by Emily Henry
Droog was too fast—I wasn’t going to catch up to her—but my eyes latched on to the tail end of her blue leash, and I had to act fast.
I dove onto it, stomach smacking the ground, hands grappling for the fraying rope. I hauled her back as I got to my feet, but she kept pulling and crying, desperate to get to whatever she’d seen.
And then I felt the crawling on my neck, that watched prickling, and I knew what she was looking at.
Even after all this time, I still responded to the sight of him with needling dread, with hot cheeks and itchy skin.
The hermit stood at the edge of the woods, just inside his fence. He looked exactly how he always did: tall and wide shouldered, scraggly gray hair that tangled around his neck and a night-shrouded face like a skull with weathered, leathery skin stretched tight over it. Even his teeth, long and gapped, unsettled me, and if all that weren’t enough, he was wearing his trademark denim overalls, like he was some kind of 1930s ax murderer—a look the most brazen, irreverent kids at Splendor High had been known to replicate for Halloween.
His eyes were the worst part. Cold and dead in a way that made me feel skinned alive as he looked at me through the deepest part of the night.
There was a rumor he only left his house after midnight. There were a lot of rumors about him, and having lived an acre from him for the past five years, I could confirm a lot of them.
He did only come out after dark, to walk the length of the fence, or rumble off in his too-loud truck down the access road, long after most places in Splendor had closed their doors for the night.
Art loved to flip him off, which made me nervous, given that the man carried a gun at all times and had posted handwritten signs up and down the fence promising he’d use it on trespassers.
That was one of the rumors too: Kids at school, the popular ones especially, had braggy stories about sneaking onto his property and being chased away with gunfire. They whispered about finding human hair in the grass, and dried blood on trees. They said he was a cannibal, that he was supreme priest in a blood cult of one, that he hung dead rabbits on posts to worship the devil or maybe just to scare people off.
And outlandish rumors aside, everyone knew he’d been the one who assaulted Eric Palladin at the Drink Inn and broke his collarbone, even if Eric’s family hadn’t pressed charges because Eric would’ve gotten busted for the fake IDs he’d been selling out of his old Volkswagen bus.
The man was a blight no one liked to think of, and even if none of the rumors were true, my blood still would have gone cold at the sight of him there, too close, too dead-eyed.
Because this man, whose name was a curse I’d never spoken aloud, was a murderer.
Wayne Hastings.
The man who’d destroyed this town once, and even now, five years later, haunted it with a hateful vengeance.
The man who’d caused the accident.
He jogged his rifle against his shoulder like some soldier on the front lines, and I dragged Droog backward a few feet, then turned and ran in through the back door as fast as I could, as if I could escape him, as if I could escape everything that had happened since the day he’d ruined my life. I didn’t even slow when the doorknob sent a shock through me.
TEN
MOM CAME FOR US at school. Dad was already at the hospital.
Arthur and I sat in the back seat of the Plymouth Voyager, asking questions she couldn’t answer.
What happened?
An accident. That’s all I know.
Is he hurt?
That’s all I know.
We could have asked what two plus two was. We could have asked anything, but Mom had stopped knowing anything, other than that her oldest son had been in an accident.
He hadn’t wanted the job at the steel mill. That was what I kept thinking as we sped through the two-way stops on the country roads surrounding the high school, headed out toward a hospital in the suburbs.
I’d bet anything that was what Mom was thinking too: Mark hadn’t wanted the job.
He’d wanted to take a year off and paint, build up his portfolio to apply to art schools. He needed something good to make up for his terrible grades. He was as spacey as Arthur or Mom, but had neither Arthur’s ability to bullshit his way through presentations and essays nor Mom’s interest in academia.
He’d inherited her curiosity and her readiness to daydream, and Dad’s gentleness and willingness to talk to just about anyone, but his artistic ability was his thing. What people talked about when they talked about Mark.
Mom had begged Dad to let Mark take a gap year, out of school and without a job. She’d spent four years hearing from his art teachers that he really had something, getting pamphlets to expensive art schools sent home with notes that Mom and Dad should really consider investing in his future, and sometimes even e-mails from the teachers at those fancy art boarding schools, working artists who’d seen my brother’s work in nationwide competitions and wanted to recruit him.
Maybe Mom wanted to make up for what they couldn’t afford to give Mark, or maybe she wanted to make up for everything she’d given up herself to raise her family.
She’d been pining for grad school and a NASA job when Mark came along, and so had settled for community college and a research-and-development job at a shampoo factory, and when she told us the story, she made it sound like the world’s best trade-off.
But maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe she thought that if Mark got to follow his dreams, it would make up for the ones she’d given up.
“Think about it, Robert,” she’d begged Dad. “This is his destiny. He’s already missed out on the camps and the boarding schools and the private lessons. We can at least support him now. We can give him time to focus, to catch up.”
“Art school’s expensive, Eileen. How’s he going to make that dream a reality if he’s not willing to do the work?”
Dad knew some guys at the steel mill. Everyone knew some guys at the steel mill. It was almost singlehandedly propping up the Splendor economy.
“Full-time,” Dad had said.
“Part-time,” Mom had argued.
Mark had stood right there, but he hadn’t said anything, just let them wear themselves out. He hated being in the middle of disagreements. Whenever Arthur wouldn’t give me a turn at Mario Kart, Mark would just hand his controller over to me and leave the room, much to Arthur’s chagrin.
When I was angry, I buried it deep. When Arthur was angry, he’d let it snap out of him like a bear trap. But when Mark was angry, he closed his eyes and thought through it.
While Arthur and I were listening in to Mom and Dad’s argument from the staircase, we could see Mark doing just that.
Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “It could be cool. Working at the mill could be cool. It’s good pay, and I bet they’d let me take some scrap metal home.”
Dad had stared back at him, not understanding what could be cool about taking home scrap metal.
“For sculptures,” Mark had explained.
Mom’s wide eyes had gone even wider, mirroring Mark’s curiosity right back at him. She turned it over. She nodded. “I suppose so.”
By then Mark was distracted, staring out the window at something we couldn’t see.
He always saw things that Arthur and I didn’t. Around that time, he’d been obsessed with Fibonacci spirals, a mathematical concept he’d tried to explain to me for easily two hours.
I was more for climbing trees and tromping through creek beds than studying either one through a microscope and then turning them into paintings, but I loved the way he’d explain something over and over again without any sign of impatience, and I loved watching him look out the window and wondering what magical thing he saw.
Two days after his conversation with Mom and Dad, he’d started the job.
And for nearly a year, life went on pretty
much how it always had.
We ate breakfast around the table in the kitchen. We fought over controllers and fell asleep on the floor watching movies with Mom and Dad. Talked about our Halloween costumes too early, and went to church on Easter, and chased Droog around the yard. Looked through Mom’s telescope while she explained the Milky Way and the Zeta Reticuli and spiral galaxies, which were, Mark informed us, Fibonacci spirals. Gave up on the exorbitant Halloween costumes and trick-or-treated as ghosts instead, though even I was really too old for it.
And most days Mark came home from work tired and too dirty for his taste; Arthur and I came home from school tired and too clean for ours. We spent our weekends stomping through woods and picking ticks off our scalps while he spent his with sketches and blueprints spread across the table, planning what he’d build when his co-worker finished teaching him to weld. Mom and Dad laughed in the kitchen. We argued. We kicked each other. Arthur spat on my face. Droog knocked things off the coffee table and Mom groaned and told her she was a very bad girl, and Mark scratched behind her ears and whispered, It’s okay, Droopy-Baby. We all mess up. And Mom kissed us good night, and said I love you from the hallway just before she turned off the light, and Dad badly sang a few bars of Carole King’s “Way Over Yonder.”
And if I’d thought about it in those months, I would’ve guessed life would always go on this way.
You’re born. You sing. You die.
Instead, Mom showed up at the school one day in May.
“Was anyone else hurt?” I asked her from the back seat of the Voyager.
She chewed on her thumbnail as she drove. “That’s all I know.”
* * *
* * *
My phone kept freezing and glitching and once even shut itself off, but finally, I made it to TheFallingSkyIncident’s page.
Only, when I navigated to the video, a notice popped up: a gradient screen with a red frowny face and the message “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim.”
I checked the URL again, but this was the right link.
How could the video be copyrighted? Levi had taken it two nights ago.
The top comment was still I want to believe, but right beneath that, the second highest-voted read, hey DICKWEEDS the videos gone.
Painstakingly, I scrolled through the glitching column of comments. People who were excited, people who’d linked to their Tumblr posts “proving this is completely edited garbage.” Apparently it had something to do with our shadows being incorrectly cast.
I went farther back, scouring for CitizenOfTheBlackMailbox’s comment. Within an hour, I’d reached the beginning without finding it. I started scrolling back the other direction, taking my time.
My anxiety was building, and the staticky energy buzzing around me seemed to worsen. The scrolling went slower and slower until I had to sit back from the screen every few seconds to let the comments resolve in front of me.
After two more hours, I had to face it: The comment was gone. And when I searched for the account that left it, that was gone too.
He’d deleted it. Or someone had deleted it for him.
But why would anyone want the video taken down?
I couldn’t think about that right now. The important thing was just to e-mail him. I was pretty sure the address had BlackMailboxBill or Bob in it, and had involved an acronym for Citizen of the Black Mailbox. [email protected] or [email protected].
In the end, I messaged every possible combination I could think of.
That was all I could do tonight.
As soon as I’d had the thought, the lamp beside my bed flickered then went out: another omen, a warning.
* * *
* * *
Falling through darkness, total, complete. Cold feathering over me, a million fingers of it.
And then, light!
Shrieking past, thick drops like rain swept up a car window on the highway.
Falling is the sensation, but there is no up or down. There’s only an object with so much mass its gravity is pulling me.
A great hand, drawing me toward something velvety and dark, a surface still and glassy as water spread out below—ahead of?—me, and when the screaming bits of light hit, they ripple out, flashing, sparking, and when I’m near enough, the total silence, the cotton-eared absence of sound—wavers.
Like thousands of violin strings played all at once.
But in the same way falling has taken on new meaning, so has sound.
It is movement, waves that travel through me, invigorating as the cold.
Not painful. Invigorating.
I reach toward the pool, the mass drawing me in, and when my hand stretches out, I am shocked but not scared to realize I have no body.
I am white light, crackling in every direction, and that is what I feel.
My white light falling toward the still pool.
I know it will be warm before I hit, and when I do, I recognize the trillions of sounds humming through me as if they are old friends.
Here to welcome me, calling me by name.
M—
“Whoa there!” The man on the far side of the counter staggered back as I jolted awake, nearly tumbling from my chair in the process. It took me a few seconds of blinking to piece together who and what I was, let alone where I was.
Sallow overhead lighting. Twin vending machines full of glossy-wrapped cookies and chips. A mounted TV playing a Reese’s commercial.
The man on the other side of the counter held his YMCA card out. “Didn’t mean to wake you!” He patted the counter. “It’s summer. You kids aren’t supposed to be tired. Summer’s when you should be sleeping in.”
I looked between him and the YMCA-emblazoned polo I was wearing. If this random man thought I should be using my summers to sleep in, maybe he’d like to cut me a check. While he was at it, he could handle the minor issue of my alien possession.
I checked his card, handed it back.
He stared at the yellow rubber gloves I was wearing. I’d gotten them out of the supply closet in the hopes they’d impede my electrical charge while I researched light-discs and incessantly checked for a reply from Black Mailbox Bill. It had worked out kind of perfectly: the cheapo rubber composite was strong enough to dull my effect on the phone but weak enough for my electrical charge to still trigger the touch screen. As far as my phone keyboard was concerned, I was basically a normal human again. The gloves had helped; the searches themselves, not so much.
“Thanks, honey,” the man finally said, tearing his gaze from the gloves.
“No problem, scout,” I said.
He hesitated, visibly confused, then started down the hall. I turned my focus back to the half dozen Wikipedia pages I had open.
Perseids: the late-summer meteor shower of debris from the Comet Swift-Tuttle that orbited the Earth yearly.
Black Mailbox: a (white) mailbox on Nevada State Route 375 that supposedly marked some kind of hotbed of UFO activity.
MUFON (Mutual UFO Network): a UFO-investigating nonprofit, one of the biggest in the U.S.
I’d stumbled across plenty of UFO enthusiasts, proclaimed experts, skeptics, and devotees, but I hadn’t found a single account of an experience like the one we’d had.
“I’m here at the Crane Energy electrical substation on Jenkins Lane,” came a familiar voice, and I looked up to find Cheryl Kelly on TV, in a black blazer and red silk shirt with an enormous bow at the throat. “Where an investigation into the source of some strange burns in the surrounding field has yielded more questions than answers!
“Sources report that though a private crew has excavated upwards of seven feet in some places, officials still have no leads on who—or what—might have caused the burns. And in another new—and bizarre—twist, police are now reporting that several pieces of machinery damaged in t
he initial incident have mysteriously vanished. The Sheriff’s Department is asking for anyone with any leads on the missing equipment to please come forward. In the meantime, the search for answers appears to have stalled. I’m Cheryl Kelly, with Channel 11 News.”
My phone buzzed with a message, and my heart palpitated as I registered the e-mail alert onscreen.
It took a few seconds to get the message open, and Bill’s reply was shorter than I’d hoped for. I made up for that by reading it six times in a row.
Hello, friend.
Thank you for getting in touch. You did the right thing. Have you told anyone else what you witnessed? I must advise against it. Having been where you are, I hope you’ll trust me on this. Take the video down too. If they haven’t already seen it, you’ll be OK. But if they have or do, you’ll need to take extra precautions.
I know what is happening to you, because it all happened to me too: the scars, the energy, the strange images in your head and impulses to do things that are utterly unfamiliar to you—commands, as it were, from the presence you are hosting. There’s so much more I should tell you, but this is not the venue. The important thing is, I can help you before it’s too late.
I believe you are in Ohio (that is what the networks I am involved in are saying after some sleuthing related to your video; try not to be alarmed, but that IS how simple it would be for the wrong party to find you, and is thus why you MUST COVER YOUR TRACKS).
I am in Nevada. Have checked flights and can arrive in any of the major cities near you by 1 PM. Please let me know what time you can meet. Again, it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL you tell no one about what you’ve experienced. NOT EVEN—PERHAPS ESPECIALLY—those you are closest to. All that you share with them will put them in greater danger with those who might wish to find you.
You must DESTROY any evidence you were involved in what that video depicts. If police find so much as a hair of yours near that location, you could be in grave danger.
My intention is not to scare you—you’ve experienced a beautiful thing, an encounter you will treasure for the rest of your life—but people in our situation have a habit of vanishing without a trace.
