The Grays

“Conner has a train set,” Dan explained to the two wondering faces. “He often builds staged railroad accidents.”

“I guess Catholics wouldn’t approve, somehow,” he said. “We don’t actually go to church—or, oops, perhaps—”

“We know that, Conner.”

Conner took a step back. He had noticed a sense of winter that clung to them both. They were not pleasant people to be around. But all suspicions immediately dropped away when the colonel said, “We’d love to see the train wreck.”

“Great! I’ve been working very hard.”

“Conner, did you do my homework?” Chris asked as the adults followed him down into his basement room.

“Absolutment,” he said. “I’ve got a new way of integrating the calculus, boy- o.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have no idea! Look at it and see if it flies.” He crossed his room, picked up a badly tattered notebook, and thrust it into Chris’s hands. “And now, may I present, the Wreck of Old Ninety-seven.” He looked up at Lauren. “It’s a metaphor,” he said, “of my day.”

“Conner, this is beautiful,” she said, looking over the train board. “Oh my God, Rob, look at this. Look at the detail!”

“Glad you like it,” Conner said. There was something in his voice that Katelyn knew well. These two were going to get a surprise.

OUTSIDE, MIKE WILKES HAD BEEN forced to return to his car, which was hidden about a quarter of a mile away. The snow was getting more persistent, and he couldn’t risk it becoming immobilized. He had processed a few of the kids in the town, but he needed the night to finish his work. He wished the damn Keltons would go to sleep. He pulled the car out into the road and drove it for a distance in the giving snow, getting it onto the crown of the road. There would be no plow through here tonight. He decided that he had about an hour. After that, he was going to be forced to abandon this part of the plan.

Not good, possibly even fatal.

WHILE THE COLLECTIVE WORRIED ABOUT the president, the Three Thieves worried about the fact that Wilkes was still close to Conner.

Adam was with them as well, preparing himself for what would happen tonight.

He detected a familiar voice. Lauren was nearby. He shifted his interest away from Wilkes. The collective wanted to let him make his mistake, and that seemed a good idea. But Adam needed Lauren away from here, too, and soon. What was to be done required absolute privacy.

He sailed across the snowy fields and into the yard behind the Callaghans’ house. There he built a vivid picture of Lauren’s car being covered with snow. He sent this like a drift of smoke into her mind.

AS THE TRAIN MOVED AROUND the tracks, Conner made sound effects, screeching and huffing. Then he touched an edge of track, which sprung open.

“It broke,” Lauren shouted.

The next instant, the wonderful black-and-brass steam engine, spewing smoke, struck the sprung track and bounded off into the superbly modeled little town. It churned down the main street crashing into stores, snapping light poles, and sending figures flying.

“Wow,” Rob said into the silence that followed this remarkably realistic effect.

“Why did you do this?” Lauren asked the boy.

“So I can build it all up again a new way. Hey. I just got this flash. Are you people gonna want to get back to town tonight?”

“Well, yes, we live in town.”

“Then I see in my mind’s eye your car getting slowly buried. Or, actually, quickly.”

THOUGHTS HAD TO BE PUSHED into Lauren’s mind, but the child just sucked them up. Adam regarded him, a smiling, strutting little thing, the aura around his body vastly more complex and colorful than those around the others.

Adam prepared to die.

TWENTY-FOUR

CONNER WOKE UP—AND REALIZED instantly that he was not in bed. He could hear wind and he seemed to be standing.

He opened his eyes. White flying dots. Cold. A leathery thing beside him. This was all impossible, so he closed them again. He opened them for just a second, saw darkness and millions of white dots, and closed them again, tight.

He surveyed his situation. The strange church people had left, he’d gone to bed in his upstairs room. Mom had come in and stared at him and gone all eerie. She’d cried for no apparent reason and Dan had come and they’d hugged each other, then gone across the hall to their room. Sometime after that, he’d fallen asleep.

Without opening his eyes again, he tried to decide what was happening to him now.

Then he knew: he was going down the street in the snow, but he wasn’t walking, he was sort of… flying.

Which couldn’t be real, therefore he was asleep.

Again, he opened his eyes. He could see the house, which was drifting back behind him. This looked like a dream and felt like a dream, but it sounded and smelled like the real world.

Perplexing, in other words—not a dream, yet not possible.

For a second he thought he heard the living room clock chiming, but it was the wind clattering pine branches in Lost Land, which was what he had named the big woods across the street.

The woods were drifting closer, home farther away. There were three big leathery heads bobbing along around him.

He gasped, started to scream, then forced himself back under control. He had to stay calm, this was contact, it had to be handled with all the skill and intelligence he possessed. You’re up to this, he told himself.

But he was being taken.

Okay, this was bad, he was being kidnapped by these guys, no question, no way to get around it. Is kidnapping ever good? If you’re going to be straight, why not just ring the doorbell?

He realized that he was hearing something odd in his left ear, a sort of deep whine, if such a sound could exist. He reached up and touched an earbud. Then he saw that one of the big-headed creatures had an MP3 player. There was no music coming out, though, just this odd noise.

He ripped the earbud out and immediately fell down in a big puff of snow. For a second he lay trying to understand just how this worked. It was sound, sound that had caused him to defy gravity. Okay, there had to be some kind of harmonic—or, no, was he crazy, he’d figure the damn thing out later!

The creatures swirled around with their mouths open and their hands on their cheeks. They were not menacing looking. In fact, far from it. They looked scared, too. Then one of them thrust the earbud at him—not toward his ear but toward his hand.

He looked down at it. They hovered and wobbled their heads.

Please, came a sort of nice-sounding voice, the same one he’d heard in his head during the encounter with Paulie.

No, it wasn’t on, not out in the woods with no explanation. He ran back toward the house as fast as he could go.