'You're alive,' Pershing said, amazed at the calmness of his own voice. Meanwhile, his brain churned with full-blown panic, reminding him he was talking to an apparition or an imposter.
'So it seems.' Terry was unchanged from youth — cleanshaven, red hair curling below his ears, and impressive mutton chop sideburns in the style that had been vogue during the '70s.
'It was you in the vents?' Then, as an afterthought, 'How could you terrorize my family?'
'I got bored waiting all week for you to come back. Don't be mad — none of them ever cared for you anyway. Who knows — perhaps we'll get a chance to visit each and every one; make them understand what a special person you are.' Terry grinned an unpleasant, puckered grin and dropped to the floor, limber as an eel. He dressed in a cassock the color of blackened rust.
'Holy crap. You look like you've come from a black mass.' He chuckled nervously, skating along the fine line of hysteria. There was something wrong with his friend's appearance — his fingers and wrists had too many joints and his neck was slightly overlong by a vertebra or two. This wasn't quite the Terry Walker he knew, and yet, to some degree it
'Surveying.'
'Surveying?' Pershing felt a new appreciation for the depths of meaning in that word, the inherent coldness. Surveying preceded the destruction of one order to make way for another, stronger, more adaptable order.
'What else would I do? A man's got to have a niche in the universe.'
'Who are you working for?'
'There's a migration in progress. A diaspora, if you will. It's been going on. well, when numbers grow to a certain proportion, they lose relevance. We creep like mold.' Terry's grin showed that the inside of his mouth was composed of blackened ridges, and indeed toothless. His tongue pulsed; a sundew expanding and contracting in its puddle of gore. 'Don't worry, though, Earthman. We come in peace.' He laughed and his timbre ascended to the sickly-sweet tones of a demented child. 'Besides, we're happy to live in the cracks; your sun is too bright for now. Maybe after it burns down a bit.»
The bathroom door creaked open and the woman in the black dress emerged. She said, 'Hullo there, love. I'm Gloria. A pleasure to meet you.' Her flesh glowed like milk in a glass, like the sugar bowl in his visions. To Terry, she said, 'He's older than I thought.'
'But younger than he appears.' Terry studied Pershing, his eyes inscrutable. 'City life hasn't softened you, has it, pal?' He nodded at the woman. 'I'm going to take him. It's my turn to choose.'
'Okay, dear.' The woman leaned her hip against the counter. She appeared exquisitely bored. 'At least there'll be screaming.'
'Isn't there always?'
Pershing said, 'Terry. I'm sorry. There was a massive search. I spent two weeks scouring the hills. Two hundred men and dogs. You should've seen it.' The secret wound opened in him and all the buried guilt and shame spilled forth. 'Man, I wanted to save you. It destroyed me.'
'You think I'm a ghost? That's depressingly provincial of you, friend.'
'I don't know what to think. Maybe I'm not even awake.' He was nearly in tears.
'Rest assured, you will soon make amazing discoveries,' Terry said. 'Your mind will shatter if we aren't careful. In any event, I haven't come to exact vengeance upon you for abandoning me in the mountains.'
The woman smirked. 'He'll wish you were here for that, won't he?'
'Damn you, you're not my friend,' Pershing said. 'And lady, you aren't Gloria, whoever she was — poor girl's probably on a milk carton. You wear faces so we will understand, so you can blend in, isn't that right? Who are you people, really?'
'Who
'Us?' Terry said. 'Why, we're kin. Older and wiser, of course. Our tastes are more refined. We prefer the dark, but you will too. I promise.' He moved to a shelf of Pershing's keepsakes — snapshots from the field, family photos in silver frames, and odd pieces of bric-a-brac — and picked up Ethel's rosary and rattled it. 'As I recall, you weren't a man of any particular faith. I don't blame you, really. The New Testament God is so nebulous, so much of the ether. You'll find my civilization's gods to be quite tangible. One of them, a minor deity, dwells in this very system in the caverns of an outer moon. Spiritual life is infinitely more satisfying when you can meet the great ones, touch them, and, if you're fortunate, be touched.»
Pershing decided to go through the woman and get a knife from the butcher block. He didn't relish the notion of punching a girl, but Terry was bigger than him, had played safety for his high school football team. He gathered himself to move —
Gloria said, 'Percy, want me to show you something? You should see what Terry saw. when you left him alone with us.' She bowed her neck and cupped her face. There came the cracking as of an eggshell; blood oozed through her fingers as she lifted the hemisphere of her face away from its bed. It made a viscid, sucking sound; the sound of bones scraping together through jelly. Something writhed in the hollow. While Pershing was transfixed in sublime horror, Terry slid over and patted his shoulder.
'She's got a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you better not watch the rest.' He smiled paternally and raised what appeared to be a bouquet of mushrooms, except these were crystalline and twinkled like Christmas lights.
Violet fire lashed Pershing.
…
In UFO abduction stories, hapless victims are usually paralyzed and then sucked up in a beam of bright light. Pershing was taken through a hole in the sub-basement foundation into darkness so thick and sticky it flowed across his skin. They
An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy coomb of an alien realm. Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball. He couldn't discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic, drooling joy.
His captors dug in his brain for memories and made him relive them. The one they enjoyed best was the day of Pershing's greatest anguish:
When Terry hadn't returned to their impromptu campsite after ten minutes, Pershing went looking for him. The rain slashed through the woods, accompanied by gusts that snapped the foliage, caused treetops to clash. He tramped around the spring and saw Terry's hat pinned and flapping in some bushes. Pershing began to panic. Night came early in the mountains, and if sundown found him alone and isolated. Now he was drenched as well. Hypothermia was a real danger.
He caught movement from the corner of his eye. A figure walked across a small clearing a few yards away and vanished into the underbrush. Pershing's heart thrilled and he shouted Terry's name, actually took several steps toward the clearing, then stopped. What if it wasn't his friend? The gait had seemed wrong. Cripes, what if, what if? What if someone truly was stalking them? Farfetched; the stuff of late-night fright movies. But the primeval ruled in this place. His senses were tuned to a much older frequency than he'd ever encountered. The ape in him, the lizard, hissed warnings until his hackles rose. He lifted a stone from the muck and hefted it, and moved forward.
He tracked a set of muddy footprints into a narrow ravine. Rock outcroppings and brush interlaced to give the ravine a roof. Toadstools and fungi grew in clusters among beds of moss and mold. Water dripped steadily and
