The Grays

and the glowing thing was right in front of his face and he was staring into the orange light inside where there were millions of glowing threads. They were just threads of light, but he couldn’t look away from them, he had to keep staring.

One of the creatures pulled his shirt front up, and he felt something pushing against his chest and getting hotter and hotter and he couldn’t stop it and he had to because it was burning him.

The snow swirled and lightning flashed and there was a loud snap like a wire had come down and was spitting in the yard.

Suddenly Conner realized that he was alone. He was standing in the snow and he had to get back inside because somebody was out here who should not be, and he was in danger.

He’d seen black eyes and orange light, terrible light, but the rest of it was all confused. Had he met the aliens? He wasn’t sure. Or no, he was sure. He hadn’t. He’d pointed the light at the sky and everything, but they hadn’t shown up.

He opened the door. He walked past Paulie who, without a word, went into the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water. When he came out, he was transformed from a posturing preteen into the little boy he had been as recently as last summer. “I want to go home,” he said quietly. Then he ran upstairs.

Conner ran after him.

Paulie burst into the living room. “I want to go home,” he yelled.

“Paulie?” Katelyn asked.

Paulie looked toward Conner, his face soaked with tears. Conner went closer to him. “Hey, man?”

“Don’t let him near me!”

Katelyn got to her feet “What in the world did you do to him, Conner?”

Conner shook his head.

“Here, come here to me, Paulie, honey. I’ve dealt with a lot of scared guys in my time, honey.” Katelyn took him by the hand. “Now, we are going into the kitchen, fellas, and guess what we’re gonna do? We are going to make a big, old-fashioned pot of hot chocolate flavored with brandy. Would you like that?”

“We have brandy?” Dan asked.

“I’m not allowed to drink.”

“This is a very tiny bit, Paulie,” Katelyn said as she drew him toward the kitchen.

“Hey, guy,” Dan said to Conner.

“Yes, Dad?”

Dan patted the couch cushion. Conner sat down beside him. “Conner, did you—no. Better way to do this. What did that to him?”

“Dunno. He was okay, then he wasn’t.”

“Did you, perhaps, have a fight? It was awfully noisy down there at one point.”

“No. No fight.”

“No, that wouldn’t make him cry. What made him cry, Conner?”

“Homesick, maybe?”

“No.”

Conner’s chest hurt. He tried to sort of move his shirt away from it to not have anything touch it.

Dan saw, and lifted it. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, there is. Katelyn, could you come back, please?”

Conner heard a voice, Hello, Conner.

“Hi.”

Dan said, “Hi what?”

Be quiet!

He started to talk, but it was like somebody had grabbed his throat from the inside.

This is real, Conner.

A coldness raced in Conner’s veins. This was somebody that was inside him, somebody else alive, in him!

“Katelyn, something’s not right here.”

Don’t tell them, Conner.

She came in.

“Look at his chest.”

“Conner, what have you boys been doing?”

Paulie had followed her. She turned to him. “Paulie, you tell me. Have you boys been playing too rough?”

“No, Mrs. Callaghan.”

“Mom?”

“Son, you’re all skinned up! You look like you’ve been sandpapered, so I want to know what you were doing.”

Conner had no way to respond. He wasn’t sure why he was hearing this voice, only that it was not being heard by anybody else.

That’s right, Conner.

Mom and Paulie returned to the kitchen, followed by Dan. Conner hesitated a moment, then hurried after them. He was trying not to be scared, because this was the real thing, this was contact. But he was not just somewhat scared, he was so scared that he was actually dizzy.

He knew what had been done to him: they had put a communications device in his chest.

Right again.

The kitchen was filling with the smell of cocoa and it seemed so wonderfully comfortable it almost made him burst into tears. He ran over and threw his arms around his mother’s waist and tried not to let Paulie hear him crying.

“What is the matter with these boys?” Katelyn asked.

“I think it’s called nervous energy. Running on fumes. When’s your bedtime, Paulie?”

“Whenever.”

“I repeat the question, Paul Warner. When is your bedtime?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“It’s already ten forty-five,” Dan said. “You must be tuckered out.”

“Conner’s an eleven o’clock guy,” Katelyn said. “But you’re tired, too, right?”

“I’m tired.”

Paulie nodded into the mug of hot chocolate that Katelyn had just poured him.

They drank their cocoa in silence, and the voice did not recur. Conner began to hope that it had been an auditory hallucination, because if contact was going to mean you had a voice inside you, that was going to take a whole lot of getting used to.

He’d read most of his father’s abnormal-psych texts, so he hoped it wasn’t an early symptom of schizophrenia, the curse of the excessively intelligent. Even though that might actually be better than having an alien communications device buried in his damn chest.

He and Paulie did not argue about going to bed upstairs. There was no way that either of them were going anywhere near that basement again tonight. In fact, Conner considered proposing to Dan that they brick the thing up tomorrow and just forget about it.

After they were both in pajamas and had their teeth brushed, Paulie said, “I’m sorry about not believing you.”

“About what?”

He put his arms on Conner’s shoulders and pushed his lips close to his ear. “The aliens! I saw them. I saw the whole thing!”

“Forget it, Paulie.”

“Forget it? Are you nuts! I saw aliens in your yard, man, three of them!”

“We don’t know what we saw.”

“Hello? You were the big believer. You were the guy who was vectoring them in.”