COLLAPSED ROOF
Ned Corben’s garage was really just a roof that connected one side of his house to one side of a dilapidated shed his grandfather had once used as a workshop. There were no support columns, because after all it was meant as a garage. For years it hadn’t even had a back wall, until his grandfather finally put one up a few years before he died, at which time the house had been left to Ned’s parents. Now that they had moved to Florida, the house belonged to Ned. But whether out of subconscious premonition or not, he had never used the garage as anything but a storage place for the lawn mower and the bags of trash waiting to be taken to the dump on Saturday.
Tonight he had been watching TV, rocking in the wicker rocker, cocooned in a blanket and drinking a beer, when he’d heard a terrific crash as if a tree had fallen. He had been watching a program that purported to document real life encounters with angels, re-enacted dramatically. Some of these encounters had more the flavor of ghostly visitations than what Ned would imagine a visit from an angel might be like, and he had found himself wrapping his nest of blanket more tightly around him, and wishing he had left more lights on in the house before he settled in to watch TV. It had still been light then. He had been watching for hours, moving only his thumb across the remote, and rocking, except for the monumental effort of getting a new beer and draining the last several times. It had been his Saturday routine since Brenda left, and lately his weeknight routine as well.
Now it was dark, and he was unsettled, and when he heard the crash he stopped rocking. The abrupt halt stopped his heart in his chest as well.
Had it been a tree? For the past few weeks, the snow had been unprecedented. It was nearly two feet deep in his yard, with just a tunnel of a pathway to the driveway he had paid to have plowed. Might a tree or at least a heavy bough, weighted with the snow, cracked at last under the pressure?
He rose from the rocker and, still wrapped in his blanket, switched on a lamp. In the kitchen he found and tested his flashlight. It was dim, the batteries low. He had to thumb the switch on and off several times until he got the beam to stay as bright as it could manage. And then he went out into the back hall.
He expected to see an angel waiting for him there, waiting just at the top of his second floor stairs, but a real angel, not one of those too-human ghosts. An angel with wings, and glowing aura, something more than human, its robes stirring in slow motion as if it stood at the bottom of the sea, which to an angel the earth must surely be like...creatures like Ned the equivalent of those ghastly fanged fish that dwelt at the ocean floor.
There was no angel.
An elderly couple rented the apartment downstairs from him. He seldom conversed with them or even saw them. For all their silence, they might have died weeks ago. He descended the stairs, passed by their door and switched on the outside light.
It didn’t work.
Of course it didn’t. Nothing worked. Not even him.
Ned had lost his job a month ago. He had been a pasteup artist for a printing company that was bought out by a large corporation. There had been promises that he and the others in his department would be taught how to do their jobs on new computers that were to be brought in.
The computers did come in. And most of the crew went out. Ned had been a pasteup artist for eleven years. The new owners had promised there would be no hiring of outsiders. Before he was let go, Ned saw the company hire a pretty set of twins, apparently just out of their teens, to work at the computers in his place. They could type quickly, and that was all they needed to do. How to balance a business card’s components, how to shoot a halftone, how to trap color separations were all irrelevant skills, as obsolete as chiseling hieroglyphics. It didn’t matter that the old phototypesetting was much cleaner, much nicer looking than the type churned out by the computers. Desktop publishing had, Ned felt, lowered the standards of excellence in printing. He believed the technology hadn’t caught up to the aspirations yet.
The technology was flawed. Hyped. Like everything, from laundry detergent to love. It was a deception of perfection, a lie. A pretty distraction, like those twins who weren’t really grown up enough to have true skill, to say that they had mastered a profession. But the twins were too shy, too cute for him to hate. Much as he wanted to hate them. Much as he needed to.
He had used all of his 401k savings to pay off his bills, so that he could survive just on unemployment until he could find a new job.
He hadn’t tried too hard yet. But of the places he had tried, none had called back.
He was thirty-eight years old.
It was a good thing he had no family to support. He was divorced. That hadn’t worked out in the long run, either. Promises, promises. Promises of security, of happiness, of forevers. A deception.
It was all like a cancer, ash gray under the pink of skin, spreading even into the most mundane, banal objects and matters.
Two days ago, after loading up his car for the dump, he had found that it wouldn’t start. He knew nothing of cars. He was more handy putting together small pieces of paper. He had the car towed. It needed a new starter. The whole thing cost him two hundred dollars. Thank God for the 401k money...even though he had lost more than thirty percent of it to taxes and penalties.
His kitchen faucet only trickled water lately. He would have to call a plumber. His father was good with things like that, but had never taught Ned to be. His father had never been close even when he was close, and now he was in Florida.
Now the bulb to the outside light was out. It didn’t surprise him. It was just another symptom of the disease, like the torn shower curtain, the leak in his bedroom ceiling he had patched up with silver duct tape, the cellar staircase that sagged alarmingly under his weight, the mineral stains in his bathtub and the spider plant that was dying in his parlor. He was too disgusted to be dismayed. It was a fatalistic acceptance.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous venturing outside, into the frigid dark, the anemic beam of his flashlight barely playing across the heaped snow that had turned his long-familiar yard into a surrealistic, alien landscape.
To his right, alien ruins lay half covered in snow.
“Oh...that’s great,” he said softly.
His garage roof had collapsed under its burden of snow. Just yesterday afternoon he had looked up at the roof and remembered how his father would make him climb onto it from a second floor window so he could shovel it off. He could have done that this winter, but had been afraid the structure wouldn’t support his weight. Now he was glad he had been timid about it.
He drew nearer. The roof hadn’t fallen flat, but had actually only dropped to the ground on the left side, the right still supported, so that it formed a great lean-to. But in dropping on the left, the roof had torn the window of his grandfather’s old workshop right out of the wall, leaving a hole in its place. He would have to nail some plastic over it to keep stray cats and skunks out of the workshop. But that was the least of his problems.
How was he supposed to deal with this? How to bring the roof down completely, and then, how to break it up and dispose of it? He, who could barely hang a picture without making a frustrating major project of it? He surely couldn’t afford to pay others to do it for him.
What would his neighbors think, particularly the ones behind his house? Last summer, through his window screens, he had overheard them bitching to friends about how awful his house looked, long unpainted, the eaves full of holes squirrels popped in and out of. Last summer, he had found a gift on his rickety front porch: a basket full of weeds. He had no doubt that his neighbors had left it as a comment upon the lawn he hadn’t mowed in weeks. But his lawn mower had broken down halfway through the summer.
He craned his neck to see if the back wall of the garage had fallen into the neighbors’ yard; he didn’t dare climb into that half-collapsed cave for a closer look. He could easily imagine them suing if so much as a splinter had dropped onto their property. To his relief, he saw that the back wall remained standing. He had at least been that lucky.
It was disorienting seeing the structure fallen like this. He had played in that garage as a boy. Parked his bike in there as a teenager. He used to set up targets in there, against the back wall, to shoot with his BB gun.
Now, it lay crushed. Was the rest of the house so weak? Would the whole of it cave in upon itself like this next winter? Next week?
There was nothing he could do tonight. Not that there was anything he could do tomorrow. Already accepting this latest development, Ned began to turn back toward the house. As he did so, his eyes swept the side of his grandfather’s workshop again. Yes, tomorrow he would have to put plastic over that...
...window...
There was someone in the window.
The figure was gone in a blink. When he swept the weak flashlight beam there, he saw nothing but a gaping hole, black as a bottomless pit, like a portal opening to the vastness of space.
But he had glimpsed something. A figure, apparently nude. All white against the dark, and softly luminous. Skeletal. With great black skull socket eyes...
A ghost.
His grandfather’s ghost, perhaps. Jolted out of the ether at the destruction of the garage, peering out mournfully from his old workshed at the damage...
Ned wanted to hurry back into the house. Pretend that he hadn’t seen that apparition, that his peripheral vision had tricked him. But his curiosity was strong, and so was his anger. Because maybe it hadn’t been a ghost, but some stranger, some teenager who had entered the unlocked shed. Some years back he had surprised two contractors, working on a house in the neighborhood, who were suspiciously peering through the shed’s window. It might be something like that. Someone who had been attracted by the dramatic crash, and been tempted to snoop.
Ned had guns in the house. But if he went in to get one the stranger might flee. It had no doubt seen him notice it, and ducked out of sight.
There was no time. Ned moved closer to the workshop’s door, having to wade into deep snow where he hadn’t bothered to shovel.
With one hand he pointed the light, with the other shoved the old door open.
He expected his grandfather to be standing there before him, at that moment. Tall, lean, smiling, his gray hair stirring lazily as if he stood at the bottom of the ocean...
Instead, he saw only various depths and shades of gloom. Leaning boards. Stacked, broken furniture. The long workbench that ran along the wall where the window had been wrenched away.
A little snow here and there where it had sifted through the holes in the roof.
No grandfather. No ghost. No teenager or contractor. Ned began to withdraw from the threshold. And heard a tiny creak.
A cat? Merely a board he had displaced under his weight? He aimed the flashlight down toward the floor.
And then he saw the face peering out at him from the corner of the room, back in the dark, sheltered in the collection of scrap wood like an animal in its den. It glowed more dimly even than the flashlight. A pallid white glow, just enough to make the figure look fuzzy, slightly out of focus.
Those gaping skull sockets he had glimpsed before were not hollows, but huge convex eyes, blank as those of a shark. There was little more to its face than that black unreadable stare; the nose and mouth were unfinished, just afterthoughts. Its head was hairless. The one hand he saw, its fingers curled over the edge of an old baby carriage, was impossibly long, as if it possessed more joints than a human hand.
“Jesus!” Ned gasped.
Either his exclamation or the light rousted the entity from its hiding place. Its burst out into the open, leaped onto the workbench, nimble for such a tall scarecrow of a being. It scarcely made a noise, didn’t disturb a single rusting tool or jar of screws on the bench. Hunched, it seemed to be racing along the workbench toward him, and in terror, Ned whirled and plunged out into the night.
His legs sank into the snow and after only two steps he had fallen, twisting around to crash onto his back, jerking his right ankle painfully in the process. The wind yanked out of him, curling in the air above his head, he could only gaze in horror as the skeletal apparition scampered out of the gaping window. He realized then that the window had been its destination, and not his throat. He continued to stare as the being raced across the slanted roof, toward the back wall, and dropped away, presumably into the neighbors’ yard. For one crazy moment, Ned felt dread that the creature might do some damage to their yard that he would be blamed for.
It was gone, and at last he struggled to his feet. The flashlight was gone, dropped and no doubt buried in the snow. He didn’t linger to look for it, instead made his way back to the house as quickly as the snow and his twisted ankle would permit.
Back inside his second floor apartment, he locked and chained the door, put on most of the lights, and then went to load his .357 Magnum, a chrome-bright nickel-plated revolver with a four-inch barrel. He kept his guns in the spare bedroom, which he and Brenda had mostly used for storage, and he had left the lights off in here. As he pushed the revolver’s loaded cylinder back into its frame, he peeked around a window shade into the yard below.
The snow all around seemed to glow slightly luminous in the night. Alien landscape...
Perhaps, he considered, that thing had been the straw to break the camel’s back, creeping across the garage roof, causing it to fall. Perhaps, even, its craft had silently, stealthily alighted upon the roof—collapsing it—and had then whisked itself away in alarm, leaving one of its small crew stranded behind...
As Ned peered out into the murk, he saw a flitting pale form duck from behind one dark tree in his yard to another. The trees were slender, but then the being was slenderer still. He watched the second tree for a long time, his gun clenched in his fist so tightly that the checkered walnut grips ended up leaving an imprint in his palm, but the figure didn’t emerge, and at last Ned gave up, withdrew from his watch.
He didn’t sleep much that night, however. He just rocked in his chair, wrapped in his blanket, watching TV. But in place of the bottle in his hand, he kept the Magnum. He must stay alert. He couldn’t afford to muffle his senses, let down his guard. They might yet try to take him away. They had no doubt come to do just that...
* * *
The next morning, bleary-eyed, he ventured outside again. He even dared approach the workshop so as to close the door he had left open in his flight. In his quick glance inside the shadowy shed, he saw no crouching figures gazing out at him. He then covered the window hole with a large trash bag, pinning it in place with numerous thumb tacks.
He detected no prints of the creature in the snow across the slanted roof, but it had snowed a little during the night, his car lightly veiled in the driveway, and the creature wouldn’t have left deep prints anyway. It couldn’t weigh more than a bare skeleton, and besides its cadaverous frame, it had had that blurry, insubstantial look, as if its cells were made of ectoplasm, as if the thing were visiting here from another dimension, but only half here, maybe the rest of its essence back on its own plane, whatever and wherever that might be.
Ned ventured out for milk, bread and a few videos, but made sure he was back well before dark, and he checked every room of his apartment carefully for any invaders who might have entered during his absence. Satisfied that he was alone, he locked himself in. By the time night fell, he had loaded two other pistols and a rifle. He hid one pistol in his bedside chest, one in the top drawer of the microwave cart in the kitchen, and the .22 rifle with its thirty-shot banana clip he pushed under the couch. This way, no matter what part of the house he might be trapped in by an intruder, a weapon would be close at hand.
The Magnum he kept with him.
* * *
By nightfall, he was nestled in the wicker rocker, watching one of the videos...peripherally aware of the window covered by curtains and drawn shade just by his elbow, but not peeking out of it for fear of what he might see lurking down in his yard.
In the adult movie, two actresses who were supposed to be sisters were acting out an incest scenario. Ned’s rocking rhythm was almost an unconscious complement to their mounting passions, the squeaking of the wicker a sound effect for the bed they writhed upon.
Ned imagined what it would be like if those young twins from work were to entwine their slender naked bodies for his viewing pleasure. They were much prettier than these actresses. He projected them over the women on the screen, until it was truly as if it were those actual sisters he was ogling. He imagined what it would be like to tie those sisters together into artificial Siamese twins, bind them into one multi-limbed exotic creature, some sensual mutation. A pet to keep. A pet to play with. And beat when he was angry...
* * *
He lifted his head to the realization that, deprived of sleep, he had dozed off in the wicker chair. The tape had rewound itself and a nature show was on, the volume low. A female praying mantis was twisting around and munching on the head of her copulating lover, starting with one large grape-like eye.
A white blur at the edge of his vision attracted his attention, and his eyes flicked to the kitchen doorway even as a pale figure darted back out of his view.
Ned’s hands scampered in his lap, clawing for the gun that had slipped from his grasp during his doze. The remote clattered to the floor. He found the pistol, lurched to his feet, nearly became tangled in the blanket as he started toward the kitchen. Already his finger was pressing hard against the trigger, on the verge of shifting it...
He saw no one in the kitchen. Grasping the handgun in both fists like a trained policeman would, he stepped around the stove. Nothing crouching there. In the bathroom, nothing. He used the pistol’s barrel to thrust the shower curtain aside, tearing it a little more as he did so.
Just his own shadow on the mildewed tiles.
It had escaped, and now Ned knew that locked doors could not keep the being—or beings—out. Yes, they had to be made of something less, or more, than flesh. They might be able to step out of their dimension at any point they chose. So how could he defend himself from them? How could he ever have peace, now that they had decided to haunt him?
He paced the house. Looked in every room, again and again. He made coffee, and as he paced with the gun in one hand and a mug in the other, he took note of the cracks in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling. Had he simply neglected to notice, or were they more pronounced than they ever had been? He didn’t remember them ever being so extensive before...
Could the alien—the aliens—have something to do with this? Were they lurking even now in the attic above him? For months now he had heard stirrings up there, creaking boards, faint scampering he had taken to be squirrels that had gotten into the eaves, storing nuts or whatnot for the winter. The beings’ weight up there where no one ever ventured might have stressed the plaster of the ceiling...
Maybe they even did these things on purpose. That might well explain the extent of the seeming decay around him, now that he knew they could venture right into his house with him. Might they have done something to his kitchen faucet to make its flow a trickle? Might they have tampered with his car’s starter one night?
Why would they do that, the bastards? He set down his mug, glared again at the cracked ceiling. Why? The power to cross dimensions, and just so they could act as poltergeists, as gremlins, wreaking petty havoc? Why?
Ned smiled bitterly, narrowed his eyes, contemplating possible motivations. It might be an experiment. Perhaps they had made him a lab rat in his own home, to be probed and taunted, his agitation observed. Maybe they wanted to test the reaction humans might have to their kind.
But no, they were too mischievous for that. Ned considered the possibility that it might in fact be children, or at least the alien equivalent of teenage delinquents, skipping into the human realm to tease him, have some wanton fun.
But the fun seemed too wanton, even for cruel children. Ned considered something else, remembering the many stories of abductions by these entities, the way they bound and probed, practically tortured their helpless victims.
Perhaps it was as simple as their being a race of sado-masochists. Maybe it excited them to make their victims helpless, and afraid, in the way that a rapist feels empowered, or a bondage freak when he ties up and dominates another, or a stronger prison inmate when he sodomizes a weaker. In the prison of existence, maybe that was the relationship humans fulfilled for these other, supposedly superior beings. They were warped, and mean-spirited, and needed to feel empowered, and even when they were not literally capturing their prey they still took delight in playing games with them, making them afraid, terrified...
But Ned’s anger was fast beginning to drown out his fear. They were taunting the wrong man. They would find that this prisoner had a shiv hidden in his palm.
“Come on,” he whispered to the cracked ceiling, as if they might hear him through the cracks, have their huge black eyes pressed to them. “Come on,” he taunted them back.
* * *
Ned lay on the living room floor, belly down, ear flat to the dusty boards. Did he hear a faint movement down there? Maybe the beings hadn’t removed or killed the elderly couple after all. At last, he got up and called their number on the phone. The old woman answered, and he hung up. It probably was her voice, but not necessarily.
Could they take on human guise? He had considered that. If so, how many of the people he had known in his life might be one of them? Or if they could not literally become human, might they at least enter into humans somehow, to possess them, control them like a skeleton hand inside a clown puppet?
He had even wondered if they might be what remained of humans...dead humans. Might that being in the workshop actually have been his grandfather? All that was left of his grandfather, his soul, visiting from whatever plane the soul really did depart to? No...he doubted that. It would not explain the stories of abductions, experiments, the ships that delivered them here from whatever world or plane they dwelt on. But Ned did believe that the being or beings he had seen might very well explain the stories of visitations by angels over the centuries. Luminous entities, otherworldly, ethereal.
And from his own experiences, he believed that they might just as easily account for stories of demons, as well.
“Come to the zoo,” he muttered, making a fresh pot of coffee, glancing up at the ceiling. He drank no beer at all now, just lots of coffee, coffee to keep him alert. He wasn’t getting much sleep, mostly just naps in his chair while it was light out. “Is that it? Come see us in the zoo? Stare at us? Laugh at us in our cages?”
After he had stirred in his sugar and milk he stood in the center of the room, head tilted up. “You think we’re funny? You think I’m funny, is that it?”
A tiny creak of sound answered him. And he saw one of the spider-webbed cracks in the ceiling widen, ever so slightly. He heard the sifting fall of plaster dust. Both sight and sound were so subtle, it was like watching the minute hand of a clock move. But the minute hands of clocks did indeed move, and cracks in plaster widened, and he had seen it happen.
Without another word, Ned set down his mug, picked up the .357 from the counter and went out into his back hall, started up the stairway to the attic. His jaw jutted from the clenching of his teeth, the tightness of his smile.
It was late afternoon, gilded sunlight lying in elongated patches across the dirty attic floorboards. Thank God evening hadn’t yet fallen. He needed a new flashlight. If it had been evening, he wouldn’t even be up here. Maybe he’d make them sorry they hadn’t kept quiet until the sun went down.
An object momentarily distracted him. On a ratty old arm chair rested a sheet of cardboard, and on that was all that remained of a wreath his aunt had given him and his wife on their first anniversary. Some kind of dried arrangement. Now all that was left of it were bits and pieces, not even describing a circle. Bugs, maybe, or the sun blazing on it through unshaded windows. Or perhaps, bored and mischievous, his house-guests had sat up here plucking at it. Brenda had left behind a lot of forgotten things in boxes up here, and the idea of those creatures poking through them only exasperated his mounting fury...
He moved toward a half-closed door that marked the place where the roof narrowed. The room beyond had sharply slanted walls, and just one window at its end, looking out on the driveway. It would be dark in there. The chimney came skewering through that space, and there were stacks of boards and boxes to hunker behind. It was the perfect place in which to hide.
With his toe, Ned pushed the door open all the way.
But they weren’t even hiding. Had they become so bold that they now dared to stand and confront him? Were they no longer afraid to be seen? No longer afraid of him?
Their brazenness caught him off guard. Some of his fury was washed back by an icy wave of fear.
There were two of them standing side by side at the end of the hall-like space, framed in the window, silhouetted in a way that lessened their phosphorescent quality, made them appear more corporeal. They were indistinguishable from one another, identical.
Tall, bony as prisoners of war. Dead prisoners of war. So unnaturally, uncannily elongated, as if they were distorted in carnival mirrors. Yet there was something vaguely feminine in their form; maybe a slight flare in the hips, the adolescent suggestion of breasts.
Silhouetted as they were, it was difficult to make out their great insect-like eyes. Mantis eyes. But somehow, seeing the eyes in suggestion made them more eerie to him than if they had been clearly lit.
“What do you want with me?” Ned hissed at them. He was sorry he spoke. He meant his voice to sound demanding. Instead, he heard its tremor. But he couldn’t help but blurt, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
And with that, he lifted his arm to point the .357.
They moved faster than humans should, with bird-quick jerking swiftness. First one and then the other of the identical beings whirled and dropped out the window, which Ned hadn’t noticed was open before. Like jumping spiders, they were so fast. Gone, before he could level the red front sight on them.
Ned surged forward down the murky hall, came to the open window. Directly below the window was the slanting, half-collapsed garage roof.
He saw no prints in the deep snow of the roof, as he should. Maybe they hadn’t actually jumped onto it, but scrabbled down the side of the house and leapt to the ground itself. It didn’t matter...Ned caught a glimpse of one of them as it ducked inside the cave of the garage. He was sure the both of them now huddled in its furthest shadows, like vampires waiting for night to fall.
“You just stay there,” he whispered. “You just make yourself right at home.”
* * *
There wasn’t much more that Ned could do that evening, but he got up early the next morning as if to go to work. Nonchalantly, he ignored the garage as he walked past it and got in his car.
In town, he bought two lengths of strong nylon cord.
In the parking lot of the store he examined his car, figuring out how he might attach one end of the linked cords. He had no trailer hitch. The frame beneath, somewhere? It was easiest, he decided, to open both rear windows and pass one end of the cord right through the back, in one side and out the other. Satisfied with at least this end of the problem, he drove home to confront the second half of the equation. As he steered the car, his heart raced like a rat in a wheel, as if its mad workings were what powered the vehicle as it sped back to his haunted house.
He backed the car into the driveway, got out, and began to uncoil his rope, sheltered on the far side of the car so his actions couldn’t yet be seen. But he couldn’t help throwing a smile at the dark maw of the garage. Did the vampires slumber, or were they watching avidly with their lidless eyes?
He fastened one end of the joined cords through the back of his car, as he had planned. “You should have messed with the car again,” he muttered. “You should have done something else to it, huh?”
From under his coat he withdrew the Magnum. Then, taking his rope with him like a spelunker venturing into a labyrinth deep in the earth, Ned crouched down and gingerly entered the garage.
Since last evening he had tried to remember what kind of supports the cross beams had, what might be holding up this end of the roof...if it were even something a car might dislodge. The answer was better than he had hoped. It filled him both with gratitude, and horror that he had dared to enter this potential rat trap.
All that really continued to support the roof on the right was a gallows-like structure, a frail little brace of wood. All he had to do was fasten the cord to the lower part of that brace, yank it away, and the top portion would surely give way. The roof must be precarious even now.
But were they in here, to be trapped?
The gallows brace was half-way into the garage. Keeping his eyes on the shadows at the back of the cave, he straightened up as best he could and began tying the cord around the forty-five degree support arm. In order to do this, he had to reluctantly tuck the pistol in his waistband. His breathing grew rapid, and his breath became an obscuring ectoplasm before his eyes. Suddenly very frightened not to be able to see into the back of the garage, he held his breath while he finished tying off the cord. He knotted it again and again, so that the car’s pull would not simply unravel it.
At last he finished, and squatted back down so he could retreat. He thought he really should venture in just a little deeper, to verify that they were indeed back there before he fully toppled the structure. But no...that was what they wanted. This was their den, now. They were there; he knew it.
As he turned to go back, he saw one of the aliens’ faces peering out at him from the garage’s rubble, not two feet from his face. Huge black eyes, compressed slash of a mouth, a blank face with no soul behind it to give it life.
He cried out, wrenched free his handgun and continued the motion by smashing it like a hammer across that staring visage in a vicious backhand blow.
Glass shattered, and he felt his flesh tear in several places. The gun dropped from his hand and fell through the old leaning window pane he had just struck.
He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest. Just a reflection. But it couldn’t have been his...he hadn’t mistaken what he’d seen. It had to have been one of the aliens, lurking behind him, peering over his shoulder.
He twisted sharply around. Neither of them was there. But he knew they were close at hand. Without waiting for them to pour in upon him, he left the gun behind and scurried out of the garage into the glaring safety of outside air.
Still gripping his gushing hand, Ned slipped into his car. Started it. Yes, they should have screwed with this starter too, shouldn’t they?
Ned clamped his fists on the wheel and stamped his foot on the gas pedal. His car lurched forward...began to race up the slope of the driveway, spitting a fusillade of pebbles behind it...
And then it was brought up short with a jolt, as if it had struck a phone pole. Ned hadn’t fastened his seat belt, and nearly pitched into the windshield.
Behind him came the delayed second half of the crash he had heard inside his house that night.
“Yes!” Ned exclaimed, savoring the monstrous shriek of tormented wood. It might have been the banshee wail of his grandfather’s ghost, anguished at seeing his grandson level the remnants of the structure.
Did he actually hear some unearthly shrieking mixed in with the falling-tree sound of the crash?
Gripping his slashed hand once more, Ned stepped out of the car to take in the results. He saw that the nylon cord had snapped, but only after its work had been done.
The roof was not totally flat. There had been an old washer and stove in there, other items and piles of debris to prevent the roof from uniform flatness, but it was flat enough to have crushed anything remotely human inside it. Ned would have worried about a stray cat being caught in that avalanche.
The back wall alone was standing, though leaning and with boards torn free. Through a gaping section, Ned could see the neighbors who had left that basket of weeds on his porch as a gift, peeking through to see what the noise had been. Two pairs of glittering, stealthy eyes. If he had still had his gun in his hand, Ned would have fired through the boards at those eyes. In fact, he reached to his waistband before he remembered he had lost the Magnum in the cave-in.
“Go away!” he shouted at the two of them instead. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
* * *
For the next few nights, he didn’t see the aliens again.
But one night, when he stood at the toilet, his mind filled with the golden haze of beer, his peripheral vision picked up a dim glow reflected in the mirror over the sink.
He jerked back so abruptly that he spattered the floor, backed out of the bathroom and clawed at the light switch on the wall outside the door.
The overhead light came on. He stole back into the room, stole up to the sink, steeled himself for a dead-on look in the mirror.
Just his reflection. But he regarded it with a frown. He had lost weight, his cheeks bony, his thin lips a tight line. His eyes glared from dark hollows. He was tall and slender to begin with, and now looked all the more cadaverous.
He had been sleeping in his bed again. Drinking again. He had let his guard down...
Could they have returned? Could one of them, at least, have survived? And invaded him in a place where it couldn’t be evicted?
He backed out of the bathroom a second time, not lowering his gaze from his own gaze.
That was what they thought, that they couldn’t be evicted...
He would watch for them. He would check, every day.
He still had the guns hidden throughout his house. He must not let his guard down again. He must remain vigilant.
He had killed two of them. He would kill each one that came for him. He would shoot them. Each and every one...until, besieged, he either shot them all or was overrun, trying.
And if he saw in the mirror what he had seen reflected in that old window in the garage...if it came to that...then he would shoot himself, as well.
And so he watched. And he waited.