Whitley Strieber - The Grays

There was also a voice: groaning, howling, wailing, and it was the strangest voice she had ever heard, because of the way it echoed in her ears and her mind at the same time, as if she was hearing both sounds and thoughts that were the same as the sounds.

A thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, shot around the room, and with it the wailing, mourning voice, its howl thin and pitiful now.

She saw something—a flash of something that gleamed black. It was big, the size of a hand, and slanted. It was also brilliantly alive—a big, gleaming eye. A sound came out of her that she knew, objectively, was a scream. Sharp, intense, made of pure fear.

The wailing at once increased. Now it was desolated, like he’d been instantly aware of her revulsion and her fright and it was making him feel really, really miserable.

“Hold on,” she said. Dimly, she was conscious that Wilkes was now standing beside the tech at the control panel.

Suddenly, the buzzing stopped. There was no sound now but the hissing of the powerful air-conditioning.

“Sit down in the chair,” Wilkes said over the intercom.

“Where is he?”

“He moves with your eyes, so he appears totally still. The eye doesn’t see anything that’s totally still.”

“Yeah, like a rock or a mountain.”

“No,” Wilkes explained, “when you look at anything at all, you’re in motion, so you see it. Since Adam is constantly making micromovements to match your eyes’ own natural flickering, he doesn’t register in the optic nerve at all.”

“What in hell is this about?”

“Tell you what. If you want to see him, make a very sudden move. As you do that, concentrate on the corners of your eyes, not your central vision. You’ll see him.”

She sat, took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on her peripheral vision, and leaped to her feet.

Not a foot away, there was a shadow. Then it was gone again.

“He’s right here! He’s right on top of me!”

Then he started wailing again, and she could feel him whizzing around the room. More and more, he was racing past her face at the distance of what felt like about an inch. Dad had gotten scratched. She sat frozen, terrified.

“Stay with it. You’re doing marvelously.”

She could see Wilkes nodding and smiling at her. “This is one hell of a sucker play,” she yelled. “False damn pretenses!” She got to her feet. Adam whizzed past so close she was forced to sit back down. She jumped up again. Same thing happened.

“He likes you, Lauren,” Wilkes said.

It felt a lot like getting a bat in her hair or something. How had Dad ever stood this, it was just way, way too weird.

“So what are we doing with an alien?” she screeched. “How in the world did we capture an alien?”

“We got two of them in a crash in New Mexico. They may have been given to us, we’re not sure.”

Bzzzt! Whooosh!

“Get away!”

“He wants to touch you. Let him touch you.”

She began waving her arms around her head. “No way, I’ll bleed out!”

“Remember, that was an accident. He’s in an agony of grief, that’s why he’s like this. Now you settle down, young woman, and follow your orders.”

Pictures of Dad kept flashing through her mind like photographs. With them came emotions of grief and the most acute regret. It was clear that they entered from the outside, although she could not say how she knew that. It was sort of like breathing a kind of emotional smoke.

“Shh,” she whispered, “now, baby…” She looked toward the control room. “The buzzing stopped again.”

Something brushed her cheek.

“I think he just touched me. I know you’re sorry,” she whispered, “I know…” She looked again toward the figures in the control room. “What am I supposed to do now?”

No response.

So she comforted him. She went through her mind, seeking for the words of some song from childhood, some sort of comforting song. Dad had not been a big singer. Mom had her Elvis, but this did not appear to be your basic Elvis moment.

Then a sort of hallucinatory flash took place. In it, the light in the room was deep red and there was a man at the table, sitting across from Adam. On the table, a bright green light like a laser that hopped up and down in the air. The man was her dad.

It was so real, it was so good to see him again, that the tears were immediate. And then she heard inside her head, oohhhhh , and she knew that Adam had realized who she was.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”

Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh!

“Oh, yeah,” she managed through her own tears, “I miss him, too, I miss him bad.”

She saw next a glowingly beautiful woman, her face surrounded by a halo of golden light. It was, she knew, herself as Adam saw her.

Empath. One who empathizes. Turned out it was in the blood. No training needed. Genetic thing, she supposed. Maybe their ancestors had been psychics or witches or something. Dad’s grandfather had come from Ireland, that was about all she knew of their bloodline.

In the control room, Colonel Wilkes and Specialist Martin exchanged looks. “He’s got her wrapped around his little finger,” Wilkes said.

“For sure, sir.”

“He knows how to handle ’em, the little bastard. That is one smart piece of work in there.”

They said no more. Lauren Glass had been captured. She would not escape, never, not until she followed her father and his predecessor, both of whom Adam had killed with a scratch.

DAN CAME INTO THE KITCHEN while Katelyn was washing spinach and nuzzled her neck. She moved her head back, enjoying him. In their case, not even thirteen years of marriage had been enough of a honeymoon, and she was very far from being used to this guy of hers.

They had met here at Bell, two days after he arrived. Bizarrely, it turned out that they’d both grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from each other. He’d been crossing the campus in that aimless way he had, looking here and there, smiling even though there was no reason to smile. He was a strikingly handsome man, the last person you’d pick for a professor, let alone a specialist in physiological psychology. But that’s what he was, and he’d just snared a provisional professorship when they met. Now Bell had reached a point of no return with him. This was, at last, his tenure year, and in a few days, his career here—and their pleasantly settled life—would either continue or it would end.

“What’s Conner up to?” she asked. “Is he downstairs?”

“He’s in the living room.”

“Too bad, he’d hear us if we went upstairs.”

“Mmm.” He continued nuzzling.

Their son was more than a genius. A well-constructed, handsome tow-head, gentle of eye and so smart that he was a de facto freak. His IQ of 277 was, as far as anybody could determine, the highest presently on record.

Dan came up from nuzzling and said, “He’s in a funk.”

“Symptoms of said funk?”

“Staring miserably at the TV pretending not to stare miserably at the TV.”

“He’s eleven. Eleven has stuff.” She arched her back, drew his head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of his lips.

“He’s watching 2001.”

Which meant that it was a serious funk and he needed Mom. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“In the first place, I wanted some love.”

She went into the family room, stood for a moment looking at the back of her son’s head. On the ridiculously huge TV Dan had unveiled at Christmas, the apes were howling at the monolith.