Journal of a UFO Investigator (18 page)

How would I hack my way through all this shrubbery? But no sooner did I approach it, push at it with my hands than it softly crumbled into greasy dust. Faster and faster I crunched my way through the bushes, in the direction of the water. I began to run, treading branches and leaves and thorns into ashen fragments.

That was when the pain shot up into me, through my foot.

It knocked me off my feet, as if I'd been caught in an ocean wave. I sat down hard amid the crumbled bushes. I gave out a loud yell, which instantly I regretted. In a world so still, a sound would travel. A blackish liquid—my blood, darkened in the moonlight—oozed through my right sock, just above the ankle. On the ground by my foot, a long, sharp bone gleamed brilliant white, tipped by wet blackness.

I'd stepped into a skeleton.

I struggled to balance myself, squatting, on my feet. Pain washed through me—my whole body this time—and once more ebbed. I rummaged amid the jumble of bones. The remains of an animal like a medium-size dog—skull, and jaws, and teeth. Several broken ribs, one of which was the bone that had pierced me. And legs . . .

Six.

I counted, over and over, forgetting my thirst, until I was sure I'd made no mistake. Shakily I climbed to my feet. The zoology of this world was more than I'd bargained for. Six-legged creatures, big as dogs ...

And where were the eight-legged things that fed upon the six-legged ones?

I stuffed my fist into my mouth. I tried to remember what the dero were supposed to look like. Basically humanoid, I thought, but warped and dwarf-like, their faces bestial and bizarre. I couldn't recall any mention of multiple limbs.... And I looked back toward the glowing red disk, to the white oval I'd left gaping on its edge. Anything might get in now.

I'll run back,
I thought.
It's not too far. I'll find a way to barricade myself inside. I won't come out again.

And survive how long without water?

No choice. I shuddered and took a few breaths. One advantage of the silence: if anything alive was slithering among these bushes, I was likely to hear it before it got too close. I began again, painfully and cautiously, to make a path for myself through the gray vegetation, toward the broad glitter ahead.

 

A lake, it seemed, as at last I drew near, praying it wouldn't turn into a mirage.

Yet it had currents, as if it weren't a lake but part of some vast river, flowing toward a place I couldn't imagine. Most of all, it was like a swampy marsh, with no defined edge. The bushes stopped abruptly, without first thinning, and a few feet onward the ashes of the land gave way to ashen waters. Before I knew it, I was up to my ankles. The water splashed, faintly, as I walked in it. My wounded foot burned at its touch.

I squatted, then knelt to drink. Immediately I pulled back. The water stank of rotting flesh, as if generations of animals had come there to die. It stretched before me, unending, no farther shore in sight. Once more I lowered my face.

“Who said that?” I yelled, jerking my head up. I clapped my hand, pointlessly, over my mouth. The bushes closest to the water's edge trembled, as if in a breeze I couldn't feel, and I thought again of the dero and wondered where I might go to escape. No voice answered. Not even an echo. The voice that said
Drink
wasn't an echo either. It was a woman's voice, from inside me.

Drink
, it said again.

“Who are you?”

The voice echoed back,
Are you, are you, are you
, and the surface of the water rippled as if something were stirring beneath.

She spoke again:
We were here before you
. And the echo said,
For you, for you, for you
, and again the water quivered.

I drank then, and the water tasted as bad as it smelled. I spit it back up. But I couldn't help myself. I drank again, and again—like an animal, my face and belly in the water, the pain in my foot forgotten—sickened by what I drank yet helpless not to drink.

 

The path back to the disk, which I'd cut for myself a short time before, was marked with my own outgoing footprints. They seemed soft and blurry, compared with the crisp prints I was now leaving, and I wondered why. I didn't stop to puzzle it out. I felt ill from the water, tired, aching to lie down even on the disk's hard floor. It was uphill from the lake, but the slope was very gradual. This was mostly a flat, level world to which I'd come.

The gap on the disk's side was wide open, just as I'd left it. No strange cobwebbed transit this time. One moment I was in the ash world outside the disk; then I put my knee inside and hauled myself in. Along the white floor I left an ashen trail, muddy with blood. My foot still bled and had begun to swell. I took off my shoe. Needed a bandage; an undershirt would do. I peeled off my shirt and set it aside—and stopped. My heart stopped also, for a second or two.

An ashen handprint on my shirt.

Tiny, not quite human. A thumb. Six fingers.

On my left shoulder. Exactly where I'd felt the grasping hand as I drifted up from my dream.

I heard high-pitched yelps, a whole string of them. They came from my own throat. I had to close that opening; never should have left it open. I yanked on the edges I'd separated, trying to pull them back together, join them once more into a solid wall. They wouldn't budge.

A dread of that empty hole in the side of the disk, such as I'd never known, came upon me. I backed away from it on my hands and feet, eyes glued to it, until I collided with the corner of the altar. Then, afraid to look into the blackness of the opening but afraid also to look away, I lay on the floor. Perhaps—surely—it was that crack in my glasses. But the blackness seemed to me alive, pulsating with multilegged, derolike obscenities that had once been inside and were certain to be back.

Once more I wailed and howled. If I'd had the strength, I would have torn off what remained of my clothes, gone stripped and naked. I lifted up my hands, pleading to the moon-ridden heaven for release from this place, yet knew, if I couldn't find a way to rescue myself, there wasn't anything on earth or in the black sky beneath it that would come to my aid.

I TURNED TO THE BOOK BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE ELSE
to turn. I trusted books; I always have. People will lie to you, betray you, abandon you. Books—never. And this
Case for the UFO
, which I imagined to be plucked from heaven . . . At the beginning I wanted to worship it. I placed it on the altar that might also have been a table, squarely in its middle, there to be bathed in the moonlight that streamed through the dome above. I knew I didn't belong on the altar, that I had no business there. The book did.

I paged through it, looking for some note from Rochelle, explaining why she hadn't been on the plane, where Julian had vanished to and why, how or if I would meet them again. Nothing. Only a printed book, every conceivable space—margins, blanks at the ends and beginnings of chapters, endpapers—packed with waves of scrawl in the Gypsies' three handwritings, their three colors of ink. Here and there a drawing.

Of a crater, for example. Like those on the moon, but with a tower jutting up from its center. A disk like a UFO rested at the tower's top. Other, similar disks approached the tower, departed from it.

Over the lunar maps and diagrams, which were part of the original printed text, there'd been drawn what looked like spiderwebs, the threads dotted with small, lopsided ellipses. The placement of these dots seemed to correlate with the patterns of buttons on the control panel, and I stood for hours by the disk's wall comparing the two. I didn't yet dare press the buttons.

Then there was the praying mantis. I stared at the blue-ink sketch in a margin near the middle of the book, of the long-bodied, long-legged insect impaled on a pencil. Its head hung at an awkward angle, unendurably painful. The thick eyes almost popped out of the face. The pencil entered between the lower legs; from the back of the neck the sharpened tip protruded. Stripes, drawn across the body in red ink as on a barber's pole, gave the impression of being wet like fresh blood.

Anxiously I searched through the sea of scrawl by the mantis's legs for some explanation of what the drawing meant, what it had to do with UFOs or with me. The words
THEY BURNED FOR 18 DAYS
, printed in block capitals, leaped out at me. No clue who “they” were, or why they burned, or what happened to them after the eighteen days were finished. On the opposite page, in another handwriting, I was able to decipher “And when the flesh is Burned shall Take Of The Fatty Ashes, and smear them upon the Altar. . . .”

Phrases from the Bible. I recognized them; by now I'd come to know the Bible well. I couldn't guess what this language was doing here. Yet it seemed strangely apt. I had walked amid the ashes barefoot now—the traction was better, and there was no way I could squeeze a shoe over my swollen right foot—and I'd been struck by their peculiar quality. They weren't dry and flaky, as I would have expected. Instead they seemed greasy, saturated with fat. What kind of burning would produce such ashes?

And why did my footprints vanish after I left them? Not instantly, to be sure, yet each time I left the disk to go to the lake, the prints I'd made in the ashes the time before were gone. Like markings in snow after a fresh fall. Were there ashfalls in this world, like snowfalls on the surface? Or did the ashes somehow ooze their way up from below? These were mysteries beyond my comprehension, unless the book should happen to explain them. So far it hadn't.

In the meantime I found good use for the oily, heavy ashes. I took one of my shoes and packed it full with them. It was a short, makeshift club, and not a bad one. I liked to stand amid the vegetation, the weighted shoe in my hand, and swing it low through the bushes. The leaves and branches flew into fragments at the impact. I knew the dero, or whatever else might come for me, wouldn't crumble quite so easily. But they wouldn't get me without a fight.

 

I knelt by the lake, prodding myself to drink. I couldn't. The water was disgusting. Vile. Putrid.

It was the voice of the woman, speaking inside my head, as it had the first time I was there. I didn't know who she was.

“I don't like this water. I won't drink it.”

“The moon? I can't reach the moon.”

Her voice repeated back, in its echolike manner:
the moon, the moon.

I realized then: the moon was in the sky. But it was also in the water, a few yards out from where I knelt. Its image rippled slightly and seemed somehow bigger than the original.

“I still can't reach it. I'm afraid to go out that far.”

Go
, she echoed back
.

I knew the path from disk to water's edge. So far I'd had no stomach to explore further. In a place like this, fear trumped curiosity. But I'd begun to trust this woman, to think of her as a friend. I did as she said.

The water deepened as I walked. The ashes at the bottom sucked my feet into them, smoothly, past my ankles. The satiny touch soothed my swollen foot. When the water got to my thighs, I leaned forward into it and began half to swim, half to walk. I tried my best to keep the ash-filled shoe, which I carried everywhere I went, above the surface. The image of the moon withdrew from before me. Then it stopped, held still. Waited for me to catch up.

When I stood, the water came to above my waist. The moon shimmered beneath my face. I bent my face into it. I drank from it. And yes, it tasted cleaner, less foul, than in the shallows.

I gulped water, then more water. I stared into the silvery disk that quivered just below me, mirroring the moon in the sky above. And the shadow that passed across it—

What I saw had to be my reflection in the water. But it couldn't be. It had appeared suddenly, a darkness upon the moon's blinding silver. A triangular face, black or perhaps gray, with two eyes and two nostrils and a mouth. The face dwindled to a point at its bottom; the mouth was a short, lipless line. And those eyes—those blank dark ovals, slanting up from the center of the face—

Eyes couldn't possibly be that big.

I jerked my hand up and felt for my own eyes, realizing a second too late that I'd let go of my shoe. I felt my glasses and behind them the soft balls in their sockets. They were still my eyes. They hadn't been transformed into the black monstrosities staring up from the water. I clenched my fist; I smashed down hard into the dark face in the moon's image.

Waves rippled away. The face disappeared.

Surely I'd been seeing things. Still, it felt like time to start getting out of there. Then I remembered I'd lost my shoe. Without it I'd be defenseless. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and pushed myself down into the water. I began feeling with my hand along the bottom.

Felt the multiple legs twine around my body.

Felt the pointed nails dig themselves into my back.

I came up screaming, spitting out water. The thing that had got hold of me came up with me. Claws like ants' pincers crisscrossed my back. They made ribbons of my undershirt, my skin. The dark arrowhead of a face, hard and wet as a lobster's claw, pressed into mine. Its eyes tried to push their way into my eyes, through the cracked glass lenses that separated us. Deep inside each eye was a vertical slit, a crevasse, opening into an abyss. The legs felt numberless.

“Let me go!”

The face backed away. The uppermost legs—skinny, angled, brittlelooking—waved around my head, dripping their water into the lake. They gave off a loamy smell, like fresh-dug earth. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my hands around the thing's neck.