Nocturnal Emissions (13 page)

“You sound old, you know?”

“We aren’t kids anymore.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, moving ahead of his brother to lead the way instead,

“too bad, huh?” He slipped the small gun into the front pocket of his blue jeans.

There were skunk-cabbages, which when inadvertently crushed emitted the distinctive smell for which they were named. Dense clumps of ferns like prehistoric cycads. Toadstools so pale against the verdant green-on-green that one could imagine they grew out of corpses hastily buried just below the surface.

Mosquitoes, another product of the recent heavy showers, bobbed in the air in living constellations. Everything around them, all of Nature, was taking on an atmosphere of overripeness teetering on the border of rot—a strange blend of growth and corruption. But wasn’t that Nature’s way? The ever turning circle of life, death, rebirth? After all, here was this lush swamp thriving at the very edge of a large graveyard. Perhaps, in part, taking its nourishment from the rivulets of human decay that had trickled into the soil over the generations.

“I’m looking for the clearing we used to go to,” Jeremy panted from the mounting exertion, “but I’m not recognizing it. Shouldn’t we have seen it by now?”

“It was so long ago, it might be overgrown now. I do think we would’ve already passed it.” Though they hadn’t reached a clearing per se, the trees had thinned out here and Allen stopped to scan his surroundings in a slow circle.

“You don’t remember anything about coming here? Nothing’s coming back to you?”

“No. Nothing rings a bell. I don’t know…maybe I never even came out here.”

“Why was the gun in your pack, then?”

Jeremy didn’t conjecture any further. From his book bag, he withdrew a bottle of spring water, unscrewed the cap and took several loud gulps. Wandering away a few paces, peering ahead deeper into the forest, he tilted back his head again and swigged some more water. It was barely cool, but still soothed his dry throat. As he stood screwing the cap back on, an ominous bass rumble like the warning growl of a mountain lion came from the distance. “Oh man,” he said,

“we definitely don’t want to get stuck out in the middle of the swamp in another monster storm, Allen.” He turned around to appeal to his brother to return home.

Allen was facing him, staring directly into his eyes, but he said nothing to allay Jeremy’s concerns. For Allen hovered stationary in the air, his muddy shoes four feet off the ground. Irrationally, for a wild moment Jeremy desperately juggled interpretations. Allen was standing on a tree stump…standing on a low tree branch. But even before he realized Allen was still rising—floating—higher off the ground, his arms and legs and face motionless as if he were a statue being hoisted by a crane, Jeremy knew the truth. Almost physically sick with horror, he looked straight up at the patches of sky shattered throughout the cloud-like ceiling of leaves.

Glowing a faint milky white against the darkening sky, and mostly hidden by the treetops except for a peek here, a glimpse there, the UFO made not even the slightest hum or buzz. A ring of bluish dots, more luminous than the rest of it, either revolved or strobed around the bottom edge of its bowl-like surface. It was terrifying for its sheer size, though even in his fear, Jeremy figured that it couldn’t hold a very large crew. Somehow it seemed insubstantial, like the ghost of a UFO. But it was sufficiently substantial to project a beam of force strong enough to slowly lift his brother’s paralyzed body toward its apparently concave underside.

“Allen!” Jeremy cried in a whimper close to a sob.

As Allen was drawn higher, his eyes no longer seemed to gaze into his brother’s. They stared straight ahead, seemingly into oblivion…the eyes of a dead man.

-SIX-

Though his eyes were already open, Allen seemed to awaken from sleep to find himself in a featureless, murky room of ill-defined size. The only light appeared to beam directly onto him, though he couldn’t discern its source, even though he lay on his back on the floor. Or was it a table? He couldn’t turn his head to see.

Couldn’t move his limbs. Was he restrained with straps, or by drugs?

A long, despairing moan of panic waited to uncoil from his throat, but remained tightly wound. Only his lungs and eyes seemed to be free to move, and the latter strained to the limits of their tethers. A man waiting to be tortured with hot pinchers would be no more frightened than Allen was at this moment. Less frightened, perhaps. That man could at least comprehend his whereabouts, the instruments of probing and pain. And even if the pain-givers wore the hoods of executioners, he would know that beneath those hoods their faces would at least be human.

His heart was free to move as well. It was moving fast enough to compensate for the immobility of his limbs, as if its accelerating beat might be enough to dislodge him from this stasis.

Peripherally, he saw the first of them coming toward him, as he had known with supreme dread that they must. At first it was merely a stirring of thin shadows, like the branches of a wind-blown tree barely discernable in the night. Then with a slow, fluid grace—as a spider is graceful—the smallish figure grew nearer, more distinct. Several times, however, it seemed to flit ahead of itself at an increased speed, as if it jolted forward several steps through time, as if a few frames of a filmstrip had been crudely edited out, before it resumed its more sedate approach.

Desperately, as if to search for escape, or simply to tear his eyes off the approaching skeletal figure, Allen rolled his eyes to the other side, and they bulged to see that a second entity was already there quite close beside him. It leaned down directly above him, and in so doing, jerked in that odd way several frames forward in time. Allen lost consciousness, then.

Their probing was what awakened him. He had the sensation of some cold but burning instrument being slipped into his nose, up the front of his skull’s interior, to pierce his very brain. When his open eyes became conscious of what they were seeing again, he could make out the two creatures hovering intently over him like surgeons—or dissectors—but he saw no instruments in their bony hands, which seemed to have only four fingers. Wait…or was it six?

Even the tears Allen wanted to shed would not well up sufficiently to emerge.

Was it his fear, elevated to a kind of delirium, that made the entities appear somewhat ill-defined, insubstantial, or was it the effect of some paralyzing drug or hypnotic spell? The figures did not seem finished, giving them an unsettling doll-like appearance, particularly in that they wore no clothing. They had no genitals that he could see; no navels, or nipples. Their corpse-pallid flesh was without freckles, moles, wrinkles even at the joints. Ribs did not stand out though their chests were emaciated, and there was no muscle definition. Worst of all were the blank faces in their oversized ovoid heads. Besides having no hair, the twin beings possessed no ears, with only a small slit for a mouth, two perforations for a nose. No lids blinked down over their immense black eyes, which were as empty and terrifying as those of a Great White shark.

Unable to physically whimper or sob, Allen did so inside, a mantra of gib-berish and garbled inexpert prayers chasing their tails around and around in his skull. Was that what they were listening to with their invasive, raping probes?

And then one of them spoke to him. Was the voice telepathic, or did he actually see one’s lipless mouth opening and closing ever so subtly? The voice was as unfinished as the thing’s body, its face—without intonation, or even gender. The utterances moved as the creatures did: slowly, sedately, but jerking unexpectedly forward before slowing again. At first, he couldn’t make out the words, but that was only due to his imploding fear. The thing was, in fact—if only in his brain’s translation—communicating to him in English.

“How are we here?”
he made out, at last.

Allen found he could reply to it quite naturally, just by thinking back at it.

As if talking to himself, internally. But all he could think to say was,
“What?”

“How did we come to be here? What made the door open?”

“Door? I don’t know how you got here!”
Allen’s thoughts blubbered.

“You came here in your ship.”

“No…ship.”

“No ship? I mean your craft…your machine…”

“No craft. No machine. Swimming. The pod…swimming. Then light,noise, turmoil. Then we are here. Swimming here, instead.”

“Please…please…I don’t know what you’re saying!”

“We will die here,”
said the second being. Allen rolled his eyes that way.

Its voice was identical to the other’s, just as their faces were interchangeable.

“Die like our siblings.”

“Please, look, I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know how to helpyou!”“Is there no way to return us? To open up the door again?”

“If there’s anyone who can help you, understand you, it isn’t me. You needto speak to scientists. You need to come out in the open and talk topeople…people in charge.”

“They will fear us. They will hurt us.”

“If you need help, they’re the only ones who might be able to do something. But not me…please…please just let me
go!
”

“Your pods have powers. Powers like the light and noise in the sky. Canyour powers not be used to open again the door in the sky?”

It was as if an illuminating lightning strike flashed through Allen’s skull.

Or did he actually see a picture that they put there for him, in illustration?

“The storms! You mean the thunderstorms, right? That was what opened thedoor you came through?”

“Yes…the turmoil…storms.”

“We can try to use electricity, something, to send you back home…but Ican’t help you myself. Please let me go, and I can bring a few people out here,just a few at first, who might be able to help you. I promise I won’t betray you,okay? I promise I won’t hurt you…if you only let me go.”

Another burst of lightning lit up the inside of his skull, but this flash of light was more vivid, more literal, and a glaring sunset pink in hue. A brief, hard thunderclap stabbed his ears. Allen’s first thought was that, unsatisfied with his answers, the twin creatures had decided to torture him after all.

Perhaps even kill him, to preserve their secret. Maybe they had stabbed that unseen probe up his nose once more, lancing into his brain.

He screamed. And this time, his ears could hear the scream. It emerged full force, pent up and springing free.

And he fell. He fell as if discarded, ejected from the hovering craft. He landed hard on his feet and one ankle twisted harshly, causing him to cry out in pain rather than fear and he rolled onto his back, lying on pine needles and staring above him at the alien craft—immense, hovering above the trees, and now on fire; melting in a blaze of gelatinous pink light.

Allen raised an arm to cover his face, to protect it, as small dripping fragments of the huge bowl-like ship began to patter down around him, across him, briefly sizzling before they went dark.

««—»»

Jeremy had his older brother under the arms, and frantically dragged him backwards, backwards toward a fringe of trees more closely clustered together, in the hopes that they would offer some measure of protection against the drooling and hissing rain of fiery pink gelatin.

“No,” Allen rasped. “No…”

“Shh,” Jeremy gabbled. “You’re going to be all right…you’re going to be all right…”

The phosphorescent pink had spread across the whole of the hovering thing’s bell-like form, outlining it clearly for the first time even as it consumed it, as swiftly and thoroughly as fire would paper.

“It had you, Allen, it was pulling you up, but I used the flare. I shot the signal flare. I was afraid I might hit you instead, but I got it…I got it…”

“Not a ship,” Allen mumbled thickly, as he regained use of his numbed tongue. “Not a machine.”

“I know,” Jeremy panted, almost hyperventilating, gazing up in terror but also with an awe like reverence. “I thought it was lifting you up with a beam.

The arms were so thin and clear, I didn’t see them at first—not until I used the flare. Then I saw them. I saw one of them come out of your nose. It had one of the arms up inside your nose, and the rest of them had a hold of your arms…lifting you.” Abruptly Jeremy cried,
“Jesus!”