MATT MERRICK SHORT STORY
LIGHTS IN THE ORCHARD
Matt Merrick arrived at his uncle’s farm around sunset.
The old man was giving him “the look” with that cocky smile of his and his familiar, a black and tan bloodhound named Emmett that had been his closest friend since he was a boy, was giving him one of those half-curious, half-surly looks that he usually did. They were both in their usual spots on the patio, with Sal Merrick sitting on his old, blue chair, and Emmett lying across on the long, red cushioned kiddie chair that functioned as a dog bed.
“So, somebody believes in reincarnation now, eh?” Sal told him with a smile.
“Fucking Eliza!” Matt said bitterly as he walked under the two tall oak trees that functioned as an entryway toward the house. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her!”
“Eliza is a good girl,” said Sal. “She didn’t tell me, though. She told Henry Fuller.”
That actually didn’t surprise Matt. For reasons he found unfathomable, most of the black girls in town, including Christine Taylor, whom he still found impossible to think of as a Merrick after her marriage to his cousin Owen, genuinely liked and or had a crush on Henry Fuller. It was something more than physical beauty and wealth, which he had some of the first and a lot of the last.
Whatever it was, Matt didn’t see it.
He ascended the stairs up to the patio of the Merrick House, a lovely, white painted house that had been originally built in the late 1800s to house the first Merricks in Bartlett Bay back when they were first employed by the Fullers to work on their farms. In those days, the Fullers made their wealth primarily from agriculture.
Over the years, it had grown extra floors, new rooms and other things, all built to accommodate new and more interesting members of the family who had a Merrick trademark of trying to alter the world to fit their eccentricities. It included an indoor garden, a martial arts dojo made by Sal’s father in the 1970s during his “Bruce Lee phase,” and a private sound studio for Sal’s daughter Alice, who was attempting, and had succeeded, in becoming a singer. It was very well maintained and quite beautiful but also looked incredibly odd to anyone who understood architecture even a little.
There was a buzz at his side and Matt raised his Galaxy S II phone to see that his mother had sent him another angry message. “You get right back home, right now, Mister!” She always capitalized the “m” in “mister” when she was angry.
He sucked air through his teeth in irritation and sat down next to his uncle in the guest chair.
His aunt by marriage, Sal’s wife, Macy, came out with a couple of glasses of lemonade that she had made and offered him one. She was a short, slightly overweight, but still quite attractive older black woman who spent far too much time on her lovely, afro hair, which hung down around her head to her shoulders like a movie star. She was wearing a lovely yellow dress and came with a pleasant smile and disposition, as always.
“Thank you, Macy,” Matt told her when she handed him a lemonade. Then she put her hands on her hips and gave him a stern look. “Okay, what did I do now?” he asked.
“Talk to your mother,” she said.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing but enter that terrible forest that you swore to your mother on your soul that you would never do.”
“I went in because Darcy Hamilton needed me,” he lied. Actually, she simply mentioned it and he readily offered to go because of a combination of being incredibly bored and desperately wanting an excuse to see what the big deal was but he wasn’t about to say that because it would instantly get back to his mother. “Darcy’s friend Becky needed backup and Bartlett’s—” he shrugged “—Bartlett.”
“Don’t make that one angry,” she told him sternly. “He’s employing half my brother’s family and all of his annoying, unemployed, drunk friends.” Marcy’s father had been a foreman in the fisheries when Julian Bartlett closed them down. Her whole family, and all the families they had been close to, had generations of workers connected in some way or another to the Bartlett Bay fishing industry, and over the years, it had been very difficult for them to find steady work. Her brother and his sons were easily slipping into the jobs their predecessors had left behind in a rare moment of all being employed at the same time.
“It’s fine. We’re friends.” Matt’s eyes narrowed. “And my mother learned of that, how exactly?”
“Eliza told Henry Fuller and Henry Fuller is not smart about keeping secrets. He got so excited that he told his sister.”
“Oh God, I should have known!” he said bitterly. One of Henry’s sisters was the mayor and she could be trusted but it was the other one, the youngest, named Marie, that Henry was closest to who also happened to be a close friend of his mother’s and had the very annoying habit of gossiping about everything she heard.
“Yes,” Macy told him with a wide smile. “She told your mother and your mother told me to tell you that she is going to ‘beat you like an infant with a paddle’ if you don’t have a good explanation of why you broke your word.”
“Yikes,” said Sal.
“Personally, I don’t know how she can stand it, being as high-strung as she is,” she told them and then turned to her husband. “Your brother has the Merrick Death Wish bad. Every weekend she calls me, terrified he’s going to die somehow when he’s gone off on one of his crazed shenanigans to some God-forsaken wilderness.”
“I’m not going to deny it,” Sal replied. “Carl was always a bit crazy. Not as crazy as Gerald but still.”
“Nobody is as crazy as Uncle Jerry,” said Matt.
“I had my suspicions about Carl for years,” Marcy told them as though deep in thought, “But I think I wasn’t entirely certain he was insane until he took his sons, sixteen, fifteen and fourteen-year-old boys, out on a hunting trip after the Australian bunyip?”
“You still on that?” Sal asked with a smile and he pulled her onto her lap.
She squeaked happily, hit him playfully and then kissed him deeply and got up. “Yes,” she replied happily. “Yes, I am.” She then walked back into the house.
“Alright,” said Sal as he turned to Matt. “I’m dying to know.”
“Me too,” said Emmett as he leaned his head over the side of his chair. “Talk.”
“About what?”
“You are a very private person when it comes to feelings,” said Sal. “You blurting out emotional things to Eliza of all of a sudden is not in character with you at all.”
Matt drank some of his lemonade, placed it on the table between his and his uncle’s chair, and turned to him. “I had to talk to someone—” he shrugged “—who was black.”
“Why?” he asked with a deeply interested look on his face.
“Oh, this is going to be good,” said Emmett and he began wagging his tail.
“Bartlett has it too but he was white in all three lives,” Matt told Sal. “The other two were white in both of theirs. The short answer is that I am the reincarnation of John Merrick.”
“Our ancestor?” His face turned instantly dubious.
“I’m glad you don’t believe me,” said Matt earnestly. “It makes me very happy that you don’t.”
“That’s basically what Henry said. He was talking to Eliza about having dreams about his past life, the story where he had that murdered daughter, the poor girl who died in the old Gurney house, and she mentioned the doorway you spoke of. You told her where you entered, right?”
“It was near the river. I think I mentioned it in passing.” His eyes narrowed. “Why exactly?”
“Well,” he said, “He followed the same path you did.”
“Him?” Matt cried in shock. “The man is a tax lawyer and not the kind that does athletics on the side! That forest will eat him alive!”
“Yeah,” agreed Sal. “That gossipy white woman, Lucy, who is part of Macy’s disgruntled wife club, was out jogging and saw him creeping into it.” The “disgruntled wife club” was Sal’s way of describing the Bay City Ladies’ Organization, who had power over what could and could not be done in Bartlett Bay as far as shows, festivals, holidays and the like.
“Goddamn it!” Matt snarled. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” He started to get up.
“He got out,” Sal told him and Matt sighed with relief and sat back down. “Yeah, he was seen the next day around sunset, wandering around in the same clothes, looking disheveled and thoroughly disturbed.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“He’s not an outdoorsy person,” said Matt. “I bet he was wandering into that forest without any weapons, food or water and wearing slacks and loafers and maybe a blazer.”
“That would not surprise me,” Sal told him. “He’s got none of the Merrick blood in him. Not like our mayor, always riding horses and looking for mischief. She’s got moxie, that one. You know, she once kneed Gerald in the crotch for getting fresh with her and he’s been deeply in love with her ever since.” Sal smiled slyly. “You seem to care an awful lot about this Fuller.”
“I’d never get laid again in this town again if something I ever said or did got Henry Fuller killed.”
Sal and Emmett both burst out laughing.
“Anyway,” Sal told him, “What I called you for is because I am dying to know exactly what you told Eliza. She told Henry, because she has a crush on him and thought it would help him, but she wouldn’t tell me. All I got was what Macy got from Marie which wasn’t a lot.”
“It’s—” he hunted for a word “—bizarre.”
“I didn’t ask you here because I thought it would be boring and normal,” he replied and then looked serious. “Why didn’t you come to me? You know I can keep a secret.”
“Might have but Eliza sensed it on me and nagged me mercilessly until I caved in.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“No,” Matt agreed.
He looked up at the tree branches of the oaks around the house, noting the darkening sky between the branches, and thought about his time in the Engelstad. It had seemed so normal out there.
“The woods do stretch out the way they say,” he said. “There are hills and mountains, things like that, but everything was otherwise seemingly normal. I wasn’t particularly worried, we were all armed and I’ve been in every dangerous landscape on Earth, but then we came upon a trail beside some terrifying trees we found this door.
“It was open. I can’t explain what I saw inside but—
* * *
“—when I woke up, everyone was dazed. Only Darcy was fine because, apparently, she had already gone through her whole past life. Becky was tripping balls about being a pirate back in the golden age of piracy and Bartlett had just had a conversation with someone he called Cardinal Wolsey.”
Marcy had just come out when he said that. “When did you get into English history?” she asked as she handed a large chewable bone to Emmett, who thanked her and started to eat it.
“Thank you, Macy,” said Emmett and she petted his head.
“How did you know that?” asked Matt.
“Because I’m educated, Matthew,” she replied. “Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was King Henry VIII’s, uh—” she thought about it “—advisor, I think. Prime Minister, maybe? The second most powerful man in England for decades. Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, you know, the famous queen who was beheaded, was his enemy and caused his downfall.”
“He mentioned that,” Matt replied uncomfortably. He had been trying to think of the whole experience as a vision, brought up by a magical spell that perhaps read his DNA, like in that game Assassin’s Creed, so as to create an imitation of his ancestor’s memory. In that memory, he would not have been John Merrick, but merely experiencing John Merrick’s memories.
The problem was that the more he thought about it, the more that theory didn’t seem to work. There wasn’t any sense of jarring abnormality that would come from feeling thoughts or doing things that were somebody else’s. Everything John did, felt that he had done, as though he was remembering moments from his childhood he had forgotten.
It was full dark by then and the lights on the porch turned on all around them.
When Marcy left, Sal said, “It’s messing with your head, isn’t it?”
“The past wasn’t the way I thought it was,” he said. “It was terrible but it wasn’t the same terrible that I had been led to believe.” How to explain it? Saying “slavery wasn’t that bad” felt so horribly wrong that he wanted to punch himself in the face for even thinking it but it wasn’t exactly a lie. “It was terrible,” he told him, “But when you hear about it, now, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what we imagined it to be, or at least, it wasn’t specifically on us.
“I saw whites getting beaten all the time. It saw one man, a white man, who had been accused of trying to burn down a church had his ear nailed to one of those stockade things by an angry priest. Like, if you only hear about slaves getting hurt, you think we’re the only ones, and you feel super bad and enraged at all the slavers, but the slavery was the only unique part to us. The violence was everywhere.”
“It was a violent time,” Sal told him. “History tends to be written by the winners and they always have a tendency to exaggerate their own nobility and accomplishments. Some must have been the kind of hypocrites I used to deal with back in the sixties, who got off making everyone else’s problems their crusade. When the Civil War ended, they probably wrote stories about how horrible the South was and how they were these perfect heroes with no flaws who never did any cruelties of their own, and now you’re seeing how they were exaggerating that for their own purposes.”
“I forgot how pessimistic you are,” Matt told him.
“Yeah,” he agreed with a smile.
“Yeah,” echoed Emmett with a lazy, dog smile that matched his master’s, staring at him, utterly intrigued. He had not moved more than a few inches for the entire conversation and looked utterly content.
But then he suddenly jerked up, his eyes staring off into the distance northwest of the house, almost like he was pointing.
“They’re here,” said Sal softly. “Don’t move.”
He quickly ran inside and came back out with his shotgun, a bandolier of shells over his shoulder and what appeared to be a few hats made of tinfoil. He leaned his gun against the wall, placed a special hat down onto Emmett, carefully pulling his floppy ears through it, one on himself, and then one on Matt.
“You’re joking,” Matt said incredulously as Sal grabbed his shotgun again. He knew Sal did that; everyone in town knew that, but it seemed far more bafflingly stupid when he was doing it in person.
“You never believe in anything,” said Sal. “That’s why that reincarnation kicked your ass hard instead of making you happy like it did that Rebecca girl.”
“Happy?” Matt replied incredulously. “I was a fucking slave, old man!”
Marcy came out wearing a lovely, yellow hat that matched her yellow dress on her head. She looked over at Emmett, who rushed across the patio and leaned around the side to look north beyond the side of the house.
She sucked in an intake of air and then slipped back into the house.
“How come she doesn’t have to wear one of these?” asked Sal.
“She is,” Sal told him quietly. “She’s too embarrassed to wear one of these tinfoil ones, so I lined the inside of that nicer hat with tinfoil. I always buy her two hats so I can line one with tinfoil.” He gave him a wink. “She knows but she pretends she doesn’t.”
“Oh-kay.” He said it almost like a question.
Sal smiled and checked his Remington 870 Shotgun which he had owned since he was a young man and had well-maintained over the years. He pointed it vertically upward and inserted five shells from his bandolier quickly and expertly.
“This feels right,” Sal told him. “A special moment of growth that my father gave to me, your father and Gerald, and I gave to my sons.”
“Crazy Uncle Jerry hunted aliens?”
“Oh, all the time,” he replied. “Right up until he got bored.” He gestured to Matt’s car. “Now get yourself a rifle. Don’t pretend you don’t have one.”
Matt was intrigued. He had never been on an alien hunt before and was half-convinced they were delusions brought about by moonshine and lies. Only half because he had seen the heads on walls and knew they had to come from somewhere. He just wasn’t entirely bought on the idea that the “somewhere” was “outer space.”
“And do not take that off!” snarled Sal as Matt reached up. “This fucks with their psychic radar! Take that off and they sense you instantly!”
Matt groaned and was grateful that none of his friends were around to see him wearing that stupid thing. He went over to his white 1994 Pontiac Firebird, his father’s old car that the two of them fixed up together when he was sixteen, opened the trunk and assembled his semi-automatic Remington 700 with military expertise. He then put on his belt with his extra magazines, inserted a 10-round mag into his rifle, shut the trunk and walked back.
Sal grinned at him as he approached and quickly led him across the property, moving to a nearby barn directly north of the house where they kept the cows and Macy’s horse, Emmett silently leading the way. Northeast of that barn was Matt’s grandfather’s personal airstrip. He had been a Tuskegee airman in World War II and kept the love of flying to his dying day, transferring that love to his eldest son, Martin, who followed after him and became a pilot during Vietnam. He was presently a commercial pilot, steadfastly refusing to retire or take any kind of lesser desk job, wholly convinced he would die in a week without something meaningful to do.
The whole property was above the freeway, the Merrick House built north of the Fuller’s estate, which was still owned by them and looked kind of like a fancy European manor house. Surrounding it on all sides and mostly westward, all the way to Worthington St, which acted as the official line that separated Merrick’s land from the Gurneys, were the crops. The asparagus and the fava beans had just been harvested and Sal was readying corn, but they had not yet grown, leaving that area widely open. To the north and northwest, however, were the orchards, not yet ripe, but still a reasonably thick, dark forest of trees at night.
That was where the dog was looking.
And it was amidst the apple tree orchard to the northwest, where Matt first saw the lights. They flickered out in the darkness beyond, looking strange and weird. There was something “unnatural” about those lights.
If he didn’t suspect what it was, he might have just thought it was a fire, flashlights, construction, or something like that, but, no, it was off, and since he did suspect, they made him wary. He couldn’t explain how it was off. Only that he just knew. There would be no answer that he could have given any cynic who wasn’t there that would ever satisfy them.
Emmett sniffed the air carefully. “More than two,” he said. “Maybe four but definitely less than five.” He sniffed some more. “Something’s wrong, though.” His eyes narrowed. “I think there might be more than that out there.”
“They usually don’t come out in May,” said Sal softly. “They like it best when there are bigger crops that they can make stupid symbols on and cost me shitloads of money, which reminds me. Don’t you dare tell Bartlett! The county boys all want to see the look of shock on his face when he sees the first crop circle on his property.”
“You’re hazing the town hero?” Matt asked.
“You’re goddamn right I am and it’s going to be absolutely glorious.” He readied his shotgun. “I’m slipping around on their east. If there is gunfire, they’ll scatter, but make sure you’re south of the light so you don’t get shot. Watch those trees, watch the light and watch the skies. Do not shoot them until they start moving, and should you see a ship, do not ever shoot at it under any circumstances. Just run.
“And, seriously, do not take that hat off! I cannot stress that enough!”
Sal crept to the north while Matt moved west. They both moved into the trees, disappearing into the darkness toward the light.
As Matt crept closer, moving through the rows of apple trees, he saw the source of the light and his head tilted in uncharacteristic confusion. He should not have been surprised but he found he was and it came from the contradiction of seeing what he expected to see but never really believing he would.
The light came from a bauble floating through the air. It had no source, no place of origin, and while it might have been magic, like what Bartlett could do with this light spell, Matt somehow knew it was not. He could feel something coming from it. Not heat, exactly, but something like electricity, making the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand up.
That meant nothing to him. It was them that caught his eye.
There were three of them. They were around six feet tall with elongated heads, pale gray skin and very skinny bodies. Their faces had huge, white-less black eyes, slits for noses, and strange, small mouths that had no lips and were more like slits than actual mouths. Something about them looked baby-ish, which was the sense he always got from their heads, but was stronger when they were alive. He only saw those three, but his instincts told him more were out there.
What are they doing? he wondered.
They were making sounds that almost reminded Matt of a computer, sounding somewhere between what computers made and a weird squawking speech that reminded him of the aliens in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. One of them was holding some kind of beacon-looking thing about the size of a large flashlight made of shining metal. It placed it near the ground, where it floated about a foot up in the air with perfect verticality, and it did something weird that created a wave of something that made Matt blink, and his head hurt a little.
Matt reached up, pulled off his hat, and—
All three of the aliens jerked their heads toward him as if he had suddenly screamed aloud. He slipped the hat back on quickly and it seemed as though they were suddenly blind again, looking around in confusion as if someone had just flipped the on and off lights off in a room to leave them in complete darkness.
They looked at each other, irritated, said a few things to each other, and then looked back in his general direction.
That cannot possibly be right! he thought incredulously but he knew it was. Somehow, for some stupid, indefinable, unknown reason, tinfoil genuinely messed up their ability to sense him.
To Matt, it felt like the dumbest people on Earth had just been vindicated.
One alien started forward, its long, weird legs walking correctly for itself but looking out of proportion for Matt, and then it jerked around the tree he had been hiding behind.
Matt had slipped behind another tree, the rifle in both hands held vertically, but looking over at it from over his shoulder showed him that the alien had seen him. It had something in its left hand, something like a mask that was clearly human-sized and would not fit an alien, which made its purpose rather clear.
His eyes met the alien’s and in the light of the bauble, Matt thought he could see his reflection in those big, black eyes.
There was a shotgun blast a bit to the north and the others rushed away. The one in front of Matt didn’t move though, staring at him, its fingers holding the mask almost casually, its first and index fingers, both longer than a man’s, tapping on it as though thinking. Matt sensed it was waiting for him to make a move, almost like a man with a gun waiting for him to step out of cover.
It jerked toward him suddenly and Matt threw himself from cover and raised his rifle.
The alien held out the mask and it shot from its hand. It didn’t throw it. It simply flew toward Matt’s face like something shot from a cannon, even though it had no obvious propulsion of any sort.
Its interior was flying directly for Matt’s face.
Matt knocked it aside with his gun, pointed, and fired. He hit the creature in the chest, right where the heart would have been, but its heart, if it had one, wasn’t there. It let out a squawking hiss and jerked to the north. Matt aimed, watched for it to appear through the trees, and then fired again.
That time, he hit the side and it went down.
He saw the others were gone, having rushed off into the darkness somewhere.
Matt checked the mask that had been thrown at him to see if it would move on its own and saw that it was bafflingly melting like soft wax in a red-hot pan. When he heard a shotgun to the west, Matt knew it was safe to move forward.
He approached the alien, his gun pointing down at it, and kicked it over but he saw that it too was melting. It was going at such a rate that it was clear that it would be gone in half a minute, and he gathered it would leave proof that it had ever been there.
Sal had mentioned something about them melting to him once. He had forgotten until then.
He looked around, saw that the other aliens were still gone, and when he looked back down at his alien, he saw it was almost gone in that instant. A few moments later, it was completely gone with nothing there but a wet spot to mark its existence.
He felt the light fade along with the electricity it sent out about then as well and as he looked back over his shoulder at it, he had just enough time to note that the beacon had melted or vanished as well.
In the absence of that light, it seemed almost pitch. In the distance to the northwest, Matt heard another gunshot and saw the flash of light from Sal’s shotgun over there somewhere. Emmett was barking as well, trying to steer the aliens into Sal’s gunfire.
“Well, that was differ—”
There was suddenly a light shooting down at him like a laser beam and he jerked away from it, stumbling over a tree root on the ground, and landing between two apple trees. He looked up and saw something gigantic up there through the branches, that blinding light shooting out from a perfect circle within it. He could not fathom what he saw above him. All he could see were lights spinning around like a carnival ride at night.
That and it was very large. He could not even see the stars anymore.
He sensed it drifting toward him and he jerked to his feet. Matt started to run and as he looked behind himself, he saw that it was following him. At least, the circle of light that created the beam was.
It moved over him and he jerked to the side an instant before the beam came down.
He had lost his tinfoil hat somewhere and was suddenly worried that was why it was able to find him so easily.
He ran in a zigzag fashion through the trees, working his way southwest, that thing in the sky following him awkwardly, shooting its beams down at him every now and then, and just narrowly missing him each time. He saw the end of the apple orchard in the south was not far away but sensed that going there was a mistake. If it was having trouble nailing him with that light amidst the trees, it would have a much easier time out in the open.
He was going to work his way to the orange groves to the north but then he sensed a shift above him and he looked up and saw the thing had risen much higher up into the air. He could see its shape more clearly and he was not the least bit surprised at its appearance.
It was a saucer-shaped spaceship flying above his uncle’s farm.
And then it was gone. He wasn’t sure if it just flew away too fast for him to clearly see that it had or if it just teleported but it was just gone. One instant it was there, another not. There was some residual light that Matt could see, like mist in the air, which could mean anything, but that soon faded as well.
And then there was literally nothing.
Matt stared up, wide-eyed, looking through the branches at a normal, evening sky in Connecticut, his right hand holding his rifle casually downward. His uncle soon appeared, a dead alien thrown over his left shoulder, his shotgun resting on his right. Emmett was trotting happily beside him, looking pleased with himself.
“How was your first alien hunt?” Sal asked.
“What the fuck was that up there?”
“It was one of their ships,” Sal said calmly. “If you get nailed by their lights, they’ll take you. They got that one guy in the seventies that they made a movie about in the nineties. It really happened.”
“That movie!” Matt cried. He couldn’t remember its name. Only that it had something to do with fire. “That was real?”
“Sorta,” he replied. “They Hollywooded it up a bunch.”
Matt blinked. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘take you?’”
“What do you think ‘take you’ means?” he replied. “That’s why you don’t shoot at the ships. Most of the time, they ignore you, but you get their attention—” he made a hiss sound through his teeth “—they come for you.”
“I got one,” he said. “It melted.”
Sal shrugged indifferently. “Got to be quicker. Their stuff always melts but their bodies don’t if you managed to kill them quickly enough.” He gestured to the alien on his shoulder. “Their bodies are funny, like they don’t have interior organs kind of funny, but they actually do. Widespread damage from shotguns tends to be the most effective.” He slapped Matt’s shoulder in a fatherly way and pulled him into a walk back toward the house. “It was wild, wasn’t it?”
“Why us?” he asked. “Don’t they just kidnap white hicks and stuff?”
“Low population areas are usually their target. Out there in the boondocks, where people can’t see them, does tend to be full of uneducated, working-class people, i.e., hicks, whom people tend not to believe, but there is an interest in this place. More of them are here than anywhere else in the world. The last time they came out in groups like this was in the sixties, though. The last time was when the wolf appeared.”
“The wolf?” That was the absolutely last thing Matt expected to be a correlation. “Why would they care about a werewolf?” he asked incredulously.
“I think it's magic,” Sal said and gave him a look that showed a crazy gleam in his eyes that reminded Matt of crazy Uncle Jerry. “It fascinates them.”
Matt thought about the door and what it had done to him. He had the idea that it might make him “interesting” to a creature who was “fascinated” by magic.
After all, there was no scientific way to explain how he could envision and experience a past life just by looking at a doorway.
“I think the forest fascinates them most of all. Strangely, they never take magicians. I think they’re worried about what their powers might do something unpredictable inside their ships.”
“They really do kidnap people then?” Matt asked. He had heard the stories before, just like everyone, but it seemed to be a much bigger deal now that he had actually seen a ship with his own eyes.
“Oh yeah, all the time,” he said. “Most of them are hicks, just like you said. People who are drunk on moonshine, who tend to hallucinate, or uneducated yokels tend not to be believed when they tell crazy stories, but now and then they nail someone competent whom people do believe. That fellow in the seventies was one and there were a bunch of witnesses who saw it too, all of whom passed lie detector tests.
“They kidnapped a woman here in the twenties, around here as well. One of the Michaeladises, I think, and they abducted Theodore Gurney in the 1980s but, unfortunately, they gave him back.”
“Theodore Gurney? Old Man Herbert Gurney’s younger brother?”
“Yeah. He’s actually quite changed. He’s no longer a racist, although he is still an incredible asshole. I had a few drinks with him back at The Green Lobster a couple of weeks back. I knew they were coming because he gets very anxious every time the aliens start coming around. It’s like he can sense them.”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
“That came later. After his son disappeared and didn’t come back.” Sal said that strangely. “Listen, nephew, aliens are a weirder sort of creature. They don’t follow the normal laws of the hunt.”
Matt could sense that. “What do they want?”
“No one knows,” he told him. “By the way, if you’re being followed by the ship, hide under a bridge. That’s the easiest dodge I know.”
“What do you mean by that? You think it’s following me?”
“You think I missed that light firing down at you?” Sal replied and he smiled. “Did you shoot at the ship? You shot at the ship, didn’t you?”
“No. I just got one of the creatures. It didn’t seem particularly different from any of the others. It had a mask.”
Sal stopped, turned to face him and looked at him strangely, his eyes very serious. “A mask? Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he replied awkwardly. “It flew toward my face.”
“Okay,” said Sal softly, his eyes wide. “You’re a tough kid, so I’ll just tell you. That mask is not to be messed with.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’ll knock you out if it gets on you and you’ll wake up in an alien laboratory.” He pointed his shotgun upward. “Somewhere up there.” He lowered his gun and shrugged. “Personally, I’ve never seen one of them, but it comes up every now and then in stories from respected sources.”
“So, you’re saying what, exactly?”
“They want you,” he told him with that wide, crazed expression that Matt had never seen on him before. “Like, not just a person who happened to be there, but you, specifically. If that’s the case, nephew, I would very much keep my eyes on the skies. If I had better advice, I’d give it to you, but if they’re coming for you, they’re coming for you, and it could be tonight or it could be twenty years from now.”
“Okay, uh—” Matt sighed “—are you serious?”
“All I know is that the last guy who told me he saw a mask also told me that over the next fifteen years, he regularly saw strange lights in the night over his house. Fifteen years and then he finally disappeared.”
“Did he come back?”
“Eventually,” he replied but he said that in a strange way that he didn’t elaborate upon. Matt didn’t press him hard. He had enough for one bad week without aliens and he just wanted to go home and relax.
Sometime later, in the daylight, he would get more information. Matt hoped it was an exaggeration. Sal did have a tendency to exaggerate some of his stories.
But he didn’t sound like he was exaggerating that time.
As Matt drove home later, he kept the gun in his seat. He found he could not stop looking up through his windows into the sky, especially at stoplights when he was motionless and felt the most vulnerable.
Always, he felt half-expecting to see that saucer up there. “They want you,” his uncle’s voice whispered in his mind.
If something was following him, he did not see it, but he had an uncanny sense, one that was rarely wrong for him, that he was very much being followed. In the jungle, the bayou, or the savannah, his sense of it was rarely wrong, even when he could not detect it in any way. Something, somewhere, was creeping up behind him in the dark once more but only that time, the dark was up in the sky.
It made him nervous enough to check his back seats and made him want to check his trunk to see if an alien was hiding within.
“I’m being paranoid,” he told himself but it didn’t feel like he was being paranoid.
He made his way down Edmonton St in Mid Town, which he never called Central Bartlett Bay, crossed Maplewood, where some of the middle-class and horse districts were, and took another left to go south on Worthington. Then he turned right onto Nathan Boulevard, passing the apartment complex Bartlett was fixing up, and to his family’s house, where he parked his car on the street.
He stepped out of the car and looked up into the sky.
He saw nothing. Nothing but stars.
But it’s up there somewhere, he thought.
Their house was one of the nicer homes in the area. The Merricks were historically found to be somewhere in the middle to upper-middle-class area of wealth. They were members of the Black Elite and still technically had a house in the Elite Circle, although that branch of his family’s last Merrick only had daughters, leaving it in the hands of his cousins, the Conwoods. Their secondary home on Nathan Boulevard had been upgraded over the years to be almost as nice, with the addition of a second floor as one of its many upgrades, although none were as wild as those in Sal’s home.
It was a lovely, beautiful white house and every time he looked at it after his day in the forest, he couldn’t stop comparing it with the shack he spent as John Merrick and his family, easily recalling how he slept on a hard pallet with just a thin blanket while he stared up at the dark brown wooden ceiling.
He parked on the sidewalk, opened the garage, placed his gun on the part of the rack that belonged to him, closed the garage and walked inside. He got about five feet or so beyond the door before he felt his mother’s hands appear out of nowhere, grab him and start shaking him.
“What were you thinking?” she shrieked at him as she shook him back and forth. “What were you thinking?”
Matt lived in fear of only one woman in his life and that was his mother. It came from never knowing exactly how to deal with her because his usual, head right for the center and break what was there method, or just shrugging and saying, “Go fuck yourself,” did not work with the woman who gave him life.
He felt revulsion at even the idea of doing anything remotely like that, so he usually just stood there and let her work out whatever was driving her insane that week until he could have a conversation with her.
When Sally Merrick stopped shaking her son and looked into his face, she saw something, and her lips tightened. “I knew it!” she hissed. She was an athletic older woman with his eyes and skin tone, her hair lovely afro tied back behind her head, wearing her gym clothes, which meant she was rage exercising. She was a professional gymnast as a young woman and though she was never able to go pro and perform at the Olympics as she wanted, she had earned herself a scholarship where she became a doctor, the skills of which she briefly used in the military, where she met her future husband during their tour across the Middle East.
Presently, she worked at the Bartlett Bay Hospital.
She was one of those women who was far more dangerous than she appeared, many believing her too skinny to throw a punch. The family story of Matt’s parents' meeting began with several soldiers getting out of line with her one day out there in the field and his father become love-struck hard the instant he saw her pummel all three grown men into the ground in a fit of berserk rage.
“That’s when I knew she was going to be my wife,” Carl Merrick was fond of saying.
“I knew that forest would try and take my children away from me!” she hissed and then she hugged him tightly.
Matt sighed and she quickly flew back to look in his face. Oops, he thought.
His mother could read him like a book and she very rarely read him wrong. “What is going on in that brain of yours?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“What did you tell Henry?”
“I didn’t tell Henry a thing!” he replied, resisting the urge to swear, and saw Eliza standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She gave him an awkward “I’m sorry,” shrug. Matt frowned at her for a moment, then took the frown off his face, turned back to his mother and added, “I told something to Eliza and he didn’t talk to me at all. If he did, I would have talked him out of the stupid idea he had and, if not that, at least what kind of shoes to wear.”
“People like Henry Fuller in this town,” she told him as if he did not speak. “No one wants to see him hurt. That forest—” she sighed “—you know my best friend lost her son in those woods.”
Of course, he knew. It seemed that she had only told him about it every day of his life since it happened.
Sally’s best friend Nancy had a son who would have been about the same age as Matt’s older brother. On a dare, he went into the woods one morning, the dare being to stick around in the Engelstad for six hours before coming back out before dark. It was a kind of hazing ritual that local kids sometimes still did. The boy brought himself a lunch and a backpack full of extra supplies in case he needed them, including a handgun, which had belonged to his father, just in case.
He was never seen again and it had deeply traumatized his mother. As for Matt’s mother, the knowledge of that incident and the disturbing fact that it was the literal only place on God’s green Earth that terrified her otherwise fearless husband had created a sort of near-trauma level fear of her own.
She took his face in her hands. “Don’t ever go into that forest again!” she whispered. “Promise me!”
“I might have—”
“Don’t you dare tell me that!” she almost screamed. “You will promise me right now!”
“I promise,” he told her but he had a sneaky suspicion that, after what he had seen and with his relation with Bartlett, he wasn’t going to be able to keep that promise.
The Englestad was not yet done with him.
Title
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Matt Merrick arrived at his uncle’s farm around sunset.
The old man was giving him “the look” with that cocky smile of his and his familiar, a black and tan bloodhound named Emmett that had been his closest friend since he was a boy, was giving him one of those half-curious, half-surly looks that he usually did. They were both in their usual spots on the patio, with Sal Merrick sitting on his old, blue chair, and Emmett lying across on the long, red cushioned kiddie chair that functioned as a dog bed.
“So, somebody believes in reincarnation now, eh?” Sal told him with a smile.
“Fucking Eliza!” Matt said bitterly as he walked under the two tall oak trees that functioned as an entryway toward the house. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her!”
“Eliza is a good girl,” said Sal. “She didn’t tell me, though. She told Henry Fuller.”
That actually didn’t surprise Matt. For reasons he found unfathomable, most of the black girls in town, including Christine Taylor, whom he still found impossible to think of as a Merrick after her marriage to his cousin Owen, genuinely liked and or had a crush on Henry Fuller. It was something more than physical beauty and wealth, which he had some of the first and a lot of the last.
Whatever it was, Matt didn’t see it.
He ascended the stairs up to the patio of the Merrick House, a lovely, white painted house that had been originally built in the late 1800s to house the first Merricks in Bartlett Bay back when they were first employed by the Fullers to work on their farms. In those days, the Fullers made their wealth primarily from agriculture.
Over the years, it had grown extra floors, new rooms and other things, all built to accommodate new and more interesting members of the family who had a Merrick trademark of trying to alter the world to fit their eccentricities. It included an indoor garden, a martial arts dojo made by Sal’s father in the 1970s during his “Bruce Lee phase,” and a private sound studio for Sal’s daughter Alice, who was attempting, and had succeeded, in becoming a singer. It was very well maintained and quite beautiful but also looked incredibly odd to anyone who understood architecture even a little.
There was a buzz at his side and Matt raised his Galaxy S II phone to see that his mother had sent him another angry message. “You get right back home, right now, Mister!” She always capitalized the “m” in “mister” when she was angry.
He sucked air through his teeth in irritation and sat down next to his uncle in the guest chair.
His aunt by marriage, Sal’s wife, Macy, came out with a couple of glasses of lemonade that she had made and offered him one. She was a short, slightly overweight, but still quite attractive older black woman who spent far too much time on her lovely, afro hair, which hung down around her head to her shoulders like a movie star. She was wearing a lovely yellow dress and came with a pleasant smile and disposition, as always.
“Thank you, Macy,” Matt told her when she handed him a lemonade. Then she put her hands on her hips and gave him a stern look. “Okay, what did I do now?” he asked.
“Talk to your mother,” she said.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing but enter that terrible forest that you swore to your mother on your soul that you would never do.”
“I went in because Darcy Hamilton needed me,” he lied. Actually, she simply mentioned it and he readily offered to go because of a combination of being incredibly bored and desperately wanting an excuse to see what the big deal was but he wasn’t about to say that because it would instantly get back to his mother. “Darcy’s friend Becky needed backup and Bartlett’s—” he shrugged “—Bartlett.”
“Don’t make that one angry,” she told him sternly. “He’s employing half my brother’s family and all of his annoying, unemployed, drunk friends.” Marcy’s father had been a foreman in the fisheries when Julian Bartlett closed them down. Her whole family, and all the families they had been close to, had generations of workers connected in some way or another to the Bartlett Bay fishing industry, and over the years, it had been very difficult for them to find steady work. Her brother and his sons were easily slipping into the jobs their predecessors had left behind in a rare moment of all being employed at the same time.
“It’s fine. We’re friends.” Matt’s eyes narrowed. “And my mother learned of that, how exactly?”
“Eliza told Henry Fuller and Henry Fuller is not smart about keeping secrets. He got so excited that he told his sister.”
“Oh God, I should have known!” he said bitterly. One of Henry’s sisters was the mayor and she could be trusted but it was the other one, the youngest, named Marie, that Henry was closest to who also happened to be a close friend of his mother’s and had the very annoying habit of gossiping about everything she heard.
“Yes,” Macy told him with a wide smile. “She told your mother and your mother told me to tell you that she is going to ‘beat you like an infant with a paddle’ if you don’t have a good explanation of why you broke your word.”
“Yikes,” said Sal.
“Personally, I don’t know how she can stand it, being as high-strung as she is,” she told them and then turned to her husband. “Your brother has the Merrick Death Wish bad. Every weekend she calls me, terrified he’s going to die somehow when he’s gone off on one of his crazed shenanigans to some God-forsaken wilderness.”
“I’m not going to deny it,” Sal replied. “Carl was always a bit crazy. Not as crazy as Gerald but still.”
“Nobody is as crazy as Uncle Jerry,” said Matt.
“I had my suspicions about Carl for years,” Marcy told them as though deep in thought, “But I think I wasn’t entirely certain he was insane until he took his sons, sixteen, fifteen and fourteen-year-old boys, out on a hunting trip after the Australian bunyip?”
“You still on that?” Sal asked with a smile and he pulled her onto her lap.
She squeaked happily, hit him playfully and then kissed him deeply and got up. “Yes,” she replied happily. “Yes, I am.” She then walked back into the house.
“Alright,” said Sal as he turned to Matt. “I’m dying to know.”
“Me too,” said Emmett as he leaned his head over the side of his chair. “Talk.”
“About what?”
“You are a very private person when it comes to feelings,” said Sal. “You blurting out emotional things to Eliza of all of a sudden is not in character with you at all.”
Matt drank some of his lemonade, placed it on the table between his and his uncle’s chair, and turned to him. “I had to talk to someone—” he shrugged “—who was black.”
“Why?” he asked with a deeply interested look on his face.
“Oh, this is going to be good,” said Emmett and he began wagging his tail.
“Bartlett has it too but he was white in all three lives,” Matt told Sal. “The other two were white in both of theirs. The short answer is that I am the reincarnation of John Merrick.”
“Our ancestor?” His face turned instantly dubious.
“I’m glad you don’t believe me,” said Matt earnestly. “It makes me very happy that you don’t.”
“That’s basically what Henry said. He was talking to Eliza about having dreams about his past life, the story where he had that murdered daughter, the poor girl who died in the old Gurney house, and she mentioned the doorway you spoke of. You told her where you entered, right?”
“It was near the river. I think I mentioned it in passing.” His eyes narrowed. “Why exactly?”
“Well,” he said, “He followed the same path you did.”
“Him?” Matt cried in shock. “The man is a tax lawyer and not the kind that does athletics on the side! That forest will eat him alive!”
“Yeah,” agreed Sal. “That gossipy white woman, Lucy, who is part of Macy’s disgruntled wife club, was out jogging and saw him creeping into it.” The “disgruntled wife club” was Sal’s way of describing the Bay City Ladies’ Organization, who had power over what could and could not be done in Bartlett Bay as far as shows, festivals, holidays and the like.
“Goddamn it!” Matt snarled. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” He started to get up.
“He got out,” Sal told him and Matt sighed with relief and sat back down. “Yeah, he was seen the next day around sunset, wandering around in the same clothes, looking disheveled and thoroughly disturbed.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“He’s not an outdoorsy person,” said Matt. “I bet he was wandering into that forest without any weapons, food or water and wearing slacks and loafers and maybe a blazer.”
“That would not surprise me,” Sal told him. “He’s got none of the Merrick blood in him. Not like our mayor, always riding horses and looking for mischief. She’s got moxie, that one. You know, she once kneed Gerald in the crotch for getting fresh with her and he’s been deeply in love with her ever since.” Sal smiled slyly. “You seem to care an awful lot about this Fuller.”
“I’d never get laid again in this town again if something I ever said or did got Henry Fuller killed.”
Sal and Emmett both burst out laughing.
“Anyway,” Sal told him, “What I called you for is because I am dying to know exactly what you told Eliza. She told Henry, because she has a crush on him and thought it would help him, but she wouldn’t tell me. All I got was what Macy got from Marie which wasn’t a lot.”
“It’s—” he hunted for a word “—bizarre.”
“I didn’t ask you here because I thought it would be boring and normal,” he replied and then looked serious. “Why didn’t you come to me? You know I can keep a secret.”
“Might have but Eliza sensed it on me and nagged me mercilessly until I caved in.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“No,” Matt agreed.
He looked up at the tree branches of the oaks around the house, noting the darkening sky between the branches, and thought about his time in the Engelstad. It had seemed so normal out there.
“The woods do stretch out the way they say,” he said. “There are hills and mountains, things like that, but everything was otherwise seemingly normal. I wasn’t particularly worried, we were all armed and I’ve been in every dangerous landscape on Earth, but then we came upon a trail beside some terrifying trees we found this door.
“It was open. I can’t explain what I saw inside but—
* * *
“—when I woke up, everyone was dazed. Only Darcy was fine because, apparently, she had already gone through her whole past life. Becky was tripping balls about being a pirate back in the golden age of piracy and Bartlett had just had a conversation with someone he called Cardinal Wolsey.”
Marcy had just come out when he said that. “When did you get into English history?” she asked as she handed a large chewable bone to Emmett, who thanked her and started to eat it.
“Thank you, Macy,” said Emmett and she petted his head.
“How did you know that?” asked Matt.
“Because I’m educated, Matthew,” she replied. “Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was King Henry VIII’s, uh—” she thought about it “—advisor, I think. Prime Minister, maybe? The second most powerful man in England for decades. Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, you know, the famous queen who was beheaded, was his enemy and caused his downfall.”
“He mentioned that,” Matt replied uncomfortably. He had been trying to think of the whole experience as a vision, brought up by a magical spell that perhaps read his DNA, like in that game Assassin’s Creed, so as to create an imitation of his ancestor’s memory. In that memory, he would not have been John Merrick, but merely experiencing John Merrick’s memories.
The problem was that the more he thought about it, the more that theory didn’t seem to work. There wasn’t any sense of jarring abnormality that would come from feeling thoughts or doing things that were somebody else’s. Everything John did, felt that he had done, as though he was remembering moments from his childhood he had forgotten.
It was full dark by then and the lights on the porch turned on all around them.
When Marcy left, Sal said, “It’s messing with your head, isn’t it?”
“The past wasn’t the way I thought it was,” he said. “It was terrible but it wasn’t the same terrible that I had been led to believe.” How to explain it? Saying “slavery wasn’t that bad” felt so horribly wrong that he wanted to punch himself in the face for even thinking it but it wasn’t exactly a lie. “It was terrible,” he told him, “But when you hear about it, now, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what we imagined it to be, or at least, it wasn’t specifically on us.
“I saw whites getting beaten all the time. It saw one man, a white man, who had been accused of trying to burn down a church had his ear nailed to one of those stockade things by an angry priest. Like, if you only hear about slaves getting hurt, you think we’re the only ones, and you feel super bad and enraged at all the slavers, but the slavery was the only unique part to us. The violence was everywhere.”
“It was a violent time,” Sal told him. “History tends to be written by the winners and they always have a tendency to exaggerate their own nobility and accomplishments. Some must have been the kind of hypocrites I used to deal with back in the sixties, who got off making everyone else’s problems their crusade. When the Civil War ended, they probably wrote stories about how horrible the South was and how they were these perfect heroes with no flaws who never did any cruelties of their own, and now you’re seeing how they were exaggerating that for their own purposes.”
“I forgot how pessimistic you are,” Matt told him.
“Yeah,” he agreed with a smile.
“Yeah,” echoed Emmett with a lazy, dog smile that matched his master’s, staring at him, utterly intrigued. He had not moved more than a few inches for the entire conversation and looked utterly content.
But then he suddenly jerked up, his eyes staring off into the distance northwest of the house, almost like he was pointing.
“They’re here,” said Sal softly. “Don’t move.”
He quickly ran inside and came back out with his shotgun, a bandolier of shells over his shoulder and what appeared to be a few hats made of tinfoil. He leaned his gun against the wall, placed a special hat down onto Emmett, carefully pulling his floppy ears through it, one on himself, and then one on Matt.
“You’re joking,” Matt said incredulously as Sal grabbed his shotgun again. He knew Sal did that; everyone in town knew that, but it seemed far more bafflingly stupid when he was doing it in person.
“You never believe in anything,” said Sal. “That’s why that reincarnation kicked your ass hard instead of making you happy like it did that Rebecca girl.”
“Happy?” Matt replied incredulously. “I was a fucking slave, old man!”
Marcy came out wearing a lovely, yellow hat that matched her yellow dress on her head. She looked over at Emmett, who rushed across the patio and leaned around the side to look north beyond the side of the house.
She sucked in an intake of air and then slipped back into the house.
“How come she doesn’t have to wear one of these?” asked Sal.
“She is,” Sal told him quietly. “She’s too embarrassed to wear one of these tinfoil ones, so I lined the inside of that nicer hat with tinfoil. I always buy her two hats so I can line one with tinfoil.” He gave him a wink. “She knows but she pretends she doesn’t.”
“Oh-kay.” He said it almost like a question.
Sal smiled and checked his Remington 870 Shotgun which he had owned since he was a young man and had well-maintained over the years. He pointed it vertically upward and inserted five shells from his bandolier quickly and expertly.
“This feels right,” Sal told him. “A special moment of growth that my father gave to me, your father and Gerald, and I gave to my sons.”
“Crazy Uncle Jerry hunted aliens?”
“Oh, all the time,” he replied. “Right up until he got bored.” He gestured to Matt’s car. “Now get yourself a rifle. Don’t pretend you don’t have one.”
Matt was intrigued. He had never been on an alien hunt before and was half-convinced they were delusions brought about by moonshine and lies. Only half because he had seen the heads on walls and knew they had to come from somewhere. He just wasn’t entirely bought on the idea that the “somewhere” was “outer space.”
“And do not take that off!” snarled Sal as Matt reached up. “This fucks with their psychic radar! Take that off and they sense you instantly!”
Matt groaned and was grateful that none of his friends were around to see him wearing that stupid thing. He went over to his white 1994 Pontiac Firebird, his father’s old car that the two of them fixed up together when he was sixteen, opened the trunk and assembled his semi-automatic Remington 700 with military expertise. He then put on his belt with his extra magazines, inserted a 10-round mag into his rifle, shut the trunk and walked back.
Sal grinned at him as he approached and quickly led him across the property, moving to a nearby barn directly north of the house where they kept the cows and Macy’s horse, Emmett silently leading the way. Northeast of that barn was Matt’s grandfather’s personal airstrip. He had been a Tuskegee airman in World War II and kept the love of flying to his dying day, transferring that love to his eldest son, Martin, who followed after him and became a pilot during Vietnam. He was presently a commercial pilot, steadfastly refusing to retire or take any kind of lesser desk job, wholly convinced he would die in a week without something meaningful to do.
The whole property was above the freeway, the Merrick House built north of the Fuller’s estate, which was still owned by them and looked kind of like a fancy European manor house. Surrounding it on all sides and mostly westward, all the way to Worthington St, which acted as the official line that separated Merrick’s land from the Gurneys, were the crops. The asparagus and the fava beans had just been harvested and Sal was readying corn, but they had not yet grown, leaving that area widely open. To the north and northwest, however, were the orchards, not yet ripe, but still a reasonably thick, dark forest of trees at night.
That was where the dog was looking.
And it was amidst the apple tree orchard to the northwest, where Matt first saw the lights. They flickered out in the darkness beyond, looking strange and weird. There was something “unnatural” about those lights.
If he didn’t suspect what it was, he might have just thought it was a fire, flashlights, construction, or something like that, but, no, it was off, and since he did suspect, they made him wary. He couldn’t explain how it was off. Only that he just knew. There would be no answer that he could have given any cynic who wasn’t there that would ever satisfy them.
Emmett sniffed the air carefully. “More than two,” he said. “Maybe four but definitely less than five.” He sniffed some more. “Something’s wrong, though.” His eyes narrowed. “I think there might be more than that out there.”
“They usually don’t come out in May,” said Sal softly. “They like it best when there are bigger crops that they can make stupid symbols on and cost me shitloads of money, which reminds me. Don’t you dare tell Bartlett! The county boys all want to see the look of shock on his face when he sees the first crop circle on his property.”
“You’re hazing the town hero?” Matt asked.
“You’re goddamn right I am and it’s going to be absolutely glorious.” He readied his shotgun. “I’m slipping around on their east. If there is gunfire, they’ll scatter, but make sure you’re south of the light so you don’t get shot. Watch those trees, watch the light and watch the skies. Do not shoot them until they start moving, and should you see a ship, do not ever shoot at it under any circumstances. Just run.
“And, seriously, do not take that hat off! I cannot stress that enough!”
Sal crept to the north while Matt moved west. They both moved into the trees, disappearing into the darkness toward the light.
As Matt crept closer, moving through the rows of apple trees, he saw the source of the light and his head tilted in uncharacteristic confusion. He should not have been surprised but he found he was and it came from the contradiction of seeing what he expected to see but never really believing he would.
The light came from a bauble floating through the air. It had no source, no place of origin, and while it might have been magic, like what Bartlett could do with this light spell, Matt somehow knew it was not. He could feel something coming from it. Not heat, exactly, but something like electricity, making the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand up.
That meant nothing to him. It was them that caught his eye.
There were three of them. They were around six feet tall with elongated heads, pale gray skin and very skinny bodies. Their faces had huge, white-less black eyes, slits for noses, and strange, small mouths that had no lips and were more like slits than actual mouths. Something about them looked baby-ish, which was the sense he always got from their heads, but was stronger when they were alive. He only saw those three, but his instincts told him more were out there.
What are they doing? he wondered.
They were making sounds that almost reminded Matt of a computer, sounding somewhere between what computers made and a weird squawking speech that reminded him of the aliens in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. One of them was holding some kind of beacon-looking thing about the size of a large flashlight made of shining metal. It placed it near the ground, where it floated about a foot up in the air with perfect verticality, and it did something weird that created a wave of something that made Matt blink, and his head hurt a little.
Matt reached up, pulled off his hat, and—
All three of the aliens jerked their heads toward him as if he had suddenly screamed aloud. He slipped the hat back on quickly and it seemed as though they were suddenly blind again, looking around in confusion as if someone had just flipped the on and off lights off in a room to leave them in complete darkness.
They looked at each other, irritated, said a few things to each other, and then looked back in his general direction.
That cannot possibly be right! he thought incredulously but he knew it was. Somehow, for some stupid, indefinable, unknown reason, tinfoil genuinely messed up their ability to sense him.
To Matt, it felt like the dumbest people on Earth had just been vindicated.
One alien started forward, its long, weird legs walking correctly for itself but looking out of proportion for Matt, and then it jerked around the tree he had been hiding behind.
Matt had slipped behind another tree, the rifle in both hands held vertically, but looking over at it from over his shoulder showed him that the alien had seen him. It had something in its left hand, something like a mask that was clearly human-sized and would not fit an alien, which made its purpose rather clear.
His eyes met the alien’s and in the light of the bauble, Matt thought he could see his reflection in those big, black eyes.
There was a shotgun blast a bit to the north and the others rushed away. The one in front of Matt didn’t move though, staring at him, its fingers holding the mask almost casually, its first and index fingers, both longer than a man’s, tapping on it as though thinking. Matt sensed it was waiting for him to make a move, almost like a man with a gun waiting for him to step out of cover.
It jerked toward him suddenly and Matt threw himself from cover and raised his rifle.
The alien held out the mask and it shot from its hand. It didn’t throw it. It simply flew toward Matt’s face like something shot from a cannon, even though it had no obvious propulsion of any sort.
Its interior was flying directly for Matt’s face.
Matt knocked it aside with his gun, pointed, and fired. He hit the creature in the chest, right where the heart would have been, but its heart, if it had one, wasn’t there. It let out a squawking hiss and jerked to the north. Matt aimed, watched for it to appear through the trees, and then fired again.
That time, he hit the side and it went down.
He saw the others were gone, having rushed off into the darkness somewhere.
Matt checked the mask that had been thrown at him to see if it would move on its own and saw that it was bafflingly melting like soft wax in a red-hot pan. When he heard a shotgun to the west, Matt knew it was safe to move forward.
He approached the alien, his gun pointing down at it, and kicked it over but he saw that it too was melting. It was going at such a rate that it was clear that it would be gone in half a minute, and he gathered it would leave proof that it had ever been there.
Sal had mentioned something about them melting to him once. He had forgotten until then.
He looked around, saw that the other aliens were still gone, and when he looked back down at his alien, he saw it was almost gone in that instant. A few moments later, it was completely gone with nothing there but a wet spot to mark its existence.
He felt the light fade along with the electricity it sent out about then as well and as he looked back over his shoulder at it, he had just enough time to note that the beacon had melted or vanished as well.
In the absence of that light, it seemed almost pitch. In the distance to the northwest, Matt heard another gunshot and saw the flash of light from Sal’s shotgun over there somewhere. Emmett was barking as well, trying to steer the aliens into Sal’s gunfire.
“Well, that was differ—”
There was suddenly a light shooting down at him like a laser beam and he jerked away from it, stumbling over a tree root on the ground, and landing between two apple trees. He looked up and saw something gigantic up there through the branches, that blinding light shooting out from a perfect circle within it. He could not fathom what he saw above him. All he could see were lights spinning around like a carnival ride at night.
That and it was very large. He could not even see the stars anymore.
He sensed it drifting toward him and he jerked to his feet. Matt started to run and as he looked behind himself, he saw that it was following him. At least, the circle of light that created the beam was.
It moved over him and he jerked to the side an instant before the beam came down.
He had lost his tinfoil hat somewhere and was suddenly worried that was why it was able to find him so easily.
He ran in a zigzag fashion through the trees, working his way southwest, that thing in the sky following him awkwardly, shooting its beams down at him every now and then, and just narrowly missing him each time. He saw the end of the apple orchard in the south was not far away but sensed that going there was a mistake. If it was having trouble nailing him with that light amidst the trees, it would have a much easier time out in the open.
He was going to work his way to the orange groves to the north but then he sensed a shift above him and he looked up and saw the thing had risen much higher up into the air. He could see its shape more clearly and he was not the least bit surprised at its appearance.
It was a saucer-shaped spaceship flying above his uncle’s farm.
And then it was gone. He wasn’t sure if it just flew away too fast for him to clearly see that it had or if it just teleported but it was just gone. One instant it was there, another not. There was some residual light that Matt could see, like mist in the air, which could mean anything, but that soon faded as well.
And then there was literally nothing.
Matt stared up, wide-eyed, looking through the branches at a normal, evening sky in Connecticut, his right hand holding his rifle casually downward. His uncle soon appeared, a dead alien thrown over his left shoulder, his shotgun resting on his right. Emmett was trotting happily beside him, looking pleased with himself.
“How was your first alien hunt?” Sal asked.
“What the fuck was that up there?”
“It was one of their ships,” Sal said calmly. “If you get nailed by their lights, they’ll take you. They got that one guy in the seventies that they made a movie about in the nineties. It really happened.”
“That movie!” Matt cried. He couldn’t remember its name. Only that it had something to do with fire. “That was real?”
“Sorta,” he replied. “They Hollywooded it up a bunch.”
Matt blinked. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘take you?’”
“What do you think ‘take you’ means?” he replied. “That’s why you don’t shoot at the ships. Most of the time, they ignore you, but you get their attention—” he made a hiss sound through his teeth “—they come for you.”
“I got one,” he said. “It melted.”
Sal shrugged indifferently. “Got to be quicker. Their stuff always melts but their bodies don’t if you managed to kill them quickly enough.” He gestured to the alien on his shoulder. “Their bodies are funny, like they don’t have interior organs kind of funny, but they actually do. Widespread damage from shotguns tends to be the most effective.” He slapped Matt’s shoulder in a fatherly way and pulled him into a walk back toward the house. “It was wild, wasn’t it?”
“Why us?” he asked. “Don’t they just kidnap white hicks and stuff?”
“Low population areas are usually their target. Out there in the boondocks, where people can’t see them, does tend to be full of uneducated, working-class people, i.e., hicks, whom people tend not to believe, but there is an interest in this place. More of them are here than anywhere else in the world. The last time they came out in groups like this was in the sixties, though. The last time was when the wolf appeared.”
“The wolf?” That was the absolutely last thing Matt expected to be a correlation. “Why would they care about a werewolf?” he asked incredulously.
“I think it's magic,” Sal said and gave him a look that showed a crazy gleam in his eyes that reminded Matt of crazy Uncle Jerry. “It fascinates them.”
Matt thought about the door and what it had done to him. He had the idea that it might make him “interesting” to a creature who was “fascinated” by magic.
After all, there was no scientific way to explain how he could envision and experience a past life just by looking at a doorway.
“I think the forest fascinates them most of all. Strangely, they never take magicians. I think they’re worried about what their powers might do something unpredictable inside their ships.”
“They really do kidnap people then?” Matt asked. He had heard the stories before, just like everyone, but it seemed to be a much bigger deal now that he had actually seen a ship with his own eyes.
“Oh yeah, all the time,” he said. “Most of them are hicks, just like you said. People who are drunk on moonshine, who tend to hallucinate, or uneducated yokels tend not to be believed when they tell crazy stories, but now and then they nail someone competent whom people do believe. That fellow in the seventies was one and there were a bunch of witnesses who saw it too, all of whom passed lie detector tests.
“They kidnapped a woman here in the twenties, around here as well. One of the Michaeladises, I think, and they abducted Theodore Gurney in the 1980s but, unfortunately, they gave him back.”
“Theodore Gurney? Old Man Herbert Gurney’s younger brother?”
“Yeah. He’s actually quite changed. He’s no longer a racist, although he is still an incredible asshole. I had a few drinks with him back at The Green Lobster a couple of weeks back. I knew they were coming because he gets very anxious every time the aliens start coming around. It’s like he can sense them.”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
“That came later. After his son disappeared and didn’t come back.” Sal said that strangely. “Listen, nephew, aliens are a weirder sort of creature. They don’t follow the normal laws of the hunt.”
Matt could sense that. “What do they want?”
“No one knows,” he told him. “By the way, if you’re being followed by the ship, hide under a bridge. That’s the easiest dodge I know.”
“What do you mean by that? You think it’s following me?”
“You think I missed that light firing down at you?” Sal replied and he smiled. “Did you shoot at the ship? You shot at the ship, didn’t you?”
“No. I just got one of the creatures. It didn’t seem particularly different from any of the others. It had a mask.”
Sal stopped, turned to face him and looked at him strangely, his eyes very serious. “A mask? Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he replied awkwardly. “It flew toward my face.”
“Okay,” said Sal softly, his eyes wide. “You’re a tough kid, so I’ll just tell you. That mask is not to be messed with.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’ll knock you out if it gets on you and you’ll wake up in an alien laboratory.” He pointed his shotgun upward. “Somewhere up there.” He lowered his gun and shrugged. “Personally, I’ve never seen one of them, but it comes up every now and then in stories from respected sources.”
“So, you’re saying what, exactly?”
“They want you,” he told him with that wide, crazed expression that Matt had never seen on him before. “Like, not just a person who happened to be there, but you, specifically. If that’s the case, nephew, I would very much keep my eyes on the skies. If I had better advice, I’d give it to you, but if they’re coming for you, they’re coming for you, and it could be tonight or it could be twenty years from now.”
“Okay, uh—” Matt sighed “—are you serious?”
“All I know is that the last guy who told me he saw a mask also told me that over the next fifteen years, he regularly saw strange lights in the night over his house. Fifteen years and then he finally disappeared.”
“Did he come back?”
“Eventually,” he replied but he said that in a strange way that he didn’t elaborate upon. Matt didn’t press him hard. He had enough for one bad week without aliens and he just wanted to go home and relax.
Sometime later, in the daylight, he would get more information. Matt hoped it was an exaggeration. Sal did have a tendency to exaggerate some of his stories.
But he didn’t sound like he was exaggerating that time.
As Matt drove home later, he kept the gun in his seat. He found he could not stop looking up through his windows into the sky, especially at stoplights when he was motionless and felt the most vulnerable.
Always, he felt half-expecting to see that saucer up there. “They want you,” his uncle’s voice whispered in his mind.
If something was following him, he did not see it, but he had an uncanny sense, one that was rarely wrong for him, that he was very much being followed. In the jungle, the bayou, or the savannah, his sense of it was rarely wrong, even when he could not detect it in any way. Something, somewhere, was creeping up behind him in the dark once more but only that time, the dark was up in the sky.
It made him nervous enough to check his back seats and made him want to check his trunk to see if an alien was hiding within.
“I’m being paranoid,” he told himself but it didn’t feel like he was being paranoid.
He made his way down Edmonton St in Mid Town, which he never called Central Bartlett Bay, crossed Maplewood, where some of the middle-class and horse districts were, and took another left to go south on Worthington. Then he turned right onto Nathan Boulevard, passing the apartment complex Bartlett was fixing up, and to his family’s house, where he parked his car on the street.
He stepped out of the car and looked up into the sky.
He saw nothing. Nothing but stars.
But it’s up there somewhere, he thought.
Their house was one of the nicer homes in the area. The Merricks were historically found to be somewhere in the middle to upper-middle-class area of wealth. They were members of the Black Elite and still technically had a house in the Elite Circle, although that branch of his family’s last Merrick only had daughters, leaving it in the hands of his cousins, the Conwoods. Their secondary home on Nathan Boulevard had been upgraded over the years to be almost as nice, with the addition of a second floor as one of its many upgrades, although none were as wild as those in Sal’s home.
It was a lovely, beautiful white house and every time he looked at it after his day in the forest, he couldn’t stop comparing it with the shack he spent as John Merrick and his family, easily recalling how he slept on a hard pallet with just a thin blanket while he stared up at the dark brown wooden ceiling.
He parked on the sidewalk, opened the garage, placed his gun on the part of the rack that belonged to him, closed the garage and walked inside. He got about five feet or so beyond the door before he felt his mother’s hands appear out of nowhere, grab him and start shaking him.
“What were you thinking?” she shrieked at him as she shook him back and forth. “What were you thinking?”
Matt lived in fear of only one woman in his life and that was his mother. It came from never knowing exactly how to deal with her because his usual, head right for the center and break what was there method, or just shrugging and saying, “Go fuck yourself,” did not work with the woman who gave him life.
He felt revulsion at even the idea of doing anything remotely like that, so he usually just stood there and let her work out whatever was driving her insane that week until he could have a conversation with her.
When Sally Merrick stopped shaking her son and looked into his face, she saw something, and her lips tightened. “I knew it!” she hissed. She was an athletic older woman with his eyes and skin tone, her hair lovely afro tied back behind her head, wearing her gym clothes, which meant she was rage exercising. She was a professional gymnast as a young woman and though she was never able to go pro and perform at the Olympics as she wanted, she had earned herself a scholarship where she became a doctor, the skills of which she briefly used in the military, where she met her future husband during their tour across the Middle East.
Presently, she worked at the Bartlett Bay Hospital.
She was one of those women who was far more dangerous than she appeared, many believing her too skinny to throw a punch. The family story of Matt’s parents' meeting began with several soldiers getting out of line with her one day out there in the field and his father become love-struck hard the instant he saw her pummel all three grown men into the ground in a fit of berserk rage.
“That’s when I knew she was going to be my wife,” Carl Merrick was fond of saying.
“I knew that forest would try and take my children away from me!” she hissed and then she hugged him tightly.
Matt sighed and she quickly flew back to look in his face. Oops, he thought.
His mother could read him like a book and she very rarely read him wrong. “What is going on in that brain of yours?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“What did you tell Henry?”
“I didn’t tell Henry a thing!” he replied, resisting the urge to swear, and saw Eliza standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She gave him an awkward “I’m sorry,” shrug. Matt frowned at her for a moment, then took the frown off his face, turned back to his mother and added, “I told something to Eliza and he didn’t talk to me at all. If he did, I would have talked him out of the stupid idea he had and, if not that, at least what kind of shoes to wear.”
“People like Henry Fuller in this town,” she told him as if he did not speak. “No one wants to see him hurt. That forest—” she sighed “—you know my best friend lost her son in those woods.”
Of course, he knew. It seemed that she had only told him about it every day of his life since it happened.
Sally’s best friend Nancy had a son who would have been about the same age as Matt’s older brother. On a dare, he went into the woods one morning, the dare being to stick around in the Engelstad for six hours before coming back out before dark. It was a kind of hazing ritual that local kids sometimes still did. The boy brought himself a lunch and a backpack full of extra supplies in case he needed them, including a handgun, which had belonged to his father, just in case.
He was never seen again and it had deeply traumatized his mother. As for Matt’s mother, the knowledge of that incident and the disturbing fact that it was the literal only place on God’s green Earth that terrified her otherwise fearless husband had created a sort of near-trauma level fear of her own.
She took his face in her hands. “Don’t ever go into that forest again!” she whispered. “Promise me!”
“I might have—”
“Don’t you dare tell me that!” she almost screamed. “You will promise me right now!”
“I promise,” he told her but he had a sneaky suspicion that, after what he had seen and with his relation with Bartlett, he wasn’t going to be able to keep that promise.
The Englestad was not yet done with him.