Under the Dome

waiting to go to sleep.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabby hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it. She didn’t understand what it meant, but she could read the words: SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

“See?” Judy wasn’t crying, but her eyes were wide and solemn, full of some knowledge too complex and too dark to be expressed. “Halloween already.”

Janelle took her sister’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “No it’s not,” she said… but she was afraid it was. Something bad was going to happen, something with a fire in it. No treats, only tricks. Mean tricks. Bad tricks.

“Let’s go inside,” she told Judy and Deanna. “We’ll sing songs and stuff. That’ll be nice.”

It usually was, but not that day. Even before the big bang in the sky, it wasn’t nice. Janelle kept thinking about the dummy with the white-cross eyes. And the somehow awful shirt: PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

17

Four years before the Dome dropped down, Linda Everett’s grandfather had died and left each of his grandchildren a small but tidy sum of money. Linda’s check had come to $17,232.04. Most of it went into the Js’ college fund, but she had felt more than justified in spending a few hundred on Rusty. His birthday was coming up, and he’d wanted an Apple TV gadget since they’d come on the market some years earlier.

She had bought him more expensive presents during the course of their marriage, but never one which pleased him more. The idea that he could download movies from the Net, then watch them on TV instead of being chained to the smaller screen of his computer, tickled him to death. The gadget was a white plastic square, about seven inches on a side and three-quarters of an inch thick. The object Rusty found on Black Ridge looked so much like his Apple TV addon that he at first thought it actually was one… only modified, of course, so it could hold an entire town prisoner as well as broadcast The Little Mermaid to your television via Wi-Fi and in HD.

The thing on the edge of the McCoy Orchard was dark gray instead of white, and rather than the familar apple logo stamped on top of it, Rusty observed this somehow troubling symbol:

Above the symbol was a hooded excrescence about the size of the knuckle on his little finger. Inside the hood was a lens made of either glass or crystal. It was from this that the spaced purple flashes were coming.

Rusty bent and touched the surface of the generator—if it was a generator. A strong shock immediately surged up his arm and through his body. He tried to pull back and couldn’t. His muscles were locked up tight. The Geiger counter gave a single bray, then fell silent. Rusty had no idea whether or not the needle swung into the danger zone, because he couldn’t move his eyes, either. The light was leaving the world, funneling out of it like water going down a bathtub drain, and he thought with sudden calm clarity: I’m going to die. What a stupid way to g—

Then, in that darkness, faces arose—only they weren’t human faces, and later he would not be sure they were faces at all. They were geometric solids that seemed to be padded in leather. The only parts of them that looked even vaguely human were diamond shapes on the sides. They could have been ears. The heads—if they were heads—turned to each other, either in discussion or something that could have been mistaken for it. He thought he heard laughter. He thought he sensed excitement. He pictured children in the play- yard at East Street Grammar—his girls, perhaps, and their friend Deanna Carver—exchanging snacks and secrets at recess.

All of this happened in a space of seconds, surely no more than four or five. Then it was gone. The shock dissipated as suddenly and completely as it did when people first touched the surface of the Dome; as quickly as his lightheadedness and the accompanying vision of the dummy in the crooked tophat. He was just kneeling at the top of the ridge overlooking the town, and sweltering in his leaden accessories.

Yet the image of those leatherheads remained. Leaning together and laughing in obscenely childish conspiracy.

The others are down there watching me. Wave. Show them you’re all right.

He raised both hands over his head—now they moved smoothly—and waved them slowly back and forth, just as if his heart were not pounding like a jackrabbit in his chest, as if sweat weren’t running down his chest in sharply aromatic rivulets.

Below, on the road, Rommie and the kids waved back.

Rusty took several deep breaths to calm himself, then held the Geiger counter’s sensor tube out to the flat gray square, which sat on a spongy mat of grass. The needle wavered just below the +5 mark. A background count, no more.

Rusty had little doubt that this flat square object was the source of their troubles. Creatures—not human beings, creatures—were using it to keep them prisoner, but that wasn’t all. They were also using it to observe.

And having fun. The bastards were laughing. He had heard them.

Rusty stripped off the apron, draped it over the box with its slightly protruding lens, got up, backed away. For a moment nothing happened. Then the apron caught fire. The smell was pungent and nasty. He watched the shiny surface blister and bubble, watched the flames erupt. Then the apron, which was essentially no more than a plastic-coated sheet of lead, simply fell apart. For a moment there were burning pieces, the biggest one still lying on top of the box. A moment later, the apron—or what remained of it—disinte-grated. A few swirling bits of ash remained—and the smell—but otherwise… poof. Gone.

Did I see that? Rusty asked himself, then said it aloud, asking the world. He could smell roasted plastic and a heavier smell that he supposed was smelted lead—insane, impossible—but the apron was gone nonetheless.

“Did I actually see that?”

As if in answer, the purple light flashed out of the hooded knuckle on top of the box. Were those pulses renewing the Dome, the way the touch of a finger on a computer keyboard could refresh the screen? Were they allowing the leatherheads to watch the town? Both? Neither?

He told himself not to approach the flat square again. He told himself the smartest thing he could do would be to run back to the van (without the weight of the apron, he could run) and then drive like hell, slowing only to pick up his companions waiting below.

Instead he approached the box again and dropped to his knees before it, a posture too much like worship for his liking.

He stripped off one of the gloves, touched the ground beside the thing, then snatched his hand back. Hot. Bits of burning apron had scorched some of the grass. Next he reached for the box itself, steeling himself for another burn or another shock… although neither was what he was most afraid of; he was afraid of seeing those leather shapes again, those not-quite-heads bent together in some laughing conspiracy.

But there was nothing. No visions and no heat. The gray box was cool to the touch, even though he’d seen the lead apron on top of it bubbling up and then actually catching fire.

The purple light flashed out. Rusty was careful not to put his hand in front of it. Instead, he gripped the thing’s sides, mentally saying goodbye to his wife and girls, telling them he was sorry for being such a damn fool. He waited to catch fire and burn. When he didn’t, he tried to lift the box. Although it had the surface area of a dinner plate and wasn’t much thicker, he couldn’t budge it. The box might as well have been welded to the top of a pillar planted in ninety feet of New England bedrock—except it wasn’t. It was sitting on top of a grassy mat, and when he wriggled his fingers deeper beneath, they touched. He laced them together and tried again to lift the thing. No shock, no visions, no heat; no movement, either. Not so much as a wiggle.

He thought: My hands are gripping some sort of alien artifact. A machine from another world. I may have even caught a glimpse of its operators.

The idea was intellectually amazing—flabbergasting, even—but it had no emotional gradient, perhaps