Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  Don was just as glad that the coffee was well boiled.

  Ungar wiped his mouth against the back of his hand. "Let's get on out there. I've got a lotta other stuff to do today."

  He pulled his ancient Jeep up to the house. His daughter and son got in with him. The four soldiers rode in Walters's much newer Jeep. Gray and Hesseltine sat in the back, deciding that it was best to leave the staff car behind.

  They bounced over the desolate land for about half an hour. Gray could see a mountain ahead, but it never seemed to get any closer. The land undulated in great, shallow waves. Spanish daggers and chorro cactus dragged along the sides of the Jeep. Tough clumps of dry grass waved in the morning breeze. Out where the land was flat tumbleweeds bounded along.

  They came to the top of a rise and he saw the crash site. His practiced eye told him at once that something had blown up us it was traveling in a westerly direction. Debris had funned out from a point about a hundred yards below the base of a hill. The wreckage covered an area about a quarter of a mile long. They stopped the Jeeps. "No large debris," Hesseltine said immediately.

  "What was it?" Walters asked.

  Gray spoke. "The lack of large debris does suggest a balloon or some such thing."

  The rancher walked into the mess. "I want y'all to take a look at something." He pointed at the ground.

  "Those things."

  Gray saw some small balsa beams, some shaped like the letter I and others like a T. He picked one up. It was marked by violet hieroglyphics.

  "Cyrillic?" Hesseltine asked.

  "No," Walters said as he examined it.

  "Jap?"

  Gray looked at the writing. It was vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian, but there were no familiar animal shapes.

  "I've never seen anything like it before."

  The little girl held up a piece of what seemed to Gray to be parchment. There were rows of little squiggles on it. They were pink and purple, and Gray couldn't make anything out of them at all.

  "Maybe they're numbers," Hesseltine said. "The way they're in columns like that."

  The little girl held another piece of the parchment up to the sun, the disk of which had just cleared the horizon. "You can see yellow flowers inside. Its real pretty."

  The torn pieces of parchment were abundant, and all four soldiers picked them up and held them to the sun.

  "Cornflowers," Gray said.

  Walters grunted. "Primroses. Cornflowers are blue."

  "You can't burn it, bend it, tear it or nothin'," the rancher said. "Just like the tinfoil."

  PFC Winters spoke. "What I think you all have here," he said in his drawl, "is the pieces of one of them flying disks like folks've been seeing."

  Nobody replied. Suddenly Walters grabbed a large piece of foil and begun struggling furiously with it. He pulled it, ripped at it, stood on it and tried to stretch it. Nothing.

  Finally he took out his pistol. "Okay, folks, we'll see just how strong this stuff really is." He laid the three-foot-square piece of material out on the ground and fired into it.

  There was a blast from the gun, and the foil swarmed into the ground behind the bullet. "That tore it," the PFC

  said. He and Walters pulled it out of the ground.

  The flattened bullet was lying in the middle of the foil, which was completely unmarred.

  "You sure that's not Cyrillic on that paper," Walters asked again.

  The bullet just lay there, flattened. The foil shone in the sun. Gray took out his Old Golds and with shaking hands pulled the foil from around the few cigarettes that remained in the pack. He took a piece of the strange metal in one hand and the cigarette wrapping in the other.

  The metal was thinner by a considerable margin. He was a methodical man, and not quick to make decisions. He carefully returned the cigarette wrapping to the pack and put his cigarettes in his pocket. He then picked up a piece of the parchment and attempted to burn it with his lighter. It would not burn.

  "Nothin' burns," the rancher said. "And the wood doesn't break."

  Walters grabbed a piece of the wood. It bent like rubber. No matter how he twisted it around he could not make it snap. Finally he threw it to the ground. "What the hell is it?"

  Gray looked at the PFC. "I think you're absolutely right, soldier. I think what we have here is the remains of an exploded flying disk."

  "Oh, Lord," Walters said. "What are they doing here? What are they up to?"

  "Maybe just looking around," Hesseltine replied.

  "By dark of night? In secret? I hardly think that's all they're doing." Walters looked grim. He had taken his pistol from his shoulder holster and stuck it in his belt.

  "We don't know what they're doing," Gray said. There was annoyance in his voice. He didn't like loose speculation. They weren't equipped even to think about things like intent. "What we need to do is gather up as much of this stuff as we can, and get it back to the field pronto." "We ought to recce the whole site,"

  Hesseltine said. The four of them walked it, making rough measurements and kicking under the sheets of foil, the wooden beams, the parchment, looking for any large objects.

  It took them about an hour to examine the area and fill the jeeps with as much debris as they could conveniently carry.

  When they returned to the house they transferred some of the material to the rear of Gray's wagon. Then they headed back to the field. The rest of the stuff remained with Walters. Don Gray was now excited, even elated.

  He had forgotten the cries in the night, and was now thinking only of the incredible thing they had found. It was one of the most momentous discoveries in history, and he had made it. Just absolutely incredible. "We are going to have a hell of a lot of work to do on this," he said to Hesseltine.

  "What work? This is gonna be Eighth Air Force business. Pentagon business. We've done our work. You'll see. The brass is gonna be all over this thing." "Maybe and maybe not."

  I believe that this was the moment that Donald Gray became a hero. To his own considerable surprise, he found that he had formed a powerful conviction about this. It was not going to be a military secret.

  "What about the threat to the 509th? I mean, why are they out here in this godforsaken place, anyway? Could be because it's close to the squadron." Hesseltine's hands gripped the wheel. "The A-bomb is a big thing.

  Maybe even big enough to be of concern to people on other planets." Now that he had seen the danger, his sense of duty was finally aroused.

  After that they were both silent for a long time, trying to absorb the import of his statement. Soon Hesseltine turned on the radio and picked up the ten A.M. news out of Albuquerque. Then there was a soap opera, Young Doctor Malone. Gray listened without interest to the complications of the doctor's life. It was nearly one when they finally reached the outskirts of Roswell. "Let's stop at my house for lunch," Gray said. "I want my son to see this stuff."

  "You sure about that?"

  "I'm certain."

  "It's gonna be classified."

  "Well, it's not classified now, and I want my boy to see it and hold it in his hands. It'll be something to tell his grandchildren."

  "He's twelve. Say he has grandchildren when he's fifty. That'll be, let's see, nineteen-eighty-five. By then everybody will know all about this. There'll probably be aliens living down the block. And the fact that he saw a few pieces of a wrecked disk in 1947 won't amount to a hill of beans."

  "Well, Jennine still makes a better ham sandwich than you'll find in the officer's club."

  "I could use a whole ham. A couple of hams. Those poor devils live on beans and bread."

  "And I've got a six-pack of White Label beer."

  "Trommers? Where the hell did you get that?"

  "Three hundred ninetieth Air Service at your service. Some of the guys brought it back on a run from D.C."

  "Does Jennine know how to make a hoagie?"

  "Which is?"

  "It's real food from Philly."

  They dumped some of
the stuff on the kitchen table. Gray called Don Jr., who was in his room struggling with a balsa model of a Zero.

  Don Jr. is now a doctor living in Southern California. His office bustles with patients; he is a successful man and honored in his community.

  I asked him to please tell me if this really happened. He looked me square in the eye and said, "Mr. Duke, it did." And he proceeded to relate the story of how his father had showed him the debris.

  "Identify it," the major had told his son.

  The boy looked at it, touched it. "Private plane?"

  "See the balsa parts."

  "Is that Egyptian writing?"

  "Nope."

  "What is it, then, Dad?"

  Jennine took out a box of Cut-Rite and compared the wax paper to the parchment. "It certainly isn't normal wax paper," she said.

  "Donnie, I'll give you a dime if you guess correctly. The debris comes from something that crashed up near Maricopa."

  "Not a balloon, not a plane." He looked at his father, smiled. "Flying disk?"

  "Smart," Hesseltine said.

  "Don't be silly, Don," his mother told him. "Your dad wants you to learn these things."

  "Jennine, the boy has just won a dime. He's exactly right. Our opinion is that this material came from a flying disk like the ones they've been reporting in the papers."

  Donnie was awed, and the awe remains with him to this day. Gingerly, he touched some of the wooden beams. He looked at his dad. "What happened to the pilot?"

  Don's mind went back to that wild, awful howling. "There wasn't a sign of a pilot."

  He thought of the poor rancher with his wife and kids. Tonight and every night, they would be out there alone with whatever had done that howling.

  He bit into the sandwich that Jennine had made for him, and ate with the gusto of the survivor.

  Chapter Six

  The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

  It is curious that distant memories become so vivid in old age. I first noticed this perhaps ten years ago; I remember my father commenting on it when he was in his seventies. When I was fifty my recollections of early childhood were little more than shadows. Now I can remember the lace collar I wore, and how Momma tied it behind my neck, and the smell of the lucifers they used to light the gas.

  I remember other things too, oh, I certainly do. They are most appalling things, and I don't know how to cope with them.

  Are they real, or is my mind beginning to mix memory and imagination?

  That would be fatal to understanding, of course, and I cannot know if it has happened.

  However, I do know that what I am about to describe has been done to many children of this generation. The Children's Circles that the others formed in the fifties and sixties were part of this phenomenon.

  I should know all about that: I personally agreed to let them enter the lives of fifty of those children. They submitted a list.

  I did not allow myself to suspect that they would use my agreement as an excuse to affect thousands more.

  But they did, of course. I told myself, only fifty. A small price.

  Were they doing it as far back as 1916, and did they do it to me? The question makes me sorrow and makes me ache. It is so important to my understanding of what has happened to me—and to us all—and so impenetrable.

  All I can do is focus myself on those days, and repeat the recollections that age has returned to the forefront of my mind.

  Once again it is early July, but this is the year 1916 and the location is Westchester County.

  This is not the suburban glut of today, but another place entirely, a land of rolling hills and comfortable, elegant homes. There are farms in the valleys, and wagons are more common than trucks and cars. Where great malls will spread across the land there are now apple orchards, and the trees show promise of a rich harvest in the fall.

  One of these houses in particular is of interest to us. In July of 1916 the house was owned by Herbert Stone, a man skilled in the application of law to the problems of the corporation. Among his clients are the National Biscuit Company and the Hill Coffee empire.

  He was there with his wife, Janet, and their two children,

  Monica and Wilfred.

  Monica was four, and I was three.

  Before God, I wish I could go back with a warning.

  The children are playing, the parents sipping scotch and water. The katydids are arguing, the butterflies fluttering. Westchester smiles.

  Like his father, Herbert is a lawyer. He loves us with the kind of simplicity that I value so much and do not myself possess. My work has denied me peace in these aged years. Instead I live like an anguished ghost.

  They were the last family I had, mother and father and my dead sister. I have been cursed to outlive my generation, and to do so without the comfort of a family.

  When this young journalist appeared, attracted like a little trout to the bait of my letter to his paper, he found me as I am now, and as I will no doubt be when I finally expire.

  If I ever do. Two years ago my doctor told me that my disease would kill me in six months. My death is as hesitant as were my loves.

  I am sitting in my garden here in Bethesda, smoking and watching the weeds grow, and scribbling in what young Duke calls "my dense and careful hand" on a yellow legal pad.

  He has never met any of the young men from the agency, and so he does not know what they call me.

  I am the T.O.M. The Terrible Old Man. They think that I am infected with alienness, that I am not really human anymore. Overexposed, they say.

  Deep in the night I sometimes awaken and feel a sense of passing presence, and I must admit that I long to join the drift in the sky.

  Some say that they eat souls. That is not true. What they do is more profound, more private, more final.

  "Don't let him catch your eye," the young men say. "They'll see you, and they'll get you, too."

  I wore my lace collar and my Fauntleroys and was washed in Pear's soap. My voice was high and happy when I was three.

  This is what I remember.

  When they came I was rolling a red fire truck up and down across the board floor of the porch, causing a rattling that reminded me of an engine.

  I have established the time as approximately five-thirty. My father had just driven up from New York, arriving perhaps half an hour before. He was still wearing his black broadcloth suit, tie and waistcoat. He had come from a meeting with Vincent Carney, a developer of office buildings. Mr. Carney had entered into an agreement to construct the new National Biscuit Building, and Herbert Stone, Esq., had made ten thousand dollars in an afternoon.

  Father was sitting in a big wooden chair with his feet up on a stool.

  He leaned his head back, imagining that he was lying in the castles of summer cloud that were passing by.

  Janet also closed her eyes.

  As far as they were concerned they were innocently drowsing on a summer afternoon. Neither of them imagined that somebody very strange and very close was generating a sound that was causing their drowsiness.

  Or that they were being watched by careful eyes.

  Only we children remained active. Monica played with a doll she had named Ricardo, and I with my beloved red fire engine.

  What my father had seen as a cloud in the sky was something very, very different. It was gray and tremendous and slow, this thing that had come over the house. Had he seen it as it really was, my father might have thought it an organic thing, something like a gigantic wasp's nest Boating in the sky.

  And what watched from within, with great, black eyes and spindly limbs—what would he have called them in their thousands? Giant hornets? He would have understood the fierceness, but never the intelligence.

  Afternoon became evening, and cowbells began to sound lazily across the valley below. A woman's voice rose, calling the cows to their barn.

  This voice was dampened by a sound that could almost be heard, a deep buzzing that seemed to pulsate in the gut and c
hest, to caress the heart and slow the blood.

  The voice faded away. The cowbells stopped. Birds stopped, katydids and cicadas stopped. A snake paused in its patient stalking of a rabbit, and its nictitating membranes slipped over its eyes. The rabbit paused in its chewing and fell to its side. Still we children played. "Rum-m-m," I said, "clang, clang, clang!" "Ricardo, are you ever going to get married? Only to you, my dear. I love you. You need a wipe. Okay . . ."

  Nobody saw the line of dots that were coming from the gray thing, saw them twisting and turning in the sky, moving as gracefully as a column of geese, slipping quickly down from the land of the clouds to the land of the stones.

  These appalling things stepped lightly into the yard, into the soft, hot grass, and they began to move forward in lockstep, closer and closer to the porch where our parents slept and we played.

  They were small and fragile, as gray and spindly as insects. Their heads were huge and had the texture of something that had been inflated. Their prominent eyes glittered in the afternoon sun. As they moved their heads bobbed.

  Every few moments there would be an angry buzz and they would sail a few feet through the air.

  "Ricardo, I love you!"

  "Rum-m-m—clang!"

  They came closer. Someone watching might have thought that these creatures were engaged in some sort of ritual. In addition to their lockstep and their gliding jumps, they were making a whole host of other gestures, moving their thin arms, chattering their mouths, turning their heads first left, then right, then toward the sun.

  Again they stepped, jumped, jutted out their hips, twisted their arms together, then turned their black eyes toward the sun.

  "Rum-m-m! Clangclangclang!"

  "Ricardo is sleeping! He is a man like daddy and he is sleeping in my arms."

  "Brum-m-m-m!"

  "Please don't wake him up, Wilfred."

  Three steps forward. Monica wrinkled her nose. There was an overpowering odor coming with the dancers, a stink of molten sulfur.