Authors: Tom Upton
I mulled it over for a long moment. I found it impossible not to scratch my head.
“How do you do that?” I asked finally.
Raffles shrugged. “That’s the secret-- apparently the secret your neighbors know.”
I thought about it some more. I discovered the harder I thought about it the more the pain increased in my head. Then I realized something. “Wait a second. Hold on, now. I’m not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer-- I’ll be the first to admit that. I’m not going to Thomas Edison Academy in the fall; I’m going to public high school, where I’ll end up on the wrestling or football team, and I’m going to end up spending a lot of my lifetime scratching myself somewhere or another…. But are you actually saying, when we were drinking lemonade in that guy’s living room, we really weren’t next door?”
Raffles eyes brighten. “Excellent!” he cried, now highly excited. “You’re brighter than I thought you were, MacDuff…. No, we weren’t. Theoretically, we could have been any place-- a hundred miles away, a thousand miles, a million miles-- who knows?”
“A million miles?” I considered the distance, and what it might imply.
“Yeah, maybe more-- maybe any given point in the universe.” He paused to consider something. “I would imagine it would all depend on how much power was available,” he said, as if to himself.
“So these people next door are-- what?-- aliens?” I asked. “Is that what we’re saying here? It sounds like it.”
Raffles shrugged. “Who can really say? The only thing I can guarantee you is that nobody on this planet has the type of technology required to turn such theoretical ideas into reality.”
“Are you sure? I always hear the government is working on some incredible things.”
“Not this incredible, buddy boy,” he assured me. “Anything the government is working on might be interesting; it might even be worth all the money spent on security to keep their projects secret. But they are in no way even close to touching something this advanced. With this kind of technology, traveling to other star systems would be as easy as walking from one room, through a doorway, and into another room. Whether these people are aliens….” he shrugged his shoulders. “They certainly appeared human. They even acted human-- although somewhat dysfunctional, and even that made them seem more human.”
“You don’t think they could be wearing some kind of disguise-- like rubber masks or something-- do you?” It became a very important question for me at the moment; I was all right with the fact that aliens lived next door to me, only so long as they were really not too different from humans. The second I started to visualize lizard-like creatures hiding in a human shell, I was hit by the heebie-jeebies.
“Ohmigod!” Raffles cried, always two or three steps ahead of me. “I don’t believe it! You’re still interested in the girl, despite the fact that she might be some kind of alien. Does this sickness of yours have any bounds?”
“Whatever she is, she’s still cute,” I admitted. “Besides, what if you counted the tiles wrong, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the house?”
Raffles gasped as though he’d just been slapped across the face. The suggestion that he could ever be wrong while doing something as simple as counting-- it was such an insult.
“Never mind,” I told him.
“No, I can’t believe you said that,” he said, wounded.
“Look, if these people really are aliens,” I said, and even after all the conjecturing, I was having serious doubts, “shouldn’t we report it, then?”
“Absolutely, not,” Raffles said.
“Then what?”
“Keep watching. Make notes,” he suggested. “If you go running around reporting that your next door neighbors are aliens, you’re going to sound like some kind of whacko. But if you have a record, a list of weird things that you’ve witnessed, at least then they would have to take you seriously.”
“What if I never see anything?” I asked.
“Well, I guess you’re stuck with aliens living next door,” he said simply, and rose from the picnic table.
Just about then, my mother started yelling out the kitchen window that she needed the milk.
“I’d better be going,” Raffles said, and started to leave. As he walked away, he glanced over at me, and then turned and looked forward, shaking his head in amusement.
2
That was so very typical of Raffles. Once he’d infinitely complicated one of my problems, he’d just take off and leave me hanging there. All I’d been doing was trying to check out a girl-- a fairly normal activity for a guy my age, no matter what anybody said. Now I had to worry about aliens living next door to me.
That night I had some truly terrifying dreams. About every two hours, I started from my sleep, and sat bolt upward in bed, bathed in sweat. In one dream, I’d been trapped in a large glass room with a creature that looked like a praying mantis. Outside the room, Raffles, who appeared as a giant, gazed into the room and made notes on a thick pad of paper, as the praying mantis had me cornered and was about to bite off my head. In another dream, high school had begun and I was talking to Eliza Laughton in the cafeteria. It had turned out that she wasn’t an alien at all. Her father was just an odd character who invented something silly-- some electronic gizmo that regulated the traffic of elevators in big high rises. We got along very well, and sometimes we would laugh at how Raffles had convinced me she and her father were aliens. Then, as I was sitting across the table from her, she opened her mouth to say something, and a small hand and arm shot out of her mouth and grabbed me by the throat. When I woke from this dream, I just about had to be peeled off the ceiling. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, then, and just lay in bed and stared up into the darkness. I got up and went to the window, and looked at the house next door. It looked utterly harmless, and I was sure that one day I would look back on this time filled with silly notions about aliens, and I would feel foolish. Just then, a dim light went on in the small window downstairs that had to be the kitchen. It was the first time I noticed a single light go on after dark. The light remained lit for a couple minutes, and then went out. A moment later a light upstairs went on, presumably in one of the bedrooms. That light stayed on for quite a long time. I tried to spot shadows or a silhouette that would tell me who it was that was roaming around the house, but saw none. Finally the light went out.
This was the first normal activity I’d seen from the house since I’d be watching it. It was exactly as if someone, unable to sleep, went down to the kitchen, and then returned to the bedroom. I shook my head in the darkness, already feeling silly; if there were such things as aliens, I reasoned, they would hardly suffer from insomnia, right? Only Raffles could make me this crazy, I thought, and then climbed back into bed, finally able to get some nightmare-free sleep.
Early the next morning, I dressed in a sweatshirt and shorts and took a short run. Getting into really good shape was one of my summer-time goals, because when high school began in the fall, I’d been planning to go out for some teams-- probably football and wrestling. So I started each day with a run, and then three or four days a week, while the heat baked everything out side, I’d lift weights in our cool dank basement, systematically increasing poundage and repetitions so that my muscles grew and my strength increased significantly over the course of the summer.
After eating a lunch free of junk food, I spent the afternoon in the backyard or the tree house. Spying on the neighbors next door had already become a steadfast part of my daily routine. Though I had never seen anything, watching had already become a sort of hobby, as if fishing is a hobby for the fisherman who never catches anything. Having seen lights in the house the night before, though, I felt encouraged that I might start seeing some activity during the day. I climbed up into the tree house, and started my watch. After a while, I dozed off-- what with all the sleep, I’d missed the night before-- and when I woke, I heard the buzzing sound of a lawn mower. Sure enough, when I gazed through the small window of the tree house, I could see, past the gnarled limbs of the tree, that somebody was mowing the lawn next door. Through the leaves, I caught glimpses of a figure moving back and forth, and the air was filled with the scent of freshly cut grass.
I climbed down from the tree house, then, and crept over to the six-foot security fence that separated the yards. I tried to peek between the boards of the fence, but could not find a space between them. At five-foot-eight, I was in no way tall enough to glance over the fence, and there was nothing nearby on which I could stand. So I ended up hopping a couple times to try to catch a glimpse of whoever was mowing the lawn. On my third hop, I saw that it was Eliza Laughton. I didn’t see her face, though, but just caught a glimpse of her blond hair as she passed. She was so close to the other side of the fence that I could smell the strong odor of gasoline from the mower, and some smoke from its motor drifted over my head. I hopped up and down then, and each time my head popped over the top of the fence, I called out “Hey.” I was already resolved to talk to her, despite the fact that I was socially inept. I had decided that I wanted to dispel as soon as possible these notions that she was an alien and that something bizarre was happening in her house. I was starting to feel a desperate need to know the truth, even if it meant risking getting my brain sucked out of my head through my eye socket or whatever other fate aliens reserved for humans who discover them. But she didn’t hear me calling at first; either my voice was being drowned out by the racket the lawn mower was making, or she was simply ignoring me.
She finally responded to my calls, after she cut the lawn mower motor-- to empty its clipping bag, I guessed.
“Yes, I hear you,” she said, rather testily. “What do you want?”
I kept hopping up and down, and with each jump, got out part of a sentence: “I just wanted to…say hi…. I’m Travis MacDuff…your neighbor…”
“Oh,” she said. There was little interest in the tone of her voice.
“Mowing the lawn?” I asked, before realizing how dumb a question it was.
“Not anymore,” she said dully, and I caught a glimpse of her emptying the clipping bag into a large paper trash bag.
I was starting to get winded from hopping up and down, and I was sure that my legs would give out before I could break the ice in the conversation-- if you wanted to call it that. The trick to gaining the interest of a girl who is an utter stranger to you, is to say something that strikes on the things in which she is most interested. The problem has always been, though, if she is an utter stranger, how can you probably guess her interests by looking at her? She can be interested in a hundred things, and you could guess all day long and not strike on one of them. Here, too, this fundamental problem is compounded by a shortness of time; either my legs would give out, or my lungs, or she would finish with the lawn and disappear into the house. The only other way to get a totally strange girl to notice you quickly is to be absolutely honest-- honest to the point of appearing stupid, in fact. Females of all ages love that kind of thing, because they expect males to be liars, cheaters, and basically all around devious. Upfront honesty is an attention grabber. Of course, all these theories had been imparted to me by the same guy who had convinced me my new neighbor couldn’t be anything other than an alien. Still, I decided the honesty approach might be worth trying.