by Robert Levy
“I’m so sorry.” She put a hand to her breast. “You weren’t there when it happened, were you? On 9/11?”
“I was. Right there. Under the towers.” He proceeded to tell her the entirety of his experience that day with every possible dramatic flourish, including his tearful reunion with Elisa back at his apartment, which had the woman welling up herself. By the end of his story, she had taken his hands and was lost in his eyes, her breath erratic as she choked back tears. He was disgusted with himself.
“Sometimes I think—” Jason stared up at the late-afternoon sky before he continued. “Sometimes I think they’ve become angels. All of them who died that day? Maybe they’re floating through the firmament right now! Tucked inside the Lord’s heavenly embrace, for all eternity. And they watch over us, even though we can no longer see them . . . I know that they’re here just the same. Our guardian angels.”
“They are angels now!” the woman said. “You poor thing. You poor thing . . .” She squeezed his hand. “You’ll be in my prayers. And so will your wife.”
Back in the car, he could barely make eye contact with Gabe. “Wow,” Gabe said from the passenger seat. “That was . . . something.” Jason couldn’t tell if the boy’s tone expressed revulsion or admiration, though most likely it was a combination of the two. “Did you make all that up on the spot?”
“Not as much as I would have liked. For what it’s worth.” He was surprised Blue never told Gabe, but in a way he was touched; it was Jason’s story to tell, after all, and he respected Blue for recognizing that.
Jason started the engine and was already pulling out of the drive when the woman appeared beside the car and gestured for him to lower his window. “Just one thing,” she said, panting. “Did you speak to Fred Cronin yet?”
Jason looked to Gabe, who shook his head.
“Ask him.” She looked back at the house for a moment before lowering her voice. “Ask him about the Other Kind.”
Chapter Five
* * *
“Darkening my door, I see.” Fred Cronin spoke with a weariness that suggested Jason and Gabe were not only expected but were in fact late. Were they supposed to know him? They had met so many locals lately. He did look somewhat familiar, what little Jason could see of him through the cracked door, a squat troll of a man with cavernous ruts in his face and an unkempt beard, a swollen nose, and bulging hazel eyes. Though Jason vaguely recognized him, he had the thought that it might be from a television show or movie, rather than from real life.
“How nice of Tanya to invite you over,” Cronin said. “That girl, that girl . . . Jesus holy hell. Well. What are you going to do. Anyhow.”
He disappeared from view, the door left an ambiguous foot ajar; it took Jason a few moments before he summoned the nerve to step inside. Gabe followed, daylight vanquished when he shut the door behind them. The outside of the single-story cottage may have been weather-beaten white, but aside from a stark bulb overhead the interior was dark as midnight, ancient roller shades drawn over the windows. Every surface was obscured, buried beneath books and documents and newspapers, stacked in some places to the rafters. A hoarder? Jason wondered, not sure where to rest his eyes. He tried to avoid Gabe’s nervous and sidelong glance.
“I run my own printing press out of the cellar,” Cronin said, and swept his arm in the direction of a perilous heap of papers on top of the woodstove. “Back issues of my journal. And I’m the only one who doesn’t charge storage.” He pulled two pamphlet-thin newspapers off the top of a nearby stack and handed one to each of them. “So, let’s get this over with, shall we?”
Below the ludicrously ornate nameplate of The Starling Cove Believer was the bold headline SEARCH FOR WHITLEY AND FRIEND CONTINUES, the subheading “Still Missing after a Week.” And there, reproduced in faulty black and white, was printed a recent photograph of Blue and Elisa. They were dancing, her arms around his neck with her back arched in a spasm of unmitigated bliss. It was like looking at Detective Jessed’s pictures all over again, the ones from Elisa’s camera. It was like seeing a pair of ghosts.
Now Jason remembered where he knew the man from: Fred Cronin was an artisan friend of Maureen and Donald’s he’d met at the ceilidh. An ironsmith, if memory served. He must have taken the photo that night.
“Beautiful girl,” Cronin said, and he cocked his head, his grizzled beard sweeping the front of his stained waffle shirt; Jason failed to detect any hint of lasciviousness in his voice. “That might be why they wanted her.”
“Why they . . . ?” Jason wasn’t sure he’d heard properly.
“You might as well stay awhile.” Their host moved a massive cairn of spiral-bound newspapers from a black velvet-upholstered couch so they could sit. For himself he produced a warped plastic chair from beneath a sagging card table covered in emptied beer bottles. “Tell me,” he said, pausing to light a cigarette. “How much do you two know about these parts?”
“You mean Cape Breton?” Jason said.
“I mean the cove.” The man couldn’t have been much past his midfifties, but he looked positively decrepit. “Have you noticed how different this place feels?” he said, hissing smoke through his teeth. “How the air smells, the unusual sound the wind makes as it whispers through the trees? The way the water tastes, even?”
“Yes,” Gabe said at once, much to Jason’s surprise. “It’s like everything is more . . . alive here. More energized.”
“So you do feel it,” Cronin said. “Not everybody does. Only the sensitive,” and he cast a baleful look at Jason. “When I first moved up here I figured the cove was hyperoxygenated. The way places like Big Sur are, with all the runoff into the lakes and waterways, you know? Locations like that, they tend to attract specific kinds of people, since back in the day. Seekers and such, the occasional religious freak. And Starling Cove is no different. Take the water, for example. That’s why we’ve always had the best screech.”
“Screech?” Gabe said.
“Shine. Moonshine. You could make a decent living bootlegging in these parts, right through the eighties. Lots of the houses around here, they still have the old gin stills in the basement, or rum-running tunnels that lead down to the water. And believe you me, the Colony made the best screech of all.”
“The commune,” Jason said. “Were you a part of that place?”
“Not as such.”
“But they made moonshine there? At the Colony?”
“Most everyone did around here. None better than those folks. Donald’s secret recipe.”
“Donald was part of the Colony? Maureen’s husband?”
“Part of it? Hell, he founded the damned place.”
“He did?” Gabe said. “But he seems so . . . professorial.”
“That was the type back then. Like Leary and Ginsburg and Castaneda, middle-aged guys with that father figure thing working for them. And Donald with his pipe and elbow patches . . . Worked like catnip, especially when it came to the ladies. Take a look at Maureen! She was a local girl, native Mi’kmaq even, only stopped in to the Colony for a visit one day and never left. Not until the fire, that is.” He watched the smoke from his cigarette curl around the plastic light fixture and its single dim bulb. “What did your missing friend tell you about life in the cove? About growing up here?”
“Not much,” Jason said. “He hardly remembered a thing about it.”
“And you believed him.”
“Why wouldn’t we? He was only a boy.”
“That’s what his mama kept saying.” He chuckled. “Should’ve known who he was when I laid eyes on him. Sensed he was one of them. But I was thrown by the name. Not to mention the fact that our workaday world seems to have rubbed off on him. Poor little Hansel . . .”
“Hansel?”
“Sorry. Michael. Or Blue,” Cronin said, in a theatrical tenor redolent with sarcasm. “I mean, what was he going to tell you about his people, if he even could? The real question is why he came back after all this time. Why now?”
>
“He came back to sell his grandmother’s house.” Jason tried to settle on the couch.
“Yeah, well, how’d that work out for him?” He lit another cigarette off the first and stubbed the spent butt into the side of an overflowing crenellated ashtray, browned filters bent into the shapes of scoliotic spines. “He’s probably still alive, if it’s any comfort. Flora was a crafty one, but the Other Kind are craftier.”
“The Other Kind.” Jason looked to Gabe. “Tanya Darrow said something about that.”
“They’re the ones that live here. Under the ground.”
“Under the ground?” Gabe sat up in his seat.
“Underground, under the bay, wherever they are. It’s hard to say exactly. They’re tough to put a finger on, since the land around these parts has a funny way of adapting whenever it suits the Kind. They live somewhere in the earth, but you’ll never find them down there unless you raze the mountain. Not without one of them to take you. And not a one ever will. Anyway, most everyone knows they’re here. Either of you gents want a beer? No?”
As if he’d said nothing unusual whatsoever, the odd little man got up and wandered off to his kitchen. He spent such an interminably long while retrieving a cold one from the fridge that it was hard not to feel he was toying with them.
“So you were telling us about the Other Kind,” Jason said once Cronin finally returned to his chair, beer and bottle opener in hand. “About the . . . I’m sorry, the ones underground?”
“Right.”
“Right what?”
“Are you messing with me, son?”
“Not at all.” What is up with this guy? “Please, go on.”
“As I was saying, nearly everyone around these parts has heard of them. Old country folks call them the Fae, but really they’re talking about the Other Kind.”
Fae. Jason recalled Donald using that word, at the ceilidh. “So, they’re out there somewhere,” he said. “Under the bay, maybe. But what are they?”
“Do you mean they’re like nature spirits?” Gabe asked.
“Hard to say for certain, since they’re not meant to be known. But they’re here all right, as sure as the seasons change. They just don’t like to be seen. That’s why if they come, they come at night. They like to take things. Laundry off the line, bottles from the recycling, a hood ornament now and again . . .” He leaned back in his chair. “No one knows what they are exactly, but everyone’s got a theory. At least I do.”
“Tell us. Please.” Gabe was breathless, and Jason recalled the Weird Creatures of Atlantic Canada paperback the boy had picked up at the airport newsstand in Halifax. “What do you think they are?”
“See, that’s the funny thing.” Cronin ran a fingertip along his chair arm, a landing strip cleared across a thick pad of dust. “Because what I think they are is the same thing everyone else does. But most people don’t know that. They haven’t thought it through. Take the old-timers, like Donald. They tend to be the more open-minded types, the ones willing to admit that there’s a presence here. They mostly think the woods are harboring fairies.”
“Fairies.” Jason said it with a straight face, but his inner clinician triggered the diagnostic process. Delusional disorder, for starters; possibly a more severe paranoiac element to boot, with a potential for schizophrenic tendencies. And a chronic alcohol abuser to be sure, a constellation of red capillaries broken across the man’s bulbous nose. “You think fairies took my wife.”
“Let me finish,” Cronin said, his annoyance undisguised. “That’s just how some people identify them. It’s cultural. In the old country, that’s what the common people called those they couldn’t begin to fathom. The Fae. The Good Neighbors. The Silent People. In Ireland, they’re the Aos Si, the people of the mounds. Lots of names for the things that live among us, but aren’t of us. Some of the Mi’kmaqs around these parts, they call them the stone dwarves.”
“But those are superstitions,” Jason said. “Folklore, basically.”
“Some of it, sure. But not all. Sometimes, late at night, we’ll get dreags over the water. You know, like corpse candles?”
“Will-o’-the-wisps,” Gabe chimed in. “Ghost lights, or something. They’re like little UFOs, right?”
Cronin nodded. “But I for one would hardly think aliens would come down from the celestial heavens to buzz a foggy little cove in Cape Breton, do you?”
“I suppose not,” Jason said. It was actually fascinating to have a conversation with someone of such heightened pathology outside of a clinical setting.
“Isn’t it funny,” Cronin said, “that the elders see fairies? Folks today, though, we talk about the whole alien abduction thing. Or maybe by now it’s all about mass hallucinations, or government experiments, whatever the flavor of the day may be. Whereas I personally prefer the term ultraterrestrials. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“I think so,” Gabe said. “They’re all just different ways of explaining similar phenomenon.”
“Exactly. Because here’s the thing: they’re all the same, man. Grays, little green men, the Fae, whatever? Hell, maybe even the goddamn angels and demons! They’re different names for the same thing.”
Jason crossed his legs, which their host seemed to take as some kind of covert sign of disrespect. “Look,” Cronin said, “I’m not some backwoods yokel. I’m from Detroit. All these terms, they’re names for whatever it is that walks these woods. Real beings, no matter where they came from. And they’re near impossible to describe.”
“And you know this how exactly?” Jason said.
“I’ve seen ’em.” He lit another cigarette and let the smoke drift from his nostrils. “Only once up close. I was driving over Kelly’s Mountain late one night, twenty-five years ago now. I rounded a corner near the peak, and at first all I saw out of the corner of my eye was a pinprick of light, like a lightning bug but greenish. Only as I kept driving, the light stayed there, hovering past the driver’s side window. Hanging over the side of the mountain too; it couldn’t be a light from a house or anything, and what’s more, it wasn’t going anywhere, even as the car kept moving. Impossible to tell just how close it was. It was like the light was following me, like the moon. Tracking me.”
A light, Jason thought. Detective Jessed asked if I’d seen any lights the night they went missing.
“I was so rattled I nearly drove off the road,” Cronin continued. “I pulled onto what little shoulder there was, and there it came again, this strange green light. It stopped just like I’d stopped, but it was still floating. It felt so close I could reach out and touch it. I rolled the window down a crack and suddenly I heard this giant burst of sound, like dialing through the world’s biggest radio, searching for a clear signal. I went to roll the window back up but it stuck, so I covered my ears, hoping my eardrums wouldn’t bust.”
He coughed violently, then collected himself. “After a while—a few seconds maybe, but it felt like whole minutes—the light started getting brighter. And then I heard voices. Whispering voices, coming out of the wall of noise. I could hear them talking. Laughing and moaning too, like maybe they had started screwing or something . . . It made me feel sick and horny all at once. It was like I was on fire, and it felt so fucking good.”
Jason bristled, but held his tongue.
“Well, the light got even brighter, so bright I thought I was going to be burned by it. It was like a monster green sun, burning itself into my corneas, even with my eyes shut. And then I saw what looked like people, standing in the middle of the light. Still with my eyes closed! They were climbing on the side of the mountain, kind of hanging there at a twisted angle, almost like trees growing right out of the earth. All different shapes—some long, some squat, but it was hard to tell because they would look puffed up one second, then deflated the next. Their shapes shifted along with the light, but also with the sound. Rising and falling, like a beating heart. There were two of them, though, both about three feet high, the size of children. They we
re in the middle, like they were important. Like they were being protected by the others.”
“Had you been drinking?” Jason tried not to use his therapist voice. “Or dropping acid, maybe?”
“Probably both,” Cronin replied with a chuckle, his lower register an emphysemic rasp. “But believe me when I tell you it happened. I saw what I saw. They’re something you can’t perceive exactly, like they weren’t made to be seen with human eyes. I could only catch parts of them—glimpses of them—the parts they allowed me to access.”
“And you thought they were aliens?”
“At the time, yeah. Like I said, this was coming off the seventies. Alien culture was all over the place back then. Close Encounters, the Mothman, all that jazz. But eventually I realized I was wrong.”
“You realized they’re actually ultraterrestrials.”
Jason maintained a neutral tone, but Cronin’s lip curled anyway. “All I’m saying is that they’re not from some other planet, or from heaven or hell or any of that bullshit. They’re from right here, and they’ve been here all along. A lot longer than us, I’m guessing. They own the place. Not us. Them.”
“Why do you think they would want my wife? And her—our friend?”
He shrugged. “Not my place to conjecture.”
That’s all you seem to be doing. Jason couldn’t stop himself from grinning, and Gabe shot him a glance. You’ve told us fuck all, except that one long-ago night you got wasted and nearly ran off the road. Thanks a lot for nothing.
“Please,” Gabe said. “We’re listening.”
“Well,” Cronin said, “from everything I’ve learned, it doesn’t seem like the Other Kind are capable of reproducing on their own. They need to crossbreed to survive. So I figure that because they took them both, it’s most likely because they want to breed them.”
