The first snow came. It was uncommon around Grover, and I went out to admire the thick, fluffy blanket that actually was wet and slushy. I scooped some soft, wet ice into my hands and compressed it into a ball…and thought of when I first saw the dark scoop in my cornfield. Could it have been compressed likewise by giant hands of forces that would make it smaller and smaller, and denser and denser, so that it would become too small to function, becoming at last a black hole, or a wormhole to nowhere, or maybe a tiny pixel, that would lead everywhere?
I looked for tracks. What would hunter tracks look like anyway? Did they punch holes into the snow while stepping, or rake the snow while scurrying? Would they make a wholly unfamiliar pattern?
The full moon shone brightly on the snow at night. The snow itself was refreezing into ice in the cold night air. There would be no tracks. The hunter could slide. Would it freeze?
The daytime brought no signs of a frozen alien body, not at my farm and not at Drake’s place when I was finally able to get there in my truck. But it was easy to see through the vegetation now, and to traipse through the slush into areas I had not been before.
And then there was a payoff. A shell. Or perhaps a dome. A small flattened hemisphere about the size of my truck. It was patterned in gray and white, almost invisible against the background of snow and branches. Did I dare approach it? I wanted to see what it felt like. To know what it was made of.
I impulsively stepped toward it.
The air itself is poison.
Was that a thought? Or did I hear it. I felt myself drawn toward the object. It was even more invisible. But it seemed to shimmer ever so slightly.
I tried to walk away, but all I did was turn to one side. Then I side-stepped toward the object. Slowly, but I couldn’t resist. My left hand reached out. It touched the object. Three fingers were touching it. They were held there. I had no will to move them.
I felt a drawing, almost sucking sensation. It was electric, but it was flowing from me rather than into me. My energy? My lifeforce? Chemicals? Cells? DNA? What was flowing out through these three fingers on my left hand? The holding force was becoming stronger…the drawing force. I was being…eaten…consumed…through this ever more deadly bond.
A small folding knife was on my keychain in my right pocket. I pulled it out of my pocket. Awkwardly…and all too slowly…I opened the knife with one hand. A quick swipe and I was free. Well, most of me. The skin at the ends of those three fingers remained attached to the object. Blood streamed out of my left hand, out of my three fingers, into their tips still attached to the object. I cut the stream with my knife…and finally pulled free.
I stepped back, away from the shimmering invisibility. I turned and ran from it. Now I knew how the hunters work. How they sometimes trap…and consume.
I was totally out of breath, and out of energy, when I reached my truck. I was glad when it started. I quickly backed, turned, slammed the gas pedal. The truck hopped over the ruts, bouncing me wildly. When I reached home, I turned off the engine and leaned forward onto the steering wheel. For some moments I lacked any will to move.
“Oh my god! What happened to your hand? I’m calling 911!”
Sue had come out when she heard the truck pull up. She saw my hand, still bleeding from the ends of those three fingers on my left hand. The fingers that nearly gave up my life.
I still couldn’t get out of the truck.
“And your eyes! Don, what has happened to you?”
She ran in to call 911 on the land line. Then came back out. I had managed to get out of the truck. And quickly to collapse to the ground.
“Let me turn you over. There. You look in shock. Let me get a blanket. The paramedics are on the way.”
The blanket helped. I was shivering. So did the gauze wrap on my hand. EMS was quick, fortunately. IV started, I was off to the nearest hospital. The doctor saw me right away.
“You’re dehydrated and in shock. We’re giving you fluids and some meds to get your blood pressure up. We’re also doing some co-ag studies, and some other tests. You don’t seem to be clotting properly. Have you ever had a bleeding problem before? And what happened to your fingertips on that hand.”
I told him I didn’t know what happened to my hand. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. And, no, I’d never had a bleeding problem before.
Later I was feeling a little better.
“Your platelets are very low, and your INR and APTT are very prolonged. You’re anemic. But your white count is pretty high. I’m giving you some fresh frozen plasma, and some platelets. Have you ever had a transfusion?”
No. None of that.
“We’ll get you stabilized and then do some scans for any internal bleed. Your fingertips will need restorative surgery that we can’t do here. Well, first things first.”
One thing led to another. Before long I was in a hospital room with my hand all bandaged and my blood type going in. How in the world did I lose all that from those few seconds when I was attached to that dome or cocoon or whatever it was? Should I tell them? I didn’t want anyone else exposed to this thing. But I knew they would think me delusional, and I’d end up back in a psych ward.
“I think there are some poisonous plants in the woods near my house.” I told the nurse. “It’s really dangerous to go out there.”
“What kind of poisonous plants?” she asked. I thought about the voice…or the thought. Something about the air being poison.
But I didn’t answer. I woke up in the ICU.
****
I was getting very tired of waking up in hospital rooms, or anywhere else for that matter, without knowing what had happened or how much time had passed. They told me I had been in hypovolemic shock, among other things. I thought of it as having been bitten by a vampire, only this vampire was connected with a dome from outer space. Some story that’s going to make. “Your story is not believable,” the publisher would say.
Still, I’m going to write it the way it is. Truth is stranger than fiction, and fictional truth, or truthful fiction, is even stranger than that.
My recovery was slow. Slow enough for me to start worrying about my insurance company and their maximums, especially since I had been in that unlocked lockup ward for quite awhile.
I told my docs I needed to get out, that I was ready. They kept asking me questions about what happened. So did police investigators, news reporters, friends and neighbors, acquaintances I hadn’t seen in ages, religious fanatics. After all, I had to be possessed by demons to have symptoms like that.
I stuck to my story about poisonous plants. So then investigators, both news and police, had to go investigate. They didn’t find anything. I don’t know if I wanted them to find that dome or not. But I told them not to touch anything suspicious. They always wanted to know what that meant. I told them they might meet the angels of the quantum gate, and they just looked at me as if they thought I’d lost my mind.
Eventually, but not soon enough, I got to go home. I wanted to be left alone. Every now and then a reporter would show up wanting to ask more questions. Them and the CDC. Nobody could figure out what I could have had such a reaction to. I was, once again, self-evidence. I thought, Drake would find this amusing.
****
It was winter now, and it was easy to see through the woods, or through my cornfield. I didn’t go back to the woods, but I did spend some time walking my field. Sue asked me why I kept sticking a shovel in the dirt. I told her it was exercise.
And then one night there was a noise. It was a deep bass thump followed by an almost imperceptible growl, then a thud. Sue was asleep, but I was immediately wide awake. This was not a normal, natural noise.
In my pajamas and winter robe and slippers, I stepped out onto the porch. I held the door in case I wanted to run back in. There was enough moonlight that I could see a dark object. At first shapeless, then rippling, round then cylindrical. There was a vague, very quiet sound, almost a hiss. I started to think this is a great
dark snake, ready to strike, hissing at me, ready to finish me up, or to take me who knows where.
I retreated into my house, locked the door, and the deadbolt. By now, why didn’t I have a gun? Did that even matter? I quietly punched 911 on the house phone. Should I wake Sue?
To the 911 operator: “There’s something dark in the front yard. And a strange noise. I don’t know what it is. Can someone come check it out? Don’t touch it, just check it out.”
The sleepy, or sleeping, operator had to wake up the cop who was supposedly on patrol in Grover that night. He didn’t have far to come so no need for lights or siren.
He drove up. His search lights lit up my whole front lawn. There was nothing there. He stepped out of his patrol car, pulled out his flashlight and started to walk toward the side of house and into the darkness. He was never heard from again.
By now Sue was awake. “What are the lights? Why is there a police car?” she said while looking at me through still sleepy eyes.
“I saw something.”
“You’re always seeing something. What’s going on?”
“I called 911. They sent this car. I’m waiting for the cop to show up. He must be walking around the house. I’ll check the other windows.”
Checking revealed nothing. I very cautiously ventured outside and in the direction of the car. Its engine was running and so was its radio. I keyed the mic and told the dispatcher about the car running without a cop to man it.
“Go back inside,” the dispatcher ordered. “We’re sending backup.”
Backup had to come from the county. It took longer than I wished.
Four more cars and eight more deputies later, the whole house and yard, even the field, were all covered with light. There was no sign of Officer Crupp. By first daylight my house was surrounded by crime scene tape, and we were being told we needed to find a place to stay for awhile.
Rob had shown up when he saw all the commotion and told us we could stay there for awhile. Then he went off to work. We showered and dressed at Rob’s place. We’d brought a few clothes with us, and I brought my laptop. We had no internet, but I had my book.
Once again I was talking to investigators and reporters. And some cranks.
“You need to check out some of these cranks,” I said to the Grover Police Chief. “They’ve been harassing me ever since I was in the hospital.”
“Well, they’re all potential suspects now. How do you like that?”
“You mean one of them may have had something to do with Officer Crupp being missing? I don’t think they’d go that far. They just like to aggravate me.”
“We have to look at all the possibilities. And by the way, you and Sue need to stay in town for the time being.”
“I’m not planning on going anywhere if I can help it.”
He gave me a look and walked back to the “crime scene”.
Chapter 14 - THE CRUPP CASE
Things were tense and plenty worrisome for awhile. I thought the questions would never cease, but I really didn’t have a lot to say. They asked about the “something dark” of course, and why I’d said don’t touch it. I just said I heard a noise, and there was something I couldn’t make out in the front yard. That was essentially the truth. About why I said not to touch it, I had no explanation. I told them I didn’t remember saying that even though it, or something similar, was obviously on the 911 recording. I told them that Officer Crupp had lit up the yard but then went off in a different direction and never reappeared. That was the truth too. I didn’t say that the dark thing was rippling and changing shape from a sphere to a cylinder. I was vague in my words and, by now, a bit vague in my memory.
They finally let us go back home. I don’t know who was happier about that…us…or Rob.
By then our home, the yard, the field, and the woods all the way to and around Drake’s ruins had been searched with a fine-toothed comb. There was nothing there of any significance, nothing at least except for a curious piece of glass found among Drake’s ruins.
“Hi, Don. I’m Frank Driscoll. I’m an FBI investigator assigned to the Crupp case. Could you come out onto your porch?”
I was glad he hadn’t asked to come in like everybody else kept doing.
“This object,” he held up a plastic bag with a shiny glass shard inside, “was found among what remains of Jim Drake’s place. Do you recognize it at all?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it there. But it’s just a chunk of shiny broken glass to me.”
“It’s an unusual type of glass with an unusual composition and characteristics. For one thing it was very difficult to sample a piece of it for the analyzers. It’s harder than diamond. It wouldn’t cut and it wouldn’t break.”
The investigator was holding it carefully, not about to let me touch its plastic bag. It looked like the stuff from inside the cave to me. From the cave under the conduit and down the shaft. I wasn’t going to talk about that. I didn’t know why Drake would have a piece in his cabin anyway.
“That’s very interesting. If it came from Drake’s place…well, he was a collector of some strange stuff. Everybody knows about his UFO interests.”
“And his Un-Alien-Able Rights group. We’ve been trying to find out more about them. Were you a member? Did you know anyone?”
“I wasn’t a member. I never met any of them or attended a meeting. But I know that Drake had lots of pictures of what he said were UFO sightings and the like. He liked to talk about them. I would politely listen…and then escape as soon as I could.”
“Well, Mr. Henson, that will be all for now. Don’t leave town.”
“I’d like to stay here. I wish everybody under the sun would leave me alone.”
He turned and walked away.
There wasn’t much I could do anymore. I mostly stayed at home. I never ventured farther than Grover, where on a good day people purposefully ignored me, and on a bad day I’d be followed by another reporter, or crank. The reporters got less frequent. The cranks did not.
“You knew Drake was a satanist, didn’t you? He traveled around with demons. Kept trying to recruit innocent people into his cause. You knew that, didn’t you?” That’s what one of them said and pretty regularly. I tried to find out where he lived or what he was doing in Grover. Nobody knew, or nobody would tell me.
I still walked my field. There was nothing to see, but I kept looking. I’d go to the edge of the woods but not into them. Except for when that old satan Jim Drake suddenly appeared.
I stepped toward him, into the shadows. “Well, what do you want to know about the Crupp case? Or about my mysterious illness? Do you think I was poisoned?”
“You sound cynical, Don. Usually you just want to know if I’m real or fake.”
“I can’t tell the difference anymore. I think I’ll just call you Man Drake. You look like a man, but you’re really a hallucination.”
“Hmmm…that might be an apt analogy. But I’m here to answer some of your questions. You seem to need some help.”
“Well, I have Driscoll from the FBI, and every other law enforcement office, telling me not to leave town. Town cranks, no matter where they come from, tell me that you’re the devil and I’m damned for associating with you. I can’t tell anyone about the dome or what happened to me in the woods. My life is being destroyed. I don’t see any of this as saving humanity.”
“But you’ve already saved humanity. You just don’t understand how.”
“Maybe an explanation would help? Not even my magic laptop would tell me the future.”
“The answer doesn’t lie in the future…at least not in how you think of the future. Remember that you are already there.”
“There amid all the uncrystallized pixels, or so I’ve been told. They have no answer that I can see. Just infinite possibilities. But I’m only living out one of the them that I can tell. And where are the Grays in all this? What are they? Where do they come from? What about other lifeforms on Earth? Are they being saved too?
”
“Earth is a strange place among many, many strange places. It’s literally wrapped in what you call life. But life is not what you think. There’s a lot more to it than reproducing DNA.”
“Many people have said as much. But they’re not so good at explaining beyond that. Are Gray’s made of DNA too?”
“They operate according to DNA principles. They have their own double helix compounds, but different nucleotides.”
“My biology is vague by now. I’m not sure I follow you.”
“All life on the Earth, in this particular universe, originated in the brew of the same comet. You all grew out of that. There are, or have been, or will be, many other comets. In this Universe, the Grays had/have/will have their own. But life is consciousness, which means communication, from one small unit to another, making up larger units, and so forth. Even the Enlightened Ones are nowhere near the top tier. Within possibility, which means within probability, which in turn means in actuality, huge units communicate over vast distances. They are aware…they are alive. They have been and are and will become.”
“Maybe we need to start over. These explanations are not helping this “little me”, in the now. This “little me” feels very alone, alone in the vastness you have shown me. Knowledge of it only makes me feel more alone, the outside more random…more absurd. There is no comfort in this at all. You are a devil, Colonel Man Drake. And you have brought me hell.”
This time Drake abruptly disappeared right before my eyes, just like the hallucination he had become. Could I believe anything he said? Anything at all?
The doorbell rang, hardly ever a good thing anymore.
It was Driscoll. “May I come in this time?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“May I sit? I suggest you do too. Crupp has been found…alive. He’s in the hospital, suffering from exposure...dehydrated. He was found wandering along the road going into town. He doesn’t remember anything. Nothing at all from the last, what, six weeks now.”
Angels of the Quantum Gate Page 7
