white things were lifted away from him. He raised his head, looking down at himself. What he saw was so bizarrely unexpected that he just stared. He saw what looked like a wet hamster curled up in the center of his chest, shivering furiously. It lay in a pool of ooze. On either side of it, things like big rubber bladders were expanding and contracting, and hissing as they did so.
Freezing cold and deadly weak, he fell back, his head hitting the hard iron of the bedstead upon which he had been laid.
Then stars came, millions of tiny stars all gold and green and speeding like sparks on a windy night. They surrounded the children, swirling around their bodies. They moved with the grace of a vast school of fish, swarming through the body of one child and then into the air, then through the body of the other. Again it happened, and again, and each time the stars invaded the profound nakedness of their open bodies, the veins and organs glowed. Light poured from their screaming mouths, blasted out of their ears and eyes.
The children struggled but could not rise, screamed but were ignored. The torture, terrible, somehow beautiful, went on.
HALFWAY ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN Colorado, a young officer picked up a phone and called Washington. “Sir, we have a glowboy hovering over Madison, Wisconsin.”
“How long?” came the tired voice of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Wilkes.
“Twenty-two minutes, sir. Shows no sign of moving.”
Wilkes glanced at his watch. Pushing four in the morning. “You were right to inform me, uh—”
“Lieutenant Langford, sir.”
“Yes. Thank you.” He put down the phone. The spruce-sounding young lieutenant would order a jet up if the glowboy stayed very much longer. Couldn’t have one of the damned things lingering over a major metro area after sunrise. Mike wondered what deviltry it was up to, sighed at his own helplessness, then tossed a pill out of a bottle, knocked it back with a glass of water he kept at his bedside, and hit the sack again.
He might request Eamon Glass to ask Bob about the stationary glowboy, but probably not. Bob was one of the two living grays they had acquired during an extraordinary incident in the New Mexico desert when one of the grays’ craft had crashed after it had moved into the range of powerful new radars being tested at White Sands. They had not expected these radars to be there, and their ship’s ability to stay aloft had been affected.
The Air Force had raced to the site of the crash and recovered two grays alive, one dead. Three were a triad, the equivalent of a single human being. Without their third partner to complete their decision-making process, the two that remained alive had been relatively helpless, and the capture had been a brilliant success… unless, of course, it was, instead, an even more brilliant deception on the part of the grays.
You communicated with Bob and Adam via thought—or rather, Eamon, who was the only person they’d ever found who could manage it, communicated with them.
Somehow, the man used his mind to exchange pictures with them. It was a very strange business, and nobody was sure if it was even really working, but it was all they had, and some of the technological information Eamon had gotten from the creatures was making valuable scientific sense, so there had to be something in it.
But they could not find out what the grays
He groaned, turned over, waited miserably for the pill to work.
IN THE SILVER VEHICLE, THE children struggled, twisting and turning in their captivity. Dan saw something white. He looked at it, trying to resolve its meaning in the haze that still obscured his vision. It was very dark, but he could still see this thing. It dangled as if it was hanging on a clothesline, and he thought it might be a big sheet, wet, because it was dripping, the drops pinging on metal somewhere below.
It was a very strange sort of a sheet, though, because it had a kind of face, a mouth gaping like that of a big lake bass, with two distorted black sockets above it. Were they eye sockets? He thought they must be, because there was also a darkness above them that looked like it might be hair. Then he saw a curliness to it, and a lightness and he knew that it was blond hair—and he had seen blond hair on Katelyn when she lit the match.
He tried to say her name, but there was only a gusty whisper. He wanted his mother, he wanted his dad, he wanted Uncle Frank, who was damn tough, to come up here and
Drip, drip, drip.
Then he saw that there was another one, and it had short brown hair and its face was all wobbled like a mirror in the Crazy House at Madison Playland.
When he stared at it, though, he knew: it was his skin. But if it was up there and he was down here, then —
His stomach churned, his heart began raging in his chest, and his throat became so dry it felt as if it had been stuffed with ashes. He wanted to scream, he wanted to beg God for help, but he couldn’t make a sound.
Off in the dark, a buzzing sound started. The things in the dark were coming. He looked, but he knew he would not see them, he never had.
Then his skin flew up and out, and spread like a huge cloud above him, a cloud with a gaping mouth and holes for eyes, and it came down on him as gently as dew falls when you are camping under the stars, and enclosed him in the deepest warmth he had ever felt in his life.
He uttered a long, delicious groan of raw human pleasure and profound relief. Beside him, Katelyn groaned, too, and he knew that she had, as well, been covered once again in her own skin.
Instantly, without them going out through a door or anything, the silver ship was rushing away overhead, turning into a dot. Wind screamed around them, their hair blew, and Dan thought they’d been pushed out and were going to die in the lake.
Below, Mr. Ehmers saw beams of light playing out of the summer clouds. “What the hell,” he said. Then Frank said, “Ho, got a strike goin’ here.” They brought up another bass.
DAN WOKE UP SCREAMING. HE was upside down and the covers were all over the room. He got out of bed, immediately felt incredibly thirsty, and went into the bathroom and drank and drank. His mother heard him and came in behind him. “You okay, Dan?”
Then he cried, clutching her with all his might, burying his face in her nightgown that smelled of cigarettes and gin.
“Hey, hey there—”
“Mom, I had a dream. It was real bad, Mom.”
She went into his room with him and sat at his bedside.
“It was these Indians, they got us, and they skinned us alive.”
“Skinned who alive?”
“Me! Me and—her. I don’t know. Me and this girl.”
A cool hand touched his forehead. “You dreamed you were naked with a girl, and that’s a little scary, isn’t it?”
“The stars,” he said, “the stars…” But what about the stars he could not recall. He closed his eyes, and his mother’s hand on his brow comforted him, but deep inside him, down where screams begin, there was a part of him that remembered every terrible moment, and would never forget.
His mother, drunk though she was, sad though she was, sat a while longer with her child, then went back down to the kitchen and resumed her mechanical and relentless assault on a bottle of cheap gin.
Katelyn found herself on the floor naked and covered with sweat. Not understanding how she had gotten there, she scrambled to her feet—and found that she was afraid to look in the mirror—terribly, agonizingly afraid. She stood, her head bowed, holding onto the sink and crying bitter, bitter tears.
Her mind could not seem to make sense of what had just happened. Why was she naked? What was she doing on the floor? Who was that boy, and why did she remember a boy at all?
She returned to her room, found her nightgown, and put it on. She went to her window seat and sat down, and watched the moon ride low over the lake, and smelled honeysuckle on the air.
Then she was sick, and ran into the bathroom and threw up. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and finally saw in the mirror her own haggard face. As if she was seeing a miracle, she touched the glass. Tears beaded
