The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  “He’s being awfully helpful,” Ed whispered.

  “Of course he is. He’s as curious as anyone. I bet he’s been wondering about those numbers for days.”

  The window behind the drum faced the river, which was a view a lot more interesting, to Annie, than the one in the display case. The sky had clouded up over the course of the afternoon, and now they were looking at what could be a rain shower rolling in from the east. Sunset wasn’t for another two hours, but it already looked dark out.

  “This isn’t the real thing, is it?”

  “What?” She got lost in the weather for a second. “The drum?”

  “Yes, the drum. It’s much too small.”

  “Could be.”

  She could see it, not resting in a case but in a recess in the stump.

  When people talked about the stump what they thought of was the kind of dead tree stump of the current times, a flattened base making a tiny stage just above the earth, but the real thing was wide and as tall as a man. The tree, when it existed, was enormous and ancient, maybe the oldest thing in the valley before it fell. The drum fit in a knot that was eye-level.

  The snow was deep that day, when the tribes rode to the stump. The wind blew hard over the river, the clouds were thundering, and the piles of white held everything down, including sound and warmth. It was unwise to go anywhere as long as the gods were raging like this, but still they went, because the drum called them, and they had to answer it.

  The little pale man curled up in the stump with the drum was not what anyone expected. One of them mistook him for a tree god and nearly bolted in fear. When the little man spoke he used words none of them knew.

  But then a little girl stepped forward.

  “Annie.”

  Annie shook her head, and the room spun a tiny bit more than it was supposed to. Ed had her by the shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay? Where’d you go?”

  “What?”

  “I was talking to you and you just sort of checked out, are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, sorry. What were you saying?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re probably tired; it’s been a long day. I should get you back.”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  It had actually been a very long and largely fruitless day. With only the Desmond interview officially on a calendar that was supposed to be much more full, she and Ed ended up walking the length of Main, popping into stores along the way both to speak with long-time residents so Ed could ask his usual reporter-ish questions (a new one was whether anyone had been sick recently, since he seemed to think this was relevant) and to get out of the heat and into some air conditioning.

  When she was at Violet’s house, she imagined herself to be missing all sorts of amazingly important stuff. So far, all she’d gotten out of the day, though, was a few interesting chats with people who all wanted her to know they’re praying for Carol, one very entertaining conversation with Pammy, the racist hairdresser who wanted Ed to know that reggae music was an alien invasion, and—apparently—an extended hallucination from Desmond’s drum.

  Desmond wasn’t at the desk any more and the door to the office was open.

  How long has he been missing?

  Ed saw her confusion.

  “He said he had to fetch it from the printer. You didn’t hear that either, huh? Maybe paper mill employees aren’t the only ones losing sleep around here.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Desmond walked back in the room with a Manila folder. “Here we are,” he said, handing it over. “If you know how to read a spreadsheet, it should be pretty obvious what this is saying. I put my business card in there too if you have any questions. Private line, skips right past Missie. You call me any time.”

  “Well thank you, Mr. Hollis, that’s incredibly helpful.”

  “I have selfish motivations. I want to know what’s going on, and I’d rather I heard about it beforehand instead of during. Hard to game-plan in the middle of it all.”

  “You make it sound like something big’s about to take place,” Ed said.

  “Isn’t it? Sure feels that way to me. But maybe you know more than I do.”

  Ed looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “We don’t know a lot more than this, Desmond,” Annie said. “Just rumors right now. But you knew that too, didn’t you?”

  “Seemed like a good bet. You know my number too, Annie. If the apocalypse arrives and I haven’t received a call, I’m going to be very disappointed in both of you.”

  * * *

  With the car still parked behind the diner, Annie and Ed had a hike ahead of them, because everything from the mill to Main was uphill. The best way to approach it was to reach the approximate same altitude as the parking lot and then taking the nearest side street running parallel to Main. It was far less scenic, but a good deal more efficient, and the humidity was just not getting any better. The weather reached that point where everyone caught outside was hoping it would just rain and get it over with.

  The clouds indicated it was about to do just that.

  The streets between the river’s edge and Main were almost entirely residential or were a building belonging to Hollis. There wasn’t much else. The residences were row houses—tall, three family buildings with a small footprint and almost no yard—that from Hollis’s window looked like a series of stairs for a giant. On the street level, the buildings blocked out the sun and made the roads seem narrower.

  Annie’s preference was to drive through this area if possible. She hardly ever walked it. She did bike it a couple of times, but the climb back was brutal enough to discourage her from making it a habit.

  They mostly climbed in silence. Ed was preoccupied with whatever he had going on in his head, stuff he annoyingly hadn’t bothered to share with her yet. She was still trying to break down whatever it was that happened when she was looking at the drum.

  Overactive imagination, she thought. That was what the teachers used to accuse her of, as if a vivid imagination was a bad thing. She would have been okay with the idea that that was all it was, but it felt different.

  It felt like a memory. The problem was, it wasn’t her memory.

  Who else is in my head?

  In any other town, the idea that something appeared in her mind that didn’t also begin there would have been entirely non-literal, but Sorrow Falls had an alien ship that put terrible thoughts in the heads of anyone who came too close to it. Also, if Ed was in any way correct, the entire town was behaving civilly to a statistically impossible degree. If the ship could reach out and make people unusually law-abiding, it could reach Annie’s head and put someone else’s memory in it. That wouldn’t necessarily even make the list of top five screwed up things going on.

  Ed stopped.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “I thought I heard a scream.”

  “Maybe one of your zombies…” she stopped talking, because then she heard it too.

  It was a woman’s scream, it came from directly ahead of them, and Annie thought she recognized the voice.

  “That’s from the lot behind the diner,” she said. “And it sounds like Beth.”

  They were already running by the time they heard a third scream—the quite clear “HELP ME!” in a voice that was unquestionably Beth’s.

  The street they were running down took them to the lower back side of the lot, which was blocked off by a chain link fence that was too tall to get over.

  Beth drove a Jeep with gold trim—Annie used to joke that Beth should paint it in pink so it would look just like the one in the Barbie playhouse set. It was memorable enough to identify quickly.

  Through the fence, they could see Beth lying on her side next to the Jeep. She wasn’t moving.

  A man was briskly walking away from Beth. Annie could only see his back, but he looked familiar.

  “Hey, HEY! You leave her alone!” An
nie yelled. He was, to that point, already doing so.

  “How do we get in?” Ed asked.

  Annie grabbed him by the elbow and pulled them back the way they’d come, up a side street, to a spot where there was no fence in their way.

  Just then, the skies opened up.

  It was not the polite kind of storm, which started with a light drizzle and worked its way up to something serious before pulling back and settling in on a decent rain-to-not-rain ratio. It was the angry kind; dumping all the water it had as fast as it could as if the clouds had someplace to be.

  It completely destroyed their visibility. The fleeing man, the Jeep, Beth and all but the nearest parked cars vanished in the downpour.

  The Jeep was at the far end of the lot, a courtesy parking job so the customers had the spots closest to the restaurant. Annie raced straight to it, her biggest fear, strangely, being that her friend was about to drown in the middle of the lot. She lost track of Ed.

  “Beth, Beth! Hey!” Annie knelt down and lifted Beth from the pavement. She was breathing, and once Annie pulled her off the ground, her eyes fluttered and opened.

  “Annie, run! We have to…” then she started crying. “Oh, it’s awful, it’s so awful.”

  “What is it? What happened to you?”

  There was blood on the pavement. Beth had an open wound on her head, but most of the blood was coming from the keys in her hands.

  “It’s his blood,” Beth said. “I stabbed him. Maced him too, but he… Annie, I sprayed mace right in the eyes and he didn’t care.”

  “Who was it?”

  Ed ran up.

  “I can’t find him. I can’t see anything out here. I called Pete, she’s on her way.”

  “She needs an ambulance,” Annie said.

  “They’re on their way too. Did she say who it was?”

  “No, but…”

  Beth squeezed Annie’s arm tightly.

  “It was Mr. Blake, Annie,” she said. “I think he wanted to kill me.”

  “Blake? Okay, I’ll tell Pete,” Ed said.

  “Put away the phone,” Annie said.

  “But Pete can send someone to pick this guy up.”

  “Ed, he lives in Peacock Cemetery. George Blake has been dead for five months.”

  Ed stared at Annie for a five count. Then he put the phone away.

  15

  The Conversation

  The deluge stopped by the time Sheriff Pete and two of her deputies arrived at the scene, which was to say that the rain didn’t last long at all given the station was only a few blocks away. It actually took them longer than Annie would have guessed, only because it never seemed like there was an actual emergency in this town so they had nowhere else to be.

  The ambulance came a minute later, and then Annie was in the back of the ambulance with Beth while Ed tried to explain what they knew to Pete, and Pete’s men began to scour the area for a man who had been blinded by pepper spray and stabbed in the thigh by a pair of keys, and who might also have been a zombie.

  “I had the late shift today, you saw,” Beth said. She was lying on a gurney while a paramedic Annie didn’t recognize wound a bandage around her head.

  “I did. Last one out?”

  “Last one out, check the lights and lock the doors, that’s the drill.”

  “I know it.”

  “I got out here, and it was about to rain so I was hurrying, and then this… guy comes up like from out of nowhere. He was, I think he was behind my car, like, waiting for me maybe.”

  “He jumped you?”

  “Not really. Not at first. He just like, stood there, and looked at me, and it was sort of murky out, right, so I couldn’t see his face, I was just like, ‘can I help you?’ And he took a step forward and said… what did he say? He asked me a question. I can’t remember what. By then I had my mace in my hand, and I didn’t know really what to do because he was between me and the car, but I was like, I don’t know what you want but… oh, I remember! ‘Are you?’ That was his question.”

  “’Are you?’ That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Right? But I was like, I do not know what you’re talking about, but back off. That was when he grabbed my wrist.”

  Beth looked up and away from Annie, because she was welling up. Her shoulder was in already in a temporary sling, and as soon as her head was taken care of and she was strapped in, they’d be moving her to the clinic up the street to see if she needed to continue on to one of the hospitals for an overnight. Annie was about to perform the unenviable task of calling Beth’s parents to let them know where to find their daughter.

  “He grabbed your wrist, and then what?” Annie asked.

  “He asked me the same question, only, I don’t know, more aggressively. Then I sprayed him with the mace and it didn’t do anything. He just, like, blinked, and tilted his head like, like a curious bird, you know? It was… anyway that was when I recognized him.”

  “Beth.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. It was dark, the rain was about to start, I was scared, but I waited on Mr. Blake for four years. Over easy, crispy bacon, side of hash, wheat toast, strawberry jam. I know my regulars.”

  “But…” Annie shot a glance at the paramedic. She was clearly listening, even if she was pretending not to. Annie leaned forward and whispered. “But he’s dead.”

  “I don’t care. That’s who it was.”

  The paramedic coughed. It wasn’t a real cough; it was one of those I am interrupting politely coughs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. The woman was in her forties, and if Annie didn’t know her that likely meant she was a stringer with the ambulance company and from one of the nearby towns. “I’m just about done here, but… I wanted to say, regarding what you two are discussing? It would not be he first story I’ve heard like this, not lately.”

  “Mr. Blake attacking other people?” Beth asked.

  “No, honey. People being attacked by people who aren’t exactly people any more.”

  Oh, I do not have time for zombies in my life right now, Annie thought.

  “All right, so maybe we have a zombie George Blake running around. He grabs you, barks an incomplete sentence, and then what?”

  “I screamed a lot. You probably heard me.”

  “Yeah, that’s what got us running. Then what?”

  “I balled up the keys in my fist, remember how they taught us that trick in gym?”

  Annie remembered. It was a basic self-defense mini-course that was mandatory for the girls in the school. They all called it anti-rape class because that was what it was. Annoyingly, while the girls were in that course, nobody was teaching a boys’ course called don’t be a rapist.

  The trick was to put your keys in a closed fist so the sharp parts stick out between the knuckles. Then you punch an attacker’s fleshy part.

  “You stabbed him?”

  “Yeah, like I told them…” them being the sheriff, “…I got him in the thigh. But that didn’t get him to let go either. I don’t think he felt it any more than the mace.”

  “But then why’d he run off?”

  “Honest, I think the screaming bugged him more than anything. I wouldn’t say he let me go, though. He threw me against the car. I went down pretty hard. I’m gonna have a hell of a bump, I bet.”

  “You are indeed,” the paramedic said. “But good for you for fighting him off.”

  Ed walked up. It looked like someone dropped him in the Connecticut River a few times. He was soaked through, and pulling his wet clothes tight to ward off the breeze, which had a tendency to cut through anything damp. Annie was just as wet, but wrapped in a blanket from the ambulance.

  “How are you doing, Beth?” he asked.

  “Super, Mr. reporter.” She gave him a thumbs-up.

  “It’s Ed.”

  “Thanks for coming to my rescue, Ed.”

  “Sure.” He looked at Annie. “You want to go with her, or come back with me? Sheriff has some questions for us, bu
t we can do that any time.”

  “Do we get to ride in one of the cruisers, or will we have to walk to the station?”

  “We can ride.”

  “Cool, let’s do it.”

  * * *

  The next hour was notable for the fact that all of the adults Annie spoke to appeared have lost their minds.

  First she sat down with Pete to talk about what she and Ed heard, saw and did, up to and following the attack. That went pretty well. Then Annie offered up what Beth told her, in as much detail as she could recall, omitting the identity of the attacker but nothing else. She even included the part about the mace not having an impact and the equal lack of response to the key stabbing. None of this caused so much as a skeptical grunt.

  “Did she recognize her attacker?” Pete asked, looking up from her notes. She took notes longhand and didn’t appear to have an interest in recording equipment. The sheriff’s office was a small affair though, with only two holding cells and nothing in the way of an interrogation room. They were talking in Pete’s office.

  “I don’t know,” Annie lied. Pete seemed to know it, too.

  “I spoke to your… boss? Is that how this is?”

  “You mean Ed? Coworker, how about?”

  “Sure. He said she gave a name.”

  “She did. But she was mistaken.”

  “Annie, babe, give me the name and let me decide that.”

  She sighed. “Won’t it, like, invalidate her testimony somehow? Like, when you catch the guy, if she named someone else…”

  “The name, Annie.”

  “George Blake.”

  Pete nodded and slowly wrote George’s name down on her pad of paper.

  “And which direction did you say he ran?”

  “I’m… sorry, what?”

  Ed had his zombie theory, and it was a crazy theory. Sure, it appeared to be coming true right in front of Annie, but that didn’t mean it was in any way a respectable theory.

  “Direction?” Pete repeated.

  “North. But, George Blake.”