she fixed him in the mirror with her glare. “Last night, at four
A.M.
, I saw something I can’t explain. A grown man—” Ronnie stopped abruptly, sensing the boys’ full attention.

“Ronnie, you know I’m going out there again tonight, damn it!”

She turned to leave, and said lightly, “No, you’re not.”

“Yes,” he said, with a dramatic pause, “I am.”

The phone began ringing.

Ronnie turned back, and said, playfully again, “No, you’re not.” She reached into the bathroom, grabbed his right wrist and planted his palm upward into his face. The shaving foam gooshed and Neary looked like a bathtub toy.

Roy stared at himself in the mirror. The white foam emphasized the reddish color of his cheek. He smeared some of the foam onto his chin and other cheek. “It ain’t a moonburn, goddamn it,” he muttered to himself.

Neary had started shaving when Ronnie reappeared in the mirror. She looked like someone who had just been told something awful. Tears began to come out of her eyes and she just stood there in the doorway shaking.

Roy turned around immediately, saying, “Okay, Ron . . . I don’t have to go.”

“R-Roy,” she said, “that was Grimsby, from the Department.”

“Huh?”

“You’re fired, Roy.” Ronnie was really sobbing now and she collapsed into his arms, cheek against cheek, tears and lather. “They . . . he wouldn’t even talk to you. What are we going to do? You got fired? What’s going on?”

“Jesus!” Neary said, stunned. He just stood there, razor in one hand, face smeared like a real bozo, his wife sobbing against him, looking at everything in the mirror and seeing none of it.

“Roy, what are we going to do?”

Neary, still stunned, didn’t really hear her. His eyes, fixed in space, finally focused on a white object that he saw through the open bathroom door in the bedroom. It was a pillow on their bed. It had been left in a pushed-together, lumpy shape just like the shaving cream earlier.

“No,” Neary muttered to himself. “That’s not right.”