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The sound cheered her up. Not only
did it break the awful silence, it meant there probably wasn't anybody
on that side of the room. The chirping stopped as soon as she began to
move. Crawling along the wall, she found her way to the tunnel. Once there
she couldn't bring herself to go into it. She sat and shivered. She wanted
to go back to sleep. Curling up on the dirt floor in the inky darkness,
she felt dematerialized, floaty, strange and not real. The strong earthy,
moldy smell and the humid stillness were oppressive. Then the cricket
started up again. It reminded her of her garden. She thought of her cats
and dogs waiting for their dinner. She thought about a bowl of hot soup
and a blueberry muffin; then she could lie down in her own clean, warm
bed and sleep.
Crawling out was far worse than going
in. Until the end, she did not realize that night had fallen and so she
could not see the opening in the culvert. The fear was unbearable when
she seemed to have crawled twice as far as before and still had not seen
light. She thought she had somehow gotten into another tunnel and was
headed deeper under the mountain. There was no going back. Then she heard
water running and she was faint with relief.
 he next morning
when she was eating breakfast, Henry was pounding on the front door demanding
that she go upstairs so he could use the phone.
“You can use the phone, but I'm staying
right here,” she said, munching on buttered toast and coffee.
There was a long silence. Early sun was
slanting through the open windows. Echoing bird songs filled the woods
all around. Finally, in a peeved voice, Henry said, “I saved your
life.”
“You knocked me out,” she answered,
still chewing, trying to read the magazine propped up in front of her.
“One of the ‘Bobs’ tried
to kill you. I gave you an antidote injection and a sedative to keep you
asleep for a few hours.”
“The ‘Bobs’?”
Henry made a wheezing sound that must
have been his idea of laughing. “All three guys had on the same outfit
with the same name on the front. They must have taken all ‘Bob's’
uniforms.”
“And you killed all three before miraculously
saving my life?”
“No. You tied one of them up for me.
The second one was watching my back door; I was trapped. When the gunshots
distracted him, I popped out the hole and nailed him. The third one got
the front door open and came in the culvert tunnel just ahead of you.
He tried to come out the back door but saw me. I could ‘see’
him encounter you. I came down and caught him just as he was trying to
go back out the front tunnel.”
“Where are they now?”
He laughed again, but didn't answer
her.
“What's wrong with your eyes, Henry?
The ‘Bob’ I met kept his head turned just like you do.”
“I told you already, we don't
see you with our eyes. You ‘see’ with your eyes, your
dog ‘sees’ with his nose, a bat ‘sees’ with his ears,
a snake ‘sees’ with his tongue, we ‘see’ with our
minds eye. I've told you this before.”
“So, how do you find your way around?
How do you use the computer?”
“We can see things perfectly that are
within about eighteen inches of our face. Beyond that, we can see light
and dark, it's just very blurry. However, it is very difficult for us
to look right at another person because, well, it's very, very rude and
quite painful for the person (in our species) being looked at. And also,
it is instinctive for us to conceal our eyes from others. To look at someone
is to reveal yourself.”
“Well then, how on earth do you recognize
each other?”
“The way that we ‘see’, the
way that you don't understand, is just as accurate among us as your eyes
are for you. Though we aren't very good at identifying you people. You
all look the same to us. We know all about each human's records, but we
can't positively identify any of you unless we have a DNA or fingerprint
match. We can't see faces and it takes a long time for us to be able to
recognize a particular human with our own form of perception.”
“That's weird.”
“Not to us.”
Edna put her dishes in the sink. “If
you're walking on that broken leg, it's never going to heal.”
“I'm using a walking stick. Crawling
doesn't bother it.”
“If you even jar it the bones won't
knit. You shouldn't be moving around at all.”
“I changed the bandage last night.
It looked perfectly all right.” He sounded annoyed.
“Fine. It's your leg. I'm heading to
the kennel so you can use the phone now. As if you wouldn't use it anyway.”
As she walked across the yard, Henry said from out of sight, “I'll
be sending you an important e-mail. Look at it and we'll talk again tonight.”
As if she had any choice.
cont. on page fifteen
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dna
awoke in total darkness. She did not know where she was. The panic that
seized her caused her heart to race violently. She could not breathe. She
reached her arms wildly to all sides, hitting the damp, stony walls and
increasing her confusion. She had a massive headache. Her eyes stared, but
there was nothing at all visible.