One night, when I was eight, I went to bed early because I was getting over a cold. I slept restlessly, and when I woke, the bright light hurt my eyes, my head. I had the gauze over my eyes, but it seemed thinner this time.
There was only one shadowy figure, standing there, looking down at me, perfectly still. Male or female—it was impossible to tell. This one was a tall, narrow blur, and though I couldn’t see its face, I knew it was looking at me. Hostility rolled off of it like a stench. I was so afraid that I stopped breathing.
It spoke for the first time. A harsh whisper, close, as if right in my ear, though the figure hadn’t bent down. It just stared down at me, and somehow it spoke.
“Wake up,” it said.
Finally, I screamed, and then I jerked awake in my dark bedroom. My pajamas were soaked with cold sweat. No one came into my room to comfort me. Maybe no one had heard. I lay alone for the rest of the night, curled up and silent.
Soon after that night, Ben arrived. My little brother, the only brother I would ever get. From the first, I loved him so hard I could feel it like an ache behind my rib cage. It was a feeling I understood by pure, primal instinct. Ben was mine. He was ours.
We set up his crib, and in my mind I pictured the figures standing over my brother, staring down at him with their cold hatred as his little arms and legs pumped, a helpless and defenseless baby. I couldn’t stand it. At night I’d sneak into his room after the house was asleep, put my pillow and blanket on the floor, and sleep there. I was ready to fight them off in a way I had never been able to fight when they came for me.
The figures didn’t come for Ben. When I slept by his crib, they didn’t come for me, either. When Ben became a toddler, he’d sometimes slip into bed with either Violet, Dodie, or me, snuggling us in his sleep. I knew he was safe if he was sleeping with one of us. And when he slept with me, the figures didn’t come. During the years with Ben, I saw the light only rarely.
And then, a game of hide-and-seek and Ben was gone. Unexplained. Unexplainable.
What was I supposed to think?
I’ll tell you what I thought. What Iknew.They took him. I was supposed to find him that day, but I was too slow, too lax. I wasn’t on my guard. The figure over my bed had shone its light on him, put the gauze over his eyes.Wake up,it had said, and my little brother had been afraid just like I had been, and for once I wasn’t there to help him. To protect him.
Ben had disappeared in the middle of the day, so how had they done it? Why hadn’t any of us seen the light? Why hadn’t I seen it? If I had seen the light, I would have done anything. I would have gladly offered myself to whatever they wanted if they would just leave Ben. But they didn’t give me the chance.
After I moved out of this house, I didn’t see the light and the figures anymore. I had plenty of other things to keep me awake at night—like, say, agonizing grief, heavy existential dread mixed with rage, and bleak contemplation of the future. Adulthood is fun.
Eventually, I found some books and looked up my childhoodproblem. I read about sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and the various types of seizures. Any one of those things would explain what I’d seen as a kid, those nights with the light and the figures over my bed—but they didn’t explain it to me.
I knew what my problem was. It wasn’t sleep paralysis, and it wasn’t seizures. My problem was fucking aliens. They had studied me, found me wanting, and had taken my brother instead. And then they’d left.
So I studied aliens, the way they had studied me.
I could work for VUFOS until I was a hundred, and it would never bring my brother back. I understood that. But my investigations were the only things that made me feel even a little bit better. People said that Violet was the crazy one, but only VUFOS made me feel sane.
When my interview subjects talked about what they saw—descriptions that everyone else in their life had scoffed or laughed at—I understood. I looked at their bedrooms and their abduction sites with dead seriousness. I wandered fields in which strange markings had appeared overnight. I investigated dead cattle. I measured electromagnetic signals and radiation. I studied flight schedules from nearby airports. I stayed awake for nighttime vigils, looking for lights in the sky where they’d been reported before. This was how the world made sense to me, and the aliens who had visited me as a kid stayed away. They knew I was onto them. When I did sleep at night, it was always in unbroken darkness.
Then I had come back to this house, and the lights had come back, and those old words from my childhood had been written on the wall.WAKE UP.
Those fucking aliens again. But what happened wasn’t right. I was a grown-up now, not a kid, and I had spent years studying a lot of aliens—secondhand accounts, but still—and I knew my business.
The thing in the living room had grabbed me by the throat, which had never happened in my childhood. I had felt its fingers, whichwere cold and dead. It had whispered those old words, but it had sounded different. I hadn’t been frozen, I hadn’t had the veil over my eyes, and when I aimed the vase at it, I had hit something solid. Then the thing had vanished.
And it had had a rancid, dead smell. A stench.
I’d assumed it was aliens, but I hadn’t been thinking straight in the moment. That wasn’t how aliens behaved. Not to me, and not in any of the encounters I had studied. I’d been shunted back to my childhood at first, reacting like that scared little kid, but now I stood in the Thornhills’ house and thought clearly about the evidence. I’d been running on the theory that the Thornhills might have been abducted, but clearly they hadn’t. Why had I thought they had? Because it was a habit, the easiest explanation in a mind like mine?
You’re supposed to be an investigator, you idiot,I told myself.So investigate.
Dodie had left, and I’d seen her walk off down the street. She was upset, but that was fine. She’d get over it, and until she did, I would work alone. As I always did.
I left, not bothering to lock the front door behind me, and strode toward home. The street was silent. A breeze gusted through, scraping some old dead leaves over the pavement and shushing in the trees around the empty Thornhill house and the abandoned house across the street. This neighborhood was a graveyard, a tomb. The rest of Fell wasn’t much better.
I banged through the front door of our house like I had when I was a teenager, then took the stairs two at a time without taking my boots off.
In my bedroom, the sunlight slanted through the window, illuminating the dust motes in the air. I yanked at the box of my files and removed the lid. My fingertips touched Charles Zimmer’s file—the most recent one—and then skimmed past it. Zimmer would have towait. I took out a blank file with blank pages in it, a pen. I closed the box and picked up my camera and tripod.
Subject: Vail Esmie
Age: Thirty-four
