The Night the Heads Came

by William Sleator

  Tim’s father has parked beside a derelict building that looks like it was once a small factory, built in the last century. It’s made of brick, and the windows are boarded up. There is a big sign on it that says BUILDING CONDEMNED. NO TRESPASSING. The only light is a bare bulb in a little metal cage over a metal door.

  “I guess it’s stupid of me to hope it might be unlocked,” I whisper. “If we can’t get in, we’ll just have to go back and get the cops.”

  “You can’t go in there, Leo!” Dad says. “I won’t allow it.”

  “I have to.” I move toward the door.

  I sense Dad hesitating, trying to decide what to do next. Then I hear his footsteps behind me. “I’m coming with you,” he whispers. “There’s no way I’m letting you go in there alone.”

  I reach the door. And that’s when the momentum that’s been pushing me ever since I cut out the implant begins to desert me. Suddenly I’m scared. And then I get an idea.

  I turn back to Dad. “Why don’t you go get the cops and bring them here. I mean, even if they don’t believe us about the aliens, they’ll be curious to find out what Tim’s father is doing in this place. I’ll wait here and see if I can get a look inside. I won’t do anything risky.”

  Dad looks relieved. “Yeah, we could sure use the police.” Then he frowns. “But you better come with me, Leo. I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

  “It’s better if I stay here—to be sure they don’t get away or anything before the cops come.”

  “What would you do to stop them? You better come with me.”

  “I’m staying here, Dad. You don’t understand. You haven’t been with aliens, and I have.”

  He sighs. “Don’t go inside, Leo,” he says firmly. “Don’t do anything that would attract their attention. You promise?”

  “Yeah, I promise,” I say, feeling guilty about it. I’m lying again. And this time, it’s not to the enemy; it’s to my own father.

  “I’ll be back as soon as possible.” He turns and sprints quietly away. Soon I hear the distant sound of the car starting. I’m assuming they can’t hear it from inside the building.

  I try the metal door. It opens.

  Why isn’t it locked? I can’t believe Tim’s father would just forget to lock the door, or that they would usually leave it unlocked. Either he is unbelievably careless—or he left it open on purpose, because he knew we were following him, and this is a trap.

  But if I don’t do anything until the cops come, it might be too late. The cops will probably make a lot of noise, and The Others will hear them and maybe transform themselves in some way and get away—probably taking Tim with them. I can’t wait until the cops come and give our presence away. I have to catch The Others at whatever it is they’re doing with Tim. And Tim’s father was acting sick and confused, and he gave no indication he knew we were following him. He probably did just forget to lock the door. I try to convince myself that this isn’t a trap.

  Very, very slowly I begin to pull the door open. It makes a little noise, but only enough for somebody right inside to hear—and if they’re right inside, I’m already out of luck. When it’s open about a foot, I peer in. It’s a long, dim corridor with doors on one side and one light on the ceiling, halfway down its length. The corridor is empty. I step quietly inside and start slowly down it.

  I’m very tense. I keep looking back to make sure the way out is still unobstructed in case I suddenly have to run. I continue down the corridor, listening hard, hearing nothing to indicate there is anybody here at all.

  “TAKE MY BLOOD,” Tim’s voice suddenly roars.

  I jump about a foot into the air. It’s all I can do not to scream.

  The voice suddenly diminishes in volume. That’s when I realize it’s amplified. Somebody just turned on a recording of Tim’s voice, with the volume too high. Now the volume is turned down, not loud enough for me to hear the words anymore, just the faint drone of it.

  Then I see the light coming from the right side at the very end of the corridor. Maybe a door is open there. I move carefully toward it. Tim’s voice grows louder.

  As I get closer, it becomes more and more certain that the light is coming from an open doorway and that the recording is being played inside that room. “All the time. If not every day, then every other day,” Tim’s voice is saying.

  I reach the doorway. Very carefully I peek inside with one eye.

  Again, I barely keep from screaming.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tim is sitting not far from the doorway on a folding metal chair in a large, sparsely furnished warehouse room, with wooden rafters and brick walls. He must be drugged or in a trance; his eyes are open, but he is staring straight ahead at nothing, and he is motionless. His father is slumped on another metal chair near him, his head in his hands. The tape recorder they are listening to is on a cheap folding table.

  The nonhuman things in the room are crouching on the floor. There seem to be dozens and dozens of them. It’s hard to tell how many, because the room is large and dimly lit.

  I wonder if I am seeing The Others in their natural form. It’s impossible to know, because Tim has told me they are shape changers, which I imagine means they can look any way they want. Still, it’s hard to believe that any creatures would want to look like what I’m seeing now, if they weren’t born that way.

  They are the same as the creatures in the drawing that was on TV.

  The things squat around Tim like toads as big as large dogs, but with no skin on their bodies, so that the yellow muscle tissue and the purple veins are exposed; their webbed hands and feet are splayed on the floor. The toadlike, skinless aspect of their appearance in itself wouldn’t be so bad—after all, I got used to the heads, who aren’t exactly pretty—but the really disgusting, unspeakable part is the faces, the human faces, that stare directly up from the backs of their hunched-over bodies. The faces are about twice the size of human ones and horribly stretched out and deformed; the eyes stare blankly and pointlessly up at the ceiling. Are these their real faces or a part of their human disguise that they haven’t sloughed off yet? I don’t see any other things like alien faces on them; the creatures consist of four jointed limbs with webbed appendages and a back, upon which rests the human face. I recognize Dr. Viridian and also Herman, the man from the meeting at Annabelle Kincaid’s.

  Then something else hits me. Tim’s father still looks completely human. Does that mean he just hasn’t taken his disguise off? Or does it mean he really isn’t one of them after all? If he isn’t one of them, that would be even worse: It would mean he’s a traitor to his own species and planet.

  “Every time they brought me back from Sawan, they took my blood,” Tim’s voice is saying on the tape. “Every time they showed me something horrible and frightening, they took my blood. Every time they told me they were about to take me back to Sawan, to Chaweewan, they took my blood.”

  “And did they ever tell you why they took your blood at these particular times, or what they were going to do with it?” a calm, restful voice asks him on the tape—the voice of the thing that calls itself Dr. Viridian.

  “You asked me that before,” says Tim’s voice, with a hint of a whine, even though he is certainly in a trance.

  “And I am asking you again.”

  “They never told me what they did with the blood. They only said it was because of The Others.”

  One of the creatures flops impatiently on the floor; another one makes a gurgling sound.

  “You never eavesdropped on them?” asks the doctor’s voice on the tape. “You never explored or spied on them? In the whole time you were with them, you never saw or heard anything you weren’t supposed to? Think very carefully, Tim. Understand, you can remember absolutely everything now.”

  “No,” Tim answers, after a moment. “I think I slept a lot on the ship. And when I was awake the bodies were always with me, watching me, taking my blood. And I was always very busy with my drawing.”

 
; The Dr. Viridian thing curses. “Those heads! If only they’d slipped up just once! They take human blood at moments of peak emotion—everyone they’ve abducted tells the same story. But why? Is it for a weapon? What are they doing?” It curses again, then stretches out one pair of legs, reaches up to the table, and switches off the tape recorder with its webbed fingers. I wonder how it can see what it’s doing, since the human eyes on its back are not looking at the table but instead, now that its back is raised, toward the door. I quickly pull my head out of the doorway, praying it didn’t see me. I stay just outside the door now, listening.

  “And his precious drawings. What of them?” the Dr. Viridian thing says, hissing, and I hear its feet slapping on the floor. “So you had no luck tonight,” it says, apparently addressing Tim’s father.

  “Leo claimed he didn’t have any more of them,” Tim’s father says, sounding exhausted. “The lying little creep,” he mutters.

  “It will be disastrous if more people see those drawings. We will have to take the risk of getting them ourselves.”

  The voice is very frightening. Still, I feel a surge of excitement and pride. It seems like what I did was exactly the right thing; The Others as well as the heads don’t want people to see the drawings. And tomorrow even more drawings will be released to the world; thousands more people will see them—assuming I ever get out of here.

  “What could I do, search the house?” Tim’s father is saying. “I used every threat I could think of. The stubborn brat wouldn’t budge.”

  “And yet, even though you did not succeed in obtaining what we desperately require, you were still so careless that you allowed him to follow you here,” the thing says.

  “Follow me?” Tim’s father says, sounding scared.

  I’m scared too. I turn to run.

  And am stopped by gray shapes rising up in the corridor, the same shapes that took Tim last night. I can’t squeeze past them. They surround me; they pull at me. In the next instant I’m inside the room, the things squatting on the floor all around me. The gray shapes sink down; they bubble and writhe; they swell and change and become two more headless, toadlike things with human faces on their backs.

  “Welcome, Leo,” the Dr. Viridian thing says, its deformed face looking up at me, its mouth moving horribly. “You are getting sleepy. Your eyelids are getting heavy; soon you will be—”

  I close my eyes and put my hands over my ears. “Stop it!” I shout. “You can’t do this to me. You have to let Tim and me both go!”

  “Not until we find out what we need to know.” It says something in a wet language. One of the other ones moves toward me, and now I notice the syringe in its webbed fingers.

  “No! Don’t do that! I’ll make a deal with you!”

  “A deal?” the Dr. Viridian thing says suspiciously. “What kind of a deal, Leo?” But the one with the syringe doesn’t come any closer.

  “I have something you want, which I might let you see, if you don’t try anything. Maybe I can get even more of them—if you let Tim and me go.”

  “I could kill you, Leo,” Tim’s father snarls at me.

  “We’ll take care of that,” the Dr. Viridian thing says. “You’re hardly in a position to bargain about anything, Leo,” it goes on. “Tell us what you have before we take it from you.”

  I slip off my backpack, terrified. Now I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. The heads wanted me to give the drawings to The Others. The heads are their enemies. For that reason, I figured that letting The Others see the drawings would hurt them somehow. And now that I’ve made sure that thousands of humans have seen them, I figured it would be interesting to see what effect the drawings have on The Others.

  I also stupidly thought I could use them as a bargaining tool. I was dead wrong about that. I have no power to bargain; I’m at their mercy—and it doesn’t seem like they have much of that. As frightened as I was of the heads, they seem benign now compared to these things. They’ll get the drawings I have in my pack, and they’ll get me too.

  I pull out a drawing. It’s not one of the gruesome ones, unfortunately; it’s a very realistic three-dimensional drawing of an alien farm. I figure Tim must have done it on Sawan, the rural, nontechnological planet where he was so happy. I hold it up under the light, so that all the many creatures squatting on the floor and lifting their hideous faces toward me in this large room will be able to see it.

  For a moment there is absolute silence. Then suddenly they are all gurgling and hissing and howling and slapping their webbed feet on the floor. Their faces are twisted in disgust.

  The Dr. Viridian thing, the closest to me, suddenly rears up and tears the drawing out of my hand and rips it to pieces. “We will get the others and destroy them!” it bellows. “We have searched all of Tim’s memories. We know he left the rest of them at your house. But first we will deal with you.”

  They surge toward me, many of them brandishing syringes. I am screaming, backing up against the wall. There is no way to get away from them. Where are the cops? Why hasn’t Dad come back with them yet? Now it’s too late.

  I am vaguely aware of Tim’s father shouting, “Hey, hold on! Homicide might cause a little problem.”

  “He will drown naturally in the river!” roars the Dr. Viridian thing, its giant face rising up inches from me.

  And then I feel the mist. It seems to be drifting down from the rafters. I feel the cool tingle of it on my face and arms; I feel it soaking into my shirt.

  The Others can feel it too. They have stopped attacking me for the moment. They are looking around as if wondering where the mist could be coming from, shaking their limbs.

  Suddenly the sensation hits everybody in the room at once: panic. It’s like the feeling I had when I was abducted, the need to run, to scream, to get away, to be anywhere but where I am.

  It’s hardly any different from the way I felt just now, before the mist arrived. But clearly The Others are panicking too. They are flopping around in circles on the floor, moaning and bellowing. They seem to have forgotten about me completely. I want to run away, but there are too many of them between me and the door. Tim’s father got away when he had the chance; he’s bolting out of the room. Only Tim is still motionless, sitting in his chair.

  One by one, the terrified Others begin to change. They writhe and bubble up and turn into the gray shapes—the gray shapes that look evanescent but still can’t go through walls. The first ones get out the door easily enough. After that, there are so many of them that the door is blocked, and because they are panicking, they don’t do anything but push and shove and try to get through. It’s like a stampede of crazed animals. They are trapped for a long time in the bottleneck of the door, meaning I can’t get out of the room, even though I am panicking too.

  But somehow, I don’t feel as panicky as The Others seem to be. I know I can’t get out, so I don’t try. I also don’t want to desert Tim. In fact, maybe I can even wake him up. I go over and shake his shoulder. No response. “Tim,” I say. “Hey, Tim. Maybe it’s going to be okay. Something’s scaring them away.” I shake him. His head wobbles loosely. He does not come out of it.

  I try something else. “On the count of three, you will be fully awake,” I tell him. “One. Two. Three.” Nothing happens. Now I am getting really worried about him. It is even stronger than the panic. If the Viridian thing hypnotized him, then maybe the Viridian thing is the only voice that can get him to come out of his trance. And now the Viridian thing is gone.

  The bottleneck at the door has cleared up. The last gray shape flees from the room. I can get out now, but what am I going to do about Tim?

  And then the cops come running in.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The cops did arrive in time to see the last phantom shapes of The Others flying toward a purple sphere in the night sky—a sphere that quickly shrank away to nothing as soon as the last shapes reached it. The cops are stunned. They treat me differently now, of course, because now they believe my
story. I’d feel smug, except that I’m so worried about Tim.

  There were three carloads of cops, Dad tells me. They arrived just as Tim’s father was driving away, and one cop car immediately took off after him. Kroll assures us it won’t take them long to catch him.

  I ride to the hospital in the cop car with Tim, the siren going full blast. Dad follows us and arrives a little later. In the emergency room they immediately hook Tim up to all kinds of equipment.

  While we are waiting, Kroll phones Tim’s mother. I can hear her hysterical voice over the phone. When she gets there, she is pale and disheveled and weeping. She is no longer the emotionless, perfectly groomed, zombielike creature she was on the night Tim disappeared; now she is behaving as I would expect a mother to behave. I wonder why she wasn’t worried like this before, when Tim was missing. What has changed to make her behave this way?

  She is also very confused. She doesn’t seem to know anything about what has been happening.

  Kroll keeps in close touch with the other cops. He leaves as soon as they report back to him that Tim’s father has been brought to the station, ready to be questioned.

  We wait at the hospital for hours, but there is nothing they can do to wake Tim up. His breathing and temperature and everything else are normal. He just won’t wake up. In the morning, when Dad and I leave, they are saying he must be in a coma.

  I’m so worried about Tim I don’t even enjoy the press conference at our house that afternoon—the press conference that should be focused on Tim instead of me.

  I tell the reporters and the TV interviewers everything I know about the heads and The Others. Kroll is there too. He won’t say anything yet about Tim’s father. But he publicly affirms that he saw the gray shapes last night. He also states that the implant from my ear represents a technology beyond anything known to the scientists at the university.

  I don’t know how much the reporters believe us. They think it’s an interesting story, I guess, but they find it somewhat confusing. It’s like they’re disappointed I’m not claiming the aliens came to destroy the Earth or to save the Earth. I don’t know what either species of aliens came here for, and the media people don’t like that. And they seem positively insulted when I tell them the heads said the Earth was completely irrelevant.