David Morrell - The Shimmer

Luther stayed behind with Johnny, ready to drive into the field if anybody spotted anything. For a while, the backs of the people in the line were illuminated by the few remaining headlights. But despite the cloudless sky, the darkness of the field was murky, and when they disappeared into the darkness, it was like a magic trick.

A breeze cooled Luther’s face as he strained to detect any movement out there.

“I see one!” a spotter exclaimed.

“Where?” his partner wanted to know.

“No! I’m wrong! Sorry, everybody! It was just a flashlight some- body turned on and off!”

Another light flickered and vanished. Luther could tell that it, too, was from a flashlight. Then several lights flickered. The temptation to see what was ahead on the ground was evidently contagious. The off- and-on flashlights looked like giant fireflies bobbing and weaving out there.

A spotter yelled into his walkie-talkie, telling the people in the field, “Turn off those flashlights! You’re making it hard for us to see what’s beyond you!”

“Cut the flashlights!” another spotter shouted.

Gradually they went off, and finally all Luther saw was darkness. The sky was another matter. When he happened to look up, he saw the flashing lights of an airliner speeding toward its distant destination. Another moving light-this one not flashing-probably came from a satellite.

“Shit,” Johnny said, hugging himself. “If I’d known it’d be this boring, I never would’ve suggested coming out here. I’m freezing my ass off. This is worse than the stupid fireworks.”

Luther was about to agree when he glanced toward the grassland, and something in him came to attention as a patch of darkness seemed to brighten a little.

Probably just another flashlight, he decided.

But it appeared to be far beyond where the searchers were likely to be, and it was different from the darkness around it.

“Johnny.” Luther pointed. “Do you-”

“I see something!” a spotter announced.

“So do I!” somebody else exclaimed.

So did Luther. Definitely. A ball of yellow light out there in the distance. Then a ball of green joined it. They bobbed as if floating in water, then merged into a single large ball that was red. A few seconds later, they drifted apart, and there were three of them, blue, orange, and a different shade of green.

Luther realized that he’d raised a hand to his right ear. An almost undetectable, high-pitched sound irritated his eardrum. It reminded him of a vibration he’d heard when he’d watched a man repair an old piano that was always stored in a corner of the school’s gymnasium. The man had taken a shiny metal object from his toolbox. It had a stem and a two-pronged fork. He tapped it against the side of the piano, and the fork vibrated with a hum, allowing the man to adjust a wire in the piano until the tuning fork and the piano wire hummed identically.

Luther heard something similar now, like a note from an unusual- sounding piano, except that the barely perceptible vibration was annoying, making him imagine a hot needle piercing each of his eardrums.

“I see another one!” a spotter yelled.

“Two hundred degrees!” his companion shouted, checking his compass.

“One hundred and eighty!” someone farther along the fence yelled.

The other spotters made their reports.

“A hundred and seventy!”

“A hundred and sixty-five!”

In a rush, the mayor and two members of the town council leaned over the hood of a pickup truck, one of them pressing down a map while another aimed a flashlight and the mayor drew lines on the paper.

“They intersect at one seventy-five!” the mayor shouted. He used a ruler to measure the distance on the map and compared it to the scale at the bottom. “Looks to be about eight miles out!” he shouted into his walkie-talkie.

Standing nearby, Luther heard a crackly response from the mayor’s walkie-talkie. “Eight miles? In the dark? That’ll take all night!”

“Just keep the line going! Head for the lights, and make sure nothing gets around you! We’ll send the trucks out now! They’ll get there in no time!”

Luther heard the sudden roar of an engine and realized that it was Johnny kick-starting his motorcycle. Two trucks started up, but Johnny was the first through the gap in the fence. He had his head- light dimmed, and when the trucks quickly followed, they used only their parking lights. Even so, Luther could see the dust they raised, and the red of their taillights revealed two horsemen riding close be- hind them.

From the sound of the receding engines, Luther could tell that no- body was speeding, but in the dark, with minimal lights, speeding was a relative term. Twenty-five miles an hour would be plenty.

At once it occurred to him that he’d been left behind.

His Jeep didn’t have a top. He leaped over the door, landed in the driver’s seat, and twisted the ignition key. As the engine rumbled and his parking lights revealed the fence, he steered into the gap. His Jeep had a stiff suspension. Bumping across the rough grassland jerked his head back.

Man, I hope the other kids saw me make that jump. Luther was reminded of an old movie that he loved to watch whenever it was on television: Bullitt. It had the greatest car chase, and Steve McQueen was the coolest driver ever, but not even McQueen could have done that jump better.

Luther’s front wheels jolted over rocks. A jackrabbit raced across his path. A night breeze ruffled his long hair. He pulled a luminous compass from his shirt pocket, took a quick glance down at it, and aimed toward 175 degrees.

The darkness formed a wall on either side. Even at this reduced speed, Luther had the sense of hurtling through space. His faint lights allowed him to see only a hundred feet or so ahead of him. Combined with the shudder of the Jeep over holes and rocks, they made it difficult for him to keep a clear, steady gaze on the area he aimed to- ward. The Ghost Lights were sometimes hard to see, even if he was standing breathlessly still in the gravel parking lot, but now he realized that, under these conditions, he couldn’t hope to notice them unless he got very close.

Abruptly he saw movement ahead. The people in the line! he realized. Silhouettes materialized. They were scattered to the side, as if they’d scrambled to get away from Johnny’s motorcycle and the trucks and the horsemen. Two people writhed in pain on the ground, while someone yelled into a walkie-talkie. Then Luther saw a horse thrashing on the ground, one of its legs bent at a sickening angle. A cowboy lay beside it. He wasn’t moving.

The next second there were only rocks and clumps of grass and the elusive darkness beyond his parking lights as he hurried on.

If I’m not careful, I’m going to run into somebody, he realized.

Wary, he put on his headlights and gasped at the black, cinder-like boulders that suddenly appeared before him. They stretched all the way to the right. If he’d been going any faster, he’d have flipped the Jeep as he steered sharply to the left and tore up dust that swirled around his head, blocking his vision.

Keep turning! Keep turning!

The damned Badlands. As he swung clear of the boulders, coughing from the dust, he noticed a glow ahead of him.

I must be closer to the lights than I realized.

They increased until they hurt his eyes, quickly becoming larger and brighter. At first he thought it was because he was gaining on them, but as they intensified, he realized that they were moving, too.

They’re coming toward me!

Luther didn’t know why that frightened him. The whole point of the hunt was to get close to the lights and explain what caused them, but as they magnified, he felt his stomach contract.