The Grays (21 page)

Dan got out of there. His stomach felt as if it had just filled with a foamy storm of acid. He dashed upstairs and into the bathroom.

“Dan,” Katelyn called, following him.

She found him on his hands and knees over the toilet, barfing like a sick dog. He rose to his feet and started yanking paper off the roll to clean up the considerable quantity of yellow froth that had missed. He worked furiously, perhaps not yet aware of her presence.

“Dan,” she said as she went down to him. She took the paper from him and flushed it away. They knelt there awkwardly, face to face.

“It’s impossible,” he said. “It has to be impossible.” How could he tell her what he thought he was remembering? He had not only been in some way connected with Marcie two nights ago, it was worse than that. His childhood seizures hadn’t been seizures at all, they had been memories so extremely strange that it hadn’t been possible to recognize them for what they were. “We’re lab rats,” he said, then got sick again.

As she nursed him through it—rather bravely, she thought—he gasped, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and it meant a whole lot of things, and she wasn’t real sure what all of them were. He got up, shook his head.

“Are you okay?”

“We’re in some sort of trouble.”

“Oh, yes.”

He took her in his arms and held her. “This goes deep,” he whispered, “real deep.”

She wasn’t sure she should, but she remained in his embrace.

“No matter how bizarre and how impossible it may seem, it had something to do with them.”

“Something to do with whom?”

“Them! It was Marcie screaming in that thing.”

She leaned back, looked at him.

“I recognized her voice—it was all crazy with fear, but it was her yelling, it was certainly her.”

Katelyn could not think of how to react. She wasn’t even sure exactly what he was trying to say. And yet the screaming had sounded vaguely familiar to her, too. She knew that he was right. It had indeed been Marcie—in the thing, with the alien, and absolutely terrified.

“How did she . . . seem?

“ ‘How did she seem?’
My God, that’s too small a question! ‘What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here’ just begins to approach it. When I walked into her office, that sour, rigid woman was—oh, Lord, totally changed, love. All soft and steamy and really, really sold on me. That cold fish. As if her personality had been totally revised overnight.” He paused. “Which is exactly what did happen, in my opinion.”

“Aliens did something to Marcie because—why? What does this have to do with the price of beans, Dan? Because you are an Irishman to your core and you might be a dull lecturer, but you can sing a song to a lady, and I think I’m hearing a damn clever one now.”

“I’m telling you the truth!”

She backed away from him, looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You’re telling me aliens—which you have always until ten minutes ago thought were utter bullshit—made you do it. I don’t think I’m going to buy it, Danny-O. Nice try though. On the fly like that, very impressive.”

Inside herself, though, she was much less sure. It seemed to her that she’d had more than a glimpse of an alien down there on that video. She’d
seen, ever so vaguely, into an aspect of life that she had never even dreamed existed. There was somebody behind the scenes, it appeared, stitching things together, and they were taking an interest in this neighborhood and most specifically, she thought, in this family.

“Katelyn, I have to tell you something. I believe that I was brought into that thing. That I was with Marcie in there. Because I have memories of that.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I have
memories!”

“Okay, don’t have a cat. So, when did this happen? While I blinked my eyes, maybe? Remember, I was there most of the time. And you did not go into that thing. In fact, if you had, it’d be on the video.”

“Do you remember that you went to sleep with Conner afterward?”

“I was scared and so was he. I didn’t want him left alone down there.”

“And when you woke up, you were up here. In bed up here . . . and we saw those marks, that strange water. What if they were tracks, Katelyn?”

“Holes in the ground?”

“After we came back and went to sleep, that thing returned. It brought her back after they’d knocked her out or whatever they did to her. And for whatever reason . . .”

“No, Dan, the aliens did not make you do it. That will not fly.”

“OKAY!”

“Keep your voice down!”

He pushed on, because a lot rode on this, his whole life with her rode on this. “The thing is—”

“Dan—”

“Listen to me! You listen, because this is bizarre and impossible but it is real, and you need to wrap your mind around it.”

“I need to wrap my mind around your infidelity and I will not be talked out of it! Come on, Dan, at least respect my dignity as a human being.”

“Katelyn, that’s your melodrama showing and I accept that. Self-dramatization is a characteristic of people scarred by traumatic childhoods.”

“Analyze yourself why don’t you, my self-obsessed little boy.”

“I take that. And I accept that what I did was wrong no matter what the explanation.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Now will you listen?”

“All right. The star people made you do it. I’m fascinated.”

“I remember seeing her on a sort of black frame cot, and we were—something was happening.” He shuddered, then went to the sink and slugged water.

“What would that have been? Alien foreplay?”

“It was horrible! Katelyn,
horrible!
They—I remember some kind of sparks, and we were—oh, God—some sort of arcane thing where I kept seeing these sparks and hearing, like, her inner voice, her memories, her—like some kind of inner scent . . . the smell of her soul.”

“Was there a rectal probe involved, or is this even kinkier?”

“I deserve that. Sure I do, but—”

“What, Dan? Don’t talk in riddles, please.”

“When we were kids . . . I saw another girl under the same circumstances . . . with them. A girl that was you.”

“We didn’t even know each other.” And yet, she did have certain disjointed memories that were really strange, that she had always thought involved child abuse by one of her mother’s many boyfriends. She did not mention these memories to him, though, not just now.

“We knew each other, but not in normal life. We knew each other very well . . . because they made sure we did. They made this family, Katelyn. We’re damn lab rats is what we are.”

“Oh, come
on!
Look, we have guests, I’m going downstairs, plus the ever-alert Conner is going to figure out that we’re fighting again and do you really want him involved?”

“He is involved! He’s heavily involved. Katelyn, don’t you get it—why he’s so brilliant, so off the charts—he’s
theirs
, Katelyn.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I really don’t think so at all, because I seem to remember something about an epidural and a hell of a birthing struggle and he is
mine!
MY DAMN SON!”

“Shh!”

“Don’t you shush me! First the aliens made you fuck that slut for your tenure, professor prostitute, then you dare to tell me my son is some kind of pod person? You’re fucking certifiable, is what you are.”

“I didn’t say that. Of course he’s our son. Our flesh and blood. Who sweated through that labor with you, who spent seventeen hours,
breathe, breathe
, who kissed your sweat and prayed with you? Who was there, Katie Katelyn, and is still here and will always be here, if you let me—and if you don’t, will live still, yes, but will also be dead?”

She looked at him. He looked at her. In that moment, something, perhaps
about the vow of marriage itself that is sacred reasserted itself, and the union decided to continue on . . . at least for the while. “Was that a question?” she asked.

He raised his eyebrows. She raised hers. He opened his arms. She went in.

“Something so complex has happened—it’s like I’ve glimpsed a level of life that’s normally hidden, where there are other motives and meanings, that never normally come to light. And somehow, Marcie and I—and you and I, Katelyn—are connected on that level . . . and it’s all to do with our boy, somehow, I know that. I know it and I love him and I love us, Katelyn, oh my God, so much.”

“We’ve got to be with him,” she said.

They walked together from their dark bedroom. Out the east window, which overlooked the field where the thing had appeared, an enormous moon was rising. By its light, silver with frost, she could see the whole field, wrapped now in the familiar mystery of an ordinary night. She looked up toward higher space, the glowing dark of the deep sky. There were stars, a few, battling the flooding moonlight.

Perhaps he was right. Maybe his struggle was, in some way, true. Maybe a shadow was there, one that you couldn’t see, but that was nevertheless very real, the shadow of an unknown mind from a far place.

He came beside her, put his arm around her. “They’re watching,” he whispered.

She leaned against him, wondering what the future would bring. He might be going mad. It happened to people in middle age, and for a psychology professor to become psychologically abnormal had a certain irresistible irony to it, did it not?

Then again, maybe aliens were the answer. Certainly, the video was odd and disturbing. It had provided him an inventive excuse, she had to give him that.

“Come on,” she said. She pushed away from him, and went back downstairs to rejoin the tormented odyssey of her son.

THE MINISTERS OF DEATH

No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

—
JOHN DONNE

“Meditation XVII”

LAUREN WATCHED THE COLONEL AS
he moved back and forth, back and forth. She’d never seen him like this, all of his rigorous professionalism gone, his eyes flickering from place to place like an animal looking for escape from a cage.

“Where’s Andy? Andy is supposed to meet us here.”

“Andy is gone.”

“And you don’t know where, of course.”

“No, sir, I had no idea he would leave.”

“You know your problem, Lauren? You’re naïve. Relentlessly damned
naïve!”

“I—sir, I did everything I could. I only backed out of there because I had no choice.”

“You didn’t think to detain Andy?”

“Of course not! Why in the world would I do that?”

“You don’t have the whole picture, I grant you that. With all his years in the hole, working with you empaths, Andy knew a little more than you do.”

“Has he, uh, what has he done?”

“Run, you damned fool!”

“Don’t you take that tone with me.”

He gave her a look that made her step away from him. He’d never been a pleasant man to work with, but he seemed violent now, and she did not like this, she did not like it at all.

They were standing in his smoke-stained office. The fire department had saved the house, but the facility below was a total loss.

“I want to know the truth of this thing, Lauren, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t think I’m getting it from you.”

That made heat rise in her cheeks. She did not like her own professionalism challenged. “My report is correct in every detail.”

“Don’t you understand what happened, even yet?”

“Of course I do. There was a grass fire, it spread to the air intake, and flammables in the air dryers ignited. That’s the official verdict and it’s also the truth.”

“Then where’s Adam?”

“Excuse me?”

“You do understand that there were no remains.”

“Well it was incinerated, then. He was, I mean. All they pulled out of there was ash, anyway. Black, sodden ash, I saw it.”

“It’s been gone through and there are no remains!”

“He burned!
Burned!”
And she was crying. Thinking of him. “He had a beautiful mind, you know. Incredibly beautiful.”

“The skeleton is made of a metal that’s quite indestructible. But we did not find that skeleton down there, and the rubble was sifted through screens. It was very carefully gone through, Lauren, so I think you must be lying to me.”

“You’re beneath contempt, you know that?”

He backhanded her. The blow came unexpectedly, a flash in her right eye. For a moment, she was too stunned to understand what had hit her. Then she did understand and a torrent of pure rage filled her. “That’s a violation,” she said, trying to force the anger out of her voice, “and I’m going to put you up on charges for it.”