Whitley Strieber - The Grays

“That was an accident, Mom!”

“—and now the neighbors are complaining and I’ve had it. You go up to your room, young man.”

Paulie started to speak, but she cuffed him in the back of the head. “Learn how to choose your friends, dummy,” she said.

He went upstairs, his face red, fighting tears.

As Dan left, the other boys filtered out behind him. They crowded together on the front porch, blowing on their hands and waiting for their rides. He walked across the yards, feeling the cold now through his cotton chinos and his light sweater. The kids sure were growing up, and it was sad. Last July, he supposed, had been the high summer of Conner’s childhood. He remembered those days of his own life. He’d been like some kind of water creature, like all the kids who lived along the lakes of Madison.

He went over to the pool. The moon was rising, and in its light he could see that the little creep had done a fair job on the fiberglass.

As he was walking back to the house, something caught his eye—a flash, he thought, coming from somewhere to the west, in the direction of the town. An explosion? There was no following rumble, so he supposed not. Nothing ever happened around here, anyway… except for kid trouble. Kids were a problem in any college town. Bored, affluent, smart, faculty brats were a notorious irritant on every campus he’d ever worked.

He went in and gently explained to Conner what had happened. “Son, there will be no fallout from this. You’ll see, Monday morning in school it’ll be as if none of it ever happened.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Count on it. They went a step too far, that’s all. They’re testing, trying to figure out who they want to be—and they’re not like you, they’re much simpler, to be honest. So even though they’re older, in many ways they’re less mature.”

“Dan, do you think you could find out about the Wilton public schools for me, since I really can’t return to B.A? I think the, uh, middle school—what’s it called, Colonel Saunders Memorial or something—has a rather good reputation in shop. And, of course, the football team is the stuff of local legend. Who knows, maybe I can try out for back end.”

Dan saw that there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him. He’d go up and report to Katelyn.

As he left, Conner said, “Promise me, Dan. Call Wilton.”

“I’ll call them first thing Monday.”

“And that boot camp in Lockridge. I could commute, actually, on the Louisville bus. I wouldn’t have to live in the barracks or anything.”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.” Dan turned to leave and, to his surprise, saw a boy standing just beyond the deck. His shape was clearly visible in the moonlight. He was not one of the gangling creeps from Paulie’s party. This kid looked even smaller than Conner. Which was very strange, because Conner himself was the youngest child on Oak Road, not counting six-month-old Jillie Jeffers.

It was dark in the underdeck, but the child was in the light of the moon.

Something struck Dan, then, hit him like an axe blow between the eyes. He was in a loud, echoing space looking down through a round hole, and there was a surface far below glistening silver just like this, in moonlight just like this. He felt in that moment a longing so powerful that it seemed to stop his blood, to cripple him with a sense of loss that might actually be larger than he could contain. For a moment, he was disoriented, as if detached from the ground, and he fell forward.

Then next thing he knew, somebody was calling him. Far away.

“Dad! Oh my God. Mom! Mom!”

Then footsteps, then he was aware that he’d fallen, and his head—his head hurt. That was it, he’d hit his head on a beam. Katelyn and Conner were there, they were terrified.

No problem, had to calm them down. “Oops,” he croaked.

“Dan, don’t move.”

He sat up. “I about knocked myself silly.”

“What happened, honey?”

“I was—” He looked around the cold, dark space. “I hit my head. One of the beams. I thought those kids had come back.”

“What kids?”

“Paulie and his buddies.”

“What were they doing in our yard?”

“It’s a long story, Mom. And there was somebody out there just now.” He pointed. “Something, anyway. It was an owl, right over there. A barn owl standing beside the pool.”

There was nothing in the backyard now except the pool itself, gray in the moonlight, and beyond it the strip of woods that separated all the houses from a cornfield that fronted on Wilton Road.

Nothing more was said about the incident. Katelyn spent some time, then, with her son. She already knew all that had happened. Maggie had called, full of apologies. The boys had overstepped. Paulie would resume the old friendship, she would make sure of that.

She left him listening to a Leonard Cohen CD, another of his private eccentricities. God forbid that any of the other children should ever find those CDs, or his audio books of things like James Joyce’s fantastically obscure and prolix Finnegan’s Wake , from which he drew some sort of equally obscure comfort. Maybe he even understood it, who could know?

She took a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses up to their bedroom, and drank some wine with her husband. No more Conner until the morning. They lay together, then, with the light of the westering moon falling on their naked bodies, and the wine in them. Dan said, “You want to give it a try?”

“With no diaphragm?”

“Clean and clear.”

She kissed him. “I do, I do.”

“Oh, wow, hey—” He reached over, got his wineglass and raised it. “To the next genius Callaghan. If we make it.”

“Okay, listen, you—I do want to, but this is not the right moment, Dan, and you know that.”

“The tenure will come.”

“The tenure may come. And when it does, we celebrate.” She laughed a little. “By doing this incredibly profound thing of making another child. But, Dan, if you do not get it, then—”

“The tenure will come!”

“Marcie is a complex, difficult human being.”

He threw himself back on the bed. She laid a hand on his head.

“You sure you’re okay, Dan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, you know there’s no beam down there you could’ve hit your head on. So that’s not what happened.”

He knew it. He allowed himself to consider the possibility of a seizure. He’d had them as a child, he remembered them, they would start with an aura that involved seeing his planetarium lights, then progress to this bizarre, echoing room where there would be unspeakable things, human bodies with no skin, giant flies—and then it would be morning, and he’d wake up perfectly fine.

He had never told a soul about the seizures, and he didn’t intend to tell Katelyn now. They were, perhaps, one of the reasons that he had become a physiological psychologist. His own suffering had led him to a fascination with the mechanics and abnormalities of the brain.

They slept then, joined to the sleeping world of man, a place that is different by night, that is not at all what it seems.

They did not sleep alone, though. They were watched, and carefully watched. Minds very different from our own, with objectives and needs completely beyond the imagining of the Callaghans, drew conclusions about what they saw, and acted on those conclusions.

Deep in the night, they acted, and Marcie Cotton became the latest victim of a great and intricate terror.

And then things went wrong. Very, very wrong.

OAK ROAD WAS SO QUIET at 3 A.M. that you could hear the whispering fall of individual pine needles as they dropped in the woods that separated the houses from the farmer’s field behind them. So when screams erupted, every human being and all the animals woke up instantly.