The Glittering World (15 page)

“Let me finish,” Cronin said, his annoyance undisguised. “That’s just how some people identify them. It’s
cultural
. In the old country, that’s what the common people called those they couldn’t begin to fathom. The Fae. The Good Neighbors. The Silent People. In Ireland, they’re the Aos Si, the people of the mounds. Lots of names for the things that live among us, but
aren’t
of
us. Some of the Mi’kmaqs around these parts, they call them the stone dwarves.”

“But those are superstitions,” Jason said. “Folklore, basically.”

“Some of it, sure. But not all. Sometimes, late at night, we’ll get
dreags
over the water. You know, like corpse candles?”

“Will-o’-the-wisps,” Gabe chimed in. “Ghost lights, or something. They’re like little UFOs, right?”

Cronin nodded. “But I for one would hardly think aliens would come down from the celestial heavens to buzz a foggy little cove in Cape Breton, do you?”

“I suppose not,” Jason said. It was actually fascinating to have a conversation with someone of such heightened pathology outside of a clinical setting.

“Isn’t it funny,” Cronin said, “that the elders see fairies? Folks today, though, we talk about the whole alien abduction thing. Or maybe by now it’s all about mass hallucinations, or government experiments, whatever the flavor of the day may be. Whereas I personally prefer the term
ultraterrestrials
. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“I think so,” Gabe said. “They’re all just different ways of explaining similar phenomenon.”

“Exactly. Because here’s the thing: they’re all the same, man. Grays, little green men, the Fae, whatever? Hell, maybe even the goddamn angels and demons! They’re different names for the same thing.”

Jason crossed his legs, which their host seemed to take as some kind of covert sign of disrespect. “Look,” Cronin said, “I’m not some backwoods yokel. I’m from Detroit. All these terms, they’re names for whatever it is that walks these woods. Real beings, no matter where they came from. And they’re near impossible to describe.”

“And you know this how exactly?” Jason said.

“I’ve seen ’em.” He lit another cigarette and let the smoke drift from his nostrils. “Only once up close. I was driving over Kelly’s Mountain late one night, twenty-five years ago now. I rounded a corner near the peak, and at first all I saw out of the corner of my eye was a pinprick of light, like a lightning bug but greenish. Only as I kept driving, the light stayed there, hovering past the driver’s side window. Hanging over the side of the mountain too; it couldn’t be a light from a house or anything, and what’s more, it wasn’t going anywhere, even as the car kept moving. Impossible to tell just how close it was. It was like the light was following me, like the moon. Tracking me.”

A light
, Jason thought.
Detective Jessed asked if I’d seen any lights the night they went missing.

“I was so rattled I nearly drove off the road,” Cronin continued. “I pulled onto what little shoulder there was, and there it came again, this strange green light. It stopped just like I’d stopped, but it was still floating. It felt so close I could reach out and touch it. I rolled the window down a crack and suddenly I heard this giant burst of sound, like dialing through the world’s biggest radio, searching for a clear signal. I went to roll the window back up but it stuck, so I covered my ears, hoping my eardrums wouldn’t bust.”

He coughed violently, then collected himself. “After a while—a few seconds maybe, but it felt like whole minutes—the light started getting brighter. And then I heard voices. Whispering voices, coming out of the wall of noise. I could hear them talking. Laughing and moaning too, like maybe they had started screwing or something . . . It made me feel sick and horny all at once. It was like I was on fire, and it felt so fucking good.”

Jason bristled, but held his tongue.

“Well, the light got even brighter, so bright I thought I was going to be burned by it. It was like a monster green sun, burning itself into my corneas, even with my eyes shut. And then I saw what looked like people, standing in the middle of the light. Still with my eyes closed! They were climbing on the side of the mountain, kind of hanging there at a twisted angle, almost like trees growing right out of the earth. All different shapes—some long, some squat, but it was hard to tell because they would look puffed up one second, then deflated the next. Their shapes shifted along with the light, but also with the sound. Rising and falling, like a beating heart. There were two of them, though, both about three feet high, the size of children. They were in the middle, like they were important. Like they were being protected by the others.”

“Had you been drinking?” Jason tried not to use his therapist voice. “Or dropping acid, maybe?”

“Probably both,” Cronin replied with a chuckle, his lower register an emphysemic rasp. “But believe me when I tell you it happened. I saw what I saw. They’re something you can’t perceive exactly, like they weren’t made to be seen with human eyes. I could only catch parts of them—
glimpses
of them—the parts they allowed me to access.”

“And you thought they were aliens?”

“At the time, yeah. Like I said, this was coming off the seventies. Alien culture was all over the place back then.
Close Encounters
, the Mothman, all that jazz. But eventually I realized I was wrong.”

“You realized they’re actually ultraterrestrials.”

Jason maintained a neutral tone, but Cronin’s lip curled anyway. “All I’m saying is that they’re not from some other planet, or from heaven or hell or any of that bullshit. They’re from right
here, and they’ve been here all along. A lot longer than us, I’m guessing. They own the place. Not us. Them.”

“Why do you think they would want my wife? And her—our friend?”

He shrugged. “Not my place to conjecture.”

That’s all you seem to be doing
. Jason couldn’t stop himself from grinning, and Gabe shot him a glance.
You’ve told us fuck all, except that one long-ago night you got wasted and nearly ran off the road. Thanks a lot for nothing.

“Please,” Gabe said. “We’re listening.”

“Well,” Cronin said, “from everything I’ve learned, it doesn’t seem like the Other Kind are capable of reproducing on their own. They need to crossbreed to survive. So I figure that because they took them both, it’s most likely because they want to breed them.”

“Okay, then.” Jason stood. “I’m sorry, but we have a lot of ground to cover. And since it’s getting late . . .”

He turned toward the door but Gabe shot up from the couch. “Wait,” the boy said, and grabbed Jason’s arm. “Please.”

Jason stared at Gabe’s hand for a moment before he shook it off. “Let’s go.”

“Jason!” Gabe lunged to take hold of his arm again. “Please. Sit down.”

“Others have been taken,” Cronin said, standing himself now. “The cops won’t admit it but it’s documented. Your friend—you might not know who he really is, but I do. He’s one of them. The night I saw the lights—”

“I’ve heard enough.” Jason stepped to Cronin so fast that without so much as laying a hand on him, the man fell back into his seat. “We can’t start chasing phantoms right now. I need some concrete answers. Something real, you know?”

“Suit yourself.” Cronin shrugged and stared at his scarred knuckles, his cigarette burned down to the filter. “If you’re not ready, you’re not ready.” He looked at Gabe. “But when you are, we can discuss it further.”

“Thank you for your time,” Gabe said. He shook the man’s hand and waited for Jason to follow suit, which he did, finally and reluctantly.

On their way out the door, Cronin handed Gabe a stack of yellowed papers that reminded Jason of the mimeographed worksheets from his elementary school days. “A little bedtime reading,” Cronin said. “For those with an open mind.”

Jason could feel the man’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head as he and Gabe walked to the car, the sensation lingering long after they pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road.

As the car ascended Kelly’s Mountain, the sky blue but for a thread of gray clouds over the horizon, Jason thought about Cronin navigating the very same route that long-ago night. As delusional as the man was, he was no liar; he really did believe he’d seen the mysterious beings he had tried to describe. But if magical alien fairies really did take Elisa and Blue—to
breed
them, Jason thought, and laughed out loud, howling up through the Caddy’s open sunroof—then there wasn’t a goddamned thing anyone could do about it.

An image shuddered inside his head, one of Blue and Elisa. Their hands upon one another, hungry and desirous like rutting animals, all flesh and savage sex . . . It was an imagined home movie that Jason had rewound and replayed many times over many months, never more so than the past few days.

Jason pushed the thought away. “Ultraterrestrials,” he said. “Can you believe that guy?”

Gabe let out a quiet titter from the passenger seat, imitative of a laugh. Other than that, he was silent, absorbed in Fred Cronin’s decomposing papers.

“Wait.” Gabe clenched the pages in his hands. “Wait a second. Stop the car.”

“What? What is it?”

“Pull the car over. Now. You have to see these.”

Jason’s first thought was that the newsletters were a hoax. Fred Cronin could have come up with the story only yesterday, spun it whole cloth after Blue and Elisa’s disappearance. But no. The crumbling circulars emblazoned with the
Starling Cove Believer
nameplate were authentic, dashed off years ago on a dinosaur of a printing press. Twenty-five years come and gone since a boy named Michael Whitley vanished, in this very stretch of woods. The first time.

They pored over the documents, pages and pages of reflections on various supernatural occurrences in and around the cove, including the disappearance of “The Starling Cove Hansel and Gretel,” as Cronin had dubbed them. In October 1981, two young children, Blue and a girl named Gavina Beaton, went missing one afternoon without a trace. Cronin included references, quotes, and reproductions of articles from legitimate press like the
Cape Breton Post
. Though there was a local panic involving vague accounts of a drifter seen camping in the vicinity, the authorities seemed to have had few leads. Eerily, the search was hampered by forest fires, then as now.

Two weeks after the disappearance, Blue and the Beaton girl wandered out of the woods. They behaved as if nothing had happened; both claimed to have no recollection of their
time away, in the woods or otherwise. According to Cronin’s account, however, there was far more to the story than the police, the media, or the children’s families would let on. His papers didn’t claim to have any firm answers, though they contained a great deal of loony speculation about who might have wanted the children and why.

The newsletters were peppered with references to local media coverage, ink-smudged phrases with erratic capitalization: “WHAT The CAPE Breton POSt does NOT want you to KNOW is that tho there was no SIGN of abuse the children were found NAKED. This indicates a possible GENETIC and/OR personality RECONFIGURATION such as is found consistently in abduction LITERATURE across the GLOBE.” As the story developed, Cronin’s dispatches became increasingly bizarre, insisting that despite all appearances, the children who returned from the woods were not the same as the ones who had gone missing. “THEYre rePLACEments. THEYre reCONSTRUCTEd BEings, disGUISEd and possibly malEVOLent. Why do THEY NEED us?!”

“Sure, he’s a bit of an oddball,” Detective Jessed said over the phone as nightfall settled across the cove. “But Fred’s harmless. Trust me on that.”

“I wasn’t saying he might be involved,” Jason said, though his implication in calling the police had been exactly that. “I just thought it was interesting that he was the only one who put together the fact that as of thirteen days ago, Michael Whitley has gone missing in these parts not once but twice now. Don’t you find that unusual?”

The detective breathed into the receiver; it might have been a sigh of exasperation. “We’re aware of Mr. Whitley’s history in our community.”

“
What?
Since when?”

“It’s nothing to be concerned with at this time. We’ve asked the press not to report on certain details of the case—extraneous or otherwise—that might jeopardize the investigation. Of course, that never stopped Fred much. Excuse me one second.” Jessed sounded as if he was thumbing through papers. “In any case, you should rest assured that the department has been exploring every angle. We want you to know that we won’t stop until we’ve found the both of them. But as you know, we have our hands full with the fires on the mountain.”

“The fires. Right. Tell me, how often do these forest fires happen?”

A long silence. “I understand why you would want us to pursue this angle, Mr. Howard. But let’s focus on facts, and not go chasing after the Devil.”

“All I want—” Jason’s voice caught. “All I want is for you to find them.”

“Of course. Of course. And we will make every effort.”