The Spaceship Next Door (5 page)

She didn’t even know he was in Sorrow Falls! Sure, it was supposed to be something like a secret, but not a
big
secret, not necessarily. Not the kind of thing a man should have to keep from his mother. It wasn’t like he was going to tell her
why
he was there. He could say he was on vacation or something. But she’d get a kick out of it, knowing he was there, and he was standing right near the ship. Because in a way it was the ship that helped them reconnect. When it landed, and everyone thought the world was going to end, he picked up the phone and called her and ended up settling the mess that had gone on with dad and the divorce and everything else. She should know where he was standing.

He stopped, and turned around, pulling out his cell phone.

“Put that away,” Morris said.

“I was just going to…”

“Yeah, I know. You suddenly realized there was something much more important you should be doing right now, way more important than looking at the side of a piece of extraterrestrial technology. And you have to do that thing this very second.”

“I want to call my mother.”

“And you should. A boy should always call his mother. But not right now. Congratulations, you had your first intrusive thought. Now look where the beam is.”

“I…”

“Son, I’ve just become convinced I left the gun cabinet in my cabin in Nebraska unlocked. I’m about to drop everything to make some calls before someone gets hurt.”

“Who?”

“Sheriff’s a friend, he has keys and… dammit, look where the beam is.”

Ed did.

“I don’t see anything.”

Morris waved the beam around. “Look at the difference,” he said.

“Okay, there’s a patch, kind of. It’s a little brighter, I guess.”

“That’s right, and it’s not true anywhere else.”

It wasn’t far up the side of the ship, not really. It was at about chest height for an adult male.

“Nobody noticed this before?”

“I think maybe someone did but thought like you did, that it wasn’t anything, just a curiosity of shading or something. Or plant matter got on the ship.”

“Something could have come down with the last snow.”

“Maybe, but doubtful. Snow doesn’t stack up.”

One of the many minor curiosities of the ship was that snow melted off of it. Yet the heat was almost undetectable. It wasn’t so much that the ship generated warmth; it was that the snow failed to cool it.

“So there’s a splotch on the side of the ship.”

“Yeah.”

“Did it turn up because of the first anomaly?”

“Unknown.”

“I’m under-impressed.”

Morris grabbed Ed’s wrist and pulled him four paces closer.

“Look at it again,” Morris said.

Ed realized he wanted to call his mother because she was dying. She hadn’t said so, he had no evidence it was so, but it was as true as anything he’d ever felt. The damn ship wasn’t going anywhere; he could look at it any time. But he had to call her.

He looked.

“Do you see now?” Morris asked.

“I have to make a call.”

“So do I. Do you see?”

What Ed saw looked like a handprint. It contradicted everything they understood about the spaceship, and it was incredibly important, and in that moment he didn’t care even a tiny bit.

“I see it. Now let go of me or my mother is going to die.”

T
here was
an enormous mural on the wall of the library. It greeted all persons upon entry, and was the subject of endless hours of scrutiny among the staff employees and volunteers, and many a patron. It was easily the most dramatic—and certainly largest—piece of art in town, if not the state.

The painting was called
Sorrow Fell
, and the most tragic thing about it—aside from what was depicted—was that nobody knew the name of the artist. The town commissioned the artwork to commemorate the foundation of the library, which was in itself odd, as there was nothing in the painting to imply that greater knowledge might be found through books. More curious, all of the historical records detailed the commissioning, installation, and aggrandizement of the mural’s creator, but in every last document the name of said creator was either omitted or excised. He or she was only ever referred to as The Artist.

What The Artist painted was the tragic, mundane, and borderline comic founding of Sorrow Falls, which aside from a particularly unusual interpretation of the Bible was an extremely non-literary event.

In the center of the piece was the heroic figure of Josiah Foster Sorrow, depicted not at all accurately. The Josiah of the painting was a strapping, powerful man with an open collar to reveal his impressive chest hair, traveling in a canoe in the most ridiculous way imaginable: standing, one knee up on the edge of the boat, hips squared and pelvic region unquestionably augmented for artistic reasons. It looked vaguely like the pose one might expect of a man on the cover of a paperback romance novel.

The real Josiah Foster Sorrow was a cult leader of sorts. Over three hundred years earlier, Josiah fled what he considered religious intolerance in the colonies, taking along his family and many like-minded religious zealots. It was an inconvenient detail that the intolerance the Sorrowers fled was in regards to his peculiarly unpleasant set of beliefs. Such beliefs involved worshipping a God who told them to ignore property rights, marriage banns, and the social and legal standards surrounding the minimum age of sexual consent.

Like an earlier band of Massachusetts settlers, Josiah had been fleeing religious persecution for a little while, having first self-exiled from the Massachusetts colony for what would later be New Hampshire, then for what would later be Vermont, before heading down-river on the Connecticut, into Western Massachusetts and Native American tribal territory.

The Connecticut River was never one of those rivers that could be traversed at length via canoe. This was a detail lost on Josiah and his people, and made for slow going, as they frequently had to stop, beach themselves, carry their boats downstream, and get back in. It was frustrating, and Josiah’s God was an impatient deity, so one night his God told Josiah to stop stalling and hurry on down to the Promised Land already.

According to at least half of the legends, what happened next was that Josiah and his Sorrowers came upon a large drop in the river, at dusk. When his followers began heading for the shore, as always, their leader excoriated them for their lack of faith and vowed the Lord would protect them from harm if they only stayed in their canoes.

There were doubts, as most of the Sorrowers—while being unswervingly dedicated to their leader—also had a passing familiarity with gravity and its consequences. So they recommended that Josiah go first.

He did, falling roughly twenty feet to his death upon a rock at the base of the falls—Sorrow’s Stone, it was now called—and putting an end to the wanderings of the Sorrowers. For as soon as Josiah perished, the rest of them looked around and concluded that this must surely be the Promised Land they had been told to expect.

They named the place Sorrow Falls, not for the waterfall that claimed Josiah’s life, but because this was the place where Sorrow fell.

That was not precisely what was depicted in the painting.

There was second version of the story, one that saw Josiah not as a determined fanatic who thought he could defy the laws of physics at a very bad moment, but as a peerless leader who was unaccountably distracted at exactly the wrong time.

In the painting, the strong, square chin, and determined blue eyes of Josiah Sorrow were pointed upward, at the sky rather than straight ahead. In his line of sight was a bright streak of light—a sign from the heavens.

Unfortunately, this sign arrived at exactly the wrong time. The river beneath Josiah’s canoe was disappearing over the falls, but as he was looking up he didn’t notice.

The depiction captured, almost comically, the moment just before his death: nearly half of the canoe was pointed over empty space, like something from a cartoon.

It was probably an apocryphal version of events, as the holders of the historical record—the founding Sorrowers—no doubt had cause to re-examine the suicidal last decision of Josiah Sorrow, and perhaps make it come off as less silly and more tragic.
No
, this version said,
there was no talk of God protecting Josiah, it was only that he was leading and became distracted by a light in the sky.

The mural, then, paid respects to both versions. Yes, Josiah can be seen distracted by a light in the sky, but
look
at him. What an idiot. He doesn’t even have his paddle in the water. Who would go canoeing like that?

Unsurprisingly, after the spaceship landed outside of town, the light in the sky responsible for Josiah Foster Sorrow’s death became a lot more interesting to a lot more people, and the painting in particular ended up gracing the cover of enough magazines to convince the town council to put some money into getting it restored.

In a bit of irony, the restoration uncovered more of the fading tail of the meteor in the top left corner of the mural. The tail—surely nothing more than an accidental brush stroke by the artist—had a thirty-degree angle in it.

The Artist, according to some, had predicted the future.

That was probably Annie’s favorite part of the painting, or it was on that particular day. Other days she ended up transfixed by a background tree, or the symbolic renderings of wild men in the woods—horror show versions of Native Americans with dull eyes, reaching out toward the water like the Karloff edition of Frankenstein’s monster. Sometimes it was the chaos of the water, or the woman on a canoe way behind Josiah, barely given detail other than a bonnet and an open mouth, screaming to warn him.

Sometimes her favorite part was just that nobody knew who painted it or exactly how old it was.

“Stop staring at it.”

Annie was at the library’s front desk, directly beneath the enormous mural. When she sat on the middle stool her head was just below Josiah’s impressively bulgy crotch. That was never one of her favorite parts of the painting.

She turned to discover a slightly paler version of herself.

“I can’t help it,” she said to Violet. “There’s always something new to look at.”

Annie and Violet were the same age, had the same basic physical shape and the same dark brown hair. Anyone filling out a document listing their attendant vital statistics would conclude that they were therefore very similar, and in those simple terms, they were. Annie even thought of Violet that way—as a lost twin sister or lab-created doppelganger, depending on her mood. At the same time, nobody who saw them together could ever mistake them for one another.

To the extent that anyone knew of Violet’s existence, they would say she was a shy girl. Her body language said
stay away
under most circumstances, or perhaps
easily frightened
. She was reserved, did not express her opinions easily, assumed nobody was ever talking to her, and didn’t like introducing herself to people. Violet was the sort of person that had to be dragged into a social setting and coerced into interacting, but when she did so the people with whom she interacted usually wondered why the person who had coerced her to do so had bothered.

Vi was home-schooled. She moved into town six years ago, and as Annie liked to joke, if she hadn’t discovered Violet, nobody would know she existed other than her parents. It probably wasn’t true, but it wasn’t that far off either. Vi didn’t hang out with any kids her own age unless she was with Annie, and the only time she ever went into town was to hang out with Annie.

All of which made Annie feel as if she had a responsibility to get others to notice Violet. She appreciated that to a certain extent some people were just by nature unsociable and introverted, and as a highly sociable extrovert she would never entirely understand her friend’s issues. Telling her to
just be friendly
and all that was probably not helping.

Annie still did it more often than she probably should. Violet was the smartest person she knew, and Annie knew a lot of smart people. (Annie was, by her own estimation, extremely smart. Violet was smarter.) If Violet were in the public school system a lot more people would know this about her, and then maybe Annie wouldn’t have to spend as much time convincing other people how cool her friend was.

“It’s kind of amateurish, really,” Vi said. “The color composition is terrible, and the artistic style… I mean, what is he even doing with his…”

“The pelvic thrust for Jesus, right here?”

“Yes, the groin region. Someone rewrote a lot of history there.”

“He did take several wives, maybe the man had the goods.”

“I think it’s more of a Methuselah touch.”

“Explain.”

“All the exceptionally wise men in the Old Testament ended up living extra-long lives. It was an artistic flourish to put a number behind exactly
how
wise they were.”

“Methuselah didn’t actually live nine hundred years?”

Annie began singing
It Ain’t Necessarily So…
in her head, which was a little curious only because while she knew the song was a show tune from
Porgy and Bess
, she didn’t know how she knew that or when she ever heard the song.

Probably something we watched together
, she decided.

She and her mother were always catching up on something older than Annie, and sometimes older than either of them.

“It was nine hundred and sixty-nine years. And no. If he was lucky, he lived to sixty-nine.”

“I am shocked…
shocked
… that you would suggest a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. In front of Josiah no less. And his enormous member.”

“I’m pretty sure Josiah was sicklier than that too. He was seizure-prone and probably had syphilis.”

“Source, please.”

“Half of the Sorrowers were dead in a year from it and he had multiple wives. And it wasn’t like they picked it up from the Indians.”

“Native Americans, please.”

“Noted.”

“The court finds your argument in favor of Josiah Sorrow having syphilis unconvincing.”

“On what grounds?”

“Speculation!”

She banged a hardbound copy of
Essentials of Gardening
on the counter to gavel home her judgment.

“If it pleases the court, what time is the judge getting the heck out of this place?”

“I can leave whenever. Nobody’s here.”

This was a common fact of the library, especially in the summer, when the high school that stood behind it and up the hill about a quarter of a mile wasn’t in session. Annie went between deciding that was sad, and not worrying much about it. A lot of books could be found online nowadays, so what could have been interpreted as a lessening of interest in reading was maybe actually a change in the way information was obtained.

True, there were a lot of books that weren’t available in any form other than print. The Sorrow Falls library had plenty of such books, and if it did—it was not in any real sense a large collection—there had to be a ton of such books out there. At the same time, a whole bunch of those books were perfectly dreadful. They were as relevant as historical artifacts, perhaps, like Methuselah’s exaggerated age, but not as valuable resources in and of themselves. They had meta-historical value, at most.

“So what are my reasons for closing early?” Annie asked. “What do you have for me that could be better than this?”

She waved her hand at Josiah’s package.

“I have the car, and cash, and the sun is still out.”

“Oooh!”

“Does it please the court?”

“It pleases the court immensely.”

A
nnie had a driver’s license
. She got it as soon as it was legally possible to do so, even though she had almost no use for one, because there was only one car in the family. Annie only drove it once, on the occasion in which she got her license. Since then, she’d driven Violet’s family car twice and that was all. It was okay; she didn’t enjoy the experience—it looked
much
easier when other people did it—but thought that this was perhaps because she wasn’t a particularly good driver.

Violet, on the other hand, seemed to have access to the car whenever she wanted, and was clearly a better driver. Annie only sort-of knew Violet’s parents and certainly not well enough to ask them what they did for a living or why that existence didn’t require them use of the car, but that was clearly the case. Her mother—Susan—mostly stayed at home, and her father—Todd—seemed to have the kind of job that used a company car and had him leaving for extended periods, but beyond that it was an Adult Thing. Annie knew about plenty of Adult Things in the town, but this was one she never tried understanding.

Plus, the happy consequence was that Violet got the use of the car, which meant Annie got the use of the car. As long as that continued to be true, Annie wasn’t going to ask any hard questions.

It took Annie about ten minutes to close down the library for the afternoon. The building was theoretically large enough for someone to hide inside of one of the stacks without being detected, but they would have to want to do it. Otherwise, it was impossible for this to happen by accident, because the library carried sound incredibly well. It was something only a few people realized, for the obvious reason that most people were trying to be quiet while inside. Once Annie walked from end to end loudly declaring her intention to bolt the door for the remainder of the day, only the deaf would have failed to hear her.