Other Aliens Read online

  He replaced the phone in the receiver. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “I’m so fortunate you happened to come outside,” Janet said to Nancy. “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to knock on your door.”

  “That was lucky,” Nancy agreed. She was setting cups on the bar counter, napkins, then a plate of dark tea bread. Charles opened the refrigerator and took out a crock of butter. “You’re American,” he observed. “Where are you from there?”

  “We live in New Jersey.” Janet approached the bar. The morning papers were spread out on a pretty table near the French doors, with two wicker chairs drawn up on either side. But where had they served the guests she’d seen leaving? There must be a dining room, but they preferred, rightly, to serve an uninvited guest in this cozier space. “It’s a small town,” she added. “It’s called Sleepy Hollow, oddly enough.” As she spoke, Charles, having set the butter on the counter, opened a cupboard below the phone and took out something she couldn’t see, as his back blocked her view. The electric kettle commenced a rising whistle and Nancy stepped away to silence it. “There we are,” she said.

  Charles was fiddling with whatever he’d taken from the cupboard; there was the sound of paper tearing. Then, abruptly, he turned upon Janet, she was very near, and she saw that he was holding something shiny between his thumb and forefinger. In a motion so quick, so practiced, she had not a moment to react, he caught her chin with his free hand and dragged her lower lip down with his thumb, bringing the object—it was a thin, flexible needle—to her mouth and lightly pricking the moist, exposed flesh of her gums. Before she could protest, he released her, turning back to the cupboard. Janet covered her mouth with her hand, casting a frantic look at Nancy, who had watched this swift and strange attack from her post at the kettle. She was smiling indulgently at her husband, as a mother might smile at a precocious child.

  “What did you just do?” Janet’s voice, soft, faintly incredulous, surprised her as it entirely disguised the hard grip of panic that had seized her heart and sent it racing down dark, previously unimagined byways.

  Nancy’s gaze shifted to her, the smile still in place. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a sample. Charles took it for his database.”

  “A sample?” Janet repeated. She passed her index finger inside her lip, feeling for the puncture left by the needle, and it was there, a tiny indentation radiating heat.

  Charles snapped the cupboard shut, repeating his wife’s dismissal. “It’s nothing,” he said. As he turned to Janet she took a few wary steps backward. “It’s a DNA sample,” he said. “I’m a clinician at the polytechnic hospital in the city. We’re creating a database. We don’t get many Americans.”

  “Tea’s ready,” said Nancy, cradling the ceramic pot shrouded in a flowered cozy between her hands. She carried it to the counter, where Charles busied himself pulling out stools.

  “Why wouldn’t you just ask me?” Janet protested. “If that’s what you wanted.”

  “Oh,” said Charles, “people are so touchy about such things.”

  Nancy nodded, taking up a slender knife to slice the tea cake. “And that’s rather silly, isn’t it, considering that we leave our DNA all over everything all the time? Do come have your tea. This cake is rather good. It’s a family recipe.”

  Janet didn’t move. Her brain was in such turmoil it took all her energy to follow it. One strain was about the DNA question. Nancy was right; it was in saliva and hair. Her neighbor had spit into a plastic cup and sent it off to a lab to find out what her ethnic heritage was. You didn’t need to prick someone to take a DNA sample. Another part of her brain considered making a dash for the door and running out into the road. If she ran toward Smithfield she’d meet the taxi coming to get her. But had Charles actually called a taxi? He could easily have depressed the call button and pretended to be talking to someone on the other end. And if she ran for the door, could she get out before Charles, who was tall, strong, very quick, stopped her, and then what? Would they struggle? But why would he stop her?

  Charles and Nancy watched her candidly, their expressions complicit and faintly amused. Nancy’s hand hovered above the teapot, prepared to pour out. Be calm, Janet advised herself. Take a breath. Her mouth had gone mysteriously dry and she was conscious of tightness around her eyes. “It wasn’t a sample,” she said.

  Nancy’s hand found the teapot handle and she raised it carefully, pouring a stream of dark tea into a cup. “What makes you think so?” she asked pleasantly.

  “It was a drug,” Janet said.

  Charles, who had never actually taken a seat on the stool he’d drawn out, moved calmly past Janet, careful, she thought, to keep a distance. “There’s no need to panic,” he said. He went to the door, turned a key in a dead bolt she hadn’t noticed there, and slipped the key into his pants pocket. “How are you feeling?” he asked solicitously, facing her, blocking the locked door with his body.

  She was feeling distinctly odd. The flesh of her face was hot, tight, dry, but her hands were cold. Her heart had picked up speed, that was natural, that was fear, but there was a hollow aching in her chest she didn’t recognize and a lassitude sweeping up her legs, her arms, as if the sinews that strung her together were dissolving. She attempted a step toward the door, the locked door, but her shoe only slid an inch or so across the stone floor.

  “She needs to sit down,” Nancy observed.

  Charles approached, one hand open, extended. What was in his other hand? “Don’t touch me,” Janet said.

  “Let me help you,” he said. He grasped her arm gently, just above her elbow, and steered her toward the kitchen. Her steps were halting; she was helpless to resist. Nancy left the bar stool and busied herself at the table, pulling out a wicker chair, plumping the cushion, gathering up the newspapers and stashing them in a bin. “You can have your tea here,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll be more comfortable and you’ll have the view.”

  Charles eased Janet down into the chair; indeed it was a relief to be off her feet. But what was this absurd pretense, this performance they were putting on for her benefit? Her head cleared and she could speak, she could understand. “What have you done to me?” she asked.

  “You’ll feel very hot, at first,” Charles said. “Then, later, very cold.”

  Nancy, ferrying a full cup of tea to the table, spoke in a voice as airy and false as a flight attendant in a pitching plane. “You may experience a bit of nausea. The sensation that your skin is crawling. That passes.”

  “How long before I can go?” Janet said.

  At this question the couple standing on either side of her chair exchanged a look of blank surprise. Then Charles smiled broadly, showing all his teeth. “About eight hours?” he said. He’d posed the answer as a question, but directed at whom? Nancy evidently agreed, as she said nothing, gazing complacently at her husband, her eyes bright and avid. They were so amused.

  A great despondency settled over Janet; she felt the weight of it bearing down on her neck and shoulders. All she could think of was Frank, and then she could see him, relaxed in the chintz chair in the sunny hotel room, a half-drunk cup of coffee cooling on the side table, turning a page of his novel—it was a new Benjamin Black, he’d picked it up at a bookshop in the airport—while the breeze rustled the curtain and the birds chirped in the garden and the soft plash of water in the fountain murmured, “Sleep, sleep.” “Frank?” Janet said.

  “Yes?” Nancy replied.

  Janet pulled herself up as best she could. These leaden hands, she thought. “I want to call my husband,” she said. “To tell him I’ll be late. He’s at the hotel. I don’t want him to worry.” She gathered her strength and struggled to push back the chair. Charles and Nancy made no move to stop her. “I’ll just tell him Bromley Hall was further than I thought,” she assured them. She was on her feet, unsteady, yes, but focused and determined; she must speak to Frank, they must allow her that. They had nothing to fear from her call. She couldn’t tell Frank
where she was because she didn’t know herself. It was only a few steps to the counter. Did she know the hotel number? Yes, she did, she had memorized it because it was so simple: the city exchange plus the word MOOR. Nancy stepped back as Janet staggered away from the chair. Just a few steps to go. Charles went to the big windows and began drawing a heavy curtain, closing in the dark. But Janet was there, she had reached the counter. She fumbled the phone from the wall set, turned it over in her hand, looking back at Nancy and Charles. Nancy was switching on a lamp near the table. Charles stood at a corner cupboard rummaging through a drawer. They appeared indifferent to her. Painstakingly she punched the numbers into the keypad of the phone. She would get the automatic service, then just put in the room number, seventeen, and Frank would be on the line.

  They had quarreled, she thought, as she brought the receiver to her ear. How stupid. What had it been about? He was annoyed by the room change and then had the good sense to stay in the new room while she, in her eagerness to visit Bromley Hall, had closed the door with unnecessary force and hurried down the stairs to catch the bus.

  The phone was dead. “Frank?” she said into the receiver. And then, hopelessly, “Frank.” She dropped the phone carelessly upon the counter. They had quarreled, she thought.

  Sadness welled up in her from its deepest reservoirs, displacing all hope and terror. How long would it be before Frank entered the grueling project that might never end? How long before he put down his mystery novel, got up from the chair, and commenced the methodical, doomed search for his wife?

  Tinkerers

  Lavie Tidhar

  A white flower bloomed outside the hospital-room window. The man looked at the sleeping boy and then looked away and he walked out from the sound of machines and into the hush of corridors where slippered feet whispered against smooth floor, and he kept walking until glass doors swooshed open and he stepped outside, into an air polluted by cars. He stood with his hands on his knees, taking deep breaths. When he turned, an old woman was there, wearing a gown, trying to light a cigarette with shaking fingers. She kept muttering all this while, and her bright button eyes glared at the man as her gums masticated, and she told him of great rivers that ran clear and pure, and of wide and wild prairies and of an ancient, never-ending war, and at last of a flower, a rare and precious flower that blooms only beyond the Mountains of the Moon.

  He knew her then for what she truly was, but soon she subsided into inarticulate mumblings and at last she staggered away, and then the man too was gone from that other terrible place.

  A gaggle of loons called out in tremolo as the Stranger passed their watering hole. He stopped and listened to the eerie calls. Their tremolo was warning, and as he listened he heard the males yodel territorially. Something had spooked the birds.

  When he came to the water’s edge he saw a pale figure floating facedown in the shallows. Tufts of black hair jutted from either side of the bald pate of the head, and a hole had been blasted with a shotgun in his back. The Stranger turned him over carefully and saw the big red nose and the smiling face of the dead clown and he felt a cold fury. It was a whiteface clown, and whoever had shot him had begun to scalp him, no doubt for bounty money, before being interrupted or scared away.

  The sky was darkening and, on the horizon, the Stranger saw that a storm was approaching from the west. Ankhs and daggers flashed briefly, and were replaced with a shower of ichthys sparks that lit up that part of the sky. It was moving fast. The Stranger looked at the ground and saw drops of red blood lead away from the watering hole and he followed them, leaving the loons to their mournful calls.

  The Stranger had been riding for a long time and was destined to ride for a long time more, and he had learned patience. He had been riding through the Doinklands for some time but he had not come any closer to his goal. He followed the trail of blood to an outcrop in the rocks on top of a low-lying hill over the little watering hole, and there he found the man who had shot the clown.

  The bounty hunter had been a veteran of the Titanomachy. This much was clear from his gimp leg, which had been turned, at some point in the past, into a long and rather graceful string instrument, and from his abdomen, where his gut had become a beautiful if plain clear-glass repository, which had until recently contained several live scorpions.

  The glass had been broken rather savagely, and the scorpions had escaped their entrapment and were currently nestled into the crook of the man’s neck and two rested over his eyes, but whether it was his injury, or the scorpions themselves, which killed him, the Stranger didn’t know, though he took a step back all the same. His feet hit a bottle. When he picked it up, he saw that it was Sticks—the common rotgut that came from mixing substance in water, and that allowed one to revisit that other place. He stared at it for a moment longer, then tossed it away and heard it shatter.

  Beyond the little shelter of stones the wind picked up, and overhead the flashes of mandalas and five-pointed stars grew in intensity as the symbol storm approached. In their watering hole, the loons wailed and hooted to each other as they sought shelter from the storm. The Stranger grabbed the bounty hunter’s feet and dragged him out of the ring of stones and dumped him unceremoniously down the slope and then he took shelter himself. He hated any and all unkindness to clowns.

  In the wake of the storm came a battle, but it was far to the west and unlike the storm did not come closer. All through the night the Stranger lay huddled within the little outcrop of rocks on that nameless hill, listening to the battlefield. Inhuman, high-pitched laughter echoed like thunder across the clouded skies, and interwoven into it like volley fire in riposte were awful bursts of silence as the two sides battled, back and forth, back and forth, Colossi and pupae. He heard the tread of giant stone feet on the ground. He had not realized that the Titanomachy had ranged this far into the clown lands, nor that the Colossi were once more abroad.

  Only once was he afraid: when, momentarily, a vast shadow flew overhead, blotting out all sound and light, and the Stranger felt the dread of the chthonic void in his guts. But whether it truly was one of the pupae umbrarum, loose upon the world, or merely a passing cloud, he didn’t know for certain, and it was very soon gone.

  Bright sunlight bathed the Escapement when the Stranger woke from his fitful sleep. Little caiques chittered excitedly to each other in the trees and the loons hooted in soft, short calls in the watering hole under the hill. The storm was gone and the battle had passed far away to the west. When the Stranger walked down the hill his horse came trotting up to him and in his wake there came three other horses, all riderless. The Stranger stroked his horse’s neck and the horse gave him a whinny of greeting.

  “Where did you find them?” the Stranger said, but the horse just snorted. The Stranger patted him again and then mounted his horse. As he rode away from the Doinklands the horses followed. Only once did he see a piece of matériel, and it must have been blown over from the battlefield by the storm. It was a swan’s long, elongated skull, one hollow eye cavity packed with earth in which grew a solitary worm rose, and it trailed behind it its long and curving neck, like a hangman’s rope, in which the multiplicity of vertebrae had been transformed into black metal links. The Stranger did not approach or pick up the piece of matériel, and the horses shied away from it in terrified revulsion. The Stranger spurred his horse on and soon they were away from the Doinklands and into wide-open country.

  That was two days earlier, and he never did find out who had killed the bounty hunter, though he was glad the man was dead all the same.

  A painter’s brush smeared strokes of yellow over the horizon, and the sky gradually turned a light blue. The clouds in the sky resembled clowns’ balloons, and the Stranger, on his horse, looked up over the Escapement. The landscape stretched away from him in all directions, with not a town or a hamlet in sight. He was two days’ ride away from clown country, and at least another day, he calculated, before he’d reach the small outpost town that was called Kellysburg. Clum
ps of heliotrope and fiveneedle pricklyleaf lit up the parched earth with vivid blue and yellow colors. The three horses the Stranger had acquired followed the Stranger and his horse at a sedate pace. Occasionally one would produce a burst of gas and dung, and in that manner they traveled, from one horizon and toward the next, a trail of orderly, still-steaming horse shit in their wake.

  The Stranger quite liked the company of the horses. He was used to no one’s company but that of his own horse, who was never even given a name. The Stranger did not like naming things, for to do so was to grow attached to them, and to grow attached to things on the Escapement was not an endeavor to be taken lightly. These horses, he reasoned, must have had names once, much as he himself once had. But their owners were dead, and their names were lost, and what private names horses may give themselves the Stranger didn’t know.

  So they rode, in companionable enough silence, accompanied only by the horses’ farts and occasional whinnies, with the horses chomping at the wildflowers or bits of grass whenever they could find them, and the Stranger gnawing, from time to time, on a strip of dried beef. The Escapement here was flat in all directions, the sky serene, and there was no sign of the war.

  As the miles passed by, the Stranger rocked in his saddle, lulled by the unchanging landscape. He was brought sharply awake, however, at the sound of a pistol shot. The sound was somewhat muffled, and yet it carried across the open. When the Stranger scanned the horizon he saw, snaking across the plains, what seemed to him the remnants of a white road and, coming in from the west, a plume of slowly rolling dust, which might have been a wagon. The Stranger did not increase his speed, but he directed his horse toward the road, at a point ahead of where the wagon would eventually arrive. The horses followed him obediently enough. They crossed the distance, passing through isolated patches of flowering cacti and fever trees, stopping only for the horses to drink at a shallow pool of muddy groundwater. All this while the small plume of dust continued to roll sedately along the white road, and as it came closer the Stranger could see that it was indeed a wagon, and it was pulled by two dirty, piebald donkeys.