The Grays (6 page)

Suddenly something shot past so fast she lurched back waving her hands. It felt like nothing so much as being buzzed by a fly—but not a small fly, no. More like the size, say, of a buzzard.

There was also a voice: groaning, howling, wailing, and it was the strangest voice she had ever heard, because of the way it echoed in her ears and her mind at the same time, as if she was hearing both sounds and thoughts that were the same as the sounds.

A thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, shot around the room, and with it the wailing, mourning voice, its howl thin and pitiful now.

She saw something—a flash of something that gleamed black. It was big, the size of a hand, and slanted. It was also brilliantly alive—a big, gleaming
eye. A sound came out of her that she knew, objectively, was a scream. Sharp, intense, made of pure fear.

The wailing at once increased. Now it was desolated, like he’d been instantly aware of her revulsion and her fright and it was making him feel really, really miserable.

“Hold on,” she said. Dimly, she was conscious that Wilkes was now standing beside the tech at the control panel.

Suddenly, the buzzing stopped. There was no sound now but the hissing of the powerful air-conditioning.

“Sit down in the chair,” Wilkes said over the intercom.

“Where is he?”

“He moves with your eyes, so he appears totally still. The eye doesn’t see anything that’s totally still.”

“Yeah, like a rock or a mountain.”

“No,” Wilkes explained, “when you look at anything at all,
you’re
in motion, so you see it. Since Adam is constantly making micromovements to match your eyes’ own natural flickering, he doesn’t register in the optic nerve at all.”

“What in hell is this
about?”

“Tell you what. If you want to see him, make a very sudden move. As you do that, concentrate on the corners of your eyes, not your central vision. You’ll see him.”

She sat, took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on her peripheral vision, and leaped to her feet.

Not a foot away, there was a shadow. Then it was gone again.

“He’s right here! He’s right on top of me!”

Then he started wailing again, and she could feel him whizzing around the room. More and more, he was racing past her face at the distance of what felt like about an inch. Dad had gotten scratched. She sat frozen, terrified.

“Stay with it. You’re doing marvelously.”

She could see Wilkes nodding and smiling at her. “This is one hell of a sucker play,” she yelled. “False damn pretenses!” She got to her feet. Adam whizzed past so close she was forced to sit back down. She jumped up again. Same thing happened.

“He likes you, Lauren,” Wilkes said.

It felt a lot like getting a bat in her hair or something. How had Dad ever stood this, it was just way, way too weird.

“So what are we doing with an alien?” she screeched. “How in the world did we capture an alien?”

“We got two of them in a crash in New Mexico. They may have been given to us, we’re not sure.”

Bzzzt! Whooosh!

“Get away!”

“He wants to touch you. Let him touch you.”

She began waving her arms around her head. “No way, I’ll bleed out!”

“Remember, that was an accident. He’s in an agony of grief, that’s why he’s like this. Now you settle down, young woman, and follow your orders.”

Pictures of Dad kept flashing through her mind like photographs. With them came emotions of grief and the most acute regret. It was clear that they entered from the outside, although she could not say how she knew that. It was sort of like breathing a kind of emotional smoke.

“Shh,” she whispered, “now, baby . . .” She looked toward the control room. “The buzzing stopped again.”

Something brushed her cheek.

“I think he just touched me. I know you’re sorry,” she whispered, “I know . . .” She looked again toward the figures in the control room. “What am I supposed to do now?”

No response.

So she comforted him. She went through her mind, seeking for the words of some song from childhood, some sort of comforting song. Dad had not been a big singer. Mom had her Elvis, but this did not appear to be your basic Elvis moment.

Then a sort of hallucinatory flash took place. In it, the light in the room was deep red and there was a man at the table, sitting across from Adam. On the table, a bright green light like a laser that hopped up and down in the air. The man was her dad.

It was so real, it was so good to see him again, that the tears were immediate. And then she heard inside her head,
oohhhhh
, and she knew that Adam had realized who she was.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”

Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh!

“Oh, yeah,” she managed through her own tears, “I miss him, too, I miss him bad.”

She saw next a glowingly beautiful woman, her face surrounded by a halo of golden light. It was, she knew, herself as Adam saw her.

Empath. One who empathizes. Turned out it was in the blood. No training needed. Genetic thing, she supposed. Maybe their ancestors had been psychics or witches or something. Dad’s grandfather had come from Ireland, that was about all she knew of their bloodline.

In the control room, Colonel Wilkes and Specialist Martin exchanged looks. “He’s got her wrapped around his little finger,” Wilkes said.

“For sure, sir.”

“He knows how to handle ’em, the little bastard. That is one smart piece of work in there.”

They said no more. Lauren Glass had been captured. She would not escape, never, not until she followed her father and his predecessor, both of whom Adam had killed with a scratch.

THE THREE THIEVES

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

—
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

“The Fairies”

DAN CAME INTO THE KITCHEN
while Katelyn was washing spinach and nuzzled her neck. She moved her head back, enjoying him. In their case, not even thirteen years of marriage had been enough of a honeymoon, and she was very far from being used to this guy of hers.

They had met here at Bell, two days after he arrived. Bizarrely, it turned out that they’d both grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from each other. He’d been crossing the campus in that aimless way he had, looking here and there, smiling even though there was no reason to smile. He was a strikingly handsome man, the last person you’d pick for a professor, let alone a specialist in physiological psychology. But that’s what he was, and he’d just snared a provisional professorship when they met. Now Bell had reached a point of no return with him. This was, at last, his tenure year, and in a few days, his career here—and their pleasantly settled life—would either continue or it would end.

“What’s Conner up to?” she asked. “Is he downstairs?”

“He’s in the living room.”

“Too bad, he’d hear us if we went upstairs.”

“Mmm.” He continued nuzzling.

Their son was more than a genius. A well-constructed, handsome tow-head, gentle of eye and so smart that he was a de facto freak. His IQ of 277 was, as far as anybody could determine, the highest presently on record.

Dan came up from nuzzling and said, “He’s in a funk.”

“Symptoms of said funk?”

“Staring miserably at the TV pretending not to stare miserably at the TV.”

“He’s eleven. Eleven has stuff.” She arched her back, drew his head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of his lips.

“He’s watching
2001.”

Which meant that it was a serious funk and he needed Mom. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“In the first place, I wanted some love.”

She went into the family room, stood for a moment looking at the back of her son’s head. On the ridiculously huge TV Dan had unveiled at Christmas, the apes were howling at the monolith.

She sat down beside him. “Can I interest you in—” She glanced at her watch, picked up the
TV Guide
. “A
Mork and Mindy
rerun?
The McLaughlin Group?”

“Invasion of my space, Mom.”

“Point taken, backing off.” But she didn’t do that. She knew to stay right where she was.

“And just because I’m watching
2001
does not mean that I’m sad.”

What could she say to the misery in that voice? “Conner, a genius does not an actor make.”

“Mother, could you consider dropping that label? You say that all the time and it does not help.”

“That you’re not a good actor?”

“Okay, let’s do this. Would you care to come out on the deck with me?”

“On the deck? It’s twenty-six degrees.”

But he’d already gotten to his feet and slid open the door. He gestured to her, and she saw the anger in it. She went out with him.

The air was sharp with smoke, the western sky deep orange beyond the black skeletons of the winter trees. One would have thought that a winter silence would prevail, but instead she heard the shrill voices of preteen boys.

When she looked down toward the Warners’ house, she saw streaks of light racing around in the backyard.

“You’re not invited?”

He went back in the house, sat down, and jammed the button on the remote. The bone sailed into the sky, the “Blue Danube” started.

Paulie and Conner had been friends effectively from birth—Conner’s birth, that is. Paulie was a year and a half older.

“Conner, what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something happened.”

“Mom, I’ve asked for space.”

“Honey, look, you’ve got one place you can go. Here. Two people who are
one hundred percent on your team, me and Dad. And I want to know why you aren’t at that party.” And why, moreover, was it unfolding outside where Conner could watch from a distance? That was real hard, that was.

Conner was ten months younger than the youngest child in his class at Bell Attached, the school that served the children of Bell College’s professional community. He was nowhere near puberty, in a class where half the boys were shaving at least occasionally.

“Conner, would it make you feel better if I told you that puberty turns boys into monsters?”

“Thank you for that little dose of sexism, Mother. Girls have trouble with puberty, too.”

“But boys
really
do.”

She could hardly believe that Maggie and Harley would allow Paulie to leave Conner out like this. “What’s really wrong?”

“All right. Fine.” He got up, crossed the room, and went downstairs.

She heard him shut the door to the basement that Dan had finished for him when he was five. It was boy heaven down there, with an X-Box and a TV/DVD combo and a hulking but powerful Dell computer, plus his dinosaur collection, all of them painted with the utmost realism, and his train set, HO-grade, which had lighted houses, streetlights lining the streets, and lighted trains. He would play trains in the dark down there by the hour, muttering to himself in the voices of a hundred train men and townsfolk, all of whom he had invented, all of whose lives evolved and changed over the years. Katelyn thought of the train set as a sort of ongoing novel, and that her boy was a word genius as much as he was a math genius.

The care he lavished on everything he modeled came from his ability to concentrate. Even when he’d been little, he hadn’t been clumsy. When he was eight, she’d discovered while cleaning up one day that the tiny human figures in his train set all had different-colored eyes, they had been that carefully finished.

She had loved him so, then, looking down at a tiny suited figure with a tie so small that you had to look under a magnifying glass to see the design he’d painted on it. And then you would hear him deep in the night talking to himself, and you would realize that he was reciting a book he’d read, maybe even years ago, all from memory, just to enjoy it again.

Conner and Dan had celebrated the completion of the room by putting a plaque on the door:
THE CONNER ZONE
.

She and her husband had celebrated in quite a different way, later that
night. This was your garden-variety tract house, as isolated as it and its three neighbors were, and the walls were tract-house thin. They did not feel that this extremely sensitive child needed to overhear the sounds of sex in the next room. And on that night, at last, they had been able to use their bed the way a bed was meant to be used, instead of being as still as possible, wincing at every squeak, and keeping their cries to a whisper.

“Dan,” she said, walking into the kitchen where he had begun trimming ribs, “there’s something kind of ugly going on. Paulie’s having a party and Conner’s not invited.”