Whitley Strieber: The Grays

The island had a round opening in it, dark and black.

Then Danny was through the round opening. He stopped in the air, then fell to a floor. Opening his eyes, he found himself in darkness, but not absolute darkness. Moonlight sifted in the opening. Far below, he could see the pinpricks of light that marked fishing boats on the lake’s surface.

A cold sorrow enveloped him. Now, here, he remembered this from before. He did not want the little doctors to touch him ever again. He knew, also, that they would, and soon. He thought of jumping back out through the opening, but what would happen then? He went closer to it, leaned out as far as he dared. “MR. EHMERS! UNCLE FRANK! HELP ME! PLEASE, UNCLE FRANK!”

A rustling sound. He cringed closer to the edge, wishing he dared jump through. A voice whispered, soft: “Hello?”

He backed away from the form. He could see white—a white face, loose white clothes.

“Help me,” the form said.

It was a girl, he could see that now, could hear it in her voice. She was standing on the far side of the opening in the floor, her face glowing in the faint moonlight that slanted in.

“Are you from Madison?” she asked. Her voice trembled.

“Yeah. I’m Danny Callaghan.”

“I’m Katelyn Burns. I never saw anybody else here before.”

“Me, neither.”

“Where are we?”

“I’m not sure.”

“’Cause when I come here I remember I was here before, but then when I go home I don’t remember anymore.” She lowered her head. Her voice dropped to a hesitant murmur. “Do they take your clothes off, too?”

His face grew hot. He clutched his own shoulders. “Uh-huh.”

“They do stuff to me that’s weird.”

“Some kind of operations.”

Her eyes flashed. “Yes, but this isn’t a hospital!”

As the two children came together and held each other, they were watched by cold and careful eyes.

The embrace between the children extended, the girl in her nightgown, the boy in his pajamas stained with yesterday’s oatmeal. It had nothing to do with sex, they were too young. They were like two little birds stolen from the nest, trying to find some safety where there was none.

“If we dive down to the lake, would that work? Instead of just jumping?” Dan asked Katelyn.

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“I’ve got a diving merit badge. I’m going to try,” he said.

She sighed, understood. The children moved along a rickety catwalk, going closer to the opening they had been drawn through. The ship wasn’t high tech. It didn’t even have a way of closing its hatch. It was old and handmade, but the materials involved were far in advance of our own. It was constructed of sticks that would not break or burn, and aluminum foil you could not penetrate even with a bullet. There were no glowing control panels, nothing like Star Trek . Just tinfoil and plywood, and a tin box full of an extraordinary substance mined out of the Earth, that resisted the pull of gravity.

The creatures hiding near the children knew what they were thinking because they could see not only their fleshy bodies wrapped in their fluttering cloth covers, but also their electric bodies, a shimmering network of lines that coursed through them, the fiery nerves that carried sensation and love and memory, and blue fear racing from the heart.

They could see, in the heads, lines of gold and green changing to red and purple, and they knew that these were also the colors of fear.

Katelyn and Dan gazed down at the shimmering, wrinkled surface of the lake.

“You gonna?” Katelyn asked.

Danny could imagine Mr. Ehmers on the lake smoking his pipe and watching his line. He took a deep breath. What would Mr. Ehmers see, though—a boy falling out of the sky? Maybe, but probably not. Probably they’d think the splash was just a fish jumping.

Then he heard the fluttering sound in the dark that meant the things were on the move.

Katelyn drew close to him. But then the slowest trace of a smile flickered on her lips, and she raised her hand. In it was a match.

There was buzzing now, urgent, coming closer.

Katelyn shouted out the opening, “I live in Madison! I live in Madison, Wisconsin!” Her voice carried past the thin walls, echoing loudly, but only the clouds heard it.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Dan shouted, “Uncle Frank, help us!”

“Who’s that?”

“My uncle. He’s down there fishing.”

She struck the match, and in its flare something moved behind her. A green glow. As he watched, it resolved itself into the slanted shape of an insect eye, but huge. It was right behind her, just inches away. It glittered and disappeared into the shadows, and then the match burned out, and then something slid up under his shirt and slithered along his chest.

He heard Katelyn gasp, heard a scream explode out of her and screamed himself, screamed with all his voice and soul. Arms came around him, and a prick like fire penetrated his chest, went deep, made him gag and filled his mouth with a taste like a dead thing smells.

Now he could not move, could not make a sound. He felt himself being carried, felt his stomach twisting and knotting until gorge came up into his throat.

He could see nothing, hear nothing except Katelyn breathing in little, shocked cries.

There came a hand, extended into a faint light, as if it was meant for him to see, a long hand with fingers like naked branches, each tipped by a black, curving claw. In this hand was a kitchen knife with specks of rust on the blade.

The knife came down on his chest, pricking, then, as the tip of the blade ran along his abdomen, tickling. In the dark nearby, he heard a slicing sound, then a crack, and the bubbling of breath being sucked through liquid. Then a coldness came that extended from his neck down to his groin, and he saw the handle of the knife, which was being used like a saw. As it rose and fell, a coldness grew in his chest. Then, with a sucking sound, two great white things were lifted away from him. He raised his head, looking down at himself. What he saw was so bizarrely unexpected that he just stared. He saw what looked like a wet hamster curled up in the center of his chest, shivering furiously. It lay in a pool of ooze. On either side of it, things like big rubber bladders were expanding and contracting, and hissing as they did so.

Freezing cold and deadly weak, he fell back, his head hitting the hard iron of the bedstead upon which he had been laid.

Then stars came, millions of tiny stars all gold and green and speeding like sparks on a windy night. They surrounded the children, swirling around their bodies. They moved with the grace of a vast school of fish, swarming through the body of one child and then into the air, then through the body of the other. Again it happened, and again, and each time the stars invaded the profound nakedness of their open bodies, the veins and organs glowed. Light poured from their screaming mouths, blasted out of their ears and eyes.

The children struggled but could not rise, screamed but were ignored. The torture, terrible, somehow beautiful, went on.

HALFWAY ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN Colorado, a young officer picked up a phone and called Washington. “Sir, we have a glowboy hovering over Madison, Wisconsin.”

“How long?” came the tired voice of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Wilkes.

“Twenty-two minutes, sir. Shows no sign of moving.”

Wilkes glanced at his watch. Pushing four in the morning. “You were right to inform me, uh—”

“Lieutenant Langford, sir.”

“Yes. Thank you.” He put down the phone. The spruce-sounding young lieutenant would order a jet up if the glowboy stayed very much longer. Couldn’t have one of the damned things lingering over a major metro area after sunrise. Mike wondered what deviltry it was up to, sighed at his own helplessness, then tossed a pill out of a bottle, knocked it back with a glass of water he kept at his bedside, and hit the sack again.