SILENCE

by Dale Bailey

It’s probably not a coincidence that Dale Bailey’s recent emails have been filled with good advice on child rearing, while his short fiction output has diminished. He did recently publish a story in collaboration with Nathan Ballingrud in Lovecraft Unbound, but his last appearance in F&SF was in our Oct/Nov. 2005 issue. We’re pleased to see him back here with this story of life during high school.

So I’m fourteen years old and Junior Starnes is on the warpath again. That was high school for me. Duck and cover. Run for your life. An endless cycle of tension and release. Most days that era in my life seems incredibly remote and I can summon a germ of compassion for Junior—he must have been held back a year or two by then and I don’t imagine his home life was any picnic. But at other times, even now, it presses all too close, and the fourteen-year-old me—I think part of me will be fourteen years old for the rest of my life—rises up to insist that Junior Starnes was a monster. Most people can be, I guess, even if you never really know when they’re going to show their teeth. You just know you don’t want to be around when it happens—if you can help it. Sometimes, of course, you can’t.

That’s what I want to write about here, now that I am a grown man setting down these thoughts in a dime store notebook with a picture of an owl on the cover: the fall of my freshman year at Thomas Jefferson High School, Junior Starnes and his buddy Richard Zell, and those moments when the monster underneath the human mask shows its face. Most of all, I suppose, I want to tell you about the thing in the woods.

I had Honors English second period that year, Ms. Blevins. Junior had Social Studies two doors down, even though it was really just a glorified study hall with a tattered Mercator projection on one wall, and a crew of burnouts and stoners killing time in the seats till they turned sixteen and could collect their walking papers. The teacher, Mr. Dayton, had given up a decade ago, when most of the kids in his class weren’t that far out of diapers. He was marking time too, punching the clock until his retirement kicked in, and every kid at Thomas Jefferson High knew that he’d guarantee you a C if you kept your mouth shut, and higher if he liked you. So his class filled up with lifers, and all the grown-ups oohed and ahhed, saying he had a knack for working with “at-risk” students. I figured it was only a matter of time before he won Teacher of the Year. Which was fine except that his room’s proximity to my Honors English class turned the transition between my second and third periods into the adolescent equivalent of trench warfare: the bell rang and, bam, over the top you went, straight into the teeth of the German machine-gun fire.

Which is pretty much how the thing I want to tell you about begins. I remember we were reading Beowulf at the time, and one minute me and Steve Collier, my best friend since third grade, were pushing through a mob of sweaty kids and debating who’d win a cage match between Grendel and Swamp Thing. The next minute Steve has vanished—he had an almost supernatural talent for that—and my own personal Grendel—Junior—has me pinned to the wall beside the water fountain. Twisting his hand in my shirt, Junior thrusts his face close to mine—so close I can smell the meaty reek of hapless Danes upon his breath. “Where you headin’, Philip?” he says, giving my name this mocking twist, wit not being a tool Junior has in his toolbox.

Me, my toolbox is empty. Where I’m heading is Algebra II—Ms. Eisenstein—a class Junior won’t see the inside of if he lives to be five hundred years old. But that’s not what Junior wants to hear. The truth is I don’t know what he does want to hear—to this day, I don’t know what he wanted to hear, and I suspect he didn’t know either—so I just stammer out the obvious, saying, “Umm—third period, Ju—Junior”—I had to hesitate here to choke back a nasty taste—”why?”

Next thing I know my books are all over the floor and Junior’s grinding my algebra homework into shreds of pencil-smudged tissue under the heel of one ratty boot.

By this time a crowd has gathered. I read this story once about a man who notices the way crowds materialize any time there’s an accident, how hungry they look, and finally he has an accident himself and they show up to get him. That’s the story of my life: Steve’s superpowers on one hand (Hey presto! I’m invisible!) and on the other one these famished-looking teenage throngs that spring up out of nowhere every time Junior decides to play a quick round of Whack-A-Phil.

Then suddenly Junior’s saying, “Jeez, Philip, I didn’t even see you there, man, I’m sooo sorry,” drawing out the words the way you do when you mean to let everybody know just how much bullshit you’re really slinging. He untwists my shirt and bends over to help me pick up my books with this totally fake shit-eating grin on his face. The crowd’s evaporated, too. The hall’s suddenly right next door to empty, like Beam me up, Scotty! empty, with just a handful of kids in clusters talking about Friday night’s big game against Broughton or trading homework or checking their makeup in those little mirrors all the girls have stuck inside their locker doors.

That’s when I see Coach Kessinger—a big guy with close-cropped hair, a nose that he broke playing one season for the Falcons, and the kind of gym-rat muscles that make it look like your biceps have emigrated to the backs of your arms in search of a better life—strolling down the hall. He stops to chat up Cindy Taylor, which is gross when you think about it and even when you don’t. Then he swings toward us and claps Junior on the shoulder.

“Why don’t you man up and come out for football, Junior? Scared?”

Junior kind of laughs, but Kessinger’s already moving on, dipping his chin in my direction—”How ya doin’, Paul?”—as he disappears around the corner.

“Loser,” Junior mutters. I’m not sure whether he’s talking about Kessinger or me, but he doesn’t bother to elaborate. He just spreads his arms, grinning—this one is from the heart, which I figure to be a chunk of icy stone in the middle of his chest—and lets the books tumble once again to the floor. He leans toward me, closer this time; at this distance his breath smells like maybe those hapless Danes had the runs. “After school, Philip,” he says, punctuating each word by jabbing two fingers into my chest. “Three-thirty, out behind the Stop N Go. Don’t make me come looking for you.” He turns away then, and I see his pal, Richard Zell, leaning against a locker down the hall, watching the whole thing go down. Richard was the brains of the operation—which you might call a stretch if you didn’t know Junior, who was, of course, the muscle. One time in the cafeteria, I nerved myself up to ask Richard why Junior hated me and if he—Richard, that is—wouldn’t step in on my behalf.

Richard just pushed his tray away and looked at me like I was a particularly loathsome loogey he’d just hawked up on the sidewalk. “Question is, Philip,” he said, “why wouldn’t he hate you? Now take my tray up for me, why don’t you?”

So I did, and spent the rest of the day hating myself for that, too.

Now, though, Richard just tipped me a wink and shot me with his forefinger. Then he swung in beside Junior and the two of them strode off to roast live kittens on spits.

I knelt to get my books. When I stood, I realized that Ms. Blevins was standing in the doorway of her room. “Are you okay, Philip?” she asked.

And what I said is, “Yeah, I just”—I waved one hand, like no big deal—”I just dropped my books, you know. It’s all cool.”

The warning bell rang. The hallway emptied with a clang of locker doors and sneakers squeaking on tile. Somewhere a girl laughed, high and sweet. Then it was just the two of us, me at the water fountain and Ms. Blevins in the door of her classroom. She crossed her arms, leaned against the doorframe, and cocked her head. Ms. Blevins wasn’t that far out of school herself—she must have been in her mid-twenties, though she didn’t seem so young to me then, I guess—and not a lot slipped past her.

“Are you sure?” she said. “For a minute there I thought that boy—”

I was nervous all of a sudden, fluttery in my stomach. “Junior?” I said. “Nah, he’s just playing around—”

Then the tardy bell rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin. The hall was so quiet I could hear my heart thump inside me.

Ms. Blevins raised one eyebrow and frowned. She stared at me for a moment. “You better get to class, then,” she said, and that was how I wound up late to algebra without a tardy note or my homework either. Steve stared at me from across the aisle as I took my seat. What happened? he said, just mouthing the words. So I took out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote Like you don’t know on it. Then I dropped my pencil, and when I leaned over to pick it up, I slipped the note into his desk.

It came back a few minutes later bearing a single sentence:

Crap, man, what’re you gonna do?

I sat there staring at that question for the longest time. I mean, the hell with quadratic equations, right? And I kept on thinking about it during Chemistry and Social Studies and Spanish, and during lunch, too, when I hid in the library—I mostly starved that year, food being forbidden in the library—and read about this experiment where scientists kept putting more and more mice into a single enclosure until finally they started cannibalizing one another.

Then it was three o’clock, and the final bell rang. I ducked into a bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and hunkered down on top of the toilet until everything got quiet outside. Then I let myself out and headed toward the west entrance, by the gym. The main entrance—the one across the street from the Stop N Go, where everybody went to buy pop and to smoke weed behind the Dumpster—was to the east. I figured I would cut across the practice field and through the woods to my house. Maybe I’d get lucky tonight and a meteor would fall on Junior Starnes. Stranger things had happened.

Outside, the air smelled of fresh-mown grass and the sun washed the grounds in that golden autumn light that meant the trees would be turning by the end of next week. The cheerleaders stood in ranks at one end of the practice field, doing calisthenics, and the football team ran laps in a pack around the track, whistling and hooting at the girls every time they passed. Finally one of the girls—Melissa Malone, I think it was—stood up and shot the whole group the bird with both hands, which brought Kessinger shouting down upon her. I took advantage of the confusion to dart across the field toward the woods. Halfway there, I heard Junior Starnes shouting—

“There he is! C’mon!”

—and I lowered my head and ran. When I reached the tree line, I snatched a glance over my shoulder. Kessinger, ever territorial about his precious practice field—I think he only tolerated the cheerleaders so he could leer at Cindy Taylor—had intercepted Junior and Richard by the one of the goalposts, where he was working himself into a full-out rage. “If you’re not man enough to play then keep your sorry asses off my grass!” I heard him scream as I slipped into the cool pine-smelling shadows and began to work my way through the trees toward home.

A little while later—I’m not sure exactly when it started—I began to hear this high keening noise. It sounded like the metallic chatter of cicadas, except it was different somehow—more purposeful, and pleading, like the sound of someone crying, if the someone in question happened to be a very large insect.

I could have walked away then. I could have ignored it, and maybe everything would have turned out different. But there was something too awful in that sound to ignore, something so pained and bereaved, so terrible, that to pass it by unheeding would have been criminal or worse. It would have been a sin. So I paused, listening, and I let the sound draw me toward it, pushing my way through tangles of briars that sewed threads of blood down my bare arms and ducking under low-hanging branches.

I found the thing at the base of a gully, huddled in a bed of rotting leaves by a trickle of brown water—just a sound at first, nothing I could see. I’ve thought about this moment for a long time now—sometimes when I close my eyes at night it seems like I can hardly think of anything else—but I still don’t know what to make of it. There are things in this world that people just can’t see, I guess. Our eyes aren’t made for seeing them maybe or maybe we’ve just never taken the time to learn how to, we’re so caught up in our own affairs. Sometimes I think the world might swarm with things like that, wonders and mysteries, but only an isolated few ever catch a glimpse of them—the wounded and the weary, the desperate, the weak. I’d like to think so, anyway. But other nights—most nights—I suspect that just the opposite is true, that such things must be rare indeed, maybe unique, and on those nights sleep is a long time coming.

All I know for sure is that the sound fixed me there in the undergrowth, like one of those butterflies pinned to the bulletin board in the biology room. I stood very still—Junior momentarily forgotten—staring at the source of that awful cry, or at the empty place in the gloom it seemed to emanate from, concentrating until I felt my vision slip out of focus. Everything around me shifted in some subtle way that even now I can hardly describe. It was like looking at one of those three-dimensional pictures where something has been hidden in a blur of color and you can’t see it and you can’t see it and then suddenly, if you turn your eyes just right, you can. Suddenly it’s there, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

Except that’s not right either, because I never did completely see it—not then, anyway, not when it could have mattered—and certainly not straight on, the way you would look at a television or a car or any other earthly thing. I could never fix and hold it in my gaze. It was just a shimmer in the corner of my eye, like a glimpse of moonlight-gilded forest pool, with the faintest breath of wind moving across the face of the water, rippling and strange. That plaintive chitter drew me closer and closer still, until I went to my knees and reached out to touch it, this thing that was there but not quite there. A living thing, too: when you turned your head and let your eyes drift out of focus, you could catch half-formed glimpses of it, a flat face, featureless but for a lipless slash where a mouth ought to be and black slashes for eyes. Then you would blink and there would be nothing at all, just that mournful chittering.

But even that glimpse of the thing’s alien visage frightened me. I scrambled back, grasping at weeds to pull myself to my feet. They slipped in the muck, and I went down again, breath blasting from my lungs. As I lay there, clawing for air the thing touched me. A hot dry palm pressed itself against my own, and fingers—six of them, long and many jointed—closed around my hand, circling it and circling it again. I couldn’t see them, or only for a breath at a time anyway. But I could feel them, squeezing my hand with this desperate, lonesome pressure, and what I thought of was my grandmother the last time I ever saw her, in a sterile white hospital room that stank of alcohol and rot. I thought of her sightless terrified eyes and the way her fingers had clutched mine, as if my warmth could anchor her to earth for an instant longer.

“Okay,” I said, even though my heart was pounding. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got you now,” which was what my mother used to say when I skinned a knee, and then, before I even really thought about it, I did what my mother had done as well. I sat up, I gathered the thing into my arms. It was like cradling a sackful of kindling, all sharp ends and taut leathery flesh, a tiny thing really, hardly bigger than a child climbing out of his mother’s car on his first day of school, and hot too—feverish with heat—like a heap of white-hot coals smoldered somewhere way down inside it.

“I’ve got you now,” I whispered, and we sat like that for a time. There were tears running down my face, I remember that, and a kind of blank, mute wonder buzzed inside my head, but that terrible chittering cry had quieted some, and for a moment anyway that was enough. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, but by the time I lowered the creature back onto its bed of leaves, the sunlight lancing through the leaves overhead had changed, so that everything seemed dreamlike, watery and strange. I clambered down to the bottom of the gully through that swimming, ethereal light and knelt there to ladle up a handful of dirty water in my cupped palms.

Back up then, on my knees, water slopping over my hands. “Here,” I said, and I felt those long fingers reach out to steady me. A dry leathery tongue slipped out to lap at my fingers. Three times I made that trip before the thing was sated. Three times before it settled back into its bed of leaves—I could sense the movement, I could see it in iridescent flashes—and that mournful chittering started up again, quieter now, but still sorrowful and alone.

“Okay,” I said, digging in my backpack for the lunch I couldn’t eat in the library. “I’m gonna leave you some stuff, okay? An apple and a peanut butter sandwich and some Oreos. You’ll like the Oreos, I promise. And here, here’s a Capri Sun,” I told it, punching the straw into the foil packet and arraying these paltry gifts around the thing like an offering.

“I’ll be back,” I said. “Soon.”

I snatched up my bag, terror and wonder humming inside me like live current, scrambled up the embankment, and headed home, Junior Starnes and Richard Zell forgotten. But that doleful chittering sound followed me all the way through the woods, so omnipresent that I thought it must have wormed its way inside my head. I burst out of the trees into our yard and used my key to open the door.

Silence, the house empty, with only the red eye on the answering machine for company, winking in the dim kitchen. My sister Donna had been away at college two years by then, a half-tuition scholarship, but it wasn’t enough—not with me on the way, Mom was always saying—so most days it seemed like my folks had gone with her. I guess they had, in their way. Dad had started pulling more hours at work, traveling a couple weeks every month, to plants in Georgia and South Carolina mostly, but also out west, to Texas and New Mexico and this week some kind of meeting in Las Vegas. Mom had taken a job as a pharmaceutical rep. She seemed like a different woman now, with her leather sample case, a closet full of dark pantsuits, and a nametag stamped with the image of a shellacked blonde that might have been a distant relative—at most—of the frowzy brunette who used to kick back on the sofa with me to watch Looney Tunes reruns.

Today I was glad to have the house to myself, but even so there was something awful in the silence. I spent half an hour shoving stuff into a backpack—bandages and aspirin, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a tube of antibiotic ointment from the medicine cabinet in Mom’s bathroom; a couple of chocolate bars, two plastic containers of apple sauce, and a pull-tab can of peaches from the pantry; a flashlight from the junk drawer in the kitchen. The whole time my mind worried at that silence, probing it the way your tongue nags the socket where a tooth used to be. Done, I found myself back at the kitchen counter, staring at the blinking red light on the answering machine.

Two messages:

Mom, apologetic as always, she had dinner with a client, I should warm up the meatloaf in the fridge and no television before I finished my homework—”I mean that, Philip,” she said—and she’d try to be home before I went to bed, but her meeting might run long so not to wait up.

Then Dad, his voice booming into the silence, Hey Champ, having a great time, wish you were here, ha ha, and I hope you’re making some time to practice your hoops—here his voice dropped an octave, the way it always did when he meant to discuss Serious Business—I really want you to try out this year, Phil, I think it might turn everything around for you. Then a gout of raucous laughter in the background, and Dad saying, Shut up, guys, and hey gotta run, Champ, duty calls—

Then silence.

Outside, twilight had fallen. I crossed the driveway, passing under the basketball goal Dad had erected last spring, jamming the post into a hole filled with wet cement, and slipped into the damp cool under the trees. It was full dark there. In the flickering cone of the flashlight, tree branches whipped toward me like the spring-loaded monsters in the haunted house at the county fair. I heard things scurrying through the bracken, and once a horrible screaming that I knew to be the sound a rabbit makes when it’s scared or hurt. I’d tried to rescue one the previous summer, after the neighbor’s cat had mauled it. It had died in my hands, a tiny thing, bloody where the cat had stripped back its fur, its black eyes shiny with terror. But in the dark that screech sounded like a kid screaming: this high-pitched eee-eee-eee, and then, suddenly, nothing at all, just silence. Any other night, I’d have turned back. Tonight, though, I felt the pull of that creature in the gully, and soon I heard it, too, crying out, luring me on into the darkness.

I slid down the side of the gully on my rear end, holding the flashlight with both hands. I could see the pitiful cluster of offerings I’d left before—the peanut butter sandwich and the Oreos, the Capri Sun—all untouched, but in the darkness I couldn’t see the creature at all, not even that silvery shimmer it hid inside of. Just the sound of it, that high-pitched keening. “Shhh,” I whispered, shrugging my pack into the leaves. “I’m here, I’m here now.” It reached out of the darkness and folded those long, long fingers around my hand, and once again I lifted it—it was so light it was like lifting a child—and brought it into my lap.

I cradled it there as I ran my hands the length of its body, moving methodically, searching for some kind of wound or something, anything I could try to treat. Once, when I touched a knob on its leg—the creature seemed to be shaped more or less like a human being, but its body felt jointed all wrong under my hands, and in too many places—the pitch of that keening shifted. It shot up two or three notches, louder and more shrill, in what I took to be pain. I jerked my hand away as if I had been burned.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I rocked it there in my lap until the sound began to die away again. That’s when the absurdity of the whole situation really hit me: a fourteen-year-old kid trying to treat the injuries of—what, an alien? I figured it had to be some kind of alien. An alien he could hardly even see even when it was light out. In the middle of the night. With the contents of his mother’s medicine cabinet.

For all I knew, a single aspirin could kill the thing.

So ha ha, as my father had said. Wish you were here.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. I was crying now—silently, biting my lip to hold back the tears. I slipped down into the damp leaves and pressed myself into the circle of the thing’s heat. This close I could smell it, a dry woodsy odor, like the potpourri my mother kept in a dish on the back of the toilet. We lay there like that for a long time, me crying and the thing beside me keening quietly—crying, too, in its way, I guess. After a while, I reached out and turned off the flashlight. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the forest canopy took shape overhead, black against the sky. Stars peered down through gaps in the leaves, and I found myself wondering what it was that I held there in the darkness, where it might have come from and what it might mean—not just for me, but for—well, everyone in the world, maybe. And I wondered who I should tell about it and why and whether anyone would listen. I was just a kid, after all, and when I started down the list of possibilities, nobody seemed very promising. Ms. Blevins maybe—I kept seeing her in the doorway to her room, asking me about Junior—but whenever I thought about how the conversation might play out, the whole thing collapsed into absurdity. What would I say, after all? So, Ms. Blevins, can you believe I found an alien in the woods behind the school?

And there was something else, as well: the thought of the scientists I’d read about in the library, shoving more and more mice into a cage until they started eating each other alive.

Then a flying saucer was chasing me through darkness. I looked back at it, a wheel of blinking red and blue lights, and saw Richard Zell at the controls, high up under the translucent dome at the saucer’s center. Junior Starnes rode shotgun. Don’t make me come looking for you, he screamed, and then I was awake, stiff and cold and disoriented. A thin moon rode high among the leaves above me. As I gazed up at it, the day came rushing back to me—Junior and Coach Kessinger and the thing in the woods, of course, the thing in the woods most of all. It was crying quietly now—a whistling moan in the darkness—and I could feel the heave of its respiration against my side.

Part of me wanted to stay there with it, curled up inside the blanket of its warmth. But it was late. Mom would be angry.

Retrieving the flashlight, I scrambled up the embankment. I paused there, looking back. Shadow cloaked the gully, hiding the thing’s weird shimmer. But I knew it was down there now—even if I didn’t understand it—and I made a silent promise, to myself and to the creature, too. I would figure something out. I didn’t know what, not yet, but something.

Then the nightmarish walk back through the woods. The trees stood black and mute in the flashlight beam, my feet tangled in the scrub, and I sensed something terrible always at my heels—the way you do in the woods at night—hurrying me along. I was out of breath by the time I burst out of the trees into our yard, and the pack chafed at my shoulders like a sack of bricks.

I let myself into the house, crept upstairs, and glanced into Mom’s room—she was breathing steady and regular underneath a mound of sheets—before shouldering open my own door. I couldn’t sleep though. I just lay there, staring into the dark, thinking about that thing in the woods and listening to something under my bed, this plaintive chittering that turned out to be my alarm clock.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Mom glanced up from her coffee, looking more like the glossy mannequin on her company ID than the woman who used to flop down beside me in her sweats, snorting laughter every time an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote’s head and the Road Runner raced off triumphant, beep beep zip bang! “You must have gone down early last night,” she said.

“My stomach started hurting,” I told her.

Over Cheerios, I added that I wanted to walk to school.

“You sure you’re up to it?” she said. “Is your tummy better?”

I told her my stomach was fine, but she insisted on driving me anyway. “We never get a chance to talk anymore,” she said. The phone rang just before we left—”But I had it down at eleven,” she kept saying, staring at her planner—and she spent the whole drive drumming on the steering wheel with her fingers instead of talking, this faraway look on her face. When I got out of the car, she leaned over to roll down the passenger window.

“You okay, Philip?” she said. “Is something bothering you?”

Just then the first bell rang. My mother frowned.

“Gotta run,” I said, turning toward the building. I wasn’t even halfway there when I heard her car pull away from the curb.

Inside, Steve was leaning against my locker.

“Where you been all morning?” he asked.

“Why don’t you ask your mother that,” I said, working my combination, and we knocked it back and forth like that—I would, he said, if I didn’t have a date tonight with your mother and I shot back, I wouldn’t say I date your mother exactly, she just likes to blow me—as I emptied my backpack and got my notebook for first period. I was almost done when the door to my locker banged shut, nearly shearing off the tips of my fingers. So here’s Grendel again, leaning against the row of lockers that had been hidden behind the door, stinking of slaughtered Danes. His mother grins over his shoulder, peering out through the Richard Zell mask she’s donned for the occasion.

“Cute, that little maneuver of yours yesterday, dickwad,” Grendel says, and it strikes me now, putting all this down, how consummately strange men are, the way the ones who like you and the ones who hate you speak to you pretty much the same way: Where you been all morning and dickwad and Why don’t you ask your mother that. Except maybe Steve doesn’t really like me, because he seems to have snapped his fingers and vanished. Again.

Which is pretty much what I’d like to do just now. But can’t.

So I say, “Listen, Junior, why do you wanna treat me like this?”

“You hear that, Richie?” Grendel says. “Dickwad here wants to know why I treat him this way.” Then he does something totally unexpected. Lifting his hand—it’s huge, the size of my dad’s hand and maybe bigger—he smashes my forehead into the locker. It feels like a grenade has gone off inside my skull. I try to choke back the tears that spring to my eyes, but it’s hopeless, I’m already crying, these huge mortifying sobs, partly because I’m just so sick of all this and partly because it feels like Junior just gave my face a thorough scrubbing with a handful of steel wool and partly because that ravenous crowd has materialized around us to suck down its morning dose of public humiliation.

Junior grins. “Damn, Rich? You see that?” And then, to me: “You got to be more careful with your locker, Phil, you could hurt yourself!”

Titters ripple through the assembled mass and it occurs to me that Junior’s toolbox isn’t really empty of wit—it’s just that in his case wit’s a bludgeon.

That’s when the second bell rings. Dr. Mattox, the principal, comes rolling down the hall, hammering on the lockers with his fist and bellowing, “Class, kids, let’s get to class!” As the crowd breaks up, Junior leans in close to me, still grinning, and hisses, “Try all the clever shit you want today, asshole. I’m taking you down. You can think of kissing that locker door as a down payment.”

He claps me on the back like we’re the best of buddies. Then he and Richard slump off together, their hands empty of books, and exactly at that moment Dr. Mattox glances toward me. “Peter,” he says, nodding, and that’s the way it goes the whole day, my head throbbing and Steve—not unwisely, I suppose—keeping his distance, ignoring me in English, where we had assigned seats, sitting across the room in Algebra, where we didn’t, and steering clear of the library at lunch, where I passed half an hour pressing a wad of damp paper towels to my forehead and reading about flying saucers.

So much bullshit, that seemed to be the scientific consensus, which meant that I must have imagined the whole thing—that I was not only a pariah and a geek, but a nut. But since I didn’t really believe that, it didn’t dam the undertow of anxiety in my thoughts. Worry that the thing in the woods would be dead or gone when I got there after school, or that it would turn out to be the advance scout for an invading interstellar force intent on mating with the likes of Melissa Malone. And worry, too, about what Junior had planned for me. Truth was, even if I had the skills to put up a fight—which I didn’t—I didn’t have the stomach to use them. Which by the rules in effect at Thomas Jefferson High School—and throughout the rest of the known universe, as far as I could see then—made me a pussy, a mama’s boy, a candyass weakling: barely a boy at all, and definitely not a man.

So what I did all day is brood and worry and keep under cover, scurrying around the school like a cockroach and gnawing my fingernails to bloody nubs. I missed—for the second time—the finer points of the quadratic equation and by the time the last bell rang, I’d once again sought refuge in the bathroom, not merely for the safety it afforded but for the comfort it provided to one afflicted with a tummy ache, as my mother would put it.

And the whole time I was wondering about that creature in the woods, if it was doing any better or if it was still curled up at the bottom of the gully, keening in agony. I could feel its lure even there, pulling at me. By the time I was feeling better, the halls had fallen silent. Stepping outside was like stepping into a television rerun, with the girls cheering at one end of the practice field—

“—fight, fight, your cause is right!—”

—and Coach Kessinger ranting at the football team as it ran laps around them. This time I managed to make it all the way to the woods undetected: home free, I think—until Grendel and Grendel’s Mom step snickering out of the underbrush.

“Thought you’d pulled one over on us, didn’t you, you stupid jerk,” Junior says.

I don’t even bother replying. I just run, cutting away at an angle into the woods, hoping not only to escape them but to draw them away from the gully. But I haven’t gotten more than fifty yards into the undergrowth—Junior and Richard crashing after me like bears—when I see how impossible that’s going to be. This deep into the trees, that unearthly keening cuts through the murk like a beacon—

“What’s that?” Richard grunts behind me.

—an awful kind of summons, lonesome and sad and hurting all at the same time, crying out for solace, and all I can think is that somehow, I don’t know how, I have to keep Junior and Richard away from it. Somehow I have to protect it.

Changing course midstride, I thrash through a thicket of stunted pine trees and head for the gully. When I get there, I hurl myself over the embankment, skidding downhill and fetching up hard against the bole of a fallen tree. The chirruping keen is even louder down here. It seems to fill up the whole world, like the wail of a train whistle blaring endlessly up from that glossy shimmer in the dim. Not even pausing to catch my breath I launch myself toward it, scrabbling through the mulch, hissing, “Quiet, you’ve got to be quiet now, you’ve got to be quiet!” Then it’s sobbing underneath me, a tiny childlike thing, its long fingers scrabbling at my face—in gladness or in recognition maybe or in sorrow or in pain.

Grendel can hear it, too.

He’s crashing around at the top of the gully, him and Richard both, like a couple of bull tyrannosaurs spoiling for a fight. “I can hear you, you pussy!” he screams. “I find you, I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna tear your head off! You’re gonna be sorry you were ever born, you hear me!”

“Shut up!” Richard hisses. “This way—”

They shift directions, chasing that mournful howl along the edge of the gully, and still I’m trying to hush the thing. I whisper and I urge and I cajole. I beg and I plead and I beg some more, hissing, “Please, please, you have to be quiet now, if they find us they’re gonna beat me up and who knows what they’ll do to you, they might kill you, you hear me, you gotta shut up! Please,” I’m bawling, “please!” And the whole time I’m choking back these big braying sobs, swallowing them down like stones between heaves of breath.

But the racket only grows louder, shriller, more lonesome and afraid.

Richard and Junior come on, thundering through the bracken. “I get you, you’re dead,” Junior’s saying, chanting it almost under his breath like a mantra, not for my ears but for his own, a running litany of his frustration and his rage. “I’m gonna get you because I can hear you, I can hear you.” Then, screaming, “You hear me, motherfucker? I can hear you! And when I find you I’m gonna tear your sorry ass to pieces!”

Still the thing is keening, those long fingers tracing the contours of my face. “Please,” I whisper, “please—”

I can see them now, maybe twenty yards away, flashes of blue jeans and booted feet hacking their way along the rim of the gully, Junior still chanting, on and on, “I can hear you, motherfucker, I can hear you, I can—”

Drawing in a long shuddering breath, I stretch my body the thing’s shimmering length, and take it in my arms. I hold it the way my mother held me once, all those years ago, cooing, Be still now, shhh, shhh, barely even speaking the words aloud. And to stop that awful chittering I fold my hand across its mouth.

Silence, then.

I press my face close against it, whispering the words so low that it’s like I’m not even really saying them aloud, saying, Shhh, be still, everything’s okay now, everything’s going to be all right.

Not ten feet above us, Junior and Richard halt at the lip of the gully. I can see them standing there in the shadows, listening. I tighten my grip across the creature’s mouth, and those long fingers draw back from my face. The alien relaxes under my weight, and I lie so still that I can feel my heart booming inside my chest. I can almost hear it, and for a single dreadful instant, a crazy certainty seizes me: that Junior and Richard will hear it, too—the telltale heart, as Ms. Blevins might say—and come hurtling down the embankment after us.

Instead, Junior says, “The hell?”

Richard lifts his face, like a bloodhound scenting the wind.

“Where the fuck are you?” Junior screams. “What do you think you’re gonna do, never come back to school? You might as well just come on out and take it like a man!”

“Shut up,” Richard hisses. “Listen!”

So they listen.

Five minutes pass. Ten. I can feel the seconds slipping away in the pulse of blood at my temple. Finally a stick cracks farther off in the woods—a deer foraging through the underbrush maybe—and I see Richard’s hand come up to seize Junior’s biceps. Nodding, he lifts a finger to his lips. He points, his lips shaping words—

—over there—

—and they move off into the trees, picking their way, one breath, two breaths, three—and they’re gone, swallowed up by the woods.

Still I crush the thing against me like a baby, whispering little comforts to it as I stare up at the rim of the gully, not even knowing if it can understand me, or if it has ears to hear me with in the first place.

Silence. A decade of silence is what it feels like. A century.

Then I blow out a long breath. “They’re gone,” I whisper. “Everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay now.” Drawing away my hand, I sit up. The creature lolls across my lap, boneless, empty of volition, wrong. And when I look down, I can see it, really see it, I mean, a tiny thing, the size of a second-grade kid with damp leaves clinging to it and mottled gray skin visible in patches through glistening streaks of mud, joints where it oughtn’t to have joints, a slit for a mouth, black slashes for eyes, and no nostrils of any kind. No nostrils at all.

And still. So still, without all that shimmery glister.

A kind of frozen horror seized me.

I just sat there holding it for the longest time. Staring down at it. Just holding it and staring.

Shadows began to stretch under the trees.

When the creature in my arms started to get cold, I stood, cradling it against my breast, and carried it down to the muddy trickle at the base of the gully. I scooped out a nest for it among the leaves there, and I tried to clean it up, scooping up handfuls of water to flush away the smears of mud until I couldn’t see anything in the gloom but clean gray flesh. Then I buried it, prying smooth stones out of the creek bed and stacking them over it and covering those with leaves until there was nothing there. Maybe it would be enough. Maybe the animals wouldn’t get to it now. I kind of doubted it. But maybe.

I got to my feet and stumbled out of the woods, dragging my backpack behind me, not even trying to be quiet. Junior and Richard could beat the hell out of me for all I cared. I guess I kind of wanted it to happen. By the time I broke free of the trees, an emerald gloaming had settled over the world. The cheerleaders had gone home and out on the practice field, in the hot yellow glare of the sodium-arc lights, the football team was dressed out and drilling. The clamor of it all came to me across the grass, the grunts and the curses and the angry shriek of the whistle between plays. Pads cracked like gunshots and boys who ached to become men hurled their bodies together with a kind of beauty that was heartbreaking. Coach Kessinger was out there, too, shouting at them at the top of his lungs, telling them how it was they had to do it. I knew that was what he was doing. I could see his mouth moving. But the truth is, as I turned away and walked into the twilight, the sound of his voice faded into nothing at all behind me. It faded into silence.