The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (13 page)

“Dominus vobiscum.”

“Et cum spiritu tuo.”

* * *

Marquita laughed again when Matthew took the food out of the brown paper bags that evening and spread it on her kitchen table.

“Matthew, you guys brought enough for six people!”

“Then you’ll just have leftovers tomorrow. We appreciate your having us over on short notice.” Marquita had opted for red wine, which Chantal shared. They’d splurged and bought a California Shiraz with an actual cork. Matthew had managed to come up with some Mexican Coca-Cola, the kind without any high-fructose corn sweetener, to go with his cheeseburger grinder.

Marquita had a white cat, named Snowball of course, and a well-kept back yard with a couple tall trees full of leaves, a willow and a big red-leafed cherry. They sipped their drinks and nibbled on potato chips and cooling slices of mushroom pizza till she judged the time was right.

“Do we need to hide, or keep real quiet?”

“No,” she laughed again, a musical laugh. “The orbs like people, they like conversation and music and parties. Except they don’t like it when people are angry, when they shout.”

She had the strap of her little electronic Nikon camera around her neck. Aiming it at the tree-tops, which were silhouetted against the fading pink and orange sunset, she clicked the shutter. The strobe flashed, painting the tree white for an instant.

“Just one,” she said, turning her camera so they could see the shot of the tree tops in the view screen on the back — mostly black and empty sky. “Here, I’ll zoom in.” She did. In the center of the viewing field now was a white disc, the outer edges opaque but the translucent center looking like a single-celled amoeba on a microscope slide.

“An orb!” said Chantal.

“With any luck, we can do better than that.”

Ten minutes later, as the sky faded to a dark Technicolor blue and Venus appeared near the horizon, Marquita was taking a shot every twenty seconds or so.

“Here,” she said. The change in the view screen was astonishing. There had to be a hundred orbs, in different sizes and colors. Chantal
kept looking up at the sky and then back to the image on the camera’s viewer. She’d watched Marquita take these photos. All those round, amoeba-like objects in various colors were really there, obviously. But how could they be?

Near the top of the image, a bright golden orb had started moving while the picture was taken, leaving a wavy trail moving up and to the right. It was moving differently from the others, indicating they weren’t all just drifting in the same direction on the gentle breeze, the way dust particles would — assuming anyone had ever seen a sky full of dust particles the size of soccer balls. Expertly, she zoomed in to show them the dancing track.

“But you never see them with the naked eye?” Chantal asked.

“Some people say after you’ve been doing this for years you can, you do start to see them. Sometimes, just as the strobe goes off, I know where they’re going to be, because I see a little white twinkle wherever an orb is. Some people say they see a red twinkle; I see white. Not always, though.”

“How big are they?” Matthew asked. “How far away?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“I mean, are they hundreds of yards up in the sky, or close to the tree tops?”

“They’re about even with the tree tops. Sometimes if Snowball is in the tree they come down to look at her. They’ll even touch her, I think, but she doesn’t act like she can feel them.”

“And you get the cat and the orb and the tree in the same photo?” Chantal asked.

“Sure. You can actually see part of the cat through the orb. Only the outer rim is, like, solid. I’ve got some of those, but I’d have to hunt through my memory cards.”

“So they’re … about the size of a basketball?”

“Some of them. They can vary, from the size of a little marble or a tennis ball up to, I don’t know, more like a beach ball.”

“And this one that started moving while your strobe was going off. How fast is he moving?” Matthew pointed at the image on the little screen.

“I don’t know. Pretty fast.”

“Well, let’s say that flash stays lit for a thousandth of a second. Some of them can last as long as a two-hundredth, some run as short as one three-thousandth, but let’s say one-thousandth, which is pretty average. How far did it move in that time — two feet?”

“About that.”

“So if it could maintain that speed, it could move 2,000 feet in a second, which is more than a third of a mile. At three seconds to the mile, 20 miles a minute, that thing is moving 1,200 miles an hour.”

“Is that possible?”

“Sure. Although you’re in speeding bullet territory. That’s a lot faster than a commercial jet, although the military probably has birds that can move that fast. But to accelerate to that speed from a standstill in a fraction of a second? That’s impressive.”

Marquita tried another shot, but her strobe failed to fire — she’d inadvertently flipped it off. The resulting image was completely black, except for a small white object at the upper right.

“What’s the thing up at the corner of the frame?” Chantal asked, pointing at the very different, angular shape that had glowed bright white for the camera, even without the benefit of the little strobe.

“We don’t know,” Marquita replied, zooming in to enlarge the little object. “I call them fairies, but Bucky says they’re bugs, just bugs that come out at night.”

The shape did appear to have rounded, attenuated wings. Other than that, it all depended on how you wanted to look at it.