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The previous night, the night the voices had invaded her mind, had been a Friday. Now it was Saturday morning and Samantha was going over the crazy instructions. She was fairly certain she was mentally ill, despite what the voices had told her. She had known mentally ill people and knew that their minds would invent anything to justify their strange beliefs. It wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t her fault; it was just the way things were. But even so, she found herself thinking on the instructions.
Wouldn’t it be worthwhile, just to go and shatter the illusion? She would go to the barn, nothing would happen, and then she would go on with her life. It would be simple. As soon as she set foot in the empty barn, the illusion would shatter, the spaceship would disappear, and her fragmented mind would magically reassemble.
Thankfully, Jessica was working that morning, giving Samantha time to slip out unnoticed. The air was brutally cold and the car coughed like a dying cat with each turn of the key. Eventually, the rattling hunk of junk started up and Samantha was driving through the city at an intolerably careful speed. She didn’t know what to expect, but she was surprised to discover that part of her wanted something to happen.
Her life was so boring nowadays.
***
THE DRIVE OVER WAS disappointingly uneventful. Samantha kept imagining that there would be some monumental, cataclysmic sign that would superimpose itself over the road. There would be huge, burning letters across the road that read: We are waiting for you. Or there would sound a shrill caw-caw, and Samantha would look up and see a bird ten times the size of an eagle swooping down to meet her, to carry her off to the strange voices. Instead, there was a near-endless stretch of snow-covered roads and the monotony of the early-morning radio.
She reached the barn in just over three hours, having to drive pitifully slow because of the ice and the snow. She found it easily enough. It was just off the road, near the frozen river. The river was thick with ice, but here and there were holes through which rushing water could be seen. Icicles dripped from the top of the barn door. The ground was thick with snow.
Samantha blew into her gloved hands and walked toward the barn. She would be attacked now; she knew it. A farmer carrying a shotgun would charge at her and demand to know: Wut errr yoooo doon on ma lan? And she would have no explanation other than: I sincerely apologize, sir, but a voice in my head told me to come here and I just couldn’t ignore it.
Instead when she opened the barn, and the pale, pathetic midday sunlight shone its rays into the crumbling structure, she saw a small rectangular black box on the ground. She felt an almost overwhelming urge to cradle this box to her chest, to hold it close and never let it go. But somehow she managed to keep her head and stay upright. She could sense a massive power in the box, a power the likes of which she had never known; it was, she thought, an alien power.
She knelt beside the box and stared at it. It had no defining features she could see, no shifts in the gradation of the black. It was just a solid rectangle of blackness. Samantha reached to it, hesitated for a moment, and then pulled her hand away. What was she doing? Why would she do this? For an instant she saw herself from outside: a red-haired, skinny woman, her face reddened by the snow, her coat making her look like an overinflated child, crouched down in the muck reaching for a black box. It was crazy.
But what was she to do? Turn back, forget any of this ever happened? She couldn’t do that now. She had come too far. Oh, Samantha, where did you go today? What did you do? Oh, I just drove a hundred miles and then stared at a black box and came home. You know, the usual. No, if nothing else, she had to justify the tedious drive.
She took off her glove, reasoning that she might as well touch the thing with her own skin, and then reached her hand out. She barely had time to think, it’s warm, before the shock jolted through her body.
She fell back, head lolling, eyelids collapsing like shutter doors.
“Samantha,” the voice said. “Samantha, can you hear me?”
***
THE FACE THAT PEERED at her from above was blue-skinned. It was the most beautiful blue she had seen since she was a child and had first gazed up at the sky and wondered if all this blue came from the sea or if there was an artist in the sky who painted it blue. It was the blue of a summer Sunday when the barbeque is cooking and the family is drinking and eating burgers and in a quiet moment you look up and the sky completes the day. The lower part of his face was covered in a bushy red beard, and his eyes were a deep white. Apart from that, he was human-looking. He had short, red, spiky hair.
“Hello,” he said, and Samantha recognized his voice as the one she had heard in the night. “I hope we didn’t scare you.”
“Scare me?” she breathed. “You attacked me!”
Why are you talking to a figment of your imagination for, Sammy? What good will come of that? You need to get out of here and drive at top speed to the nearest mental-health clinic and check yourself in. Come on, just get up and run. An imaginary stalker can’t detain you.
Instead, she climbed to her feet and faced the blue-skinned man.