Earlier that same night, in the state of Michigan, a couple of teenagers out on a date were abducted by a flying saucer.
For a month since the family Delb had been stolen away on a cold January night in the middle of a prologue, there had been saucer sightings across North America. They always happened in remote, strange places. You know how it is with aliens. Even though they’re supposed to want to make contact with our odd, half-hairy species and give us messages, they never just land in the middle of a city with a big crowd watching and step out of their ships waving their claws like the Queen of England. No, they always make contact with people in empty, desolate, out-of-the-way locations:
Flat farms in the Midwest. Nothing but the green of the fields and the white beam from the lightly bobbing ship up above.
Cabins in the woods. The knobs on all the doors start turning at once.
High up in the cold air above Alaska. An air force pilot turns and sees a disk heading right toward him.
The red desert, with a green evening sky. No town for miles. Electrical towers strung together by wires stand across the horizon like an alien army with their arms spread wide. They are motionless in the evening, the wires singing. Far off, a glint of silver light appears.
Swamps where men in rubber pants fish at twilight. There is a glow under the water. The pond starts to boil. Something rises out of it. Something bigger than a house, with water streaming off its metal hide. The men stumble backward. They will never be able to make it through the woods to the road. They will never make it.
Alien abduction is part of the American poetry of loneliness.
Young Jed Lostrup did not think it was going to be a lonely night. Nope. On the contrary. Jed got off work at the warehouse and drove to pick up his date. She was a girl called Shirley. He had been wanting to go on a date with her forever. Since the beginning of high school. Finally he got the guts to ask her out when they were both chosen to sing solos with the high school choir.
He had to rush to make it to her house on time after work. He rolled along the highway as fast as he could. He got off at her exit. He screeched to a halt in front of her house and ran across the lawn, straightening his shirt. He rang the bell.
There she was. He couldn’t believe it. His dream. She looked beautiful in her sweater, with her hair.
“Hi,” they said awkwardly.
He said, “You ready, Shirley?”
She looked up and down the street. “Where’s, um, where’s your car, Jed?”
“Oh,” he said sheepishly. “I came right from work. I don’t have a car. I don’t own one.”
“So you came to pick me up,” she clarified, “in a forklift?”
“Yeah. Brought the forklift from work.”
Shirley smiled weakly, like someone who was about to make an excuse. “Oh. Great.”
“Come on, Shirl, just wait till you see this baby go!”
She held on to the door frame like it was something that floated and she was something that sank. “I don’t know . . . ,” she said. “Maybe sometime when you . . . have . . . a . . . you know. Car.”
“Come on.” He knew it was crazy, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her out across the lawn. “I got it set up all special.”
He was not just talking about the fact that he had hung a mesquite air freshener in the cab of the forklift. Also, on the lifting forks, there was a . . .
Shirley said, “Is that an upright piano?”
“Yup!” He smiled proudly. “And not just any upright piano. A player piano. I wanted to make it romantic.”
He ran over to the forklift and climbed in. He started up the engine. It growled loudly. Then he pulled on a string, and the player piano started to hammer out “Some Enchanted Evening.”
Jed’s grin was so wide that Shirley couldn’t help smiling too. And then she started laughing. And then they both were laughing. And he held out a hand like a gentleman and helped her into the forklift. They puttered along through the suburbs with the player piano tinkling and banging away. People looked out their windows in astonishment. Jed put his foot on the gas, and they got up to ten miles per hour.
And it was, indeed, some enchanted evening, at first. They went to a J. P. Barnigan’s American Family Restaurant on the highway and they had as many waffle fries as a person could eat. They talked and found they had a lot in common. They made jokes about their choir director. The room was decorated with brass railings and old rowing oars and sports team photos and a shelf of dusty Jasper Dash books.
“It’s so sad!” said Shirley. “I bet no one ever reads these books anymore.” She lifted one down from the shelf. She and Jed took turns reading from it while they waited for the bill. They loved all the corny old exclamations like “Jupiter’s moons!” and “By gum!”
Jed was driving faster on the way home than on the way out. (There were free refills on Coke, and he’d had about seven.) It was a forklift, so that still only meant about fifteen miles per hour. But anyway, that was probably why he got off at the wrong exit.
They were a little lost.
They were driving along beside what was a cornfield in the summer. Now the stalks were all broken up and black. The trees were black too, and the road was black, and the sky was black and stormy. They didn’t mind, though. Shirley had very carefully started to lean against Jed, and the piano was playing “What a Wonderful World.”
Jed looked around. “Oh, shoot, Shirley. We’re lost. At ten miles per hour.”
He started to turn around in a field.
They bumbled back along the dark road.
Shirley asked, “What do you think the other kids in the choir would say if they knew we went on a—” Then she stopped.
There was something in the road.
Some one.
Caught in the forklift’s headlights.
A figure standing perfectly still in the middle of the road.
Outlined in black: a humanoid shape, but too thin and spindly to be a person, wearing a helmet with fins.
And then Jed looked to the side and saw that, in the middle of the field, there was a great white saucer sitting darkly, and he began screaming.
He struggled to turn the forklift around. The dark, tall figure walked toward them. The piano played “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”
Jed put his foot to the floor. The forklift trundled off the road and into the field. Its tractor wheels half sank in mud. Now it was going even slower. Jed didn’t pay attention. He leaned forward against the wind.
“Don’t you worry, Shirley! I’ll get us out of—Hold on!”
She held on to his arm as they went over bumps and troughs.
“Look back!” Jed shouted over the engine. “How we doing?”
Shirley swiveled her head.
The alien walked beside them at his own pace. He slowed down sometimes so he wouldn’t get ahead of them.
“Um,” she said.
The alien raised a glass wand.
There was a beeping sound in their ears.
And then they both fell asleep.
* * *
The frozen cornfield was empty except for an abandoned forklift.
A player piano on the front of it sadly and slowly played a song:
Blue moon,
You saw me standing alone . . .
* * *
The interrogation was terrifying. Brilliant white light. Weightlessness. Tumbling through the air.
“WHERE IS JASPER DASH?”
“WHERE IS THE HUMAN NAMED JASPER DASH?”
“IF YOU REMAIN SILENT ANY LONGER, YOU WILL BE SORRY!”
“YOUR WHOLE WORLD WILL SUFFER FOR YOUR SILENCE!”
All these voices screaming—until finally Shirley shouted back, “All right! All right! You don’t have to yell! He’s from—he’s from some stupid old books that no one even reads anymore!I The books say he lives in a town called Pelt!”
Shirley and Jed fell back asleep.
They awoke in a field.
It was morning. Steam was coming off the cold ground. Broken cornstalks lay around them.
Far away, the spaceship was headed for Pelt.
I This is not strictly true. You, after all, have a stack of the Jasper Dash books that you got at the church rummage sale. A couple of days later, the woman who owns the vacation house your family rented comes by to see if everything’s okay, and she sees the books and laughs. She says that the Jasper Dash books were in the house for years, and that they just gave them to the church rummage sale a few weeks ago to get rid of them.
She says, “Here they are back again. Like a bad penny!”
That is a weird coincidence. I don’t need to tell you this, but you think, That’s really crazy. Maybe there’s something cosmic in it. Like the books just belong in this house.
So one afternoon when your brother and a cousin are hogging the computer, you go up to the bedroom where all the kids sleep, even your annoying cousin Maxwell, who snores like a lumber mill. You reach under your bed and go through your duffel bag and take out Jasper Dash and His Marvelous Electro-Neutron Sled.
Sitting under a tree by the lake, you open it up. You begin to read.
What’s it about? The Alaskan wilderness . . . a wild search for an old sailing ship trapped in the ice a century earlier . . . Supposedly, there are priceless paintings still onboard . . . and Jasper Dash is whamming across the tundra in his Electro-Neutron Sled, seeking the lost treasure ship, racing against time and thugs. Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger: a shoot-out or a polar bear or a snow avalanche or a bomb. When you look up, it is almost evening. Your father is grilling things.
You wonder who the books used to belong to. You flip through the pages. On the inside of the front cover, someone, a long time ago, has written, “Busby Spence” in awkward letters. Then they wrote, “1942.”
You wonder who Busby Spence was, and you feel a ghostly shiver come over you. These books were originally from this house. You wonder what Busby Spence was like. You wonder whether he read this same book sitting in this yard, under this tree, by this lake.
Slowly you reach down with a finger and touch his name. It is like you are touching him through time, through a pane of glass.
Busby Spence. He wrote his name there so long ago, he is probably a grandfather now, an old man, or dead.