BEMENT, ILLINOIS, NOVEMBER 6, 1953
Kate Keys continued the story of Artemis, a huge squirrel who lived in a gigantic oak tree in the middle of the forest. Jesse listened attentively, his face nearly motionless save for his large, expressive eyes. He was seven years old now, but in bed he still looked like an infant, perfectly formed and innocent, a storybook child.
She finished the story, closed the book, gave Jesse a good-night kiss, then rose and headed for the door.
“Mom…”
“Go to sleep, Jesse.”
He looked troubled, and Kate knew what the trouble was. His question didn’t surprise her.
“Mom, do you think Daddy ever thinks about us?”
Russell had been gone for five years, and Kate had no idea where he was. But she felt that she still knew Russell, knew his decency, and the love he’d had for his son. Wherever he was, whatever he might be doing, she was certain that he thought of Jesse all the time, dreamed one day of seeing him again, that from the depths of this madness that tormented him and had finally driven him away, he still reached for Jesse… and for her.
“Of course he does, honey,” she said. She wished she had more consoling words, something that would explain Russell to his son, explain the torturous look she’d seen in his eyes as he’d frantically searched for his old crew, then the sense of mission that had overwhelmed him, his determination to find Johnson. He’d gone in search of his copilot, she knew that much. She also knew that he’d found him, and that the man had all but died in Russell’s arms. She’d learned that much in her own efforts to find him. She could only imagine the pain of that moment, the baffled, animal fear that must have settled over Russell, the futility and the hopelessness. It didn’t surprise her that he’d vanished after that, willed himself to stay away from his family despite how much he loved them. She’d seen the way he felt about himself, the sense that he carried some dark seed within him, some dreadful trait or quality that imperiled those he loved, so that his only choice, bitter and painful though it was, had been to separate himself, simply go off, like a dying animal. She wanted to explain all this to Jesse, but couldn’t find the words. He was only seven, after all.
“Go to sleep, now, Jesse,” she told him gently as she closed the door.
Bill was at the kitchen table, thumbing through the evening paper when she came into the room.
“Jesse asleep?” Bill asked.
Kate walked to the window and peered out. “He’s asking about his father again.”
Bill put down the paper. “How about you, do you still miss him?”
Kate walked over to Bill and knelt beside him, her face very near his. “He ran out on us, Bill. And he never came back.” She touched his face. “But you were there, and you didn’t go anywhere.” She leaned forward and kissed him softly. “Don’t you think I know that?”
He nodded silently, accepting her assurance that she would never leave him, but she saw it in his eyes, the insecurity, his fear that Russell would turn up again one day and take her and Jesse away from him She knew that would never happen, but she also knew that in the dead of night, when the house creaked and the wind rattled the windowpanes, Jesse probably dreamed of just such a return, dreamed of sleeping in the warm protection of his father’s arms, of mending the broken circle that had once made his life whole, and that despite herself, despite the wonderful husband and father Bill had become, she sometimes dreamed it too.
Jesse heard the scratching first, soft but insistent, like fingers on a windowpane. He shifted beneath the covers, tried to press the noise from his mind, then rolled over and opened his eyes.
And he was there.
Artemis, the squirrel.
Jesse propped himself up in bed and stared into the gray, furry face. The squirrel didn’t move, but he felt drawn to it, summoned to follow it. He slid out of his bed, walked to the window and opened it.
Artemis drifted away from the window and hung in midair, smiling softly and with an eerie sense of beckoning, as if to say, Come with me.
Jesse climbed out of the window, and stood on the second-floor ledge, his cowboy pajamas billowing out in the chill autumn breeze. At the edge of the roof, he stood stiffly, arms plastered to his sides, a little cylinder of flesh high above the green lawn to which Artemis had now descended, a huge gray doll in the rippling grass.
For a moment their eyes locked. Then Artemis blinked slowly, and Jesse heard his silent command, Jump.
He jumped and Artemis swept forward and up into the air and caught him as he fell, the two of them spinning wildly in the warm summer darkness. He felt the furry arms around him, holding him protectively. Then he was on the ground, surrounded by a vast green lawn, Artemis leading him away, across miles and miles of green, time flowing in all directions, like a river overflowing its banks, the world a moving carpet beneath his bare feet, drawing him deeper and deeper into the entangling forest.
A giant oak stood out from the rest of the trees, and Jesse knew that this was Artemis’ home. A black mouth gaped at the center of the tree, the door to Artemis’ world.
“Can I?” Jesse asked.
He felt Artemis’ soft furry arms embrace him and lift him to the doorway, then through and inside it, where he waited until Artemis leaped in, the door closing behind him, sealing them inside.
At first it was dark, then shade by shade the black air brightened and brightened until it shimmered all around, a light that came from everywhere, as if everything gave off its own radiant glow.
He felt the tree lift, like the slow rise of a rocket as it pushed against the heavy gravity of earth, then rising faster and faster, streaking across the nightbound sky. The next thing he knew, he was standing on the blue road, two beams of light closing in upon him like the shining eyes of a ravenous animal until the brakes shrieked loudly and the tires squealed to a halt and he stood in the truck’s blinding beams, a little boy, alone, Artemis hidden somewhere behind the stars, no more than the memory of a warmth he’d once known.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, DECEMBER 14, 1958
Owen Crawford stood on a ladder, hanging Christmas decorations outside his house while Anne and his two sons, Eric and Sam, scurried about the yard, shooting at each other with toy ray guns.
“Hey, watch it,” Owen snapped when Sam crashed into Anne, knocking her against the ladder.
“Sorry,” Anne said meekly.
“Just be careful,” Owen told her sternly.
He returned to his work, though he took no joy in it. For what was Christmas, after all, but an enforced holiday, trivial and meaningless, perfect only for people who had nothing better to do than hang these ridiculous lights.
From the top of the ladder, he saw the staff car move down the tree-lined street and pull up to his curb. Thank God, Owen thought, I can get out of here.
“I have to go,” he said brusquely as he hurried toward the car, leaving Anne alone to watch the boys chase each other wildly across the neatly trimmed lawn.
They reached Groom Lake a few minutes later. As the car moved smoothly across the tarmac, Owen glanced at the latest military advance, a black bomber with swept-back wings, a plane no radar could detect.
In the staff room, he took his seat at the end of a long conference table where various scientists and military personnel sat around, chewing pencils and flipping through reports as they waited for him to speak. Dr. Kreutz sat in a chair at the back of the room, idly fastening and unfastening a Velcro strap, one of the “advances” that had been discovered in the craft, the only piece of information from which they’d been able to benefit after years of study.
“We took this craft apart more than ten years ago,” Owen said. “More than ten years and we still have no idea how it ran. No clue what its power source was or what the aerodynamics involved were.” He nodded toward Dr. Kreutz. “This is Dr. Kreutz,” he said. “He has agreed to come over to our program for an indefinite period of time.” He cast a merciless eye over the assembly. “As of now,” he said, “the rest of you are reassigned to other duties.” He smiled coldly. “In Iceland.”
The men around the table glanced at each other in shock and disbelief.
Dull and unimaginative, Owen thought contemptuously, mere slugs, men who lacked the passion of pursuit, who did one thing until they were told to do another, men who lacked the mettle of a true commitment. Not one of them deserved any further explanation.
And so he gave none, but simply rose and escorted Dr. Kreutz out of the room.
“There’s something you should know, Doctor,” Owen said as the two men headed toward a distant hangar. “I report directly to President Eisenhower, and he is not a patient man. I’ve let him believe a few of your technological advances were derived from our research. I hope when you meet the President, you won’t disabuse him of his impression.”
Dr. Kreutz chuckled. “And wind up reassigned to Iceland a week before Christmas? Certainly not.”
They stopped at the doors of the hangar.
“Let me see your little bird,” Dr. Kreutz said.
Owen swung open the doors and it stood in the shadowy light, the craft Owen had retrieved from the desert years before.
“The interior wasn’t damaged,” Owen told Dr. Kreutz. “It’s exactly as it was when we found it.”
They had now reached a small stepladder that rose to the open door of the craft. Kreutz mounted the stairs, followed by Owen.
For a time, Kreutz moved about the interior of the craft, noting its sleek design, the seats with their finger-pad controls, everything smoothed and buffed to a shimmering perfection.
“None of those white coats could figure anything out,” Owen said with a smirk. “For years they’ve scuttled around in here, but they never came up with anything.” He laughed. “For all their degrees, they couldn’t even find out how the damn thing was powered.”
Kreutz shrugged. “It is easy to see what baffled your researchers,” he said. “No instrument panel. No monitoring devices.”
“You’ll notice some kind of energy field,” Owen said. “In about six minutes your head will begin to ache. Twenty minutes later, you’ll have a cerebral hemorrhage.”
Kreutz nodded as if not at all surprised, then pressed his hand against the smooth interior wall. “You will never get this craft off the ground without an engine.”
“But there is no engine.”
Dr. Kreutz smiled as he nodded to the five empty seats. “Actually, there were five of them,” he said.
“The crew?” Owen asked incredulously. “The crew supplied the…”
“Power, yes,” Dr. Kreutz said. “The power of the mind. That’s the energy source you’re looking for.”
“We had one alive,” Owen said. “He had powers.” He told him the story of Dr. Goldin’s vision, then his death and the visitor’s, how alien and human blood had briefly swirled together on the laboratory floor.
Kreutz looked at Owen pointedly. “We have to find someone else with unimaginable power of mind.”
LUBBOCK, TEXAS, DECEMBER 19, 1958
Jacob Clarke held a Lone Ranger lunch box to his ear, as if listening for the sounds inside, its tiniest vibration. A group of fifth graders watched silently,
“Oreos and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Jacob said quietly.
Travis grinned mockingly. “Wrong,” he said. “My mom promised me a steak sandwich and a slice of pie.”
Jacob opened the box and there it was, exactly as he’d predicted, neatly wrapped and placed side by side, a packet of Oreos and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Travis’ eyes widened in angry disbelief. “How’d you do that?”
Jacob looked at Travis pointedly. “Your parents had a fight last night about your father being drunk. She used the steak on her eye, and besides, she didn’t feel much like making anything fancy this morning.”
Travis’ features turned stony. “You’re dead, brainiac,” he snarled.
Later that afternoon Travis and a few of his friends skidded their bikes to a halt, blocking Jacob’s way home.
“Tell me where you were, you little creep,” Travis demanded menacingly. “In the bushes outside my house?”
Jacob watched silently as Travis’ friends surrounded him.
“You’re gonna die,” Travis said.
Jacob backed away, tripping over the curb, and in an instant Travis was upon him, his knee pressing down on Jacob’s chest.
“Travis,” Jacob said quietly. “Look at me.”
Travis stared into Jacob’s eyes, his expression hard and threatening until suddenly it changed, and a look of sheer terror swept into his face. Jacob knew that Travis was seeing his own leg blown off on a hill near Da Nang, his screams now so loud and wretched his friends backed away in terror.
Jacob got to his feet, watching expressionlessly as Travis trembled before him, pale and stricken. He knew he could do more to this boy, but each time he used the power, some measure of strength drained from him, like a light slowly fading with each use. And so Jacob merely turned and made his way down the road, unblocked now, toward home, where he knew he’d find his mother doing the usual things, cooking, cleaning, different from other mothers only in the odd way she gazed at the sky at night, searching the stars with a curious urgency, like someone looking for a face in the crowd.
BURNHAM TRAIN YARD, DENVER, COLORADO, DECEMBER 19, 1958
Russell Keys huddled inside the boxcar with four other hobos, half listening as one of them declared that rock and roll had died when Elvis went into the Army. Russell’s eyes were sunken, and he was rail-thin, the mere shadow of the man he’d once been. Life on the road was never kind, but it seemed to him that the ten years of his sojourn had taken a heavier toll upon him than it had upon the other men on the train. It was what he knew that withered him, a knowledge no one else could comprehend, but which locked him in a terrible solitude, made him the silent scarecrow he had become.
“The captain there’s not one for conversation,” one of the hobos said.
Russell drew his old duffle bag more tightly into his arms.
The hobo laughed mockingly. “You’d think that was a sack of gold, the way you hold on to it.”
Russell said nothing, but only continued to clutch the bag.
“Leave him alone, Dave,” another hobo said.
Dave shrugged. “I’m just trying to make a little friendly conversation.” His cracked lips curled down scornfully. “Man thinks he’s the only one with a past.”
That wasn’t true, Russell knew, though he said nothing. It was only that his past-as well as his present- was unlike any other man’s.
Dave stared at the bag. “So, what you got in there anyway?” He leaned forward and reached for the bag. “Lernme see.”
“Don’t touch it,” Russell warned.
Dave glared at Russell, his eyes red with rage. “Gimme that bag, Captain.” He drew a length of pipe from his pocket, and before Russell could move, brought it down hard on the side of his head.
Russell crumpled to the floor, blood dripping from his head.
Dave grabbed the bag and reached into it. “Nothing but a bunch of medals,” he said with a laugh. He looked at Russell. “You some kind of hero, way back when, Captain?” He lifted the pipe again. “Well, you ain’t much of one now.”
Suddenly a burst of light swept over Dave, freezing him in its brilliance. “Railroad guards,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He raced to the door and pulled it back, started to leap then stopped, the other hobos now behind him, staring down at the earth a hundred feet below, speechless and amazed, as the railroad car rocketed upward into the night.
The hobos stared at each other stunned, then rushed back from the open door as the light grew brighter and brighter.
From his place on the floor, Russell saw two creatures step out of the blinding radiance. They were coming into the railroad car, and he knew they were coming to get him. He heard his own scream slice the air, but they came on anyway, took his hand and drew him from the floor. He could feel their wiry fingers, the extra knotted joints, the terrible power they possessed, and against which he could do nothing but go with them into the excruciating light where, in a tiny glimpse of shadow, he saw a teenage boy hanging upside down above a table, like a lamb at slaughter, his eyes filled with terror, eyes that were incontestably familiar, and that seemed to recognize Russell, understand that he was a human being, helpless and alone, beyond the aid, or even the understanding, of his fellow men.
AMARILLO, TEXAS, SPACECRAFT CONVENTION, DECEMBER 19, 1958
The speaker’s name was Quarrington, and from her seat in the convention hall, Sally listened closely as he claimed to have been in a flying saucer and thus could assure the world that creatures from outer space meant no harm.
Sally knew that this was true. The man she’d found in the shed had had plenty of chances to hurt her and her children, but he’d shown nothing but an overwhelming tenderness that still lingered in her memory.
“I’ve met them, too,” she said to Quarrington a few minutes later as he autographed his book, My Life Inside the Flying Saucers.
“Do you think they’ll be coming back?” Sally asked expectantly. “I mean, at some time in the future?”
Quarrington handed her the book with a dismissive shrug. “Our time and their time are not the same.”
Sally stepped away, aware that Quarrington had not taken her seriously. But then, why should he? She was just a waitress from a dusty little Texas town. He probably thought she was yet another lonely housewife who’d concocted a flying saucer story to get attention. Such women were out there, Sally knew. But she also knew that she was not one of them. She remembered the stranger, John, felt the gentleness of his caress. No, she told herself, she was not like other women at all. John had made sure of that. The burden of her life was that she knew absolutely that he’d been real. A man from another world had come to her, touched her, loved her… and left her with a son. The impossible and the fantastic had joined to create the single searing experience of her life. But it was an experience about which she could speak only to the likes of Quarrington, and these other people whose stories she sometimes believed and sometimes didn’t, and who sometimes believed her story, and sometimes didn’t, all of them brought together and at the same time separated by the sheer fantastical nature of their experience.
On the way out she looked at the other people in the line, all of them clutching Quarrington’s book to their chests as if it were a lost child they’d miraculously found. There was weariness in their eyes, a terrible isolation. Some of them were probably crazy, she thought, but which ones? It didn’t matter really, she decided. All of them bore the mark of the outcast, the scorned and the ridiculed. She bore that mark, too, and she knew that Jacob was doomed to bear it as well.
He was waiting motionlessly in the truck when Sally returned to the parking lot.
“You look tired,” she said. “You can sleep on the way home.”
He looked at her wearily, a little boy older than his years, burdened with a secret dread he couldn’t describe or even understand. She thought of the night of his conception, felt herself once again within John’s alien arms, and suddenly realized that Jacob was held in that same embrace, the two of them touched by the same presence, she to live on in memory and longing, endlessly in hope of John’s return, her son to live on in search of something else. She recalled a scene in Alice in Wonderland. In the scene, a lock rushes ceaselessly about, searching everywhere for what it calls “the key to me.”
For a moment she held Jacob in her gaze, longing now for the key to her son, so that she could give it to him, and by that gift, make him safe. But she knew that only John could do that, and that all she could do was try to find him, speak to him, beg him to come back just one more time, be, however briefly and in what blinding light, a father to his son.
Russell opened his eyes and winced at the hard white light that fell over him in a brilliant slant. He felt the wooden floor of the railway car beneath him, smelled the hotdogs a hobo named Hank was cooking over a homemade fire a few feet away.
“Breakfast. Compliments of Irish Dave and the others,” Hank said with a grin.
Russell struggled to his feet and staggered over to the fire, his head still aching from the beating Irish Dave had given him.
Hank reached into his pocket and took out a piece of fabric hung with medals. “Dave wanted you to have these back. Said to say he was sorry, and if he ever saw you again, which he hoped he didn’t, please forgive him.”
Russell took the medals, then glanced about, looking for the duffel bag. “I had a map,” he said.
“In the bag,” Hank told him.
Russell quickly rifled through the bag, found the map and brought it out into the light.
“Seems like you care more about that old map than you do your medals,” Hank said. He eyed the map Russell clutched tightly. “What is it, secret treasure?”
Russell shook his head. “It’s just a topographical map.”
“So what makes it so special?”
Russell didn’t know how to answer. He knew that if he told Hank what made the map special, he would be dismissed as just another hobo lunatic. And yet something rose in him despite the fear of once again being thought crazy. A need to tell, or perhaps only a need to communicate the desperate nature of his search to at least one other human being.
“I was a pilot in the war,” he began softly, like a broken man trying to explain himself, trace the dark and downward trajectory of his life, reveal the meaning of his rags. “Twenty-three missions. All with the same crew.”
Hank nodded toward the medals. “Guess you earned those the hard way.”
“Nine men,” Russell added. “All dead.” He stared at the medals. “Something like what happened last night. We were taken.”
He glanced up toward the sky. “Whatever they did to us, it killed my men. I know that for a fact. What I don’t know… what I can’t understand… why am I alive?”
Hank considered what he’d been told, took it seriously and turned it over in his mind. “Maybe the fact that you didn’t die, maybe that’s why they keep… taking you. Maybe they want to know what makes you special.”
Special, Russell thought, and felt some distant piece of an even more distant puzzle fall softly into place. In what way was he special, he wondered. He considered his life, but found nothing particularly special about it.
He had grown up a small-town American boy, then gone off to war, fought… survived. The word caught in his mind. Hank was right. Out of all his crew, he alone had survived… being taken. If that were what made him special, then it was something in his makeup, he reasoned, sheer physical stamina, perhaps, or an unexpected form of immunity, some characteristic he’d inherited from his parents and which he might have passed on to…
A chill passed over him.
To Jesse.
BEMENT, ILLINOIS, DECEMBER 24, 1958
Russell saw the carolers through a concealing veil of snow, and the strangeness of the scene, himself hidden behind the great oak on Kate’s front lawn on Christmas Eve while carolers moved freely down the wintry street, once again reminded him of the terrible journey of his life, the loneliness which now enclosed him and set him apart and made him a creature of the shadows.
He waited for the carolers to leave, then made his way to the front door, knocked softly and waited.
The boy who opened the door was thirteen, and he saw himself in the boy’s large eyes, the angle of his jaw, the width of his shoulder.
“Jesse,” he said.
Suddenly Bill appeared at the door.
“Hello, Russell,” he said evenly. He placed his hands on Jesse’s shoulder and turned him back toward the inside of the house. “Your mother needs you in the living room, son.”
Jesse obeyed instantly, and the two men faced each other alone.
“You’re not welcome here, Russell,” Bill told him.
“I have something to tell Jesse,” Russell said urgently.
“You lost that right a long time ago,” Bill said. He looked at Russell’s worn-out clothes and scraggly beard and seemed to see the vagrant life he’d lived, a bum among bums, homeless and bedraggled. “You can stay at the station,” he said. “I’ll call ahead so…”
“Jesse is in danger,” Russell interrupted. “I need to talk to him.”
Bill stepped back from the door and steadied himself, as if he expected Russell to charge him. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, then abruptly closed the door.
For a moment, Russell stood, facing the closed door, unable to leave, yet knowing that he had to leave. He had tried to act openly and honestly to save his son. Now that way was closed to him, and Jesse was still in danger, and he alone knew the real nature of that danger, that the ones who’d taken him had also come to take his son. He had to be protected from them, hidden from them, taken somewhere from which he could not be… taken.
Russell stepped away from the door and made his way through a lightly falling snow, his mind already searching for a plan.