Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  “Well, not precisely.”

  For a moment it seemed that Papaw’s breath was hitching in his chest. He turned his head quickly, checking the side-view mirror. They drove on, passing through shades of shadow and light, and when Papaw looked back, his voice was steady.

  “Mr. Fahrenheit was some Hollywood bullshit name I made, that’s all. I thought it sounded good, like somethin’ Brando or James Dean would have—oh, who gives a damn about that, Lightman!” Papaw said bitterly.

  Benji flinched. He’d never seen Papaw so upset, so angry at himself.

  Papaw took a deep, steadying breath. “Point is,” he said, “I was practically pissin’ myself when I saw the light that night, so I did what I always did when I was scared back then: I told myself I wasn’t just Bobby Lightman. I was somebody else. Mr. Fahrenheit.

  “So, I get out of the Dream Machi— the Cadillac. Judy is raisin’ hell, but she calms down a little when the music stops and the light starts going into the woods a-ways deeper. She wants to go home. I say, ‘No, Judy. Let’s go see what this was.’ She says maybe it’s a meteorite, maybe it’s a satellite, neither of which sound very appealin’ to her. ‘I’m not gettin’ back in the car, Bob Lightman, unless you promise to take me home.’ Now, I’m not proud of this, but I just told her, ‘Okay, then,’ tossed my flashlight to her, and drove off. The actual drive-in was only a five-minute walk down the hill, but she ’bout turned the air blue. I never heard a girl curse like that. Well, Bob Lightman wasn’t exactly being gentleman of the year, either, so okay, fair enough.”

  “Why didn’t you want to go home?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “Did you know what the light was?”

  “No, I just . . . I seen that light, and I just felt like I was supposed to follow it, like if I was brave enough to go after it, then I—”

  “You could become Mr. Fahrenheit,” Benji finished. Like I thought I could become Benji Blazes.

  “Or some such similar bull,” Papaw said brusquely. “I tailed that green light for miles and miles, almost all the way back to Bedford Falls. It started rainin’ real heavy, and I had to follow it through the woods on these roads that weren’t hardly roads at all. Then there was this lightning flash, and when it ended, the green light wasn’t in the sky anymore. I thought I’d lost it. No such luck. It had landed.

  “I seen the light ahead in this kind of valley. I parked in the woods and walked the last hundred feet or so. I truly did think of goin’ back to the car, ’cause I had no notion of where in the world I even was. There were sounds ahead of me, like the earth was being ripped up. Thunder, I reckoned.

  “I couldn’t quite see the saucer yet—it was farther back in the valley—but I could just see this shape moving in the rain. It had legs but they were not touching the ground. I thought, It’s an angel. Ha. Maybe the one that lost the War in Heaven.

  “I tried to go closer, but It must have seen me. It just flew at me, like It wanted to stop me before I could see what It was doing. I couldn’t even move. And I felt something touch my head.”

  “What happened?” said Benji. “Did you—did It make you see anything?”

  “No, because the Beast didn’t use Its hand to touch me. It was holding this thing.” Papaw patted the ray gun strapped in his hip holster.

  “It wanted to kill you?”

  “Sure seemed that way. But right then, I hear this BANG, and there were black cars speedin’ up this hill. I guess you know where the boys drivin’ the cars drew their paychecks. The Beast turned, like to go back to Its saucer—”

  “Why didn’t It just kill you? All of you, if It had Its ray gun?”

  “I don’t know, Benjamin. You’re right: It probably could’ve killed me and most of them in a heartbeat. All I know is, the creature saw those cars, and all of a sudden It turns back to me, and then It did touch me with its hand. The world kinda went away, like everything was fading. I could feel Its panic, Its fear. I believe that once It touches you, you have some kind of weak connection to It, maybe one that’s activated when It’s close to you. And It can’t look into your mind without letting you look into Its own. When It touched me, I knew: It had a secret. It had buried something there. . . .”

  “What did the Voyager bury?”

  “I . . . dammit, I couldn’t quite see it! But It had come here for a reason, and It didn’t want me to remember seeing It at all. I could feel It fogging my mind, Benjamin, making my memory get dimmer. It didn’t disappear right away, but it happened soon enough. And I haven’t been able to even think about that night for decades, until today.”

  “Why can you remember all of it now?”

  Papaw sighed wearily. “The last few nights, I been having nightmares. I suppose that Beast and I are still connected, and when It came back and sensed me close by, that helped It—and me—remember bits and pieces.

  “Anyway, that night, It went back to the saucer and flew away. Adios went the cars, too. But It dropped Its gun accidentally, It was so scared. I didn’t know this monstrosity was a weapon, a’course. I just put it in my pocket, and you better believe I left skid marks on the road that night goin’ home. I locked that gun in a trunk in our attic, and the memories got locked away, too.

  “That Beast—that Voyager, that’s as good a name as any—did do somethin’ to my mind to make me forget. But . . . maybe that’s not the whole reason I forgot, Benjamin. Maybe as time passed, I just doubted myself in the light of day. You tell yourself it’s not possible, how could you believe such foolishness? And then you start a summer job at the police station, and you push back college for a semester to take ’er easy, and hell, the job you had over the summer is still open, so why not stay until you leave? Then one day, you look up from your desk and realize your job has become your career. It’s become your life. I told myself, well, I can be like my own daddy. A real cowboy gunslinger. I don’t know if I ever filled those boots. But you don’t want to spoil the happiness you’ve found by lookin’ back. God, you don’t know how rare happiness is.

  “Then this afternoon, the Voyager came to the house. It touched me, unlocked and looked into my memories, and that’s when I understood: It was lookin’ for you.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would It need anyone’s memories, let alone mine?”

  “Don’t you see, son? It’s been playin’ those damn old songs because It doesn’t have any new ones to play. Ellie is safe, at least for now, at least I think, because you and your friends have something It needs. That Beast was here years ago, It went away, and now It’s come back . . . but It doesn’t know why it did any of it. It had a plan, but can’t remember what the reason is! The night you shot It down, you damn near killed It—It took a few days to recover—and you did something to Its mind.

  “It doesn’t know why It came back, Benjamin . . . but you do.”

  It doesn’t know, Benjamin . . . but you do.

  The words clanged in Benji’s mind like discordant bells.

  You know.

  There was undeniably a kind of logic to Papaw’s theory; it made sense of the mysteries since the Voyager’s arrival. But Benji felt no relief—only a kind of vertigo.

  Because even if Papaw had just explained everything, on a deeper level Benji didn’t know anything. He looked at his grandfather’s face, which, in the soft radiance of the Cadillac’s instrument panel, appeared almost unlined. Benji had recently feared Papaw would die, but now, hurtling through a nightmare in the front seat of a long-lost dream, a new and overwhelming knowledge came to him: His grandfather was alive. Papaw existed now, and always had, independently of Benji. Papaw had had his own youth and dread and hopes and a heart that beat with the same fierce and chaotic yearning as Benji’s own. His grandfather was a person, neither more nor less real than Benji. The world of his youth had surely been different, but “different” was a past-tense idea, something that could only be understood by looking back. And Papaw had not lived looking back. He had only lived.

 
And it was then that Benji understood his own great sin: his blinding, idiotic obsession with obliterating his past. The dreams of childhood were dangerous illusions, things he should have left behind. The true “dark man,” the true man in black, was Papaw, for he’d held more mysteries within him than either of them knew. Neither Benji nor Papaw had seen what was really happening around them, because they didn’t want to. They hadn’t paid attention to reality, but only to their desperate attempts to make it into what they wanted it to be.

  I didn’t feel like I should spend time with the pod because I was “meant to,” Benji realized. The Voyager was just manipulating me. It had hidden in the pod, gravely injured and trying to piece everything together in Its scattered mind, only emerging and pursuing Benji when It was about to be turned in to the government.

  “I don’t know what the Voyager wants, Papaw,” Benji said. “When It touched me, It looked through my memory, but I didn’t even see anything important. There were flashes from the night we shot it down, but there wasn’t anything useful. Some of what I saw wasn’t even real. All I felt was Its anger. And that It’s lonely. All alone, maybe.”

  “I think you know more than you realize, son,” Papaw said. “Let’s talk to Zeeko, okay? Maybe that’ll help.”

  “Sure, I definitely saw something real when It touched me for a second, Mr. Lightman,” Zeeko said. It was clear that he kept his voice steady only with tremendous effort.

  They’d pulled over to the side of the highway. A sodium lamp buzzed overhead. “I saw it that night at the quarry, when we shot it down,” Zeeko said. “Benji, remember I said I saw something else at the bottom of the lake? That’s what the alien kept looking at, in here.” He tapped his temple.

  “Did you get any kind of feelin’ about why It wanted to see that?” Papaw asked.

  “I just know it’s something very important to the Voyager. It buried something there; I don’t know what the something is, but I think It was trying to use the tractor beam to pull it out of the lake when we shot the saucer down. It’s something powerful.” Zeeko shivered. “Mr. Lightman, should we go to the lake and try to stop It?”

  Papaw shook his head. “No, that Thing had a head start on us. I imagine It’s already got whatever It needed.”

  “Papaw, when you were young and saw the Voyager burying something, could that have been at the quarry?”

  “No, the quarry was just farmland back then. I saw the Voyager in the woods.”

  “Okay. But if the Voyager needed to get something from the lake, and It already knew that after It touched Zeeko, why would It still need Ellie?”

  Zeeko answered. “Because whatever was in the lake was only part of what It needs. The Voyager was really relieved when It got my memory, but It also felt angry, or frustrated, like I hadn’t given It enough info.”

  “Zeeko, you’re doin’ a helluva good job tonight,” Papaw said. Zeeko smiled gratefully. “So, it seems like you all—Zeeko, Ellie, Benjamin, and maybe CR, although I’m sure he’s safe now, at the game—have bits of information. But none of y’all have the whole puzzle, so It’s just tryin’ now to put it all together. Benjamin, did Ellie ever say anything unusual, anything she saw that nobody else did?”

  “N— Wait, yes, she did! She saw something on the ice when we tried to pull the saucer up! There were these blue lights, like patterns the saucer was accidentally projecting. It was the only thing that she recorded before the camera shut off.”

  “Recorded? That’s good, son! Where’s the tape? Please don’t tell me she had it with her tonight.”

  “No, she didn’t want it on her, in case McKedrick came for us. . . .”

  Benji trailed off, silently cursing himself. This is my fault. If I would’ve just listened to her about the lights, maybe we could have figured it out.

  He’d always envisioned the Voyager’s aims as being unimaginable because they were so amazing. There was no use in trying to think like that anymore, no point in trying to fathom the creature as he had before. Benji had no mystery or magic inside himself. In fact, it was pretending that he had that let all of this happen in the first place.

  I’ll do anything; I’ll be whoever I need to be. Just let her be safe.

  “She hid it someplace where people would find it if something happened to us,” he said. “Papaw?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re going to the carnival.”

  20

  The county fairgrounds waited for them in the eternal quiet of the abandoned farmland dark. The empty carnival climbed the hill like a spider toward the full searchlight moon. There was no ticket required for entry tonight, no lines to wait in for the really good rides. The unoccupied playland was like a kid’s ultimate fantasy. But Benji was not on an errand of childhood anymore.

  They parked the SUV and Cadillac by the front gate. Zeeko helped remove the Cadillac convertible’s soft-top roof. Papaw pulled out his key ring to unlock the gate. Benji took the ray gun and vaporized the lock.

  Papaw said, “Attaboy,” smiling. Sadly.

  Zeeko drove the Cadillac up the carnival midway slowly.

  The midway was a wide walking lane covered in cedar chips and sawdust that ran between parallel rows of food trucks and games. Kneeling on the passenger seat, Papaw swept the ray gun back and forth, scanning the carnival. Benji did the same with McKedrick’s pistol in the backseat.

  There was a brief gap between the attractions, so Benji could see beyond the fences to the area surrounding the fairgrounds. To their right was nothing but cornfields, the cornstalks waving in slow motion like a homecoming queen. To the left were more cornfields, but miles away you could just see the light of the Bedford Falls High School football stadium. The dimmest phantom sounds of the cheering crowd floated to them. It seemed impossible to Benji that there was a place in the world where people still cared about a football game, where they did not know that Ellie had been taken. He had never wanted so badly to let everyone in on a secret. . . . But that was kids’ crap again, that was him hoping someone else would step in. He was going to fix this, or it wasn’t going to be fixed.

  “. . . in Jesus’ name we pray,” Zeeko whispered.

  “Zeeko, quiet, this Beast might already be here,” Papaw hissed.

  Zeeko flinched; the Cadillac jerked to a stop. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lightman. I didn’t think anyone could hear me.” Zeeko’s voice shook. “I’ll just do it in my head—”

  “Don’t even waste your time,” Benji interrupted. His voice was low but fierce. Papaw stared at him, taken aback. “If there’s a God and He did this, I’m not really sure I want Him on my side.”

  “Benjamin, easy,” Papaw whispered.

  Zeeko had been facing forward all this time, and even now he did not look back at Benji. His grip on the wheel turned white. For a second it seemed that for the first time in the history of their friendship, Zeeko would truly and completely lose his meditative cool and erupt. Benji almost wanted him to.

  But he didn’t. He drove.

  Now the midway climbed again. They followed it around a sharp turn and left the games area behind. A banner stretched above them:

  AMAZEMENTS A-WAIT!

  (RIDES RIDES RIDES!)

  This was the heart of the carnival, jam-packed with rides. The midway grew thinner as the rides pressed in claustrophobically. All Benji’s senses seemed to be dialed to their maximum: the wind on the back of his neck claw-sharp, the pop-pop-pop of the tires on the cedar chips as loud as distant machine-gun fire. The rides’ shadows scrawled the midway wildly, no longer like the neat rectangles of the uniformly shaped food trucks and game booths. The Vomatron unlike the Tilt-A-Whirl unlike the caterpillar roller coaster unlike the mirror mansion unlike the haunted house (its own banner read YOU’LL HAVE ONE HELL OF A TIME!) unlike the carousel (HEY-HEY-HEY GRAB THE GOLD RING TODAY!). Benji double-checked that the pistol’s safety was off.

  “We’ll walk from here, Zeeko,” Papaw said when they had almost reached the top of the hill. Benji p
eered up at the “Starlight Express” Ferris wheel, whose shadow now webbed them like the work of a spider. In the frozen moonlight, its wires and struts glowed like bones in an X-ray, its dozens of suspended cars swaying, crying softly in the wind.

  Because the Ferris wheel required so much power, it had its own diesel generator, which was hidden underneath the raised wooden platform where passengers boarded their carriages. “Zeeko, you know how to turn on a diesel generator?”

  “Sure, Mr. Lightman. We use them at the hospital in case the electricity goes out.”

  “I thought so. Could ya crawl on under the platform and power up the generator, young man? It would be a big help.”

  Zeeko nodded, looking relieved to have something helpful to do.

  Benji followed Papaw up the small wooden staircase to the boarding platform. An operator’s control panel sat on a kind of raised metal podium to their left. As they walked to it, Papaw said softly to Benji, “Think you might’ve been a little tough on your friend?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If prayin’ helps him through this, where’s the harm?”

  “I was telling the truth, to grow up, like you always do.”

  A strange sadness appeared in Papaw’s eyes. “Is that what I sound like? Damn. . . .” He peered at the sky, at nothing. “The truth,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe the truth doesn’t matter so much, Bob Lightman. What the hell is it, anyway?”

  The generator sputtered to life under the platform. The lights on the Ferris wheel turned on, clacking and blinking. As Zeeko joined them on the platform, Papaw hit a big green Go button on the control panel, shifted the large emergency brake handle, and with a pneumatic chuff, the Ferris wheel began to revolve. “You said Ellie put it in the top carriage?” Papaw asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Benji said.

  When the top carriage, number five, reached the platform, Papaw pulled the lever to set the brake. The wheel squealed to a stop.