Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 6

  The microphones were ready now, each in its parabolic reflector. The Arriflex was to be hand-held. Lacombe had insisted that it not be mounted on a tripod. He wanted the technician to keep it on his shoulder, to have the mobility to photograph … whatever there was to photograph.

  His eyes closed, the Frenchman seemed to relax, although his back was stiffly erect. Out of the corner of his mouth, in French, he murmured an order to Laughlin, who turned to the audio technician.

  “He wants to make sure you shield the Nagra.”

  “Why?” the man wanted to know. “We’re nowhere near any electrical interference.”

  “He’s had bad luck before with tape recordings. The capstan motor usually conks out and the recording heads lose magnetism.”

  “No kidding,” the technician said. “Well, if he says so.” He produced a large, copper-mesh, boxlike affair, a shield that he placed over the small precision Nagra recorder. Then, shoving copper spikes into the earth, he grounded the shield carefully. “Does that suit the mother?”

  Laughlin wondered, and not for the first time, what they were doing in this strange place, with all these thousands, waiting … waiting for what? The report spoke of an event strictly unbelievable, but Lacombe had shown him how to suspend disbelief, to open himself to the incredible.

  Laughlin turned away and watched the bloated disk of the sun as the hills to the west began biting a chunk out of its lower rim. In a moment only half the sun was visible. The sadhu stirred slightly.

  What happened next seemed to be in slow motion to Laughlin. He watched the sadhu’s outturned elbows pull in toward his emaciated brown ribcage. The palms of his hands, still pressed together, began a slow separation until only the fingertips still touched.

  The sadhu’s eyelids slowly rose, like shutters on temple windows. Open, his eyes were enormous, jet black, ringed all the way around by white, the white then ringed by glossy black lashes.

  The sadhu’s body stirred. Slowly, without apparent effort, he began to rise from the lotus to a standing position. The sleek city Brahmin sank to his knees, Laughlin found himself sitting down abruptly, as if the only person who had any right to be on his feet was the sadhu. Out of the corner of his eye, Laughlin could see the audio technician and the camera operator fall, incredibly, to their knees. He was sure they had no idea what they were doing.

  With grave deliberateness, the sadhu’s bare arms spread out from his body like the powerful wings of some great land-locked bird ready to take the skies. Behind him, all that was left of the sun was the thinnest edge of rind. As Laughlin watched, the sun snuffed out. Darkness fell instantly.

  The sadhu’s long arms swung up at his sides to shoulder height. They paused, then continued their upward sweep until the gnarled backs of his hands touched each other high over his head. They paused again. Then he brought the arms down in one great sweep—a conductor cueing a mighty orchestra.

  From ten—twenty—thousand throats came a low, melodious note. They sustained it with such power that it began to eat its way into Laughlin’s brain. He noticed Lacombe’s eyes snap open and swing sideways, cursing the technicians. Laughlin gestured. The audio man started the Nagra. Laughlin could see its reels turning through the copper mesh.

  Now the sadhu brought his arms up and cued another note, an interval above the first, higher on the scale. His worshippers filled the world with the two tones, alternating them, sounding them separately and together—a minor interval, Laughlin thought, less than a third. A minor third? Not quite.

  The sadhu produced another note and then another and another. Now Laughlin began to lose a sense of the melody in the harsh cacophony of many voices. The ground beneath him seemed to vibrate with the intensity of the notes, unmelodic, strange to Western ears, notes the report had stated had come down from the stars four nights ago and that the sadhu and his followers had been sounding each night since.

  The intervals were never whole, Laughlin felt. They were quartered, halved, bent slightly into micro tone steps. Each singer changed the notes slightly, making a raw, elemental howl. It soared skyward in a great chant, somehow ominous. It shook the earth beneath Laughlin but it also made the air itself vibrate.

  The tropical twilight was now night. Damp blackness had descended upon them all. And even though they could no longer see their sadhu, the many thousands continued their chant, forcing it to grow to an almost unbearable intensity.

  The stars had come out overhead. Laughlin gazed upward, shaking with the fierceness of the singing around him. He watched the star at the end of the Big Dipper’s handle. It grew brighter, waned, brightened again. There was a frequency to it, like a message in Morse code. And then it … exploded.

  A bright crimson flash illuminated the upturned faces of the multitude. Lacombe was on his feet now, standing beside the sadhu. The cameraman had swung his shoulder-braced Arriflex upward.

  The crimson light elongated into a rolling pillar, turned orange. Then yellow. Then pale green. It hovered in the sky, and suddenly the heavens were filled with the same five notes. The same chord, played on something that was not human. Pure. Melodic. Clean. The worshippers below fell silent. And once again the sky sang down to them.

  “Goddamn!” the cameraman said.

  The pillar of fire winked out The song ended.

  The worshippers below sank back, faces pressed to the earth. The sadhu turned to Lacombe.

  “The sky,” he said in a thin voice, “the sky sings to us.”

  The two men embraced. Tears ran down the Frenchman’s cheeks. His voice was thick with emotion.

  “It sings to all of us, my friend.”

  12

  Several hours later that morning, Saturday, Neary stood bleary-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to organize enough of himself to at least get the shaver working. Eventually, Roy took the can of Rapid Shave and nozzled a mound of white lather into the palm of his right hand. He automatically lifted the cream mountain toward his face when something mind boggling stopped him.

  Neary began to stare at the stuff in his hand. He cocked his head and brought the lather mound eye level, then vaguely began to shape some of it with the middle finger of his left hand.

  “No, that’s not right.” Neary said to himself, not really conscious of what he was doing or saying. But this image was reminding him of something—something maddeningly out of mental reach—he knew this shape so well and yet it felt as if the connection was a million miles away. Neary blinked, a little distressed. Everybody experiences something like this he thought—a moment that feels so familiar, a face you think you’ve seen before but really never have, a place you think you visited once but knew you never did. These were flashes that some psychoanalysts like to call déjà vu; they always pass in a few seconds. This flash was sure taking its time passing. It lingered for minutes, and so did Neary’s eyes, on that sloppy mound of Rapid Shave. Then …

  The appearance of Ronnie—in the mirror—standing in the bathroom doorway brought Roy partway back.

  “Ronnie,” he said. “What does this remind you of?”

  She totally ignored the lather mound, and said firmly, “We’re going to tell people at the party tonight that you fell asleep under a sunlamp on your right side.”

  “What? What for?”

  “I don’t want to hear you talking about it at the party,” she said. “Not till you know what you’re talking about.”

  “If I don’t talk about it,” he said, essaying logic, “how am I gonna find out what’s to know?”

  “Talk about it with your buddies in the Department, not at parties.”

  “What does the Department know?”

  During this meeting of the minds, Brad and Toby had wandered into the bathroom.

  “Dad, are they for real?” Brad asked.

  “No, they’re not for real,” Ronnie snapped.

  “Don’t tell him that,” Neary said.

  “Mom … I believe in them,” Brad persisted.

  �
�No, you don’t.”

  “Dad says so.”

  “He does not,” Ronnie said. Then, pleadingly, “Roy?”

  “I just want to know what in the world is going on,” Neary admitted, the mound of foam still balanced in his right hand.

  “It’s just one of those things,” Ronnie said, matter-of-factly, as if that resolved everything.

  “Which things?”

  “I don’t want to hear about this anymore.”

  “Do they live on the moon?” Toby asked.

  “They got bases on the moon,” Brad said, really getting into it, “so at night they can come in your window and pull the covers off!”

  Ronnie shut her eyes. “I’m not listening to this. I don’t hear it.”

  “Last night,” Neary said, as calmly as he could, “I saw something I can’t explain.”

  Her fierce blue eyes snapped open and she fixed him in the mirror with her glare. “Last night, at four A.M., I saw something I can’t explain. A grown man—” Ronnie stopped abruptly, sensing the boys’ full attention.

  “Ronnie, you know I’m going out there again tonight, damn it!”

  She turned to leave, and said lightly, “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes,” he said, with a dramatic pause, “I am.”

  The phone began ringing.

  Ronnie turned back, and said, playfully again, “No, you’re not.” She reached into the bathroom, grabbed his right wrist and planted his palm upward into his face. The shaving foam gooshed and Neary looked like a bathtub toy.

  Roy stared at himself in the mirror. The white foam emphasized the reddish color of his cheek. He smeared some of the foam onto his chin and other cheek. “It ain’t a moonburn, goddamn it,” he muttered to himself.

  Neary had started shaving when Ronnie reappeared in the mirror. She looked like someone who had just been told something awful. Tears began to come out of her eyes and she just stood there in the doorway shaking.

  Roy turned around immediately, saying, “Okay, Ron … I don’t have to go.”

  “R-Roy,” she said, “that was Grimsby, from the Department.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re fired, Roy.” Ronnie was really sobbing now and she collapsed into his arms, cheek against cheek, tears and lather. “They … he wouldn’t even talk to you. What are we going to do? You got fired? What’s going on?”

  “Jesus!” Neary said, stunned. He just stood there, razor in one hand, face smeared like a real bozo, his wife sobbing against him, looking at everything in the mirror and seeing none of it.

  “Roy, what are we going to do?”

  Neary, still stunned, didn’t really hear her. His eyes, fixed in space, finally focused on a white object that he saw through the open bathroom door in the bedroom. It was a pillow on their bed. It had been left in a pushed-together, lumpy shape just like the shaving cream earlier.

  “No,” Neary muttered to himself. “That’s not right.”

  13

  He’d gone back the next night. Of course. And when none of the strange objects or colors appeared, he swore he was going to give up the whole idea. But the night after that he returned again.

  The people he found there were getting to know one another. Old friends. The farmer in his pickup, with his pint bottle of whiskey, was on hand. So was a lady who had brought along a rocker and sat there doing needlepoint, to fill in the time before the next appearance of what everybody had taken to calling “the night things.” Another elderly woman had an album of photographs of “them,” the by-product of other nights in other places. A sound made everyone look toward the northern skies. Jet aircraft could be heard passing in the rarefied distance. “We’ll be here all night if that keeps up,” one of the elderly people complained. Roy knelt down by a lady who was eighty if she was a day. “Are they coming over tonight?” he whispered gently. Those words were like magic, for her very pressed face blossomed years off her, as though Neary had told her the meaning of life. She became teary-eyed, saying, “Oh, I hope so. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered her in all seriousness. The old lady measured his fervor, blinked an eye and hefted to her lap a leatherette volume-sized photo album. She opened it to the first page.

  “I took these myself,” she said smartly. “Out by the parochial school.”

  Neary looked at her six color snapshots, a splash of yellow, a slit of white, a blur of out-of-focus blue. Anybody who didn’t know how to use a camera produced mistakes like that for the first few rolls of film.

  It wasn’t that they were kooks, the kind of crazies who were always sighting flying saucers. It was just that, except for her, Neary didn’t sense in any of them the same yearning need he had to find out what had happened. They seemed content simply to witness it, like the crowd at the circus who watches the fire-eater spew great sheets of flame but doesn’t care how he does it.

  The second night after the “night things” had appeared, quite a crowd seemed to have collected. There were people Neary couldn’t remember seeing before. And, for the first time, he noticed the young woman and her little boy whom he’d pulled from the path of the wildly careening police cruisers.

  Neary nodded to her over the heads of the crowd. She took her boy’s hand and came over. “You do remember us?”

  “How can I forget?”

  “Jillian Guiler,” she said, shaking his hand. “This is Barry.”

  “Roy Neary. That was some night, wasn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t feel like it’s over.” She touched his cheek. “You’re sunburned.”

  “Hoping to tan the other side tonight.”

  “It got my face and neck.” She opened her blouse to reveal the upper curve of her breasts and the hollow at the base of her throat.

  She watched as Roy’s cheek turned a shade darker. “I’m sorry,” she said, buttoning up. “I just had the feeling you were my oldest friend.” She laughed. “It only takes one experience like that, doesn’t it?”

  Neary nodded, no longer embarrassed. As he did so, a genial-looking man in unmatching slacks and a sports jacket shone a flashlight on them. Their sunburns seemed to stand out in his beam. This seemed to please him, and with a Pentax and strobe, he snapped their picture. Jillian blinked and turned toward him as the man focused at little Barry, sitting near the fence and playing with a mound of dirt.

  Moving swiftly, Jillian got in the way of the amateur photographer. “He’s a little young to have a record,” she told him angrily.

  Neary watched the man cough up an apology and ankle away. “Where do you think he’s from?”

  “Earth,” Jillian muttered bitterly. She bent down to wipe dirt off Barry’s face. He was busily patting together a tall, conical mound.

  “I, uh, have three of my own at home,” Neary announced.

  “Did you tell your wife about what we saw?”

  “Of course.”

  “What does she think?” Jillian asked.

  “She understands,” Neary said with some sarcasm, “perfectly.”

  Jillian grinned. “I called my mother to tell her. She said that’s what I got for living alone.” She paused, and Neary saw that in some way she felt embarrassed, as he had before at the sight of the breasts—well, part of them.

  “I’m not alone at all,” she covered quickly. “There’s Barry and the neighbors and I’m … not really … alone at all.”

  “Barry’s father?”

  “Died.” She paused. She looked away from him. “I don’t suppose he’d have understood this any better than your wife does.”

  There was nothing Neary could think of to say at this point. Instead he hunkered down to Barry’s level and helped him pat dirt into place. “Working kind of late tonight, huh, kiddo?”

  “I know he should be in bed,” Jillian said in a guilty tone. “But after the way he ran off the other night, I’m not letting him out of my sight.”

  Neary nodded. He stared for a moment at the cone of dirt the little boy had built. He fingered a twi
g and etched fluted sides into the mound. “Hm.” He reached for some pebbles nearby. “Try these,” he offered.

  Barry arranged them around the base of the cone, as if they were boulders thrown there by some explosion of natural forces.

  “That’s better,” Neary said. Oddly enough both the boy and his mother accepted this as perfectly natural behavior.

  “Hey,” Neary asked, suddenly puzzled. “What does this remind you of?”

  Jillian dug deep for an answer but she didn’t know what. Then she bent over Barry to gently rough up the smooth side facing her. “I like it better like so,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he breathed.

  “Here they come!” a voice shouted.

  “Out of the northwest!” someone yelled.

  Neary and Jillian looked in the direction everyone was pointing. A hush descended over all. Adults and juveniles raised binoculars and cameras. On somebody’s transistor radio the Eagles were singing “Desperado.”

  “There!” Jillian said pointing.

  Two foggy pinpoints of light shifted back and forth, rising, falling, growing brighter in the darkness.

  Neary raised his camera. “I’m ready this time.”

  She had placed her hand on his arm. “You’re trembling.”

  “I know.” Neary laughed recklessly. “What if were just two whackos standing on a hill with a dozen other loonies?”

  “Your eyes burn, don’t they?”

  “For two days now.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “But this is crazy,” he said, his teeth almost chattering. “It’s like Halloween for grown-ups.”

  The lights were bearing down on them inexorably now, blinding, larger, merciless, painful to watch. “Trick or treat?” Jillian asked then.

  Neary aimed his camera, but he had begun shaking so badly he wondered what kind of picture he’d get. “If those things stop and open their doors,” he asked her, “would you get in and go?”

  “If those things stop, I’m going home.”