Brent decided it was time to change the subject. The program was close to being a tabloid as it was, without describing animals eating corpses.
“And the lights? What happened to them?”
“They just disappeared. The next night, they didn’t come back- and the night after that. It was a couple of months before they returned.”
“You said the lights chased your friend’s motorcycle and the truck?”
“And the other truck and the two cowboys. That’s the way it looked to me. Of course, it might have been an optical illusion. During the investigation, a psychiatrist claimed that everybody just got carried away, that we saw the lights because we wanted to see them, and when one person panicked, everyone panicked. I don’t know what to believe. That night the lights sure seemed real, and they sure seemed to have a will of their own. They scared one of the horses so bad it broke its leg, and another threw its rider and bolted away. That was the horse I saw galloping toward me. The cowboy broke an arm and his collarbone.”
“And what about you? From what you’ve said, the lights didn’t bother you.”
“I sat in the darkness for a long time, trying to figure out what I’d seen. I tried to tell myself that my eyes had played tricks on me. But if I was seeing some kind of hallucination, Johnny and the guys in the pickup truck must have seen exactly the same hallucination. Why else would they have been driving so fast to get away? When I finally got the strength to turn the Jeep around and go back to this parking lot, I realized that my shirt collar was wet.”
“Wet?”
“With blood.”
“What?” Hamilton hadn’t told him about this before.
“There was a sound.”
“A sound?”
“High pitched. Almost impossible to hear. It felt like a hot needle against my eardrums. They broke.”
“Broke?”
“My eardrums. Blood flowed out of my ears. I couldn’t hear any- thing for three months. My doctor was afraid I’d be permanently deaf. It’s amazing how much of that night I shut out of my memory. Talking about this again…”
Hamilton actually looked as if he were going to cry.
Time to wrap this up, Brent thought. He pointed toward the darkness.
“And now, all these years later, another tragedy has happened be- cause of the lights. We’re going to take a short break. As soon as we come back, we’ll train our cameras on the area behind me and try to find some answers about-”
“I see one!” somebody in the crowd shouted.
“Where?”
“Over there! To the right!”
“I see it, too!”
Brent felt the motor home shake as the crowd pressed in that direction.
“Look! A half dozen of them!”
Brent sensed Anita moving forward with the camera.
“Where?” someone shouted. “I still don’t see them!”
“To the right!” someone else yelled.
Brent stared in the direction a lot of people were pointing. All he saw was darkness. He hoped that the camera operators on the ground and in the chopper were following his instructions and focusing on the crowd. The people were the story. Their reactions were becoming frenzied.
“Yes! My God, they’re beautiful!” a woman exclaimed.
At once Brent saw something in the distance. Six lights appeared to float. They converged in pairs, then separated.
“I see them!” Brent said to the viewers at home. “This is extraordinary. You’re the first live audience ever to view the mysterious Rostov lights.”
Anita was next to him now, aiming the camera toward the lights. The intense look on her face told Brent that she was getting fabulous images.
“Perhaps this will help us understand what causes them,” he told his audience.
“That isn’t them,” Hamilton interrupted.
Brent continued. “Perhaps we’ll be able to-”
“I’m telling you those aren’t the Rostov lights,” Hamilton insisted.
“But I can see them. They’re obviously out there.”
“Headlights.”
“What?”
“You’re looking at the road from Mexico. Those are the headlights of cars driving along the highway. The road goes up and down over there. That’s why the headlights seem to float. A lot of people have been fooled by that road.”
“But…”
“The lights don’t look anything like that. Besides, it’s the wrong direction. That’s southwest. You need to look southeast.”
“Over there!” a man yelled.
As one, the crowd turned southeast, and the Winnebago shook again. Several pointed emphatically.
“There!”
Brent turned to stare in this new direction and felt overwhelmed. The first thing he noticed were the colors. He’d grown up in Michigan. One disturbing summer night when he was ten, he’d been out- side after dark and had seen countless ribbons of colors rippling across the sky. They’d radiated from the north and filled the heavens, eerily lustrous, swirling as if alive.
He’d run into the house and warned his mother, “We’re going to die!”
“What?”
“The sky’s on fire! It’s the end of the world!” His father had died from a heart attack six months earlier. That was probably why death had been on Brent’s mind.
When his mother had finally realized what was happening, she’d held his hand and made him go outside with her.
He’d struggled with her. “No! It’ll kill us!”
“There’s no reason to be afraid. What you’re seeing is the aurora borealis.”
“The what?”
“The Northern Lights. I heard an explanation for them once. Apparently they’re magnetic rays from the sun reflecting off the polar ice cap.”
What Brent saw now-off in the distance-made him feel as if the Northern Lights had been squeezed into seven shimmering orbs. Their iridescent colors kept changing, rippling from within, giving the impression that something churned at their cores. Their shimmer was hypnotic as they drifted and floated, sank and rose and hovered. Even though they were far away, Brent tried to reach out and touch them.
Many in the crowd felt the same. They reached toward the darkness.
“Get out of my way!” a man yelled.
“You’re blocking the view!” somebody complained.
“Move!” a woman insisted. “I need to get closer! I need to be cured!”
“Stop shoving!”
“No, don’t…”
Everyone surged toward the fence.
“Can’t breathe!”
People slammed against the motor home. As it shook, Brent had trouble keeping his balance. When even more people surged, it trembled violently. He reached out for something to hold him up, but all he grasped was air. The next time the Winnebago shook, his knees gave way. Suddenly he was in the air, plummeting toward the crowd. He fell between bodies, struck the gravel, and groaned from the mass of people charging over him.
37
Earl Halloway sat in the harshly lit surveillance room beneath the observatory’s dishes. He’d just swallowed six aspirins, for a total of a half bottle today, but he still couldn’t control his headache. His stomach burned. The hum from the facility’s generator or the dishes or whatever the hell caused it became louder, making him grind his teeth to try to relieve the pressure behind his ears.
This wasn’t Halloway’s shift, but there was no way he could contain himself enough to watch a movie on the computer in his room. He’d attempted to turn off the lights and lie in bed with a wet washcloth over his closed eyes. But the headache was too excruciating for him to lie still, so he’d come to the security office in the hope that doing something useful would distract him from it.
The harsh lights only made the pressure in his head more intense.
“Are you okay?” one of the other guards asked.