Mysterious Skin (15 page)

I didn’t bother looking at the others. I knew those were the eyes that had looked into mine; the hands that had led me into the blue room. The kid stood next to the end of the top row, his arm brushing the arm of the Panthers’ coach.

Something about the coach stopped me. Strangely, I couldn’t remember anything about him. For years I had recalled things about baseball practices, those agonizing first games I’d trudged through before quitting. But I had erased this coach. Still, something about him looked familiar, as if he’d starred in an outdated movie I’d seen through my half-sleep, years ago. In the photograph, he towered above everyone else, smiling broadly, the expression almost
noble, brimming with pride for his team. His teeth shone unnaturally white beneath the broad curve of his mustache. He was the only person in the picture who gave me as intense a response as the boy from my dream, and I wondered if this coach had somehow played a part in the abduction as well. Perhaps he had been there, just as Avalyn’s grandparents and brother had been there when the aliens had kidnapped her on that long-past afternoon.

My heart was thrumming. I had taken one step, perhaps one giant leap, closer to discovering an answer. “What next?” I said aloud. Curiously, I felt queasy, as if I were being watched by someone or something that wanted to harm me. I glanced at the side and dashboard rearviews, then rolled the window down and squinted up at the sky.

7/21/91
—

A dream about the kid from the ball team—we’re together in the blue room again. This time, we’re on opposite sides of the room, I’m just watching as the tall alien figure glides over to him, slowly stretching him out on the silver table. The alien’s fingers are a sickly gray, the color of fish scales, and they’re shaped like frankfurters, they’re touching my teammate’s arms, his chest, his face—when the fingers get to the kid’s mouth they linger there, caressing the skin of his lips, and then the kid’s lips move—they mouth the words “here we go” and I know the kid is speaking to me, he’s looking at me, and then he smiles and the alien’s fingers penetrate that smile, they slip between the lips, reaching into the boy’s mouth—I’m watching this all, I’m horrified but I can’t move. And then the boy’s clothes are in a pile on the floor. I look up at the blue light that floods everywhere, waterfalls of blue, and I know the boy’s hand is reaching for me, the alien’s hand is reaching for me, but I won’t look at them, I only look at the light, because the light is blinding me, and I want to be blinded.

7/29/91
—

I stand in the middle of trees, I’m wearing the Satan costume—the Haunted Mansion is behind me, it’s that Halloween night again—and this time when the stick cracks I turn and see the alien—its skin is gray and rubbery, it has unbelievably long arms—its hairless head and those huge black eyes—it resembles a joke sculpture made from marshmallows or bubble gum wads. It shuffles toward me, almost gliding as if its feet are wheels—and then its arm comes reaching out, stretching and stretching toward me—it twists off my mask and its fingers touch my face—I feel the fingers land there like heavy bugs, one-two-three-four. And then it takes me in its arms, it lifts me up to hold me like it’s in love with me, and then the most surprising thing, the alien’s teensy slitted mouth opens and it speaks. It says Brian you don’t remember me do you, but I sure remember you—it says I sure liked you Brian, I always hoped I would see you again, I always wanted you to come back to the team.

Sleep came fitfully, disturbed by the aliens’ black eyes and their disembodied blue-gray fingers. Some nights I barely slept at all. After dinner my stomach ached, sharp pangs shooting through my body, as if sea creatures rested inside, prodding and flexing their pincers. The pain and the insomnia reminded me of certain UFO cases, and I returned to the books that contained passages about a couple named Barney and Betty Hill. I read how Barney, plagued with ulcers and sleeping disorders for years, had finally opted for hypnosis, only to discover that he and his wife had been abducted during a drive through the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1961. The Hills knew something I, too, would soon know.

One night, around 2
A.M
., I was preparing for bed when the telephone rang. My mother was sleeping, and the house
had been still for hours. The ringing cut through the silence with a clamor I’ve always associated with sadness or bad news. The noise made me think of the night the hospital had phoned to notify us of my uncle’s fatal stroke. It made me think of times when my father would call, those random nights after he’d left, to scream at my mother in a drunken rage.

Before the third ring, I picked up the receiver and whispered hello. It was Avalyn. I thought she might be calling to cancel the upcoming dinner I’d planned at my house, but that wasn’t the case. She sounded flustered. “Something’s happened,” she said. “I’m a little jittery. I want you here with me.”

I didn’t question her. But I knew, for the second time in as many weeks, I would borrow the car without my mother’s approval. She hadn’t minded when I snuck to the Chamber of Commerce; I’d told her about the dream and that I’d seen the photo, but she didn’t yet know I’d stolen it. I doubted, however, that my mother would okay my leaving at two o’clock to drive to Inman. But it couldn’t wait. After Avalyn said good-bye, I listened to the swollen hush at the other end of the line and knew I had to go.

The car radio’s station played nonstop romantic favorites. Faceless singers crooned about finding love, losing it, and finding it again. “Just look at it out there,” the deejay said between songs. “It’s the perfect night for making love.”

The road linking the highway to the Friesen cabin was spooky after dark. Thin tentacles of moonlight stretched through the overhead dome of trees, accentuating some shadows, deepening others. The area was as gloomy as the roads that twisted through the White Mountains or that fishing pond in Pascagoula. The Toyota coasted forward, and I eased it into the space where I’d parked before. A single light shone from Avalyn’s bedroom window.

Once again, Avalyn met me at the door. She wore a similar white dress, this one even frillier than the last, its pearl buttons gleaming like a row of cataracted eyes. “Thanks for coming,” she said. At the sound of her voice, Patches trotted forth from the darkness, his tail feathering behind him. I bent down, and he licked my face.

Avalyn stepped onto the porch and shut the door. “Follow me,” she said.

We walked out into the night, Patches lagging behind. Toward the north, heat lightning blinked on and off from a wall of clouds, luminescing distant acres of wheat. Leaves rattled in the wind, but everything else seemed uncomfortably quiet. There were no cicadas, no crickets, no random bullfrog making its lewd croak. “The silence,” I said, and I realized I was whispering. Avalyn and I were tiptoeing as well, as though we’d become spies, and this trek to her pasture was our secret mission. I suddenly wanted to tell Avalyn about the dreams I’d had since our last phone conversation, about the shards of memory that concerned my Little League teammate. But the worry lines across Avalyn’s brow stopped me from speaking. I knew she meant business. Whatever she needed to show me, it had to be something significant and indismissable, something potentially threatening.

After we’d walked a few hundred feet, we reached the pasture’s edge and its stretch of barbed wire fence. I turned. The Friesen log cabin sat behind us in the shadows. The single bedroom light still burned, but the rest of the windows were sheeted with black. Avalyn’s father slept inside. He was separate from us because the dreams he dreamed were safe and warm, the dreams of a regular human, of the unblemished.

Avalyn leaned to touch the fence. Several of its barbs were wrapped with balls of red and black hair, furry twists
where cattle had scratched their hides against the sharp points. She tugged one hair ball away and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. “For good luck,” she said, smiling.

The smile faded. Avalyn’s touch on the fence became a grip. “You first.” She stepped on the second line of the wire, then pulled another upward to make a gaping barbed wire mouth. I crawled through it. I made another “mouth” for her; she grunted as she shimmied through. Patches flattened himself on the ground, shrugging his body under.

We stood inside the field. I breathed the sweet smell of alfalfa, the manure and the dewy, freshly turned earth. And, underneath that pungency, the faint odor of roses, the yellows and pinks from the bush where we’d lazed only days before. Avalyn gave me a soft shove. “Keep walking,” she said. “It’s a couple hundred feet forward, over by that tree.” I squinted toward her finger’s point; saw the outline of a small evergreen.

More lightning in the distance. We headed for the tree. As we approached, I made out the shape of a cow, standing still beside the evergreen’s webby fronds. Its stomach’s curves expanded and contracted on each breath. The cow suddenly mooed, a drawn, haunting bawl aimed toward us, frightening me a little. We got closer, and at the cow’s feet I saw another form. It lay in the grass beside the tree trunk. In the dark, it looked like a pile of discarded clothing. Patches galloped ahead. He stopped when he reached the reclining form, nosing and sniffing it. “Patches, get back,” Avalyn said, and she skipped closer to shoo him away.

I bent level with Avalyn. The cow stood over us, breathing heavily, her warm air fluttering my hair. I was sweating, and Avalyn’s dress stuck to my skin like a tongue against dry ice. I could feel the heat emanating from her body to blend with mine. “Here he is,” Avalyn said.

The form on the ground was a young calf; the adult cow,
I presumed, was his mother, standing guard beside him. The moonlight made the calf look silky, cocooning it in a faint glow. I could see its hide’s pattern, black spots against white, and the tiny coarse hairs on its face. I touched its ears, the curved cartilage like rubber cups. I touched its fragile eyelashes, the pad of its nose. Instead of damp and velvety, the nose was dry and stiff. The calf was dead. When I understood this, I looked at the full of its body. There was a gash in the calf’s neck, a smile wedged into its flesh. Most of the animal’s form was unharmed, but under its stomach was another cut, this one an immense gouge between its back legs. The calf’s genitals had been severed.

The cow softly lowed again, a sound not unlike the noise a human mother in mourning would make. “This has happened before,” Avalyn said. “Farmers around here have been finding mutilated cattle for years now. Happens all across Kansas. I told ‘World of Mystery’ about it, but they edited it out. And my father still denies the truth, even though he himself found two of our holsteins dead on the same night last autumn. He insists it’s a bunch of maniacs or Satan worshipers that drive around chopping up cows. Ha ha.” She touched the calf’s throat, tracing the incision’s border with her finger. “What kind of maniac cuts with this precision?”

Avalyn lifted her hand from the calf, and it landed on my own hand. “Feel this,” she said. Together, we reached toward the wound in the calf’s underside. I ran my fingers over it, feeling a meaty organ, a mass of guts that coiled around my fingers like cooked onions. “This is what’s left,” Avalyn said. “They take the sex organs away, the udders and the slits on the females, the you-know-whats on the males, even their anuses. The aliens experiment on cows, because animals can’t complain, they can’t voice themselves like humans.”

Something was building from deep inside my throat, something rising toward my mouth that could have been vomit or a scream but felt sickeningly like a fist, a fist slowly opening. Avalyn continued, her voice muted and far away, as if spoken from behind a mask: “Us, on the other hand, they can’t kill. But we have to live with the memory of what they do. And really, it’s what they do to us that’s worse.”

She still held my hand, pressing it into the wound. “Notice anything else strange? I’ll answer for you. There’s no blood. They took that, too.”

Avalyn was right. The calf’s throat had been cut, and it had been bizarrely eviscerated. But the grass wasn’t glistening with its blood. I knew the aliens had taken it, necessary fluid for more of their enigmatic experiments. I moved closer to the calf, shuffling my knees forward in the grass, and as I did I drew my hand from Avalyn’s. With no reason, no reason at all, I pried my fingers under one of the exposed organs, probing deeper inside the wound. The innards were bloodless, but still as damp and sloppy as sponges. They closed around my wrist, accommodating my hand. I moved farther inside the body, searching for any remaining drops of blood.

Within minutes I was up to my elbow. I closed my eyes, and at that moment the clouds across my mind broke. Something like this, I knew, had happened before.

In my head I saw him just as he’d appeared in dreams: the boy, my Little League teammate, crouching beside me.
Open your eyes,
he said.
Here we go.
He whispered in my ear.
It’s okay, he likes it, he’ll give you money. It feels nice. It’s fun isn’t it, tell him you think it’s fun.
I heard him speaking to me, but I couldn’t comprehend his words, tangled chunks of sentences that meant nothing to me. He told me to open my eyes, to see what was happening, but I wouldn’t do it. I was eight years old again, and I wouldn’t open my eyes.

Like before, the boy was nothing more than a vision. This time, however, I wasn’t certain how to control the dream; it seemed far removed from the usual security of sleep and the sheltering knowledge that I would soon wake up.

I was up to my elbow.
It feels nice,
the boy’s voice said.

I lost hold of the fact I wasn’t alone, must have briefly forgotten Avalyn and Patches and the cow beside me, because I started crying. I tried to hold it, but the sob broke like glass in my throat. Avalyn held me, her arm around me as shocking as icy water. I leaned into her and cried, cried because, at that moment, I considered the possibility that everything I’d recently accepted as fact was wrong—my new beliefs about my buried memories, the aliens and their series of abductions, these perfect explanations for my problems. What if all of it, each particle of this new truth, were false? What then?