I began. “I videotaped your TV show. I’ve watched it over and over.”
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “A little showy for my tastes, and they left out some things I told them, but they managed to get across the right idea.”
“You were playing with a dog.”
“That’s Patches,” Avalyn said. She swiped the back of her hand across her lip’s mustard smudge. “He’s an outside dog. He follows Daddy into the fields to look after the cows.” She got up and padded back to the kitchen. She reached into a cracked pitcher, pulling out two sticks of incense. “Which do you prefer, frangipani or sandalwood?”
Before I could answer, Avalyn touched a match to the tips of two sticks. She jammed the incense into the dirt of a potted plant in the kitchen window. Curlicues of smoke lifted around her head. “Let me give you a tour of my little home,” she said. “And I can show you around the farm if you want. And we’ll talk.”
Her father’s bedroom was empty save for a small dresser and a double bed. The bed seemed to separate into two distinct hemispheres; the first had a rumpled pillow, the blanket’s corner pulled away to reveal the sheet underneath. The bed’s second half was immaculate, unwrinkled. The room smelled like an elderly spinster’s perfume. Avalyn switched off the light. “And now, my bedroom,” she said.
She opened the door. Her room looked like a teenager’s: posters and triangular college banners covered the walls, and clothes, books, albums, and tapes scattered the floor. The room was messier than my own. “I cleaned,” she said, “just for you.” She laughed.
Avalyn flopped on the bed. Her housedress lifted, revealing her thigh, as white as porcelain. I turned away and focused on the wall’s largest poster, where four scraggly-haired men in makeup stood on silver podiums. They pouted and scowled dramatically. “That’s my all-time favorite band,” Avalyn said. “They went by the name of Kiss. Are you old enough to remember?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve heard their music.” I sat on the floor, next to an album by that very band. “I mostly listen to electronic stuff, music no one else listens to.”
“I went through the same rebellion in high school,” Avalyn said. “But I’ve always liked the glitter rock, the heavy metal. Kids around here just listen to country-western twang and not much else. Things never much change.” She gestured toward the Kiss poster. “What a group they were,” she said. “So theatrical. You could get lost in them. The band members were each a specific character, hence the makeup. Every day was Halloween. They were the lover, the vampire, the kitty cat, and the spaceman. Guess which member I loved the most.” I scrutinized the spacey-looking-one’s outfit: shiny boots with spiked heels, metal plates crossing his chest and crotch, starbursts of silver makeup around his eyes.
Avalyn leaned over and took the Kiss album between her fingers. She slid the record from the sleeve, lowered it onto her turntable, and clicked the stereo switch. A guitar riff filled the room. “Yes.” She lay back on her bed, directing her voice toward the ceiling. I looked there; saw glittery speckles in the dimpled surface.
“As you’ve no doubt figured out by now,” Avalyn said, “there’s a reason for everything. Something as simple as me, in my teens, being attracted to the guy in the band that dressed and acted like a spaceman. Or me, throughout my life, reading all these books…” She pointed to a bookcase, and I noticed several titles from my own room’s shelves. “These are clues. For me, memories were buried there. The aliens don’t want us to remember, but we’re stronger than that. For you and I, nearly everything we do stems from our abduction experiences. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“There’s so many of us. Not all of us realize it. Yet we have a drive to know what’s happened. What they’ve done to us.”
On the record, the guitar solo started, and the singer howled in ecstasy. Avalyn sat up and tugged at sections of her dress to fan herself. “From what you’ve told me on the phone, I know you’re at a difficult position. I was there a few years ago. Things are starting to come back to you, and you’re curious. You want to know what’s going on.”
“You’re exactly right,” I said. Her hand had fallen to the bed’s edge, motionless. I wanted to hold it. “Something happened to me that summer, that night I told you about. And maybe, later, on that Halloween night. I know it.”
The music ended. In that empty groove of vinyl between the two songs by Avalyn’s favorite band, I heard sounds from outside: barn swallows twittering, cicadas humming. Somewhere, far away, a round of firecrackers popped and snapped.
“There may be even more to it,” Avalyn told me. “Instances you don’t yet know about. Brian, it’s odd. People like you and me are in this for the duration of our lives. The first time they take us, we are tagged. They track us, and they come again and again. We’re part of their experiments.
“Let me show you something,” she said. “Here’s one thing they left out of that foolish ‘World of Mystery.’” She lifted the frilly edge of her housedress, her white thigh cold and shocking against the dark bedspread. “Lean closer,” she said, her words coming in perfect synch with Kiss’s pounding bass.
Avalyn thumbed a V-shaped scar on her thigh’s upper region. I felt a blush spread across my face as she traced it back and forth. “You can touch it,” she said, and the blush grew warmer. In the dim light, her eyes were the color of outdated pennies, the ones I used to collect in hopes of making a fortune. She reached out to take my hand, guiding it toward the scar. I touched it, then withdrew.
She sighed, and I could smell the sardines on her breath. “When the aliens returned me to my grandparents’ car that first time, my leg was bleeding. We got home, and I remember my parents being furious, with the whole ‘what the hell happened to Avvie’s leg’ and so on. But none of us knew anything about it, not even me. The cut didn’t even hurt.
“Through Ren’s hypnosis, I discovered that was where they’d put their tracking device. They’ve known where to find me, all these years, because they inserted something into my skin. It’s floating in here, somewhere, just as much a part of my blood as the food I eat and the water I drink. It’s filling them in on everything I do. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re up there watching us right now, taking notes.” She waited for my reaction, her eyebrow raised as if she knew what I’d say. Her finger returned to the scar. She caressed it as she might caress a pet salamander.
“I think they tracked me too,” I said. “I might have told you this in my letter, but when my sister found me in the crawl space, my nose was bleeding. They must have put something there.”
“Aha.” Avalyn nodded. “The old nose trick. Some have scars on the leg or the arm. But others, like you, get it right up the nose, where the scar can’t be seen.” She moved closer to my face, peering into my nostrils, as though she might spy their miniature machinery. “Now we need to figure out how they’ve used you. It’s doubtful they would shove something into your brain without coming back to experiment further.”
“I think they tried to take me again that same summer,” I said. “When my mother and sister and I saw the ship over our house. All my life I’ve connected that night with the crawl space night. Only now am I starting to understand why.”