The Visitors

by Jack Alcott

part 3 of 4

Strangely enough, it was only hours after that Ferrari ride that I saw my UFO.

Now, I realize I might be undercutting my credibility here and maybe casting doubt on my sanity. But I can’t lie: I saw something that night, something I can’t quite explain. I was alone in our split-level ranch house out on Ryder Ridge; my wife had gone over to her mother’s with the baby.

It was about 9 pm and it was nice to have some down time to myself. So I grabbed a beer from the fridge and stepped out on the back deck and wham — over the treetops comes my UFO... Just floating... Silently... No noise at all; it was just there — an enormous triangle of light with a dark, opaque center that blocked out the stars. And then it was directly overhead, obscuring first the Cepheus constellation and then Hercules’ legs and star-limned torso, where it seemed to stall and wait as I gaped up at it, Corona bottle in hand, immovable as I listened, straining for a sound, any noise, but not hearing anything — just like they said in all the news reports.

Except, what hadn’t come across on TV, really, was the sheer size of the thing. From where I stood, I tried to estimate its height and width, based on the nearby trees and houses, but it was hard to get any perspective; distances seemed warped and askew. It was definitely gigantic, bigger than a 747 jet, and it just hung there, magically levitating in the star-spiked sky.

A wavelet of fear swept through me, head to foot, followed by a cold, nauseous sweat. What I was seeing didn’t add up, was incomprehensible — wasn’t supposed to be there. Something was amiss in my usual, if somewhat dull, suburban universe.

As I watched the giant glowing triangle edge slowly up the night sky, then down, then sideways, an uncanny calm came over me, a sense of acceptance, as though I’d told myself not to fight it — just believe. There it was, the impossible unfolding right before my eyes and I was suddenly in awe and full of wonder. It felt good, miraculous even, the way I imagine a religious experience would feel.

And then it was gone; I can’t even remember exactly how it left, or disappeared, or whatever it did. It was like a movie screen suddenly going dark and sucking all that light back into the projectionist’s booth; it just vanished.

We lived in a woodsy, isolated part of town and our nearest neighbors were several hundred yards away. I didn’t know them and didn’t even consider checking to see if they’d seen the object. Instead, I called the state police barracks out on Route 22, but the line was busy and stayed busy for the next twenty minutes.

Finally, I gave up; the switchboard was probably jammed with people phoning in reports on the UFO. Then I flicked through the TV channels — this was before cable made it out here — and there was nothing.

I thought about ringing Jimmy up, but decided not to; I wasn’t in the mood to get depressed. Seeing the UFO had induced a kind of euphoria in me, and I wanted to hang on to that high. When Jean came home, I was already well into my fifth beer and was slurring my words with excitement as I told her about the visitor. But she seemed tired and unimpressed.

“You’ve been drinking. Are you sure it wasn’t a military plane out of Newburgh?” There was an Air Force base up there that was home to a fleet of B-52s and who knew what other top secret aircraft.

“No way. We don’t have anything that can hover and float like that. This thing was enormous and it just stopped dead in mid-air.”

“Sounds like a weather balloon, like they found out west in the fifties — where was it?”

“New Mexico. Area 51.”

“Wasn’t that a hoax or something?”

“It was never really explained.”

“Oh, c’mon. It was some local yokels playing a prank. That’s probably what you saw, too. Somebody’s big joke. Jimmy said they were flying those ultra-light thingys from that little backwoods strip over in Stormville.”

“I’m not so sure; nobody’s proved that yet, and what I saw, well, it was unearthly. There was something wrong about it, like it didn’t belong here.”

The baby woke up just then with his hungry cry, so Jean dismissed my UFO with a wave of her hand and put a pan of water on the stove to heat up a formula bottle.

“You’ll laugh at yourself in the morning when you’re sober.”

* * *

But when I woke up the next day, I was still freaked out about the incident, and I wasn’t hung over. I went outside in my bathrobe to pick up the local paper, The Reporter Dispatch, from its usual place on the front walk. My hands fumbled the paper from its blue plastic sheath, and there was my UFO in a grainy black and white photo at the bottom of Page One. “UFOs sighted over Putnam” read the uninspired headline, and the story told of multiple reports of “flying pyramids and triangles” seen over the eastern part of the county.

The prose was flat and matter-of-fact, as though chopped out on a tight deadline with no chance to communicate the wonder of the thing. The story reported that police were inundated with phone calls and witnesses described pretty much what I’d seen.

An expert in the story derided the reports, saying they were most likely unusual atmospheric disturbances or a hoax, possibly by pilots in ultra-light aircraft. I didn’t buy it. Whatever I saw was not of this earth, to echo one of those old flying saucer movies.

Over the next couple of days I talked about the UFO with friends at work whenever I had the chance, but soon quit because I got tired of the skeptical looks and wise-ass remarks.

When I ran into Jimmy at the A&P a week later, the spaceship wasn’t on my mind. In fact, he mentioned it first as we rolled our full carts into the parking lot.

“Hey, Candice saw that UFO that was in the paper,” he said. “I was away on a business trip, so I missed it, dammit.”

“I saw it, too.”

“Wow. Do you believe it was the real deal?”

“What I saw was real. I don’t think anyone could have faked it.”

“No kidding — you’re sure?”

“I wish you’d seen it.”

“I’ll tell you what: Candice hasn’t made much sense since she saw the thing over our backyard; she’s totally convinced her alien attractor pulled it in. She really believes that pile of junk summoned it — that it came to see her.”

“She’s yanking your chain.”

“I wish she were, but she’s obsessed. She’s been switching on her ‘attractor’ lights every night since it happened. It’s almost pathological.” Jimmy didn’t look happy, but he could be a good actor when he wanted to put one over on you, so I wasn’t biting.

“Get her to a shrink. Maybe she needs some electroshock treatment,” I said, joking, of course, although I found the mental image pleasing. “Nothing like a few jolts of electricity to bring you back to reality.”

Jimmy didn’t think it was funny; or at least he pretended it was no laughing matter.

“I mean it, Jack. I’m worried about her, especially with all the other stuff going on in our lives right now. I think she’s cracking up. She’s been acting erratically lately, and we’re fighting all the time.”

“You two should get yourselves into therapy. You need to work through some issues.”

I wasn’t really ready to discuss the dissolution of their marriage in the middle of the A&P parking lot, but I felt bad for the guy. To my relief, the conversation returned to the UFOs, and Jimmy wanted as many details as I could remember. He got me to describe the ship’s blue-white lights and its shimmying movement across the sky — the way it left a momentary after-image behind that then caught up and merged with the craft.

I told him everything I could remember, trying to keep it going so I didn’t have to go back and talk about his marriage. He listened intently, as he always did. Finally, he looked abruptly at his watch and said he was sorry, he had to run, to give him a call later in the week.

“Candice and I have a date tonight,” he said with a bitter little laugh. “It’s something we’re doing to liven up our marriage. We pretend we just met and then go out to lunch or a bar, see if we can’t learn something new about each other.” He shrugged, signaling that it wasn’t his idea. “I’m trying to keep us together; whatever it takes.”

We’d pushed our carts out to his Chrysler station wagon by now, and he opened up the tailgate and loaded in his groceries. Then he reminded me to call, got in his frumpy anti-Ferrari, and was gone.

I called him later that week and left a couple of messages on his answering machine, but didn’t hear back. It worried me; I hoped they were getting along. I even thought about driving over to see them, but decided against it. I let a couple more weeks slip by without getting in touch.

That’s when the detectives came knocking on my door. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and there were two of them. They were from the Sheriff’s “BCI Unit,” the younger one said as he flashed his shield.

“The Bureau of Criminal Investigation,” added the older detective, a big, pulpy-faced guy who appeared to have a drinking problem, judging from the rosacea that scrawled across his nose and cheeks, not to mention his sweetly alcoholic breath. “I’m Detective Walsh, and this is Detective Valenti, he said. “We just want to ask you a few questions about friends of yours, James and Candice Austin.”

“What’s happened to Jimmy?” I asked.

“Jimmy — Mr. Austin — is fine,” Walsh said. “This is about his wife, Candice Austin. She’s been missing for about a week. At least that’s when Mr. Austin reported that she hadn’t come home.”

“Jesus, I didn’t hear anything about this.”

Walsh stared at me as I said this, watching for something, a twitch, or a nervous tic, I suppose.

“Was everything OK between them, was there any marital discord? “ Valenti asked. Walsh didn’t seem pleased by the interjection.

“Did you know his wife was having an affair?” Walsh asked.

“Well, I mean, he’d told me about it... He’s not a suspect, is he? Jimmy would never hurt Candice, Officers.” I had to say it, out of friendship — though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“We didn’t say he did,” Walsh said. “We’re just trying to get to the bottom of this. In most cases involving spouses that disappear, they just got fed up and took off. It’s clear they were having some marriage troubles, right?”

“They weren’t getting along lately, if that’s what you mean. He told me she met this guy at her horse club — have you checked him out?”

“We’ve interviewed him already,” Valenti said, tucking his shirt in over a premature potbelly. His boss gave him an exasperated grimace meant to convey that he should shut up. Valenti stepped back and Walsh took over again.

“As Detective Valenti pointed out, we’ve already talked with him. His wife’s divorcing him and he’s a person of interest. But I’m going to guess that your friend Candice is staying with friends out of town, and will — or won’t — come back after she figures out what to do with the rest of her life. But I still gotta ask you a few questions.”

He wanted to know when I saw her last, whether they fought, if Jimmy had been acting “suspiciously,” etc. I told him what I knew and repeated that I didn’t believe Jimmy would harm her.

“She was kind of a whack job, wasn’t she?” Valenti said.

“If you mean her sense of humor, yeah, she can be pretty funny and unpredictable.”

“What about that flying saucer thing she had set up in the backyard? That was a little nutty, huh?”

“That’s Candice. She’s always doing things for their shock value; she has an artsy, theatrical streak.”

“I’ll say. She seems way out there to me. You think she believed in these UFOs?”

“You guys tell me. Everything I’ve read said the cops are getting calls about lights in the sky all the time.”

“They’re pranksters flying outta Stormville,” Walsh said.

“That’s what Jimmy said, too.”

“We had a case recently over in Carmel like this,” Walsh went on. “Wife went missing after one of those objects allegedly buzzed her neighborhood. She left a note, though, said she was leaving her husband for a ‘studly starman’.”

Valenti snickered.

“Two months later, she turned up in Santa Barbara, California. Alive; had a nice tan. Now Santa Barbara is on another planet, but it ain’t Mars.”

A little titter from Valenti.

“This is after we’d spent hundreds of hours searching for her,” Walsh said. “Her ‘starman’ was a stud carpenter ten years her junior. He’d been doing renovations on the house. Obviously was renovating her, too (another snicker from Valenti). Believe it or not, there have been two or three other wives who took off, apparently hoping their idiot hubbies would think they’d been snatched by aliens. Crazy world we live in, huh?”

“If you’re telling me you think she’s a bored housewife who just up and split after her affair was discovered, I think that’s a real possibility,” I said. “I don’t understand why Jimmy wasn’t enough for her, but she was tired of him, I could see that. I’m not quite willing to say she was unstable, but she was certainly impulsive, so leaving suddenly would not be out of character.”

That seemed to be what they wanted to hear. They probably had a whole backlog of cases — drugs, burglaries, sex assaults — the usual ugliness that festers just beyond the prim suburban fences and chemically enhanced lawns. Then there were the reports of missing teen-age girls, runaway boys and wayward, unhappy wives. Guess which investigations they’d rather pursue?

So that was about it with the interview. They told me to call if I had anything more to add, and they left.

I dialed Jimmy on the phone as soon as I was back in the house. He didn’t pick up until it rang nine times, and then he sounded depressed. His words came thick and slow, as though he’d been drinking, drugging, or both. But maybe he’d only been crying.

“She’s gone, man, left me and the kids, I don’t know where... Maybe the aliens got her. Maybe they beamed right in on her emanations and came and plucked her off the planet.”

“What are you talking about, Jimmy. You been drinking?”

“Nothing too strong, just vodka.”

“Great. Listen, you’ve got to hold it together. Your kids, Graham and Emmy, they need you now.”

“They’re at my mother’s over in Danbury. They’re okay. I need some time... I hope she calls me man, I miss her so much already.”

He stopped talking and I heard him sobbing in the background, and then there was the unmistakable tinkle of ice on glass.

“Where’d she go? You have any idea?” he asked when he got back on the line.

“I don’t, Jimmy. But she’ll be home soon, I bet, like nothing happened.” That was a lie I thought he wanted to hear. I’d been telling a lot of little lies lately.

“I really miss her, man... I forgive her, I really do. She asked me, y’know, if I ever could, and I told her I didn’t have an answer, that I had to wait for all the scar tissue inside me to heal up, to stop hurting so much. But I do forgive her; I just want her back with me... You’ve got to help me find her, Jack.”

“Listen Jimmy. I’m coming over. Don’t go anywhere till I get there, okay? I’m leaving now.”

He muttered something unintelligible and hung up.

* * *

Proceed to part 4...