Whitley Strieber - The Grays

The collective had one of the Three Thieves physically observe Wilkes depart in his car. The Two listened to the brown moaning of his mind as he drove away. And then the world was once again silent, and he rejoined his brothers in carrying Adam into Conner’s sleeping form.

Adam was not yet fully depleted. There remained in him structures of thought that would organize Conner’s mind. These structures were the core of him, held in immensely complex fields of electrons that rested in permanent superposition. As such, they were both in Adam and were Adam, and were also everywhere in the universe, and potentially capable of tapping all knowledge. This core could not be implanted in Conner until the rest of Adam’s being had settled in him, or the core would burn the boy’s nervous system like an out-of-control nuclear reaction.

The transfer of this last material would result in the permanent annihilation of Adam—in fact, this was the essence of Adam, the part of him that felt real and alive. Here and now, is when Adam would feel actual death.

He was scared. In fact, so were the Thieves. This was the unspeakable thing that, as emotionless as they were, every gray still feared, the final end, wherein even the memory of self disappears and all the long years lived without emotion and thus without meaning, slide away into useless nothingness.

The whole collective watched, breathless and sorrowful, each one hoping that Conner would find a way to save them, that after this death there would be no other.

The Thieves crossed the yard and slipped into the house via the basement door, and rose quickly through the darkness to Conner. They spread Adam’s body, now thin and as pale as a wraith, and guided it over Conner.

Adam had wondered how this would be, to die into another. He’d feared it, and out there in the woods, he’d cried. Do it .

He felt himself dwindling into the boy, sifting downward as lightly but as inexorably as dew. All that had enabled him to relate to and understand man, what he had learned from Eamon Glass and Lauren Glass, slipped away into the sleeping child.

He had given Conner all he knew, and his ancestors knew, of the universe. Now he gave him himself. As each tiny bit of his being detached and flowed into the hungry new nervous system that was spreading like a fire through the boy, he felt not regret but an abiding joy, an emotion that he had not known he could feel.

Thus, as he died, this ancient creature regained all that time and age had taken from him, the once-rich spirit of the grays with its love of truth and appreciation for the glory of the universe.

It had been eons since a gray had felt . Now, though, Adam’s experience hummed across the gulfs of space, and the whole collective felt with him the anguish and joy of his death.

They sang in their chains, the grays, as they felt, each of them, a taste of hope that they had not experienced since they day they left their planet and began this long dark journey through the nowheres of the sky.

Simply because they were there, water in the vast desert of his heart, the first tears Adam had ever shed—and his last—were tears of joy.

IMAGES FLASHED ON THE WALLS of Conner’s mind, of the long and improbable histories of man and the grays, dancers in a secret dance whose steps were measured in eons. He saw that we, as a species, had lived before, that we’d had another civilization and another science that had worked by different laws, in a time when the light of the human mind had been brighter. He saw the tragic, lingering evening that we have named history, and heard along it the forlorn chanting of the Egyptians as they built boats that would never reach the sky, and the grim, rising roar of human voices that signaled the onset of the modern world, and the ignorant hordes that now marched the Earth, sucking every green blade and morsel. As this vision swept through him, he listened to the booming drums of time.

And so it was done; Adam, ancient in his days, fulfilled a destiny that was also a tragedy: he died. The last light of the wraith flickered in the air above Conner’s bed.

Then it was dark.

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, this phase of the grays’ mission was complete. They searched for memories in Conner’s mind that would shield him from the huge thoughts that now lay hidden within him. Time would be needed before he could bring them forth and put them to work.

Looking through the house, they saw where he had put most of his effort, into his splendid trains. They planted his consciousness in one of his own superbly painted plastic figures. This would give him an unforgettably vivid dream.

CONNER FOUND HIMSELF IN HIS own toy railroad town, under his own streetlights, and everybody else was horrible and plastic, staring at him with painted stares. The sidewalk under his feet was plastic, the trees made of foam. A shrieking rose, and his own train screamed past, impossibly immense, electric fire roaring under its wheels.

He was right in the middle of the street and he couldn’t move. The plastic faces of the people around him stared, expressionless. Then he saw a huge, glaring giant looming back in the shadows of the sky, saw his own hand, now gigantic, come down. He heard a length of track screech as it came loose.

He was trapped in his own train wreck, somehow part of one of the plastic people, as stiff and still as they were. He wanted to run, he was desperate to get off this street because he knew what would happen. But he could not run. He watched in fixed horror as the train’s headlight flickered among the trees to the left, as it came roaring around the bend, and with a curious grace leaped off the track and sped toward him, its wheels churning, the headlight a cyclops eye.

Then a warm hand was on his forehead.

Mom was there.

“Hey, mister,” she said, “you’re gonna wake everybody on Oak Road if you don’t stop running that train.”

“I—oh, wow, I dreamed I was in the train set during the wreck!”

“In the train set?”

“I’d become one of my figures. I couldn’t move and the train came right at me!”

She hugged him. “Oh my love,” she said, “Mom and Dad are always here for nightmares.”

He felt the depth of her love, then, with a power that he never had before. He adored his mom, she was the most beautiful, the smartest, the nicest—she was like Dad, very much the best.

Unseen now, the Three Thieves guided his mind back to a memory of a certain spring day long ago, when the lilacs were bobbing on the lawn and the leaves all were new, and he had come from glory, a tiny, secret spark, and gone gliding down into the house and saw her sleeping, her belly big, and gone closer, and entered into her, and lay, then, in the cradle of her womb.

“I love you, too,” he said. It felt so good to hug her, it felt like floating halfway to heaven.

DAN ALSO REMAINED AWAKE ON this restless, uneasy night. He was determined to prevent the aliens from abducting his son. As he listened to Katelyn speaking softly to Conner, he felt an isolation that made him sad. She had been trying to forgive him, he knew, but there was a coolness in her now that even his most tender efforts—kissing her, speaking to her of love—could not seem to cure. He loved them, both of them. And yet, he did not feel free to join them across the hall, when they were in such intimate communion.

To avoid dealing with his couple crisis in the middle of the night, he turned his mind to what the Air Force people had said. Strange, strange stuff. Lies, of course, on some level.

He would protect Conner from them until they told him the truth. There were dark corners in this world, and Conner was not going to fall into one, not as long as his dad had anything to say about it.