Aliens in Disguise

by Clete Barrett Smith

  “What? No, that’s just a figure of—”

  “Earthlings are weird. That’s worse than corn dog.” He jotted down a quick entry in his notebook.

  “Just leave it alone,” I whispered to Amy.

  Long sleeves, ankle-length dresses or baggy sweats, and oversize hats took care of most of the class. The slime-drippers, however, presented more of a challenge. We put them in XL nylon sweat suits; when the slime leaked through we tried covering their bodies in Saran Wrap under their clothes. Not good. Finally, even Mrs. Crowzen admitted that it just wasn’t going to work.

  “I’m afraid you boys will have to stay here during the field trip,” she told them.

  “No way!”

  “We’ve been stuck inside for days!”

  “It’s just too risky.” Mrs. Crowzen shook her head. “You’d be putting the rest of the group in danger, and compromising the security of our hosts.”

  “But can’t we—”

  “No.”

  The slime-drippers looked at each other. Then they whispered in each other’s ears. Finally, they both nodded at the same time. They wiped the slime from their bodies and shook it off their hands in yellowish-green gobs that spattered the floor.

  “How’s this?”

  They were both totally dry, and without the slime oozing out from everywhere, they looked really humanoid. Hardly needed a disguise at all—just a hat to cover the antennae.

  “What happened?” I said.

  One of them grinned sheepishly. “We can sort of control it. Sometimes.”

  The other laughed out loud. “We can totally control it. Always.”

  Amy looked confused. “Then why would you choose to walk around covered in slime?”

  “Because it’s awesome!”

  “Yeah, we love this planet.”

  “How mortifying.” Mrs. Crowzen huffed and clacked her claws. “First, you will apologize to our guests for the deception, and then you will stay here as a punishment and—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “They’ll fit right in. I don’t know a single Earth boy their age who would have done anything any different.” I didn’t add including me, though, because Amy looked as appalled as Mrs. Crowzen. “You all go out and have fun. Just be back before six o’clock, okay? We’ll have dinner ready then.”

  The other kids had drifted away and were messing around in the sitting room. Mrs. Crowzen made that horrible screeching sound by rubbing her claw on her chest plate, and the little aliens rushed over and lined up single file in the entryway.

  Amy took her place up front as the leader of the excursion. She pulled out a sheaf of notes and cleared her throat as they marched out the front door. “Forest Grove was founded one Earth-century ago, with the primary industry being fur trapping and logging, sending goods by river to the larger city of Bellingham.” She led them down the steps. “The third mayor of the new town was Martha VanDeBosch, making this the first town in the Pacific Northwest to elect a woman to that position.” She paused halfway down the front path and looked at the kids. “You’re probably going to want to write this stuff down.” The kids stifled groans as they hauled out their notebooks. Then they were off, Amy lecturing away. I smiled and shut the door.

  The next couple of hours were pretty uneventful. The Arkamendian Air Painters asked to go out. There was really no way to disguise them, but they just wanted to hike up to one of their secluded meadows. I could hardly say no after letting the kids out, so off they went. Then Cottage Cheese Head and the Blob pressed their case to be allowed to go fishing down at the river.

  “I don’t know, guys. I mean, I guess we could throw a big fishing hat and some sunglasses on you.” I pointed to Cottage Cheese Man. “But you…” I sized up the Blob. “I just don’t think we can make you look humanoid enough. Do you, uh, mind telling me why you even picked this spot for vacation? I mean, you knew it was a primitive planet that required a disguise, right?”

  The Blob chuckled. “Let’s show him.” Cottage Cheese Head grabbed one of the Blob’s stumpy arms and pulled. The thing stretched like taffy until it was the approximate length and width of a human arm. After doing the same with the other one, he went to work on the torso, kneading and pulling the blobby mass into a more elongated, thinner shape. It looked like he was molding a huge pile of sculptor’s clay.

  “Little help with the legs?” the Blob said. I knelt down and grabbed a handful of his squishy flesh (I had kind of gotten used to that disgusting feeling last summer). He had a wide base of solidified jelly that he slithered around on, so I had to tug hard to create the legs from scratch. And making the knees was difficult; they came out pretty knobby. But in the end I think I did a pretty good job.

  The Blob stood up. He was a little shaky on his new limbs, but a lot taller and more humanoid. Man, I wish I could do that to my body before basketball season started. I’d transform from point guard to power forward in five minutes.

  “Will you stay like that?”

  “For a few hours, anyway. After that, everything will sort of melt back into position.” He marched in little circles, getting used to his new body. He kind of jiggled when he moved, but then again so did a lot of earthlings. I thought he could pass.

  “All right, fellas. Grab some clothes and you’re good to go.”

  They were the last of the Tourists, so now the house was empty. I cleaned up the breakfast stuff and made a few beds in the guest rooms. Then I fed Snarffle, and he curled up on the bed in my room for one of his naps.

  So I was all alone in that big house when someone started pounding on the front door like they were trying to knock it off its hinges.

  I looked out the peephole.

  Aliens.

  The tall one had dusky yellow skin with an enormous round nose and spiky hair. The short one had the same nose, but more of an orange tint. She either had an antigravity beehive hairdo or else there was a traffic cone on her head. And they both had decided to go with the silvery one-piece-jumpsuit look.

  The male continued to beat on the door while the little female peeked in the windows. Both of them cast nervous glances back down the road toward town, but the street was empty, as usual.

  Leaning my shoulder against the door, I scanned a mental list of the Tourists I’d met so far this summer. It’s hard to keep track of all the aliens that come through here, but I was pretty sure I’d never seen these two. Although I might have met someone from their planet; there was something vaguely familiar about them.

  More pounding. What was going on? Maybe they had checked in with someone else a few days ago and then had gone out and gotten lost? That didn’t seem right. Tate would have kept records of—

  “Please! Help us!”

  I looked through the peephole again. The female was calling through cupped hands pressed against the window.

  I cracked the door open a few inches, careful to block the jamb with my shoe so they couldn’t burst in.

  “Oh, thank the stars,” the female said. “Quick, open up and let us in.”

  Not yet. “What’s going on?”

  The male wedged his face into the narrow crack between door and frame, like a dog trying to nose open a door. “We heard this place was a safe haven.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know…for travelers.”

  The female’s face appeared below his. “Travelers from far away.” She gave me a broad wink. “Very far away.”

  My weirdo radar, which I thought had been broken by overuse after hanging out at the B&B, was definitely buzzing now. Something was off.

  “So…what, are you saying that you’re not guests here?”

  “Not as such.”

  “But we’d like to be.”

  “In fact, it’s urgent—”

  “Most urgent.”

  “—that we check in.”

  “Today.”

  “Right now.”

  This was too strange. Why hadn’t they arrived in the transporters? I mean, I knew that spaceships exi
sted, because I had seen a couple, but they didn’t visit often. And I’d never seen an alien just show up at the front door.

  But wait—Grandma had been running this place for forty years—there were probably lots of things I’d never seen before. What to do?

  “How did you get here?”

  They glanced at each other, the male looking straight down, the female straight up. Finally they faced me again. The male cleared his throat. “We’re sorry, it’s just that—”

  “We’re not in the habit of trusting, you know, humans. No offense intended, you understand.”

  Whatever. “Look, you’re the ones who came here, remember? I can shut the door if you’d rather—”

  “No!”

  “Then how did you get here?” I repeated.

  “Well…that’s kind of a long story,” the male said.

  “Oh, it is not,” the female said. “Our, uh, vehicle crashed. There, that’s a pretty short story.”

  The male winced. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

  “I should say so.” The female huffed. “Some people don’t know how to read a simple navigational chart, or even how to—”

  “Someone’s coming!” the male said.

  I looked down the street. A group of kids were riding their bikes in this direction. Time to act.

  “Go around the side of the house. Meet me on the back porch.”

  I shut the door and marched down the hallway, my mind racing. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t let aliens into the house if they didn’t even have a reservation, could I? I mean, there must be some kind of off-world screening process for anyone who wanted to use a transporter. The last aliens that had shown up by ship without authorization hadn’t been too friendly. They had, in fact, tried to kidnap pretty much the entire town of Forest Grove.

  But, okay, these two didn’t seem very intimidating. And it’s not like I wanted them to just stroll into town, either. I had to get this figured out. Fast.

  I couldn’t believe how often I was thinking it, but I really wished the adults were back. Responsibility is overrated.

  I opened the back door to find the aliens in the yard, craning their necks to study the windows on the top floors. Shutting the door firmly behind me, I stepped out onto the porch.

  It took the male only a few long-legged steps to climb the porch stairs. “I’ll get right down to business, as you earthlings like to say: We need a place to stay while we fix our ship. It’s in the forest, about a half mile from here.”

  The little female bustled up behind him. They must have come from a planet with no concept of personal space, because they both crowded me. I stepped back, but the female leaned in even closer.

  “We covered it with tree branches. Wouldn’t want anyone—any earthlings—to find the ship, now, would we?” she said, her voice thick with implications. “It would be a shame if the authorities suspected it belonged here…wouldn’t it?”

  An alarm sounded somewhere in my brain. You know that parent trick, where they pretend to know way more about something than they actually do, and they start casually talking to you about it, and pretty soon you’re accidentally giving up new details? That was definitely the vibe I was getting here.

  As any kid knows, the only thing to do is play dumb and try to see where the adults are going with it.

  “Why would anyone suspect that?” I didn’t look directly at the female’s eyes. Maybe she had some sort of alien-hypnosis power. You never know.

  The male scanned Grandma’s big backyard. “Speaking of ships, where are they all parked, anyway?”

  “The ships?” I said.

  “You know…for the travelers…?” the male said, elbowing me gently, letting me know that we were two good buddies sharing the same big secret. “The ones out front are just decoration. We checked.”

  “The real ones must be hidden somewhere,” the female said.

  “Of course.” The male nodded in approval. “Can’t be too careful.”

  “Underground storage?” The female’s orange eyebrows were raised in a question at me.

  Hold on… They didn’t know about the transporters? This was too bizarre. How was it even possible for two aliens to not know—?

  Wait a minute.

  It wasn’t possible for two aliens to not know about the transporters.

  I reached out and ran my finger along the female’s forearm. She gasped. The tip of my finger came away smudged with orange makeup.

  “How rude! You have no right to—”

  I ignored her and grabbed the male’s round nose. It popped right off his face. He staggered backward, covering up his very human nose with both hands. I tossed the yellow rubber schnoz back at him.

  It all clicked into place. “You’re the couple who tried to take pictures on the Fourth of July!” I said. “With the blue skin? Trying to get in here afterward? I found one of your rubber ears when you ran off.”

  The female smacked the tall one. “I told you these getups wouldn’t work.” Her voice had changed, dropped a few octaves. She had been doing an impersonation of what she thought an alien sounded like.

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’ve been watching the house, haven’t you? The hot air balloon? The car down the street? Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

  The male held up both hands, palms out: I come in peace. “Okay, kid, look. We can explain everything.” The pinkish hue of his real nose made it stand out comically against the yellow alien makeup all over his face.

  “We’re on your side,” the female said.

  “One hundred percent.” The male nodded eagerly. “We promise.”

  “What do you mean, my side?” Time to go into full denial mode. “There are no sides. We’re running a bed-and-breakfast with an outer-space theme. Looks like you two got a little carried away with the whole idea.”

  They exchanged a meaningful glance. The male cleared his throat. “Well…we don’t think that’s exactly true.”

  “There’s something else going on here,” the female said.

  I shrugged. “Think what you want.” It was difficult to appear calm when my heart was beating so hard. This whole scene was really freaking me out. I couldn’t decide which was worse: authentic shipwrecked aliens or nosy humans dressed up like aliens.

  “We would just like to be allowed to come inside,” the female said. “Check things out for ourselves.”

  “Too bad.” I backed toward the door. “We’re all booked up for the rest of the summer. But give us a call in a few months. Maybe we can squeeze you in for a quick stay this fall.” I gestured toward their disguises. “Maybe around Halloween.”

  “Oh, we tried to make reservations, all right. We’ve been trying for over a year,” the female said. “But we always seem to get turned down, or we get canceled due to lack of space, even in the off-season. Fishy business, young man. Very fishy, indeed.”

  The male kept his hands up where I could see them, his facial expression all innocence and good intentions, but he was slowly advancing across the porch. “If this is just an average bed-and-breakfast, kid, there should be no problem letting us in to look around.”

  I blurted out, “We reserve the right to refuse service.” It was lame, but it was the only thing I could think of. The doorknob pressed into the small of my back. There was nowhere else to run. The yellow man kept advancing. “Stop right there,” I warned, “or I’ll call the police.”

  “The police?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know about dressing up like freaks, but spying has to be against the law.”

  The man froze. Good.

  But then he looked at the woman. And they both chuckled.

  Not good.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay, what?”

  He shrugged. “Okay, call the police.”

  “We’ll wait right here,” the female said.

  How could they be so confident about calling my bluff? Who were these people?

  The door opened and I near
ly fell over backward.

  Cottage Cheese Head and the Blob tromped out onto the porch. They must have just come back from fishing, because they were still done up in their gear.

  “These two giving you any trouble, David?”

  It’s always nice to have real aliens to save you from fake aliens. Especially when they looked like a couple of big, burly outdoor types.

  “No. They were just leaving.”

  The strange couple backed away. The male put the false nose back on his face, as if that would allow him to preserve a little dignity.

  “We’ll be seeing you again, David,” he said.

  “Very soon,” the woman added. Then they disappeared around the side of the house.

  “What was that all about?” Cottage Cheese Head said.

  I exhaled heavily. “They were humans.”

  The Blob snorted. “No kidding.”

  “Don’t tell me those lame disguises actually fooled you for even a minute?” Cottage Cheese shook his head. “Well, what did they want?”

  “I have no idea. Let’s get back inside.”

  I shut the door behind us and walked into the kitchen. I needed a glass of water. And some quiet time to think. But they followed me.

  “So…” said Cottage Cheese. “Is ‘fishing’ an actual human recreational activity, or were you pulling a prank on us? Because basically we just stood around all afternoon, feeding worms to the river.”

  “Not the most thrilling three hours of my life,” said the Blob.

  I nodded. “Yep, that’s fishing.”

  “Earthlings are weird,” said Cottage Cheese Head.

  “That’s what I hear.” I needed some time alone, to plan how I was going to handle those two people. “Look, guys, I’m going to go upstairs and—”

  Whoa. The Blob’s clothes suddenly puffed up like an inflatable toy. His flannel shirt stretched out, seams taut, until pink jelly-bubbles pooched out between the buttons. Then the buttons popped right off. His Levi’s split down the sides and sloughed off his expanding body. Pretty soon he was back to himself, a big heap of pink blobbiness surrounded by ripped-up clothes.