Startoucher

by C. J. Odle

  Pain detonated at the base of his skull, and he cried out.

  “Sorry,” the masseuse said, thinking she’d dug her thumb in too deeply below his shoulder blade.

  Jake felt as though long needles were being pushed into his ears. The sharp points radiated blinding white flashes that strobed inside his mind. He clenched his temples and fists as he lay there helpless, the masseuse continuing her slow, rhythmic movements. The electric light raced from his head and down his body like forks of lightning discharging. His body shuddered again and again.

  “That’s great,” the masseuse said. “You’re releasing a lot of pent-up energy.”

  Her soothing words floated gently through his mind and carried Jake to an eye of calm within the typhoon of agony.

  Releasing a lot of pent-up energy… releasing a lot of pent-up energy.

  Jake unclenched his temples and fists. It was time to stop fighting. In his teenage years, he’d learned to squeeze the visions away by overcoming the intense physical pain of resisting. But now he realized that he’d only squeezed the pain deeper inside his brain to plug the point where the visions emerged from.

  Gradually, the electric-white flashes receded and the shudders became less frequent as the hands of the masseuse continued to work the tension from his body.

  Jake let the vision wash over him when it arrived. The blistering desert shimmered in front of him, the two tall dunes in the background. The blurred dot between them slowly resolved into the figure of the alien as it approached. Its jellyfish skin became apparent as it glided forward on the sand, its black oval eyes staring out of the bulb-shaped head. Yet this time, it stopped some way in front, as though unaware of Jake’s presence. Then another alien appeared from the distance and walked toward the first. The two strange creatures stood silently facing each other, oversized heads nodding, gesturing with their three-fingered hands.

  One turned its head, and Jake sensed that it could see him.

  Jake looked up at the azure desert sky, and the blue dome began to darken. The mantle of night was drawn in seconds, and he gazed at the twinkling stars of the Big Dipper, following the line of its handle to the polestar. The constellations above began to swirl and shuffle, rearranging the night sky. When they stopped moving, Jake scanned for a familiar pattern. There were none. He had the uncanny feeling this vista could not be seen from the Earth…

  The masseuse finished kneading Jake’s muscles and then started to pummel his back lightly with the heel of her palms. Jake shifted in and out of the vision, relaxing with the ebb and flow.

  Jake watched as a parade of stars passed before his eyes. No, not stars—worlds. Jake saw cold gas giants, massive and regal, orbited by moons as large as planets. There were smaller, hotter spheres, their atmospheres mere traps for unknown gasses filtering starlight into ribbons of color. There were cold, barren rocks with atmospheres long since torn away.

  And then other worlds. Worlds Jake seemed to glide down onto, taking in strange deserts and oceans, grasslands that looked both familiar and strange. He saw creatures who didn’t resemble the animals he knew but which were built along similar lines, maybe because there were only so many ways life could be shaped. He saw more of the white aliens, in curved, luminescent rooms.

  At some point, the masseuse left the room. Jake didn’t mind. He lay there, as relaxed as he’d ever been, visions of other places running through him like a dammed-up stream finally bursting its banks.

  Eventually, Jake sat up and prepared to leave. He pulled on his clothes and walked out of the gym, feeling freer, lighter, and finally at peace.

  He headed for a bar just down the street from the gym. The bar was small and quiet, occupied by a few regulars who probably never left the place, a couple of women in suits who’d come in for lunch, and a guy playing pool in the background. A TV above the bar displayed an obscure news report rather than the usually inevitable sports.

  Jake ordered a beer and a sandwich and tried to make sense of the TV program. A dour scientist talked to a presenter about the encroachment of arid areas onto farms and grassland, and the ways local wildlife was struggling to adapt. Jake half listened as he ate his lunch, surprised that no one in the bar had complained about the choice of channel.

  “But there are examples where grasslands have fought back,” the scientist was saying. “Here in California’s Mojave Desert, near the Kelso Dunes, plant life has found ways of stabilizing the advance of the sands and even reclaiming ground—”

  At the mention of a desert, Jake glanced up, then narrowed his gaze. As the camera panned to show two dunes, he recognized them. He leaned forward, the sandwich in his hand forgotten. It had to be a mistake? Just some odd coincidence. The camera cut away for a moment, concentrating on the grass and low scrub on the borders, but when it cut back to show the dunes again, he was certain.

  Jake had seen those dunes. He’d caught the same flash of sunlight between them, standing very near to where the camera now lingered. He flinched as he recognized the exact point where the haunting figure in his visions and dream had appeared from, gliding down the gap between the two shifting peaks.

  Jake’s mind scrambled to find a simple explanation. Maybe he’d seen pictures of the Kelso Dunes somewhere, and somehow the alien had superimposed itself in his mind over this landscape that he already knew. But his visions and dream were exactly like the shots of the Mojave just shown.

  It would be far too much of a coincidence if random pictures he’d seen of the Mojave years ago, and then forgotten about, had been of the exact same spot. And anyway, didn’t the shapes of dunes change over time with the wind?

  Jake became aware of the sandwich in his hand, and he took a large bite before putting it back on the plate. As he carried on chewing, he became more and more convinced.

  The Mojave Desert held the key to understanding his strange experiences.

  “Hey, Lewis, change the channel! Football’s on!”

  Jake didn’t protest. He’d seen what he needed to. Instead, he sipped his beer, trying to work out what he should do now that he’d discovered the location of his visions.

  He never considered it could actually be a real place, or one quite so close. The Mojave was northeast of LA, and he would be able to drive to the Kelso Dunes in just a few hours. He pulled out his phone and did a quick search and discovered people were not allowed to drive right to them. He would have to hike the last part.

  Jake had no choice but to go. As a teenager, he’d repressed his visions in order to fit in with his family and friends. No one had accepted who he was, and this made him reject a vital part of himself. His previous teenage visions had proved fleeting, one-off glimpses into the future. The strange alien in the desert, however, just kept coming. Almost like a summons.

  There was no way to know exactly what he would find, or what would happen to him if he drove out to the Mojave Desert. He didn’t care. He finished his beer and paid the tab. It was time to stop running.

  Jake was going to face his destiny head-on. He was going to the Kelso Dunes.

  Back at his apartment, Jake packed some water, a spare set of clothes, and a flashlight before printing off a couple of maps in case his GPS failed to work in the desert. As he approached the front door to leave, he stopped in his tracks, suddenly thinking of Sarah. He placed his duffel bag on the hardwood floor and dug his phone out of his pocket to listen to her messages.

  “Jake, why won’t you pick up? Are you OK? What happened? Call me, I’m worried about you Whatever it is that’s going on, talk to me.”

  He listened to the second, and this time Sarah’s voice was noticeably upset.

  “Jake, its… seven a.m. on Tuesday morning. I didn’t sleep that well. If you don’t want to talk, at least send me a text to let me know you’re OK and explain what happened. Please.”

  Jake sighed and walked back into the main living area of the penthouse to sit down on the leather sofa, laying his phone by his side. He put his hands behind his head and ga
zed at the black rectangle of the TV. He could see her now, wavy brunette hair cascading to her bare shoulders, the turquoise pendant in her hands, eyes moist as she talked about her grandmother. Jake remembered how she’d asked him about point C, and his heart had skipped a beat. He let out a longer sigh and then picked up his phone to compose a text.

  “Dear Sarah, how can I begin to apologize for running out so suddenly. I can’t explain why now. Please give me time and I will, I promise. What happened yesterday had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me. It’s just something I need to sort out. I’m going away for a while, and will call you as soon as I get back. You’re an incredible woman.”

  Jake sent the text and walked toward the door.

  He nursed his Porsche through the late-afternoon LA traffic, inching his way across the city until he passed beyond the skyscrapers and the town houses, the stores, and the endless parking lots. He drove out onto more open roads, heading east toward San Bernardino, then turning north as the sun began to set.

  The last embers of dusk slowly faded to night as he drove past the lights of the towns on the way, Victorville and Barstow. When he reached Interstate 40 and turned east again, he breathed a sigh of relief. Now even his GPS remained silent. In another hour and a half he reached the Kelbaker Road turnoff and yawned as he steered onto it.

  Jake tried to focus on the road in front as his headlights carved a luminous band in the night. His eyes felt tired, and he turned on the radio. He listened for a while, then switched it off. With the windows open at least the flow of the wind helped to keep him awake, but even this had a lulling, repetitive rhythm. Jake slapped his face twice in quick succession and nearly missed the left turn for the Kelso Dunes Road.

  “Concentrate,” he told himself as he drove onto the wide dirt road.

  It couldn’t be far now. Jake glanced to each side and could see dry scrub and broken land giving way to sand. He kept driving into the dark, his hands tense on the wheel. He cursed himself for not bringing a thermos of coffee and shifted in his seat knowing that relaxing would—

  Dazzling light flared ahead of him, and a pickup truck blasted its horn like giants blowing conch shells in his ears. Jake snapped to and realized he’d been drifting onto the wrong side of the road. He jerked the wheel, and his car shot out of the way as quick as a quarterback dodging a sack, but the comparisons ended there. It skidded sideways, the wheels locking up. Jake fought the slide, then remembered too late you were meant to steer into it. It didn’t matter now. He could do no more than ride it out and hope for the best.

  The car screeched over the side of Kelso Dunes Road, plowing onto sand. The world spun until Jake lost all sense of direction. Yet he still seemed to be driving. He felt dissociated from his body, an impartial observer, some part of him knowing exactly where to steer as his car carried enough momentum not to dig in, moving along the firmer patches of desert.

  His luck ran out when the front left wheel struck a small boulder. Jake had no chance to brace for it, and the impact felt as sharp and hard as a baseball bat across the ribs. The airbags went off, and for a split second, Jake whirled around in blur of plastic as the vehicle flipped sideways, bouncing slowly before righting itself. He groaned faintly, feeling the wetness of blood on his face as he sat up and clambered from his car.

  The desert night fell thickly around him, the silhouettes of mountains in the distance. The Milky Way stretched across the heavens, and thousands of stars shone above. As Jake stared up, they began to swim, though whether from the effects of the crash or something else, he couldn’t say. Not knowing which direction to head in, he stumbled off unsteadily over the sand.

  Chapter Eight

  Jake lay unconscious, his naked form stretched out on a bed of crystals extruding from the floor. They pulsed green and yellow, switching to a rainbow of different colors as they reached the head. The being known as Sirius read them as expertly as a doctor from Earth might have read a medical file. The creature’s impenetrable dark eyes swept over Jake as it analyzed and extrapolated. Yes, this one would be suitable. But then, Sirius had known that since the moment they’d acquired the human in the desert. Vega had agreed, but its assertion did not seem to be based on data. Very few of its assertions seemed to be, these days.

  The operating room had none of the severe geometry of the world outside. An operating room there would have been a place of chrome and antiseptic white, square edges and sharpness. Even the scents would have been sharp and sterile, the smell of anesthetic and alcohol wipes.

  Here, there were no straight lines, no harsh colors. Shapes and surfaces flowed into one another as if grown, and perhaps they were. A bright, pristine, and open space, light emanated softly from the walls, with a subtle tinge of orange yellow reflecting the ambiance of the nearest star. Equipment extended from the ceiling, mechanical arms and laser tools for delicate work. Glistening crystal and delicate glass, intricate metalwork and lines that seemed as much for decoration as to carry power.

  It was a place of beauty, just as much as one of function. Those who created it had not seen the need for a distinction between such concepts.

  Sirius stood over the recumbent body and decided it was time to begin. The alien touched one of the large crystals supporting Jake’s head, and waves of yellow light began to pulse into his brain. Sirius watched for signs of consciousness, and when the eyelids flickered open, it stepped back. For the procedure to be successful, it was necessary for the human to be conscious, but Sirius knew it would be immobile and feel no pain.

  Sirius called forward the assisting arms of the automated apparatus, positioning them just so before checking that they were functioning optimally. There was wisdom in caution.

  Sirius stretched out with its thoughts, and the machines responded. The merest twitch of one translucent white finger, and a crystalline robotic arm slipped forward until the pointer at its tip was level with the side of Jake’s skull.

  Another twitch, and the laser scalpel began its work. Robot arms came and went in an intricate dance that would have appeared to have nothing to do with Sirius had an observer not been watching closely. As it was, they performed as perfectly as they were designed to do, attuned to the smallest actions of a being totally in control.

  Metallic fingers peeled back flesh, crystal saws cut through bone, and then the laser scalpel created a delicate channel to access the middle of the brain. Sirius went to a hemispherical container to check on the tiny portion of cosmic plasma within. It writhed for a moment before Sirius could pulse a quieting mental expression its way. Not a true communication, barely more than a hint, but enough to make the living plasma cooperative.

  With the kind of infinite patience that could have watched galaxies form, Sirius used a needle-thin probe to maneuver the plasma into place, layering it over what to Sirius’s mind was the characteristically underdeveloped pineal gland of the human. Another pulse, and the plasma woke up, sinking into the tissue beneath and joining with it. Sirius instructed the machines once more, and robotic fingers delicately closed the edges of the wound together. The sealing tool came next, its gentle light flickering down in a wash of healing far more sophisticated than anything on Earth. Just the most cursory examination of Jake’s body had revealed places where flesh came together in scars from past injuries; Sirius would not be so sloppy.

  For a moment or two longer, Sirius studied Jake, assessing the result of the operation. Not admiring its handiwork but simply checking there were no adverse reactions, no unexpected complications. Sirius was not a being who tolerated complications.

  Sirius regarded the human lying there, the one who had answered the calling. The alien wondered if this… creature could really be suitable? This body was so different from its kind, lacking even the photosynthetic liquid in its skin necessary to feed on starlight.

  But Sirius had its duty, and it was nothing if not a being to follow its duty.

  Jake became conscious and aware of lying in a strange room. His body f
elt completely numb, and he could only move his eyelids. Something had happened in the desert, knocking him over into the space where he sleepwalked and dreamed strange dreams. When the jellyfish-skinned creatures had come to him he hadn’t even tried to resist.

  He remembered staggering for few hundred feet before collapsing onto the desert floor. When he came to, two pairs of large black eyes were looming above, and three-fingered hands straightened out his body on the sand. Then he began to feel a subtle vibration inside his head. The tingling sensation slowly swept down his body in a horizontal band, just as it had in his vision…

  One of the aliens stood above him now, performing an examination, an operation… something. Extended mechanical arms moved, and Jake knew they must have been moving on him, in him. He couldn’t feel it, numbed to the point of no pain, but there were plenty of other sensations.

  He could feel a pulsing around himself, like the beating of some giant heart. The rhythm was so slow it might have barely seemed like a rhythm at all had he not been still enough to perceive it. His own heartbeat was hummingbird fast by comparison, but it was slowing down to be more and more in tune with it. He dipped in and out of dreams and visions, walking through a landscape of sandstone and granite, pillars of the same material rising up unimaginably high around him. Each one had been carved by a thousand hands; thoughts and dreams and faces cut into the surface by so many generations that it was impossible to guess at what the untouched rock might have looked like. Jake traced the surfaces with his fingers…

  And found himself standing in a forest where every tree seemed to be heavy with birds. Crows and starlings, parakeets, kingfishers. Owls looked down from above, heads twisting to follow as Jake passed. Raptors sat with haughty expressions. Some of the birds broke into laughter in the voices of people he’d met, and Jake jerked his head around to look. When he looked back, he saw a single bird sitting on a tree stump, a raven as large as a small child. It opened its beak, and this time its laughter shook the air around him…