"Listen. Where are you? You got there somehow. You must remember."
"Remember? No. l just remember turnin' on the radio and rockin' to the music. It was the only thing that made the pain seem even-like. I don't understand. I'm sweatin' all over. It must be the fever."
"The room sounds like it's in a . . . motel, is that right!"
"I don't live in no motel. I got a home. Had one. I can go back. If I can just get over feelin'
sick like this, I can go back."
"Of course you can."
"I'm so glad you said that. I was listening and I heard you talking and you sounded so calm. I knew you'd say I could go home, just as soon as I get out of this X-Files scene."
"X-Files? Like the TV show? What makes you think of that?"
"I don't know. Mulder's always waking up somewhere weird and someone weird brought him there and his sister doesn't remember. Do you think I could he Mulder's sister? I don't remember my family much, except for yelling and screaming. I don't want them to yell and scream anymore, maybe that's why I'm doing it now--"
"No, you're talking now. You're talking to me, Mr. Midnight. On the radio. Remember?"
"Oh, yeah. I dialed the number. Even the phone works here. I think a man helped me. A man brought me here. Cigarette-smoking man. I don't think that's good. Cigarette-smoking. It's not good for you."
"But he's gone, the man?"
"Uh, yeah. I'm alone. All alone. Except . . . l think the aliens are with me. That's why it hurts so much, like Im tearing apart."
Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Leticia's hand chop down through the air. Relief surged through him as he realized they were off the air, that a commercial or a song was waiting out to the world, not his voice and hers.
Leticia was hissing directions into her mike, then glaring at him while her luscious fuchsia lips mouthed words he could hardly make out.
Where? they pantomimed. Find out where!
Where? He was just beginning to comprehend what.
"Breathe deep," he advised the caller, "and if it hurts, short and Shallow."
"Oh, it hurts. It hurts!"
During the commercial break her shouts grew into shrieks.
He'cl never seen, heard a woman giving birth before. He'd read a bit on natural childbirth.
He was aware of activity around him. He was aware of unthought-of activity over the phone line. But he was basically lost in the umbilical cord of communication that connected him and the woman, the girl in the nameless room.
She was panting now, silent.
"How are you?"
"All right."
"Not so much pain?"
"No."
"And what else?"
"I know it's aliens now." Her voice was strangely removed. Remote. Alien.
"How?"
"There's one in the room with me."
He was speechless.
"It's slimy. Aren't aliens supposed to be slimy? And small?"
"No. That doesn't sound like an alien."
"I know it is. It hurt me, like a needle in the navel. I've got to get rid of it! Before it . . . gets me. I've got to, to . . . tell me what to do, Mr. Midnight."
"First, you must remember where you are. Tell me where you are and I can send help." Leticia was nodding frantically.
Matt glanced at the console through the glass window and saw a Christmas tree of lit red and green lights. They weren't off the air! He wanted to shout at Leticia, the sound man, condemn them as ghouls, but it would disturb an already too-disturbed girl.
His hands strangled the mike stand as if it were a mechanical throat.
"I know," she was saying. "I've got to . . . drown it. Kill it. It's an alien. There's slime all over it."
"No. That's just an illusion. Remember when Mulder was slimed? You've got to brush it away and then you'll see it's not an alien."
"It's so icky! So stringy. And . . . yes, there's a face in there but it's unshapen. It's trying to scream. I've got to stop it, because the other aliens will hear and they'll know where l am and they'll come in and slime me and take me away in a ship. I'll be locked up where the bad girls are."
"No, no you won't. Listen, you're on a phone. There's a . . . secret code on a label. Numbers.
Read me the numbers."
"Yeah. You're right. Maybe you are right. Do you know what these numbers mean?"
"I do, and if you give me them. I'll get them to Agent Mulder."
"Not Scully. She doesn't believe. She's a doctor. She'd lock me up. With this alien-thing, attached to me like a leech. It's not part of me, it's not!"
"No, but you don't want to . . . destroy the evidence that will help Mulder, do you? The evidence that will help me. I really need those numbers. What's your name?"
"Name? l don't want to say, they might find me."
"What's a name I can call you? Say of a favorite doll, or pet."
"I had a doll. Once. Daisy."
"Daisy. Read me the numbers on the telephone, Daisy, and help will come."
"I've got to kill this alien first. I've thought of how to do it, in the toilet. It's still small, but it's getting bigger every day, every minute. I tried to kill it before, but it didn't work."
"The numbers, Daisy, please, the numbers."
"Uh, all right, Mr. Midnight. I could really use some help. it's, um, 5556389."
"Wonderful! Wonderful, Daisy." Matt glanced at Leticia. Her face was set, but her beringed fingers were circling on each side of her mouth. Matt tried to interpret her sign language. Talk, keep talking. Keep her talking?
"Help is coming, Daisy. You don't have to kill the alien. The government wants it for experimentation. You know the government."
"Oh, yeah. And they can have it. Except, it's moving! I'm so afraid. I've got to kill it, or it'll . . .
eat me. I'll be right back."
"No, don't leave me! I have to know you're all right."
"But if l don't go and kill it, l won't be all right. Listen, it's screaming now, such an icky-eerie scream, just like in the movies."
Matt heard the faint whine of a siren over the line.
"Hang in there, Daisy. That's the good guys coming. They'll help you."
"Oh, l don't know. I don't know."
He heard a jackhammer pounding. Fists and feet on a door. A sudden cessation of all noise.
A girl's shriek. The sound of heavy breathing.
"It's all right." A man's breathless voice hummed over the line.
"We've got her. We've got the baby. It's alive."
"Thank God. Be careful with her."
"As careful as she'll let us."
The line went dead.
Matt felt he'd been catapulted out of a plane into a free-fall to earth.
The silence was deafening.
Then music came on. "And I Will Always Love You." The Whitney Houston version of the Dolly Patton chestnut. The Ambrosia touch.
He looked at his watch. Eleven-forty-eight.
Leticia came in from the control room.
"Relax, Brother John. Mr. Midnight is off-duty for the evening."
Chapter 31
Dancing in the Dark
Carmen crossed the nearly empty parking lot to her car, the long dry-cleaning bag whispering at her side.
The time was only midnight, but the Blue Dahlia parking lot looked as desolate as it had the last time she had been here. Just a few nights ago.
This time her car was parked under a twin-headed streetlight that resembled the alien ships'
creepy periscope heads from War of the Worlds. The vehicle's passenger side faced her blankly.
She was almost there when a figure rose from the driver's side, stretching suddenly and endlessly upward like Dracula assuming human form after moonlighting as a bat.
"Don't drop your dry-cleaning while going for the artillery, Lieutenant. It's only me," said Max Kinsella.