Fifty-six
John Hartman stared at the ceiling. In the world
overhead, things were happening. Dobbie howled at the intruder slipping
through the skies of the Ridge. A car slid into his drive. Upstairs,
David came slamming through the patio door screaming hysterically.
John raced up the stairs to find David on the verge
of hysteria and Gene Packerson wandering the patio like an entranced
zombie. He relinquished the sphere to his son's desperate care, only now
beginning to realize how hopeless the situation was becoming. The entire
house was awash with a green light.
David dropped to his knees and cradled the sphere in
his arms, frantic with mounting despair. "Don't let it get Mom!" David
cried over and over, tears streaming from his eyes. "Don't let it get
Mom!"
John didn't know how to stop it from happening.
Gene fixed his gaze on the massive object overhead,
shielding his eyes against the glare with one hand and clutching his
useless revolver with the other. John reached out, placed his own useless
revolver on the refrigerator, and then turned to the empty house.
"Marlene, talk to us."
Her image snapped into focus in the center of the
room. She wore a white gown that John recognized. He didn't want to
remember where he had seen it before, or when. A funeral shroud. The apparition pleaded
with her dark eyes, but said nothing.
"What do you need!" John roared at her. Anger masked
his terror. "You said you thought it might be possible! You said there
should be a way! You gave David a new body! You gave me a new hand!
What else do you need?"
She stared at him sadly.
"Marlene, just don't stand there! Tell us what you
need!"
Gene Packerson looked on, horror-stricken and totally
confused. He stared at Marlene Hartman in abject wonder and then down at
David clutching the sphere and weeping with hopeless bitterness.
The green light flared and covered the night sky for
as far as the eye could see in any direction. The sphere in David's arms
turned transparent, like a beach ball made of clear plastic. John stood
over the boy with clenched fists. David was screaming, and there was
nothing brute force could do to stop the sphere from fading away.
"You said you needed a part of what you were," John
said to Marlene's glowing apparition, now calmly accepting defeat. "You have to explain."
David's sobs caught in his throat. He looked up the
apparition. "Dad, she's at the cemetery! Don't you see? That's a part
of what she was! She needs her dead body back!"
John stared down at his son in mind-numbing horror.
"It doesn't matter if it's dead!" David shrieked.
"The mirror can fix it!"
John backed away shaking his head emphatically.
David had been healed of a life-threatening disease only to be driven
mad. Marlene had been returned to him only to drive the last vestige of
sanity from his mind.
"She hates the stone angel!"
David cried. "She never believed in
angels! We have to get her out and make her live again!"
David tried to cover the sphere with his arms. He
pressed his face against it’s surface. He shrieked in helpless protest
when it vanished, leaving him clutching thin air.
Marlene's image, too, faded slowly away, and then
vanished altogether.
David scrambled to his feet and ran outside, reaching
for the visitor in the night sky with both arms. "Don't go away yet! She
has everything she needs now! Please help her!"
A dizzying shadow spun around his son and began to
lengthen. The glass egg moved over the slope. David's fell to his
knees. John moved to his son’s side, devastated by the unfolding tragedy.
So close, and they had lost her again.
Gene Packerson clutched his arm. "John, it's moving
toward town."
John saw that it was true. The gargantuan object
gained no altitude. Instead, it drifted toward Eagle Junction.
David fell abruptly silent. He leaped to his feet
and broke out in a dead run across the slope.
Gene turned the other way and ran for his car. John
leaped into the car at Gene’s side. Gene spun the tires and braked
alongside David long enough for the boy to jump into the back seat.
"Seatbelts," Gene called out, and John thought it the
craziest thing he had ever heard.
The sheriff drove on the ragged edge of destruction.
With his emergency lights flashing, he entered town at ninety miles an
hour, barreling through one red light after another. Awash with green
light, the streets were now deserted. Those left behind cowered wide-eyed
with terror behind drawn curtains and watched a single car sail by at high
speeds.
"Slow down!" David cried. "It's stopping at the
cemetery!"
Horror sluiced through John like shards of ice
tearing through his flesh. Any place but the cemetery. Gene jammed on
his brakes rather than drive beneath the ominous underbelly of the object
settling low to the ground. He broad-slid the car, sideswiped a parked
car, and set the abandoned vehicle into a brutal half spin. David threw
open his door and tumbled out across the pavement.
John made a grab for the boy, missed, and helplessly
watched the ten-year-old scale the wrought iron fence and vanish into the
glare of emerald light.
A low-pitched droning sound reverberated in the
stillness. A white light began to glow on the underside of the oval
behemoth overhead. Tombstones along the perimeter of the hill cast fifty
foot shadows across the surrounding streets.
Gene Packerson's courage failed. He clambered from
the car and fled on foot back down the street. John stood rooted
alongside the car, wishing he could do the same, but unable to abandon
David to the glare of light.
Marlene's stone angel on the crest of the hill flared
with the intensity of sunlight. And then a thread of light dribbled from
the belly of the alien craft. It engulfed and evaporated the stone
angel. A roar filled the world, drowning out John's frantic cry of
despair.
