The Spaceship Next Door (15 page)

Susan didn’t join them. Annie assumed she’d eaten already or had plans to eat later, and until then elected to remain in the house’s study, reading a book by lamplight.

The study was the most impressive part of the house, and Annie resolved to spend more time in it. If her own living room was an unconscious homage to old Hollywood, Violet’s study was a paean to unusual books. Annie spent a lot of time around books as a library volunteer, but Susan and Todd’s collection (Todd was Violet’s nearly-always-absent dad) had stuff she never heard of before. It was like an alternative history
Twilight Zone
library, covering a lot of less-than-respectable subjects, like cryptozoology and nutso assassination theories. There were also books on since-debunked scientific ideas and books on subjects that would never make it into the public library, like eugenics. It was, in short, a vast collection of wrong things. Annie couldn’t wait to jump in.

After they ate and cleaned up—dishes were done by hand in Annie’s household, so when it turned out that was the standard in Vi’s house as well she was already prepared—and then retired to the guest bedroom, where Annie tried to get used to the idea that she was going to be spending the evening there.

The room was small, but clean. It smelled like an alien room, though, and the sounds were all different, the air blew wrong, and basically this whole thing sucked.

Violet seemed attuned to her friend’s discomfort.

“Maybe we can work something out,” she said. Violet was sitting at the foot of the bed across from Annie at the head. It was a queen-sized mattress, bigger than the twin in Annie’s own room. If this were a hotel and she were there under different circumstances, she’d be pretty happy with the larger bed. “You can sleep over there on weekends or something. I’ll stay over too.”

“You’re the same age as me.”

“Sure. But we’ve been there alone before.”

“Look, I’m probably gonna be pissed at Ed about this for a while, but that doesn’t mean I want him to get in any trouble, either. If he says I need to stay here with you and Susan, I probably have to.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right.”

A
nnie couldn’t fall asleep
, which was more or less as expected. After Violet left, she talked to Carol on the phone for a half an hour or so. This was a challenge, because only one part of the bedroom got any cell phone reception, and it was a part with no place to sit. It was good to hear her voice though. Annie imagined her mother was at home and Annie was the one on the trip, and that idea made it easier for some reason.

Carol found a channel running
Bringing Up Baby
and the two of them spent a good amount of time quoting lines to each other. But then her mother had to get some rest, and Annie was left alone in the big strange bed with the wrong noises and smells and breeze.

Sometime around midnight she decided to stop staring at the ceiling and tried staring out the window instead. The window was on one side of the bed, so it was possible to look through it while still retaining the comfort of being in bed, which was nice.

The isolation of the cabin was jarring. Her own bedroom window faced the street, and while their street was essentially empty—she looked out on farmland on the other side, with the nearest neighbors to the left and right on the same side of the road—there was still a paved road there with a line down the middle and an expectation of periodic traffic.

Violet’s place was completely secluded, and until midnight, looking out into the dark woods and listening to alarmingly loud insect and animal sounds, Annie didn’t entirely appreciate what true seclusion really was. This was Stephen King-level isolation. Cujo was surely about to emerge from the brush.

No sooner did she have that very thought when something large moved in the trees on the other side of the clearing in front of the porch. In a mild panic—mild because she was pretty safe where she was—she ran through all the obvious options from wolf to deer, then drifted to less obvious ones, like bear, moose, and (on loan from one of the cryptozoology books in the study) Bigfoot.

Then a man emerged from the trees, and Annie’s heart stopped for a solid five seconds. He stood at the edge of the clearing, this man: motionless, like statue-motionless, like she couldn’t even see him breathing.

The terrifying possibilities regarding who he was and what he was doing there were only beginning to churn through her already-over-imaginative brain when he moved again, two steps, enough for his face to be seen in the moonlight.

It was Todd, Violet’s dad.

Why he was wandering around in the woods at midnight was only one of a hundred questions. Another was, what was he even doing in Sorrow Falls, when as far as Annie knew he traveled for his job? And where was his car?

She turned away from the window and went back to staring at the ceiling again.

“I take it back again, Violet. Your family is really weird,” she said.

“
I
t happened
like we told you,” the corporal said, with a trace of irritation. This wasn’t the best attitude to have when being questioned by a general, but he looked like he wasn’t working on a lot of sleep. General Morris didn’t seem too put off by it.

“We have your statement,” Morris said. “And you’re not in any kind of trouble here, son. Mr. Somerville just wants to go over it. Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s just what people say before they start accusing people of things.”

Ed stifled a laugh. He decided he liked Sam Corning, and could understand why Annie spoke well of him.

Sam turned to Ed, but spoke to the general.

“Has Mr. Somerville read our reports, sir?”

They were sitting in Morris’s office, which had a surprisingly understated and temporary feel to it. The table in the center of the room and all the chairs were of the collapsible variety, and the room itself was the interior of one of the temporary-to-permanent trailers the base had. He wasn’t sure if this meant Morris thought this was only a brief assignment for him, or if he just didn’t have any things.

They already questioned the other men who were a part of the incident, most recently Corporal Louboutin. Dillard Louboutin stood at attention the entire time and refused to comment on any element of his original statement other than to affirm the words contained within it. If it hadn’t been obvious from the behavior of the other four men they’d already spoken to, Dill’s attitude drove home the point: they all thought the army was looking for someone to blame for Hank Vogel’s death, and Ed was the man with the power to make that accusation.

The men were closing rank and backing each other up. Usually, with something like this, at least one person would start in with dark hints that maybe someone did something they weren’t supposed to, but that hadn’t happened. It spoke to the six men having a strong leader at their center. Ed was pretty sure he was looking at that leader.

“I’ve read the reports, yes,” Ed said. “Can I walk through your statement with you?”

“You can do whatever you want to, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir, I’m not an officer. I’m not even army.”

“My mother raised me to be polite to my elders regardless, sir.”

Ed caught Morris stifle a laugh of his own.

“Son, you can relax,” the general said.

“Yes sir, thank you sir,” Cornell said, visibly not relaxing.

Ed sighed.

“According to… well, everyone, Corporal Vogel was sleep-walking,” Ed said. “Had he ever done that before?”

“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

“You knew Vogel for some time, didn’t you?”

“Knew of him, sir. We were neither friends nor foes. It’s a large base. I knew him by sight.”

“Did he know Louboutin?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

“We did that, yes. As I’m sure you know.”

“Not sure what you mean by that, sir.”

“I only mean Dill Louboutin thinks highly of you and would confide if given the opportunity. So Vogel was sleepwalking, and nobody remembers him ever doing that before. Does anybody else have that problem?”

Corning hesitated. It wasn’t a question he’d been expecting. “In the world, sir?”

“On the base. In the barracks. Has anyone ever sleepwalked before?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. That might be a question best asked of the doctor.”

“You’re right, it is. I’ll take it up with her. What I’m getting at, corporal, is that I’d like to know just how unusual it was, seeing Vogel walk around like that.”

“Not sure what you mean, sir. People get up and down all through the night. We roll three eight-hour shifts, people are always about. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to tell if one of them was sleepwalking or running to the toilet or heading off to guard duty. I was trying to get some sleep myself.”

“Yet there was something different about Vogel that night.”

The corporal looked as if he was about to deny this, then thought better of it. His testimony and Louboutin’s were united on this point: Dill Louboutin thought something was wrong with Hank Vogel and attempted to engage Vogel because of it. Sam Corning couldn’t very well turn around and claim otherwise.

This was the line of questioning that had been missing from the original testimonies.

The statements from the six men were pretty straightforward. Four only reported on what happened
after
Vogel began choking Louboutin, because before then those soldiers were uninvolved. The two other statements—from Sam and Dill—were so nearly identical they sounded like they’d been memorized ahead of time…, which was probably exactly what happened.

“Not sure how to answer that, sir,” Sam admitted.

“According to both of you, Corporal Louboutin tried to get Corporal Vogel’s attention by touching Vogel on the shoulder. Vogel responded by attempting to murder Louboutin. What I’d like to know is
why
Dill wanted to get Vogel’s attention in the first place. As you said, people were up and down all the time, and you wouldn’t necessarily know if one of them was sleepwalking or running to the bathroom or going out to howl at the moon. But Pickles knew something was up with Hank Vogel.”

Corning blinked at Ed’s use of Louboutin’s nickname. It implied a level of familiarity with the soldiers Sam was perhaps not expecting.

“You’d have to ask him,” Corning said.

Ed met Sam’s gaze and considered the best way to proceed.

“General,” Ed said, “this is a little unorthodox, but I wonder if I can speak to Sam alone for a few minutes? I know it’s
your
office, but—”

“Not at all.” Morris stood, which made Sam stand. “Remain at ease, corporal.”

“Sir.”

“I mean sit down.”

Sam sat.

“Answer the man’s questions,” Morris said.

“Yes sir.”

The general left, and an uncomfortable silence took his place.

“Just you and me, Sam,” Ed said. “There aren’t any listening devices in here, you’re not on camera, and my word holds no particular weight with the brass.”

“Yes sir. But if I can ask… all that being true, what are you doing here? Seems to me you just ordered a general to vacate his own office.”

Ed laughed. “I guess I did, at that. Annie can pick ‘em, can’t she?”

He looked confused, which was perhaps the first non-soldierly, human emotion Ed had seen him register. “How do you mean, sir?”

“I mean, she speaks well of you, and she has high standards.”

“Well I appreciate that, sir.”

“Look, I just want to know what Dill noticed about Vogel. I’m asking you, because I think you noticed too, and because Annie told me I could trust you.”

Annie told him no such thing, but he had a feeling if he asked, she would. He also wished she were there with him, but bringing her to a military interrogation—for, as informal as this was, it was still an interrogation—would have been impossible. Plus, she had enough to deal with.

She’d have gotten an answer by now, though.

“Why are you here, Mr. Somerville?” Sam asked.

“Well, some of that’s confidential.”

“Which part isn’t?”

Ed smiled. “The part that really needs to know what happened to Hank Vogel isn’t. At least, not yet. Look: I think something’s going on in Sorrow Falls. Or maybe not some
thing
, so much as a lot of little sort-of somethings that add up to one big something, only we don’t know what things to add together yet. I’ve got a lot of pieces that don’t make sense yet, and this is one of them. Nobody here did anything wrong. Hank Vogel died of a brain aneurysm, and medically speaking everything that happened in his skull that night would have happened if he’d remained in his bunk. But he didn’t remain in his bunk, and I’d like to know why, and what his last few minutes of life on Earth looked like to someone who was there. Can you help me with that?”

Sam didn’t answer for long enough that Ed was ready to give up.

“He looked empty, sir,” Sam said. His eyes, which had been directed either straight-ahead or locked with Ed’s, had fallen to the floor.

“Call me Ed, please. What do you mean,
empty
?”

“Empty like he wasn’t in there.” His eyes drifted back up. “Nobody home. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, sir.”

“Ed.”

“Ed. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I… I can’t stop seeing his face sometimes. It wasn’t that he was sleepwalking. He was moving wrong. That’s what Pickles saw. Up close you could see…”

He trailed off.

“Sam, trust me when I tell you, there isn’t anything you could say here that I haven’t already heard. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people around town and I’ve heard a lot of pretty out-there things. At this point I’m willing to take all of it at face value. What could you see?”

Sam fidgeted uncomfortably in the folding chair.

“It’s hard to be honest about something like this. Not sure now if what I think I saw is something I’m just remembering wrong. But thinking about it now, it was like… like he was already dead. Like he wasn’t in there any more, and someone else was driving.”

“A zombie.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“He didn’t want brains, either. I mean, if we’re going with zombie.”

“How do you… did he speak?”

“…yes. We didn’t want to tell anyone, it was too weird.”

“What did he say?”

“He said ‘are you’.”

“The letters? R and U?”

“No, like it was part of a question but he couldn’t say the rest of it. I mean, it was flat. He said it flat, but he was asking, I think. It was almost as if he couldn’t figure out how to make more words than that.”

“I wonder what he was trying to say?”

“I don’t know. But I think he was looking for somebody.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It was what Dill noticed. Hank kept going bunk-to-bunk and staring at people. That’s what was happening before Dill called him over.”

“Some
body
and not some
thing
?”

“That was my take. I don’t think it was Dill he was looking for though.”

“And he responded to his name? When Louboutin called him?”

“He responded to someone looking at him and making a sound. Everyone else was asleep or trying to be, pretty much. Could’ve been like with a bull. Wave a red blanket in front of him, and it’s not that he’s reacting to the color red, he’s reacting to the movement. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“A lot of the guys are thinking what happened to Hank is… you heard of the space flu, right?”

“You want to know if I think the space flu was what killed Corporal Vogel? Sam, I don’t think the space flu is real. The effect the ship has on people when they get close to it is real enough, but I don’t believe that has a long-term impact, and I don’t believe it harms at a distance. What’s happening now is the same thing that can happen in any situation like this. For every malady or accident, someone’s going to wonder if the big unexplained phenomenon at the bottom of the hill is the culprit. But at the same time, I’m here to piece together that phenomena, because at the end of the day there actually
is
a spaceship down there, and we still really don’t know what to expect from it.”

“So maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“Which means what happened to him could happen to us.”

“I didn’t say that. Vogel died of an aneurysm. Those are pretty rare in healthy adults under forty.”

“Sure, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Someone dies of something they shouldn’t have… that’s what gets people worried.”

“Are you worried, Sam?”

“Of course I am. But if you want to know what’s keeping me up nights, other than the memory of Hank’s face, it’s that I don’t know when the aneurysm killed him. Either it was before he got out of bed or after we tried to wake him up, and to be honest, I’m not sure I like either answer.”

H
aving involved
himself in the army’s investigation of Vogel’s death, Ed ended up pulled into a series of meetings with higher-ups that lasted the entire day. He had no say in what was to become of the six men, or what the report Morris was supposed to file on the incident would look like. He had
thoughts
, though, and if there were people in uniform who wanted to hear them, he was there.

Those thoughts were disjointed, and hardly involved Sam and Dill and the other four. Ed was starting to put pieces together, and now he had a word to use when talking to people. It was a preposterous word, but that was exactly what gave it value.

It wasn’t until Monday that he had a chance to employ it. That was in the Sorrow Falls sheriff’s department.

One of Ed’s first top-secret papers on Sorrow Falls leaned heavily on data from the sheriff. Even then, he was trying to prove something was amiss with the town by pointing out what was
missing
, and in this case what was missing was criminal behavior.

Crime statistics before the ship landed and after the ship landed remained essentially the same in Sorrow Falls, which was just not possible. For one thing, the number of people inside the town line doubled. A concomitant doubling of criminal acts would have been too much to expect, but an
increase
was appropriate, and it hadn’t happened. For another thing, reported criminal acts in every town outside Sorrow Falls
had
gone up, and not just in Massachusetts. It was a nationwide phenomenon.

Those numbers alone were enough to convince Ed something subtle was happening in the town, but they didn’t convince anyone else.
The army’s presence is discouraging criminal behavior
, he was told. When he pointed out that even when he added the reports of local peacekeeping actions to the sheriff’s statistics, the totals were still too low, he was told that the existence of a military force was a natural deterrent.

Ed had mountains of evidence from every police action and war zone in history that said this wasn’t the way the world worked, but nobody would believe him.