“How come you didn’t drown?” Nora asked.
“They did something to me that made me able to breathe under water,” Ray answered.
Dale gave a doubtful shrug.
Ray glared at him. “But I’m supposed to believe your story about seeing your dead son in a spaceship, right?” he demanded. “So why is it that you can…”
“Could you share the story of your son with us, Dale,” Harriet said, cutting Ray off.
“We lost our boy, Luke,” Dale began. “In the Gulf War. It was about six months later when they came for me. One night, I woke up and there were these five young men standing by my bed. Soldiers, like Luke was. They asked me would I like to see Luke. Then there was this big light, and Luke was there and we talked. And after that, they’d come for me every night, these same soldiers, and there’d be Luke, and we’d talk, and then he’d be gone.” He shook his head. “It was like they wanted to make me grieve for him all over again.”
Ray shook his head. “You’re just having bad dreams, Dale.”
Dale leaped to his feet, his eyes flaring. “Does this look like dreams to you?” he asked as he pulled down the collar of his shirt, revealing several slender red lines on his neck, each knotted with what appeared to be joints.
Ray looked at the marks on Dale’s neck. “That could have happened any way at all. You could have done that to yourself.”
“Please now,” Harriet said. “You’re all here because you believe you’ve experienced something. This is hard work. Painful work.”
The door opened and Charlie saw a slender, dark-haired young woman enter the room. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, glancing at Charlie.
“Lisa, we have a guest today,” Harriet explained. “This is Charlie. He’s taping the session for a documentary he’s doing. Charlie has spent years talking to people who’ve had experiences like yours. The others have agreed to being taped but if you’re not comfortable…”
“No, I’m not,” Lisa interrupted. She looked Charlie dead in the eye. “I like to keep my private life private,” she said.
Charlie lowered the camera. “Sorry,” he said. “I understand.”
Throughout the rest of the session, Charlie noticed that Lisa continually drew her eyes toward him. They were knowing eyes, and what they knew was something fierce and dreadful, that a human being could vanish into a white light, then reemerge hours later in a completely different place, be taken again and again in sudden, nightmarish seizures, never told why you’d been chosen or if they would ever leave you alone.
Later that afternoon, as they sat together in a coffee shop, Lisa made no effort to conceal what had happened to her, or what she knew had happened to Charlie.
“How long have they been taking you?” Lisa asked.
“Since I was a kid,” Charlie answered.
“Me, too.”
“But they don’t take me anymore,” Charlie added. “Not in nine years. Since then, I’ve been trying to prove that it really happened. I want to know why they did it and why they stopped.”
Lisa considered this briefly, then said, “Did you like your abductions?”
“Like them?” Charlie asked, astonished.
“Yeah,” Lisa answered. “As in enjoy them. Look forward to them. I used to get this energy thing. This buzz. It felt great. I believe this whole abduction deal is going to turn out to be a positive event. Right now, people think we’re whacked, we’re fringe-dwellers, but that’s going to change. We’ve been chosen for something.”
“For me, it was never a buzz,” Charlie said. “I didn’t know what was happening to me… and I fought back as hard as I could.”
For a moment they peered at each other silently, then Lisa began to gather up her things. “I have to get home,” she said. “I have a daughter.”
Neither of them stood up. They just stared at each other, neither of them able to shake the eerie feeling that they’d already met.
Charlie reached for his wallet, and as he did so a picture fell onto the table between them. “That’s my dad,” he said when he noticed Lisa staring at it.
“The carny,” she whispered, her eyes lifting slowly toward Charlie. She seemed almost to shiver. “Things just got a lot more weird,” she said. “We need to talk to Dr. Penzler.”
Minutes later Charlie sat a few feet away as Penzler prepared to do what she called a regression. Lisa lay on a sofa, her eyes watching him, so strangely familiar, he felt they’d watched him all his life.
“Are you ready?” Dr. Penzler asked.
“Ready,” Lisa said.
And suddenly the walls of Dr. Penzler’s office dissolved into panels of radiant light, and she felt her body lift and turn and float upward toward the top of a huge glass canister. Revolving slowly, she saw small creatures with almond-shaped eyes. Then another canister came into view. Inside the canister, a naked man floated in the same thick liquid. Suddenly both canisters began to close in upon each, getting nearer and nearer until, in a moment of radiant energy, they touched, held briefly, then drew apart, each turning more rapidly now, the velocity building steadily, until she felt herself spinning wildly, everything a passing blur as if she were being shot through a tunnel of light at terrific speed, away and away, back to something far below, something added to her from the journey, a thrilling spark of life.
“Lisa!”
She opened her eyes and saw Charlie standing over her, Dr. Penzler at his side.
“What did you see?” Charlie asked.
“It wasn’t quite my ‘new age’ dream,” Lisa answered quietly.
“What was it then?”
Lisa looked at him softly. “It was about you and me.”
“What about us?”
Lisa shook her head.
Charlie stared at her urgently. “What was it?” he asked insistently.
Lisa’s eyes fled toward the window, held briefly, then returned to him.
He could see how oddly shaken she was, how reluctant to reveal what she’d seen.
“I’m not ready,” was all she said.
Charlie met Allie an hour later, a little nine-year-old girl with large, penetrating eyes who seemed to reside in an otherworldly calm. They sat in the small living room of Lisa’s apartment, Allie framed by her mother’s poster of “I Married a Monster From Outer Space.”
“You’re in the fourth grade, right?” Charlie asked.
Allie nodded.
“I taught fourth grade,” Charlie added. “You’re doing state history, reading Sarah, Plain and Tall, and this is the ‘big ideas’ year in science. Electricity and magnetism.”
“We read Sarah, Plain and Tall, last year,” Allie said, her voice spirited and energetic, a little girl so eager to learn that time itself seemed her only obstacle. “This year it’s Island of the Blue Dolphins.”
“Good one,” Charlie said with a quick smile.
Allie’s expression grew oddly serious. “So this is the year I find out how everything works? The ‘big ideas?’ ”
“Pretty much,” Charlie answered.
“So then what happens, they all forget?”
Charlie laughed. “I never thought of it that way,” he admitted.
Nina arrived before Charlie could ask another question, and he saw that she was surprised to find a stranger in the house.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Lisa laughed. “We’ve been trying to figure that out all afternoon.”
Nina’s eyes remained on Charlie. “I can’t hang around to find out more,” she said, “But it looks to me like I’ll be seeing you around.” She rushed over and gave Allie a kiss. “Gotta run. Bye sweetheart.”
At dinner, Allie paused a moment, as if considering the right approach, then said, “You’ve been on spaceships too.”
It was not a question, Charlie recognized, but a statement of fact. “Yes… I have,” he said.
“Was it scary?”