The Grays (27 page)

“I hadn’t realized that.”

“Well, try K-Paxian next time. I’m sure you’re fluent in that, too. Now, little boy, if you’re gonna crack Gestapo, crack it and I’ll suck your toes.”

“Conner!” Katelyn called.

“Okay! Okay! In a while.”

“It’s after ten.”

“So, little boy, we gonna get tucked in by mommy?”

“No, we’re not at your house, little boy. Come on.” Conner went across the room and out under the deck. He was outside before he asked himself why he’d done this. He’d just suddenly felt like coming out.

Paulie joined him. “Wow, is it ever
snowing!
Look at this!” He danced around, then went down on his back and made an angel. He leaped up. “It’s butt cold, we need our coats.”

As he ran back inside, Conner pointed the flashlight upward and flicked it on and off. As he’d learned, he varied the signal, three long, three short, two long, two short. The beam revealed a whirling maelstrom of snowflakes, dancing, racing before the wind. The air was sharp with smoke and the tang of ice. Off to the west, thunder rumbled. Conner went on signaling, even though it was nowhere near 3:33, even though it felt hopeless, even though Paulie was probably right and he’d dreamed up the whole thing.

“Lame-o, Connner! I mean, you really are trying. You believe this.”

“Shut up.”

Paulie brushed Conner’s head with his hand. “Ah, little boy’s getting all covered with snow, isn’t he?”

Conner stopped signaling. A light glowed around them just then. It didn’t last long, but it came from above. “Oh, Jesus,” Conner said. He started signaling again.

“It was lightning.”

“They’re here.” He looked up, letting the snow pummel his face. “You guys,” he whispered, “come on down.”

Suddenly and without a word, Paulie took off toward the house. Then, in the distance, Conner heard the Keltons’ dog Manrico set up a howl. He looked in the direction of the Keltons’ place . . . and saw, standing at the edge of the yard as if they’d just come up out of the woods, three kids. They had really big heads and their eyes were terrible in the reflected light from the house. “Paulie!” Conner whispered. But Paulie was standing under the deck, as still as death “Paulie . . .”

Then he saw that they had a lantern. He looked at it, glowing in the snow, the interior flickering orange.

“Mom,” he called, but it came out as a whisper. He fought to form the word. “M-o-o-mm.” It stayed in his throat.

They came across the snowy lawn, sort of floating just above the ground, floating and flickering.

Conner was terrified beyond anything he’d ever thought possible. It was freezing-cold fear, a fear so deep he had not known that it could exist.

Had he been insane? Why had he done this?

The thought crossed his mind that this was yet another joke, but then he heard them, a buzzing sound like huge flies, a sound that was really, really strange, that was not of this world. They remained out in the gushing, swirling snow.

The lantern wasn’t a lantern at all, it was a very black metal thing with glowing holes in it that sort of looked like eyes, and it seemed to Conner as if it was sort of alive, too. The three aliens came closer, moving swiftly and accurately now, no longer floating and flickering. They were like wolves in the snow, now, and they were clearly interested in him.

And then there was something on his shoulder, as light as if a bird had landed there. Almost too scared to move, he looked down. A hand was there, with fingers like long, thin snakes, and black claws.

CONNER HAD TO RUN, HE
had to get out of here, but then the world distorted, seeming almost to bend, and the glowing thing was right in front of his face and he was staring into the orange light inside where there were millions of glowing threads. They were just threads of light, but he couldn’t look away from them, he had to keep staring.

One of the creatures pulled his shirt front up, and he felt something pushing against his chest and getting hotter and hotter and he couldn’t stop it and he had to because it was burning him.

The snow swirled and lightning flashed and there was a loud snap like a wire had come down and was spitting in the yard.

Suddenly Conner realized that he was alone. He was standing in the snow and he had to get back inside because somebody was out here who should not be, and he was in danger.

He’d seen black eyes and orange light, terrible light, but the rest of it was all confused. Had he met the aliens? He wasn’t sure. Or no, he was sure. He hadn’t. He’d pointed the light at the sky and everything, but they hadn’t shown up.

He opened the door. He walked past Paulie who, without a word, went into the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water. When he came out, he was transformed from a posturing preteen into the little boy he had been as recently as last summer. “I want to go home,” he said quietly. Then he ran upstairs.

Conner ran after him.

Paulie burst into the living room. “I want to go home,” he yelled.

“Paulie?” Katelyn asked.

Paulie looked toward Conner, his face soaked with tears. Conner went closer to him. “Hey, man?”

“Don’t let him near me!”

Katelyn got to her feet “What in the world did you do to him, Conner?”

Conner shook his head.

“Here, come here to me, Paulie, honey. I’ve dealt with a lot of scared guys in my time, honey.” Katelyn took him by the hand. “Now, we are going into the kitchen, fellas, and guess what we’re gonna do? We are going to make a big, old-fashioned pot of hot chocolate flavored with brandy. Would you like that?”

“We have brandy?” Dan asked.

“I’m not allowed to drink.”

“This is a very tiny bit, Paulie,” Katelyn said as she drew him toward the kitchen.

“Hey, guy,” Dan said to Conner.

“Yes, Dad?”

Dan patted the couch cushion. Conner sat down beside him. “Conner, did you—no. Better way to do this. What did that to him?”

“Dunno. He was okay, then he wasn’t.”

“Did you, perhaps, have a fight? It was awfully noisy down there at one point.”

“No. No fight.”

“No, that wouldn’t make him cry. What made him cry, Conner?”

“Homesick, maybe?”

“No.”

Conner’s chest hurt. He tried to sort of move his shirt away from it to not have anything touch it.

Dan saw, and lifted it. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, there is. Katelyn, could you come back, please?”

Conner heard a voice,
Hello, Conner
.

“Hi.”

Dan said, “Hi what?”

Be quiet!

He started to talk, but it was like somebody had grabbed his throat from the inside.

This is real, Conner
.

A coldness raced in Conner’s veins. This was somebody that was
inside
him, somebody else alive,
in him!

“Katelyn, something’s not right here.”

Don’t tell them, Conner
.

She came in.

“Look at his chest.”

“Conner, what have you boys been doing?”

Paulie had followed her. She turned to him. “Paulie, you tell me. Have you boys been playing too rough?”

“No, Mrs. Callaghan.”

“Mom?”

“Son, you’re all skinned up! You look like you’ve been sandpapered, so I want to know what you were doing.”

Conner had no way to respond. He wasn’t sure why he was hearing this voice, only that it was not being heard by anybody else.

That’s right, Conner
.

Mom and Paulie returned to the kitchen, followed by Dan. Conner hesitated a moment, then hurried after them. He was trying not to be scared, because this was the real thing, this was contact. But he was not just somewhat scared, he was so scared that he was actually dizzy.

He knew what had been done to him: they had put a communications device in his chest.

Right again
.

The kitchen was filling with the smell of cocoa and it seemed so wonderfully comfortable it almost made him burst into tears. He ran over and threw his arms around his mother’s waist and tried not to let Paulie hear him crying.

“What is the matter with these boys?” Katelyn asked.

“I think it’s called nervous energy. Running on fumes. When’s your bedtime, Paulie?”

“Whenever.”

“I repeat the question, Paul Warner. When is your bedtime?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“It’s already ten forty-five,” Dan said. “You must be tuckered out.”

“Conner’s an eleven o’clock guy,” Katelyn said. “But you’re tired, too, right?”

“I’m tired.”

Paulie nodded into the mug of hot chocolate that Katelyn had just poured him.

They drank their cocoa in silence, and the voice did not recur. Conner began to hope that it had been an auditory hallucination, because if contact was going to mean you had a voice inside you, that was going to take a whole lot of getting used to.

He’d read most of his father’s abnormal-psych texts, so he hoped it wasn’t an early symptom of schizophrenia, the curse of the excessively intelligent. Even though that might actually be better than having an alien communications device buried in his damn chest.

He and Paulie did not argue about going to bed upstairs. There was no way that either of them were going anywhere near that basement again tonight. In fact, Conner considered proposing to Dan that they brick the thing up tomorrow and just forget about it.

After they were both in pajamas and had their teeth brushed, Paulie said, “I’m sorry about not believing you.”

“About what?”

He put his arms on Conner’s shoulders and pushed his lips close to his ear. “The aliens! I saw them. I saw the whole thing!”

“Forget it, Paulie.”

“Forget it?
Are you nuts! I saw aliens in your yard, man, three of them!”

“We don’t know what we saw.”

“Hello? You were the big believer. You were the guy who was vectoring them in.”

“Maybe I made a mistake.”

“Maybe you didn’t.”

They left it there, and soon Paulie was asleep. Conner watched the night, listened to the snow whispering on the windowpanes, and wondered how the world really worked.

There came that voice again, very quick, trembling with something like fear and something that, oddly enough, sounded to Conner like a sort of awe:
Soon you will know
.

CHARLES GUNN PULLED UP TO
the presidential safe house on Embassy Row. The mansion had been acquired during World War II when the Roosevelt Administration was concerned that Hitler might develop a long-range bomber and attack the White House. Successive administrations had continued to use it, and during the cold war, tunnel access had been added across the mile that separates it from the White House. Now it functioned as a very private presidential enclave, at present ostensibly owned by Washington insider Larry Prince, but actually under the control of the Secret Service.

He walked quickly to the door, which was opened as he approached. A young man in a dark suit, with an earbud in his ear and the bulge of a small machine gun under his jacket, stepped aside and let him through the metal detector. Another young man fell in ahead of them, and the three of them proceeded silently down the hall, then turned right into the president’s ornate office.

The president didn’t know it yet, but he was going to provide a diversion that would, hopefully, deceive the grays into looking in the wrong direction for the source of danger to their evil little child. It might well mean that the president would himself be killed, but to Charles this was of little consequence.

He was watching the news and paging through a speech. “Hey there, Chester,” he said without looking up, “just give me a second, here.” Then, a moment later, “Pull up a chair.”

“It’s Charles, sir,” Charles said as he sat down.

On the wall of this office there were paintings chosen by FDR, the most spectacular being a Nicholas Poussin,
Landscape with St. John on Patmos
. As Charles knew, and as FDR had certainly known, the geometry of the painting
resolved into a date: 2012. That this was the year of tribulation had been known by the secret societies that had created western civilization literally from the very beginning. The date had been handed down through the Masonic community from the ancient Egyptian priesthood who had divined it by looking through the last, clear glass of man’s old, lost science: a window into the future. This had been at Abydos in Egypt, and some of the other things they had seen had been commemorated on beams that held up the temple’s roof to this day.

“So,” the president finally said, “how are you gonna make me miserable today, Charles?”

“Mr. President—”

“You never come here with good news. All your good news is secret. So, hit me.”