Max Collins - Majic Man

“What did the ‘foreign’ bodies look like, Maria?”

“I never saw anything so gruesome in my life. Two were badly mutilated, mangled, dismembered, probably by predators … one was mostly intact; I think he may have survived the crash, but died of exposure-all three bodies were black, but it wasn’t pigmentation, I’d say prolonged exposure to the sun.”

“What did they look like, Maria?”

“I worked as long as I could, but finally it got the best of me, the nausea, that all-pervasive odor. The doctors were having as much trouble as I was; finally they put the bodies in body bags and packed them in dry ice for shipment to Wright Field. And that’s … that’s all I know.”

“Maria-what did they look like?”

Her eyes narrowed as she stared into her memory. “… Three and a half feet, four feet tall. Small, fragile, no hair. If they looked like anything human, it’d be an ancient Chinaman. Their heads were large for their bodies, larger than ours … noses didn’t protrude, more concave, with two little slits. Where the ears should be, just slight indentations, with little flaps, like lobes. Deep, sunken eyes-concave eyes. Slit for a mouth, no lips at all … one thing the doctors said, something I do remember writing down, was that there was heavy cartilage instead of teeth, like a … like a piece of rawhide. Their bones were like cartilage, too, pliable, the head like a newborn baby’s, nothing like the bone structure of a human being. Could I … could I please have some water?”

“Sure.” I got up and went to the wet bar and poured her a glass of water over ice, brought it back to her, returned to my seat as she drank it as greedily as if she had been lost out in the desert.

“Go on, Maria.”

“There were some basic anatomy differences…. For example, the distance between wrist and elbow was longer than the distance between elbow and shoulder. Oh, and they didn’t have thumbs, but four fingers that were long and slender, almost like tentacles … and on the fingertips-they had no fingernails, by the way-on the fingertips were little hollowed pads, like suction cups.”

“Did they have any sex organs? Were they men, or women, or something else?”

“I think probably something else. There were no signs of sex organs, or secondary sexual characteristics, either. But then that’s the sort of tissue predators go after, first, and also the first thing that decomposes, so how can we be sure?”

“Did they have any kind of clothing on? Had the doctors removed any garments …?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t remember seeing anything like that, but frankly, it was all so horrible and gruesome, and I was so overcome with nausea, and the desire to get the hell out of there, I just didn’t pay the close attention I should’ve.”

“I think you did just fine. You came out of there with more details than most people could ever have managed.”

“Well … maybe my nurses’ training came through for me, a little. Nathan … are you humoring me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pretending to believe all this, while you think it’s nonsense?”

“Maria, I don’t know what you saw, but I believe you saw something.”

“Glenn thinks they’re from outer space. He thinks the debris he saw was from wrecked ‘escape pods.’”

“What do you think?”

She frowned, searching inside herself. “I try to make those bodies into humans, possibly human children … features distorted because of long exposure to the high desert … or maybe monkeys. There are rumors of missiles being shot off, at White Sands, with animals-dogs, monkeys….”

I sat forward. “Could they have been monkeys, their hair burned off in a crash? I’ll bet dead monkeys that’ve been out sunnin’ in the desert could smell pretty ripe.”

“I want to believe that’s what I saw. But the anatomy was all wrong … and it was consistent from corpse to corpse.” She shook her head, in frustration.

“All I know for certain is it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. Do you think I’m insane, Nathan?”

“No.”

“I wish I were as confident of that as you are,” she said, and collapsed into tears.

I went to her, gathered her in my arms-she was trembling all over, bawling like a baby, and I cradled her in my arms, patted her back, rocking her, saying, “It’ll be all right … it’ll be fine … don’t you cry … shush … shush.” She whimpered and sobbed for quite a while, as I held her, and finally it abated, and she relaxed, face against my shoulder, as I kept rocking her.

She was feather-light, when I carried her up the stairs like Rhett Butler whisking Scarlett O’Hara away, only my Scarlett was sleeping, snoring even, a very unfeminine snore that made me smile. The bedroom was decorated in an Early American style, centering around a four-poster double bed with a quilted comforter. I eased her onto the bed, slipped her black pumps off her tiny feet, made sure the pillow was cradling her head comfortably, then eased out of there, switching off the light, padding down the stairs.

Since I hadn’t even bothered to take my bag upstairs, I camped out on a couch downstairs-a Duncan Phyfe number whose carved mahogany and light blue tapestry-style upholstery looked too elegant to be comfortable. I took off my shirt and my shoes, but decided to sleep in my T-shirt and trousers, for decorum’s sake. I threw some more wood on the fire, got it going again, then stretched out on the couch, whose plump cushions proved my expectations nicely wrong; on my back, elbows winged out, I watched the walls and ceiling where flames and shadows did a mocking dance.

Was I just humoring her? For those blue eyes, what couldn’t I convince myself of? For that Dorothy Lamour figure, what wouldn’t I pretend to believe? I mean, could I really be taking seriously the prospect of outer space creatures with big heads and big eyes and tentacle fingertips, taking a right turn at Pluto and heading for Roswell, New Mexico? What, they could navigate all those asteroids and meteor showers, they could make it safely to earth from the other side of the Milky Way, but those Roswell July Fourth fireworks really threw them, and they panicked, and slammed on the brakes….

Yet within a day or so of when the Army Air Force may have been out recovering those “foreign bodies” from some unknown desert crash site, Major Jesse Marcel was salvaging pieces of strange debris at a nearby ranch. Something had crashed in the desert; something important enough for Uncle Sam to go around scaring the bejesus out of those citizens unlucky enough to be witnesses, coercing those good Americans into a terrible silence.

The fire was dwindling, and I was nodding off, when a tiny noise drew my eyes to the stairway and the ghostly figure coming down; in the faint dying glow from the fireplace, throwing long shadows, she moved slowly, as if in a trance, the powder-blue dress wrinkled from her sleeping in it, hiking up a little, her knees and even her thighs showing.

She crossed tentatively toward where I lay on the couch, whispering, “Nathan? Are you awake?”

“For a minute there,” I said, moving onto my side, leaning on an elbow, grinning, “I thought you might be Rebecca.”

She sat on the edge of the couch; the raven’s-wing hair was fetchingly tousled, an improvement on the severity of her pageboy. “Who’s Rebecca?”

“The ghost.”

“What ghost?”

“The one the restaurant’s named after-some chambermaid who was killed by her lover, years ago. This is supposedly her favorite room.”

She smiled a little, but nervously. “You’re just saying that. You’re teasing.”

“No. That’s the story. You know, it’s just nonsense to keep the tourists entertained.”