“Chief,” he said, his voice sounding loud in the dark. “Do you want me to get the shotguns from the cruiser?”
There was a pause, and Jay wondered if the chief hadn’t heard him, and then he said, “Nooo, I don’t think so, Jay. I think we’re all set.”
“All right.”
The log he was sitting on was suddenly uncomfortable. It felt as though a piece of broken-off branch was now jutting into his right thigh, but as he started to move, he stopped. His feet were rustling the leaves and branches on the ground and it was making too much noise. Someone (or something, a part of him thought) might hear him, and he didn’t want that, not at all. It had gotten so dark that he had a hard time making out the shape of the chief sitting near him, even with the glow from the pipe’s ember, and the police cruiser was a dark bulk in the shadows. He suddenly remembered all those childhood stories, the tales told around Boy Scout campfires, of terrible bears and creatures in the forests, the abandoned mines that held crazed hermits, and the ten-foot-tall Windigo, which ate human flesh.
Jay tried to push the dark thoughts out of his mind, and he touched his holstered pistol, but it was small comfort. He looked all around him, seeking a light, something warm, something familiar, a streetlight or a headlight or a lit window from a house miles away, but there was nothing save the darkness and the faint shapes of the trees. He remembered what the chief said, of hundreds of miles of woods stretching all the way into Canada and beyond, and he thought again of what type of people just might live in those woods, hiding themselves and everything else from the outside world. He had a feeling that he and the chief were outnumbered and exposed, being watched and evaluated, and he wished they were in the cruiser, the engine running, the radio playing, and the doors locked. He looked up at the sky and saw a few stars and the darker bulk of the nearby hills, and he was about to make up his mind to ask the chief if they could go into the cruiser.
Then the lights came.
About six hours earlier they had stopped at the home of Agatha Tate, who had called the chief about the lights and who was also the mother of Brian Tate, the chairman of the three-member board of selectmen. He had gone with the chief and as they drove in the old Ford cruiser (the odometer was on its second trip to one hundred thousand miles) the chief explained the complaint.
“Sure, she might sound nuts, Jay,” he had said, steering with one hand and holding his pipe in the other. “Martians landing in her backyard and killing people. But she is a taxpayer, and she is the mother of Brian Tate. Brian’s got a lot of power here in Crawford, and my budget’s coming up for review next month. Brian and I get along all right now, but come budget time, he’s also gonna remember that we helped out his momma, and that might help us get a new cruiser. This is Crawford, Jay, not Brockton or Medford. People take their police work seriously up here.”
Which certainly was true, Jay thought. Complaints here in Crawford that wouldn’t have even been logged in at his old job in Massachusetts-like bent car radio antennas or broken mailboxes-not only were they reported here, but the people in town actually expected you to go out and investigate them. And follow up with a phone call or a visit a week or so later, to give them an update.
Mrs. Tate’s house was the last one on the dirt road, a two-story wooden structure that looked as if it was at least two hundred years old. Any paint on the thin clapboards had faded away to a dull gray, and the yard was full of a mishmash of old barrels, rotting boxes, piles of rusting chicken wire, and scraps of wood. Cats and chickens prowled and pecked around a rust-colored 1940s-era Ford with no wheels and no roof.
Inside the house it was tough going, with piles and piles of yellowed newspapers and magazines, tied together with twine, blocking the floors and hallways. The floors were made of wide, rough-hewn planks, and even more cats had the run of the house inside. Mrs. Tate was sitting at a wooden kitchen table, puffing on a cigarette. She was in her late eighties, thin and stooped over, wearing a shapeless flowered dress. Her skin was wrinkled and looked dry, and her eyeglasses had thick lenses. Her hair was so thick and blond it had to be a wig. She was hard of hearing, and the chief had to almost yell at her to be understood. Mrs. Tate shouted back, as if she thought everyone had the same level of hearing as she.
“It’s been like this, Frank,” she yelled, her hands quivering as she moved an ashtray closer to her. “Every goddamn Saturday night the past month they’ve been landing up there in the ravine. I seen the lights, every Saturday night. ‘Course, I ain’t dumb enough to take a peek up there at that moment, so I goes up Sunday morning, before my son Brian picks me up for church. Sure enough, there’s bloodstains up there on the ground. It’s a scary thing, Frank, to think of what they’re doing.”
“Who do you think’s up there, Aggie?” the chief asked, his voice still loud, his hands politely folded in front of him on the table.
“Hmmph,” she grunted. She reached behind her on a cutting bench and pulled down a few newspapers. Jay recognized them instantly as the tabloids one saw at the supermarket checkout line. One headline read: UFO ALIENS KIDNAPPED MY TWINS. Jay felt like rolling his eyes. What a way to spend a day.
“It’s all right here, Frank,” she shouted, opening the papers. “I read ‘em every week, though Brian doesn’t like it when I buy ‘em. Aliens are all around us, and they’re gettin’ ready to make their move. It says here in one of these papers-I’m not sure which one-that the aliens have agents here, people who are renegades and who are workin’ for ‘em. Well, this story says that sometimes the aliens get mad at their agents and kill ‘em, but you never find the bodies. That’s why so many people are reported missing each year and they’re never found. Well, hell, this is as good a place as any to take ‘em and kill ‘em, right up there on Crawford Hills.”
Jay nodded his head and looked around the cluttered kitchen, at the sink overflowing with dishes, the half-opened cans of cat food on the floor, the piles of newspapers. A black-and-white cat with one gray paw jumped up to the sink and started licking from a water-filled casserole dish. He wondered if Mrs. Tate had any thought, any inkling, when she was young, that she would end up here, old and alone, living in a big house at the edge of a wilderness, huddling in fear some nights because of aliens in the backyard. He could see how her mind might have started slipping. She was almost a mile from her nearest neighbor, with only a thin electrical line and telephone cable connecting her to the outside world. He wondered what it was like up here when the winter storms started, when the electricity failed, and when the town plows couldn’t make it up the steep hills.
“What do you think, young man? Jay, that’s your name, ain’t it? Do you believe in aliens?”
Jay coughed, trying to think of a polite answer. “Well, ma’am, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
Mrs. Tate giggled. “When you get to my age, young man, you won’t believe what you’ve seen over the years. Where are you from, anyway?”
“ Newburyport, originally.”
“That’s in Massachusetts, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
She frowned. “Now, Frank, he seems like a nice boy, but wasn’t there anybody local you could hire? I mean-”
The chief interrupted her. “Oh, come on, Aggie, don’t pick on him. He was the best qualified and he’s doing a good job. Listen, do you have any of your cider around? I’m a bit thirsty.”
Jay declined the offer of a drink from Mrs. Tate after he saw the old woman dump gray water out of a glass in the sink and then fill it up with cider from a jug in the refrigerator. Jay’s stomach did a slow roll, but the chief drank it down in one long swallow.