The face was that of a snake or a lizard, but flattened and extended so that it covered the front of a human-sized head. It was softly angled, sleek, with a snake’s fixed lips. There was a smile, though, sparkling in the golden eyes, which were an incredible contrast to the human eyes she’d been exhibiting a few moments ago. These eyes were sparkling with life and humor and, he could see it so clearly—glee.
There was an earthly equivalent to these creatures. They were chameleons. But these—they were far, far more evolved than any earthly shape-shifter. And he suspected, also, now, why Samson carried his syringe. He wasn’t an addict. To live on the surface, they must need some kind of support. Allergies, diseases—he’d probably never know what endangered them there.
“Now, I want you to try to stay calm, Al. The less you fight, the less this will hurt. You need to understand that we have no mercy, Al. We have no mercy.” The eyes twinkled. “So it’s up to you. This can be a terrible agony for you, or it can go smoothly. Up to you, Al, up to you.”
The others were working with their equipment. Al watched the nearest one turn toward him. He was as black as night, his skin had the polish of a jewel. It shimmered as he moved, sleek muscles rippling within. He drew a black tube out of the wall and approached Al. As he moved forward, the tube made a faint hissing sound. The end, which appeared to be made of copper, glowed with a curious green light.
“We’ve already tested you on this,” ‘Jennifer’ said. “We know it’s going to work.”
A huge emotion filled him. This wasn’t just death, it was worse, it was the absolute end of his being. Soul murder.
He hadn’t practiced his martial arts in years, but he called his old skills up from the very depths of his being, moved to a back stance and tried a side kick.
The creature caught his foot and slammed him to the floor.
He took the hit, tried to shake it off, failed. The female made a string of sounds. And then, unmistakably, they all laughed. It was quiet, easy laughter, the laughter of men running a slaughter line, joking about something else as they slit the throats of the pigs.
The one who had taken him down turned away and continued his work, which involved screwing a copper fitting onto one of the strange glass tubes.
Al got to his feet. He was feeling a dull, hopeless sort of determination. His own greed had brought him here. He’d taken the assignment from Samson despite the fact that he knew damn well that something was very wrong. He had done this out of eagerness for promotion, and that even though the entire system was hopelessly broken and none of it made a bit of difference.
They had seen his ambition, and used it against him to lure him very neatly into this trap.
He had been more than willing to come down here and kill another human being’s soul, so why was he now being so careful of his own?
But he was. He had a touch of eternity in him, he could feel it clearly, and he did not want it to die, he did not want it so much that this time he really lashed out at the female, who had come close to him. His blow connected, and her head bounced to one side as he gave her the hardest knuckle slap he could manage. Then he waded in, fists pounding. But each time he struck a blow, less seemed to happen. It was like fighting wet cotton, and she watched him impassively as he slowly became unable to move at all. Just like the victims in the relief, he was soon standing frozen, arms at his sides.
One of the males now strolled over to him.
The female pointed at a particular painting and spoke a few words. The painting showed a prisoner having his eyes gouged out.
One of his captors went to it, looked at it for some moments, then opened a black case like a thick pocketknife. There was a pop, followed by hissing. The thing became like a tiny star in his hand, fiercely bright.
He approached Al. His eyes were emptier than hers, narrow and yellow-green, not gold. As Al watched, the nictitating membranes slid quickly over the pupils, then disappeared back into the orbits.
The star was brought close to his face. It was hot, and he tried to turn away but could not move a millimeter. Now it began to burn around his lips. Then there was a sizzling sound and he tried to cry out, but instead found himself gagging on his own blood.
When the light was withdrawn, blood poured down, spattering on the floor, washing his feet and the fleshy remains of his lips in thick, red sheets.
His mind blanked. He knew that he was being slaughtered. Was aware of it but distantly. Shock does that, even to a soldier.
An instant later, what appeared to be a red serpent’s tongue darted out of the object, striking his left eye, causing a bright red flash in his brain. He heard muscles pop and felt torment in his neck as his body literally tore itself to pieces in its effort to move against the invisible restraints that bound it. He did not understand that he had been placed on an electrically charged plate that neutralized his nervous system, stopping all communication between brain and body. He also did not understand that all this equipment was not only old but simple—simpler by far than most man-made circuitry. He did not understand that these creatures were not advanced beyond man in most science, but only in one science, the science of the soul, which made these exhausted, half-starved and poverty-stricken beings appear like dark gods to him, as the Spaniards—sick, starving, and far from home—had once appeared to the Aztecs.
He never dreamed that the operators were tired and bored and longing to be home with their own wives and lovers, and did not, themselves, fully understand why they were here or what they were doing. He did not know that the young female’s happiness came from the fact that she would get a great deal of credit and power if the monster she was creating was successful. He didn’t even begin to understand what it was—that it would be used to penetrate into another universe and end a threat that had appeared there.
It was a human universe, and one that they had known about for thousands of years. They could even enter it, to some extent, but not so completely that they could actually do something there as complex as finding a computer file and destroying it.
They could enter that universe only with clumsy thrusts, not with the kind of precision they now needed.
The world went black and he wanted to howl out his rage and his absolute terror, but those abilities were not available to him. Nothing was available to him. He was a bright spark called Al, that was all—that, and pain, waves of it, gushers of it, boiling oceans of it.
Then he felt fingers moving his genitals, and then yet more pain, this time radiating up from there, and he knew that he had been castrated.
Through the agony, Al began to get the odd feeling that he was rocking, as if he was in a boat or on a swing. He had no way to know that the surgery he had just undergone had shattered the specialized nerve-endings that bound the electromagnetic organ that was the soul to the physical one that was the body. This was one way to do it. The shearing light was another.
The moment the coring and cutting was complete, the rocking became a bizarre, sensationless lurching and the room seemed to race past him, the figures in it whizzing and spinning as his vision, freed from the limitations of his eyes, saw everything around him at once. He was manipulated as casually as if he had been a moth captured between the fingers of a cruel child.
And yet, the connections between body and soul remained strong, and when one of the creatures thrust his thumbs into the base of Al’s jaws, he felt it pop as his blood-gushing mouth gaped.
The next sensation Al felt was very like what he’d experienced during his nightmare the other night—the same choking, gagging sense of being invaded down his gullet. One of the thick cables with its frayed, cracking insulation was being brought up and pushed down his throat. It hurt a thousand times more than what had been done the other night, and what happened to his mind was similar but a thousand, thousand times more powerful. He gagged, his body tried to choke the thing out of him, but strong hands pushed it deep.
The other night, they’d been sifting his thoughts to see if h
e would come to understand who they really were and what they were doing, and therefore if he might betray their plans on his way into their trap.
He gagged furiously, he tried to make sounds, he tried to scream out warning to the world, that the United States was actually under the leadership of the invaders.
That traitor Samson’s flyers were indeed intended to deceive people into congregating, and Samson had used some sort of mind control to induce the president to commit suicide, and now Al was down here being destroyed, the one person who might have been able to get in Samson’s way.
He was here because he’d been about to figure out that Samson was one of them.
Like pages from a book, the living pages of his soul swept from his body and into a new state. Around him, he saw blue glass, and beyond it, the lithe and gleaming figures moving in the extraction chamber where his body now lay in a bleeding heap. He saw them take the parts they had cut off and push them into a hole. He was stuck to the filament inside one of the huge glass tubes. The filament was inside him, and his whole soul was on fire, his soul was burning.
“Nice,” the female said in English. “We’re done, General.”
The tube was now filled with him: a plasma of electrons that shimmered with a million different colors, sparking and recoiling when it hurled itself against the glass wall again and again.
The captain made a series of statements, speaking in her soft, swift voice. Two of her helpers lifted the tube as the third pulled the cable out of its worn bronze socket. They placed the tube into a larger socket in the floor. Al could see them, but he could not speak, he could not scream out, above all, he could not get out of the tube.
He watched them slide his body into an ordinary military issue body bag. Then two of them lifted it onto their shoulders and carried it out. As the door slid closed behind them, Al saw them taking it off into the depths of the facility.
When the door closed, darkness came, absolute. Then, not quite. There was a glow, fitful, that he realized came from this tube. What light was left in this dark chamber of hell, was the light of his soul.
PART TWO
THE RUIN OF SOULS
Saint Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits, prowling throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls.
—POPE LEO XIII Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel
This is the Hour of Lead—Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
—EMILY DICKINSON “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes”
TWELVE
DECEMBER 18, EVENING CHILDREN OF MYSTERY
MARTIN HAD BEEN LYING SO still for so long that he had lost sensation from the waist down. His legs were not there at all, his torso was as cold as a corpse. He was famished and freezing. He’d been on the move for days, going from house to house, sleeping in attics and storm cellars, anywhere that offered a decent seal against the return of the light.
He was home now, hiding in his own crawl space.
All of this time, he’d been looking for Trevor. He’d given up on Winnie and Lindy. They were beyond his help now, given that following was a trap.
As an American, he had not felt vulnerable in the same way that so many people did in this world, perpetually frightened that their loved ones might simply disappear some night.
That didn’t happen here, and he had not anticipated the extraordinary emotional wear and tear that losing your loved ones brought. It was so emasculating that he had to fight just becoming passive.
He did this by creating a goal for himself. His goal was Trevor. He’d searched half the houses in the Smokes by now. He was planning a night raid into the town, soon, too. Night after night, the light had scoured Harrow, Kansas, and he doubted that many people were left by now. The same was true of the Smokes. It came here every night, seeking and probing, and those other things came, too, the shadowy things that he’d encountered when he was a follower.
Thunder bellowed. Another storm was coming. Soon, there would be more rain. Methane releases from permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers, the flooding of polar oceans with fresh water from the melt, the wild state of the sun—all of these things were combining to make the weather turn dangerous just when this horrific attack occurred.
For years, the U.S. had pleaded with the empires to curtail pollution, but they would not touch their development zones. Industrializing regions of Africa and South Asia had completely overwhelmed the planet’s ability to maintain balance.
More planning on the part of these invaders? He feared so. He feared that they might have infiltrated every colonial administration on earth. No doubt they would turn out to be comfortable in an atmosphere choked with what we thought of as pollution.
Despite the sodden cold of the crawlspace, he sweated.
The silence was deep, now. His watch told him that sunset was not far away. He had a mission tonight—aside from avoiding the light and the other menaces. He intended to track down a sound he’d heard off and on, that came from down toward the Saunders. Drumming, he thought. Somebody down there, perhaps.
Of course, in this world it was impossible to tell. Could be anything. Some creature from hell, or an alien machine. Or it could be people, and if so, there were more than one or two of them.
He stirred a little, just moving his body slightly. Then he waited. There was no sound from above. He raised his left hand and pressed it against the trapdoor.
After a moment, he pressed harder, causing the door to move just slightly. When there was no reaction, he pushed the door all the way open.
He made his way through the dining room, then the living room where he had spent so much time in his chair reading, where he had read to his kids, where he had listened to the music he loved.
The front door gaped. As he went through, he tried to push it closed, but it was no use, they’d torn it off its hinges. He stepped into the grass, in the long shadows of evening. He listened, heard nothing.
No, it was a night sound, that drumming, and finding its source was about the only thing he could conceive of that would draw him outside after the sun went down.
Then he heard another sound, a great whooshing overhead that was familiar to him from his night as a follower. He glimpsed, turning hard against the clouds that raged above, what looked like a gigantic bat.
He could feel it watching him. Knew that it was. And then he heard from the woods behind the house that familiar mechanical clatter.
The sun was not yet down, but the alien animals were already stalking him. The bird was the spotter, and whatever was in those woods, he suspected, was there to tear him apart.
He scrambled down the hill toward the stream, and then moved along its bank, rattling the dry autumn brush as he went through it. Tears swarmed his eyes, he was that afraid, as above him the wheeling bird wailed, and the woods behind him and around him echoed with the noise of whatever monstrosities were there.
He came to the little lake, really just a widening of the Saunders, where he sometimes swam in the summer, and ran out onto its pier. Forcing himself not to dive, he slipped into the frigid water and moved under the pier, clinging to one of its slippery pilings, concealed by the three rowboats that were there, old Mrs. Lane’s little white dingy that she used to fish for crappies, and his boat that could be fitted with a small sail and go racing across the thirty-acre lake, and the third boat, a duck hunter’s craft, camouflaged, that had not been used by anybody in years.
Then he heard his pursuers, their feet splashing softly, and heard their sounds, mutterings, clatterings, small whistles that he realized were a language and a complex one, and he wondered, then, if these might be the real aliens, or if they were creatures that had been trained like dogs or were smarter than
dogs, and then if they might be constructed things, machines brought to life.
There came tapping, a claw tip on the wooden dock above his head. He heard the eager whisper of their breath, and the more intimate clattering of what he thought now must be mouth parts. There was a whisper in that clattering that suggested knife blades, steel against steel. From high overhead there came the long wail again, and he could hear in it quite clearly a tone of angry question.
Had they lost him?
Something slid into the water. It was clear and deep, the little lake, with tall water weeds that rose up from its darkness, and he saw, sailing below him, a huge shadow, blacker than black, with eight great legs outstretched around it.
He watched it sailing above the gently waving fronds, coming toward him, and felt as it came closer, more frozen, more helpless.
This was his death, then, his ugly destiny, and he’d done nothing to deserve it.
The thing in the water made a graceful turn and then came back toward the dock. He watched the shadow glide closer.
He’d lost, he’d been captured, and now, he thought, his lot must be to share the fate of the mangled boy he’d seen in the field. Perhaps he should fight more, but he didn’t know how. If he swam, the thing would be on him in a second. If he got out, he’d have to confront the ones crowding the dock.
Something brushed his leg, feeling like a whipping frond of water weed, and he saw the shadow darting there. It was closing in, it was about to strike.
He shut his eyes. Waited. Heard a sloshing sound, very light. Sick with fear but unable to bear the feeling that he was about to sustain an attack he opened them again.
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