A Festival of Murder (21 page)

“Well, Nicholas
just came by to say hi,” Charles said quickly as he wrapped a plump arm around
Nicholas’s shoulders. “He has to run now.”

“Did you know,”
Nicholas said as he resisted Charles’s pulling arm, “that aliens detest plaid?
Any abductee wearing Burberry was chucked out over the Atlantic Ocean. I saw it
happen!”

“Time to go,
Nicholas!”

Nicholas waved and
allowed the other man to drag him out of the room, trailed by murmurs of
confusion and alarm.

“Honestly,
Nicholas, they’re fans of yours!” Charles gasped once they were back in the
relative privacy of the kitchen. He scrounged around through the detritus on
the counters and dug out a green paper napkin, which he promptly darkened with
facial sweat. “Human chia pets. My lord!”

The barest hints
of doubt began to coalesce in the fogged swamp of Nicholas’s brain. Maybe he’d
laid it on a bit thick.

“It must have been
the eggnog. Someone will need to run an intervention on me one of these days.”
He groaned and slapped a hand over his face. “I only wanted to be alone,
Charles. What happened to that?”

“But we’re not
alone,” Charles said simply, looking bewildered. “I thought that was the point?”

Perhaps upon
reflection tomorrow, shoveling snow at midnight while drunk will seem
ill-advised. But as it wasn’t tomorrow and Nicholas was still under the
influence of too much rum it seemed perfectly reasonable, no, ingenious, to
shovel the snow from around Winchester’s pen.

Nicholas had built
the three-walled shed with great reluctance. It had been like throwing in the
towel and allowing the squatters to win. He knew if he built the thing
Winchester would feel entitled and would make this his permanent home. If it
hadn’t been for Phoebe’s offhanded remark about how well Nicholas had built his
own cabin and wouldn’t it be cute if Winchester had his own place, Winchester
might be chomping away on someone else’s oats and pooping on
their
back
porches.

But the shelter
was here, and he was clearing it of snow. Not out of any kindness for the
interloping alpaca, but because he hoped that he might gain insight as to why
Phoebe, or whoever it was who was doing the strange nighttime shoveling in
Hightop, was doing so around his property.

It wasn’t,
however, proving to be very enlightening. His inability to spike the shovel in
the snow without staggering one way or the other afterward might have had
something to do with his lack of progress. He also, for some reason, kept
flinging snow over his own back and down the inside of his parka. He made
Winchester aware of all this as he went about the business of tidying up after
the alpaca. Winchester appeared bored, a common look for him, and did nothing
to help, which was also common.

At the back of
Nicholas’s mind hung a lingering doubt that he may have done something
regrettable at Charles’s party. He entertained a vague recollection of singing
Wham’s
Last Christmas
accompanied by Dennis on the guitar and Charles on
the teaspoons. It could have all been a dream, however. He wasn’t particularly
certain about anything at this point except for the fact that he was freezing
his genitals off.

He was puffing
away, back bent awkwardly over the shovel, when he heard a sound.

There were some
sounds Nicholas could ignore no matter how often they repeated themselves.
These included knocks at his door when he wasn’t expecting visitors as well as
greetings from strangers wearing alien-themed T-shirts. There were also sounds
that occupied the opposite spectrum of his awareness, these being sounds
Nicholas could hear while standing at a drag-racing strip during the middle of
a tornado while wearing earmuffs. This was one of those sounds.

The hairs on his
skin pricked up immediately, making him feel like a human cactus. The thin
sweat he’d managed to raise while doing his dirty work for Winchester froze
over immediately, sheathing him in a glove of ice.

He didn’t look to
the forest, where most men would expect danger in the mountains to come. He
raised his eyes to the murky gray clouds overhead which ostensibly held the
next batch of snowfall but which he, being a very experienced sort of person,
knew held something much more insidious. Even Winchester, dull-witted and slow
on the uptake as he was most days, could tell that something was up. His banana
ears swiveled like radar dishes on a spy ship, and he paused midway in the act
of chewing. Surely, a rarity for him.

Run, Nicholas
thought. He wasn’t sure if the warning was for him or for Winchester. Not so
long ago, he’d entertained the fantasy of strapping reflectors to the alpaca to
make him an easier target for the aliens. If someone had to go, it may as well
be Winchester; it was only fair to spread the opportunities for fame and
fortune.

Yet to Nicholas’s
surprise, he actually wanted the alpaca to go away. He told himself it was
because Winchester possessed the coordination of a one-legged duck and would
undoubtedly find a way to fall outside the grip of the alien’s tractor beam and
land on Nicholas or his cabin.

He finally managed
to unfreeze his vocal cords enough to rasp, “Run, you idiot!”

Winchester looked
at him myopically and then resumed his slow, goofy chewing.

He’d had his
chance, Nicholas told himself. Now it was every man and alpaca for himself.

He began backing
toward the cabin. Even though he’d already been sucked through its roof,
proving that it could be as useful a defense as a shield made of Jell-O,
Nicholas found its bulk comforting. Maybe this time, they wouldn’t see him if
he hid somewhere besides the bedroom. Maybe this time, they’d forgotten to
charge their Matter Displacement Thingamajig and would have to ask him politely
to come outside to be beamed up, to which he’d provide a suitably offensive
reply.

These thoughts
raced through his head as he stumbled backward through the snow, the kitchen
doorway seemingly miles out of reach. Snippets of images began to fly through
his mind, chipped loose by the alcohol, the fear, or a combination of both. All
of the images were horrible and all of them, he knew with terrifying certainty,
originated from his previous abduction.

He lost all
concept of pride, seized only with a rabid sense of self-preservation. With a
yell, he spun and darted toward his backdoor.

Or at least, that
had been his intention. Heavy boots and inebriation conspired against him. The
shovel in his hand didn’t help. The three elements came together in a perfect
storm of Three-Stoogian grace as the toes of his boots caught in the snow. The
head of the shovel lodged beneath his boots, prompting the handle to whip back
and rap him sharply in the forehead. He staggered, seeing lights—not alien ones
this time—before everything spun into darkness, carrying him with it. His last
thought was a desperate entreaty:
please don’t let me remember it this time . . . .

Hope was as thin
as the atmosphere of Mars.

~~~~~

He was airborne,
flying under his own propulsion over the Rocky Mountains. After a week of heavy
flurries, the skies were clear and blue in the manner typical of Colorado in
the winter. The sun was a shiny orb directly overhead, its rays causing clean
snow banks to glitter like piles of diamonds and snow-draped trees to sparkle
like ornaments made of crystal.

After circling
once over the beautiful view, he located his cabin. It wasn’t difficult since
it was surrounded by a crowd made up of hundreds of people, all chanting his
last name. They were dressed as if attending an alien-themed Halloween party.
Antennae bobbed like gnats around heads, oversize sunglasses gave the
impression of huge eyes, skin was painted green or purple, and shirts boasted
images of UFOs, aliens, or sayings such as “I Was Abducted By Aliens and All I
Got Was This Lousy Brain Implant.”

“Tril-by!”

“Tril-by!”

Their voices grew
louder, causing visible sound waves to batter his cabin, rattling the logs.

“Tril-by!”

“Tril-by!”

“Stop it, you
fools!” he yelled down at them. “You’ll blow it down!”

But they couldn’t
hear him over the sound of their chanting. When he tried to steer his way down
to them he found himself caught on an air current, trapped in an endless, circling
loop of the area.

That’s when he
noticed them: the members of the alien army marching through the forest toward
his home. They were lined up like soldiers, waves of them crossing from some
distant location, a green blanket of bodies being drawn over the snowy
mountains.

Nicholas tried to
fly away but he couldn’t break from the loop. Helpless, he looked down at his
neighbors.

“Run!” he screamed
at them. “The aliens are coming! Run for your lives!”

But when the first
residents began to notice the alien invasion, instead of fleeing they turned
and braced themselves, putting their backs to Nicholas’s cabin. More and more
of them followed suit until to his amazement, he realized they were going to
hold their ground and defend his home.
His
home.

His inexplicable
propulsion failed him then, and he began to plummet to the trees below. The
cold wind seared his cheeks. His eyes teared. As the tree limbs and pinecones
battered him, he heard the chanting continue.

“Tril-by!”

“Tril-by!”

“Trilby! Open your
dang eyes!”

His eyes shot
open, which was itself a shock since he’d been unaware that they were closed.
After blinking several times, he understood that he’d been dreaming. What a
strange dream, he mused. He resented the faint tendrils of guilt that clung to
him. Dreaming that his crazy neighbors had selflessly protected him didn’t mean
they were self-sacrificing in real life. In fact, he had one neighbor in
particular who seemed intent on interfering with his life. Captain Sam was bent
over him, a sight as ominous as that of an avalanche about to fall.

“Captain Sam,”
Nicholas said slowly, not sure he could trust the information he was about to
receive, “what happened to me?”

There was a large,
rather alarming lump beneath Captain Sam’s upper lip. When he grinned, it
proved to be a no less horrifying wad of saliva-soaked chewing tobacco.

“You don knocked
yourself out with your shovel, Trilby. Gave me a good laugh, it did.” He
clapped Nicholas hard on the shoulder. “Darn funniest thing I seen all year.
Darn funny.”

“I’m thrilled to
have amused you.” Grimacing in annoyance and from the headache throbbing at the
front of his head, Nicholas gingerly sat up. He wished he hadn’t once he
glimpsed what he’d been lying on. The circular papasan pillow was covered with
so much white hair it looked to be part of the weave of the fabric. As far as
Nicholas knew, Captain Sam didn’t own a pet, so who—or what—did the hair belong
to?

Perhaps it was one
of those questions better left unanswered.

He saw with no
little amount of dismay that he was inside Captain Sam’s trailer.
Unsurprisingly, the interior was infused with an eye-watering miasma of feet,
body odor, and the faint sweetness of rotting food. Nicholas resisted the urge
to look around for something with which to cover his nose and mouth and diffuse
the stench. A skunk tail would have done the job nicely.

The trailer was
narrow and dirty, a metal shoebox that a rat would have found perfectly
comfortable, and some probably did. A lopsided and lumpy futon appeared to
serve as both main seating and sleeping areas. Currently, it was doing triple
duty as Captain Sam’s dining room table. It teetered beneath an impressive pile
of open snack bags, Hot Pocket wrappers, and a rather horrifying mound of masticated
and spat out sunflower shells sitting on the pillow where presumably Captain
Sam rested his face when he wasn’t listening for aliens.

The instrument he
used for doing such dominated the trailer. An old rolltop desk was pushed
against the wall opposite the sitting room-
cum
-dining room-
cum
-bedroom.
As if a robot had disgorged its electrical innards atop the desk, wires and
strange boxes and pipes spilled every which way. Several old HAM radios peeked
out from beneath the mechanical flotsam and jetsam and a pair of grimy
earphones, whose padding was bursting from the cups, was tossed on top of it
all. Above the desk was a corkboard to which was pinned a topographical map of
the United States. Red pushpins dotted its surface like the tracked path of a
viral infection outbreak.

More disturbing,
however, were the newspaper clippings also affixed to the corkboard. Captain
Sam seemed to realize they might not be a welcome sight because he strode over
and quickly ripped off the most incriminating ones, those which included
photographs of Nicholas.

Crumpling the
pieces of paper in a fist, Captain Sam glowered at him before tossing the wad
onto a pile in the corner, which could have been a mound of trash just as
easily as it could have been the dirty laundry.

“What am I doing
here?” Nicholas demanded after his initial shock gave way to a queer cocktail
of revulsion and curiosity.