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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

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BOOK: The Medium
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A motor boat sped by the far shore, and a minute later, the inner tube was rocked gently by its wake. Helen picked one ripple and tried to track its progress all the way to shore.
What should she do when she saw Billy again? She was sure he would be as reluctant as she to mention the meeting in the woods. But it would be there between them all the same.
Unless. Unless she could convince him that it needn't be and wasn't. She would behave toward him exactly as if there were no secret, no embarrassment, no rotten Beth. And he would see that she could be counted on, that she wasn't silly or small-minded. After a while, maybe it would feel that things were the same. Maybe even better.
She noticed she was opposite a familiar sandy spit and started paddling toward it with long, smooth sweeps of her cupped
hands. She wanted to go home. She wanted to rinse the river out of her hair and put lotion on her shoulders. And she wanted to throw away her contemptible bathing suit.
OCTOBER 1938
It was the end of October, and high school had come to seem to Helen not only a congenial environment, but a mildly intoxicating one. She liked having different teachers for different subjects, and she liked sharing complaints about them with her friends. She liked hugging a pile of heavy books to her chest, and writing with her grandfather's thick fountain pen, which Walter had ceremoniously given her on the first day of school. She liked the loud, bustling halls, the noise of metal lockers banging shut, the babble in the crowded girls' rooms, the way students poured out the doors at the end of the day in clamorous throngs, the way the throngs gradually diverted into side streets like cooling lava. There was excitement in all of it, and a sense of being part of something large and dynamic.
Of course, she still had uncertainties. She was already beginning to worry about mid-term exams and how she'd ever manage to hold in her head all the information needed to get through them. The marvelous confidence of the juniors and seniors as they moved splendidly in small groups through the halls could make her feel gangly and dull. The gang showers in the gym were a challenge to composure. And both the logic and the allure of football remained inscrutable. She went dutifully to every home game, joined in the chants the cheerleaders led, stood up and shouted when everyone else did, but she was only aping form, as she would have done at services in a strange church.
Once, she had spied Beth standing with three other girls near a water fountain. Helen ducked round a corner to avoid passing her, but not before taking in the girl's attractive stance, weight shifted to one foot, hip nudged outward. Helen and Billy had never spoken directly of Beth, but Helen would not let herself presume his interest in the girl had waned.
Billy had stopped by the very next day after Helen encountered him and Beth in the woods. He was going away for the rest of the summer to work on a road gang in the Ramapo Mountains and had come to say farewell to the Schneiders.
“That's good work for a young fellow,” Walter said. “Out in the open air, being useful. You're fortunate to get it.”
“Yes, sir, I know. I wanted to go to the CCC—those fellas make thirty dollars a month, and the CCC sends all but five dollars straight to your family. They're digging drainage ditches and building dykes in the Hackensack Meadows and in Secaucus to control mosquitoes, but I'd have to sign up for at least six months, and my mom doesn't want me skipping school.”
“Your mother will miss you,” Emilie said.
“It's only 'til September,” Billy said. “Barbara's got some hours down at Woolworth's now, and Lloyd can look out for the family. My Mom would rather have him home than me, anyway.”
“Well, you take care of yourself,” Emilie said. “Will you have an address? We'll send you cookies.”
“Oh, Em, don't fuss at the boy,” Walter grumbled.
“There's a post office box,” Billy answered. “I have the number at home.” Looking straight at Helen for the first time since entering the house, he added, “If Helen can come to the fence, I'll pass it over.”
Helen didn't have to wait long at the fence, but every second was agonizing. Would she be able to keep her pledge to herself to behave as if the meeting in the woods had never happened? When Billy arrived, he didn't immediately give her the address.
Instead, he rested his arm on the top of the fence, the folded square of paper tucked between two fingers like a cigarette.
“Helen, you know … I …”
Helen concentrated on keeping her face blank.
Billy shook his head ruefully and laughed a short laugh.
“So, did you have a good swim yesterday?” he said.
“Yes, I did.”
“Kinda muddy there, though.”
“I went way out onto the river.”
“Well, then, that's okay.”
A dog barked somewhere, and Billy peered toward the street, as if trying to locate the dog exactly. He looked at Helen again and held out the paper.
“Tell your mother she doesn't really have to send me anything,” he said.
“All right.”
“Except if she does, maybe you could put in a note, huh? You know, just about what's going on around here, if my Mom's okay, stuff like that.”
“If you want me to.”
“Yeah, sure. I'll even try to write back.”
He smiled, and she was sure she blushed. She stepped down from the box on which she'd been standing and began walking to her house.
“Hey, Helen!”
She turned. He was still on the box on his side of the tall fence, only his head and shoulders in view.
“Thanks,” he said, and waved.
She managed a smile. He jumped off his box and was gone.
 
It was eight o‘clock Sunday night, time for the
Chase and Sanborn Hour
with Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Tomorrow would be Halloween. Helen had decided she was
too old to go trick-or-treating this year, but she'd carved a large jack-o'-lantern to set in the bay window in the living room. From her seat on the sofa beside her mother, she could catch the pleasant scent of raw pumpkin warmed by candle flame.
Walter lit his pipe and leaned forward in his easy chair to turn on the radio. Ursula took her customary seat. She turned on the floor lamp beside her chair and pulled a ball of yarn, a pair of needles, and a partially finished sweater out of a basket at her feet and began knitting. The theme music from the
Chase and Sanborn Hour
swelled into the room. It was a favorite program with all of them. In the opening ten minutes, they shared several laughs over Charlie McCarthy's brash joking.
When Nelson Eddy came on to sing
Neopolitan Love Song,
Walter turned the dial. It was a habit of his, switching to another station during commercials or unappreciated musical interludes. He stopped at the sound of a man's excited voice. The man identified himself as Carl Phillips, a CBS news correspondent, reporting from a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. It sounded like one of those flash bulletins that sometimes interrupted programming, like when Japan had seized Chinese cities last year, or this spring, when Hitler annexed Austria, and only a few weeks ago, when German troops, with the acquiescence of the British and French, had occupied parts of Czecho-Slovakia.
What I can see of the object itself doesn't look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I've seen,
Carl Phillips was saying.
It looks more like a huge cylinder.
“What is he talking about?” Ursula said, pausing with her knitting needles raised.
“Grover's Mill,” said Emilie. “That's in south Jersey, isn't it?”
“Near Trenton, I think,” said Walter.
The reporter was interviewing the farmer on whose land the object had fallen. In the background, you could hear a crowd and the gruff commands of policemen trying to keep them back.
The reporter held his microphone out to pick up a scraping sound coming from the object.
“Now what's that supposed to be?” Ursula said. The ball of yarn had dropped to the floor, but she didn't retrieve it.
Carl Phillips asked the same thing of Dr. Pierson, a Princeton professor who was on the scene. The professor was unsure about the strange sound, but he did express doubt that the object was a meteor.
The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial—not found on this earth,
Dr. Pierson said authoritatively.
“Not found on Earth?” Emilie echoed nervously. “What does he mean, not found on Earth? Walter, what does he mean?”
Walter made a shushing motion with his hand. In rapid succession, Carl Phillips narrated the incredible facts that the scraping sound was the cylinder opening up and that a huge, tentacled monster had emerged, dripping saliva from quivering, rimless lips. People in the crowd were gasping and shouting. He described a small band of men waving a white flag as they carefully approached the creature.
Walter stood up and tensely faced the radio. They were all concentrating on it, straining to sort out Carl Phillips's words from the confused voices and noises around him. Helen's heartbeat thumped so loudly in her ears, it almost seemed another element of the broadcast. Whimpering, Emilie put her arm around Helen's shoulder.
Then from the radio, screams and shrieks. A jet of flame from the cylinder had incinerated the little group of approaching men and set the whole field on fire. Automobiles were exploding. More flames were shooting out of the cylinder, aimed at the fleeing crowd. Carl Phillips cried out that it was coming his way. Then, dead silence.
“Walter?” Emilie said weakly.
“There's something wrong with the radio?” Ursula asked.
Helen heard a distinct quaver in her indomitable grandmother's voice.
An announcer stated that due to circumstances beyond their control, they were unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill, but that they'd return to it at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, they'd continue with the musical program the news bulletin had interrupted. A piano began playing.
“I'm going to try another station,” Walter said. “Somebody's got to know more.”
But before he could turn the dial, the piano was abruptly cut off, and another announcer relayed a phone message from Grover's Mill that forty people had been burned to death there. The governor had declared martial law in Mercer and Middlesex counties. Militia were heading to the area.
Helen was trying hard not to cry, fearing once she began, she wouldn't be able to stop. She tried to picture the map of New Jersey on the wall of her history classroom. How near was Grover's Mill?
A sober announcer reported that of the 7,000 militiamen, only 120 survived; the rest had been burned or trampled to death. Communications were down in central Jersey from Pennsylvania to the ocean. Highways were jammed with terrified civilians trying to escape.
“My God,” Walter intoned.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.
The Secretary of the Interior came on to caution the public to remain calm, reminding them that the Martians were contained in one area. But on his heels, various bulletins
contradicted him. More cylinders had landed. Martians in fighting machines were advancing northward, tearing up railroad tracks, bridges, power lines. The Schneiders listened, horrified, to Army officers in bombers as they were engulfed by a black cloud of poison gas. The same gas was blanketing Newark. They heard a newsman choking to death. The Martians were headed for New York City.
“We must call Franz and Marie,” Emilie cried, jumping up and running to the phone.
Helen wondered how soon the Martians would reach Brooklyn. Would her relatives have time to get out? But they had no car. Where could they go anyway? Where could anyone go?
“I can't get through,” Emilie wailed. “The lines must be down. I can't get through.”
She covered her face with her hands and began sobbing. Walter seemed not to notice. He was circulating the room in agitated strides, stopping momentarily when he neared the radio to stare expectantly at it. Helen knew she should go to her mother, but she couldn't move.
Ursula went to the sofa and took Helen's hand.
“Aufstehen!”
she said, pulling her to her feet. “We must leave.”
“Leave?”
“We must go to the north, or west. Away from towns. To hide, so we can see what may happen later.”
As she spoke, they could hear voices in the street, the slamming of house doors and car doors, a small child crying loudly and bitterly. Though muffled by the closed windows, they were unmistakably the sounds of panic, and they further inflamed the family's already tossed emotions.
“Let's call the police first,” Walter said. “They've probably closed some roads.”
“Go, Helen, get our coats. And your father's flashlight,” instructed Ursula. Her voice was still shaky, but Helen was glad
to hear her giving orders. “Emilie, some oranges there are in the kitchen. Bring what else you see quick to take.”
Emilie wiped her eyes and looked around with a bewildered expression, then hurried out of the room. Helen ran to the hall closet.
“Can't get through there, either,” Walter said, putting down the phone. “We're on our own.”
When Helen returned laden with coats and hats, an announcer was reporting from the roof of a building in New York. The faint drone of people singing hymns was floating up to him from the streets below.
BOOK: The Medium
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