But even as he asked the question, Happy knew the answer. Whistling to Spike, he abruptly changed his course for Sam’s house.
Chapter 17
"To what do I owe this honor?" Sam grinned at her old friend as she opened the front door widely. But her smile quickly faded as she gazed into Happy’s serious and drawn face.
"What’s wrong, Hap?" she asked as she joined him on the porch.
"I need to talk with you, Sam. And I guess I’d like you to let me finish having my say before you speak." At Sam’s amiable nod, he continued. "Something happened to Spike and me the other night ..... something that I want to tell you about."
Sam tried to wait patiently while Happy shuffled his feet and tried to decide where best to start. Sighing heavily, he sank down onto the top step, nervously crunching his cap between his knotty, arthritic fingers. She took a seat beside him.
Encouragingly, Sam asked, "What is it, Hap? You seem really upset." She absent mindedly patted Spike, who had flopped down beside her.
Taking a deep breath, Happy, seeing no other way, jumped in with both feet. "I had a visitor last week, Sammy. You might say a real unexpected visitor," he paused for a moment, "from someplace far away."
Sam narrowed her eyes as she peered suspiciously up at Happy beside her. "How unexpected?" She couldn’t figure out where Happy was going with this conversation.
"Well," he mumbled uncomfortably, "to tell the truth, I’m not real sure where it was from."
"Can you at least tell me what "It" was ?" asked Sam, feeling herself becoming annoyed at his reticense.
"It was a flying machine of some kind." he replied.
"You mean an airplane?" Sam laughed. At the negative shake of Happy’s head, she continued, trying unsuccessfully to control her heightening irritation. "Or perhaps a helicopter. Maybe the National Guard is playing war games out of Bangor again."
"Nope, it wasn’t anything like that. Besides, it wasn’t one of ours." Happy stated flatly.
Sam’s eyes widened. "Well, if it wasn’t one of ours than just who’s the hell was it?"
"That’s just it .... I’m not sure. Never seen anything like this before."
At last, completely exasperated, Sam snapped, "Okay, Happy, I bite. Where the hell do you think it was from?"
Sitting up straight, Happy looked her directly in the eye and blurted out earnestly, "Outer Space."
"Hap?" questioned Sam, certain that she had misunderstood him.
"I said from Outer Space, goddamn it!" he cried belligerently. " First, I thought it was just a small plane, you know, flying in way too low over the bay.
But it kept coming and coming and all of a sudden it was just there ..... sort of hovering like ..... right in front of me, clear as day. It seemed to send a kind of beam out to me ...... like a green light or something. I’ve never seen a light like that before - it sort of reached out and wrapped me up in it. Spike, too. No matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t get away from it. Jesus, it was so bright I felt like it was going right through me." Happy paused to take a shaky breath. He looked over at Sam. She didn’t so much as blink.
"Anyway, next thing I remember was being inside this thing. Don’t ask me how I got there - couldn’t tell you for the life of me. All I know is that one minute Spike and I are standing on the bluff minding our own business and the next we’re in this ....... big, metal thing!"
Sam sat stiffly beside her friend. All of a sudden, she was finding it difficult to breath.
Happy continued, "Funny thing was, I find I’m not alone. There were others there, too. Jesus, they were tall bastards. But that’s not all, Sammy." Happy choked back what sounded suspiciously like a sob. His gnarled hands were rigorously shaking now and the tattered cap fell unheeded to the porch floor.
Here it comes, thought Sam. She knew with certainty what he was going to say next. As if she’d wished the very words out of his mouth, Happy spoke in a voice filled with undisguised agony.
"They didn’t have faces, Sammy! Swear to Christ!" Happy buried his head in both hands as if that motion would help to erase the dreadful memory from his mind.
Sam tried to speak, to offer Happy some sort of solace. But no words came. She felt as if she suddenly needed to fight for every breath she took. Inside her head, her mind was screaming, "It was real! It was real!"
Tears started to trail down her cheeks. the salty taste of them seeping through her lips seemed to help snap her out of her trance-like state.
"Happy!" Sam clutched him by his faded flannel shirt, roughly pulling him to his feet. "I know! I know! It’s okay, I believe you!" She was both laughing and crying at then same time. Happy stared at her in astonishment.
"What do you mean, ‘You know’?" he asked suspiciously, trying to regain his footing by grabbing hold of the porch railing.
"I’ve seen them! These ..... beings. I’ve been with them, too. And the light, Happy! My God, it’s just like you describe it ...... it’s so powerful. It’s all encompassing!" Sam gripped his arms as she spoke. "Happy, I lost my child to them ..... and there’s been no one to believe me! No one I could talk with about any of this."
Awkwardly, her elderly friend put his arm about her shoulders. Happy was long unaccustomed to any form of compassionate contact. The sympathetic gesture felt totally foreign to him.
"Did they hurt you?" While you were with them, were you ..... hurt in any way?"
Anxiously, Sam looked up at him with remembered grief etched upon her face.
"I don’t rightly know, Sam." Happy replied uncomfortably, "They put something in one of my eyes. It didn’t hurt." He rushed to reassure Sam at her look of alarm.
"This is the thing they stuck in me."
Happy retrieved his rumpled handkerchief from his back pocket and carefully unfolded it. Gingerly, Sam took the odd looking disc out of the material. She’d never seen anything like it before.
"How did you find it?" she asked Happy as she turned the round object over in her hand.
"Damn thing fell out." He replied. "Guess I wouldn’t ever have known it was even there if it hadn’t. What do you make of it, Sammy?"
Sam was thoroughly perplexed. "I don’t know, Hap. But I’d like to have someone I know in Boston take a look at ii, if that’s okay with you. Can I keep it for a day or two?"
"Be my guest." Happy responded. He sat quietly for a bit staring off into space.
"There’s one more thing that I need to tell you about that night, Sammy." He took a deep breath before continuing. "They talked to me for a long time when I was in that ..... ship ...... with them." Here he snorted a quick chuckle. "Doesn’t make any sense, does it, Sam? I mean, how can you talk if you don’t have a face?"
Happy absently kneaded his forehead, which had started to ache.
"It’s what they had to say, though, that really scared the shit out of me. Sammy, they told me all about the end."
Chapter 18
Sam stayed huddled in the same spot on the porch long after Happy had gone home with a hungry Spike eager at his heels. She desperately wished she could have a cigarette. But she was determined not to give in to the temptation. The silence that surrounded her was comforting to her tired mind. She worked the strange disc in her hand like a worry stone. There was a great deal to think about.
Martha had been looking for the boys for almost an hour now. Where could they be?
She was just starting to feel the first twinches of worry when she realized that she hadn’t checked Nana’s apartment. They seemed to be spending more and more time with their Great-Grandmother these days.
Quickly, she opened the door to the main hall and crossed it into the small apartment attatched to the back of the house. As soon as Martha opened the door, she could hear their voices. Immediately filled with relief, she alowed herself a moment to rest against the door frame.
"But Nana," Kevin Jr. was saying, "why can’t Gluskabe try to save everyone?
Doesn’t he want to?"