Invaders From Mars (6 page)

David leaned over the foot of the bed and turned on the small planetarium that was on his toy box. When Dad flicked the light off, the room became a window to outer space. The ceiling and walls were suddenly covered with pinpoints of light arranged to form a vast night sky all in one room.

Dad started to close the door, stopped, and stepped back inside. “Almost forgot,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He held up a shiny new penny in a plastic case. “Here, a fifty-eight-D in mint condition.”

David sat up in bed. “Wow!” Spots of light sparked off the shiny penny. “Thanks, Dad!”

“Sure.” He looked around the starry room a moment until he spotted David’s shirt hanging on the back of a chair by the desk. “I’ll leave it for you here in your shirt pocket.” He dropped the penny in the pocket and went back to the door.

“Thanks,” David said. “I love you, Dad.”

“Love you, too, Champ. Good night.”

He slowly pulled the door closed until all the light from the hall was blocked from the room, leaving David to gaze at the stars and constellations around him. After a moment, he swept the covers back and got out of bed, then went to the window where his telescope waited, staring blankly out at the night.

He slid the window up and looked through the telescope, trying to find the meteors, hoping he’d be able to follow their rapid course. They moved too fast for his telescope, though, so he stepped around it and sat on the windowsill.

Although none were as bright as the one he and Dad had witnessed earlier, he could still see them, flitting through the sky like distant thoughts being rejected by God. The thought made him smile.

David hoped to be out there one day, to see firsthand what there was to see, to perhaps be the first astronaut ever to make contact with another intelligence . . . whatever kind of intelligence there was in space. He stared through his window at the endless sky, which came to life now and then with more meteorites, and imagined himself in a sleek spacesuit, at the controls of a ship, traveling swiftly and silently through space . . .

A flicker of lightning brought him from his reverie. It was followed by the rumble of far-off thunder. A storm was coming in.

He pushed away from the sill and crossed the room, getting into bed, still clinging to his thoughts of the future, of space travel and discovery.

Turning on his side and snuggling into the pillow, David watched the stars on his walls and slowly, comfortably drifted off to sleep.

C H A P T E R
Four

D
avid sat bolt upright in bed, suddenly jarred from his sleep by a shattering crash of thunder and the howl of wind raging around the corners of the house.

The planetarium was still shining stars onto his wall.

The alarm clock beside his bed read 4:40.

He had left the window open and rain was blowing into the room, bringing with it a biting chill.

David suddenly felt rather dizzy. He realized, looking around him, that the planetarium by his bed was slowly beginning to turn, sending the stars around and around the room. He rubbed his eyes, still puffy with sleep, and blinked them several times, puzzled. He hadn’t flipped the rotate switch, and yet that was what it was doing. He sat up straighter in bed as the stars began to move faster and faster, creating a tornado of light around him. Soon they were no longer specks but silent streaks whizzing over the walls and ceiling.

A bright flash of lightning filled the room with white and startled David; he pressed himself against the headboard and lifted a hand before his eyes. The lightning seemed to last a long time, much longer than usual.

“Jeeeeez,” he breathed.

Catlike hissing and spitting sounds made David look over the foot of the bed. The planetarium was spinning madly, shooting sparks and puffing smoke in little clouds. The room was suddenly black and silent except for the sounds of the storm outside.

David kicked the covers aside and hurried to the window. He gripped the sash to pull it down when the rain stopped—not gradually, as rain usually does, but all at once, leaving behind it an eerie stillness.

Pushing the window all the way open again, David looked outside and listened. Only the sound of water dripping softly from the trees could be heard. The moon and stars were gone, hidden behind dark storm clouds. It was so dark, David could barely see anything outside; the hill was just a dim shape in the distance.

As he gazed out the window, David realized how tense he felt. Beneath his white pajamas, his limbs were rigid as sticks and there was a tightness in his chest that came only with . . . dread. Something was not right.

The silence outside was too heavy, too thick, worse, even, than the silence that followed Mrs. McKeltch’s
“One,
two,
three,
four,
five!”

David leaned toward the window, palms flat on the sill, and waited, although for what he did not know. The whole night seemed to be waiting . . . for something.

And then it came, a sound so sudden and loud that it ripped the silence jaggedly in two—a horrible, throbbing sound so deep and massive that David could not only hear it, he could feel it in the very marrow of his bones, in the windowsill beneath his hands, vibrating the air around him. David was so terrified that, for a moment, he could not move a muscle. His hands felt like lead weights when he finally lifted them from the windowsill and reached over his head, grabbed the sash, and pulled it down.

It would not budge.

With a frightened groan, David tried again, putting all his weight into it, lifting his feet from the floor, hanging, for just an instant, from the sash.

The window was sturdy as stone.

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away from the window, then started to hurry down the hall and wake his parents, when the room slowly began to fill with a soft light. Brighter and brighter . . .

David looked out the window again and his jaw hung loosely, his eyes became so wide that they felt like they might pop from their sockets.

There were lights cutting through the cloud layer, solid bars of light that landed on the ground in bright circles, flashing with a strobe effect, each appearing then disappearing in a heartbeat, beams of bluish-white dancing in a strange, hypnotic rhythm so precise, so perfect, that it seemed important, significant.

David gawked at the lights darting over the ground until something above caught his eye, something descending from the sky, easing through the thick clouds, something glowing and huge, so huge that its size alone filled David’s stomach with an icy ache. Its light diffused outward through the storm clouds, giving them a shimmering glow. It was a sphere that seemed, at first, to be as big as a building. But as it continued to descend, more and more of it became visible and David realized that it was far bigger than any building he’d ever seen.

The sphere—metallic, glowing a bright bluish-silver—began to shift its shape. As if it were an enormous water balloon, it flattened itself into a disc, like a giant, glowing Frisbee. It wobbled slightly and changed again, first into a bottle shape, then, smoothly, it became more rectangular, like one of those jars Grandma Gardiner used to can peaches in every summer. It thinned out then, elongating itself into a spear shape, falling lower and lower until it disappeared behind the hill. It continued to glow, its light reflecting off the clouds overhead, and when David placed his hands on the sill again, he could still feel the vibration of that awful, gut-wrenching thrum.

Then they both faded, the light and the sound.

The night, once again, was silent.

An explosion of lightning was followed by thunder, more distant now. With a howl of wind, the rain began to fall again, as if it had never stopped.

Blinking his eyes with shock, David leaned forward, sticking his head out the window a bit, looking all around, his heart pounding like the footsteps of a giant in his chest.

Nothing. Only the yard, the hill, and the storm.

David pulled his head back just as the window slammed shut loudly. He jumped back with a startled cry, then stood like an ice statue, staring with wildeyed fear and wonder at the night, waiting for something more to happen.

The rain fell with a vengeance.

Lightning brought an instant of distorted daylight.

Thunder purred sedately, more evenly than before.

The wind made the trees murmur among themselves.

Like a racehorse from the gate, David bolted from his room and ran down the hall, his feet thumping on the floor. Without knocking, he threw open the door of his parents’ bedroom and hurried to their bedside, stopping so suddenly he nearly fell on his face.

“Dad! Mom!”

They were motionless lumps beneath the covers.

“Dad! Mom!” David cried again, grabbing the lump on his dad’s side and shaking it urgently.

Dad jerked awake, turned over and tried to sit up, his eyes squinting. “Whuh-Da-David, what’s wrong?”

David was screaming now, his whole body crawling with goose pimples. “You’ve gotta come! You’ve gotta come see, a, a UFO! A big one! It went down over the hill! I saw it!”

Wearily, Dad pulled the covers aside and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Mom simply stirred beneath her blankets.

“C’mon,” Dad said to her.

She rolled over and groaned, “Ooohhh, I’m
so
glad you got him a telescope.”

David ran back down the hall to his bedroom and stopped in his doorway. He turned to see his dad staggering slowly from the far bedroom, tying the belt of his robe. David ran back and grabbed Dad’s arm. “C’mon, c’mon, Dad!”

“Okay, Champ, okay.” He allowed David to lead him, stumbling, to the bedroom, then to the window. Mom was not far behind.

Dad gripped the sash, opened the window, and all three of them leaned forward to look outside. Mom yawned loudly, halfheartedly covering her mouth.

The rain was falling lightly now and water babbled as it fell from the rain gutter above the window. A flicker of sheet lightning illuminated the peaceful hill; the scrub pines were nodding in the gentle wind.

David couldn’t believe it. Not only was there nothing out of the ordinary in sight, but even the storm had calmed.

“But . . . it was
there!”
David shouted, pointing toward the hill. “It was huge! And it glowed really bright with this strange light! And it went down over there, right behind the hill!” He stepped back as his mom and dad turned to him. His mom yawned again; Dad leaned against the windowsill.

Fear suddenly caused a gurgle in David’s stomach. He wished that he hadn’t run to them because he could almost hear the thoughts in their heads. They would think he’d been dreaming, having another of those nightmares. When they went back to bed, after David had left the room, Mom might say something like, “Think we should send David back to Dr. Wycliffe?”

And Dad might say, “Maybe so. He seemed pretty shook up.”

He had to convince them, he
had
to make them believe it was real and not just a dream.

“I bet it was ball lightning,” Dad said quietly.

“I know what ball lightning is, Dad! No, no, this was something else!” David sighed, suddenly feeling very tired and helpless. He looked out the window at the hill. “No, it was a UFO. It must have been.”

Mom folded her arms before her, snuggling warmly into her robe, and turned to Dad. “Could it have been something from the base?” she asked.

“No, Mom,” David said before Dad could reply. “It wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t from . . .” He paused, debating whether or not to speak the words on his lips. “It wasn’t from Earth.”

“Maybe it was a meteorite,” Dad suggested.

“No way,
Dad! It was too big, too bright. It was even brighter than the big one we saw! And louder! It was so loud, it shook the house! I can’t
believe
you didn’t wake up!”

Mom and Dad stared at David blankly, then looked out the window again.

Remembering the planetarium, David grabbed his dad’s hand. “C’mere, Dad! Look what it did!” He led him to the foot of his bed and pointed to the lifeless machine, now spotted with black. “See? It freaked out my planetarium, made it throw sparks and everything! It just blew up!”

Dad touched it with his toe. Suddenly, his face changed. His left eyebrow moved down over his eye and the other one popped up. He was concerned and, more importantly,
interested!

“Tell you what, Champ,” Dad said thoughtfully, slowly walking back to the window and looking out at the hill. “I’ll take a look in the morning, when it’s light.”

“But, Dad, it could be—”

“It’s cold and rainy and dark out there, David. I’ll look in the morning before breakfast, I promise.”

David looked down at his bare feet and clenched his teeth. Reluctantly, he said, “Okay.”

Dad closed the window, then bent down and swept David off his feet, hefting him over his shoulder and carrying him to the bed.
“You,”
he growled, “go back to sleep!” He tossed him onto the bed, pulled the covers over him, and smiled. “In the morning. I promise.” He kissed David on the forehead. “Good night again, Champ.”

“Night, Dad.”

They left the room, closing the door quietly. As they went down the hall, David could hear their muffled, hushed voices and was able to distinguish a few words.

“. . . those nightmares again . . .” Dad said quietly.

“. . . talk to Dr. Wycliffe?” Mom asked.

After a few moments, their bedroom door closed softly.

David curled up under the covers and clenched his eyes shut, his whole body tense. He was angry at himself for waking them. He realized he should never have told them what he’d seen; now they were talking about sending him to Dr. Wycliffe again, just as he’d thought they would. Well, he wouldn’t go.

“I
won’t!”
he mumbled into his pillow.

David wrapped an arm around his pillow and held it close to him, wishing he’d just gone outside himself to see what had gone down in the sand pit instead of waking Mom and Dad. When he found out what it was, he could’ve come back to the house and gotten them, taken them to it,
proved
to them that he’d really seen something.