He went to her. She turned away from him. “Katelyn, they brought us together when we were children, for God’s sake!” He touched her shoulder. She pulled away. “I remember you, Katelyn, in a blue nightgown. I remember—oh, my God, they’ve been with us all our lives.”
She shook her head, waved her hand in front of her face.
At that moment, Conner burst in. “Can we take the DVD down?”
“Be my guest,” Dan said.
“Be careful with that, the Keltons’ll kill you if you mess it up.”
“We will,” Conner said as he raced off. Then he returned. “Plus, we need a flashlight.”
“A flashlight?”
“Check the snow, see if it’s stickin’!”
Dan got a flashlight out of his toolkit and gave it to him.
“Okay, listen,” Conner said to Paulie when he returned to his basement lair. “I’m reasonably sure that they’ve been in here. In this room.”
Paulie’s eyes opened wide. “They have?”
“What’s interesting is I have a screen memory—”
“Which is? Remind me.”
“Paulie, you’ve gotta quit. Right now.”
“Quit what?”
“I can hear the laughter in your voice. You’ve seen the video, you know this is real. So trying to laugh me out of court is wrong. And that Connerbusters thing, Paulie, it’s incredibly corny. It’s the sort of thing that happens in third grade, not middle school.”
“It’s just a joke, Conner. If you didn’t take it so seriously, nobody else would, either. You gotta be more mature about these things. Kids are assholes. You get a few more years on you, you’ll learn to roll with it.”
Conner said, “You want me to crack that game?”
“Jesus, yes. Can you?”
“You know I can. But you have to promise me, Paulie. We’ve been friends a long time. All of our lives. You stop dumping on me.”
“Is that why I’m here? To get begged? Because I’m not the one you need to beg. You need to beg every guy in the class, Conner, because they all think you’re a complete schmedlock. The schmedlock of the century.”
“Paulie, if you quit, they will quit, which you know very well.”
“You got guts, I’ll say that. You crack the game for me and the Connerbusters are on hold for a week. You vector in the grays, and I’m your puppy dog.” He pulled a Nikon digital camera out of his backpack. “Six megapixels. Detailed pictures should be worth a fortune. So, when do they show up?” He looked at his watch.
“The exact time will be three-thirty-three,” Conner said. He realized that he was setting himself up for something. The odds against him felt huge.
“Okay, then, let’s synchronize watches.”
“My watch—”
“Conner, everybody on planet Bell Attached knows that your Christmas watch automatically sets itself to the Naval Observatory time signal once every twelve hours. So let me rephrase that, let me synchronize my ordinary watch to your awesome one.”
“Paulie, you want this watch?” He started to take it off.
“Conner, you just do not get it. I don’t want your watch. If you’re gonna get people off your back, you need to stop bragging and showing off. Everybody knows you’re a genius. Half the school are geniuses. Maybe you’re our major genius, I don’t know, but kids don’t like having their faces rubbed in the kind of shit you dish out.”
“I’m not understanding you.”
“Like night before last. You actually tried to communicate with the aliens you thought were out there in English
“I hadn’t realized that.”
“Well, try K-Paxian next time. I’m sure you’re fluent in that, too. Now, little boy, if you’re gonna crack Gestapo, crack it and I’ll suck your toes.”
“Conner!” Katelyn called.
“Okay! Okay! In a while.”
“It’s after ten.”
“So, little boy, we gonna get tucked in by mommy?”
“No, we’re not at your house, little boy. Come on.” Conner went across the room and out under the deck. He was outside before he asked himself why he’d done this. He’d just suddenly felt like coming out.
Paulie joined him. “Wow, is it ever
As he ran back inside, Conner pointed the flashlight upward and flicked it on and off. As he’d learned, he varied the signal, three long, three short, two long, two short. The beam revealed a whirling maelstrom of snowflakes, dancing, racing before the wind. The air was sharp with smoke and the tang of ice. Off to the west, thunder rumbled. Conner went on signaling, even though it was nowhere near 3:33, even though it felt hopeless, even though Paulie was probably right and he’d dreamed up the whole thing.
“Lame-o, Connner! I mean, you really are trying. You believe this.”
“Shut up.”
Paulie brushed Conner’s head with his hand. “Ah, little boy’s getting all covered with snow, isn’t he?”
Conner stopped signaling. A light glowed around them just then. It didn’t last long, but it came from above. “Oh, Jesus,” Conner said. He started signaling again.
“It was lightning.”
“They’re here.” He looked up, letting the snow pummel his face. “You guys,” he whispered, “come on down.”
Suddenly and without a word, Paulie took off toward the house. Then, in the distance, Conner heard the Keltons’ dog Manrico set up a howl. He looked in the direction of the Keltons’ place… and saw, standing at the edge of the yard as if they’d just come up out of the woods, three kids. They had really big heads and their eyes were terrible in the reflected light from the house. “Paulie!” Conner whispered. But Paulie was standing under the deck, as still as death “Paulie…”
Then he saw that they had a lantern. He looked at it, glowing in the snow, the interior flickering orange.
“Mom,” he called, but it came out as a whisper. He fought to form the word. “M-o-o-mm.” It stayed in his throat.
They came across the snowy lawn, sort of floating just above the ground, floating and flickering.
Conner was terrified beyond anything he’d ever thought possible. It was freezing-cold fear, a fear so deep he had not known that it could exist.
Had he been insane? Why had he done this?
The thought crossed his mind that this was yet another joke, but then he heard them, a buzzing sound like huge flies, a sound that was really, really strange, that was not of this world. They remained out in the gushing, swirling snow.
The lantern wasn’t a lantern at all, it was a very black metal thing with glowing holes in it that sort of looked like eyes, and it seemed to Conner as if it was sort of alive, too. The three aliens came closer, moving swiftly and accurately now, no longer floating and flickering. They were like wolves in the snow, now, and they were clearly interested in him.
And then there was something on his shoulder, as light as if a bird had landed there. Almost too scared to move, he looked down. A hand was there, with fingers like long, thin snakes, and black claws.
EIGHTEEN
CONNER HAD TO RUN, HE had to get out of here, but then the world distorted, seeming almost to bend,
