Majestic (35 page)

"Hello," I said. Her heavy jaw made her unattractive, but she had nice skin. She did not reply.

I pulled back my line and started preparing another cast. All the while I was aware that she was watching me.

It really wasn't very polite; nobody local would stand on the riverbank and stare at a fisherman.

Finally I waded out of the stream. "May I help you?" I asked as I clambered onto the bank. I had absolutely no premonition of danger.

When I straightened up from my climb I found myself face to face with her.

Why had she come so close? She was taller than me and her eyes were pools of shadow. Her lips were set in a mean line. I was suddenly aware that I was alone on the stream and far from help.

Her muscles rippled; she was obviously strong. I got the idea that she might be an inbreed from back in the hills. There were said to be a few pockets of such people in the Catskills.

Then I smelled something awful. I was thunderstruck. A familiar and terrifying odor of sulfur clung to her.

I threw my rod aside and leaped down the bank into the water. Fighting my hip boots I plunged across, keeping to the rocky shallows. I grabbed brush and tugged myself up the other side. There were fallen logs and brush tangled in the rocks, and beyond them huge cypresses. I ran into the darkness, limbs slapping my face, roots tripping me.

That smell, that smell! It was a woman, though, an ordinary woman!

A vision of that face came into my mind as I struggled toward the bluff beyond the woods. If I could get up there I could circle back and cross the Beaverkill on the covered bridge, and from there make my way back to the clubhouse.

The boots were never meant for this kind of activity. I could barely keep my balance, let alone move quickly.

I soon noticed that she wasn't behind me. Finally I stopped. I was well into the stand of cypress, which was so dark that I risked colliding with a tree trunk if I didn't feel my way.

Obviously I'd lost her. But I didn't relax. That smell - I could never mistake that smell again if I lived to be a hundred. She had to be connected with them. I started up the bluff.

Then I saw behind me a brief flicker of light.

I didn't waste an instant. That flicker told me everything I needed to know. She was herding me away from the stream. I had to move fast or I'd never turn her flank.

She was one of their things, like the gnomic man I'd encountered at Los Alamos. I was literally dizzy with fear.

I dragged myself up the cliffs, tearing my fishing vest on the granite, lacerating my hands.

Behind me she seemed to glide through the trees like a ghost, her blue light flickering from time to time. I thought I heard her making a sound, a faint whistling.

Farther and farther up I went.

Soon she was behind me. She was climbing easily and she was very close. I pressed myself against the rocks. Now I could hear her breathing, could hear the sound of her dry skin scraping on the rocks. The beam of blue light flashed above me.

Then I smelled damp air, cave air. There was a hole to my left. I pressed myself back into it.

An instant later I saw a hand, then the top of her head. She was right here. As soon as her eyes appeared she was going to see me.

I forced myself back into the cave. I intended to go as deep as I could, to press myself against the stone until I blended with it.

The tunnel was low. I had to go on my stomach. Moss and damp earth got into my mouth. Creeping insects fouled my hair and went down my neck.

Finally the walls spread and I was able to rise to my hands and knees. I was breathing hard now. My eyes were tightly closed; there was no reason to open them, not in this dark.

I began to be able to stoop, finally to run with my head tucked into my chest and my arms out to feel for jutting stones.

Then I heard it again, that strange cooing sound. Only it was in front of me, down deep in the cavern.

Three short, soft cries. They resonated with a tenderness of some sort, but to my ears it was the love of the leopard for the deer, of the snake for the frightened mouse.

I pulled out my lighter, flicked it but couldn't get fire. In the glimmer of the flint I saw huge shapes, old Indian paintings on the walls perhaps, and seething, glittering movement in the tunnel ahead of me.

They were here, deep in the cliffs, in the ground. God, what were they? Where had they come from?

The three cries were repeated, closer now. They were urgent, sweet sounds.

Behind me I heard her pushing herself along the tunnel. I was trapped, caught. All around me I could hear whistlings and rustles.

I couldn't run, could hardly move. A hand closed around my ankle. I yanked myself away and shrieked.

And suddenly I was falling. Wind rushed around me. I flailed and screamed. I didn't hit, I just kept falling and falling and falling.

There was light. My eyes flew open and I was staring with total incomprehension at a magnificent view. I didn't understand. Where was the cave? Where was I?

I had risen above the sunset and was in the light that ascending larks strive to reach.

The horror of dislocation so overwhelmed me that I was reduced to a primitive state. My humanity collapsed. I felt the man falling away like a flimsy costume, bits and tinsel fluttering in the sun.

My cries disappeared into the sky.

Below me the world was a purple shadow bisected by a glowing line of sunlight. Westward evening spread across the fields, and farther west the land rested in spreading day.

Nothing was holding me up or restraining me in any way. I gritted my teeth and moaned. The impression was strong that I was about to fall. Why did they keep doing this to a man afraid of heights?

The lights of Roscoe disappeared into the general shadow of the globe. When I tried to breathe it simply didn't work. I was freezing cold. There was no wind around me. My skin began to feel tight, my eyeballs as if they were working their way out of my head.

It must feel like this for the trout to be dragged from his lair. He gasps and gulps, his eyes bulge from his head. And the fisherman, chuckling to himself over the cleverness of the capture, tosses him into his creel.

They were treating me exactly as I treated the trout, and in that there was a lesson I have never forgotten.

Now the world was glorious below me, half of it in sunlight and half blue with night. I had been pulled from out of the shadow line. It was an appropriate moment to grab me: my life was lived in that deceptive edge.

There was a heave within me. My stomach knotted, my knees came up to my chest, I retched. White foam flew from my mouth, and in that instant I felt myself lying on a floor. I gagged; I couldn't help it. The combination of shock, cold and oxygen starvation had caused the reaction. I was having a fit, flopping and spitting and choking - exactly like a fish Hupping in a creel. By slow degrees my body recovered from the punishment it had received. I pulled myself to my feet. I was in an absolutely dark room, inky black.

Experimentally I put my hand in front of my face. I couldn't see it, not even with my palm touching my nose.

I went for my lighter, flipped it open and struck the flint.

For a moment I didn't understand what I was seeing in its shaky flame. Then the rows of glistening objects resolved themselves. There were dozens of pairs of huge, black eyes around me.

With a bellow of horror I threw the lighter at them. I jumped back but their long arms encircled me in an instant. I felt their black claws pressing into my skin.

I knew what these creatures were. I had seen one autopsied. "More vegetable than animal." I fought like what I was, a trapped beast.

The sentry's screams returned to my ears. He'd yelled "No, no, no" his voice rising to an absolute pitch of hysteria.

I would lash out and they would withdraw into the dark. Then there would be silence for a while.

I would hear stealthy movement. When they touched me it felt like the skin of a frog.

I fought with the strength of the mad. They twined themselves around me, grasped me with their wiry fingers, scratched me with their claws. I kicked, I hit, I bit, around and around I turned, lashing out with my fists whenever I felt their wet, soft touch.

Again and again they came and I fought them off. I didn't think, I didn't hope, I just fought. Finally, though, I started to tire. My breath burned my lungs, my legs wobbled. All around me they were cooing and whispering, and I heard in my head a woman singing a gentle song. One of them came up to me and put its skeletal hands on my shoulders. Although I could not see I remembered from the autopsy how those hands looked: three long fingers and black, sharp claws.

I could feel the hands sliding around my back. The thing was drawing me closer. I was so exhausted that I could no longer raise my arms.

Another one was behind me now, grasping me, holding me, twining itself around me.

I screamed and screamed and screamed and they cooed and finally a voice spoke. It was like a machine talking. "What can we do to help you stop screaming?"

There wasn't a darned thing they could do! I screamed until my voice cracked and my shrieks became ragged blasts of air.

Then I could scream no more.

They were all around me, caressing me with their soft hands, their smell thick in my nostrils.

I sank to my knees.

"Can you take off your clothes or do you want us to help you?" The voice was breathless and strangely youthful, like a child of about fourteen.

Suddenly I was on the porch at home, playing with a toy when - hadn't they carried me, then?

I was a little boy then, and they had carried me, had carried me!

"You - you - "

They were touching buttons, scrabbling at zippers. There was rapid breathing and little snapping sounds. My fishing vest and shirt went off, my trousers opened.

And then there was a great deal of prodding and poking at my hip boots. Finally it stopped.

"What do you wear?"

"Rubber boots."

"Take them off."

"Why don't you do it?"

"We can't."

"What will you do to me when I'm naked?"

"We're naked."

I toppled to the floor. I just couldn't stand up anymore. I went down in a cage of supporting arms.

There was more fumbling and scrabbling with the hip boots. Finally they withdrew. I sat up, feebly waved around me. Nothing - the air was empty.

"Pull thy boots, child."

This voice was very different from the ones I had boon hearing. It was clearly ancient and full of authority.

"What will you do to me?"

"I can do with thee what I wish."

"I don't want to take off my boots! I want to go home! I'm a federal officer. My government will rescue me. We have planes - "

"You have no weapons, child."

"We have the bomb!"

"No, child, the bomb has you. Take off thy boots."

I would not.

There appeared to be an impasse. But then the boots started to get warm. In seconds they were hot. I smelled burning rubber.

I got right out of them.

A sort of chuckling followed, slow and low and terribly sinister. "Don't you remember us at all?"

I saw my red fire engine. It stood bathed in golden light, the lost treasure of my boyhood.

I reached out, put my hand on it. Yes, it was real, my own beloved fire engine, the one I'd lost when I was three.

All through my childhood I'd dreamed about it. How lovely it was, my heart ached to see it.

They'd - I remembered when I was very young . . . flying ...

The lights came on.

I was alone in a surprisingly small gray room. Although I was physically the only person here, I had no sense of being mentally isolated. Just beneath the surface, my mind was seething with voices, images, thoughts. It was as if I was skating the short-wave band with its static and half-heard messages from far away.

Then two blond people came into the room. I recognized both of them. One I had seen briefly on the train. The other was the woman in the flowered dress.

"We are here to assist you," said the man. He sounded as if he was reading a script.

Soon I would know the secret of the disappearances. What would Hilly find of me?

Late tonight they'd miss me at the Trout Valley Club and decide that the stream had taken me. They'd search its length tomorrow morning, looking in all the places where a fisherman's body is apt to lodge. Would they find even my rod and reel? I thought not. My guess was that the woman had policed the area after I was captured.

Hilly would guess what had happened.

The government would lose balance completely. If Stone went, then they were all vulnerable.

The woman came up to me, grasped me firmly by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips. Her kiss was dry and firm and gave the impression of something a loving father might do to calm a distraught ten-year-old kid.

She embraced me in a wooden hug. She said, "It's gonna be all right, buddy."

The man in the seersucker elbowed her. "You don't sound a hell of a lot like a frail," he muttered.

The woman sent him a hard look.

He had some white stuff in his hands, which he unfolded into a robe. It was simply cut and made of soft paper. The two of them raised it over my head and drew it down.

For a moment it clung to me, then it seemed to take on a static charge and stood out from my body. I tingled.

"Come on," the man said.

Why were they like this? Were they robots?

"We aren't," the woman snapped. Her voice sounded petulant and very human. But when I asked them their names they gravely shook their heads. "Your name dies with you," the woman said. "We don't remember."

We went down a hall that was more a tunnel it was so low. I could see that it was made of paper of the same type that formed the inner walls of the ship we had found. Light came through it from the outside. The yellow flowers pressed into the paper seemed almost alive, so vividly did they glow.

We entered a round chamber that contained a circle of what appeared to my eye to be plush first-class airplane seats. As a matter of fact they were airplane seats, familiar to me in every detail. I recognized the United Airlines logo on some of the headrests, TAT on others.