The bleachers: full to bursting with fans, thrashing their pennants like flags of war.
The crowd standing at the fence that ringed the field: ten people deep, swelling against the chain-link for a better view, shouting at Benji as he shoved through them.
And despite all the insanity, as Benji finally reached the chest-high fence, a tiny piece of his heart broke for his best friend. The score was 21–17, and Bedford Falls was losing.
Benji tried to climb the fence. Someone cursed, yanking him back.
CR screamed, “HIKE!”
A series of machine-gun pops: The shoulder pads of the offensive and defensive lines collided, powered by all the fury and hope of their two towns. Ball in hand, CR faded back, back, and perhaps it was the snow that did it, but CR suddenly stumbled. For one electrifying instant it seemed that he would fall, fumble, and end the game and his fans’ world.
He caught himself and scrambled up again, head whipping left and right, left, right, searching frantically for a receiver.
And so that was why CR didn’t see the impossible thing occur: A seam opened in the vaunted Bedford Falls offensive line, and a Newporte defender surged through. CR was looking left, the defender barreling in from the right, and as the game clock hit 0.0 and the stadium’s buzzer blared, the Newporte defender dove at CR, going airborne, a lunatic missile aimed directly at CR’s knees.
AND CR LEAPED OVER HIM.
But it was not just a leap: It was art, a miracle on Earth. The defender sailed under CR harmlessly and the hometown crowd let loose a shout like a beat of their single collective heart.
Returning to the ground, CR spotted a receiver downfield, cocked back his arm.
And there it went, zoom, the long bomb, the Hail Mary, the most important throw of his life. The spiral split the snow like an asteroid ascendent, soaring, ten thousand necks craning to follow the leather rocket, and whether they wanted the quarterback to win or lose, there could be no doubt: This was what destiny looked like.
Amid all the other noise, there came a low quivering shriek of metal being rent apart. At the same moment, the shadows of every football player were thrown in a new direction. Benji looked up and saw with a surge of terror and awe that the great silver poles of the field lights were bending forward toward the field, like divining rods pointing to something secret in the earth.
The sky overhead looked as if it had been lit on fire. The blizzard above the field had become something like a hellish vision of the northern lights. But the northern lights, which Benji had watched longingly on YouTube a hundred times, were caused by a wondrous conspiracy of nature. Whatever was up there was not natural.
The announcer’s voice came over the speakers: “Oh, Christ almighty, boys, look out, get off the field!”
A black helicopter tumbled out of the clouds, its blinding searchlight whirling. Its blades cut CR’s football cleanly in two. The helicopter slammed straight down on the fifty-yard line.
Touchdown.
The field lights, still bowing magnetically, exploded all at once, throwing glass and sparks, burning an afterimage of the stadium on Benji’s eyes. As the crowd and players began to scream, he climbed over the fence and sprinted through the darkness.
Get CR before the Voyager does!
Benji shouted for CR, but the air was a chaos of voices. He was almost knocked off his feet as he collided with another player. He checked that the ray gun was still in his jacket and barreled on.
Now he could just make out the stampeding shapes in the moonlight. He wove through them, calling “CR!” again and again. He felt the earth begin to quake underneath him and tried to tell himself it was only because so many people were running from the stadium at once.
After a minute of fruitless searching, Benji seemed to be the only person left on the field. Just as he was about to leave the field, he spotted one of the players standing a few feet from the helicopter wreckage, staring at it. Benji’s heart leaped when he saw NOLAND on the back of his jersey. Benji reached out for him—
The field gave a roaring seismic lurch, as if the whole planet had been rocked off its axis. Benji was knocked off balance, staggering into CR. They fell together onto the trembling ground, Benji landing on top, CR crying out beneath him.
As Benji rolled off him, a tower of light suddenly erupted upward from the place where the helicopter had been. A hole had opened in the earth and was expanding every moment, threatening to take Benji and CR down to whatever lay buried beneath them.
Benji pulled a strangely wooden CR to his feet and away from the hole, no longer caring about the Voyager mystery, only that he get his friend to safety.
They had gone only a few steps when they had to stop: Without warning, a wall of flames jetted straight up from the ground before them, as if the awakening of the Voyager’s subterranean machine had ignited a long-lost pocket of Bedford Falls’s natural gas. As the earthquake grew stronger, so did the inferno: The fire raced around nearly the entire field, a ring of flame encircling them on all sides. The terrible memory of being stranded in the House flashed through Benji’s mind.
“We have to get out of here!” he shouted over the flames, spinning toward CR. “The Voyager wants y—”
CR grabbed Benji by the collar of his tuxedo. “You did this!” he screamed. “Look what you did, you sack of selfish shit! Is this what you WANTED?!”
Benji knew he deserved every bit of CR’s rage, but the great hole in the ground was still widening as more and more of the earth collapsed. It would reach them in just a few moments.
Benji tried to conjure Papaw’s steady, grown-up calmness. “I’m sorry, CR! I’m sorry for everything! I’m the stupid one, okay? I know I screwed up, I know I’ve done nothing but screw everything up since you pulled me and Ellie out of the House, and I’m sor—”
CR released Benji and shoved him away. “Stop lying!”
“I’m not.”
“I didn’t pull you out of the House!”
Despite the madness all around them, Benji blinked, stunned, confused. “Yes, you did. I passed out inside and you came in.”
“That is not what happened, and you know it!” CR screamed. “You found Ellie and brought her out, and then you passed out, on the porch! All I did was drag you into the damn yard!”
Benji didn’t hear whatever CR said next. He couldn’t hear anything at all except for a kind of dizzied ringing in his head.
I didn’t pass out until I got outside, he thought, and the idea seemed inconsequential, so why did it hit him like a depth charge? I didn’t pass out by the door to the cellar. He felt something enormous hauling itself up and up into the light of his mind, like the bogeyman mounting the stairs.
The dark man in the cellar. I saw something in the cellar when the House was burning. It was coming out of that huge hole in the ground where the gas exploded.
He’d assumed it was just a hallucination. After all, he’d thought he was passing out.
But if he hadn’t been passing out, then . . . then . . .
“Benji, look out!” CR shouted, his face transported with horror by something he saw behind Benji.
The ledge of the pit had reached them at last. Benji had enough time to look down and see a huge metallic saucer rising from the earth. The Voyager stood atop it. Benji reached for the ray gun within his jacket at the same moment the Voyager’s claws flew up and clasped his head like a vise.
It felt as if the inferno had breached his skull. As agony consumed him, Benji again flew gravityless down the memory corridor of mirrors, and he understood why both Papaw and Ellie believed the Voyager’s mangled mind was shattering: The corridor was now filled with the smoke and the sound of sizzling snow from the football field. It was as if the Voyager could no longer tell the difference between the past it sought and the present by which it was surrounded.
Still, the creature pressed on through the corridor, piercing more deeply into Benji’s mind. At the end of the corridor, growing brighter and nearer, Be
nji could see the image of “the dark man” in the cellar. An overpowering feeling of longing and loss suffused the Voyager: This was what It wanted! Where was this place, where was this House? It needed to find out—
But then, through the memory, light erupted: three brilliant ovals, atomically green, crashing through the mirror and shattering it into a thousand pieces. The Voyager’s physical and psychic grips on Benji loosened.
Benji was back on the football field, lying in the snow. CR stood beside him, aiming the ray gun past Benji.
“I don’t think I killed It, but I hit It,” CR said. “This gun kicks like a mother!”
Benji saw something strange behind CR: A collection of sod, soil, and snow had floated from the ground and formed an odd ghost shape, a shape that resembled Benji-as-a-boy. It was like when the Voyager had telekinetically used snow at the drive-in to reenact the saucer explosion.
Before Benji could fully process this, the shape collapsed and CR yanked him to his feet.
The secret machine, buried so long ago beneath Bedford Falls, had finally risen.
Stumbling backward from the pit, Benji thought, It’s another saucer. But that wasn’t true. It had the same basic shape as the original saucer they’d shot out of the heavens, but this looked like a vehicle from hell. The new saucer was not silver but black, marred by clots of the sediment and stone in which it had hidden. Savage arcs of electricity hissed across its surface, filling the air with a wild ionic charge. Ten times the size of the original saucer, it seemed to take an eternity to escape the ground.
“Shoot it, CR!” Benji shouted. But CR just gaped at the ship like a terrified kid.
Benji grabbed the ray gun from him and aimed at the ship.
Just before he fired, without warning or explanation, the saucer tilted backward, as if reeling from a devastating impact. For an insane moment soaked in adrenaline and hope, Benji thought he had inadvertently dealt the death blow.
The portal on the underside of the ship opened, like a poisonous and omnipotent eye.
The tractor beam blazed into CR like a searchlight. Benji dove for him, but he wasn’t the athlete in the friendship.
CR tumbled upward, screaming, abducted from the only place he’d ever felt at home. He vanished into the portal, which sealed shut as the ship began to rise. Benji raised the ray gun and almost pulled the trigger, but he had to stop himself: Hitting the ship might mean killing CR. He could only stand there on the football field, watching helplessly as the Voyager’s unholy ship ascended into the storming sky.
24
No. Please, no. Please let it not have happened.
Benji might have stayed there forever, but slowly he became aware of the world around him mirroring the way he felt: It began to shred and fall into the fathomless sky.
Several long, ragged objects whizzed past his head. Great sections of turf flew from the field, strips of flesh being gashed by invisible claws. They soared into the sky as if drawn by a black hole, and as the saucer climbed out of sight, Benji saw the pieces of debris coming together to form some larger shape as the Voyager’s malfunctioning mind explored CR’s own brain.
Where was the saucer going? I don’t know—we have to follow it!
He turned, facing the flames, which still burned hot and were as tall as he was. He ripped off his tuxedo jacket, yanking the strings on the shoulders to make the full-length cape unfurl. He smashed snow onto the fabric until every inch of the cloth was soaked. Then he wrapped the cape around himself like a fireproof tarp, sprinted to the firewall, and leaped. Ladies and gentlemen, he thought madly, Mr. Benji Blazes!
Flames licked his exposed ankles and the cloak hissed viciously, but he landed on the other side, unburned. He detached the steaming cape from the jacket and tossed it to the ground, whipping his jacket back on as he sprinted across the field.
The fire illuminated the stadium. Benji was alone, the bleachers and sidelines deserted. The snowstorm and smoke had formed a visually impenetrable seal around the field, and he had to use the distant sounds of chaos from the parking lot to orient himself. The stadium destroyed itself around him as he ran, the light poles and goalposts spearing into the sky. To his relief, the objects were at least flying away from the parking lot; the saucer was retreating in that direction.
The Cadillac was where he had left it, just past the turnstiles, a reflection of the firelight dancing across its hood. All across the parking lot was a roiling, shouting mass of people and cars. From the sound of the sirens wailing across the night, it seemed every last fire truck, ambulance, and police cruiser in town was on its way. But how would they even get into the parking lot? How would Benji leave? The main exit of the lot was blocked by a several-car pileup, all the drivers fighting frantically about who needed to move and where. . . .
Benji slid over the Cadillac’s hood. Only when he opened the door did he realize the driver’s seat was already occupied.
“Ellie, move over, we’ve gotta go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t even know. We have to follow the— Listen, you don’t have to come, okay? This is my fault—”
“We will leave,” Ellie said firmly, “after you tell me what happened.”
When Benji had left her in the car a few minutes ago, she had been shattered, and so it was a shock to him to hear the dark steel in her voice. Her jaw was set, her knuckles whitening as she grasped the steering wheel. She was Ellie, undeniably, but she didn’t quite look like the girl he loved. Sitting before him was a woman, a fierce woman with green eyes ablaze with determination.
“I want that asshat dead as much as you do,” she said. “And you can’t kill It by yourself. If you could, you already would have. So tell me. Tell me where we are going to go.”
A dozen different emotions whirled in Benji. It took him a moment to find his voice. “We have to follow the saucer.”
“What saucer?”
“One the Voyager buried under the field. I don’t know where It’s going, but It has CR.”
Ellie’s eyes may have widened, but their spark never wavered.
“Get in,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Benji Lightman, if we live through tonight, I imagine that we’ll have a lot to talk about. And whatever happens, I want you to know that I care about you very, very much, and you have many brave and beautiful qualities, so please don’t take offense when I say this: You drive like both an old man and a little girl. Now get in.”
The Cadillac exited the parking lot faster than Benji would have thought possible. As the fire crept closer to the lot, someone had taken charge and cleared the pileup that had been blocking the exit. Now the emergency vehicles were arriving, and when the crowd parted, Ellie threaded through oncoming ambulances and fire trucks like a needle. She ignited the high beams and floored the accelerator as they reached the street, the g-force pushing Benji into his seat’s soft leather embrace. Snow zoomed into the open-air Cadillac, making it feel as if they were piloting through a meteor storm.
Soon they had the roads mostly to themselves. Benji was navigator, and he peered upward, trying to spot the ship. The storm seemed to be weakening, but it still obscured the sky. He caught only a glimpse of the saucer, miles to the east.
“Ellie, it’s heading out of town!” he shouted over the wind. “Go left!” As they raced in the direction of the saucer, his heart thudded sickeningly. He wondered what was happening up there, and whether the Voyager had finished with CR. . . .
Miles later, the road beneath them transformed: Bedford Falls’s streets had their share of potholes, but this route into farm country was wild and unpaved. Ellie sped through switchbacks, passing rows of corn and rusting natural gas mining equipment. Once more the storm momentarily slackened. Benji spotted the silhouetted treeline of a forest about a mile ahead.
That’s . . . that’s the forest where the House was.
“It’s taking us to the House,” Benji said.
“What house?”
“The one I burned down.”
“Why?”
His thoughts returned to what CR had told him. I wasn’t passing out when I opened the cellar door. That Thing in the cellar wasn’t a hallucination.
As a teenager, when Papaw had watched the Voyager bury something outside Bedford Falls, the creature had fled, frightened not for Itself, perhaps, but for something far more vulnerable. . . . And when the Voyager had seen Benji’s memory of that moment, It had filled with loss and longing. . . .
Papaw had been right: Benji did have a secret the Voyager needed, after all. It just wasn’t a secret he’d learned the night he’d shot down the saucer.
The secret came from the sunset of his childhood’s last summer, a moment he’d tried so desperately to forget but could instead only misremember.
“Oh my God, Ellie. I know what It wants. It left Its— Hey!”
Ellie nearly drove off the road: Her gaze had been drawn to something to their left. She cursed and jerked the wheel, righting the car.
He saw why she’d been distracted. The Indiana countryside looked like a war zone. The cornfields had been ravaged flat, the roof ripped from a corn silo, the bell tower torn from an old church by the forest. Even as he and Ellie watched, the destruction continued. Headstones from the church’s cemetery were wrenched out of the ground and flew toward the forest ahead, stolen telekinetically by the Voyager’s malfunctioning mind. A brilliant green light surged from deep within the heart of the woods, making the trees appear to be gaunt, gigantic guardians from a fairy tale.
Now the road thinned, becoming little more than a path snarled with roots that rocked the Cadillac back and forth. As they drove into the forest, tree limbs scratched along the sides of the car like hands begging them to go back. The green light ahead grew brighter and closer. The hair on the back of Benji’s neck stiffened, the air humming with that ionic charge.
They heard the thunderous sound of earth being torn apart ahead. “What is that?” Ellie shouted.
“I think the Voyager’s using the tractor beam to dig!” Preparing to leave the car, Benji secured the ray gun firmly in his waistband.
Mr. Fahrenheit Page 24
