He signed off, figuring he’d do the chat rounds in a couple of hours, get feedback from anybody who’d listened to his show ... Maybe even zero in on some saucer broadcasts. Tonight definitely had that touch of weird to it.
Then he went down, grabbed his World Weekly News and headed hopefully for the crapper.
“UFO SHOCKER,” screamed the headline.
“HEAD BANGERS FROM OUTER SPACE”
“You Centaurans,” said Harry Reynolds, rocking on the commode with laughter, as he read about a UFO heavy metal concert in South America, his belt buckle jingling on the tile floor. “What comedians!”
He turned the page, where he started to read about the pregnant hundred-year-old woman. (“And Dad’s a hundred and four!”)
That was when he started feeling groggy.
He looked up, and noticed that the bathroom light looked a little funny. He’d been sitting on the can now for about fifteen minutes. About five minutes into the session, he’d noticed the light waver a little. And the house had creaked a bit. It was nothing to get excited about; it wasn’t exactly a new house, and it made odd sounds from time to time. But the lights—he kept those in pretty good repair, what with his electrician’s sensibilities. He felt ludicrous and vulnerable now, his Lee jeans and boxers around his ankles, and the lights going funny—
He put the World Weekly News down and moved to get off the commode, when the faint spell hit. It wasn’t really like he was paralyzed—it was like the air had suddenly turned to Jell—O, and he just couldn’t move real quick. The very act of simply pulling up his pants was a daunting proposition. He blinked, and just stayed in that bent-over position, happy to be able to breathe.
What the hell...?
The sounds were an odd swirling of little feet and little voices. First, they sounded like they were coming from the living room. But then they altered subtly in texture, echoing and booming nearer, like steps coming through a tunnel.
The sounds were coming closer. They were coming toward the bathroom! Fear like he’d never felt before engulfed Harry Reynolds. These sounds were touching something deep and primal—an ancient alarm signal that never goes off in most people! Sweat popped out in beads on his face, and he strained again to reach down and pull up his pants. He had to get up! Had to close that door! Through the fog of his slowed perceptions, the ringing klaxon inside him demanded: CLOSE THAT DOOR! LOCK IT! it screamed. THEY’RE HERE, HARRY. THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU!
He touched his belt. His fingers curled around the top of the blue jeans. Even as he felt the fabric on his fingertips, he knew there would be no time. With all his might, he pushed himself away from the toilet, toward the door. He sprawled across the tile floor, hands outstretched toward the door, the pink tassels of the bathmat looming like a jungle before his left eyeball. He’d left the bathroom door ajar, and now he had to close it, lock it!
Through the clear tar of the air, he wallowed, reaching, reaching for the door.
His fingers were just a moment from the wood, when a hand reached around the doorjamb.
It came around, below the knob. Harry could see long, delicate digits move into a slow grip like spider’s legs.
Sheer terror stopped him from further movement. Harry Reynolds could only stare up helplessly as the being entered the room. All language had fled his mind, so he did not think the word alien or visitor or any of the many synonyms he’d used over more than thirty years of fascination with the UFO phenomenon. His mind was in pure R-complex now, back to its prehistoric beginnings, locked in flight-or-fight mode, but unable to jerk out of paralysis.
The door opened, and the being at the other side swam into view.
The creature was perhaps three feet tall, and humanoid purely in dwarfish standards. Its limbs were slender and garbed in a dark blue jumpsuit of some sort that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the bathroom light. Some kind of cap was perched atop a narrow insectile head, but this was not what caught Harry’s attention. It was the eyes.
The eyes were like gigantic onyx almonds. They looked down at Harry with a bottomless strangeness from a grey—tinged skin pulled tight over a delicately boned skull.
For a moment, Harry was lost in wonder at those eyes. They looked like the darkest corner of space. Space beyond time, beyond being, space that was somehow alive.
The creature moved further into the room, stopping by the sink. Another one moved in, identical to the first. Beyond the door, out of sight, Harry could hear others, chattering softly.
In the hand of the second was a wand, and suddenly Harry’s fear was back again, full force. Because the tip of this wand began to glow, to pulse a cherry red, like the tip of some red—hot poker. And the creature was moving it toward Harry’s face.
Suddenly, Harry realized he was screaming.
It didn’t sound like him. It came out, unbidden and urgent, like a spike of vomit.
The creatures stepped back, blinking their eyes, seemingly surprised by Harry’s reaction. Another one entered the room. The one with the wand leaned over and said something, though its lips did not move. “Please be quiet. You are alarming us!”
Harry could not stop screaming. A tiny part of his mind watched himself, wondering that after thirty years of waiting for just this moment, why he should react this way. That tiny part, though, was fading, fading into the scream ...
They weren’t out there anymore. They were here!
The wand lifted. It floated as though adrift in antigravity, and gentled down to touch the forehead of Harry Reynolds.
The night flowed in through the bathroom window, swirled around him, and zipped him up into seamless darkness.
Spicy cardboard.
That smell. In the darkness, that smell came first, like a beckoning finger hooking into him and dragging him out of unconsciousness.
When Harry Reynolds woke up, he wasn’t screaming.
He lay, he realized, elevated from his surroundings, on some sort of horizontal cushion that was like an examination table. His eyelids fluttered open fully. His shirt was off, but his jeans were on. He looked around him, first focusing on the array of blinking lights which were hung in screens and panel displays, some on what appeared to be controls—and some embedded in three-dimensional patterns, like floating holograms. Then he realized that he wasn’t alone. His company shifted into view.
The ones hovering over him were taller than the ones who had come into his bathroom. There were three of them, and he had the odd feeling that they were female. Their heads were more humanoid, less triangular, and their eyes, though certainly slanted, had pupils. Their jumpsuits were more metallic looking, silver sheaths over slim bodies.
The table on which Harry lay was against the wall of a circular room perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter. He could see, in the dark side of the room, the dim outlines of a round passageway. A door?
“What are you doing?” he said as one of the beings turned to a globular outgrowth attached to the wall.
He could talk. He was still terrified, but he could talk! The return of his tongue—his most cherished physical commodity—reduced his sense of impotence. Everything remained foggy and uncertain, a dreamlike quality draping over the reality, but he had some kind of control.
The closest of the creatures turned to him, curiosity filling its eyes. “We will not harm you,” it said, but its mouth did not move. Harry felt as though the words bloomed like audial flowers in his brain.
He lifted his head, but the strain of just speaking exhausted him, and he lay back, still confused. He could only watch what the creatures were doing.
The globular unit at the wall seemed to be an item of furniture. The creature pulled out a drawer from it, and on this drawer rested the gleam of metal, the shiver of crystal. The creature picked up a long, needlelike instrument that seemed to sparkle of its own accord. Carefully, gracefully, the instrument was carried over to Harry. He could see it glitter by his eyes, and caught the reflection of a hypodermic—like end nearing his ne
ck, by the base of his ear.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to do this!”
They ignored him. He felt a sharp bite on his neck and could feel the metal going in, as though it were an insect proboscis probing for a vein. Deeper, deeper, deeper ... And the pain did not stop. The sensation of the metal intrusion jabbing up into his brain stopped, but the pain in his head screamed and seared. He slipped into unconsciousness once more, and then abruptly he was back awake, the cardboard smell in his nostrils again.
Cardboard and roses, this time.
Two of them leaned over him now. Some kind of tubing dangled down from the ceiling. It was coiled, and had a metal device on the end, like something out of a dental nightmare. One of the creatures grabbed the device, and turned on a switch. The instrument hummed and began to glow a bright green. The creature carefully made a scan of Harry Reynolds, from cranium to abdomen, the device beeping and humming with an unearthly awfulness. The three other aliens in attendance watched the operation intently.
“Would you STOP THIS!” screamed Harry. “Talk to me—don’t dissect me.”
They tilted up their heads and looked at him, like he was the oddest and most astonishing thing in the universe. Then they started chattering amongst themselves.
“You turkeys! Stop hurting me! Let’s communicate! For years I been defending you, and now you do this to me?!”
He tried to get up, but found he could barely move.
“What kind of things are you?”
All of his life, he’d cherished the odd and unusual. But this wasn’t just weird—it was goddamn scary!
One of them came and leaned over him. Its breath smelled foul, like machine oil mixed with garlic and strained through old cardboard. “Please be still,” it said, its voiceless words filling his head. “You are the Honored One.”
“Yeah! My ass!” And then such a wave of dread consumed Harry Reynolds that he thought he was going to die. He felt cold ... Cold, and alone ... The lights glowed around him like dead diamonds. Cold and lonely ... adrift not just in an uncaring universe ... but a malevolent universe.
Harry moaned, unable to scream: vocal dry heaves.
Another device lowered from the dark, misty ceiling, like a periscope with claws. The creatures conferred amongst each other, then they turned back to Harry, their tender hands drifting toward his pants. In a few deft motions, they had undone his belt, unzipped his zipper and pulled down his jeans and underpants, exposing his genitals. The cold and fear had shrunk them, and now with this new blast of chill, they dwindled further. One of the aliens took the newly lowered device from the ceiling, and adjusted the cuplike object at the end.
Harry could only stare, horrified, the “No!” caught in his throat like a chunk of gristle.
The sheen of stainless steel, slivers of razor-sharp glass, pinpoints of needles: the end of the thing, opened, was like a robotic porcupine. The creature guided it down so the cup fitted over Harry’s penis and scrotum. Harry sensed the sharp parts of the device more than felt them. Still, it was like imminent fellatio from a moray eel!
“No!” he whispered.
The creature touched a section of the shaft of the instrument, and lights—red, yellow, blue—rotated, whispering a soft whir. It started as a tickling that reached and shivered the short hairs of his very soul. Then the penetrating pain began, worse than anything before. It felt as though his privates were being fed to a food processor, resurrected, then fed in again. Somehow, through this blinding pain, Harry remained conscious. Tears leaked from his eyes and his back arched, but otherwise he could not move.
And through it all, he was aware of those dark alien onyx eyes on him, staring dispassionately.
Mercifully, his mind managed to tear away from consciousness, and he slipped again into nothingness.
When Harry woke up again, his muscles were braced as though for pain, he was breathing hard and was aware of the sweat on his face and chest.
The visitors no longer hovered over him. Two were by the nearby control boards, and the others were gone.
Harry realized that he could move—he was no longer in pain. He simply felt very confused and deeply troubled. He lifted his head and saw that his pants were still lowered. He perceived little red dots covering his genitals, but there was no blood. His Midwestern modesty winning over his paralysis, he lifted himself and pulled his jeans up to cover himself.
The creatures at the control board did not seem to notice that he was awake. They stared intently at their screens or readings or whatever, ignoring Harry.
Harry shivered on the examination table, getting hold of himself. The pain, dread, and terror still hung on him like a shroud, but somehow other emotions, as well as ego, had reasserted themselves, and were in control again once more.
Harry Reynolds felt ashamed. Deeply, inexplicably ashamed. He knew then, at that moment, how violent a degradation rape must be for a woman. There was pain and abuse here, yes ... but it was more than that, something deep and unexplainable, and so troubling that Harry did not care to explore it. He focused instead on his other, more familiar feelings.
First, there was outrage and anger. And then ... then there was betrayal.
It had been so long ago that Harry Reynolds had started looking up at the sky and wondering about other superior life forms that he’d forgotten the purity of his initial, almost religious attitude. For so long, he’d reached out, shaming himself in the eyes of people—reached out for them with his radio signals, his heart on his sleeve.
And now, this.
Somehow, though—something, inside him, feared that something bad would happen. Korea and the army had drained Harry’s innocence, and the embittered side of him knew that the possibility the aliens weren’t saintly emissaries from paradise definitely existed.
They had done nothing to assuage his anger and his sense of betrayal.
On Harry’s left pants’ leg at the inseam, was a zipper. He’d fixed these jeans himself, special—just like he’d fixed all his pants, so he could get at his false leg, if he needed to adjust it or take it off or something, without actually shucking his whole pants. He found the zipper tab and carefully, soundlessly pulled it up all the way to his crotch, laying bare his leg.
Good. The aliens hadn’t fooled with it. A quick glance up showed the two remaining creatures involved with their work.
Harry returned to his fake leg. His right leg had been amputated just above the knee by a MASH unit (and he never could watch that TV show) after a Chinese shell had blown most of it off anyway. For years he’d relied on a clunky, VA-provided wooden leg that needed a crutch as a complement. But in the late sixties, he had gotten one of those articulated plastic—jobbies and never looked back. Supposedly, with the new ones you could play basketball, they were so good. But Harry didn’t play basketball. He figured out pretty fast how the things worked (and cursed himself for not inventing them earlier) and started perfecting his own type—one with a compartment.
He thumbed the tab, and the springs pushed out a lid that lifted. Harry waited a moment for his fingers to stop trembling, then lifted out his invention.
The smallness of this compartment in the calf was the key to the nature of the device; you could only fit one thing inside, and Harry wished to conceal several things. He called it his Swiss Army Camera.
One of Harry Reynolds’s consuming life-passions was to get a picture of a UFO. Those first two times he’d seen the things, he’d only had words to recreate them. And should he ever be actually picked up by aliens, he wanted to take their pictures. But then, he thought it over, he also figured an audio recording wouldn’t hurt either. But when he had this secret compartment on his body, the first two things together couldn’t fit, so he built a casing that slid in perfectly, and built inside of this a camera and a tape recorder.
Harry assayed the situation. He figured he had time to take a couple of pictures. He took off the lens cap, and clicked off a few shots—the camera automatically adjusted
its own f—stop. He took out the roll of film and stuck it into the pocket of his jeans, just in case he ever got out of here—which he rather doubted. What he had planned next, the fucking buggers wouldn’t like at all.
In his paranoid nightmares, Harry Reynolds had foreseen this possibility. He’d been following the reports of alien abductions carefully, and knew how upset the abductees were with the experience. Harry figured that there was two possibilities—either naiveté on the part of the Visitors (and hadn’t he tried to educate them in his broadcasts), or malevolence. With what had just passed, he had to opt for malevolence. The fuckers were gonna pay for betraying his hopes and dreams and violating his body. Apparently not only the planet earth stank—so did the whole universe!
In the army and in Korea, Harry Reynolds’s specialty was munitions. He’d built model rockets for his son, but he didn’t go in much for weapons. Still, when he made his decision, it was easy enough to construct the thing with a safe little ball of plastic explosive and a firing wire. It had slipped into the extra space of his camera casing, easy as you please. He’d also made sure that it was damn hard to accidentally press the button that would set off the timing device—you had to pull the camera button up, twist it around just so, and then cock it before it would engage.
Harry Reynolds did this, anger and outrage still swelling in him, the pain in his head and his groin still throbbing.
He set the camera—grenade. There was a five second fuse.
Harry carefully studied the panel where the aliens stood. He could lob the thing right underneath, and the bastards wouldn’t be able to touch it. And when it blew up—Harry had no idea where he was. He supposed he was in one of their ships. There was a possibility that the ship was in the air, and his little present would send it plummeting. His pain and his upset were such that he didn’t care. Maybe this would lob a present into the laps of UFO fanciers——a crashed saucer, courtesy of Harry Reynolds!
Wherever he was, he had to strike back. Every part of him demanded it. And if he died—well, from what he heard, if aliens got hold of you once, they liked to come back and mess you over some more later on. He didn’t want to believe it was that bad, but now he knew it was worse than he could possibly imagine. Better to die than to again go through what he’d just experienced.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 2
