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THOMAS F. MONTELEONE
It was late afternoon as I walked down Forty-Sixth Street, headed for a Manhattan bar called Swaggerty’s, where I was supposed to meet a guy who probably wasn’t human.
Several times, I had the compulsion to just pull up and run in the opposite direction, but a more rational thought always intercepted the urge. If this guy, whoever (or whatever) he was, was somehow responsible for the awful stuff happening over the years, then finding me would be a piece of cake. I had the unsinkable feeling that there was no place to hide, and that I may as well run headlong into whatever was awaiting me.
Just get it over with.
He was sitting at a corner table in the cool darkness of the Irish bar. Amidst the sepia-tone pictures of soccer teams and revolutionaries, the guy with the plain, familiar face was sitting there watching me approach. In person, he looked so plain, so nondescript, that I had to silently congratulate him on such a wonderfully artful disguise.
“Mr. Sam Aaronson, I presume,” he said. He did not get up or offer to shake hands, and I took that as a bad sign. “Sit down, please.”
I sat, still staring at the plain-brown-wrapper of a face. “All right, let’s cut the crap. What do you want with me?”
Before he could answer, a waiter appeared, and I ordered a double George Dickel on the rocks. The waiter disappeared, and the guy across the table from me grinned.
“‘Let’s cut the crap.’ That’s such a wonderful idiom, Mr. Aaronson. Wherever did you pick it up?”
I figured the best thing to do would be to say nothing, so I decided to just stare at him.
He smiled. “Believe it or not, you are the first person to have ever come so close to discovering me. When I saw your article, I was impressed.”
“Who are you?” I asked after a short pause. My skin was feeling loose and crawly along my neck and shoulder blades, but I did need to know what was going on. The guy looked so non-threatening that I knew I should be terrified... and I guess I was getting there.
The waiter returned with my drink. My friend with the insurance-salesman face waited till he was gone. Looking around the room, I noticed that we were practically alone, that everyone else was doing a great job of ignoring us.
“Who am I?” he repeated the question. “Don’t you even want to guess?”
I shrugged. “It hadn’t really occurred to me,” I said. “But I don’t know, let’s see: you’ve got to be either Death, or the Devil, some form of God, or... an alien.” If none of those are right, then I don’t know. I never was very good at multiple-choice exams—all the answers always seemed so reasonable to me.
He smiled. “That’s very clever, Mr. Aaronson. Very clever. An odd mix of mysticism and science. It may be flattering to be confused with your local pantheon of deities, but that is not the case.”
As I assimilated his response, realizing what he was telling me, my stomach heaved, like it was hitting the first hill on a rollercoaster. My mind was reeling, and I found myself instantly recalling the crazy events which had brought me to this pivotal moment in my life...
...and it had all started because I noticed this weird little thing about the world in the news.
I mean, have you ever noticed how odd, unusual disasters seem to occur in clusters?
You know the kind of things I mean: a grain elevator explodes in Silas, Nebraska—the first accident in twenty-seven years—and suddenly another one goes up in Dubuque, and maybe a few days pass and a couple more detonate in Wichita and Biloxi.
Or, how about those railroad tank-cars filled with some really terrible substance like chlorine gas? For years they roll around the country, not bothering anyone or anything, and then, as if on cue, they start derailing and leaking poisonous vapors all over places like Kankakee and West Gatch.
You get the idea, don’t you?
This kind of thing happens more than you might think—it doesn’t always make the papers or the wire services, that’s all.
Take last month, for instance. A cargo freighter called the Novo Queen, sailing out of Portland, and filled with liquid fertilizer, suddenly explodes and kills everyone on board. Three days later, the Hiasa Maru, also full of fertilizer and bound for Tokyo, blows itself to smithereens while docked in Oakland. The following week, another ship carrying liquid fertilizer buys the farm.
After that... nothing.
Before these ships started blowing, there hadn’t been a similar incident in more than twenty years.
Weird, right?
I’ve noticed the same kind of group occurrences in other kinds of accidents: safes falling from lofts, black widow bites, elevator cables snapping, you name it. But the strangest part of the whole phenomenon is that it’s been going on, apparently unnoticed, for years and years—until I picked up on it, back when I was working the Night Desk for The Mirror.
It was the middle of February—a cold, slow night. Hardly anybody was out-of-doors, no domestic murders, not even so much as a ruptured fireplug. Just to keep awake, I would make myself get up and check the teletype every time it clattered out some filler or stringer items from wherever.
One of the pieces was a short blurb about a steamroller accident—seems as if an unfortunate pedestrian in Idaho Falls had managed to get run over by one. For some reason, I recalled reading a stringer about the same kind of thing in Chicago the week before.
Very rare accident, I thought. And yet, here was another one within a couple of days.
So just on a whim, I went down to Records, where they keep the clippings files and the microfiche readers (It’ll take years to get everything transferred to the computers.), and started checking the cross indices on “Deaths, Accidental,” and “Steamroller.”
I found only one instance in the files of a close encounter of the steamroller kind since 1921.
And suddenly: two in the space of three days. I chalked it up as one of those weird coincidences, but figured that it wouldn’t hurt to await any further developments.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Another steamroller accident over the weekend in Platte, Illinois. It was definitely strange stuff, and I had the feeling that maybe I’d stumbled onto something. So I pursued it down in Records whenever I had an hour or two, and some nights on my own time too. I looked for grouped incidents, improbable accidents, stuff like that.
I guess I don’t have to tell you there were hundreds of them!
Time went by, and I finally had a file four inches thick, and I was adding to it all the time. Finally, I wrote an article and sold it to a slick, high-paying magazine. I didn’t have any sophisticated computer analysis of the data—just the facts in the old “strange-but-true” tradition of Frank Edwards.
My story appeared as “Accidents Happen” in Montage, and I received letters from people all over the country. Many of them claimed to have noticed the phenomenon at least subconsciously, but hadn’t put it all together until reading my piece. Others even took the time to send me new material.
The experience inspired me to begin working on a book—the dream of all newspaper hacks, ‘cuz we all know a reporter ain’t no author.
First thing I did was hire one of the kids down in the Advertising Department to spend a few hours each night in clipping files and in microfiche. I had him collecting photographs in any of the connected articles, thinking I might find a visual correlation.
Within a month, the kid handed me more than four hundred clips and pix in an old carton. That weekend, I separated all the pix into categories of events, and that didn’t seem to be doing anything except crapping up the dining room table real nice.
But just as I was about to quit for the night, I happened to notice the face of a man in the foreground of a picture taken at the sight of an Amtrak derailment in Essex Junction, Vermont. He was walking away from the wreckage of a twisted club car, and was passing the photographer on the left.
His face was so exquisitely normal that there was no reason for me to take notice of him: short, sandy hair, with no outstanding features like big eyes, big nose, thin lips, dewlaps, prominent Adam’s apple, or anything like that. Just a plain waspy-looking face that reminded you of your average State Farm Insurance salesman.
And yet, I had noticed him. Why?
I shuffled through the pix, and it started to come together.
In a 1962 shot from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, where a piano had fallen from a mover’s crane, there was a crowd assembled around the point of impact—one of the faces was my insurance-salesman type. He was turning away from the lens, but not in time to get nailed by the flash of the trusty Graflex. From a clip and pix from the Los Angeles Times I caught sight of the same guy mingling with a crowd of onlookers where a water tower collapsed in Bakersfield in 1981. He was also standing in the back row of a bunch of rubberneckers who watched a school bus being pulled out of Cayuga Lake near Seneca Falls in 1950.
My heart was thumping as I searched through the rest of the stack, and came up with forty-seven pix that contained a shot of somebody who might be my guy. I threw out all the ones in which, for one reason or another (weird camera-angle, blurriness, partial obscurement), the make on the guy was not a hundred percent positive. That left me with thirty-two photographs, covering a period of more than fifty years, where the same guy appeared.
Weird. Crazy. Impossible. Ridiculous.
All these words kept popping into my head as I popped another Marlboro into my mouth, fired it up. There was no way that the same guy could be showing up at all these grouped events for fifty years and never get any older.
Yet, there he was, right on my dining room table, so to speak.
If this guy really was the same guy, I started thinking that the pix only happened to catch him by chance. Maybe he was at every one of the events? Could that be? Maybe he was causing them?
Now that was crazier than anything I had considered up to that point. But what was I supposed to think? It seemed obvious that insurance-salesman-face was linked to the events in some way. Only a jerk would deny that. But why did he look the same for all those years—and who was he?
But then, I got a new thought. Something darker, more sinister. Perhaps, like in all the old movies, there really were Things-Man-Was-Not-Meant-To-Know? Suppose, by opening up this bizarre can of worms, I was putting myself into a dangerous situation? Maybe it would be best if I didn’t tell anybody yet, didn’t get anyone else involved? I got a funny feeling down my backbone, and suddenly the house seemed too damned quiet, and the darkness beyond the windows seemed blacker and more impenetrable than before. I was spooking myself, I knew it, but the feelings wouldn’t go away.
Maybe I should just forget about this stuff?
I figured I’d give it a rest for a few days, then decide what I’d do about it. I kept as busy as possible at work, and I was feeling pretty good, less spooked, as each day passed. I was sitting at my desk at Amalgamated with my lunch spread out across the blotter when the phone rang.
“Hello?” I said as I forced down a swallow of corned beef on rye.
“Yes, I am trying to locate a Mr. Sam Aaronson,” said an innocuous male voice.
“You got ‘im. Who’s calling?”
“Oh, just an old friend. A very old friend.”
There was a suggestion of humor in the voice, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. I was about to wisecrack something, but suddenly my Early Warning System flared, and I got this weird feeling that something was wrong.
“Hey, look, I’m pretty busy... who is this?”
There was a pause at the other end, and the silence seemed to gnaw into my ear.
“I know you’ve been checking on some photographs.”
“Really?” My voice quavered ever so slightly.
“Yes, and so saying, I think you know who I am, don’t you, Mr. Aaronson?”
“What do you want?” I asked, trying to be noncommittal.
“I think it’s time we sat down and had a little talk,” said the voice. “When can you meet me?”
I swallowed hard, suddenly not very interested in my lunch any longer. “Where are you?” I croaked.
“Manhattan. A little bar on Forty-Sixth Street between Park and Fifth. Called Swaggerty’s.”
“I know where it is,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ve got plenty of time,” said the voice.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you have,” I said. “See you in a bit.”
I hung up the phone because my hands were starting to tremble and my voice was cracking all over the place.
Sweeping up my lunch, I chucked it into the circular file—there was the need for something of a more liquid nature at this point—and took off for Swaggerty’s.
The streets were crowded for lunch, and the weather was brisk for October, but the sun was warm as I walked across town toward Fifth. The women were out in force with the latest fashions, and on any other day, I would have been doing my share of ogling, but this one was different. I knew who I was going to meet at the bar, and I knew he didn’t want to sell me any insurance...
...and so there I sat listening to this kind of wimpy-looking guy tell me he was an alien. I sipped on the Dickel and it burned a velvet path down my throat.
“Go on...” I said. My voice was barely more than a whisper.
“We have been among your kind for many of your centuries—not a great amount of time for my race. I have been here for more than fifty years.”
“What for? What do you want with us? What’re you trying to do, plan an invasion or something?”
He smiled, then actually laughed. “No! Nothing at all so dramatic!”
“What?”
“Would you, or any of your kind, be interested in ‘invading’ an anthill? Or ‘taking over’ that which you might find beneath a flat rock?”
He laughed again.
“Is that what we are to you?” I asked. “A bunch of slugs and insects?”
He shrugged. “If you must know the truth—less. You are simply here. To use one of your idioms, we don’t really give a shit about any of you.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I could feel the indifference, the abject lack of feeling in his voice. He truly meant what he was telling me.
“You wouldn’t understand the true nature of my purpose here.” he said.
“Try me,” I said, downing the rest of my sour mash.
He chuckled nastily. “Mr. Aaronson, would you attempt to read Emmanuel Kant to a cage full of baboons?”
“Oh, you really think a lot of us, don’t you? Well, if we’re so disgusting to you, why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”
He grinned, nodded. “Let me just say that we are sent here by our... ‘elders’... for what you might call ‘training.’ There are aspects of this planet—its distance from its star, the makeup of its magnetic field, the atmospheric balance, and other parameters which would have no meaning in your primitive science—that make it an ideal location for our training.”
“What kind of training?” I was getting the idea, but every time he explained something, I had more questions. I guess once you get the newspaper ink in your blood, it’s a permanent affliction.
“Again, any attempt to explain to you what my race does here, in terms of training, would be totally futile. Let me suffice to say that we are concerned with many physical and metaphysical laws of the universe, that we are fascinated with such concepts as cause and effect, predestination, probability, permutations, and other phenomena which you would not understand.”
“You’re making me feel just great.”
He shrugged. “Sorry. I know your limitations.”
“That still doesn’t explain the grouping effect,” I said.
He nodded. “Yes, well, you see, that is merely a side effect, a contra-indication, caused by aspects of our training. There are moments when the continuum is violated, and the normal Fabric of Being attempts to mend itself. Sometimes there are events of overcompensation, which result in multiple events occurring.”
“What? You mean you actually have control over reality?” The full impact of what he was saying brought a lump into my throat.
He chuckled again. “Well, of course! That’s what it’s all about, don’t you see? The events as they happen are of no consequence to us. They are merely byproducts of a much larger, far more complex mechanism at work. It is that mechanism which I control, not these silly events!”
There was something about his condescending, disdainful attitude that was very convincing. His words chilled me with a cavalier cruelty. I knew he was telling the truth, but I pushed him anyway.
“How do I know this isn’t a bunch of bullshit?”
“You know it is not.”
“You say you’re an alien,” I said, trying to sound forceful. “Prove it. Show me.”
“You would not like me to do that.”
Another cold spike went through me, but I pushed on into unknown territory. “Yeah, I would. Go on.”
He gestured at his face, his body. “This is just an illusion,” he said. “A carefully constructed piece of work, yes, but nothing more than playing with your spectrum of visible light.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let me see what you guys really look like...”
“Very well,” he said, and his image began to waver around the edges. He started to disappear like a superimposed ghost in an old black-and-white movie, and then I started to see what was “beneath” the illusion.
It rippled and pulsated and glistened, for starters. There were tendrils and whiskery-looking things. Things that looked like open sores, running ooze and pustulence. Very organic, not pretty. And there were odors which apparently had also been masked. The smells reached out and grabbed me, smacking me, and then choking me with their foulness. My stomach churned.
“Okay! That’s enough!” I said, but it was too late.
A thick, hot column surged up my throat, and I heaved across the table violently. My eyes filled with stinging tears and my mouth burned with acid. The alien resumed his masked appearance just before a waiter rushed over to help me with a warm cloth, and expertly scooped up the tablecloth with everything in it. Amidst my gasping apologies, the waiter walked away in long strides. It all happened so quickly, I was a bit startled to look up through my tears and see the insurance-salesman face staring back at me.
“You were warned,” he said.
“All right,” I took my breath in large gulps. “I believe you now... I just have one more question.”
“Which is: why are you telling me all this? Correct?”
I nodded dumbly.
“Well, my training is almost at an end. I will be leaving this world for the next stage in my evolution. You were smarter than the rest of your breed—you at least noticed my presence.”
“So?”
“So I decided to reward you for your work. You deserved to know, and I don’t care if you know or not.”
Now this sounded kind of odd to me. Something didn’t add up. “You mean you don’t care if I tell the world about you?”
He chuckled meanly. “Come now, Mr. Aaronson... now who would believe you?”
I thought about it for a minute, nodded. “You’ve got a point there.”
He grinned. “Yes, but just to make certain there are no repercussions, before I take my leave, I fear I will have to eliminate you.”
My stomach churned violently again and adrenaline shock-jarred my entire system. “What?”
“You heard me correctly.”
“Some ‘reward’ for being so clever,” I said. Suddenly my fear had been replaced by anger. If this walking bedsore was going to take me out, he would have to do it the hard way.
“And now, Mr. Aaronson, it is time to say adieu,” said the alien, as he sipped the last of his drink.
Using that instant as my only chance, I grabbed the steak knife at my place setting and lunged at him over the table. Plunging the blade into his eye, I felt something soft and wet and slimy almost envelop my hand. The thing screamed, and its image began to waver like bad TV reception.
I kept jabbing and dicing it up with the knife, like I was tearing into some rotten fruit, and the thing howled horribly. By now, the other people in the joint had rushed over to watch, but when they saw the tendrilled horror that was grappling with me, they all recoiled in a kind of shock.
It kept making this keening, howling sound, and there was a black, ichorous, fluid spraying out all over the floor like a broken water pipe. Suddenly, the thing broke free of me and surged toward the front door. The crowd parted in panic, and the thing moved by them with alarming quickness.
As I followed it out onto the street, amid the gasps of terror and amazement of the crowd, I had a crazy thought, a journalist’s thought. It suddenly occurred to me that I had an incredible story on my hands.
I would be famous tomorrow morning!
Reaching the sidewalk, I raced to the corner, looking for the thing, but it had vanished. Wondering if I had mortally wounded it, I glanced over at the early afternoon edition of the New York Post, staring up at me from a newsstand.
In that instant, I understood everything.
CHICAGO MAN BATTLES ALIEN IN CORNER BAR said the headline.