Whitley Strieber - 2012 - The War for Souls

“In the part of it that’s set in our universe, what are the characters’ names?”

She knew him well and she was not dumb. Far from dumb. “Well, of course, I’m using ours—”

“NO!”

“Well, uh, it’s us. They’re us.”

“My kids’ names will not be in another one of your books. You know what Nicholas said? He said you really are the most embarrassing father in the world, and he was right! Saying you were taken aboard a UFO was bad enough, but you included him! When he was all of seven years old. Wiley, where do you get off?”

“The names are—are—like, they’re just place markers. After I’m done, I’ll change them.”

“Because it’s an act of vanity to write novels about yourself!”

“Brooke, goddamnit, that’s a betrayal. You know it happened.”

“It hurt this family so much, honey. I just can’t go through it again. The kids can’t. Especially not your son. He is so brave but he suffers.”

“What do you mean?”

“The kids eat him alive! His dad got a rectal probe. You try living that down at the age of twelve.”

“The laughter is the failure, not the book. It happened.” He paused. “It just wasn’t what I thought.” There came to him, then, a feeling—a sort of pull, really. To go back to the office, to sit down…

But not after sixteen straight hours, he’d be in heart attack country. Stroke country.

“Thing is, this book—I’m not its author, babes, I’m its prisoner.”

“You will be responsible, Wylie Dale. You will be!”

“All right, that’s it! I’m going walking. You’ll be asleep when I get back, God willing.”

“If I smell the least trace of cigar smoke—”

“Kelsey’s gotta have Indian blood, the way she follows me and I never see her. But neither one of us is an Indian, my dear, so how do you explain that?”

“By the fact that you’re two hundred percent hot air and half baked.” She came to him. “Which are two of the many reasons that I’m so damn crazy about you.”

She kissed him. He was furious at her, but he kissed her back, and she felt so vulnerable and so—so Brooke. He held her tight.

Noisy though it was, this marriage was a good fit for Wiley Dale. He needed someone willing to come up the side of his head on occasion, and Brooke had no compunction about that. But he was not going to change any names in any part of the book, this one included. “You’re so nice,” he said.

Little feet went scurrying away. Kelsey could be heard whispering, “We have a kiss. Gawd!”

Wylie and Brooke managed to swallow their laughter.

When he went downstairs, she sort of tried to stop him, but he promised to come back soon. He really did need that air. If he didn’t get away from that keyboard and let this thing die down, he’d be up all night.

He left the house, glad to enter his familiar woods beneath the familiar starry sky—and that good old moon up there, good old friend. It couldn’t be very romantic to have two moons.

He sucked the air deep to rid his head of the fog that the writing had invoked. He shuddered. It was a mild night, but he felt cold in his blood.

He had lived Martin’s sense of suffocation down under the pyramid, had cringed in anguish of terror with him as the blocks smashed down around him, had actually not known whether or not he was going to be annihilated.

Creepy enough, but even creepier was the fact that he could still feel Martin’s presence. See him, sort of. He was down in Harrow, and things had gone very bad since his visit to the White House just—what was it—eleven or twelve days ago?

He was down in Harrow and he was living in absolutely amazing terror, and Wylie knew that, as soon as he returned to his office, he was going to live that terror, too.

Thing was, he could sort of see into the lenses, and what he saw there was another parallel earth, a third one, and it was bad news. Real bad.

He couldn’t see it clearly, but he could feel that it was a fallen world, a real, living hell, and it was seeking to escape itself. He could sense its ravening hunger to escape the ruin it had made of itself.

Amazingly enough, they’d done even worse than we had. “They’re old,” he muttered to himself, returning to one of the lines of thought that he’d been worrying for years. He thought he might now know the secret of the bizarre creatures he had encountered in these woods a few years back, that were the subject of Alien Days. They weren’t aliens at all. They were from here. But in their version of earth, the dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Instead, that dark reptilian brain had grown and evolved and changed until these sleek creatures had come about—tough, brilliant, and utterly heartless.

Oh, God. God help the human beings.

With our compassion and our softness of spirit, we were not going to be a match for brilliant reptiles, not in Martin’s universe or in this one.

They were going to take it all. They really, really were.

The woods were dead quiet, the early December night touched by just an edge of crispness. As always, he found himself moving along the old foresters path that crossed the top of the little draw where, five years ago almost to the day, he’d noticed that odd light.

He stopped, looked down the draw. He had encountered them just there, just fifty feet down. It had looked like an old witch’s cottage that he’d never seen before. Glowing, infinitely sinister.

Curious, thinking maybe he had squatters in his woods, he’d walked up to it, and the next thing he knew, he was grabbed by scaly hands, he was being glared at by the most terrible eyes he had ever seen, he was being manhandled—and yes, the infamous rectal probe had taken place—and then he was on the ground, the little cottage was gone, and there was a crackling electricity in the air.

At least, that’s what he remembered in his conscious mind. His dreams were a different story. In his dreams, there were towering emotions of loss and longing, and Brooke was involved, but she had sworn that she’d seen nothing that night, heard nothing.

He moved up the dark path, shining his light ahead, looking for the cigar cave. A smoke was what he needed. He had a gargle station in the garage, which he’d use before he got in bed with Brooke. Cigar breath and he’d be on the couch, and he was way too tired for that.

He shone his light on the trees that loomed around him, the oaks with their golden leaves, the red maples, the gnarled pitch pines that began to appear as he climbed farther up the ridge.

He was maybe fifty yards from the cave when he became aware of a more solid shape up ahead.

He stopped, peered into the dark. Matt was on duty tonight, so maybe it was a deer. And yet, the form—it looked like a man standing real close to the trunk of that oak.

Oh, shit, what if the reptilians knew that he was writing about their invasion, and they didn’t like it?

Hardly daring to do it, his hands shaking so much he could barely manage it, he got the flashlight pointed in the direction of the figure.

—which did not move.

Was it a branch? What was that?

He stepped closer. “Hello?”

It leaped out at him.

He fell back, he lost the light, and then the figure was on him, glaring down at him—and laughing.

“Godddamn it!”

“Oh, man, Wiley, Wiley, oh Christ, this is rich! It’s rich!”

Wiley got to his feet. “You call yourself a cop? Out here wasting taxpayer money like this—what if there’s a lost kitten or something down in the town? What will you do?”

“That flashlight! How many batteries in that thing?”

“A few.”

“Beka says to me, who’s got a searchlight up on the ridge behind the Dale’s house? That’s what it looks like. I mean, they were concerned over in Holcomb, they thought we had a fire goin’ up this way.”