Otherworld (9 page)

“Well. Glad it was good,” Tom said.

That night, after the party guests had all given him their best wishes and shuffled on home, the Woodbridge family sat around their dinner table and talked.

“We are so proud of you, Son,” his mother said.

“Thanks, Mom.”

His father slid a pile of papers across the table and left them in front of his son. “Your application to Brantley came in. I went ahead and filled it out for you. Everything but the essay part, that is. I guess you just need to do that and then sign it.”

Steve looked over it.

“I filled it out just the same as the other ones you did yourself. It should be the exact same,” his father said.

“Yeah. It is.”

“Something the matter, Son?”

Steve glanced at the blanks next to MAJOR and MINOR. They were filled in with the words
Christianity
and
Music
.

His mother joined the inquiry. “Steve? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Everything's good.”

“You look like something's wrong.”

“Well …”

“What?” his mother asked.

“I was thinking …”

“About what?”

“About maybe concentrating on Spanish.”

His father spoke up. “Spanish? What for?”

“Well …” He knew they were not going to like this. “I've been thinking about maybe going back to Mexico.”

“What do you mean?” his mother said. “Another mission trip?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. But, like, I was thinking about the missionary training school some of the guys were telling me about. I think I might like to see what it might take to go into Mexico. Like, long term.”

His mother looked like she might cry.

His father chose a different line of objection. “Steve, I know you and the kids just got back from having a great time down there. I'm sure the Lord really moved.” He said this as if he had no idea what it really meant. “I'm sure you did a lot of good things for a lot of people, and naturally, you're real emotional about that. You feel good about it. But I think maybe you're confusing that with something else. You don't want to alter your entire life from a week's worth of a good feeling.” The truth was, Steve knew,
it was his father who
didn't want him to alter his life. His father's plans.

“What about being a preacher?” his mother asked.

“It's still being a preacher, I guess,” Steve said. “Just different.”

“It's not just that,” Father interjected, but it
was
just that. “I just don't think you should forget about your goals, here.”

“Yeah,” Steve offered lamely. “I guess you're right.”

He could not convince them. He knew it was pointless. They lorded his uprightness over him, used it against him. He was a good kid, compliant, passive. Always had been. His respect for his parents was used against his own best interests but he was too respectful to point it out. Any protest could find no purchase. His dad was a master convincer and his mother a master at passive aggression, a veritable maestro with the martyr complex. Trying to convince them that full-time missionary work was what he really aimed to do was like trying to shove a wet piece of paper through the cracks in a brick wall. It wouldn't go.

As he aged, matured, he could actually see more of his parents' perspective, could feel its sensibility take shape in his mind. If he'd had a kid who came home from a short-term mission trip to announce he was going to be a missionary, he would scoff too. What do kids know?

Except that kids know a lot. No, not about what's prudent and what's practical, but much, much more about what's spiritual, intuitive, what lights up the angelic senses in their souls, what gives life its groove. Kids have faith. Adults have the facts that make faith seem like kid's stuff.

So Steve Woodbridge pursued their goals as if they were his own. College. Seminary. Looking back, the only truly fulfilling thing about it all was finding and falling in love with his wife. When those goals were accomplished, he became
Pastor
Steve Woodbridge, and his life's work and mission became climbing the corporate ladder of ministry. Knowing the right people. Knowing the right words to say and the right way to act. Moving to another church only if it had a larger congregation and a higher salary (although he would never admit this to anyone, including himself). He played the part and worked his way to the top.

But others were playing the game too. Which is how he found himself in Houston, lured by a nice salary and a nice building,
hornswaggled
, as it were, by what turned out to be a congregation mired in conflict, sunk in debt, and primed to vote a tremendous pay cut for their new pastor in his second year.

And yet, the financial situation was not his regret. His pursuit of the American pastoral dream had come back to bite him, but his lament was not
this
decision but
every
decision since 1995. Every day, he could not help but think about that village in Mexico.

CHAPTER FIVE

The meteorologist's prediction proved accurate. The coldest day of Houston's unusual cold spell hit with a vengeance, encasing the Bayou City in an icy cocoon.

Pops Dickey, back from his journey to the West Coast, made his customary morning rounds on the farm. There would be no reporters on the Dickey farm for a while, no photographers to pose for. (The results from the panel of experts' inspection of the deceased cow were inconclusive.) Stepping into the barn, he almost hoped he'd find her surviving counterpart flat in the hay, maybe even with a little gray alien standing over her, smoking ray gun in hand. His little metallic shoulders would be hunched innocently. “No beef on Mars,” he would say. But the animal had managed to survive the bitter cold of the preceding night and any attempts on her life by otherworldly invaders.

 

A few miles away, Graham Lattimer arrived at the station, wearing his police blues under a windbreaker and khaki trench coat. He had received a scarf for Christmas two years prior, and he wore it for the first time. He wondered how it could be so cold and, given Houston's humidity, not snow. He noticed the sky lacked for clouds. Then he wondered how the sun could shine so brightly on such a clear day and yet offer no warmth.

 

In the early hours of the morning, Dr. Leopold Sutzkever sat in his tiny office in Landon University and read the newspaper. He sipped hot cocoa from a #1 TEACHER coffee mug, a gift from a former student. On Saturdays, classes didn't begin until 9:00 a.m., so the doors remained locked, and the only illumination in the hallways came from the emergency fluorescents in the hallway and the meager light cast by Leo's cheap desk lamp. The building was relatively dark and completely silent. He separated the Local News section from the other pages and had begun to peruse the articles when he heard a crash down the hallway. It was not loud. It didn't have to be. One could hear the mechanical whispering tick-tock of the clock on the wall outside. The crash was muffled and seemed to come from another room a ways down, not from the hallway itself. Leo was not the sort of man to let something so seemingly insignificant go without inspection. If someone was injured, he intended to help.

He emerged from his office and had not taken more than two steps when a blinding fury of light escaped from under the closed office door belonging to Dr. Samuel Bering. Though emitted from a crack less than an inch in height between door and floor, it set the entire hallway ablaze for nearly three seconds. Leo's eyes filled with a brilliant white that promptly dulled into black as his vision failed. He rubbed his eyes vigorously with his wiry aged-spotted hands, desperately attempting to restore sight. When it came, he found himself sitting on the floor, and he immediately stood and cautiously approached his colleague's office. No hint of light appeared from within. He knocked.

“Dr. Bering?” he called. “Dr. Bering, are you in there?” No response. “Samuel, are you in there?”

He checked the knob and found it unlocked. He slowly turned it and opened the door to reveal Bering's office. He stepped into the darkness and looked around. No one. He flipped the switch on the wall, and the light revealed a vase on the floor at the base of the desk. It lay in a thousand broken pieces and pottery dust. He thought it strange detritus for such a short fall. But he couldn't figure out how it would have fallen. There were no open windows for a strong wind to come through. And no one in his right mind would schedule the air conditioner to come on in the middle of winter, ruling out the possibility of a brisk breeze from the vent. Even stranger, there was nothing to explain the blinding light. At least nothing visible. And the room … yes! It
was
. Despite the cold without, the room within was easily twenty degrees colder. And it smelled musty, like a years-neglected attic.

Sutzkever found the smell, the sensation, the whole not-as-it-seems environment eerily familiar. His thoughts now concerned Dr. Bering.

 

Mike Walsh awoke shortly before noon and was happy to escape the tyranny of sleep. He was a miserable fellow. Sleep for him had been hard to find, and when found, it presented a cavalcade of horrific dreams. He sat for a minute, trying to let the drowsiness and the dreams seep out of him. When full consciousness arrived, he put the coffeepot on and sat at the table.

He sorted through the accumulation of mail and magazines and other papers on the table, separating them into two piles: keep and throw away. In the heap of paraphernalia, he came across “Aliens from This World” by Dr. Samuel Bering.

The professor's theory seemed preposterous, something out of
The Outer Limits
, but then there was the problem of the professor's pitch-perfect congeniality. Perhaps he was an eccentric, but Bering didn't seem crazy. Mike hadn't read the professor's article. He felt it had nothing important to add to his story. His assignment was simple: UFOs. Throwing in some crazy bit about other dimensions or parallel universes or whatever the professor called them would have been a needless tangent. Had the science of it not had the potential to confuse the average
Spotlight
reader, it would have made a suitable story on its own.

He began to read the article, and it
did
appear as if the professor knew what he was talking about. It was heavy with bits of scientific data and research done by cosmologists and theoretical physicists and other academics who spent their time doing nothing but contemplating the whats and hows of pseudoscientific pursuits like time travel and telekinesis. The professor neglected to cite this research and data with Mike in their talk, but Mike knew he wouldn't have understood it in the least anyway and that Bering probably knew it. But even from his layman's perspective, Mike thought the article laid out a fairly convincing case for Bering's theory. The professor made it sound possible. He made it sound
probable
.

From “Aliens from This World” by Dr. Samuel Bering in
Science Quest
:

In the early '80s, Kaluza-Klein theory reemerged with researchers aggravated by the task of unifying gravity with other quantum forces. Under this theory, forces are reconciled with each other because there is much more space with which to work. Expanding to an nth dimension allows the unification of Einstein's field of gravity with the electromagnetic force and the Yang-Mills “weak and strong” forces. Kaluza-Klein may provide a reason to file away the heaps of papers Einstein left unsolved on his desk when he passed away. It is his holy grail. It may reveal how we may reconcile all forces, known and unknown, and though its full understanding is beyond our present capabilities, it can be manipulated mathematically. In essence, its propositions are extremely ludicrous but can be proven on paper. Kaluza-Klein holds the secrets to higher dimensions and even the unwanted stepchild of theoretical physicists—time travel. Arguably, Kaluza-Klein theory and its revelations contain answers to the proverbial “meaning of life” …

 

Captain Lattimer sat at his desk and dug through the drawers in search of relief. Without notice, Kelly entered and deposited an aspirin bottle in front of him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I left mine in my glove compartment.”

“No problem.”

He unscrewed the lid and devoured three tablets.

“I guess I should tell you,” she said.

Graham studied her face. He was in pain and wasn't sure he wanted to hear what she was on the verge of saying. Her countenance, all scrunched brow and bitten lower lip, only deepened his apprehension. Graham sighed.

“Do I want to hear it?” he asked.

“Probably not.”

He rubbed his forehead and then responded, “Okay. Shoot.”

“We got four calls last night reporting sightings of mysterious lights in the sky.”

He groaned. “You gotta be kiddin' me,” he said, not really to Kelly so much as to the air, to the invisible spirit of aggravation he had, until this time, only acknowledged subconsciously.

“No, sir.”

“Anybody check them out?”

“Yeah. Lane drove out to each site. He said he didn't see anything. He took down some statements. Also, there was a camera crew here.”

“Camera crew? What for?”

“Not here at the station, but here in town. They're from some TV show. Lane said they followed him around from site to site.”

Graham nodded knowingly and smiled. He wondered at first why the townspeople had waited so long to make their calls, but he realized that the TV show's presence in Trumbull was too much for some to bear. They, like Pops Dickey, wanted their day in the spotlight. Tired of anticipating the reality shows no one knew lay on the television horizon, they wanted their fifteen minutes now.

“Anybody get any photos of these lights?” he asked.

Kelly only smirked.

“Of course not,” he said, and he smiled back at her.

“Lane's reports are out here on the table if you'd like to look at them.” She was still smiling.

“No, that's all right.” He was still smiling too.

Kelly exited, closing the door behind her. Graham settled deep into his chair and thought about the events of the past week. What should have been a simple case of one unknown person killing a local farmer's cow had blossomed into a national media event, and all thanks to one veterinarian. One crazy veterinarian who had read too many science-fiction novels and had seen one too many alien autopsy videos. The panel of experts who investigated the crime did nothing to squelch the publicity, despite their vague conclusions, the obtuseness of which, in fact, only provoked more crackpot theories to fill in the gaps. The people of Trumbull wanted flying saucers and nothing else. Just like the urban myths of the inner cities (alligators in the sewer or a ghostly woman who appears when you say “Bloody Mary” five times into a mirror in a dark room) or the stories of sea serpents from sailors who had spent too much time on the ocean, the bored people of Trumbull (schoolteachers and widows and waitresses and retirees and, of course, farmers) shared an imagination collective enough that it eventually became truth. All of the hoopla disappointed Graham. He had hoped his fellow citizens would cling to their better judgment, a practicality and a simple empiricism common in rural folk. He didn't like the eagerness with which they had lapped up the media attention. It sickened him, all of this strange talk diverting people's attention away from the concerns of real life.