The Grays

Then next thing he knew, somebody was calling him. Far away.

“Dad! Oh my God. Mom! Mom!”

Then footsteps, then he was aware that he’d fallen, and his head—his head hurt. That was it, he’d hit his head on a beam. Katelyn and Conner were there, they were terrified.

No problem, had to calm them down. “Oops,” he croaked.

“Dan, don’t move.”

He sat up. “I about knocked myself silly.”

“What happened, honey?”

“I was—” He looked around the cold, dark space. “I hit my head. One of the beams. I thought those kids had come back.”

“What kids?”

“Paulie and his buddies.”

“What were they doing in our yard?”

“It’s a long story, Mom. And there was somebody out there just now.” He pointed. “Something, anyway. It was an owl, right over there. A barn owl standing beside the pool.”

There was nothing in the backyard now except the pool itself, gray in the moonlight, and beyond it the strip of woods that separated all the houses from a cornfield that fronted on Wilton Road.

Nothing more was said about the incident. Katelyn spent some time, then, with her son. She already knew all that had happened. Maggie had called, full of apologies. The boys had overstepped. Paulie would resume the old friendship, she would make sure of that.

She left him listening to a Leonard Cohen CD, another of his private eccentricities. God forbid that any of the other children should ever find those CDs, or his audio books of things like James Joyce’s fantastically obscure and prolix Finnegan’s Wake, from which he drew some sort of equally obscure comfort. Maybe he even understood it, who could know?

She took a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses up to their bedroom, and drank some wine with her husband. No more Conner until the morning. They lay together, then, with the light of the westering moon falling on their naked bodies, and the wine in them. Dan said, “You want to give it a try?”

“With no diaphragm?”

“Clean and clear.”

She kissed him. “I do, I do.”

“Oh, wow, hey—” He reached over, got his wineglass and raised it. “To the next genius Callaghan. If we make it.”

“Okay, listen, you—I do want to, but this is not the right moment, Dan, and you know that.”

“The tenure will come.”

“The tenure may come. And when it does, we celebrate.” She laughed a little. “By doing this incredibly profound thing of making another child. But, Dan, if you do not get it, then—”

“The tenure will come!”

“Marcie is a complex, difficult human being.”

He threw himself back on the bed. She laid a hand on his head.

“You sure you’re okay, Dan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, you know there’s no beam down there you could’ve hit your head on. So that’s not what happened.”

He knew it. He allowed himself to consider the possibility of a seizure. He’d had them as a child, he remembered them, they would start with an aura that involved seeing his planetarium lights, then progress to this bizarre, echoing room where there would be unspeakable things, human bodies with no skin, giant flies—and then it would be morning, and he’d wake up perfectly fine.

He had never told a soul about the seizures, and he didn’t intend to tell Katelyn now. They were, perhaps, one of the reasons that he had become a physiological psychologist. His own suffering had led him to a fascination with the mechanics and abnormalities of the brain.

They slept then, joined to the sleeping world of man, a place that is different by night, that is not at all what it seems.

They did not sleep alone, though. They were watched, and carefully watched. Minds very different from our own, with objectives and needs completely beyond the imagining of the Callaghans, drew conclusions about what they saw, and acted on those conclusions.

Deep in the night, they acted, and Marcie Cotton became the latest victim of a great and intricate terror.

And then things went wrong. Very, very wrong.

FOUR

OAK ROAD WAS SO QUIET at 3 A.M. that you could hear the whispering fall of individual pine needles as they dropped in the woods that separated the houses from the farmer’s field behind them. So when screams erupted, every human being and all the animals woke up instantly.

Marcie Cotton also heard the cries, and an expressionless voice repeating again and again, “What can we do to help you stop screaming?” Only when she felt herself suck breath, and realized that the narrow, black cot from which she could not rise was not her bed, did she connect with the fact that the screaming was coming from her. She thought: nightmare. And then she screamed again.

THERE WERE FOUR FAMILIES LIVING at the end of Oak Road, all Bell College faculty. The last house on the dead end was occupied by the Jefferses, Nancy and Chris, and their baby daughter. Beside them were the Callaghans, next the Warners, Harley and Maggie, Paulie and Amy. The house closest to the beginning of Oak Road belonged to the Keltons, two parents and two teenage sons.

At the Kelton house, Manrico, the family dog, sat up and snorted, then stood and commenced barking. The two teenagers leaped out of bed and started pulling on their pants.

Nancy Jeffers also screamed, and Chris, the youthful head of the physics department, jumped up as if there was a snake in the bed. Out the bedroom window, he saw a glow through the woods. “Dear God there’s a fire,” he shouted, pulling on a pair of rubber overshoes and an overcoat.

THE TRIAD HAD BEEN COMMANDED to bring Marcie Cotton to Dan Callaghan. The collective wanted them to bond her to him, so that she would do anything to make sure his tenure bid succeeded. There must be no chance that the Callaghans would leave Wilton, where every street, alley, basement, attic, and mind was known to the collective. An attack on the Callaghans was inevitable, and the collective’s plan to defend them had been constructed around their staying in the town.

Important work, certainly, but not all that they intended to do on this night. There was a reason this particular triad called themselves the Three Thieves… which was their imperfect ability to handle temptation. And Marcie was such very strong temptation.

PAULIE WARNER RAN INTO HIS parents’ room, shouting that the Keltons’ house was on fire. Harley Warner said to his wife, “My God, they might be trapped.”

Maggie went to the window. “Is that a fire? It’s very steady.”

“Somebody’s really screaming,” Amy said, coming in behind her brother.

“Let’s get over there,” Paulie said.

Harley was pulling on his jeans. “Not you kids.”

“Aw, Dad!”

“Paulie, not until I know what’s going on out there.” He did not want his children exposed to whatever might be happening over there, not given the agony he was hearing in those screams.