Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Jeremy was so intent on peering up at the snared plastic that he neglected the ground directly beneath him. It wasn’t until he felt his shoe press into a soft mass that he quickly looked down. The sensation had been like stepping into a puddle of half liquid matter, like ice cream…though what he saw reminded him more of the contents of a bottle of shampoo, poured out onto the ground. Whitish-translucent, and gelatinous. Jeremy stepped back from it, and wiped the sole of his shoe against the bed of dried pine needles.

  He noticed several more of these gelatinous puddles scattered about. And behind the trunk of a tree ahead, what he had first, peripherally, taken to be a large stone poking up from the earth. But now he saw that it shimmered where the fragmented sunlight shifted across it.

  Avoiding not only the strands now (twenty? more?), but the blobs of goo strewn about the ground as well, Jeremy stole up on the glistening hump. He stepped around the tree and saw it more clearly.

  It was also a blob of that gelatinous matter, but bulked up into a smooth mound a foot high at its center. He wanted to poke it with the toe of his shoe, decided his shoe had made enough contact with the slime for one day, and looked around for a stick instead. He spotted one a few paces away, and bent to pick it up.

  He felt a whisper of contact across his forehead, and instantly knew that he had touched one of those swaying ribbons, which had been unseen without the highlighting of the sun to alert him to it.

  But Jeremy did not recoil back away from it. He did not straighten up erect. Nor did he complete his reaching forward for the stick just inches from his extended hand.

  He held that pose. His eyes did not blink. And patches of golden summer sunlight played across his face and body…migrating across him as the hours passed, until the splotches of light became tinted copper with the coming of dusk.

  -TWO-

  Allen Spence left work early and drove immediately from Worcester to Eastborough, his mother having called and told him that his brother Jeremy was in trouble at work. He had shown up at his mother’s house this morning to rage and complain that he had been laid off. Which was bad enough. But the more unsettling thing was that Jeremy had already come by last Friday and told her the same thing.

  Jeremy ranted that his boss was going insane, in claiming that he had laid Jeremy off a week ago, wondering why Jeremy was punching into work again today as if nothing had ever happened. His boss would have him believe it was the 16th of August, Jeremy said, pacing her kitchen floor in a rage, when it was obviously only the 9th.

  Both Allen and his mother knew that it was, indeed, the 16th.

  And there was another thing. Jeremy had a welt or a burn across his forehead that he couldn’t account for. He had been drinking more lately, their mother strongly suspected; she feared he had fallen somehow, struck his head.

  Apparently he had lost his memory of the entire past week.

  ««—»»

  No emergency was enough to prevent Allen from stopping at a little coffee shop in the town center for a big cup of java before going on to Jeremy’s rented house. As he stood off to one side, pouring in his cream and sugar, he heard two teenage girls talking at a table nearby him. Obviously, Eastborough had experienced the same scary thunderstorm last night that Worcester had almost as impressive as the one that had raged through the area last week. One of the girls was saying, “My dad and brother went out on the porch to watch the lightning, but I was too scared, and they said they saw UFOs in the sky.

  Really! They swore it. They were like yelling at my mother and me to go look, but I said no way, I’m not going out there and get hit by a bolt of lightning!”

  “My dad got knocked out by lightning when he was talking on the phone once,” her friend said. “He has a fit if I talk on the phone in a thunderstorm.

  So…UFOs, huh? What did they look like?”

  “I dunno. Lights shooting across the sky. Back and forth. They’re so gay. It was probably just, you know, spotlights from a new car dealership or something.”

  Stirring his coffee, Allen recalled the globule of light he and his cousin Jim had seen floating slowly through the air, inches off the grass, in Pine Grove Cemetery while in their teens, smoking pot on a summer evening. He had done some reading on ball lightning over the following years as a result. Maybe the books he consulted were dated, but scientists did not seem to entirely understand the phenomenon. Witnesses had claimed that ball lightning appeared to move about with something like sentience; there was one case where an orb physically pushed open a door to gain admittance into a house. Humans who had come into contact with these spheres of apparent energy had never been harmed by them (even when, in one instance, a child kicked one of them), and yet farm animals had been killed in a number of cases.

  He had decided long ago that what he’d seen had been another phenomenon—a will-o’-the-wisp, caused by the decomposition of animal or vegetable matter, which released hydrogen that in turn was spontaneously ignited by the oxygen in the air. Either the rot of the bodies in the graveyard or the gases from the adjacent swamp had been responsible, no doubt. But in listening to the girls, Allen was sure that what the father and brother had really seen in the sky was ball lightning associated with the electrical disturbance of the thunderstorm—such orbs could range in size from a few inches across to several feet. He would have liked to share his theory with them but decided they might mistake his intrusion for lechery, and so he capped his coffee and went outside to his car.

  ««—»»

  “Hello? Sibling?” Allen had tried the front hall door and it was locked.

  That was unusual. Usually Jeremy only locked the outer door when he went to bed…but then, with no job, Allen supposed he might be taking a late afternoon nap. He pressed his forehead against the screen in the livingroom window. “I see your car in the driveway! You can run but you can’t hide!”

  He straightened, glanced up and down the quiet street his brother’s diminutive rented house faced upon. It was only a five minute walk to the center of town, but this street was given over mostly to small warehouses and outer structures of a sprawling abrasives company, the vast brick chimney of which loomed above the flat rooftops like a rocket on its launch pad.

  He heard a rustle behind the screened window, and when he looked back, saw an indistinct version of his brother’s face gazing warily out at him.

  “Sorry…I was taking a nap.”

  “So I guessed.”

  The outer door was unlocked with a click, and Jeremy admitted him.

  Glancing back as he brushed past him, Allen saw Jeremy look up and down the silent street and then up at the sky, which was beginning to dim as evening neared. He locked the front hall door again, then the door to his livingroom after him. Allen watched as he even shut and locked the window they had peered at each other through. He switched the overhead fan on to a higher setting to compensate.

  “Pretty hot to be closing the windows,” Allen noted.

  “I need to get an air conditioner,” Jeremy mumbled. “Want a beer?”

  “I got my coffee.” He held it up. “I’m wishing now that I’d made it an ice coffee.”

  Allen followed Jeremy into the stuffy kitchen. He saw that all the other windows on the ground floor were closed, as well. He also noted the bareness of the place and realized it was the first time he had been here since Shannon had left Jeremy. He felt guilty now for having neglected his brother lately, though he hoped Jeremy would understand that Allen had his own family to focus on, a wife and a three-year-old son.

  Jeremy uncapped a bottle of Corona, ran its smooth cool curve across his forehead several times. He hadn’t shaved, and his shoulder length hair looked tangled and wild from his nap, not tied back in the ponytail he usually wore it in these days. Allen hadn’t worn his hair that long, himself, since he was a teen. The baggy shorts Jeremy had on were wrinkled from having been slept in, maybe worn for several days, and he was bare-chested, pale. Allen’s younger brother, so stick thin as a boy, n
ow had a paunch, and Allen felt a twinge of guilt for being relieved that his own was smaller.

  “Mum told me about your job.”

  “Yeah?” Jeremy gulped a swallow of beer. “She tell you about my memory lapse?”

  “Something about it. Though I’m not clear on it.”

  Jeremy wasn’t meeting his eyes. “Me neither. I thought it was my boss who had the dates mixed up. Now I know it was me. It looks like I lost about a week, somewhere along the line.” He gulped his beer again. Behind him, clustered in a corner of the counter he leaned against, were more bottles of Corona, empty.

  “Well…what do you think happened? Haven’t you thought about seeing a doctor about this?” He raised his coffee toward Jeremy’s forehead, where a reddish stripe ran from his hairline down to his eyebrow. It wasn’t actually raised like a welt, or blistered like a burn. “What happened there?”

  Jeremy touched it with his fingers quickly, almost as if to hide it. “I dunno.

  I guess I fell. It’s starting to go away.”

  “Man, losing a week of your life is not something to be so lackadaisical about, ya know?” Allen set aside his coffee and poked his head in Jeremy’s refrigerator. “How much have you been drinking?”

  “Not much, okay? A few beers a day…that’s it.”

  Jeremy had never been much of a drinker before, except when out with friends. Allen saw a six pack and a half in the fridge, and a half empty bottle of white wine. Looked like more than a little drinking to him. He closed the door and leaned his back against it. “Really, I want you to see a doctor.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Jesus, come on! Mum’s worried about you! What if you had…I dunno…an aneurism or something?”

  Jeremy chuckled. “Aneurism. Do aneurisms cause amnesia, or do they just sound alike?”

  “This isn’t a joke. Maybe if you fell you have a concussion; those can be dangerous.”

  “My head doesn’t hurt. It never did. Well, I’ve just got one of my usual headaches, but. Yeah, it’s freaky, I lost a week. Maybe it’s just because I’m laid off, I’m not punching a clock, all I do now is sit around watching TV. I don’t know if I’m coming or going now, so time is a blur.”

  “It’s not like you’ve been laid off long enough for that.”

  Jeremy turned his back on him, shuffled in his sandals back into the livingroom and flopped down in front of the TV, which had been left running at a low murmur. Allen settled into a chair beside him, and for the first time noticed the small blue box resting atop a pile of typewriter sheets on the coffee table. He recognized that box. It was the one which contained Jeremy’s snub-nosed, nickel-plated .38 special. He put down his coffee, hefted the box into his lap, and opened the cover. Lifting the bright little revolver in his fist, seeing his reflection smeared across it, he noted the blunt gray ends of bullets in its five-shot cylinder.

  “What’s this doing out, Jeremy?” he asked gravely. “Huh?”

  “What do you think? That I’m going to go shoot Shannon or something?

  Or my boss?”

  “Actually, I was more worried about you.”

  “Aw, man.” Jeremy plopped his head heavily against the backrest of his sofa and sank down further on its cushions. He rubbed at his closed eyes with one hand and groaned. Allen could tell he was indeed having one of his killer headaches, no doubt worsened by dehydration from alcohol. Still, he wasn’t entirely convinced there was no head injury involved.

  “Well, why is your gun out, then?”

  Jeremy’s hand lowered from his face, revealing sore, reddened eyes. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t recall getting it out. I found it in my backpack, with some boxes of shells. I found a trash bag filled with soda cans in the kitchen, too. I must’ve been thinking about going out in the woods target shooting, but I don’t remember.”

  “Or maybe you were taking the gun to work, after all.”

  “Christ, Allen, do you think I’m insane? You think I’m a psycho? Nice to know Mum and you have such a high opinion of me.” Jeremy got up from the couch to start poking around for the TV’s misplaced remote.

  “We’re just worried—is that okay?”

  Allen replaced the .38 in its box, and in leaning forward to rest the box back on the disorderly pile of papers it had been weighing down, his gaze fell on the top sheet. Allen picked it up, then the rest of the sheets, and began paging through each of them.

  Remote in hand, Jeremy turned and saw what his older brother had discovered. “Hey, come on…can I have a little privacy around here?”

  In a subdued tone, Allen asked, “Why are you drawing these, Jer?”

  Jeremy sighed, averting his eyes. “I don’t know. It’s something…some-thing I’ve been dreaming.”

  Allen flipped through the crude ballpoint sketches again. Each one showed one or more figures, apparently as small as children and as stick thin as the two brothers had once been. Figures with bulbous, hairless heads. With huge, lidless black eyes.

  -THREE-

  “It isn’t that he was missing for a week,” Allen told his wife Laurie as he undressed for bed. With the air so humid, their Worcester apartment so stuffy, he stripped down to just his underwear. Laurie patted his rounded, fuzzy belly as she walked past him. He barely noticed her tease. “His whereabout are accounted for. People saw him. His boss, when he laid him off. My mother. It’s just that a week of his memories got misplaced somewhere along the way.”

  Wearing one of his T-shirts to bed, her legs bare, Laurie folded back the single sheet that was all they could stand for covers on so sultry a night. The air conditioner was broken again. Without its hum, they could hear the subdued but ever present sounds of the city beyond. “Did you convince him to go a doctor, then?”

  “He said he would, but I kind of doubt it.” Allen set the clock alarm.

  “Jeremy’s feeling sorry for himself these days. Not that I blame him. But it makes him dangerous to himself. Speaking of which…”

  Allen went to the closet, slid open its door, and brought down a small blue box from the top shelf. He half lifted the lid so Laurie could get a peek of its shiny contents.

  “Oh, no, Allen, no!” Laurie exclaimed, sitting up erect in their bed. “We have a young child in this house!”

  “A child too small to reach the top of the closet. Do you want my brother to shoot himself?”

  “Well if he’s that much of a threat to himself, then maybe he should be under psychiatric care.”

  Allen glowered at his wife a few moments before responding. “I’ll have him come live with us so I can keep an eye on him, before I send my brother to a psych ward.”

  Laurie sighed, watched her husband replace the box with the revolver on the closet’s top shelf, beside some containers of .38 cartridges. “It isn’t that I don’t care for him, too, you know!” She lay her head back on her pillow, boyishly short dark hair mussing into punky jags. “So…he’s drawing aliens. And he’s forgotten the whole of last week. Maybe part of his mind is trying to convince him that he was abducted by aliens for a week, even though we know better. He lost his job, and after losing Shannon it was too much to bear. So he wiped it right out of his mind, and he came up with a dream or a delusion to take its place.”

  “Sounds probable.” Allen joined her under the sheet. “I’m going to drop in on him again after work, tomorrow. I’ve been neglecting him. I’m gonna hound him until he sees a doctor for certain.”

  “Maybe there’s a mass hysteria going around lately,” Laurie murmured, burying her profile into her pillow and closing her eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t hear about the UFOs people have been seeing in Eastborough, lately?”

  “UFOs? Tell me.”

  Her eyes opened. “Last week a few people saw them. One was a cop in his patrol car.”

  “My God…you know what? When I was getting a coffee today, I heard a young girl say her father saw UFOs last night, during the thunde
rstorm. I just assumed it was ball lightning they were talking about.”

  “That’s probably all it was last week, too,” Laurie said. “Because people saw the UFOs around the time of that other big storm we had.”

  “Where did you hear about all this?”

  “In the Eastborough News. See what you miss reading USA Today?

  Maybe Jeremy saw that ball lightning or whatever, too. And that’s what put that delusion in his head. Hey…Allen…that scar you saw on his head. Could he have actually been hit by lightning, do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” he muttered, turning his eyes to their curtained bedroom window. Through its translucent veil, the scattered lights of the night city glowed like stars.

  ««—»»

  It was the howling of coyotes that awoke Jeremy Spence.

  His eyes snapped open so thoroughly it was as if his eyelids had been entirely sliced away. It wasn’t the first time he had been awakened by coyotes; beyond his back yard, only three cross-wise streets separated his rented house from one of the borders of Eastborough Swamp. But still, it was not something easily acclimated to. The sound was unearthly, haunting—a primeval cry to disturb the dreams of slumbering Yuppies.

  The cries died off. But Jeremy lay just as stiff, paralyzed, as if waiting for another sound to be discernible now that the wild canines had ceased their ruckus. Something subtle that had been hidden behind their wails. There was a chittering layer of insect song. And, eventually, the mournful and distant rumbling of a train, like blood rushing through one of night’s black veins. But he had heard all these things before.

  He sat up in bed, checked the time on his bedside clock. 2:25 AM. Well, he didn’t have to worry about not getting enough sleep, did he? Not without a job to go to.