Chapter 23
Vail
My very first memories were of the figure standing over my bed.
I don’t know how old I was, but the light was bright white, and at the same time my vision was cloudy, as if someone had placed a layer of gauze over my eyes. I couldn’t make out details, only shadows. There was just the light and the shape standing there, looking down at me.
I remember being afraid. In the beginning, on the nights the figure came, it didn’t move or speak. I’d open my eyes to the light and see it there, like a bad dream, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t move.
Maybe it was the same shadow every night. Or maybe there was more than one.
After a while, the fear changed into a tired resignation.
Every time I closed my eyes at night, I knew the figure might come, that I might wake frozen in the light, and there was nothing I could do.
There’s nothing kids can ever do about their situations.
There was no point in talking about it, just as there was no point in talking about my parents’ hatred of each other or the fact that no one ever asked me whether I had done my homework, or about the time my father looked at me with a bleary, hungover gaze as if he’d never seen me before and said, “I thought I’d be a Hollywood actor.
What happened to my life?” There was no point talking about anything.
Later, on the bad nights, I’d open my eyes and see the figure moving.
Sometimes the light would shift, as if someone was adjusting a lamp.
There were whispers, words I couldn’t hear, as if there were more of them outside my vision.
They never touched me, only left me frozen in terror before the light went out.
I had periods when they came frequently. Then weeks or months when they never came at all, and I’d think it was over.
One night, when I was eight, I went to bed early because I was getting over a cold. I slept restlessly, and when I woke, the bright light hurt my eyes, my head. I had the gauze over my eyes, but it seemed thinner this time.
There was only one shadowy figure, standing there, looking down at me, perfectly still.
Male or female—it was impossible to tell.
This one was a tall, narrow blur, and though I couldn’t see its face, I knew it was looking at me.
Hostility rolled off of it like a stench.
I was so afraid that I stopped breathing.
It spoke for the first time. A harsh whisper, close, as if right in my ear, though the figure hadn’t bent down. It just stared down at me, and somehow it spoke.
“Wake up,” it said.
Finally, I screamed, and then I jerked awake in my dark bedroom. My pajamas were soaked with cold sweat. No one came into my room to comfort me. Maybe no one had heard. I lay alone for the rest of the night, curled up and silent.
Soon after that night, Ben arrived. My little brother, the only brother I would ever get. From the first, I loved him so hard I could feel it like an ache behind my rib cage. It was a feeling I understood by pure, primal instinct. Ben was mine. He was ours.
We set up his crib, and in my mind I pictured the figures standing over my brother, staring down at him with their cold hatred as his little arms and legs pumped, a helpless and defenseless baby.
I couldn’t stand it. At night I’d sneak into his room after the house was asleep, put my pillow and blanket on the floor, and sleep there.
I was ready to fight them off in a way I had never been able to fight when they came for me.
The figures didn’t come for Ben. When I slept by his crib, they didn’t come for me, either.
When Ben became a toddler, he’d sometimes slip into bed with either Violet, Dodie, or me, snuggling us in his sleep.
I knew he was safe if he was sleeping with one of us.
And when he slept with me, the figures didn’t come.
During the years with Ben, I saw the light only rarely.
And then, a game of hide-and-seek and Ben was gone. Unexplained. Unexplainable.
What was I supposed to think?
I’ll tell you what I thought. What I knew.
They took him. I was supposed to find him that day, but I was too slow, too lax.
I wasn’t on my guard. The figure over my bed had shone its light on him, put the gauze over his eyes.
Wake up, it had said, and my little brother had been afraid just like I had been, and for once I wasn’t there to help him. To protect him.
Ben had disappeared in the middle of the day, so how had they done it?
Why hadn’t any of us seen the light? Why hadn’t I seen it?
If I had seen the light, I would have done anything.
I would have gladly offered myself to whatever they wanted if they would just leave Ben. But they didn’t give me the chance.
After I moved out of this house, I didn’t see the light and the figures anymore. I had plenty of other things to keep me awake at night—like, say, agonizing grief, heavy existential dread mixed with rage, and bleak contemplation of the future. Adulthood is fun.
Eventually, I found some books and looked up my childhood problem. I read about sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and the various types of seizures. Any one of those things would explain what I’d seen as a kid, those nights with the light and the figures over my bed—but they didn’t explain it to me.
I knew what my problem was. It wasn’t sleep paralysis, and it wasn’t seizures. My problem was fucking aliens. They had studied me, found me wanting, and had taken my brother instead. And then they’d left.
So I studied aliens, the way they had studied me.
I could work for VUFOS until I was a hundred, and it would never bring my brother back. I understood that. But my investigations were the only things that made me feel even a little bit better. People said that Violet was the crazy one, but only VUFOS made me feel sane.
When my interview subjects talked about what they saw—descriptions that everyone else in their life had scoffed or laughed at—I understood.
I looked at their bedrooms and their abduction sites with dead seriousness.
I wandered fields in which strange markings had appeared overnight.
I investigated dead cattle. I measured electromagnetic signals and radiation.
I studied flight schedules from nearby airports.
I stayed awake for nighttime vigils, looking for lights in the sky where they’d been reported before.
This was how the world made sense to me, and the aliens who had visited me as a kid stayed away.
They knew I was onto them. When I did sleep at night, it was always in unbroken darkness.
Then I had come back to this house, and the lights had come back, and those old words from my childhood had been written on the wall. WAKE UP.
Those fucking aliens again. But what happened wasn’t right. I was a grown-up now, not a kid, and I had spent years studying a lot of aliens—secondhand accounts, but still—and I knew my business.
The thing in the living room had grabbed me by the throat, which had never happened in my childhood.
I had felt its fingers, which were cold and dead.
It had whispered those old words, but it had sounded different.
I hadn’t been frozen, I hadn’t had the veil over my eyes, and when I aimed the vase at it, I had hit something solid. Then the thing had vanished.
And it had had a rancid, dead smell. A stench.
I’d assumed it was aliens, but I hadn’t been thinking straight in the moment.
That wasn’t how aliens behaved. Not to me, and not in any of the encounters I had studied.
I’d been shunted back to my childhood at first, reacting like that scared little kid, but now I stood in the Thornhills’ house and thought clearly about the evidence.
I’d been running on the theory that the Thornhills might have been abducted, but clearly they hadn’t.
Why had I thought they had? Because it was a habit, the easiest explanation in a mind like mine?
You’re supposed to be an investigator, you idiot, I told myself. So investigate.
Dodie had left, and I’d seen her walk off down the street. She was upset, but that was fine. She’d get over it, and until she did, I would work alone. As I always did.
I left, not bothering to lock the front door behind me, and strode toward home.
The street was silent. A breeze gusted through, scraping some old dead leaves over the pavement and shushing in the trees around the empty Thornhill house and the abandoned house across the street.
This neighborhood was a graveyard, a tomb. The rest of Fell wasn’t much better.
I banged through the front door of our house like I had when I was a teenager, then took the stairs two at a time without taking my boots off.
In my bedroom, the sunlight slanted through the window, illuminating the dust motes in the air.
I yanked at the box of my files and removed the lid.
My fingertips touched Charles Zimmer’s file—the most recent one—and then skimmed past it.
Zimmer would have to wait. I took out a blank file with blank pages in it, a pen.
I closed the box and picked up my camera and tripod.
Subject: Vail Esmie
Age: Thirty-four
Status: Single, never married, no children
Number of encounters: Exact number unknown in previous period (estimated at least twenty); in current period, one
Type of encounter: Home invasion and possible study
First encounter: Unknown, possibly 1959 or 1960? to 1971; current period 1989
In the living room, I stared at the words on the wall. They looked just as strange in daylight, though less frightening. I loaded a fresh roll of film into my camera.
Points of entry: Two doors (front, back), numerous windows
Time of encounters: Night (all)
Communication from entities: Whispered words “Wake up”
Physical encounters with entities: Assault
Missing time: None
Injuries from encounters: None
Other manifestations: Lights, vision effects, smell, writing on wall
Notes: Visitations seem to be connected to one house and have changed in nature between 1971 and 1989.
Current visitations include physical assault (grab to the neck) and whispering.
Visitation has left the bedroom and migrated to the downstairs living room.
Visitors left writing on living room wall, using crayons left on the kitchen table.
Visitation only seen by one resident of the home and not the others, though the others were nearby.
Visitors left by unseen means after the subject hit one with a vase, which broke.
I set up the tripod next to the coffee table and mounted the camera, lining up a perfect shot of the writing on the wall.
I took several pictures of it. A crayon lay on the floor beneath the writing.
I took a picture of that, too. And a picture of the shards of vase where Violet had swept them into a corner.
I stepped back from the camera and looked around, giving the room a critical eye.
Nothing else looked moved or disturbed. How had the thing gotten in, and where had it gone after I hit it?
There was no window in the living room, so where had the light come from?
There was a window in the kitchen, but not in here.
Violet and Dodie had been in the kitchen, but they hadn’t seen the light.
I strode into the kitchen and to the window, studying the dust on the windowsill, then running my fingers along where the window met the pane. Nothing moved or wiggled. The window was locked shut, and the dust was undisturbed.
I circled back to the living room, took the camera from the tripod, and walked out the back door, making a circuit of the house. I saw no footprints in any of the soft earth below the windows. I checked each window, one by one, and found them all firmly locked, undisturbed.
I went back into the house and upstairs. I opened every door, walked into every room, checked every window. I even checked the window in our parents’ bedroom, ignoring its airless emptiness. I checked my own bedroom last, giving it an investigator’s eye for the first time.
The window in this room was, most likely, how they had come in when I was a child. Aliens didn’t need to physically open windows and climb in, but they needed something. A sight line. It was why I hated skylights.
The window in here was undisturbed, too. Locked shut. I had never kept my window open at night as a kid, even when it was hot out. I had been trained too early not to make it easy for them to get in uninvited.
I sat on the bed, dangling the camera between my knees.
The silence of the house pounded in my ears.
I stared out the window, which was at the front of the house, looking across the street to where the empty house was shrouded in trees.
I didn’t see anything move, didn’t get a rush of inspiration. I was thinking too hard.
“Damn it,” I said aloud to no one after a few long minutes. Because even though I wanted to, I couldn’t escape the truth. After years of studying this one subject, I knew the truth too well.
It didn’t add up.
The change of location, the physical touch, the writing on the wall, the rancid smell, the lack of window. It was too inconsistent.
The aliens had finished with me twenty years ago when they took Ben. They weren’t back for me now.
Which meant that what had happened last night wasn’t aliens at all. It was something else.
What was it?
I put the camera down on the bed next to me and dropped my head into my hands, racking my brain. I was out of my depth here, but I knew someone who wouldn’t be. I’d have to call her.
“Damn it,” I said again, and then, because there was no one to stop me, “Fuck it.”
Then I stood up and went downstairs to the kitchen phone.