“I did.” Ryan spread his hands. “All the reports came back the same… That an outside source exerted barometric pressure strong to make the animals’ brains explode.” It felt freaky sharing the details of Holden’s report, but he was talking to a guy who believed in Martians and Sasquatch. If anyone was going to take the veterinarian’s findings seriously, it was Jerome.
“That makes sense.” Jerome took a gulp of coffee, then set the mug aside. “See… A UFO could do that. We don’t know what kind of frequencies they operate at…sound that might not affect us, but could be a siren song to an animal.” Standing, he hunched his shoulders and began to pace. “When I heard about the dogs, my first thought was that something lured them to that clearing. Probably not intentionally. It could have been an extraterrestrial craft transitioning through dimensions.”
“What does that mean?” Katie hadn’t taken a single sip of coffee, and probably had no intention of drinking the bitter brew. She set her mug beside Ryan’s and leaned forward, lacing her hands on her lap. “Are you saying UFOs just appear, randomly popping in and out of space?”
“Exactly.” Jerome beamed at her as if he’d discovered a star pupil. “That’s why it’s so hard for the government to track them. It’s not like they fly into our air space. They appear and disappear at whim through layers between worlds. When people think of UFOs, they tend to think of them as existing in our universe, but the reality is most exist in parallel, even temporal universes. The Men in Black know that. I’m not even sure all of them come from Earth.”
Ryan let out a slow breath. He’d seen enough strange shit lately to keep an open mind, but it was tricky navigating Jerome’s rapid-fire delivery. “You’re saying the Men in Black are aliens?”
“I’m saying some of them could be.” Jerome stopped pacing and shoved his hands into his pockets. His shoulders were still hunched in an awkward posture, but his voice had grown stronger, fueled by confidence in a subject he knew well. “UFOnauts don’t want to be discovered. They want to observe our world for whatever reason, and move on. That’s why you’ve got all these guys running around, warning people who’ve seen flying saucers to keep the stories to themselves. In that respect, our government and alien visitors are on the same page. Big Brother isn’t limited to our world alone.”
Ryan’s gaze drifted across the room to the stack of newspapers below the window. How many hours, days, weeks, even years had Jerome spent reading about stuff like this? His life seemed to revolve around little else. Katie was definitely off the radar, but it was a shame the guy didn’t crawl out of his shell and try to be more social. He was clearly intelligent, but unquestionably most people would find his choice of topics odd.
“Okay, put that aside for now.” Ryan chose not to go down the path of Big Brother and parallel worlds. “If I read you right, you think the pressure from a UFO caused the dogs and Wilson’s cows to die the way they did?”
Jerome bobbed his head. “Rex was lucky. He was probably drawn to the clearing like the other dogs, but must have gotten there after the saucer left. That’s why he was spared.”
“But what about the green cloud my son saw the night Rex ran away?” Katie asked.
“Another dimension traveler, passing through on a different plane. Not all would have the same effect or cause the damage. It was probably unusual enough to lure Rex away, but didn’t operate on a frequency that would harm him.”
“And the star shit?” Ryan used Wilson’s term for the silvery goop scattered throughout the farmer’s pasture and the clearing in the TNT.
“Residue left behind by the UFO’s passing. If you tried to get a sample of the stuff, it probably evaporated before a lab could examine it.”
Katie squeezed Ryan’s leg. “That’s exactly what you said happened.”
“Yeah.” A few weeks ago he’d have thought Jerome had a screw loose. Now he was starting to think the guy was the only one who knew what was going on. “The first cow Wilson lost was in a pasture a good distance from the barn. We couldn’t find any tracks in the field, animal or human.”
“Probably transported there by whatever craft drew her outside.”
Ryan webbed a hand over his face. The discussion was starting to sound like something out of Star Trek. Remaining seated was too confining. He stood and paced to the window. Jerome had opened the blinds before they arrived, the view outside a vista of browning grass and autumn-colored trees. “Hank Jeffries always said strange things happened around his house.” The observation came out of the blue, a memory tugged awake by their unusual conversation.
Jerome stepped closer, halting halfway between the window and the sofa. “I think this house is on a ley line. I think it’s where Indrid Cold is going to meet Parker on the thirty-first.”
Ryan spun. “Here?” The idea made a warped kind of sense. Parker had watched his brother die at Hank’s hands, then killed the drunken man in a blind rage. Caden had hinted he knew where Cold might appear and Caden was directly tied to the Jeffries house, now Jerome’s. Ryan should have pieced it together.
Katie stood and placed a hand on Jerome’s arm. “So you’re going to wait for him at the appointed time?”
He flushed with a visible start, obviously pleased by her touch. “I am.”
“And if he doesn’t show?”
“I’ll be no worse off than before.” He sucked on his bottom lip. Somewhat reluctantly, he glanced back to Ryan. “Parker told me he heard a lot of radio chatter. That’s how they communicate, you know. It’s just static to us…noise that shouldn’t even be there. But Parker understood it. He knew what they were saying when they talked to each other. The only message he wanted was from Cold. He did that drawing-thing as homage to him, waiting for the contact.” His eyes grew large, rounded by a hint of awe. “And then it came.”
Cold must return. Evening will follow.