The snow all around seemed to glow slightly luminous in the night. Alien landscape...
Perhaps, he considered, that thing had been the straw to break the camel’s back, creeping across the garage roof, causing it to fall. Perhaps, even, its craft had silently, stealthily alighted upon the roof—collapsing it—and had then whisked itself away in alarm, leaving one of its small crew stranded behind...
As Ned peered out into the murk, he saw a flitting pale form duck from behind one dark tree in his yard to another. The trees were slender, but then the being was slenderer still. He watched the second tree for a long time, his gun clenched in his fist so tightly that the checkered walnut grips ended up leaving an imprint in his palm, but the figure didn’t emerge, and at last Ned gave up, withdrew from his watch.
He didn’t sleep much that night, however. He just rocked in his chair, wrapped in his blanket, watching TV. But in place of the bottle in his hand, he kept the Magnum. He must stay alert. He couldn’t afford to muffle his senses, let down his guard. They might yet try to take him away. They had no doubt come to do just that...
* * *
The next morning, bleary-eyed, he ventured outside again. He even dared approach the workshop so as to close the door he had left open in his flight. In his quick glance inside the shadowy shed, he saw no crouching figures gazing out at him. He then covered the window hole with a large trash bag, pinning it in place with numerous thumb tacks.
He detected no prints of the creature in the snow across the slanted roof, but it had snowed a little during the night, his car lightly veiled in the driveway, and the creature wouldn’t have left deep prints anyway. It couldn’t weigh more than a bare skeleton, and besides its cadaverous frame, it had had that blurry, insubstantial look, as if its cells were made of ectoplasm, as if the thing were visiting here from another dimension, but only half here, maybe the rest of its essence back on its own plane, whatever and wherever that might be.
Ned ventured out for milk, bread and a few videos, but made sure he was back well before dark, and he checked every room of his apartment carefully for any invaders who might have entered during his absence. Satisfied that he was alone, he locked himself in. By the time night fell, he had loaded two other pistols and a rifle. He hid one pistol in his bedside chest, one in the top drawer of the microwave cart in the kitchen, and the .22 rifle with its thirty-shot banana clip he pushed under the couch. This way, no matter what part of the house he might be trapped in by an intruder, a weapon would be close at hand.
The Magnum he kept with him.
* * *
By nightfall, he was nestled in the wicker rocker, watching one of the videos...peripherally aware of the window covered by curtains and drawn shade just by his elbow, but not peeking out of it for fear of what he might see lurking down in his yard.
In the adult movie, two actresses who were supposed to be sisters were acting out an incest scenario. Ned’s rocking rhythm was almost an unconscious complement to their mounting passions, the squeaking of the wicker a sound effect for the bed they writhed upon.
Ned imagined what it would be like if those young twins from work were to entwine their slender naked bodies for his viewing pleasure. They were much prettier than these actresses. He projected them over the women on the screen, until it was truly as if it were those actual sisters he was ogling. He imagined what it would be like to tie those sisters together into artificial Siamese twins, bind them into one multi-limbed exotic creature, some sensual mutation. A pet to keep. A pet to play with. And beat when he was angry...
* * *
He lifted his head to the realization that, deprived of sleep, he had dozed off in the wicker chair. The tape had rewound itself and a nature show was on, the volume low. A female praying mantis was twisting around and munching on the head of her copulating lover, starting with one large grape-like eye.
A white blur at the edge of his vision attracted his attention, and his eyes flicked to the kitchen doorway even as a pale figure darted back out of his view.
Ned’s hands scampered in his lap, clawing for the gun that had slipped from his grasp during his doze. The remote clattered to the floor. He found the pistol, lurched to his feet, nearly became tangled in the blanket as he started toward the kitchen. Already his finger was pressing hard against the trigger, on the verge of shifting it...
He saw no one in the kitchen. Grasping the handgun in both fists like a trained policeman would, he stepped around the stove. Nothing crouching there. In the bathroom, nothing. He used the pistol’s barrel to thrust the shower curtain aside, tearing it a little more as he did so.
Just his own shadow on the mildewed tiles.
It had escaped, and now Ned knew that locked doors could not keep the being—or beings—out. Yes, they had to be made of something less, or more, than flesh. They might be able to step out of their dimension at any point they chose. So how could he defend himself from them? How could he ever have peace, now that they had decided to haunt him?
He paced the house. Looked in every room, again and again. He made coffee, and as he paced with the gun in one hand and a mug in the other, he took note of the cracks in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling. Had he simply neglected to notice, or were they more pronounced than they ever had been? He didn’t remember them ever being so extensive before...
Could the alien—the aliens—have something to do with this? Were they lurking even now in the attic above him? For months now he had heard stirrings up there, creaking boards, faint scampering he had taken to be squirrels that had gotten into the eaves, storing nuts or whatnot for the winter. The beings’ weight up there where no one ever ventured might have stressed the plaster of the ceiling...
Maybe they even did these things on purpose. That might well explain the extent of the seeming decay around him, now that he knew they could venture right into his house with him. Might they have done something to his kitchen faucet to make its flow a trickle? Might they have tampered with his car’s starter one night?
Why would they do that, the bastards? He set down his mug, glared again at the cracked ceiling. Why? The power to cross dimensions, and just so they could act as poltergeists, as gremlins, wreaking petty havoc? Why?
Ned smiled bitterly, narrowed his eyes, contemplating possible motivations. It might be an experiment. Perhaps they had made him a lab rat in his own home, to be probed and taunted, his agitation observed. Maybe they wanted to test the reaction humans might have to their kind.
But no, they were too mischievous for that. Ned considered the possibility that it might in fact be children, or at least the alien equivalent of teenage delinquents, skipping into the human realm to tease him, have some wanton fun.
But the fun seemed too wanton, even for cruel children. Ned considered something else, remembering the many stories of abductions by these entities, the way they bound and probed, practically tortured their helpless victims.
Perhaps it was as simple as their being a race of sado-masochists. Maybe it excited them to make their victims helpless, and afraid, in the way that a rapist feels empowered, or a bondage freak when he ties up and dominates another, or a stronger prison inmate when he sodomizes a weaker. In the prison of existence, maybe that was the relationship humans fulfilled for these other, supposedly superior beings. They were warped, and mean-spirited, and needed to feel empowered, and even when they were not literally capturing their prey they still took delight in playing games with them, making them afraid, terrified...
But Ned’s anger was fast beginning to drown out his fear. They were taunting the wrong man. They would find that this prisoner had a shiv hidden in his palm.
“Come on,” he whispered to the cracked ceiling, as if they might hear him through the cracks, have their huge black eyes pressed to them. “Come on,” he taunted them back.
* * *
Ned lay on the living room floor, belly down, ear flat to the dusty boards. Did he hear a faint movement down there? Maybe the beings hadn’t removed or killed the elderly couple after all. At last, he got up and called their number on the phone. The old woman answered, and he hung up. It probably was her voice, but not necessarily.
Could they take on human guise? He had considered that. If so, how many of the people he had known in his life might be one of them? Or if they could not literally become human, might they at least enter into humans somehow, to possess them, control them like a skeleton hand inside a clown puppet?
He had even wondered if they might be what remained of humans...dead humans. Might that being in the workshop actually have been his grandfather? All that was left of his grandfather, his soul, visiting from whatever plane the soul really did depart to? No...he doubted that. It would not explain the stories of abductions, experiments, the ships that delivered them here from whatever world or plane they dwelt on. But Ned did believe that the being or beings he had seen might very well explain the stories of visitations by angels over the centuries. Luminous entities, otherworldly, ethereal.
And from his own experiences, he believed that they might just as easily account for stories of demons, as well.
“Come to the zoo,” he muttered, making a fresh pot of coffee, glancing up at the ceiling. He drank no beer at all now, just lots of coffee, coffee to keep him alert. He wasn’t getting much sleep, mostly just naps in his chair while it was light out. “Is that it? Come see us in the zoo? Stare at us? Laugh at us in our cages?”
After he had stirred in his sugar and milk he stood in the center of the room, head tilted up. “You think we’re funny? You think I’m funny, is that it?”
A tiny creak of sound answered him. And he saw one of the spider-webbed cracks in the ceiling widen, ever so slightly. He heard the sifting fall of plaster dust. Both sight and sound were so subtle, it was like watching the minute hand of a clock move. But the minute hands of clocks did indeed move, and cracks in plaster widened, and he had seen it happen.
Without another word, Ned set down his mug, picked up the .357 from the counter and went out into his back hall, started up the stairway to the attic. His jaw jutted from the clenching of his teeth, the tightness of his smile.
It was late afternoon, gilded sunlight lying in elongated patches across the dirty attic floorboards. Thank God evening hadn’t yet fallen. He needed a new flashlight. If it had been evening, he wouldn’t even be up here. Maybe he’d make them sorry they hadn’t kept quiet until the sun went down.
An object momentarily distracted him. On a ratty old arm chair rested a sheet of cardboard, and on that was all that remained of a wreath his aunt had given him and his wife on their first anniversary. Some kind of dried arrangement. Now all that was left of it were bits and pieces, not even describing a circle. Bugs, maybe, or the sun blazing on it through unshaded windows. Or perhaps, bored and mischievous, his house-guests had sat up here plucking at it. Brenda had left behind a lot of forgotten things in boxes up here, and the idea of those creatures poking through them only exasperated his mounting fury...
He moved toward a half-closed door that marked the place where the roof narrowed. The room beyond had sharply slanted walls, and just one window at its end, looking out on the driveway. It would be dark in there. The chimney came skewering through that space, and there were stacks of boards and boxes to hunker behind. It was the perfect place in which to hide.
With his toe, Ned pushed the door open all the way.
But they weren’t even hiding. Had they become so bold that they now dared to stand and confront him? Were they no longer afraid to be seen? No longer afraid of him?
Their brazenness caught him off guard. Some of his fury was washed back by an icy wave of fear.
There were two of them standing side by side at the end of the hall-like space, framed in the window, silhouetted in a way that lessened their phosphorescent quality, made them appear more corporeal. They were indistinguishable from one another, identical.
Tall, bony as prisoners of war. Dead prisoners of war. So unnaturally, uncannily elongated, as if they were distorted in carnival mirrors. Yet there was something vaguely feminine in their form; maybe a slight flare in the hips, the adolescent suggestion of breasts.
Silhouetted as they were, it was difficult to make out their great insect-like eyes. Mantis eyes. But somehow, seeing the eyes in suggestion made them more eerie to him than if they had been clearly lit.
“What do you want with me?” Ned hissed at them. He was sorry he spoke. He meant his voice to sound demanding. Instead, he heard its tremor. But he couldn’t help but blurt, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
And with that, he lifted his arm to point the .357.
They moved faster than humans should, with bird-quick jerking swiftness. First one and then the other of the identical beings whirled and dropped out the window, which Ned hadn’t noticed was open before. Like jumping spiders, they were so fast. Gone, before he could level the red front sight on them.
Ned surged forward down the murky hall, came to the open window. Directly below the window was the slanting, half-collapsed garage roof.
He saw no prints in the deep snow of the roof, as he should. Maybe they hadn’t actually jumped onto it, but scrabbled down the side of the house and leapt to the ground itself. It didn’t matter...Ned caught a glimpse of one of them as it ducked inside the cave of the garage. He was sure the both of them now huddled in its furthest shadows, like vampires waiting for night to fall.
“You just stay there,” he whispered. “You just make yourself right at home.”
* * *
There wasn’t much more that Ned could do that evening, but he got up early the next morning as if to go to work. Nonchalantly, he ignored the garage as he walked past it and got in his car.