CHAPTER "5"

 

I've been reading more books, and I'm STILL having trouble with dialogue. It's not so easy.

I have too many he-said-somethinglyies.

You've got to mix them up a little. Like this—

"Oh, Fred, I love you," she husked.

"I love you too, Carol darling," he said lovingly.

"I want you, Fred, I need you," she snapped.

"Carol, I want to sleep with you and be your husband!" he shouted from the rooftops.

Like that. You have to put vareity in your writing.

 

One night, it was about a week from school starting, I heard all kinds of noises upstairs in the attic. There wasn't banging or anything, not like Nathan was still working up there. Just rustling and bustling and stuff.

I just laid there and listened. Boy, I was curious as to what the hell was going on. I mean, this was ridiculous. Here we had these wierd guys living with us, and they were obviously aliens, and nobody was interested, except for Mrs. Carey across the street. And Nathan and Mom and Tyler and Lori just slept like logs.

Lori didn't because she had a date almost every night. She would get home late, and I'd hear her, and usually when she opened the door to come in, the noise in the attic would stop. And Lori would come upstairs and go into her room, and in a little while the light would go out in her room, and then awhile later, the damn noises would start again, but Lori wouldn't here them. Was I the only one?

Jeez, this was getting decidedly tiresome.

"I'm going up there," I snapped to myself.

But I was a little afraid, so I took my time getting out of bed. I put my sweats on, and shoes, too, just in case they'd go out again. But they seemed like they were staying up there in the attic.

I was alone in the room that night because Tyler was staying with Grandma Alice in Columbus. She was my real Dad's mother. Grandma had drove up from Columbus and picked Tyler up. She's usually pretty nice to Tyler and Lori and me, Grandma Alice is. She isn't rich but she buys stuff for us alot. She's nice.

I opened the door to the bedroom and snuck out in to the hallway. I tip-toed to the spare bedroom. Lori wasn't home yet tonight, and I wanted to get up there before she came back.

But I was afraid. I mean, these guys were aliens. What would they do if they didn't want anyone watching them and they caught someone spying? They might zap me with their Phazers. Or even worse.

But somehow, I wasn't all that afraid. I was scared, sure, but I wasn't like real scared, so that your tongue gets dry and tastes bad. That happened to me once, when I almost fell off a latter, when I went up it to get a ball off the roof. Never mind about that now.

I stood and put my ear against the door of the spare bedroom. The tv wasn't on, or the CD player of Nathan's that he gave them. Boy, he gave them everything. It was quiet in there.

They must of moved everything up to the attic, I thought. I was right.

I tried the doorknob. They never locked their door, I checked it now and then. The knob turned and I slowly opened the door, and looked in, and I saw that their futon wasn't there, or anything. The room was bare.

I came in and shut the door. The light was on, so I wasn't afraid. I went to the closet. Inside the closet, on one side, there are these big steps that go up to the attic, and there's a trap door at the top of the steps. The trap door was open. There were lights up there. I didn't hear any TV or CD player, but there was some noise, like birds or something. Actually, I knew what it was, it was them. The aliens. That's what they really sound like when their talking.

There were still some boxes of old clothes on the steps and on a shelf that ran along the wall. You had to squeeze past some of them. I creeped up the stairs. When I say big steps they are big, more like shelves than steps, if you get my meaning. Its hard to explain. But that's the way they built the house. There are only three steps, and you get to the trap door. So I kneeled down on the top step and listened.

More birds. I stayed that way, kneeling and listening, for a couple of minutes. Then I slowly raised my head till I could see over the edge of the hole.

There they were, Zorg and Flez, still dressed in slacks and Hawaaiin shirts, still looking a little like youknowwho. They weren't space aliens with anntennaes or anything. But something else was strange.

That skylight that Nathan had installed. It was pretty nifty. It could open.

And it was open.

Zorg and Flez were standing right under it, looking up and out, at the sky, I thought. Zorg began to raise his hands.

Suddenly, for no reason, because I wasn't making a sound, he turned his head and looked at me. He smiled.

Flez saw him, and turned in my direction. He looked a little surprised.

"Hey," Zorg said.

"Hey," I uttered.

"What are y'doin?" Zorg asked.

"Uh, what are YOU guys doin?" I stated.

Zorg giggled and so did Flez. They talked in bird talk for a while.

I stood up and looked around. Everything was up here all right, real cozy. And lots of other stuff that I didn't even know Nathan got them, boxes and cartons of stuff. I didn't look to see what it was exactly. It looked like video tapes and bunches of games and toys and stuff. Wow, some of it looked interesting.

Nathan had really fixed the place up, but it wasn't all finished. The drywall was up and spackled, but it wasn't sanded or painted yet. The floor was pine planks, but it didn't have varnish or anything on it yet. It was pretty nice little place to live, I guess, if you were four feet tall.

Zorg made a motion to come here. So I stepped up, and bumped my head against the slanting ceiling. I'm pretty tall for 13. I stooped and shuffled over to them.

Zorg raised his arm and pointed up, through the skylight.

I edged over a little so I could look up.

I couldn't see anything, something was blocking the view. Then I thought, what the heck could be up there? So I put my head under the hole and straigted up.

Now I could see. I could see the roof and across the street, and all around, and I sure as heck could see what was floating above the house.

The Flying Saucer.

I stooped down again. "Neat!" I exclaimed.

Zorg giggled and shook his head. "Yeah, neat. You wanna go for a ride?"

Wow. I mean, that really hit me.

I swallowed before I said nervously, "You mean in the ship?"

"Yeah, we don't have a car," Flez said gigglingly.

"Nope, we don't," Zorg said jollyily. "We have a starship."

"COOL!" I said in a loud voice, but I hushed myself.

I didn't think about it too long, but I thought about it. I mean, what if they took off for space and never came back again? What if they took me to their planet and made me a slave or something, or a robot?

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Just for a ride," Flez said.

"You're going to come back, right?"

Zorg nodded. "We like it here."

"And your not going to go back to your planet?"

"Not yet"

Both of them shook their big bald heads.

"You wouldn't like, do anything to me, would you?"

They shook their heads again, not smiling, like they're feelings were hurt or something.

"No. We like you. We want to have fun with you."

Zorg said that, and I looked at him. You know, for some silly damn reason I believed him. There was just something about him that you believed what he said. He was sincere. I cant explain it. Both of them were like that, Flez too.

"OK," I argued. "Let's go. Uh, what do we do?"

As soon as I said it the hole appeared in the bottom of the spaceship. Light poured out. It was bright, but not enough to hurt my eyes.

"What do I—"

But that's all I said before I just floated up. I mean, just floated, like I weighed practically nothing. Like I was on an elevator, only there was no elevator. I went up and through the hole and then to one side a little, and then I started to come down. My shoes touched the floor and there I was.

I was inside the alien spaceship.

And there was nothing to it. It was big and empty. The floor was soft, like soft plastic. It was just a big room, round, with a kind of dome in the middle, and that was it. The color was sort of greenish, but not too.

I walked around. Boy, there wasn't a stick of furniture, no instruments for the pilot, no nothing. Unless this was some kind of storage compartment and there were other compartments somewhere else. There were no seats to sit in, no shelves to put stuff up on, nowhere to hang anything. There was lots of nothing in that alien spaceship. I was kind of confused.

"Welcome," someone stated.

I didn't know who the heck it was. There was no one there.

"Make yourself comfortable," said the person who was saying that. I still didn't see anyone.

"Hello!" I shuddered.

"Hello. You may call me Kel."

"Hello—Kel? Like, is that short for Kelly?"

"No. Please make yourself comfortable."

The floor started doing something funny, and it was sort of like what that robot did in that one Arnold Shcwartszenanager movie, it sort of flowed and came up and formed into something, and that something was a chair, sort of.

"Will this be usable?" Kel asked, but I still didn't see him. And I wasn't so sure it was a him. It wasn't a deep voice or a woman's voice either.

In fact, I was sure of something right away. Kel wasn't a regular person. He or she or it wasn't a human being. Well, neither were Zorg and Flez, but Kel was different from both of them too.

"Yeah, sure," I said.

"Please seat yourself."

I looked at the thing. Sure, I could sit down on it, though it was kind of curvy. So I did. I was kind of hard on my butt but I didn't say anything.

"Satisfactory?" Kel asked hospitalitly.

"Uh, yeah. Good. Fine." Like, what the heck was this place? It didn't make any sense.

"Will you be needing refreshment?"

"Huh?" I wondered.

"Would you like something to eat or drink?"

"Uh, nothing for me, thanks!" I said surprisedly. I wasn't expecting that.

"You're quite sure?"

"Uh. . . Uh. . . . OK. I'll have a Coke."

"With ice or without?"

"With, please."

"Very good."

The floor did the weird thing again, it started to get wavy and bulgy, and then a little table formed and came up, and on the table was this glass of Coke with ice.

I took it and looked at it. It felt cold. I smelled it. It smelled like Coke. I drank some. It tasted exactly like what it was supposed to taste like.

"Satisfactory?" asked Kel.

"Yeah, cool."

I was sort of like, I didn't know what to say about any of this.

I looked around and saw that Zorg and Flez were already in the ship, and there was no hole in the floor anymore.

"OK," Zorg said, "let's flarn."

Flarn? I was sure that's what he said. Flarn. OK, like, what the heck is that?

I didn't ask. I just sat there drinking my Coke. The boys sat in the middle of the floor and the floor got bumpy and puffed up, making a bunch of pillows. The guys sat among them with their legs crossed and their backs to one another, looking toward the walls.

I didn't understand why until the walls sort of dissolved, in spots, so you could see through them.

And WOW! We were flying. Just like that. And I didn't even know it until I looked. There was no way you could tell. There were no bumps or any feeling of motion. It was night and all you could see was lights, but you could see highways and shopping malls and house lights and everything. We must have been thousands of feet in the air already. It was just like being on a plane but not as bumpy.

And there was no noise at all. That was the spooky thing.

I watched cars crawl along the highway below. They looked like little toy cars with little battery-operated headlights. The rows and rows of houses looked like model train villages under a Xmas tree, little windows all lighted up. I expected to see a pile of presents next.

We were over Columbus, I thought, not out in the country. We must have been moving real fast, because it takes like 30 minutes to get into Columbus from where we live. But here we were flying over it, and then we passed it, and went back out over empty areas again.

Here and there something lit up on the ground went by, or we went by it. Like a power station or something. It was pretty dark, not like when I saw the guys the first time flying their ship, with the moon up and all. There was no moon. Still there was a lot of light for it being night. I guess there's so much light at night now, with all the electric lights in the stores and homes and stuff. I read where astronomers have trouble keeping the city lights out of their telescopes, which is why they have to put them up on mountains out in the desert. But I wasn't thinking about that, I was sitting there enjoying the view.

The ship started to go down, and it didn't do it slow. It kind of swooped. But it didn't feel like a rollercoaster or anything. I wasn't getting motion sick, like I used to in the car sometimes when I was a little kid. It was smooth. We dipped and we were close to the ground. Funny thing was, when the ship turned or dipped or made any motion, it was the horizon that tilted, not us. Sort of like in a plane, you get the same effect sometimes, when the plane banks real hard, and I guess its the gravity that makes you stick to your seat. But this was a little different. You felt no sensation of movement, but a bit, and the ground went crazy out there. It was odd.

It was kind of dark down there except for a road, and the only reason I knew there was a road was because we were following a car, one car. It was going along at a pretty good clip, its high beams on. Overhanging trees would hide it for a stretch, and then you could see it again. We were skimming along the tops of the trees, real close.

The reason we could see straight down was that part of the floor was like glass now. You could see straight through. Sort of a wedge shaped area.

We followed the car for a good stretch, and I was wondering why we were doing it, when I realized that now the ship was doing to this car and the people in it exactly what it did to our car and us.

The people or the driver in the car seemed to realize this as soon as I did, I mean, that something was following him. He or maybe it was she, started to swerve a little, and slow down. The ship slowed down to, then the car suddenly screeched and pulled off the road and stopped just like we did that night we saw the UFO.

Wow, this was really strange, to be up here in the ship instead of down there in the car, scared. I wasn't scared, but I was feeling pretty qeesy. I was getting a wierd feeling. Those people down there were probably scared.

But then again, it was kind of fun doing this. Like, you know, playing ticktack at Holloween, throwing pebbles at peoples windows, or papering their trees. That means hanging toilet paper all over the branches, if you've never seen it. Or had it done.

It was fun. The ship swooped, turned, and then came back, and then it slowed and stopped, right above the car.

Then it lowered until it was right above the car, and I could hear some people talking. They were in the car.

"What is it? Oh, my God, Carl, what is it!"

"Jeeez!!! I don't know!!!"

"Tell it to go away, Carl!!!"

"You tell 'em!!!"

"Carl, I feel sick!!!!!"

"Don't throw up on the leather!!!"

"Ohhhhhhhhhh!!!!!"

The guy stuck his arm out the window and waved it real fast.

"Hey, get the F out of here!!! Leave us alone!!!!!"

He used the F word. He was like more mad than scared, but he was pretty scared too.

Then, suddenly, the ship lifted and we sailed away, real fast.

We gained altitude again and cruised over cities and towns. More highways with little toy cars, smaller this time, because I guess we were really high.

We passed through clouds and it was like fog, yet you could still see the ground, only it turned a different color. Like red or something. I didn't get that. Anyway, we flew faster and higher, and it was really neat.

There was something out there, flashing. It looked pretty wierd and I wondered what it was. It had flashing lights all over it and it was flying. It was bobbing up and down, so it couldn't of been a plane.

But I was fooled, because it was a plane, an airline plane, a 747 or some big jet. The reason it was bobbing wasn't because it was doing it. It was the saucer, I guess. I told you you couldn't tell if the alien ship was moving or doing any movements. Well, the ship settled down and now I could see the plane was a jet. You could see the windows all lighted up. There were numbers on it and it had the name of the airline, but I forget what it read, it was one of them like American or something. You couldn't really see it all that good. And there were lights blinking all over the plane. We were behind it, then we came alongside, and then we pulled ahead. Then we dropped and it flew over us, and you could see it against the stars.

It was neat that different parts of the floor and walls and ceiling in the ship could become transparent so you could see, depending on where what you wanted to see was at the time.

Then we rose again, and came up alongside the plane, and we got real close, like you could look right in the windows. I saw some faces. Not everybody was looking. Just a few people. I thought somebody waved, but I'm not sure.

We flew like that beside it for awhile, then I guess Zorg and Flez got tired of it, and the ship zoomed away, and that plane got tiny in a second, and in another second it was GONE.

Wow, could that spaceship fly fast or what.