2012 (5 page)

He swallowed the terror that had been building in him. He just hoped to God he could make it home, that there was still time.

TWO

DECEMBER 6 

THE LAST GOOD NIGHT OF WYLIE DALE

WYLIE DALE TRIED TO STOP shaking, could not. He thought he might be more scared right now than he ever had been in his life. He was exhausted, his story had been running through his mind like some kind of out-of-control hallucination and he thought that it was not a story, it was real.

This was because of the fact that he’d been unable to stop his hands from hitting the keys. He’d watched them like an outsider. No control.

At least they were no longer moving. He glanced over at the clock. “Holy shit!”

“What?” came Brooke’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.

“I’ll be there in a sec.”

Wiley had been in front of his laptop writing for an incredible sixteen hours. He knew what had been written, but not as if he had been the author. It wasn’t creation, it was transcription. He wasn’t creating a novel, he was writing a history and it was a very scary history and he was afraid it was real, and it wasn’t just a history, it was a warning.

He turned on the little TV set that sat on the corner of his desk. He watched Fox News for a while, then went up to MSNBC, then back down to CNN.

Just more of the usual bullshit, an actor gunned down by a posse of outraged fans, a combination hailstorm, tornado, and flood that seemed to have flattened every trailer park in Arkansas. The European empires were gone, and there was nothing about any weird lenses coming up out of the ground anywhere at all, and certainly not under the Great Pyramid.

He flipped through what he’d written-and found over fifty pages.

What the hell, you don’t write like this, nobody does.

What in God’s name had happened to him? It’s hard to create fiction, it takes hours, sometimes, to get a single sentence out.

His damn knuckles hurt from the pounding.

He read more. If this wasn’t fiction, then what was it? There was no President Wade, there was only one moon in the sky, and there was certainly no czar.

This was reality from a parallel universe, somehow bleeding over into a susceptible mind-his.

The creatures he’d seen in his woods five years ago-the subject of his notorious book Alien Days-had been scaly, and Martin had described the ancient biblical Nephilim as having a reptilian appearance. There was nothing like that in our Bible, but he’d certainly seen scaly faces, right here in these woods, not a quarter of a mile from here.

Brooke slipped into the room and put her hand on his cheek. “Wiley, it’s time to come to bed.”

The spell broke, and his body took over. It had been in this chair for a damn long time, and there was a bladder involved and the bladder had just come to its senses.

He ran like hell.

“Wiley?”

He hit the john just in time and opened up. “Thank you, God.”

She followed him in. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, now!”

“You’ve been in there since breakfast, do you realize that?”

He finished his business, opened the medicine cabinet, and drank a couple of slugs of Mylanta. Chased it with Pepto Bismol. “Nectar of the gods,” he said.

“It’s late, it’s time to go to bed.” She caressed him from behind.

“I need a breath of air. I’m gonna take a walk.”

“The book is making you crazy.”

“No.”

“Yeah, it is, and I’m not ready to go through that again, Wiley. That alien book, that was enough for one lifetime.”

She referred, of course, to the hated Alien Days. He hated it, too, for that matter. It wasn’t fun, being a laughingstock. “The book I’m writing is not about aliens.”

“I know you, Wylie Dale, it’s about something weird or you wouldn’t be so crazed. No more saucer crap, that’s bedrock, boy!”

“It isn’t about aliens, and neither was the other book. I only thought it was.”

“Alien Days was about a writer being very crazy in public. Embarrassment, that’s what it was about.”

“There are no aliens.”

“At last, he faces the truth.”

“What’s happening is much stranger than the arrival of aliens from another planet. And this book, it’s-wow-it’s possessing me.”

“You write fiction that you come to believe is real and in the process you drive this entire family crazy, and I’m sorry, no more.”

“Brooke-“

“No more! End of story! Books that possess you, that drive you nuts-no, I’m finished, I’ve had it!”

“Mom? Dad?”

Nicholas appeared, looking bleary and pissed off.

“Wonderful,” Wiley said.

Brooke said to their son, “Dad has a sour stomach.”

“You’re fighting.”

“I love your mom too much to fight with her. I just obey.” He made a steeple of his hands and bowed toward her.

“Except you don’t, Daddy.” Now Kelsey had arrived, his gorgeous little girl. “He has cigars hidden in the woods.”

“That is not true!”

Brooke folded her arms. So did Kelsey. Brooke glared. “The aliens you go looking for in the woods, Wiley Dale? Would they be from Cuba?”

“The cigars are Matt’s,” he said.

“And he’s out there right now, isn’t he, smoking a Monte and sucking on a bottle of Beam, and that’s the real reason you want to take a walk-to make yourself sick on cigars and hootch.”

“Cubans are the best cigars in the world.”

“You’re coming to bed with me. And scoot, you two, the sandman’s gonna be furious.”

“I’m past the sandman,” Nick said.

“I’m not,” Kelsey told him. “I’m just a little girl, and I still believe.”

“Meaning, don’t rain on your sister’s parade.”

“No, Sir.”

Wiley went into the bedroom and fished his flashlight out from under the bed where he kept it alongside his shotgun. “I need some space, hon. This thing I’m writing, it’s getting to me, for sure, and I agree with you, we need that not to happen. It’s about us and about people who live in another version of this house in a parallel universe. I think that’s what it’s about, anyway. I’m sort of more of a reader than a writer, here. Reading as my fingers write, as it were.”

“About us in what sense?”

“Well, like this conversation. This will be in the book. Because we’re part of the story, somehow. I’m not sure how, yet, but we’re part of it.”

“Not our names again!”

Uh-oh. He had to tread carefully here. “Well, uh…hm. The people in the parallel universe aren’t us. They have different names. They live in their version of this house and the town is called Harrow, too, but the people are not the same.”

“I am so tired of this.”

“Whoa, slow down. The parallel universe is obviously different. Their McDonald’s has emerald arches. Their Target target is blue. The president’s named James Hannah Wade and the family’s named Winters. We’re the Dales, if you hadn’t noticed. And here, McDonald’s has golden arches, obviously. Plus there is no British Empire, among numerous other things. They have two small moons rather than one large one.”

“In the part of it that’s set in our universe, what are the characters’ names?”

She knew him well and she was not dumb. Far from dumb. “Well, of course, I’m using ours-“

“NO!”

“Well, uh, it’s us. They’re us.”

“My kids’ names will not be in another one of your books. You know what Nicholas said? He said you really are the most embarrassing father in the world, and he was right! Saying you were taken aboard a UFO was bad enough, but you included him! When he was all of seven years old. Wiley, where do you get off?”

“The names are-are-like, they’re just place markers. After I’m done, I’ll change them.”

“Because it’s an act of vanity to write novels about yourself!”

“Brooke, goddamnit, that’s a betrayal. You know it happened.”

“It hurt this family so much, honey. I just can’t go through it again. The kids can’t. Especially not your son. He is so brave but he suffers.”

“What do you mean?”

“The kids eat him alive! His dad got a rectal probe. You try living that down at the age of twelve.”

“The laughter is the failure, not the book. It happened.” He paused. “It just wasn’t what I thought.” There came to him, then, a feeling-a sort of pull, really. To go back to the office, to sit down…

But not after sixteen straight hours, he’d be in heart attack country. Stroke country.

“Thing is, this book-I’m not its author, babes, I’m its prisoner.”

“You will be responsible, Wylie Dale. You will be!”

“All right, that’s it! I’m going walking. You’ll be asleep when I get back, God willing.”

“If I smell the least trace of cigar smoke-“

“Kelsey’s gotta have Indian blood, the way she follows me and I never see her. But neither one of us is an Indian, my dear, so how do you explain that?”

“By the fact that you’re two hundred percent hot air and half baked.” She came to him. “Which are two of the many reasons that I’m so damn crazy about you.”

She kissed him. He was furious at her, but he kissed her back, and she felt so vulnerable and so-so Brooke. He held her tight.

Noisy though it was, this marriage was a good fit for Wiley Dale. He needed someone willing to come up the side of his head on occasion, and Brooke had no compunction about that. But he was not going to change any names in any part of the book, this one included. “You’re so nice,” he said.

Little feet went scurrying away. Kelsey could be heard whispering, “We have a kiss. Gawd!”

Wylie and Brooke managed to swallow their laughter.

When he went downstairs, she sort of tried to stop him, but he promised to come back soon. He really did need that air. If he didn’t get away from that keyboard and let this thing die down, he’d be up all night.

He left the house, glad to enter his familiar woods beneath the familiar starry sky-and that good old moon up there, good old friend. It couldn’t be very romantic to have two moons.

He sucked the air deep to rid his head of the fog that the writing had invoked. He shuddered. It was a mild night, but he felt cold in his blood.

He had lived Martin’s sense of suffocation down under the pyramid, had cringed in anguish of terror with him as the blocks smashed down around him, had actually not known whether or not he was going to be annihilated.

Creepy enough, but even creepier was the fact that he could still feel Martin’s presence. See him, sort of. He was down in Harrow, and things had gone very bad since his visit to the White House just-what was it-eleven or twelve days ago?

He was down in Harrow and he was living in absolutely amazing terror, and Wylie knew that, as soon as he returned to his office, he was going to live that terror, too.

Thing was, he could sort of see into the lenses, and what he saw there was another parallel earth, a third one, and it was bad news. Real bad.

He couldn’t see it clearly, but he could feel that it was a fallen world, a real, living hell, and it was seeking to escape itself. He could sense its ravening hunger to escape the ruin it had made of itself.

Amazingly enough, they’d done even worse than we had. “They’re old,” he muttered to himself, returning to one of the lines of thought that he’d been worrying for years. He thought he might now know the secret of the bizarre creatures he had encountered in these woods a few years back, that were the subject of Alien Days. They weren’t aliens at all. They were from here. But in their version of earth, the dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Instead, that dark reptilian brain had grown and evolved and changed until these sleek creatures had come about-tough, brilliant, and utterly heartless.

Oh, God. God help the human beings.

With our compassion and our softness of spirit, we were not going to be a match for brilliant reptiles, not in Martin’s universe or in this one.

They were going to take it all. They really, really were.

The woods were dead quiet, the early December night touched by just an edge of crispness. As always, he found himself moving along the old foresters path that crossed the top of the little draw where, five years ago almost to the day, he’d noticed that odd light.

He stopped, looked down the draw. He had encountered them just there, just fifty feet down. It had looked like an old witch’s cottage that he’d never seen before. Glowing, infinitely sinister.

Curious, thinking maybe he had squatters in his woods, he’d walked up to it, and the next thing he knew, he was grabbed by scaly hands, he was being glared at by the most terrible eyes he had ever seen, he was being manhandled-and yes, the infamous rectal probe had taken place-and then he was on the ground, the little cottage was gone, and there was a crackling electricity in the air.

At least, that’s what he remembered in his conscious mind. His dreams were a different story. In his dreams, there were towering emotions of loss and longing, and Brooke was involved, but she had sworn that she’d seen nothing that night, heard nothing.

He moved up the dark path, shining his light ahead, looking for the cigar cave. A smoke was what he needed. He had a gargle station in the garage, which he’d use before he got in bed with Brooke. Cigar breath and he’d be on the couch, and he was way too tired for that.

He shone his light on the trees that loomed around him, the oaks with their golden leaves, the red maples, the gnarled pitch pines that began to appear as he climbed farther up the ridge.

He was maybe fifty yards from the cave when he became aware of a more solid shape up ahead.

He stopped, peered into the dark. Matt was on duty tonight, so maybe it was a deer. And yet, the form-it looked like a man standing real close to the trunk of that oak.

Oh, shit, what if the reptilians knew that he was writing about their invasion, and they didn’t like it?

Hardly daring to do it, his hands shaking so much he could barely manage it, he got the flashlight pointed in the direction of the figure.

-which did not move.

Was it a branch? What was that?

He stepped closer. “Hello?”

It leaped out at him.

He fell back, he lost the light, and then the figure was on him, glaring down at him-and laughing.