26
In the state of New Mexico, well-mannered prisoners are allowed to work on the state highways. Val fit this bill, and in September 2005, he and several other men had been assigned to a stretch of highway 380, about halfway between Roswell and Alamogordo. Felix Nasiverra was not a part of this road crew. Val remembered this, all except the part where Felix wasn’t present. Were one to have asked Val about it, he would have assured you he and Felix did it together. That they’d sat together on the old converted school bus, painted white with the mesh windows.
Val worked the night shift. In all actuality he sat on the bus with a young Mexican man named Al who’d shot his wife after catching her with another man. Prison records stated Al was released in October of 2005, though if anyone had bothered to check the records, they would have seen he wasn’t scheduled for release until 2016. And even though Al and Val, who thought it was hilarious their names rhymed, sat in the very back seat of the bus and wisecracked on their way to work every night, were you to ask Val about his buddy Al, you would have received a blank stare. Val had no memory of the man. He would tell you—or at least he would have told you—it had been Felix himself with whom he’d sat on the bus.
October fifteenth started out like any other night. The eight prisoners went through security and joked around, business as usual, Val got his place in the back, like he liked, and the ride to the site was encompassed by a con man telling racist jokes. Everyone laughed, even the Mexicans. They all had to stand lined up in their leg irons and listen while Assistant Warden Smiley explained the drill, his big German Shepherd, Zeus, at his side. His assistant, a deputy named Smith, stood off to one side.
He discussed how Zeus could—and had—bitten a prisoner’s finger clean off while the man was trying to escape. Val stared off up at the sky, happy to be outdoors, somewhere other than the prison cell. The warden’s words rolled off him like rain.
The work wasn’t very complicated. They couldn’t be trusted with backhoes, or sledgehammers, or things like that, so they mostly moved fill from one point to another. During the day a state crew did most of the work, and at night the prisoners came and shuffled dirt and rocks around. Val had a green wheelbarrow, and couldn’t walk very fast due to his leg irons, so he sauntered around at a casual pace, whistling old punk rock songs to himself. Being out here and listening to the sounds of night birds made him happy.
But around three, the birds and crickets all fell silent. Val only had a second or so to notice before the sky opened up with light.
For the night work—especially since they were dealing with felons who hadn’t yet been rehabilitated—they used massive banks of sodium halide lights hooked up to loud industrial generators. Those lights were bright.
The light that swallowed the site whole was even more radiant.
Everyone froze, blind. Hands went to shield eyes, and Zeus the dog began to pace and bark—a troubled, high-pitched sound.
Val’s feet went out from under him. He started to fall, but he wasn’t falling down. He fell up, into a dark circle which appeared in the center of the sky. The prisoners rose slowly, disoriented by the light until they were above it, and a floor appeared under their feet. The men tried to speak to one another, but there was a solid, steady hum that drowned everything out. Zeus looked like he belonged in a silent movie, mouth moving over and over again, no noise.
Everyone move in, closer together.
Val would never remember what happened next, not even under hypnosis. A large red arrow appeared on the blinding white floor, and the men and the dog followed it. Where else was there to go? What else was there to do? They stayed close, in a clump. Between the blinding white of their surroundings and the powerful low tone, touch was the only communication they had. The chains from the men’s leg irons jingled noiselessly.
They followed the arrow, and a white door closed behind them. The white space in which they stood was smaller now. The humming became unbearable, one of the older men’s noses started to bleed. The orange jumpsuits and the red blood looked strikingly out of place here, even more so when first one drop of blood, then another plopped fat onto the white floor. A rectangle opened in one of the walls. The rectangle was a door, and there was blackness behind it. The men imagined cool, quiet darkness. Zeus kept shaking his head, the way dogs do when they have ear mites. He kept his tail tucked between his legs.
A smallish gray shape filled the door, and each man knew what it was. Some of them, Assistant Warden Smiley especially, believed until the very end this was a test by the U.S. Government.
The gray shape was naked, smooth gray skin stretched across a humanoid body. Where its legs met was smooth and sexless; more gray-on-gray. Its head was large, as were its shiny black eyes. The nostrils were two slits in the center of its head, the mouth a little black smile. It held up a three-fingered hand and its words arrived in each man’s mind.
Welcome. Please line up for testing now.
The door closed behind it. The return to the unblemished white walls sucked away at the morale in the room.
No one moved.
Welcome. Please line up for testing now.
This time the men lined themselves up.
Not a one of them had the clarity to acknowledge that they’d been abducted by aliens, just like the cover of the
Weekly World News
. Instead, the collective thought, which the Sangaumanian doctor could hear quite well, was an agony over the hum. It started off annoying, but managed to eventually drive out all other thoughts. Just the way the Sangaumans liked it.
The doctor walked up to the first man in line. Evan Ringrich, a physician from the northeast corner of the state who’d had his license suspended for drinking but still continued to practice medicine, who was only four months away from a parole hearing he most likely would walk away from, stood tall under the scrutiny. He was a proud man, and had rehabilitated himself in prison. The little gray doctor pointed to him, and pointed off into the whiteness. A red arrow appeared, and a black rectangle slid open on the wall. A doorway. Ringrich looked at the other men with a questioning gaze.
Go, please.
The being’s mouth was an unnerving black line.
More than to any of the others, Ringrich looked to Smiley for his assurance. Perhaps because they’d all spent so long looking to Smiley for everything—when to eat, when to shit, when to work—the habit remained ingrained in the men. Smiley gave a little half-shrug. He didn’t care what happened to any of these lowlifes, so long as that fuck-forsaken noise in his head stopped.
Ringrich followed the red arrow, and vanished into the black rectangle. This went on for seven of the eight men, pausing for a moment as Zeus dropped in a heap of black and tan fur, blood oozing out his ears. Smiley lunged for the doctor. They could do what they wanted with the men, but fuck with his dog, and that was the end. The doctor sidestepped as pretty as you please, and Smiley went down on his face. In the humming silence Val couldn’t decide which bore more watching, Smiley and the doctor, or Zeus and the pool of crimson forming around his triangular head.
Smiley stood up and pulled his gun on the doctor. Its expression never changed, not even as Smiley silently fired his weapon. The doctor held up its hand with those three knobby fingers and froze the bullet. It clattered to the floor without a noise. Smiley let his gun slide out of his fingers and it dropped to the floor, discharging a bullet which began to ricochet. The doctor stopped that one as well, and then stopped Smiley, too. He stood dead still in his khaki officer’s uniform, like something out of a wax museum, albeit not a very interesting one. The stain where he’d spilled his coffee earlier stood out in the harsh lighting and Val felt embarrassed for him.
The doctor pointed at the next man, a red arrow appeared, and a door opened. The man went, all the fight gone from him.
Val was last in line. Only Val, the doctor, frozen Smiley and dead Zeus remained. The doctor walked right up to Val and the little black smile expanded. It said something in its native tongue, and the original black door opened. Two more Sangaumans cautiously entered the room. They looked from Zeus to Smiley, then to Val. They crowded around him.
The same as many felt no remorse in slicing open rats in the name of science, neither did the Sangaumans from the planet Ye’Tunatal, feel remorse at the things they did to their prisoners from the Chaves County Correctional Facility. All except for Val. Val they nodded at, took a blood sample from, all the while chattering at him and one another in their own mental language. They measured him, weighed him, removed his cuffs and leg irons as if they were made of tinfoil, looked in his mouth, in his eyes, and in his ears, treating him with respect and gentle, cool, dry hands, and all of a sudden the hum disappeared and the hot white room vanished, and Val was on his hands and knees, bringing up the remainder of his dinner in a ditch on the side of 380. He rocked back onto his haunches and plopped onto his ass, covering his face with his hands and rubbing at his eyes. My god it seemed quiet. The crickets sounded so far away…someone was saying his name. He turned and peered though his fingers like a child, and there was Smith, a wet stain on his pants, Val noted with some amusement, calling to him, looking horrified. Moments later a Chavez County Sheriff cruiser rolled in, followed first by an unmarked army car, and then by a simple navy blue Crown Victoria.
27
Val felt as though he were sinking into the Crown Vic’s plush gray seat.
“That didn’t happen,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and said it again, with meaning this time. “That didn’t happen.”
Felix, not having been there on the alien craft, could only tell Val the parts he knew. That Val and seven other men had been taken onto the ship, and Val alone had returned. That Val had only been aboard for four minutes.
“They altered your memories. Now I told you it should all come crashing down. You should remember everything, in time.”
“White,” Val said. Like the dreams. Val felt like he was talking through a mouthful of cotton. His temples throbbed. Jail had seemed much simpler, and he rather wished he was back there. Maybe his incarceration here would be as simple.
White
. It gnawed at him. He hadn’t
really
gone up into a spaceship…
Except he had. He remembered blood on white. A white so polar pure it made the blood look black.
“Do you have water?”
“There’s water inside.”
“They’re going to lock me up?” he asked, feeling very young. “You’re going to lock me up?”
Felix looked at the gray leather steering wheel, with its rubber grips, black and gray. Like a certain smile. “For a while. Until it’s safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“Just safe. Come on.”
Val followed, thinking of running, knowing he’d never make it past the fences and the guards, knowing even if there were no fences and guards he wouldn’t run. Because he was a coward? He preferred to think of himself as an opportunist.
Inside he might as well have been in a hospital. A vacant looking pretty blonde with cherry red lipstick took his information and admitted him. Felix got him a glass of water in one of those conical paper cups.
“This snow cone sucks,” Val said, drinking it all. “Can I have another one?” He knew he wouldn’t get another one because his legs were buckling under him. They had drugged him. Felix caught him, slowed his descent to the floor, and as his cheek lay against cool white linoleum, his vision began to white out and Val’s last memory was of being very, very afraid.
Excerpt #4
from
Trinity
by Judd Grenouille ©1988
The next time I saw Adrienne, she was in quite an uproar. Her doctor said, not bothering to hide his disdain, that allowing her to see me was quite unusual, and it was only because she had had no other visitors that he acquiesced to her request to see me. She was not in a rehab this time, but a psychiatric ward.
I was searched before I went in, for she was on suicide watch, and they didn’t want me smuggling in anything that she could use to hurt herself. She’d tried to end her life, but failed.
She looked dangerous when I saw her, but more self-possessed, like a Gorgon from mythology. She wore a shapeless white shift.
“There are triangles everywhere,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear it. We met in a dark room because the light, she said, hurt her eyes. The single bulb from a lamp cast long shadows across her face, like when children tell stories by a campfire. “The Irish have their shamrocks. The Arabs have trifecta as a fertility symbol. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But the real trinity is us and them. Humanity, the Sangaumans, and the Tylwyth Teg.”
I didn’t speak, waiting for her to go on. What could I say? The glittering in her eyes that the doctors took for madness, I took for her unwavering certainty.
“One of them is in Cal’s school. I can tell by the way Cal described him on the phone. You know what they are?”
Again I said nothing, content to let her talk.
“They’re nothing. They’re worms. Little parasites, who take over bodies. They can’t have a world of their own until they make someone who can give it to them. And I gave it to them.” She started to cry.
I stroked her wrist, feeling the texture of her scabs.
“They had nothing until a race with ships was unfortunate enough to land on their swamp planet. Then they gained hands, and that species’ knowledge of ship building. They destroyed their home world, and then moved to another, then another.”
She paused, turning away from me, facing into the darkness.
“Until I gave them what they needed to build a new race for themselves.”
“A new race? How do you mean?”
‘The Sangaumans can move things with their minds. Stop time, control the weather, all sorts of stuff like that. They can float me up to their ship, the Tylwyth Teg have to come down a ramp and carry me up. The Tylwyth Teg can’t use the Sangaumans as hosts, so they’ve been looking for a species that can breed with them. They keep their Sangauman donors inert, frozen. They milk them like cows, and have been trying to find someone who can carry their babies to term.”
She started to cry and I offered her a tissue. She took it. While she talked, she’d scratched open one of her scabs.
“They said because I was on so much drugs I’d altered my chromosomes, and that’s why they got two babies out of me.”
‘Why didn’t they take Cal the way they took your daughter?”
“She didn’t work out.”
“What do they need these children to do?”
“Act as hosts. They can use the Sangaumans control over matter to build their new bodies and transfer their consciousness.”
“And then what?” I asked. “I’ve never spoken with someone who knew this much…”
“The Sangaumans told me. They wanted me to know why it was important they not get to Cal.”
“You said Cal was being watched.”
“One of the girls in his class. I can tell by the way he described her. They’re using her as a host to watch him.”
I did some research on this girl, we’ll call her Amelia. I could find no conclusive evidence, one way or another, that she was inhabited by the Tylwyth Teg. I am inclined to believe Adrienne because Amelia’s parents moved to a new town a year and a half later, and the girl fell into a stream and drowned. A case of the Tylwyth Teg covering their tracks, or coincidence? I honestly don’t know. I discovered there are two strains of Tylwyth Teg inhabiting humans on earth, there are Alphas and Betas. The Betas are disposable, used for scouting missions, etc. They have less defined social skills, and are often confused by unfamiliar objects. They only have their host’s knowledge to pull from, and cannot form inferences based on new information. The Alphas are able to blend almost seamlessly with the hosts consciousness. They have personalities, and can leave a host once they inhabit it. The host will usually die at that point (it is my theory that the Alpha left the little girl when she was no longer useful, and they discarded the body—just a useless husk at this point—in a stream.)
“If they grow their own bodies, they’ll be unstoppable. They’ll take over resources even faster than they do as parasites.”
Based on Adrienne’s description, which she received from the Sangaumans, in their natural form, the Tylwyth Teg are about two inches long, and look like mottled, brown slugs. The Alphas and the Betas are indistinguishable. They reside in the sinus cavity of their hosts—the human hosts, anyway. They seem to be able to inhabit most any creature, except the Sangaumans. They then release two long nerves which tap into the host’s brain.
“I have to get out of here so I can help my son,” she said.
“It makes sense to them,” I said. “Imagine, a vast intelligence, but with no way to implement it. No thumbs, no hands, not even paws. How long did they simply languish in the mud of their home world?”
“You’re taking their side?” Adrienne asked, her voice like daggers.
“We can’t know anything about them. We can’t know what their motives are.”
“I know. I’ve seen them. You don’t know what you’re saying. I want you out of here! And leave my son alone. All of you! Nurse! Nurse!”
An orderly came in and asked me to leave. Adrienne spit at me as I left. That was the last time we spoke. I shouldn’t have said those things to her, as she was in a delicate mental state. But the way our three species, humanity, the Tylwyth Teg and the Sangaumans interact has made me really do some thinking on the nature of the universe. It is not a simple thing that we can ever hope to learn. All I know, as I look up at the sky, is that there are more vast wonders out there than there are twinkling stars.