Out of This World

Chapter One

He was changing lanes, cutting in front of a silver-grey Toyota, when he suddenly felt as if he were being watched, as if someone were desperately trying to get his attention. He was alone in the car, though. He knew he was alone in the car.

He swerved back into line and checked his mirrors.

Everything looked normal.

He shook his head, puzzled, and began looking for another opening. His appointment was in five minutes, and he had three miles to go on the highway, another through the city streets. He wasn’t going to make it on time, but all the same, he didn’t want to be any later than necessary. He ignored the odd sensation, waiting for it to go away.

It refused. Instead of fading, it nagged at him like a sore tooth. Someone was watching him, somehow.

When he stopped at a light he looked in the back seat, just in case; of course, no one was there. For a moment he even thought about checking the trunk when he parked, but then he shook his head again. That was ridiculous.

The feeling was very definite. It was almost like one of those psychic things he’d read about-but he didn’t believe in those.

The feeling was there, and it wouldn’t go away.

He forced himself to ignore it.

* * * *

“Mommy?” Angela, seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor with her Raggedy Ann doll sprawled on her lap, looked up at her mother.

“Yes, honey?” Margaret Thompson went on scrubbing the saucepan, trying to get out every trace of the burnt-on cheese sauce.

“Mr. Nobody’s talkin’ to me again.”

“Oh?” Margaret answered, not really listening. “What’s he saying?” She peered critically at the pan, decided it would do, and put it in the drainer.

“He’s in terrible trouble, Mommy,” Angela told her, quite seriously.

“What kind of trouble?” Margaret asked, picking a skillet out of the soapy dishwater.

“There’s this bad monster wants to get him, and eat him up, and make everybody do bad things.”

Margaret looked down at her daughter. “Angie, there aren’t any monsters. You know that. You tell Mr. Nobody that.”

“I told him that, Mommy,” Angela said very seriously, “but he just keeps talkin’ about a monster in the shadows.”

Margaret was a bit startled to hear a phrase like “a monster in the shadows” from her three-year-old, but she didn’t worry about it. Kids pick up all kinds of things, and besides, Angie was almost four now. She was growing up fast. “Well, if he keeps talking about monsters,” Margaret told Angie, “then just don’t listen to him. Tell him to be quiet and stop bothering you with that stuff.”

“Okay,” Angela said, doubtfully. “I’ll try.”

* * * *

PSYCHIC PREDICTS ARMAGEDDON

Ray Aldridge, noted West Coast psychic advisor, told reporters today that he has it on good authority that Armageddon, the final battle of good and evil, is almost upon us.

“It was the clearest message I’ve ever gotten from any psychic entity,” Dr. Aldridge reported. “It was a warning sent by beneficent aliens far out in the galaxy, telling me that the powers of darkness are building up their forces for the final conquest of Earth. The aliens who contacted me say that the Galactic Empire they represent has tried to fight back Shadow, as they call it, but has been unsuccessful. It’s up to us, here on Earth, to defeat it.”

When asked how this evil force could be defeated, and what ordinary people could do that telepathic space aliens could not, Dr. Aldridge admitted, “I don’t have any idea at all.”

* * * *

“Got a good one,” the agent at the desk called, holding up an opened letter.

His partner looked up from the file drawer. “What’s this one say?”

The man at the desk smiled. “Dear Mr. President,” he read from the letter. “The angels from Venus who have been helping me with my garden called me up yesterday on the special telephone in my head to warn me that we’re in big trouble. The Devil Himself…” He pointed and said, “That’s underlined in red crayon.” Then he continued reading. “The Devil Himself has found out about all the secret messages I’ve been relaying to you, to keep the Chinese from invading and to tell Americans how to grow better carrots, and he’s really mad. I think my neighbor with the sick cat told him. I’m sure she’s a witch or one of them Satan cults. The Venusians are going to fight the old bastard and chase him back to Hell…” The agent paused again and looked up, grinning. “’Hell’ is in all capitals and underlined in red,” he said, before turning his gaze back to the letter. He cleared his throat and continued, “…chase him back to Hell, but they need some help, so if you could send the 82nd Airborne to Goshen, Maryland, that’s where they expect to meet him. Yours Truly, Oram Blaisdell.”

“Goshen?” the other man asked, bemused. “Why Goshen? Where the heck is it, anyway?”

“Just north of Gaithersburg, I think,” the reader said. “One of those ritzy suburbs with three-acre estates.”

“Does this guy live there?” The man by the files knew, intellectually, that the nuts whose letters came to this office sometimes lived in fancy suburbs, but it still didn’t seem right. He expected them to come from either the inner city or the outermost sticks.

“No, no, of course not,” the man at the desk replied. “He lives in Tennessee somewhere.”

“Then why’d he pick Goshen? How’d he ever hear of Goshen, Maryland?”

The man holding the letter shrugged. “Who knows?” he asked. “Why the 82nd? Why Venus? Why carrots?” He tossed the letter aside. “At least that one didn’t have Elvis in it.”

* * * *

Pel Brown gave the screwdriver another turn and cursed when it slipped out of the slot and scraped across the metal. He dropped the screwdriver to one side, then brushed at the red-enamelled surface and leaned over to peer at it, wishing the light were better.

It looked okay.

Better light might be nice, Pel decided, but what he really wished was that wagons came ready-assembled. Had his father had to put together his old wagon? He’d never thought about that before; just one year there it was, under the Christmas tree, and he’d taken it entirely for granted.

Well, this one was going to be a birthday present, rather than for Christmas, but Rachel was probably going to take it for granted just as much as he had. And she probably wouldn’t notice if he did scratch the paint. That wasn’t something a six-year-old cared much about.

She was going to be six. Amazing. Almost ready for first grade.

Of course, the next school year was still almost four months off, but she would be six tomorrow.

She still wouldn’t care about scratched paint, though. He sighed and reached for the screwdriver, then froze.

Standing next to the screwdriver was a… well, a person. Pel hesitated to call it a man, even in his thoughts; it stood just over a foot high, wrapped in a tattered cloak of coarse brown wool, black hair pulled back in a tight braid, revealing oversized pointed ears. It was looking about curiously and uncertainly, taking in the contents of the basement-the furnace, the water heater, the boxes of stored junk.

It was not a doll; no doll could look that lifelike and alert, no matter how many computer chips were stuffed into it. It wasn’t a monkey, either.

And Pel sure hoped it wasn’t a hallucination, as up until that moment he hadn’t had any reservations at all about his mental health, and he hadn’t taken anything more mind-altering than beer in weeks.

The creature had seen him, he was sure, but it wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t running or hiding or attacking. It was just looking around, a trifle uncertainly, taking in the scenery.

“What the hell are you?” Pel asked.

The thing looked up at him and grimaced. “I’m a bookkeeper,” it replied. “Wouldn’t know it from this outfit, would you?” Pel was relieved that it spoke, and spoke English; that probably simplified the situation, because it meant he could just talk to it and get some answers. Its voice was higher-pitched than a man’s, but not squeaky or thin at all. Pel had heard grown women whose voices sounded far smaller and more childlike.

“No,” Pel said, “I don’t mean what do you do, I mean what are you?”

“I’m a human being, of course,” the creature replied. “A small one. What do I look like?”

“You look like some kind of fairy,” Pel replied, in honest bemusement.

The little person squinted up at Pel. “Are you looking for trouble, buddy?” he demanded. “I’m as much a lady’s man as the next guy! If you weren’t so damn big I’d punch your lights out!”

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Pel said, holding up his hands in apology. “I didn’t mean that. I meant an elf or something. I mean, you’re a foot tall, with pointed ears-where’d you come from?”

Somewhat mollified, the little man said, “That’s better. Yeah, I’m a little person. I came from a place called Hrumph-no jokes, I know it’s a stupid name! That’s what we called it, though, when it still existed. It was in… well, in another world.”

“Oh, wow,” said Pel, who had seen just as many episodes of ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Lost in Space’ as most of his generation. “You mean like another dimension?”

The creature looked puzzled. “Dimension? Um… I guess.” He hesitated. “Not the word I’d have used,” he said. “Another world, alternate reality, parallel universe, whatever.” He waved vaguely, and his voice trailed off somewhat.

Pel blinked. After a moment of unthinking acceptance, a certain uncomfortable suspicion was growing in the back of his mind. Outside of movies and TV, things like this didn’t happen, did they? Not for real.

“You’re putting me on, right? This is a joke?” he asked.

“No, it’s… it’s not a joke.” The person-he might not be human, in the usual sense, but after conversing with him Pel certainly thought of him as a person-looked uncomfortable. Not as if he were lying, but as if he were considering throwing up. “Hey…” he said, “I don’t feel real good just now. Is it hot in here?”

“Hot?” Pel glanced around at the cool, moist basement. If this little person really did come from another world, maybe it was one colder than Earth-but that was silly. He shouldn’t be taking it that seriously. “No, it isn’t hot,” he said.

“No?” The little man was swaying visibly.

“Are you all right?” Pel asked, concerned.

“No,” the creature said. “I think… I think I better go.” He swallowed hard. “Listen, we’ll be back, okay? Or someone will. Don’t go away!”

Before Pel could answer, the elf, or whatever it was, turned, stumbled away, and walked into the concrete wall.

Pel heard the smack clearly from where he sat. He winced in sympathy.

The little man got to his feet, let out a wail, and again stepped forward.

This time, when he hit the wall, he vanished into it.

Pel stared for a moment.

Then, moving slowly, he reached out and picked up the screwdriver.

He looked at the wall. In the movies, any character who had just seen such a thing would reach out and poke at the place the little guy had vanished, and maybe nothing would happen, and maybe not. He might get sucked into another world, or he might get killed by some sort of splashy special effects, or monsters might jump out at him.

Pel Brown was not going do that. He had no particular interest in watching the end melt off his screwdriver, or seeing his finger disappear into the fourth dimension, or even just poking the wall. It wouldn’t prove anything. If he could hallucinate an elf, he could hallucinate anything.

He waited for a moment, but nothing happened, and he turned back to the wagon, shaking slightly.

Whatever he had just seen, real or not, seemed to be over. Maybe it had been just a weird sort of dream or something, or some kind of flashback to the one hit of mescaline he’d taken back in college, when he was young and stupid.

Or maybe he really had just talked to an elf from another dimension, and this sort of thing happened all the time, but most people didn’t talk about it because they didn’t want everyone thinking they were nuts. Maybe all those UFO aliens were real, Bigfoot was roaming the woods, and Elvis really was alive in outer space somewhere.

Maybe it happened all the time.

And maybe it didn’t.

Whatever it was, it was not his problem; he still had to get the wheels on this stupid wagon in time for Rachel’s party tomorrow. If the little man came back, Pel thought, he would worry about it then.

* * * *

Amy Jewell leaned back in her lawn chair, the book on her lap forgotten for the moment as she rested her eyes and listened to the pleasant hiss of the sprinkler. The sun was warm on her face, unseasonably warm for early May, and enjoying it seemed more important just now than reading whatever Danielle Steel had to say.

She wasn’t sure she was going to bother finishing this one; she was beginning to lose her taste for Steel. And it was good to just lie here, eyes closed, enjoying the warmth, knowing that she had all day with nothing important to do. She liked that about Sundays.

Her eyes snapped open and she looked up, startled, at the crack of a sonic boom. It sounded as if it was almost directly overhead; she scanned the sky, but she couldn’t see any plane.

Then suddenly she did see a plane, or something like one, but it wasn’t flying, it was falling. It was brightly painted, like the old Braniff jets, mostly purple, and she didn’t see any wings, just stubs. And it was huge, and it was almost directly overhead and it was falling almost directly toward her.

She rolled out of the lawn chair, scrambled to her feet, and ran for the house.

An instant later the thing hit with an immense, booming thud. The shock of its impact rattled windows and the dishes in her kitchen, and a planter at the corner of the patio toppled over, spilling scraggly geraniums across the flagstones. The sprinkler bounced, but did not overturn; its spray rattled against the thing’s metal side.

The object had completely flattened the back hedge and had torn a major limb off the big sycamore. One of the stubby wings, or fins, or whatever they were had missed the lawn chair by just two or three inches.

It had stayed in one piece, though, it hadn’t broken into sections like the crashed airliners she had seen on the TV news. The nose was no more than twenty yards from Amy’s back door, while the tail was well across the property line, on Mr. Janssen’s vegetable garden.

Amy had reached the back door just as it struck; she turned for a quick glance, paused long enough to lean over and turn off the sprinkler, then slipped inside. From the safety of her kitchen she stared out the window over the sink for a few seconds, then reached for the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

9-1-1 worked on Sundays, didn’t it? Of course it did. Emergencies weren’t limited to weekdays.

She didn’t wait to hear what the person on the other end said; when she heard the phone picked up she said, “This is Amy Jewell, at 21550 Goshen Road, and an aircraft of some kind just crashed in my back yard.”

“Do you need an ambulance?” a woman’s voice asked calmly.

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “There hasn’t been any explosion or anything, and the plane looks mostly intact; I don’t see any bodies or flame.”

“We’ll send one. That was 21550 Goshen Road?”

“Yes.” Amy heard other voices in the background.

“Even if there hasn’t been an explosion yet, you might want to get well away from the wreckage. Was it a private plane? We have no reports of any commercial craft in trouble.”

“I don’t know what it is. It’s purple.”

The voice on the other end was silent for a moment, then asked. “Ma’am, where are you calling from?”

“I’m calling from my kitchen. I can see the plane, or whatever it is, out the window, about fifty feet away, and it’s purple, and I never saw a plane like it before. Maybe it’s some kind of experimental military thing.”

“Fifty feet? Ma’am, I strongly suggest you leave the building and get well clear, quickly.”

“Yeah,” Amy said, staring out the window, “I think you’re right.” She hung up the phone.

The thing was lying across most of the width of her back yard, easily over a hundred feet long, with leaves and twigs from the sycamore scattered all over it. Amy’s yard was three acres, what the real estate people called a “mini-estate,” and the aircraft, or whatever it was, seemed to cover most of it, and a fair chunk of the Janssens’, as well. Three fins, each shaped differently, projected from the near side, and a fourth jutted up from the top of the tail; the fins were pink and maroon, with yellow lettering she couldn’t make out on them. The fuselage was mostly purple, with maroon detailing and more yellow lettering. It didn’t look like any sort of airplane Amy had ever seen; it had a rather old-fashioned appearance, somehow.

And a hatchway over the central, largest, nearside fin was opening.

Amy knew she should turn and run, go out the front door and either wait for help or alert the neighbors, but she stared, fascinated.

The hatch swung wide, and a man stepped out. He was tall and blond, wearing a purple uniform with a black belt and high, shiny black boots-it wasn’t any design she recognized, but it was clearly a uniform. He had a black holster on his hip-securely closed, to Amy’s relief, with a flap that hid whatever weapon was in there; for all she could tell, it might be empty. He held a helmet in one hand, something like a motorcycle helmet; it was purple, too, with a yellow star on the side. He gazed around the yard. He said something.

Long ago, Amy Jewell had learned to read lips a little, just for fun. She couldn’t hear him through the closed window, but she knew what the man had said.

He had said, “Shit.”

He turned and called something back into the hatch, but Amy couldn’t make it out, nor could she see his lips.

The man looked perfectly normal and ordinary, except for his rather outlandish attire. He was clean-shaven, his hair in a military crewcut that was beginning to grow out. He was tall and broad-shouldered and reminded her a little of Harrison Ford. She could see no sign of any injury; the thing’s fall didn’t even appear to have seriously mussed his uniform.

He was scanning her back yard, looking over the lawn chair, the still-dripping sprinkler, the spilled geraniums and the branch that had been torn off the sycamore. He did not look pleased.

Then he spotted her in the window. He waved and cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Hello!”

Amy stared for a moment.

Then another head appeared in the hatch, looking out-another young man in uniform and crewcut.

Amy decided that she didn’t want to talk to these people. They might be harmless-but they might not, and she was alone in the house, the neighbors were still off at their church, and there were at least two of the strangers and either one was bigger than she was. Those blond crewcuts brought Nazis to mind, which didn’t help any.

She didn’t think that the plane, or whatever it was, was going to explode. If there were any possibility of that the men would be running to get clear, not standing there looking around as if her back yard was some sort of disaster they had to clean up.

She locked the back door and then went upstairs to her bedroom. She got the little gun her father had given her from the bedside drawer, then crossed to the back windows and looked out again.

There were three men standing in her yard now, looking about. They looked nervous; one of them, the one she hadn’t seen at all before, looked downright twitchy, his head jerking back and forth, scanning the shrubbery.

Naturally, he was the one with the gun.

It was quite a large gun, too, not one that would fit in a holster and not a kind Amy remembered ever seeing before. It looked oddly bulbous, but very complicated and ominous. He had it tucked under his right arm, he wasn’t pointing it at anyone or anything, but Amy still had to suppress a nervous shudder. She was very glad she hadn’t gone out to yell at the men for wrecking her yard; that man looked as if he might have shot her without even meaning to.

The second man righted the fallen lawn chair and sat down-making himself right at home, Amy thought with a stab of resentment. Then he put his head down in his hands and she felt a twinge of guilt for her resentment. She still didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on, but obviously, whatever these people were doing had gone wrong. Let the poor man sit down if he had to.

The big blond who had been the first out cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Hello, in the house!”

Amy didn’t answer. She thought about it, but decided to wait.

“Hello!” he called again.

She put the gun down and opened the window-latch, then reconsidered.

“Where are we?” the man shouted. “Can you send for the authorities?”

Amy frowned. That seemed like a strange thing to ask. She opened the window a few inches.

“I already did!” she called.

The man blinked up at her, and the other man, the one with the big gun, turned to look. She ducked down and picked up her own gun.

This was crazy, she told herself. This was absolutely insane. These people were not acting like air-crash survivors at all. And that plane didn’t really look that much like a plane.

So who the hell were they, then, and what was that thing? They didn’t sound like foreigners, not really-though asking her to send for the authorities, rather than to call the cops, was odd phrasing.

That thing they came in-she had a better view of it from upstairs than she had had at ground level. It didn’t look like an airplane.

It looked like a spaceship.

Not a real spaceship-not the space shuttle or a moon rocket. It looked like something out of an old Flash Gordon serial, only real-as if those comic-book spaceships had been based on this ship the way comic-book cars were based on real ones.

It bore the same relationship to those cheap models in “Flash Gordon,” she thought, that a real 1947 Checker bore to Benny the Cab in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

She blinked. Was someone shooting a movie, maybe? She’d never seen a ship like that in any movie, though. They wouldn’t build it full scale and drop it in her back yard, in any case-not without asking her permission.

What the hell was going on?

Then she heard the sirens approaching and decided it wasn’t her problem any more.