“Nice place,” Wiley said.
“I’ll say.”
As they came to a stop, a woman appeared. She was as stark as her ultramodern home, reminding Wiley of one Andrew Wyeth’s immeasurably sad paintings of the model Helga Testorf.
Closer, Wiley saw that her face was a tear-stained shambles. A teenage boy appeared in the doorway behind her. He wore baggy jeans and a black T-shirt.
She came up to Wiley. She stood silently, so close to him that he could smell sweat and the sourness of her breath. She leaned into his chest and clutched him.
“I’m sorry for you,” Wiley said, “I’m so sorry for you.”
She looked into his eyes. “I know you.”
Holy Christ, this was not what he needed. “I’m from Harrow. You’ve probably seen me around.”
“No, from your book. You said they were good. In your book, you said they were.”
“I said they were very strange.”
“They are not good. No, Mr. Dale, they are not good. He had all your books, you know. He was trying to come into contact. He went up the ridge to meet them. And this is what happened.”
“Mrs. Nunnally, we have to understand that we have very little idea about what’s going on with the aliens—even if they are aliens. That’s why my book doesn’t give answers, it asks questions. Because we do not understand.”
She put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were like fire burning into his soul. “There was light,” she whispered. “Two nights ago, the whole house was surrounded by it.”
Oh, Jesus. “And this light,” he asked, “what did it do?”
“Lit up everything. Then suddenly it’s gone and there’s this clap of thunder but no clouds, see. When it went away he says, ‘It’s them,’ and the next afternoon he went up the ridge, and it came again, and he went up in it.”
This wasn’t the killing light, then, it was something else. But what? “And that’s what the farmers saw?”
She nodded. “You’re in touch with the aliens, it says so on your Web site. I want you to call them!”
Nick and his friends had created a Wylie Dale website. It was very slick, but he hadn’t seen anything on it about him still being in touch with aliens, and there had been many books since the one about the close encounter.
The boy came out. “Please, Mr. Dale, tell them to bring my dad back home.” He was perhaps seventeen, a gangling kid with anguish in his face. He looked like he was in physical pain—as, Wiley felt sure, he was.
Wiley realized that he’d been a damned fool to come here.
“Call them,” the boy hissed.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Don’t say that!”
At that moment, a state policeman appeared around the side of the house. He came up, his face grim. “Mrs. Nunnally—”
“No! NO!”
“Ma’am—”
“Oh, God…God…” She twisted as if at the end of a rope, and then turned and clutched her boy.
They came out then, from a wetland a thousand feet behind the house. Wiley watched the play of sunlight along the silver bars of the gurney, and the blackness of the body bag in the sun.
“Mrs. Nunnally, we need to get an identification.”
She heaved with grief, but made no sound, which made it more awful, somehow, this silent, gagging, shuddering woe.
A man in soaking jeans unzipped the bag, and Wiley then saw something so unexpected that he cried out. He saw the head of a man, but with black sockets where the eyes should be, and teeth grinning from a lipless mouth. “Can you recognize him?” one of the troopers asked.
“Dad,” the boy shouted. “What happened to my dad?”
“It’s rapid deterioration…because of the wetland he was in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Nunnally shrieked, “it’s a mute, Mr. Dale, a mute! They mutilated my husband just like they do the cattle!”
Wiley was well aware of the mysterious cattle mutilations that had been going on for fifty years. Cattle would be found by farmers and ranchers with their lips, eyes, tongues, and genitals removed and their rectums cored out. Often, they looked as if they’d been dropped from above, and huge lights were seen in the fields the night before they were found. Between 1970 and 2010, over fifty thousand cases had been reported, all blown off by the government as coyote attacks, which was clearly a lie, and now here was this human being, killed in exactly the same way.
A hideous thought came tickling into his mind, I have a beautiful home in an isolated area. What if they were looking for me?
One of the state cops said, “Ma’am, you need to say if this is Mr. Nunnally.”
She nodded. Nodded harder. “I think so. I think so. Ohh God, God—” She clutched at Wiley. “Help me! Help me!” It was horrible to be near her, he could smell her sour sweat. He feared that he would throw up on her.
The boy, his face streaming with tears, said, “What if they come back, what happens to us then, Mr. Dale?”
What, indeed?
He could not be silent, but he had no idea what to say or do. He remembered the creatures he had seen, and the figure Al North had seen in his room, that delicate, hard face, and he knew what this was, what it must be: they were trying to cross the barrier into a universe that had not accepted them as real, and this was a side-effect of their struggle.
The boy leaped at him and suddenly he was on the ground being hammered by powerful fists. He tried to protect himself, but the kid got through his flailing, incompetent arms.
Matt and one of the state cops pulled him off.
“My dad wanted to meet them! Well, he sure did, he sure did, you bastard. Liar! Liar! BLOODY LIAR!”
“Get him out of here,” one of the cops said to Matt. “For God’s sake, get that freak out of here!”
“I thought it would help. He knows about this stuff.”
“Come on, Matt, please,” the state cop said. Then he confronted Wiley. “There’s no law against the kind of crap you dish out, Mister, but I have to tell you, there has to be a special place in hell for scum like you, lying scum! This man died we don’t know how, but it wasn’t little green men, God damn you!”
“No,” Wylie said, and the quietness in his voice drew the attention of all of them. “I am not a liar. And the real shame is, maybe if I had understood this better, or taken it all more seriously, this man would not have died.”
He went to the car, got in, and closed his door. For good measure, he locked it.
Matt drove them away. Wiley looked back at the fabulous house in the middle of nowhere.
“I saw somebody,” Matt said, “at your house.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Last night, buddy.”
“I didn’t see anybody.”
“You were downstairs.”
“But—where were you?”
“On the ridge. I was goin’ out to see if you were fuckin’ with the cigars, and I just happened to see this guy come across your yard. Came right up to the house, looked in the window at you, then went around the back, and a few seconds later your computer comes on.”
“When was this?” Wylie asked.
“About eight.”
“Eight! The whole family was up!”
“Nobody did a thing. He was quiet, man, and fast.”
“Was it an alien? Could you tell?”
“It was a person.”
He turned onto the highway. The storm was closer now. He punched a couple of buttons on his police radio, and a mechanical voice began to deliver National Weather Service warnings. High winds in Hale Center, roofs off houses in Holcomb, tornado sighted in Midwood County, fast moving, dangerous storm.
He increased speed.
“You think we’re gonna take a hit, Wylie?”
“That’s a big mutha out there, you got that right.”
The storm towered, its base black and flashing with lightning. “Matt, I’m so scared it’s beyond scared.”
“I hear ya.”
“You say he was a person? Like us kinda person?”
“He looked like a kid. Nick’s age, twelve, thirteen.”
“So it was a townie? Or someone looking for Nick? Some friend of his, maybe.”
“No. This kid, he steps back, he looks at the house, he peers in windows.”
None of the town kids would do that. There were only maybe a hundred twelve-year-olds in the whole community, and Wylie knew them all. “No kid from around here, then,” he said.
“Absolutely not. He looked—I don’t know, Wylie, but the word is confused. Looking and looking at that house. Like he was trying to figure something out and couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t’ve been trying to get in. The place is unlocked until late. He could’ve just walked in.”
“He went in and went into your office and came out. Then he went down toward the Saunders. So I followed him. I’m right behind him. I thought he was some kid from town, was my impression. But when he walks up to the river bank, he did not cross the stream. He disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Swear to God.”
“Why didn’t you come into the house?”
“You guys were doin’ a screamer.”
“But he disappeared? I mean, in what sense?”
“He took three or four steps into those little rapids. The shallow place where it’s easy to cross. Right in the middle of it, he just simply was gone. Gone, Wylie.”
Dear heaven, it had been Trevor. He’d crossed the boundary between the worlds and he probably didn’t realize it. He’d been going home, but come here instead.
For a long time, Wylie had entertained the notion that the weir-cats people saw around here—the black panthers you saw back in the woods every once in a while—were from a parallel universe. They were animals that had evolved an ability to pass between the worlds as a defense mechanism.
There’d been a book called The Hunt for the Skinwalker, written about a ranch in Utah where scientists had documented the movement of such animals—not between this earth and Martin’s world, but yet another parallel universe, one in which creatures from our ice age still roamed freely.
Wylie’s mind wanted to race, but he didn’t know where it should go.
Silence fell between them. Wylie’s thoughts turned to the poor mutilated guy. What was that about? Something they were doing in their effort to enter this world. No question, but what was it?
They’d cut the guy up—therefore, had taken parts of him.
He shuddered. He had a feeling, if he waited, he was going to find all this out, and it wasn’t going to be good, not at all.
The storm, when it came, brought long, heavy gusts of wind, and the police radio began to burp trailer calls, as they were known. As everybody in Tornado Alley knows, trailers actually attract twisters, which was why the Kan-Sas Trailer Park had been the only thing destroyed by that tornado back in September.
“I know something’s wrong,” Matt said at last. “I just don’t want it to be this—oh, crap, Wiley, this weirdness that seems to follow you everywhere you go. I never told you this, but when we were kids—eleven, twelve, about—I was out on my bike late. I used to like to ride past Sue Wolff’s house and hope I’d see her on the porch and we’d get to talking or I’d get up the courage to ring the bell or whatever, and I turned onto Winkler, and there is this goddamn huge light over your house.”
“Jesus.”
“I thought the place was on fire. But then I felt the thing, Wiley. I felt it looking back at me. And, you know, it did not want me there.”
“When was this?”
“Summer of, uh, eighty-eight, I guess.”
“No, what time?”
“Oh, late. Coulda been after midnight, even. ’Cause I couldn’t risk her actually seeing me, of course. Not fat me, mooning after a cheerleader and all.”
They arrived at Wylie’s place. As he got out of the car, he saw that Matt had tears on his face. He said nothing about them, only thanked him for the ride and watched him leave.
Storm or no storm, he clambered down to the Saunders, moving among the heaving trees.
The little stream flowed normally. Some rain along its path somewhere had sped it up a bit, but that was the only thing in the slightest out of the ordinary.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Nick!”
“I saw you coming down here.”
“Yeah, I—”
“The kid is from the other world.”
He was absolutely so stunned that he couldn’t talk.
“I’ve read your book, Dad, and I know it’s real.”
Nick was a private sort of a kid. Smart, as his grades revealed, but not by nature very social. Wylie and he had a good relationship, though.
“You’ve been reading my book?”
“I read all your stuff.”
“And this kid? You’ve seen him?”
“Come over here, Dad.”
Nick led him a short distance away. They were right before the little rapids. Thunder rolled and wind gusted. Leaves raced past, yellow and red. It was quite amazingly beautiful, Wylie thought, but also completely normal.
“Watch,” Nick said. He picked up a river stone and sailed it out over the water, as if he was trying to skip it but coming in too high.
In its flight, the stone did a very strange thing. It sort of jumped. Not a lot, but it jumped in the air.
Nick tossed another one, and this time his aim must have been better, because the stone completely disappeared. Never hit the water. Was gone.
“My God, Son, when did you discover this?”
“He did it this afternoon.”
“He was here?”
“In your office, Dad. Dad, he’s all dirty and he looks really scared, and I think he’s Trevor. He started reading your book.”
The world heaved, and it wasn’t the storm. “Oh, my God,” Wylie said.
He turned and ran back to the house, Nick following.
“What’s going on,” Brooke yelled as they burst in, “don’t you two know it’s raining?”
“They can use it!” Wylie shouted as he dashed upstairs. “They can use the book!”
“Who? Nick, what’s going on?”
Nick hesitated on the stairs. “The closer we get to the twenty-first, the wider the gateways are opening, and there’s one down on the Saunders, right at the rapids. It’s between our world and Martin’s, and they’re using it. We think his son is. We think it’s Trevor. He tried to come home last night, and came through the gateway instead.”
Wylie said, “If they can read the book, honey, think how it can help them! We can let them know that Samson’s evil—”
“Dad—”
“—we can help them find the wanderers, maybe they can turn this thing around!”
“Dad, I think Trevor came here by accident. That’s why he was so confused and afraid. He thought he was going home. He couldn’t understand why all the furniture had changed, why there were strange people in the house, any of it. Then he stumbled on the book.”
“But he’ll be back. Of course.”
“We can’t know that, Dad.”
Wylie went into the office. Sat before the laptop. “There’s something larger at work, here. Whatever created that gateway. Whatever prevented me from destroying this incredibly precious book.”
“Um, Dad, that would be me and mom.”
“Excuse me?”
Nick nodded. “She has a USB drive she keeps in her pocket. She saves it on that.” He paused for a moment. “Don’t be mad at me, but I wrote the code that prevented you from erasing it.”
“You can program? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s a few lines of code.”
“We need to find Trevor. I need to write about him. Tell him where his dad is, give them a plan of action.”
“It’s better not to talk about this.” Brooke stood in the doorway. She had the drive in her hand.
“But you—we—”
She put her finger to her lips. “Don’t talk about it, either of you. Just let it lie.”
Kelsey came in. She came to her daddy, crawled into his lap.
Silence fell among them. Wylie understood that all was not as it seemed. In fact, nothing was as it seemed. “What’s going on?”
“Wylie…”
Kelsey stuck her face in his. She held him by the ears. “That’s what we don’t ever, never talk about, Daddy.” She shook her head. “Ever, never.” Then she gave him a wet kiss and ran off laughing down the hall.
Nick and Brooke gazed steadily at him. He thought again of poor Nunnally, and how very close to this house that attack had been.
The reptilians had reached Nunnally, and they could come here, too. Five years ago, they’d opened a gateway not far from this house. What would prevent them from following Trevor through the gateway on the river? “We could be in trouble, here,” Wylie said.
“You’ve got that right,” Brooke said.
“But I don’t know what to write about. I don’t know where to take it.”
Brooke said softly, “Trevor. Just think about Trevor.”
Wylie closed his eyes.
“Let yourself happen,” Nick said. “Just let it flow.”
He saw a face. White hair, gray eyes, all crag and grandeur. “Christ, I don’t need Al North!”
Then it came, a flood that blanked his mind, that broke his thought and his will and took him over completely.
Throwing back his head as if he had been slugged hard, he started to type. He watched his fingers fly across the keys. He stared, finally, at the words that were pouring out of him. “Al,” he whispered, “it’s you, it’s gonna be you.”
Outside, the thunder rumbled and sheets of hail came bouncing down, and the trees moaned. Inside, Wiley’s helpless shouts at a man who could not hear him echoed through the house, in the dark of the storm.
Brooke got water for him, and tended him as she always did, while he worked.
Nick went downstairs and saw to the guns.
ELEVEN
DECEMBER 11 MOUNTAIN OF LIES
2012 The War for Souls Page 15
