Journal of a UFO Investigator Read Free

there . . .
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    . . . and very quiet, except for the phone on the kitchen wall, ringing loudly over and over. It had been ringing even as I opened the door. My watch read 11:37.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œDanny! Are you all right?”
    Jeff Stollard. I pressed the receiver against my ear, breathing hard. “Damn near crushed me,” I said, as soon as I could speak.
    â€œWhat? What crushed you? What are you talking about?”
    My parents must not have been home. Lucky for me. I could almost hear my father: Don’t your friends know better than to phone you in the middle of the night? But he wasn’t around, nor my mother. Jeff and I could talk freely, as long as we needed. Like the summer before, between seventh and eighth grade, when one or two evenings a week we sailed off on our bikes into the softening light, and when tired of riding, we walked the bicycles, no parents to eavesdrop, until we’d talked through everything we cared to understand. Religion, mostly; how his being Baptist made him different from me, me different from almost everyone in our school. What happens to us, if anything, after we’re dead.
    â€œSo you got the signal?” I said.
    â€œTold you it’d work.”
    My keys were still in my hand, the Delta Device attached. The Delta rested in my palm, a shadow among shadows. I ran my thumb over it. Two small triangles of sheet metal, their edges hammered into curves and soldered together, the wiring pressed inside. It pained me to feel the lumpy, splattery soldering, to remember how the gun had jumped and trembled in my hand. Jeff had done his better, smoother. In metal shop he always did better than I did.
    â€œBut what was the emergency?” he said.
    I tried to tell him. My teeth chattered; I had to stop and take a few breaths before I could go on. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me this thing actually landed?”
    â€œNo, it didn’t land! My God, if it had landed—”
    â€œI’m not your God, Danny.”
    â€œFor God’s sake! I just meant—”
    â€œI just meant, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!”
    â€œI’d have been squooshed like a bug!” I screamed, and felt my saliva spray over the receiver. I felt myself getting demerits, over the telephone wires, for being hysterical. “It was bearing down on top of me,” I said. “And—and—”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œIt spoke to me.”
    â€œReally? What did it say?”
    A serious question? Sarcastic? Jeff can be both, and you usually don’t know, even from his expression, until afterward.
    â€œ ‘Until the seeding,’”I said.
    â€œThe seeding ?”
    He spelled the word out, and I confirmed it. The seeding. Even as I wondered how I’d earlier lost the memory of what the disk said and why it just popped out now, talking with him.
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
    I couldn’t tell whether he was going to laugh or have me exorcised, try once more to convert me so I won’t go to hell when I die. “Until the seeding,” I repeated, and felt the electric tingling shoot up through my legs, my thighs, the two currents meeting in my belly and running upward. My hand shook so I could barely hold the receiver.
    â€œIt was heading westward,” I said. “Toward Braxton.”
    He didn’t answer, and I knew what he was thinking. Rosa Pagliano lives in Braxton. Would the disk stop over her house, as it had over mine? Descend to her, speak to her? Take her inside? I thought of how she’d smiled at me in music class, while everybody was singing that song “And I’ll not marry at all, at all, and I’ll not marry at all ...” And then I really began to shake.
    â€œDo you think—you know—I should phone Rosa? Let her know—to go outside—she might see it too—”
    â€œYou wouldn’t dare,”