Whitley Strieber - 2012 - The War for Souls

He pulled out his cell phone. Would there be a signal in this place? Yes, good. He called Lindy. “I’m coming home, baby.”

“I thought you were on a plane!”

“I took a detour. A quite incredible detour.” He looked around, saw a man in the doorway, a Secret Service agent, apparently his minder. “Excuse me, I need to get to Kansas City,” he said.

“National Airport. TAT and Braniff both go to K.C.”

“Actually, I was brought here on an Air Force jet, and I thought—”

The agent smiled. “Our job was to get you here. You’re here.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Martin, what’s going on?” Lindy asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’ll call you from the airport, let you know when I’m getting in.”

He swallowed the terror that had been building in him. He just hoped to God he could make it home, that there was still time.

WYLIE DALE TRIED TO STOP shaking, could not. He thought he might be more scared right now than he ever had been in his life. He was exhausted, his story had been running through his mind like some kind of out-of-control hallucination and he thought that it was not a story, it was real.

This was because of the fact that he’d been unable to stop his hands from hitting the keys. He’d watched them like an outsider. No control.

At least they were no longer moving. He glanced over at the clock. “Holy shit!”

“What?” came Brooke’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.

“I’ll be there in a sec.”

Wiley had been in front of his laptop writing for an incredible sixteen hours. He knew what had been written, but not as if he had been the author. It wasn’t creation, it was transcription. He wasn’t creating a novel, he was writing a history and it was a very scary history and he was afraid it was real, and it wasn’t just a history, it was a warning.

He turned on the little TV set that sat on the corner of his desk. He watched Fox News for a while, then went up to MSNBC, then back down to CNN.

Just more of the usual bullshit, an actor gunned down by a posse of outraged fans, a combination hailstorm, tornado, and flood that seemed to have flattened every trailer park in Arkansas. The European empires were gone, and there was nothing about any weird lenses coming up out of the ground anywhere at all, and certainly not under the Great Pyramid.

He flipped through what he’d written—and found over fifty pages.

What the hell, you don’t write like this, nobody does.

What in God’s name had happened to him? It’s hard to create fiction, it takes hours, sometimes, to get a single sentence out.

His damn knuckles hurt from the pounding.

He read more. If this wasn’t fiction, then what was it? There was no President Wade, there was only one moon in the sky, and there was certainly no czar.

This was reality from a parallel universe, somehow bleeding over into a susceptible mind—his.

The creatures he’d seen in his woods five years ago—the subject of his notorious book Alien Days—had been scaly, and Martin had described the ancient biblical Nephilim as having a reptilian appearance. There was nothing like that in our Bible, but he’d certainly seen scaly faces, right here in these woods, not a quarter of a mile from here.

Brooke slipped into the room and put her hand on his cheek. “Wiley, it’s time to come to bed.”

The spell broke, and his body took over. It had been in this chair for a damn long time, and there was a bladder involved and the bladder had just come to its senses.

He ran like hell.

“Wiley?”

He hit the john just in time and opened up. “Thank you, God.”

She followed him in. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, now!”

“You’ve been in there since breakfast, do you realize that?”

He finished his business, opened the medicine cabinet, and drank a couple of slugs of Mylanta. Chased it with Pepto Bismol. “Nectar of the gods,” he said.

“It’s late, it’s time to go to bed.” She caressed him from behind.

“I need a breath of air. I’m gonna take a walk.”

“The book is making you crazy.”

“No.”

“Yeah, it is, and I’m not ready to go through that again, Wiley. That alien book, that was enough for one lifetime.”

She referred, of course, to the hated Alien Days. He hated it, too, for that matter. It wasn’t fun, being a laughingstock. “The book I’m writing is not about aliens.”

“I know you, Wylie Dale, it’s about something weird or you wouldn’t be so crazed. No more saucer crap, that’s bedrock, boy!”

“It isn’t about aliens, and neither was the other book. I only thought it was.”

“Alien Days was about a writer being very crazy in public. Embarrassment, that’s what it was about.”

“There are no aliens.”

“At last, he faces the truth.”

“What’s happening is much stranger than the arrival of aliens from another planet. And this book, it’s—wow—it’s possessing me.”

“You write fiction that you come to believe is real and in the process you drive this entire family crazy, and I’m sorry, no more.”

“Brooke—”

“No more! End of story! Books that possess you, that drive you nuts—no, I’m finished, I’ve had it!”

“Mom? Dad?”

Nicholas appeared, looking bleary and pissed off.

“Wonderful,” Wiley said.

Brooke said to their son, “Dad has a sour stomach.”

“You’re fighting.”

“I love your mom too much to fight with her. I just obey.” He made a steeple of his hands and bowed toward her.

“Except you don’t, Daddy.” Now Kelsey had arrived, his gorgeous little girl. “He has cigars hidden in the woods.”

“That is not true!”

Brooke folded her arms. So did Kelsey. Brooke glared. “The aliens you go looking for in the woods, Wiley Dale? Would they be from Cuba?”

“The cigars are Matt’s,” he said.

“And he’s out there right now, isn’t he, smoking a Monte and sucking on a bottle of Beam, and that’s the real reason you want to take a walk—to make yourself sick on cigars and hootch.”

“Cubans are the best cigars in the world.”

“You’re coming to bed with me. And scoot, you two, the sandman’s gonna be furious.”

“I’m past the sandman,” Nick said.

“I’m not,” Kelsey told him. “I’m just a little girl, and I still believe.”

“Meaning, don’t rain on your sister’s parade.”

“No, Sir.”

Wiley went into the bedroom and fished his flashlight out from under the bed where he kept it alongside his shotgun. “I need some space, hon. This thing I’m writing, it’s getting to me, for sure, and I agree with you, we need that not to happen. It’s about us and about people who live in another version of this house in a parallel universe. I think that’s what it’s about, anyway. I’m sort of more of a reader than a writer, here. Reading as my fingers write, as it were.”

“About us in what sense?”

“Well, like this conversation. This will be in the book. Because we’re part of the story, somehow. I’m not sure how, yet, but we’re part of it.”

“Not our names again!”

Uh-oh. He had to tread carefully here. “Well, uh…hm. The people in the parallel universe aren’t us. They have different names. They live in their version of this house and the town is called Harrow, too, but the people are not the same.”

“I am so tired of this.”

“Whoa, slow down. The parallel universe is obviously different. Their McDonald’s has emerald arches. Their Target target is blue. The president’s named James Hannah Wade and the family’s named Winters. We’re the Dales, if you hadn’t noticed. And here, McDonald’s has golden arches, obviously. Plus there is no British Empire, among numerous other things. They have two small moons rather than one large one.”