David Morrell - The Shimmer

Another screen went dead.

Well, that’s okay, Halloway thought. I wasn’t going to be watching the monitors anyhow.

He picked up his reloaded M4 and went down the hallway to the door marked DATA ANALYSIS. Inside, he’d already placed five other M4s on a table, along with numerous hundred-round magazines and a small stack of grenades. If an assault team tried to stop him from listening to the music, he planned to show them just how furious that would make him.

The room still smelled of death, mostly because of the dried blood that covered the floor. But Halloway didn’t have time to clean it. Any- way, when the music started, the scent of cinnamon would replace the stench of the blood. Because he didn’t know how to manipulate the electronic instruments, he’d kept all of them on, their panels glowing continuously.

The only switch he felt confident using was the one that activated either the speakers or the headphones, and the only knob he knew how to control was for the volume. While he’d prepared the booby trap, he’d kept the sound coming from the speakers. It had been loud enough that he could hear the static from a distance. More important, he’d been able to hear growing hints of music emerging from the static. Those half-heard alluring echoes were what had made him capable of working despite the agony of his headache.

Now the music was more than just hints and echoes. Strengthening, it drifted and floated. Halloway felt its eerie tones lifting him. The pain of the drill boring into his brain mercifully receded. The hum diminished, overcome by the sensual melody that again brought the taste of orange juice and vodka.

He closed his eyes. The woman he danced with whispered into each of his ears. Kissed them. Drew her tongue along them.

It left his ears wet. He put his hands to them and opened his eyes long enough to see what was on them.

Blood was dripping from his ears.

Raleigh finished yet another phone call in a successful effort to keep law enforcement away from the observatory. The voices in the urgent conversation had sounded distant because he couldn’t take the risk of removing his earplugs now that it was almost dark outside and the static on the audio monitors was beginning to resolve itself into music.

The words “national security” were a powerful invocation. With the cooperation of the FBI, Raleigh had again stopped the Highway Patrol from entering the restricted area. He’d arranged for equipment to be delivered that would allow an assault team to break into the observatory. After they eliminated the guard and cleaned the facility so that outside agencies couldn’t question its true purpose, Raleigh would make sure the bastard’s autopsy revealed a high blood level of crack cocaine, explaining his psychotic behavior.

With one crisis dealt with, but anticipating more, he set down the phone, stepped from the command center, and surveyed the eight men poised in front of the numerous electronic consoles. Their faces reflecting the glow of instruments, they turned dials, refining and adjusting the incoming signals. In response to his orders, they’d turned off the audio capability of their monitors. Their earplugs were firmly in place.

Raleigh thought about his great-grandfather, who in 1919 had flown toward the lights and never been seen again. His great- grandmother had taken her two-year-old son and moved to Boston, but despite the distance that she’d put between herself and the lights, she hadn’t been able to keep them out of her thoughts. Her memories of the lights and her husband became the bedtime stories she told her son, who grew up dreaming about them. When he was twenty and skin cancer finally killed his mother, he hitchhiked all the way to Texas. He needed to hitchhike because the Great Depression continued to ravage the nation. Using his legs and his thumb was the only way he could afford to make the trip. His name was Edward. His mother’s story about his father’s disappearance had so obsessed him from when he was a child that he was drawn to Rostov the way religious people are drawn to holy places. It took him three months to get there. When he finally arrived, his belt was cinched so tightly that it barely kept his pants up. His shoes had holes in them. His shirt was tattered. His face was browned by the sun.

The dry-goods store that Edward’s mother had told him about was still in business-although barely, judging from the meager samples in the front window. A bell rang when he opened the door. A tired- looking, gray-haired man and woman looked questioningly at him from behind a counter. Despite their age, he could see the resemblance immediately.

“I’m your grandson,” he announced.

They gaped. Before they could ask any questions, he said the thing he had wanted to say all his life.

“Tell me where to go to see the lights.”

They gaped even more.

Edward helped at the dry-goods store. He also found part-time jobs, painting barns and repairing wooden sidewalks in exchange for new shoes, clothes, and the extra food his grandmother needed to prepare. In Boston, meat had been a luxury, but not in cattle country.

His grandmother’s beef and potatoes helped him regain the weight he’d lost on his trek.

Every night Edward borrowed his grandfather’s battered Chevrolet pickup truck and drove out to see the lights-or to try to see them, because they didn’t appear.

“Are you sure they’re real?” he asked his grandparents. “Have you ever seen them?”

“Yes,” his grandmother said, and his grandfather nodded in agreement. “It’s been a while since we tried, though.”

“My mother swore she saw them a lot.”

“At first she couldn’t see them, either,” his grandfather explained. “It took quite a while.”

“My father believed in them enough to risk his life,” Edward said, beginning to feel angry, as if something were being hidden from him. “So where are they? Why can’t I see them?”

“Some people just can’t,” his grandmother said matter-of-factly.

“Why not?”

“No one knows.”

That left him feeling more exasperated than ever.

On the days when he couldn’t find work, he hiked through the area where the lights were said to appear. He stood where his father had built the airfield during World War I. Weeds and grass filled the un- paved runway, the length of which was just barely visible. The adobe buildings that had functioned as hangars were piles of dirt. He studied the distant rim of black boulders that looked like huge cinders- the aptly named Badlands.

He stared to the south toward Mexico.

“No one ever found the wreckage of an airplane?” he asked his grandparents.

“Some of his former students tried. They flew fifty miles-all the way to Mexico. A couple of them actually flew into Mexico. They went back and forth in what they called grids, but no one ever found your father or his plane.”

“But nobody just disappears.”

“The wings were covered with linen and hardened by shellac. If the plane crashed and burned, the debris could have been blown away by the wind.”

“And his body?”

“Coyotes. God bless him, John’s bones could have been carried off.”

“I want to see the lights.”

“Maybe you’re trying too hard.”

The next day, Edward dug postholes on a ranch until he earned enough to buy a bottle of whiskey-something that wasn’t easy to locate because even though Prohibition had ended four years earlier, Rostov had voted to remain “dry.”

At dark Edward drove out to the old airfield, sat on the ground, opened the bottle, and began sipping. Until then the only alcohol he’d ever sampled was beer, but the chance of obtaining beer in Rostov turned out to be even slimmer than that of finding whiskey. Be- sides, he wanted something strong.