Whitley Strieber - The Grays

“Mom, I need to be home.”

“Then it’s not an emergency? You’re just—”

“I need to be home!”

She sighed, then put the car in gear. Then she turned around, heading back toward the school.

“It’s an emergency!”

“All right, tell me what the emergency is.”

He could not tell her he could hear thoughts, hers included. How could he? He said, “I’m afraid I’ll go insane on you, unless I can go home and get some private space.”

She took a sharp breath. Then she stopped the car again and sat there for a moment in silence. Look at his face! He looks insane! Oh, God, he looks like his great-gran. Could it be that he’s schizophrenic, too, will we be cursed now with that? Help him, help him God .

He smiled a glaring, hollow smile.

“Come on,” she said, “whatever, you can take the rest of the day off. Let’s go home and game together. Would you like to game with me?”

They played a lot of Myst: Uru together but he didn’t want to. “You never told me we had schizophrenia in the family.”

She was silent for some time. When she talked, her voice lilted like it did when she was trying to hide something. “What makes you ask that?”

He had to watch her lips to see if they were moving, or he was going to keep giving himself away. If Mom knew he could hear her thoughts, she was going to withdraw from him. Not right away, but over time. Anybody would, because of the invasion of privacy. He hunched close to the door, stared out.

“What makes you ask that particular question right now?”

“Uh, it was in science.”

“They were talking about schizophrenia in science? Why was that?”

“Abnormal-psych module.”

“Dan would be fascinated.” Oh, my Dan, I need you now .

Conner clapped his hands to his ears and forced the scream that urged to get out to become a hiss through his teeth, ssssss!

Mom’s neck flushed, she gripped the steering wheel, she glared straight ahead. Then she sort of shook it off. She started the car and they continued home.

“Mom, it’s not Dad’s fault.”

“What isn’t Dad’s fault?”

“Mom… you know. It’s not his fault.”

She almost ran the car off the road. Then she looked at him with her eyes bugging out and her face bright red. What is this? Her hand came out and she grabbed his shoulder and she turned him to her. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

She stared at the road, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Conner, I think I know why you’re feeling so bad. You’re feeling so bad because you know about Marcie.”

He did not exactly know, not the name. But now he did, because the instant she uttered the word Marcie, a huge complex of thoughts and feelings had poured out of her. They were frightening adult thoughts about sex and things he knew little about, and they made him feel like he was prying into his mother’s deepest privacy, and he didn’t want to but could not help it.

“Conner, has she been at the house? Has she been there when I was gone?”

He shook his head. She’d turned onto Starnes, which meant that they would be home soon and he could get away into his room and get out of this hell of thoughts .

“She has, hasn’t she, Conner? You answer me!” He better not lie because if he lies, he’s not my son, not anymore!

“Oh, Mom, no! NO! I’m not lying and I am your son, I love you so much, Mom, you have no idea!”

She looked toward him. Her eyes were full of tears, now. “You’re reading my mind.”

He could not lie to her, he would not do that to his mother. But he wanted to, he wanted desperately to. He remained silent.

“You know what I’m thinking!”

He still did not answer.

In her face there were suddenly other faces, flowing one and another to the front with the lazy assurance of carp drifting up from the shadows of a pond. She was a shimmering mass of changing eyes and lips and shapes and hair. She whispered in a voice quite different from her ordinary voice, that he recognized as her soul’s voice, her real voice, “I know what you’re doing and we don’t do it, Conner, we hide this. This is a secret of the soul.”

Just then they turned onto Oak and then into the driveway, and Conner was very, very glad to open the car door and get out of there, and run downstairs and get some space and not have to listen to thoughts.

“Conner?”

“Gotta go to the bathroom, Mom!”

He raced into the kitchen from the garage, then headed across the family room toward the door to the basement. He took the stairs three at a time and dashed across to the bathroom and shut the door.

His mother followed him. “Conner, are you okay?” If this is locked…

“Fine, Mom!”

He is not . “I’m coming in.”

“Mom, I’m on the pot!”

“Oh, for goodness sake, I’m your mother.”

The handle turned, and in the gleaming of the brass he saw people moving in bright rooms. His vision focused and then he was in one of the rooms. The Keltons were there and they were in a state of rage, fighting and screaming and pushing each other around like battling animals. Pictures were falling off the walls and their dog was all contorted trying to bite itself—and then Mom came in and she came down to the floor where he had fallen, and he saw a boy walking away down a lane lined with flowering trees and dappled by golden sunlight. He knew, then, what had thrown him to the floor, what agony. That was the lane that led to the land of the dead.

“Mom,” he whispered, “I’m in danger.”

She held him close to her, and he knew that he had seen something that was going to come soon. When the sun was low in the sky and the bare trees shuddered in the wind, everybody on Oak Road, him and Mom and Dan, Paulie and the Keltons and everybody, even the animals—everybody who lived here—was going to face death.

“THEY’RE FINISHED,” CREW SAID. “I observed it to completion, then took the boy home myself.”

“When did it happen?” Rob Langford asked.

“Last night, just at two. They instilled Adam’s content into the child. It looks like it went well.”

“So Adam is gone?”

Crew heard Lauren’s grief. “You and Adam have a long future together. You’ll find him in Conner. He’ll seem like a sort of shadow, I’d imagine, a little like seeing the ghost of the parent in the child.”

“But he’s… in there?”

“Adam is no more. What’s in Conner is his knowledge, and the structures of his mind.”

“Then my friend is dead.”

“I don’t think you really have a word that describes his state. He’s not alive. He hasn’t possessed Conner, he’s given himself to him. But there is so much of him in there, of his personality, his being, his—well, essence, I suppose is the closest word—that you’re going to feel, when you’re with Conner, that you’re also with your friend.”

“Is that reassuring?”

“It’s meant to be.”

“Then that’s how I’ll take it, but what does it mean to Conner? What’s he experiencing? He seems like such a very intense child.”

“He’s confused and afraid, I would think. He’ll have powers he doesn’t understand, and that’s going to really throw him. Knowledge that seems to have come out of nowhere. It’s probably going to be about as stressful as human experience can get. The whole family will be stressed. Extreme stress. Psychotic breaks are possible.”

“Have the grays factored that in, do you think?” Rob asked.

“That’s a hard one. What do you think, Lauren? What sort of insight do they really have into the human mind?”