You Like It Darker

2

In the old days, when Butch and I ran the town dump, we had Picker Tuesday. It was Butch’s idea. (We also had Rat Saturday, but that’s a different story.)

“If they’re gonna pick,” Butch said, “we should give em a day to do it when we can watch out for em and make sure some juicer or pothead doesn’t gash a leg and get gangrene.”

One old alkie who showed up more Tuesdays than not was Rennie Lacasse. He was what Maine folks call a ratchet-jaw, probably even talked in his sleep. Whenever he got talking about the old days, he’d always begin by saying “That pitcher never excaped my memory.”

That’s how I feel about the hunting trip in 1978 that changed our lives. Those pitchers have never excaped my memory.

* * *

We left on November 11th of that year, a Saturday, and the plan was to be back on the 17th or 18th, maybe earlier if one or both of us got our deer. If we did, we’d have plenty of time to get them dressed out at Ordway’s Butcher Shop in Gates Falls. Everyone enjoyed venison at Thanksgiving, especially Mark, who was due home from college on the 1st.

Butch and I clubbed together to buy an Army surplus Willys jeep back in the early fifties. By 1978 she was an old lady, but still perfect for loading up our gear and groceries and bucketing off into the woods. Sheila used to tell me every year that NellyBelle was going to throw a rod or drop her transmission somewhere in the 30-Mile, but she never did. We drove that Willys out there until Butch headed west. Only we didn’t do much hunting after 1978. We even avoided the subject. Although we thought about it, of course. Hard not to. By then I’d sold my first book, and Butch was making money doing comics and graphic novels. Nothing like the money he made later, but a-country fair, as Rennie Lacasse might have said.

I kissed Sheila, Butch gave her a hug, and off we went. Chapel Road took us to Cemetery Road, then to three woods roads, each more overgrown than the last. By then we were deep into the 30-Mile and pretty soon we could hear Jilasi Creek. Some years it wasn’t much more than a chuckle, but that summer and fall we’d had buckets of rain and old Jilasi was roaring.

“I hope the bridge is still there,” Butch said.

It was, but listing a bit to starboard. There was a yellow sign nailed to a stanchion with one word on it: UNSAFE. When the spring runoff came the next year, the bridge washed out entirely. After that you’d have to go twenty miles downstream to cross the Jilasi. Damn near to Bethel.

We didn’t need the sign. It had been years since we’d dared to drive across that bridge, and that day we weren’t sure we even dared walk across it.

“Well,” Butch said, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive twenty miles down Route 119 and then twenty miles back.”

“You’d be pulled over by a cop for sure if you tried,” I said, and slapped the side of the Willys. “NellyBelle hasn’t had an inspection sticker on her since 1964.”

He grabbed his pack and his sleeping bag and walked to the edge of that clattery old wooden bridge. There he stopped and looked back. “You coming?”

“I think I’ll wait and see if you make it across,” I said. “If the bridge goes, I’ll fish you out. And if the current takes you before I can, I’ll wave you goodbye.” I actually didn’t want both of us on it at once. That would have been tempting fate.

Butch started across. I could hear the hollow clonk of his bootheels over the sound of the creek. When he got to the other side he put down his gear, dropped his pants, and mooned me.

As I went across I could feel the bridge trembling like it was alive, and in pain. We went back—one at a time—and got the cartons with our food in them. They were full of things men eat in the woods: Dinty Moore, canned soup, sardines, eggs, bacon, pudding cups, coffee, plenty of Wonder Bread, two sixpacks of beer, and our annual bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Also a couple of T-bone steaks. We were big eaters in those days, although far from healthy ones. On the last trip we brought our rifles and the first aid kit. It was a big one. Both of us were members of the Harlow Volunteer Fire Department, and the EMT first aid training course was a requirement. Sheila insisted we drag the VFD kit with us for our hunting week, because accidents can happen in the woods. Sometimes bad ones.

As we tarped NellyBelle to keep her from filling up with rain, Butch said, “This is the time one of us will go in the drink, you wait and see.”

We didn’t, although that last trip we had to make together, one holding each end of the first aid kit, which weighed thirty pounds and was the size of a footlocker. We talked about leaving it in the jeep, but in the end we didn’t.

On the far side of the bridge there was a little clearing. It would have been a nice place to fish, except the Jilasi ran through Mexico and Rumford before it got to us, and any fish we caught would be toxic because of the runoff from the textile mills. Beyond the clearing was an overgrown path that led a quarter of a mile to our cabin. It was neat enough then, with two bedrooms, a wood-fired cookstove in the kitchen half of the main room, and a composting toilet out back. No electricity, of course, but there was a little pumphouse for water. All a couple of mighty hunters could possibly want.

By the time we got our gear bucked up to the cabin, it was almost dark. I made a meal (Butch was always willing to do his share, but that man would burn water, Sheila used to say) and Butch built a fire in the fireplace. I settled down with a book—there’s nothing like an Agatha Christie when you’re out in the woods—and Butch had a Strathmore drawing pad, which he would fill with cartoons, caricatures, and forest scenes. His Nikon was on the table beside him. Our rifles were propped in the corner, unloaded.

We talked a little, as we always did up there, some about the past and some about our hopes for the future. Those hopes were fading by then—we were in our early middle age—but they always seemed a little more realistic, a little more attainable, out in the woods, where it was always so quiet and life seemed less… busy? That’s not exactly right. Less cluttered. No phones to ring and no fires—literal as well as metaphorical—to put out. I don’t think we ever went into the woods to hunt, not really, although if a deer walked into our sights, who were we to say no? I think we went out there to be our best selves. Well… our honest selves, maybe. I always tried to be my best self with Sheila.

I remember going to bed that night, pulling the covers up to my chin and listening to the wind sigh through the trees. I remember thinking that the fading of hopes and ambitions was mostly painless. That was good, but it was also rather horrible. I wanted to be a writer, but I was beginning to think being a good one was beyond me. If it was, the world would continue to spin. You relaxed your hand… opened your fingers… and something flew away. I remember thinking maybe that’s all right.

Out the window, through the swaying branches, I could see some stars.

That pitcher has never excaped my memory.

* * *

On the 1th we put on our orange vests and orange hats and into the woods we went. In the morning we separated, getting together again for lunch and to compare notes—what we’d seen and what we hadn’t. That first day we met back at the cabin and I made a big pot of pasta with cheese and half a pound of bacon. (I called this Hungarian goulash, but any self-respecting Hungarian would have taken one look and covered his eyes.) That afternoon we hunted together.

The next day we ate a picnic lunch in the clearing, looking across the creek—which was more like a river that day—at NellyBelle. Butch made sandwiches, which he could be trusted to do. There was sweet water from our well to drink, and Hostess Fruit Pies for afters: blueberry for me, apple for Butch.

“Did you see any deer?” Butch asked, licking frosting from his fingers. Well… those fruit pies aren’t exactly frosted, but they have a glaze that’s quite tasty.

“Nope. Not today, not yesterday. But you know what the oldtimers say—the deer know when November comes, and they hide.”

“I actually think that could be true,” Butch said. “They do have a tendency to disappear after Halloween. But what about gunshots? Heard any?”

I thought it over. “A couple yesterday. None today.”

“Are you going to tell me we’re the only hunters in the 30-Mile?”

“Christ, no. The woods between here and Dark Score Lake are probably the best hunting in the county, you know that. I saw a couple of guys this morning not long after I started out, although they didn’t see me. I think one of them might have been that nummie Freddy Skillins. The one who likes to call himself a carpenter.”

He nodded. “I was over on that humpback ridge, and I saw three men on the other side. Dressed like models from L.L.Bean’s and carrying scoped rifles. Just about had to be out-of-staters. And for every one we see, there’s probably five or ten more. There should be plenty of bang-bang, because not all the deer decided to up stakes and head for Canada, did they?”

“Seems unlikely,” I said. “The deer are out there, Butchie.”

“Then why haven’t we seen them? And listen!”

“What am I supposed to be listening f—”

“Just shut up a minute and you’ll hear it. By which I mean you won’t.”

I shut up. I heard the Jilasi roaring away, no doubt undercutting the bridge supports even as we sat there on the grass munching the last of our fruit pies. I heard the far-off drone of an airplane, probably bound for the Portland Jetport. Otherwise, nothing.

I looked at Butch. He was looking at me and not smiling. Solemn.

“No birds,” I said.

“No. And the woods should be full of them.”

Just then a crow gave out a single loud caw.

“There you go,” I said, and actually felt relieved.

“One crow,” he said. “Big deal. Where are the robins?”

“Flown south?”

“Not yet, not all of them. We should be hearing nuthatches and cardinals. Maybe a goldfinch, and chickadees galore. But there’s not even a fucking woodpecker.”

I usually ignore the soundtrack of the woods—you get used to it—but now that he mentioned it, where were the birds? And something else.

“The squirrels,” I said. “They should be running around everywhere, getting ready for winter. I think I’ve seen a couple…” I trailed off because I wasn’t even sure of that.

“It’s aliens,” Butch said in a low, joke-spooky voice. “They could be creeping toward us through the woods right now. With their disintegrator rayguns.”

“You saw that story in the Call,” I said. “The one about the flying saucer.”

“Wasn’t a saucer, it was a cigar,” Butch said. “A flying see-gar.”

“The Tiparillo that came from Planet X,” I said.

“With a lust for Earth women!”

We looked at each other and snickered.

* * *

I had an idea for a story that afternoon—much later it became a novel called The Terrible Generation—and I was making some notes in one of my spiral notebooks that evening. I was trying to think of a good name for the villainous young man at the heart of the story when the cabin door banged open and Butch ran in. “Come here, Lare. You have to see this.” He grabbed his camera.

“See what?”

“Just come!”

I looked at his wide eyes, put aside my notebook, and followed him out the door. While we walked the quarter-mile to the clearing and the creek, he told me he’d come out to check if the bridge’s tilt had increased (we would have heard it if it had collapsed entirely). Then he saw what was in the sky and forgot all about the bridge.

“Look,” he said when we got to the clearing, and pointed up.

It had started to rain, just a gentle mist. It was full dark and I shouldn’t have been able to see the lowering clouds, but I could, because they were lit by slowly moving circles of bright light. Five, then seven, then nine. They were different sizes. The smallest was maybe thirty feet across. The biggest could have been a hundred. They weren’t shining off the clouds, the way a bright spotlight or a powerful flashlight will; they were in the clouds.

“What are they?” I asked, almost whispering.

“I don’t know, but they sure as shit aren’t Tiparillos.”

“Or White Owls,” I said, and we began to laugh. Not the way you do when something is funny; the way you do when you’re absolutely gobsmacked with amazement.

Butch took pictures. This was years before chip technology allowed for instant gratification, but I saw the prints later, after he developed them in his own little darkroom. They were disappointing. Just big circles of light above the dark jig-jags of the treetops. I have seen pictures of UFOs since then (or UAPs, if you prefer), and they are usually disappointing: blurry shapes that could be anything, including the trick photography of hoaxers. You had to be there to understand how wonderful it was, and how weird: great soundless lights moving in the clouds, seeming almost to waltz.

What I remember most clearly—other than a sense of awe—was how divided my mind was during the five or ten minutes it went on. I wanted to see what was making those lights… yet I didn’t. I was afraid, you see, that we were close to artifacts—maybe even intelligent beings—from another world. That exalted me but it also terrified me. Looking back on that first contact (for surely it was that), I think our only two choices were to laugh or to scream. If I’d been alone, I almost certainly would have screamed. And run away, probably to hide under my bed like a child and deny I’d seen anything. Because we were together, and grown men, we laughed.

I say five or ten minutes, but it might have been fifteen. I don’t know. It was long enough for the drizzle to thicken into real rain. Two of the bright circles grew smaller and disappeared. Then two or three more went. The biggest stayed the longest, then it also began to dwindle. It didn’t move from side to side; simply shrank to the size of a plate, then a fifty-cent piece, then a penny, then a brilliant dot… then gone. As if it had shot straight up.

We stood there in the rain, waiting for something else to happen. Nothing did. After a little while Butch grabbed my shoulder. I gave a squawk.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. “Let’s go in. Lightshow’s over and we’re getting soaked.”

That was what we did. I hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket, so I built up the fire, which had been down to coals, and stripped off my wet shirt. I was rubbing my arms and shivering.

“We can tell people what we saw, but they won’t believe it,” Butch said. “Or they’ll shrug and say it was some crazy weather phenomenon.”

“Maybe it was. Or… how far away is the Castle Rock Airport?”

He shrugged. “Has to be twenty or thirty miles east of here.”

“The runway lights… maybe with the clouds… the moisture… it could, you know… some prismatic effect…”

He was sitting on the couch, camera in his lap, looking at me. Smiling just a little. Saying nothing. He didn’t have to.

“That’s bullshit, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes. I don’t know what that was, but it wasn’t lights from the airport and it wasn’t a fucking weather balloon. There were eight or ten of those things, maybe a dozen, and they were big.”

“There are other hunters in the woods. I saw Freddy Skillins and you saw three guys who were probably flatlanders. They could have seen it.”

“Maybe they did, but I doubt it. I just happened to be in the right place—that clearing on the edge of the creek—at the right time. In any case, it’s over. I’m going to bed.”

* * *

It rained all the next day—the 14th, that would have been. Neither of us wanted to go out and get soaked looking for deer we probably wouldn’t find. I read and worked a little bit on the idea for my story. I kept trying to come up with a good name for the bad kid and didn’t have any luck—maybe because I didn’t have a clear fix on why the bad kid was bad. Butch spent most of the morning with his pad. He drew three different pictures of the lights in the clouds, then gave up in disgust.

“I hope the photos come out, because these suck,” he said.

I looked them over and told him they were good, but they weren’t. They didn’t suck, but they didn’t convey the strangeness of what we’d seen. The enormity.

I looked at all the crossed-out names of my proposed bad guy. Trig Adams. No. Vic Ellenby. No. Jack Claggart. Too on-the-nose. Carter Cantwell. Oh, puke. The story I had in mind seemed amorphous: I had an idea but no specifics. Nothing to hold onto. It reminded me of what we’d seen the previous night. Something was there, but it was impossible to tell what, because it was in the clouds.

“What are you doing?” Butch asked me.

“Fucking off. I think I’ll take a nap.”

“What about lunch?”

“Don’t want any.”

He considered this, then looked out the window at the steady rain. Nothing is colder than cold November rain. It crossed my mind that someone should write a song about it… and eventually, someone did.

“A nap sounds like just the ticket,” Butch said. He put his pad aside and stood up. “Tell you something, Lare. I’m going to draw all my life, but I’ll never be an artist.”

* * *

The rain stopped around four o’clock that afternoon. By six the clouds had unraveled and we could see stars and a sliver of moon—God’s fingernail, the oldtimers say. We ate our steaks for dinner (along with plenty of Wonder Bread to sop up the juice), then went out to the clearing. We didn’t talk about it, just went. We stood there for maybe half an hour, craning our necks. There were no lights, no saucers, no flying cigars. We went back inside, Butch found a pack of Bicycles in the living room cabinet, and we played cribbage until almost ten o’clock.

“I can hear the Jilasi even in here,” I said as we finished the last hand.

“I know. That rain didn’t do the bridge any help. Why is there a fucking bridge there, anyway? Did you ever ask yourself that?”

“I think someone had an idea for a development back in the sixties. Or pulpers. They must have clear-cut these woods back before World War I.”

“What would you think about hunting one more day and going back?”

I had an idea he was thinking of more than going home, most likely empty-handed. Seeing those lights in the clouds had done something to him. Could have done something to both of us. I’m not going to call it a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s just that maybe you see something, lights in the sky or a certain shadow at a certain time of day, how it lies across your path. You take it as a sign and decide to move along. You say to yourself that when I was a child I spoke as a child, understood as a child, thought as a child, but there comes a time to put away childish things.

Or it could have been nothing.

“Lare?”

“Sure. One more day, then we go back. I have to clean the gutters before the snow flies, and I keep putting it off.”

* * *

The next day was cool and clear and perfect for hunting, but neither of us saw so much as a single flick of a single whitetail. I heard no birdsong, just the occasional crow-call. I kept an eye out for squirrels, but didn’t see any. I didn’t even see a chipmunk, and the woods should have been full of their scurry. I heard some gunshots, but they were far away, near the lake, and hunters shooting didn’t mean they were shooting at deer. Sometimes guys get bored and just want to let off a round or two, especially if they’ve decided there’s no game to scare away.

We met back at the cabin for lunch, then went out together. We no longer expected to see deer, and we didn’t, but it was a fine day to be outdoors. We walked along the creek for a mile or so, then sat on a fallen log and opened cans of Bud.

“This just isn’t natural,” Butch said, “and I don’t care for it much. I’d say drive out this afternoon, but by the time we got loaded up it’d be dark, and I don’t trust NellyBelle’s headlights on those woods roads.”

A sudden breeze kicked up, rattling leaves off the trees. The sound made me startle and look over my shoulder. Butch did, too. Then we looked at each other and laughed.

“Jumpy much?” I asked.

“Just a little. Remember when we went in the old Spier place on a dare? 1946 or so, wasn’t it?”

I remembered. Old Man Spier came back from Okinawa missing an eye and blew his head off in his parlor with a shotgun. It was the talk of the town.

“The house was supposed to be haunted,” I said. “We were… what? Thirteen?”

“I guess. We went in and picked up some stuff to show our friends we’d been there.”

“I got a picture. Some old landscape I grabbed off the wall. What’d you get?”

“A fucking sofa cushion,” he said, and laughed. “Talk about stupid! I thought of the Spier house because the way I felt then is how I feel now. No deer, no birds, no squirrels. Maybe that house wasn’t haunted, but these woods…” He shrugged and drank some of his beer.

“We could leave today. Those headlights will probably be okay.”

“Nope. Tomorrow. We’ll pack up tonight, go to bed early, and leave at first light. If it suits you.”

“Suits me fine.”

Things would have been very different for us if we’d trusted NellyBelle’s headlights. Sometimes I think we did. Sometimes I think there’s a Shadow Laird and a Shadow Butch who led shadow lives. Shadow Butch never went to Seattle. Shadow Laird never wrote a novel, let alone a dozen of them. Those shadows were decent men who lived unremarkable Harlow lives. They ran the dump, they owned a hauling company, they did the town’s business the way it should be done—which means so the books balance at Town Meeting in March and there’s less bitching from mossbacks who’d be happy to bring back the Poor Farm. Shadow Butch got married to some girl he met in a Lewiston bop joint and had a litter of shadow young’uns.

I tell myself now it was good none of that happened. Butch told himself the same thing. I know, because we told each other when we talked on the phone or, later, via Skype or FaceTime. It was all good. Of course it was. We became famous. We became rich. Our dreams came true. Nothing wrong with those things, and if I ever have doubts about the shape of my life, doesn’t everybody?

Don’t you?

* * *

That night Butch threw a bunch of leftovers into a pot and called the result stew. We ate it with Wonder Bread and washed it down with well-water, which was really the best part of the meal.

“I’ll never let you cook again,” I told Butch as we did our few dishes.

“After that mess, I’ll hold you to it,” he said.

We packed up what we had and put it by the door. Butch dealt the big first aid kit a sideways kick with one sneaker. “Why do we always bring this thing?”

“Because Sheila insists. She’s convinced one of us is going to fall in a sinkhole and break a leg or one of us will get shot. Probably by a flatlander with a scoped rifle.”

“Bullshit. I think she’s just superstitious. Believes the one time we don’t haul it out here is the one time we’d need it. You want to go take another look?”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Might as well.”

We went down to the clearing to look at the sky.

* * *

There were no lights up there, but there was something on the bridge. Or rather, someone. A woman, lying facedown on the planks.

“What the fuck?” Butch said, and ran onto the bridge. I followed. I didn’t like the idea of three of us on it at the same time, and close together, but we weren’t going to leave her lying there unconscious, maybe even dead. She had long black hair. It was a breezy night and I noticed that when the wind gusted her hair blew in a clump, as if the strands had been glued together. There were no gauzy flyaways, just that clump.

“Grab her feet,” Butch said. “We have to get her off before the fucking bridge falls into the fucking creek.” He was right. I could hear the supports groaning and the Jilasi thundering, in full spate thanks to all the rain.

I got her feet. She was wearing boots and corduroy pants, and there was something funny about them, too. But it was dark and I was scared and all I wanted right then was some solid ground under my feet. Butch lifted her by the shoulders and gave a cry of disgust.

“What?” I asked.

“Ne’mind, come on, hurry!”

We got her off the bridge and into the clearing. Only sixty feet, but it seemed to take forever.

“Put her down, put her down. Jesus! Jesus Christ!”

Butch dropped the top half of her and she face-planted, but he paid no attention. He crossed his arms and started rubbing his hands in his armpits, as if to get rid of something nasty.

I started to put her legs down and froze, not able to believe what I thought I was seeing. My fingers appeared to have sunk into her boots, as if they were made of clay instead of leather. I pulled free and stared stupidly at the marks of my fingers as they smoothed out. “My God!”

“It’s like… fuck, like she’s made out of Play-Doh, or something.”

“Butch.”

“What? For Chrissakes, what?”

“Her clothes aren’t clothes. It’s like… body-paint. Or camouflage. Or some damn thing.”

He bent toward her. “It’s too dark. Have you got—?”

“A flashlight? No. Didn’t bring it. Her hair—”

I touched it, then pulled away. It wasn’t hair. It was something solid but pliable. Not a wig, more like a carving. I didn’t know what it was.

“Is she dead?” I asked. “She is, isn’t sh—”

But just then the woman took a long, rasping breath. One of her legs twitched.

“Help me turn her over,” Butch said.

I took one of her legs, trying to ignore that weird pliability. A thought—Gumby—shot through my head like a meteor and was gone. Butch grabbed her shoulder. We rolled her. Even in the dark we could see she was young, pretty, and ghastly white. We could see something else, as well. It was the face of a department store mannequin, smooth and unlined. The eyes were shut. Only her lids had color; they looked bruised.

This is not a human being, I thought.

She took another rasping breath. It seemed to catch in her throat as if on hooks, when she exhaled. She didn’t take another one.

I think I would have stayed where I was, frozen, and let her die. It was Butch who saved her. He dropped to his knees, used two fingers to yank down her jaw, and put his mouth on hers. He pinched her nose shut and breathed into her. Her chest rose. Butch turned his head to one side, spat, and took another deep breath. He blew into her again and her chest rose again. He lifted his head and stared at me, bug-eyed. “It’s like kissing plastic,” he said, then did it again.

While he was bent over her, the woman’s eyes opened. She looked at me through the bristles of Butch’s buzzcut. When Butch pulled back she took another of those rasping, guttural breaths.

“The kit,” Butch said. “EpiPen. Inogen, too. Hurry! Fucking run!”

I swayed on my feet and for a moment thought I was going to faint. I slapped myself to clear my head, then ran for the cabin. She, it, whatever it is, will be dead when I get back, I thought (I told you, none of this ever excaped my memory). That’s probably good.

The first aid kit was just inside the door, with our packs on top of it. I shoved them aside and opened it. There were two fold-out drawers. Three EpiPens in the top one. I took two of them and rammed the drawers shut, pinching my right index finger in the process. That nail turned black and fell off, but at the time I didn’t even feel it. My head was throbbing. I felt like I had a fever.

The Inogen oxygen bottle with the attached mask and the controller was in the bottom, along with flares, rolls of bandage, gauze pads, a plastic splint, an ankle brace, various tubes and ointments. There was also a Penlite. I took that as well and sprinted back down the path with the light swinging back and forth in front of me.

Butch was still on his knees. The woman was still giving intermittent gasps for breath. Her eyes were still open. As I dropped to my knees beside Butch, she stopped breathing again.

He bent, sealed his mouth over hers, and pushed breath into her. Raised his head and said, “Thigh, thigh!”

“I know, I took the course.”

“Then do it!”

He gulped another breath and went at her again. I popped the cap on the Epi, put it against her thigh—it looked like corduroy pants but it wasn’t, it was her thigh—and listened for the click. Then I counted to ten. At five she gave a hard jerk.

“Hold on, Lare, hold it!”

“I’m holding it. Do you think I should use the other one?”

“Save it, she’s breathing again. Whatever she is. Christ, the taste of her is so weird. Like one of those see-through slipcovers you put on furniture. Have you got the oxygen?”

“Right here.”

I gave him the mask and bottle. He held the mask over her mouth and nose. I hit the power switch on the controller and saw the green light. “High flow?”

“Yeah, yeah, shoot the works.” I saw a drop of sweat from his forehead hit the plastic mask and run down the side like a tear.

I pushed the slider all the way to HIGH FLOW. Oxygen began to hiss. On high, the oxy would last for no more than five minutes. And while there were backups of almost everything in the kit (there was a reason it was so heavy), this was the only Inogen. We stared at each other across her.

“This is not a human being,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, maybe some top secret cyborg, but it’s not human.”

“It’s not a cyborg.”

He jerked his thumb at the sky.

* * *

When the oxy ran out, Butch removed the mask and she—might as well call her that—kept breathing on her own. The rasp quieted. I shone the light on her face and she closed her eyes against the glare.

“Look,” I said. “Look at her face, Butchie.”

He looked, then looked at me. “It’s different now.”

“It’s more human now, is what you mean. And look at her clothes. They look better, too. More… jeepers, more realistic.”

“What do we do with her?”

I snapped off the light. Her eyes opened. I said, “Do you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Who are you?”

She closed her eyes. I shook her shoulder, and my fingers no longer sank in.

“What are you?”

Nothing. I looked at Butch.

“Let’s take her to the cabin,” he said. “I’ll carry her. Keep that other EpiPen ready if she starts to choke and rasp for breath again.”

He got her in his arms. I helped him to his feet, but he carried her easily enough once he was upright. Her dark hair hung down, and when the breeze gusted, it blew the way normal hair does. The clumping was gone.

I had left the cabin door open. He carried her in, put her on the sofa, then bent over with his hands on his knees, getting his breath back. “I want my camera. It’s in my pack. Will you get it?”

I found it wrapped in a couple of tee-shirts and gave it to him. The woman—now she almost did look like a woman—was looking up at him. Her eyes were a washed-out blue, like the knees of old denim pants.

“Smile pretty,” Butch said.

She didn’t smile. He took her picture anyway.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

No response.

Butch took another picture. I leaned forward and put my hand on her neck. I thought she might pull away, but she didn’t. It looked like skin (unless you looked closely), but it didn’t quite feel like skin. I held my hand there for maybe twenty seconds, then took it away. “She has no pulse.”

“No?” He didn’t sound surprised and I didn’t feel surprised. We were in shock, our processing equipment overloaded.

Butch tried to slide his hand into the right front pocket of her corduroy pants and couldn’t. “Not a real pocket,” he said. “None of it is. It’s like… a costume. I think she’s a costume.”

“What do we do with her, Butch?”

“Fucked if I know.”

“Call the police?”

He lifted his hands and then dropped them, a very un-Butchlike gesture of indecision. “The closest phone is Brownie’s Store. That’s miles from here. And Brownie closes at seven. I’d have to carry her across the bridge to the jeep…”

“I’d take a turn.” I said this stoutly enough, but I kept thinking of how my fingers had sunk into what looked like boots and weren’t.

“It would mean testing the bridge again,” he said. “As for moving her, she’s stable now, but… what? What are you smiling about?”

I gestured to the woman—what looked like a woman—on the couch. “She has no pulse, Butchie. She’s clinically dead. You can’t get much more stable than that.”

“But she’s breathing! And she’s…” He checked to make sure. “She’s looking at us. Listen, Laird—are you prepared to be on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story on every TV station not just in Maine or the U.S., but in the whole round world? Because if we take her out, that’s what it’ll come to. She’s an alien. She came from outer fucking space. And not with a lust for Earth women, either.”

“Unless she’s a lesbian,” I said. “Then she might, you know, lust for Earth women.”

We started laughing the way you do when you’re trying not to go crazy. She was still looking at us. No smile, no frown, no expression of any kind. A woman who wasn’t a woman, who had no pulse but was breathing, who was wearing clothes that weren’t clothes but looked more like clothes all the time. I had an idea that if Butch tried her pocket now, his hand would go in. He might even find some change or a half-used roll of Life Savers.

“Why did she end up on the bridge? What do you suppose happened to her?”

“I don’t know. I think—”

I never heard what he thought. That was when light flooded in the east-facing window of our cabin’s main room. Thoughts came to me, knocking each other over like dominoes. The first was that time had slipped somehow and the sun was coming up. The second was that sunrise was never that bright in our cabin, because there were too many trees on that side. My third was that some government organization had come for the woman and those were searchlights. The fourth was that someone had come for her, all right… but it wasn’t the government.

The light grew brighter still. Butch squinted and raised a hand to shield his eyes. I did the same. I wondered if we were taking a hard dose of radioactivity. Just before the room grew so bright that my vision whited out, I looked at the woman on the couch. Remember me saying that, like old Rennie Lacasse, these pitchers never excaped my memory? There’s one exception to that. I can’t remember what I saw when I looked at her in that awful brilliance. Or maybe I blocked it out. Either way, I don’t think I was looking at her at all. I think I was looking into her. As to what I saw, I can remember thinking just one word: ganglia.

I covered my eyes. No good. The light shone straight through my hands and through my closed lids. There was no heat, but it was going to burn my brains to a cinder just the same. I heard Butch scream. That was when I lost consciousness, and I was glad to go.

* * *

When I came to, the awful brilliance was gone. So was the woman. Sitting on the couch where she’d been was a young man—maybe thirty, probably younger—with neatly combed blond hair, the part as straight as a ruler. He was wearing khaki pants and a quilted vest. A small shoulder bag hung at his side from a strap across his chest. My first thought was he was an out-of-state hunter, a flatlander with ammo in his bag and a scoped rifle nearby.

Probably not was my second one.

We had half a dozen battery-powered lamps and he’d turned them all on. They gave plenty of light, but nothing like that unearthly (literally) glare that had invaded our cabin earlier. How much earlier was a question I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure it was the same night. I looked at my watch but it had stopped.

Butch sat up, looked around, saw me, saw the newcomer. He asked a question that was both mad and—under the circumstances—completely logical. “Are you her?”

“No,” the young man said. “That one is gone.”

I tried for my feet and made it okay. I didn’t feel hungover or dazed. If anything, invigorated. And while I’d seen a dozen movies about evil invaders from space, I didn’t feel that this young man meant us any harm. Nor did I believe he was actually a young man any more than the woman from the bridge had been a young woman.

There was a pitcher of water and three leftover cans of beer in our little coldbox. I debated and took a beer.

“Give me one,” Butch said.

I tossed it and he caught it one-handed. “What about you, sir?” I asked.

“Why not?”

I gave him the last can. Our visitor looked normal—like any young man on a hunting trip with his friends or his dad—but I was still careful not to touch his fingers. I can write what happened, but as to how I felt… much more complicated. All I can do is reiterate that I didn’t feel threatened, and later on Butch said the same. Of course we were in shock.

“You’re not human, are you?” Butch said.

The young man opened his beer. “No.”

“But you’re in better shape than she was.”

“That one was badly hurt. You saved her life. I think it was what you call ‘luck.’ You could just as easily have injected her with something that would have killed her.”

“But the EpiPen worked,” I said.

“Is that what you call it? Epi? EpiPen?”

“Short for epinephrine. So I guess it was an allergy that knocked her down.”

“Could have been a bee sting,” Butch said, and shrugged. “Do you know what bees are?”

“Yes. You also gave her your breath. That was the actual saving. Breath is life. More than life.”

“I did what we were taught. Laird would have done the same.”

I like to think that was true.

The young man took a sip of beer. “May I take the can when I go?”

Butch sat on the arm of one of our two old easy chairs. “Well, old man, you’ll be robbing me of the nickel deposit, but under the circumstances, sure. Only because you’re from another planet, you understand.”

Our visitor smiled the way people do when they understand it’s a joke but don’t get the point of it. He had no accent, certainly not a Downeast twang, but I got the clear sense of a man who was speaking a learned language. He opened his bag. There was no zipper. He just ran his finger down its length and it opened. He popped the Bud can inside.

“Most people wouldn’t have done what you did. Most would have run away.”

Butch shrugged. “Instinct. And a little training, I guess. Laird and me are in the local volunteer fire department. Do you get that?”

“You halt combustion before it can spread.”

“I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

The young man dipped into his bag and brought out something that looked like a spectacle case. It was gray, with a silver shape like a sine wave embossed on the lid. He held it in his lap. He repeated, “Most people wouldn’t have done what you did. We owe you. For Ylla.”

I knew that name, and although he pronounced it Yella, I knew the correct spelling. And I could see by his eyes that he knew I knew.

“That’s from The Martian Chronicles. But you’re not from Mars, sir, are you?”

He smiled. “Not at all. Nor are we here because we lust for Earth women.”

Butch put his beer down carefully, as if a hard bump might shatter the can. “You’re reading our minds.”

“Sometimes. Not always. It’s like this.” With one finger he traced the wave shape on the gray case. “Thoughts don’t matter to us. They come, they pass, they are replaced by others. Ephemera. We are more interested in the engine that drives them. To intelligent creatures that is what’s… central? Powerful? Meaningful? I don’t know the correct word. Perhaps you don’t have one.”

“Primal?” I said.

He nodded, smiled, and sipped his beer. “Yes. Primal. Good.”

“Where do you come from?” Butch asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you come?”

“That’s a more interesting question, and because you saved Ylla, I will answer it. We gather.”

“Gather what?” I asked, and thought of stories I’d read (and seen on TV) about aliens kidnapping folks and sticking probes up their asses. “People?”

“No. Other things. Items. But not like this.” He reached into his bag and showed us his empty beer can. “This is special to me and means nothing. There’s a good word for it, perhaps French. A venir?”

“Souvenir,” I said.

“Yes. It is my souvenir of this remarkable night. We visit yard sales.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“They are called different things in different places. In Italy, vendita in cantiere. Samoan, fanua fa’tau. We take some of these things to remember, some to study. We have film of your Kennedy’s death from rifleshot. We have an autographed picture of Juhjudi.”

“Wait.” Butch was frowning. “Are you talking about Judge Judy?”

“Yes, Juhjudi. We have a picture of Emmett Till, a young man with his face gone. Mickey Mouse and his Club. We have a jet engine. That came from a repository of discarded objects.”

They’re dump pickers, I thought. Not much different from Rennie Lacasse.

“We take these things to remember your world, which will be gone soon. We do the same on other worlds, but there aren’t many. The universe is cold. Intelligent life is rare.”

I didn’t care how rare it was. “How soon will ours be gone? Do you know, or are you only guessing?” And before he could reply: “You can’t know. Not for sure.”

“It may be what you call a century, if you are, as you say, ‘lucky.’ Which is only an eyeblink in the sweep of time.”

“I don’t believe that,” Butch said flatly. “We’ve got our problems, but we’re not suicidal.” Then, perhaps thinking of Buddhist monks who had been setting themselves on fire in Vietnam not so long ago: “Not most of us.”

“It’s inevitable,” the young man said. He looked regretful. Maybe he was thinking of the Mona Lisa, or the pyramids. Or maybe just of no more beer cans, no more autographed pictures of Juhjudi. “When intelligence outraces emotional stability, it’s always just a matter of time.” He pointed to the corner of the cabin. “You’re children, playing with weapons.” He stood up. “I must go. This is for you. A gift. Our way of saying thank you for saving Ylla.”

He held out the gray case. Butch took it and looked it over. “I don’t see how to open it.”

I took it. He was right. There was no hinge and no lid.

“Breathe on the wave,” the young man said. “Not now, after I’ve gone. We give you a key of breath because you gave Ylla yours. You gave her part of your life.”

“This is for both of us?” I asked. Only Butch had given the woman mouth-to-mouth, after all.

“Yes.”

“What does it actually do?”

“There is no word for what it does except primal. A way to use what you are not using, because of…” He bent forward, brow furrowed, then looked up. “Because of the noise in your lives. Because of your thoughts. Thoughts are pointless. Worse, dangerous.”

I was bemused. “Does it grant wishes? Like in a fairy tale?”

He laughed, then looked surprised… as if he hadn’t known he could laugh. “Nothing can give you what isn’t already there. This is axiomatic.”

He went to the door, then looked back.

“I’m sorry for you. Your world is a living breath in a universe that is mostly filled with deadlights.”

He left. I waited for the light to flood in, but it didn’t. Except for the gray case Butch was now holding, the whole interlude might never have occurred.

“Lare, did that actually happen?”

I pointed to the case.

He smiled, the reckless one that went right back to when we were kids, racing up and down the Suicide Stairs in Castle Rock, feeling them shake beneath our pounding sneakers. “Want to try it?”

“There’s an old saying, beware of Greeks bearing gifts…”

“Yeah, but?”

“What the hell, I’m game. Blow your precious primal breath, Butchie.”

He smiled, shook his head, and held the case out. “After you. And if it kills you I promise to take care of Sheila and Mark.”

“Mark’s almost old enough to take care of himself,” I said. “Okay, open sesame.”

I blew gently on the wave. The case opened. It was empty. But when I breathed in, I caught a faint whiff of peppermint. I think that was it.

The case closed by itself. There was no line where the lid met the body, and indeed no hinges. It looked completely solid.

“Nothing?” Butch said.

“Nothing. You try.” I held it out to him.

He took it and breathed gently on the wave. The case popped open. He bent down, took a timid sniff, then a deep breath. The case shut. “Wintergreen?”

“I thought peppermint, but I guess they’re about the same.”

“So much for Greeks bearing gifts,” he said. “Lare… it wasn’t some kind of a hoax, was it? You know, like some girl and some guy pretending to be… you know, a trick…” He stopped. “No, huh?”

“No.”

He put the gray case on the end table next to his drawing pad. “What are you going to tell Sheila?”

“Nothing, I guess. I’d prefer it if my wife didn’t think I’ve gone crazy.”

He laughed. “Good luck with that. She can read you like a book.”

He was right, of course. And when Sheila pushed—which she did—I told her no, we hadn’t gotten lost, we’d had a close call in the woods. Some hunter had fired at what he thought was a deer and the bullet went between us. We never saw who it was, I told her… and when she asked Butch, he backed me up. He said it had probably been some out-of-state flatlander. Butch had seen a couple, so that much was true.

Butch yawned. “I’m going to bed.”

“You can sleep?” Then I yawned, too. “What time is it, anyway?”

Butch looked at his watch and shook his head. “Stopped. Yours?”

“Yes, and…” I yawned again. “… it’s a wind-up. Should be fine, but it’s not.”

“Lare? What we breathed in… I think it was some kind of sedative. What if it’s poisonous?”

“Then we’ll die,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

That was what we did.

I had a dream of fire.

* * *

It was full daylight when I woke up. Butch was in the kitchen part of the main room. The coffee pot was on the stove, huffing away. He asked how I felt.

“Okay,” I said. “You?”

“Fine as paint… whatever that means. Coffee?”

“Yes. Then we ought to go see if the bridge is still there. If it is, we’ll get going. Show up earlier than planned.”

“Which we do some years anyway,” he said, and poured. Black coffee, rich and strong. Just the thing after an encounter with creatures from another world. By daylight it all should have seemed hallucinatory, but it didn’t. Not to me, and when I asked Butch, he said the same.

The Wonder Bread was gone, but there were a couple of fruit pies left. I imagined Sheila shaking her head and saying that only men in the woods would eat Hostess Fruit Pies for breakfast.

“Good,” Butch said, munching.

“Yes. Excellent. Did you have dreams from that stuff we breathed in, Butchie?”

“Nope.” He considered. “At least not that I remember. But look at this.”

He picked up his pad and flipped past the pictures he’d drawn during our evenings—the usual sketches and caricatures, including one of me with a big grin on my balloon head, flipping flapjacks in a skillet. Near the back he stopped and held the pad up to me. It was our young visitor from the previous night: blond hair, vest, khaki pants, shoulder bag. It was no caricature; it was that man (might as well call him that) to the life… with one exception. Butch had filled his eyes with stars.

“Holy shit, that’s terrific,” I said. “How long have you been up, anyway?”

“About an hour. I did that in twenty minutes. I just knew what to do. Like it was already there. Never changed a single line. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I agreed.

I thought of telling him I’d dreamed about a burning barn. It had been incredibly vivid. I had tried several different ways to get into a story about a freak storm I’d been playing with for quite awhile. Years, actually; it had originally occurred to me when I’d been about the age my son was now. I’d try this character, then that character, then some overview of the town where I wanted to set the thing; once I even tried kicking things off with a weather bulletin.

Nothing worked. I felt like a guy trying to open a safe when he’s forgotten the combination. Then, this morning, courtesy of my dream, I saw a bolt of lightning hitting a barn. I saw the weathervane—a rooster—turn red with the heat as fingers of fire spread down the barn’s roof. I thought everything else would follow. No; I knew it.

I picked up the thing that looked like a spectacle case from where we’d left it the previous night and tossed it from hand to hand. “This did it,” I said, then tossed it to Butch.

He caught it and said, “Sure. What else?”

* * *

All that was over forty years ago, but the passage of time has never caused me to believe my recollection of that night is faulty. Doubt has never crept in and the pitchers have never excaped my memory.

Butch remembered it as well as I did: Ylla, the light, passing out, the young man, the spectacle case. That case, so far as I know, is still in the cabin. We went out there a few more Novembers before Butch headed west, and each took a turn blowing on the embossed wave, but the case never opened for us again. Nor will it open for anyone else, I’m sure. Unless someone has stolen it—and why would they?—it’s still on the mantel of the fireplace, where Butch put it the last time we were there.

The final thing Butch said to me before we left the cabin that day was that he didn’t want to draw in his pad anymore, at least not for awhile. “I want to paint,” he said. “I have a thousand ideas.”

I had only one—the burning barn that became the first scene in The Lightning Storm—but I felt sure others would follow. The door was open. All I had to do was walk through it.

* * *

Sometimes I’m haunted by the idea that I’m a fake. Before he died, Butch said the same in several interviews.

Is that surprising? I don’t think so. We were one thing when we went into the woods in the fall of 1978; we were something else ever after. We became what we became. I suppose the question has to do with talent—was it in us, or was it something given to us like a box of candy, because we saved Ylla’s life? Could we be proud of what we accomplished, kind of a lifting-up-by-the-bootstraps deal, or were we just a pair of poseurs, taking credit for what we never would have had if not for that night?

What the fuck is talent, anyway? I ask myself that question sometimes while I’m shaving, or—in the old book-promotion days—while waiting to go on television and sell my latest glut of make-believe, or when I’m watering my late wife’s daylilies. Especially then. What is it, really? Why would I be chosen when so many others try so hard and would give anything to be chosen? Why are there so few at the top of the pyramid? Talent is supposed to be the answer, but where does it come from and how does it grow? Why does it grow?

Well, I tell myself, we call it a gift and we call ourselves gifted, but gifts are never really earned, are they? Only given. Talent is grace made visible.

The young man said nothing can give you what isn’t already there. This is axiomatic. I hold onto that.

Of course, he also said he felt sorry for us.