That night, he drank a whole six-pack of Flying Dog while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on AMC. By the time Richard Dreyfuss found himself surrounded by those bug-eyed, long-limbed extraterrestrials, David was half in the bag. He rarely got drunk and never when he was home alone with Ellie, but he cut himself some slack tonight.
When the movie was over, he shut the TV off but remained on the couch, staring off into the darkness while the wall clock in the kitchen kept a metronomic beat. There was a drip in the kitchen sink, too, a steady and repetitive plink! every few seconds, and he focused on that for a while in his drunkenness. But then some nonspecific disquiet roused him just as he was about to slip into unconsciousness, and he got up, wended down the hall in the dark, and checked on Ellie. She was still sound asleep in bed. On the nightstand beside her was the shoe box containing the bird eggs. Ellie was not the source of his disquiet, he realized: It was something else. Without disturbing her, he kissed the warm and dewy side of her head, then retreated back out into the living room.
Before going to sleep, he peered out the front windows. It was as if something was beckoning to him. Across the street, the houses were dark, silent.
The white van was still parked along the curb.
And he realized it was the van that troubled him, although he had no idea why.
How do I know that van? Where have I seen it before?
In the dark, he collected the six empty beer bottles from the coffee table and carried them into the foyer. There, he set them up in a line on the floor in front of the door—an adult version of Ellie’s Night Parade. When he finished, he checked the dead bolt to make sure he’d locked it before returning to the warm indentation on the couch.
54
He stood barefoot on a gravelly patch of earth, watching as a parade of impossible animals campaigned along the desolate countryside in a single-file line that stretched all the way to the horizon. They were prehistoric in their hugeness, yet there was nothing mammalian about them. Instead, they appeared insectoid, multi-legged and wielding great segmented antennae, with shimmering, chitinous carapaces and eyes like swirling, gaseous planets. Their massive, spine-laden feet punched craters in the earth, and their sheer size blocked out the sun. Massive machinelike limbs muscled over trees and brushed against the sides of shallow mountain ranges. When these monstrous creatures reached civilization, David saw that all the buildings were decimated and abandoned, like those of ancient Greece or the bombed-out cities of some Middle Eastern country, and there were no signs of human life anywhere. Or at least it appeared so, until a figure materialized from within the shadows of a crumbling brick alleyway. A ghost-shape. The figure was slight, sinewy, feminine, with long hair hanging over her face. She looked like a teenager, perhaps even older, her clothes filthy and nothing more than rags, her arms piebald with bruises and abrasions. Her bare feet left bloody footprints on the dusty pavement. As David watched, the woman’s hair swung away from her face and, despite her years—despite the feral, detached look in her eyes and the broken shards of teeth that gnashed and chattered endlessly, madly—David recognized his daughter.
David awoke in a bedroom with blank alabaster walls and a single window at his back. He was sprawled out on a bed, his hair still damp from the shower he’d taken, and he was dressed in the clean clothes Tim had given him, though he could not remember getting dressed. As consciousness fell fully upon him, he was aware of a small headache jackhammering at his right temple. He realized he had come in here to lie down for a few minutes after showering and getting dressed, but the time—and his own consciousness, apparently—had been siphoned from him. Judging by the murky seawater quality of the daylight coming through the partially shuttered bedroom window, David guessed he’d been asleep for a few hours.
The image of those insectile dinosaurs was still fresh in his mind. He could still taste the powdery air of that evacuated city at the back of his throat, could still feel the impossible vibrations of those hideous, segmented, Lovecraftian bug-legs driving themselves into the earth. He knew it was only a dream . . . yet what troubled him was the idea that it might have been a portent of things to come, too: a glimpse into a not-too-distant future when the next breed of creature ruled the earth, much as people had replaced dinosaurs. And in that future, the only living human being was his daughter.
The thought caused him to shudder.
Downstairs, he found the three of them seated around a kitchen table, a plate of overdone flank steaks on the counter. He’d caught them in the middle of their meal, Ellie’s plate piled high with scalloped potatoes, green beans, applesauce, and a blackened, rigid cut of meat. He got the sense that he also had caught them in the middle of some private conversation, for they all ceased talking and stared at him as he approached. Ellie looked startled by his presence.
“Well,” Tim proclaimed. “There he is.”
“Hi, Daddy.”