At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semi-daze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.
Peter was howling.
The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson's back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth-the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she knew she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn't like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of herself as well. It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.
Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky-long, chilling, mournful sounds.
“Stop it, Peter!” Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.
Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.
Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be-well, she didn't know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.
She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun-and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four hours she'd spent digging were like her memory of hanging her blouse on the bush-hazy and fragmented. They were not memories; they were fragments.
But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear… and a mounting sense of excitement.
Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but huge.
The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object. Gray metal… some object…
You'd ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps-and composition aside, she had absolutely no idea what it was.
She began to unbutton her jeans so she could tuck in her blouse, then paused.
The crotch of the faded Levis was soaked with blood.
Jesus. Jesus Christ. This isn't a period. This is Niagara Falls.
She was momentarily frightened, really frightened, then told herself to quit being a ninny. She had gone into some sort of daze and done digging a crew of four husky men could have been proud of… her, a woman who went one-twenty-five, maybe one-thirty, tops. Of course she was flowing heavily. She was fine-in fact, should be grateful she wasn't cramping as well as gushing.
My, how poetic we are today, Bobbi, she thought, and uttered a harsh little laugh.
All she really needed was to clean herself up: a shower and a change would do fine. The jeans had been ready for either the trash or the rag-bag anyway. Now there was one less choice in a troubled, confusing world, right? Right. No big deal.
She buttoned her pants again, not tucking the blouse in-no sense ruining that as well, although God knew it wasn't exactly a Dior original. The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.
But instead of starting up the slope to the path, she walked back toward the thing in the earth again, drawn to it. Peter howled, and the gooseflesh reappeared again. “Peter, will you for Christ's sake shut up!” She hardly ever shouted at Pete really shouted at him-but the goddam mutt was starting to make her feel like a behavioral psychology subject. Gooseflesh when the dog howled instead of saliva at the sound of the bell, but the same principle.
Standing close to her find, she forgot about Peter and only stared wonderingly at it. After some moments she reached out and gripped it. Again she felt that curious sense of vibration-it sank into her hand and then disappeared. This time she thought of touching a hull beneath which very heavy machinery is hard at work. The metal itself was so smooth that it had an almost greasy texture-you expected some of it to come off on your hands.
She made a fist and rapped her knuckles on it. It made a dull sound, like a fist rapping on a thick chunk of mahogany. She stood a moment longer, then took the screwdriver from her back pocket, held it indecisively for a moment, and then, feeling oddly guilty-feeling like a vandal-she drew the screwdriver blade down the exposed metal. It wouldn't scratch.
Her eyes suggested two further things, but either or both could have been an optical illusion. The first was that the metal seemed to grow slightly thicker as it went from its edge to the point where it disappeared into the earth. The second was that the edge was slightly curved. These two things-if true-suggested an idea that was at once exciting, ludicrous, frightening, impossible… and possessed of a certain mad logic.
She ran her palm over the smooth metal, then stepped away. What the hell was she doing, petting this goddam thing while the blood was running down her legs? And her period was the least of her concerns if what she was starting to think just might turn out to be the truth.
You better call somebody, Bobbi. Right now.
I'll call Jim. When he gets back.
Sure. Call a poet. Great idea. Then you can call the Reverend Moon. Maybe Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson to draw pictures. Then you can hire a few rock bands and have fucking Woodstock 1988 out here. Get serious, Bobbi. Call the state police.
No. I want to talk to Jim first. Want him to see it. Want to talk to him about it. Meantime, I'll dig around it some more.
It could be dangerous.
Yes. Not only could be, probably was-hadn't she felt that? Hadn't Peter felt it? There was something else, too. Coming down the slope from the path this morning, she had found a dead woodchuck-had almost stepped on it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer's poison bait and stumbled out here to die.
Go home. Change your pants. You're bloody and you stink.
She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.
“Your own damn fault,” Anderson said. “I told you to stay home.” All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn't, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall… and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by… that idea didn't fetch her.
She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.
A plate, that's what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.
A flying fucking saucer.
Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains-more than half-down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.
She was no great shakes with a pen unless it was words she was making, but she had some small sketching talent. This sketch went very slowly, however, not just because she wanted it to be as exact as she could make it but because she was so tired. To make matters worse, Peter came over and nuzzled her hand, wanting to be patted.
She stroked Peter's head absently, erasing a jag his nose had put into the horizon-line of her sketch. “Yeah, you're a good dog, great dog, go check the mail, why don't you?”
Peter trotted across the living room and nosed the screen door open. Anderson went back to work on her sketch, glancing up once to see Peter do his world-famous canine mail-retrieval trick. He put his left forepaw up on the mailbox post and then began to swipe at the door of the box. Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little-until this year, Peter had never lost his balance. Getting the mail had been his piece de resistance, better than playing dead Viet Cong and much better than anything mundane like sitting up or “speaking” for a dog biscuit. It wowed everyone who saw him do it, and Peter knew it… but these days it was a painful ritual to watch. It made Anderson feel the way she imagined she would feel if she saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on TV, trying to do one of their old dance routines.
The dog managed to get up on the post again, and this time Peter hooked the mail-a catalogue and a letter (or a bill-yes, with the end of the month coming it was more likely a bill)-out of the box with the first swipe of his paw. It fluttered to the road, and as Peter picked it up, Anderson dropped her eyes back to her sketch, telling herself to stop banging the goddam funeral bell for Peter every two minutes. The dog actually looked half-alive tonight; there had been nights recently when he'd had to totter up on his hind legs three or four times before he was able to get his mail-which usually came to no more than a free sample from Procter amp; Gamble or an advertising circular from K-mart.
Anderson stared at her sketch closely, absently shading in the trunk of the big pine tree with the split top. It wasn't a hundred per cent accurate… but it was pretty close. She'd gotten the angle of the thing right, anyway.
She drew a box around it, then turned the box into a cube… as if to isolate the thing. The curve was obvious enough in her sketch, but had it really been there?
Yes. And what she was calling a metal plate-it was really a hull, wasn't it? A glassy-smooth, rivetless hull.
You're losing your mind, Bobbi… you know that, don't you?
Peter scratched on the screen to be let in. Anderson went to the door, still looking at her sketch. Peter came in and dropped the mail on a chair in the hallway. Then he walked slowly down to the kitchen, presumably to see if there was anything he had overlooked on Anderson's plate.
Anderson picked up the two pieces of mail and wiped them on the leg of her jeans with a little grimace of disgust. It was a good trick, granted, but dog-spit
