The Grays Read Free

though, that was certain. Awful and it came from the sky and the Air Force couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So it was secret, and would remain secret.
    He groaned, turned over, waited miserably for the pill to work.
    IN THE SILVER VEHICLE, THE children struggled, twisting and turning in their captivity. Dan saw something white. He looked at it, trying to resolve its meaning in the haze that still obscured his vision. It was very dark, but he could still see this thing. It dangled as if it was hanging on a clothesline, and he thought it might be a big sheet, wet, because it was dripping, the drops pinging on metal somewhere below.
    It was a very strange sort of a sheet, though, because it had a kind of face, a mouth gaping like that of a big lake bass, with two distorted black sockets above it. Were they eye sockets? He thought they must be, because there was also a darkness above them that looked like it might be hair. Then he saw a curliness to it, and a lightness and he knew that it was blond hair—and he had seen blond hair on Katelyn when she lit the match.
    He tried to say her name, but there was only a gusty whisper. He wanted his mother, he wanted his dad, he wanted Uncle Frank, who was damn tough, to come up here and
help them!
    Drip, drip, drip.
    Then he saw that there was another one, and it had short brown hair and its face was all wobbled like a mirror in the Crazy House at Madison Playland.
    When he stared at it, though, he knew: it was his skin. But if it was up there and he was down here, then—
    His stomach churned, his heart began raging in his chest, and his throat became so dry it felt as if it had been stuffed with ashes. He wanted to scream, he wanted to beg God for help, but he couldn’t make a sound.
    Off in the dark, a buzzing sound started. The things in the dark were coming. He looked, but he knew he would not see them, he never had.
    Then his skin flew up and out, and spread like a huge cloud above him, a cloud with a gaping mouth and holes for eyes, and it came down on him as gently as dew falls when you are camping under the stars, and enclosed him in the deepest warmth he had ever felt in his life.
    He uttered a long, delicious groan of raw human pleasure and profound relief. Beside him, Katelyn groaned, too, and he knew that she had, as well, been covered once again in her own skin.
    Instantly, without them going out through a door or anything, the silver ship was rushing away overhead, turning into a dot. Wind screamed around them, their hair blew, and Dan thought they’d been pushed out and were going to die in the lake.
    Below, Mr. Ehmers saw beams of light playing out of the summer clouds. “What the hell,” he said. Then Frank said, “Ho, got a strike goin’ here.” They brought up another bass.
    DAN WOKE UP SCREAMING. HE was upside down and the covers were all over the room. He got out of bed, immediately felt incredibly thirsty, and went into the bathroom and drank and drank. His mother heard him and came in behind him. “You okay, Dan?”
    Then he cried, clutching her with all his might, burying his face in her nightgown that smelled of cigarettes and gin.
    “Hey, hey there—”
    “Mom, I had a dream. It was real bad, Mom.”
    She went into his room with him and sat at his bedside.
    “It was these Indians, they got us, and they skinned us alive.”
    “Skinned who alive?”
    “Me! Me and—her. I don’t know. Me and this girl.”
    A cool hand touched his forehead. “You dreamed you were naked with a girl, and that’s a little scary, isn’t it?”
    “The stars,” he said, “the stars . . .” But what about the stars he could not recall. He closed his eyes, and his mother’s hand on his brow comforted him, but deep inside him, down where screams begin, there was a part of him that remembered every terrible moment, and would never forget.
    His mother, drunk though she was, sad though she was, sat a while longer with her child, then went back down to the kitchen