Mantua Bay (9)

9

Jeff kept an eye out for Agnes at the kitchen door while laying the groundwork for his turkey chili. Normally the sounds of opening Fancy Feast cans never failed to get his cat’s attention. Yet the old girl had been a no-show tonight. He didn’t recall letting her out since the call with Dina Mitchell, though it was possible Sara could have let her out. He lowered the heat on the garlic and onions and walked out to the porch. 

“Aggie?”

******

Chris eyed the bundle of mushed fur and innards in the clear plastic. Lee had tried for a black trash bag from somewhere within the pickup to more properly conceal the viscera of what had clearly once been a cat, but no luck. A silver-plated ID tag dangled from underneath a skewed gullet and hit the plastic bag as it moved in Lee’s hand. Chris could read the engraving of Agnes’s name.

“Here I was thinking this was going to be the easier portion of our day, Coslet. What with that Lipman conversation, then the cops, the medics…now for the pièce de résistance. I mean, what do we even say? ‘Evenin’ there, ma’am. So eh, an alien melted your cat down into a tub of goo. Got any questions about that?’ ” Chris spoke the last part in a Texas accent that caused Lee to smirk in spite of his own hectic day.

“Do you reckon it belongs to this homeowner?”

“We’re finding out one way or the other. Come on, let’s get this done.”

They made the trek up the driveway of 113 North Carolina Avenue. Lee had spent every year of his adult life in Mantua Bay, yet this was the first he’d ventured back here since watching Earl’s Court get flattened out in 1971—a year after the incident. For the last forty-six or so years, he’d managed to steer clear of here. And now here he was, a government agent in tow, about to drop some highly unfortunate news on whoever owned 113 North Carolina, holding what was most likely their dead cat. Lee wondered whether it was better to explain what happened to their cat in advance of explaining the issues with their property, or the other way around. He figure it hardly mattered. Both of these issues were bound to make no sense to anyone, no matter how you worded them. Chris rang the bell, turning down to frown at the cat in the bag a second time.

A young man appeared at the door and caused Chris to flinch and take a step back. “Oh shit. It’s you.” 

Jeff smiled indulgently. “Yup, it’s me.” 

“Love your work, man. Debts and Debtors? I’ve thought about that ending every day.  Though I have to say, Sundays with Alexander is probably my favorite. I love the Netflix series they made from it too. But I guess you’ve seen that.”

“Yes, I’m sorry to say I have.”

Jeff eyed Lee, and his countenance darkened at the sight of the bag. He crossed his arms at his chest as if suddenly cold. “And you seemed to have also found our Agnes.”

Chris looked back at Agnes’s remains smushed in the bag, completely forgotten in the moment. “Eh, yes, Agnes it would be,” Chris said in a considerably smaller voice. “I’m terribly sorry, Jeff.”

Jeff rubbed his eyes. “What happened? Did you see? Was it a car that got her?”

“No,” Lee said. “Something far more dangerous than a car.” 

Chris gave Lee a severe glance.

“And what would that be exactly?” Jeff asked them, a saltier tone in his voice now. 

Chris took the moment over to introduce himself and offer his government ID to Jeff, which didn’t seem to do much for Jeff’s mood. 

“The Grey Fox?” Jeff studied the ID card. “Which umbrella does that fall under, Chris? Are you CIA? FBI?”

“I work in close association with both CIA and FBI, but the Grey Fox is not part of either. Actually, we’re more NASA-based than anything else. You would say we’re a boutique government agency.”

“Odd enough.” Jeff handed the ID back to Chris. “And what kind of business does a boutique government agency have with Mantua Bay?”

“My business requires me to be specifically here, Jeff” Chris said. “At your house. It’s about this property. It’s very important.”

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the political tweet I made in April, would it?”

“Not at all.”

“You sure?”

“This property is dangerous, Jeff. It could be very dangerous for you…” Sarah came up behind Jeff then, Steven on her arm, peering inquisitively at the two strange men on the porch. Lee had heard her coming, and had managed to hide the dead pet behind his back in time. “…and your family.”

Jeff put an arm around Sarah, who silently waited to be introduced. “Honey, this is Agent Chris Bennett from the Grey Fox. And—er—sorry I didn’t catch your name?”

Lee introduced himself and shook both Jeff and Sarah’s hands.

Jeff took in Lee’s lifeguard attire, a mild smirk forming on his lips. “My guess is you don’t work with the Grey Fox, Lee.”

“No I’m the local beach patrol supervisor. I work for the mayor.”

“And just what do you have to do with all this? You were mentioning something being dangerous before? Would someone please tell us what’s going on?”

“I think it’s best we come in and give you both a full explanation,” Chris said. “It’s a lot to take in, but I’m obligated to tell you, and guide you and your wife through various processes. Lee will have some viable information for you both too.”

Jeff stared at Chris, then back at Lee. “Alright. Would you just leave Agnes out here, please? I don’t want my family to see her like that.” He turned aside to let them enter.

“What happened?” Sarah held Steven closer to her.

Jeff sighed. “They found her. It was an accident, babe. Agnes is gone.”

“Oh god….” Sarah shook her head in dismay, on the verge of tears. Agnes had been part of their relationship since the beginning. She wanted a moment to grieve for the cat, but knew this was hardly the time. “What about dinner? Sorry, you guys, but we were about to sit down.”

“Oh, er…” Chris looked at the set dinner table, a mound of turkey chili sitting in the middle, steam rising from the bowl. 

“Care to join us?” Jeff said. “Perhaps we can cover all of this while we eat.”

Lee looked hopefully to Chris to negate being roped into a family dinner, but he was already taking his suit jacket off.“Awfully gracious of you, Jeff,” Chris said, beaming at the couple. “We’d like that.”

They all sat at heaping plates of turkey chili some minutes later, the men equipped with Mantua Local Blood Orange IPA cans, Sarah with a glass of Chardonnay.

“Well, which one of you wants to start?” Jeff asked them. 

“I was thinking we’d start with you,” Chris said. “Have you experienced anything unusual since you’ve began living here?”

“Sure, there was this car…”

“What car?” Sarah said.

“Emero Highlander sedan? Silver?” Chris said.

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “Probably though. It sped up our street like a bat out of hell last night. It’s hard to be sure the make, but this also wasn’t the first time I’d heard it come around. Whoever drives the thing must be investing in spare tires though. A lot of burning rubber.”

Sarah frowned at her husband as she leaned over Steven to mop up pieces of meat and cauliflower rice from his face with a piece of napkin.

“This car you speak of turned up in a bad accident today, Jeff. Just a few miles from here.”

“You’re sure it’s the same one?”

“We know,” Lee said. “It was a rather unusual car.”

“What’s unusual?” Sarah said. “They’ve been making Emero Highlanders for decades, I don’t understand.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Chris said. “The interior had not one seat, air vent, or gear shift. No radio. Nothing. Instead, it was all laid out in a type of metal alloy no one has seen before.”

Jeff, who had been taking a long swig from his beer, brought it down abruptly from his mouth. He looked at his two guests before going into the story with the yard, starting with the door stopper and ending with his text to the realtor. 

The four of them sat in silence for a moment, then Chris excused himself from the table for a moment to extract an envelope from his jacket. He set it down in between Jeff and Sarah, returning to his seat. Lee took a long swig of beer, shifting uneasily in his chair.  

“This is something you must both look at now,” Chris said. 

Jeff thumbed open the envelope and extracted from it a folded wad of xeroxed documents. The first page was a typewritten police report from 1970. Paper-clipped to the top left corner of this was an old photograph from what appeared to be the same year: a boy with dark shaggy hair, wrapped in a fire blanket. Subsequent pages bore the Grey Fox letterhead, memorandums clipped with small black and white snapshots of what was their yard, yet horribly polluted with litter, yellowed weeds, an old box spring; had it not been for the fenced in pines in the background of the photos, Jeff wouldn’t have been able to tell. One shot was of a horribly mauled little girl in a checkered dress,  which caused Jeff to drop everything to the table and cover the photo with his hand. He shook his head at Sarah, who had been trying to look on. 

“The boy in the first picture is me,” Lee said. “I was involved in what turned out to be a case of extraterrestrial misconduct. It happened right there, in that yard.” Lee pointed towards the porch.

“Extraterrestrial misconduct,” Sarah spoke the words casually, and turned to smirk at Jeff.

“It’s the truth,” Chris said. “Since our inception in the early fifties, it’s been honestly non-stop. It’s actually amazing there are people that still continue to doubt presence of aliens in the US. Because given the way a lot of them mess around here, they might as well apply for health insurance. In any American city you can name we’ve had issues with private properties getting taken over, installations of devices to enable control of cars…it’s their experimentation, and seldom do we still know what for. Every executive branch from Eisenhower and on has been vehemently trying to keep this stuff under wraps. It’s hot-button. Alien invasions don’t exactly have good marketing in the US right now. Our government has always been terrified of a mass panic if too much gets leaked. I’m not talking about a couple fuzzy pictures that come up on Google either. I’m talking actual news stories about this stuff getting out. I’m talking the declaration of a national emergency. Military deployment. The worst part? No one who actually knows about this stuff can tell what would be done to protect us from the real-life E.T. It invites layers of new issues that our country will probably never be ready for. Unless something real bad happens. And it might…it might right here in this town.”

“Here’s what I don’t understand. The woman who lived here before me never seemed to experience a moment of anything out of the norm. For her, this property might as well have been like any other.”

“I’m not at all surprised to know that, Jeff,” Chris said. “Clandestine alien activity can dissipate for months, years, even decades, only to resurface. And there’s no telling what for. Or why some places over others. But consequently, it all has been emanating right here, under your home.”

“I don’t believe it.” Sarah drained her glass and poured another. 

Lee reddened, and seemed to get more antsy at the table. 

“You need to give us a hell of a lot more information before you can expect either of us to start believing you. And while I don’t doubt, Lee, that that’s you in that photograph, it definitely doesn’t mean I have to believe you—either of you.”

“Completely agreed,” Sarah said. Steven started to make a fuss then. Lifting him out of his seat and onto a shoulder, she made for the stairs without another word. 

“Cute kid,” Chris said.

Jeff’s diverted his attention solely to his plate of turkey chili, which had been largely untouched. He ate fast, not looking up at either man as he did.

“Like what?” Lee said. He stared hard at Jeff, his reddened face darkening to a blue-purple. His hands on the table clenched into fists, then unclenched. “What’s it going to take, Jeff? What do you want to know that’ll make you believe us?”

Jeff smiled at him. “I think I’m going to leave that up to you and your associate here. You’re being absurd. We just moved in here. And yeah, some strange things have happened. I told my story and I stand by it. But I can’t just buy into an alien invasion, not just like that.” 

Lee said nothing in response but got up out of his chair. He took off his windbreaker, lying it over the arms of the kitchen chair before slipping off his t shirt. Turning to the side, Lee bent so they  could see the metal notch the size of a half dollar embedded in the small of his back; right where his spine met his ass.  Lee craned his head to look at Jeff, staring back at him with that emblazoned gaze. “Give it a tap, Jeff,” he said coolly. 

Jeff sat frozen, napkin in hand. 

“Take your finger and give it a tap, Jeff.”

Still nothing; Jeff only stared. 

“Alright. I’ll do it.”

Lee reached around then, extending a right hooked index finger, and gave the metal notch in his back a tap, and then there was a drut and then another and he awoke in the yard. It was dusk and everything was still ensconced in atrociously heavy stenches of old food and garbage. Lee got up from the ground, dusting from his buttocks shards of glass, dirt clumps, a piece of plastic. The see-saw had stopped moving. The little girl was  gone. His pool towel lied askew in a thatch of weeds nearby, and he remembered the swim lesson he was supposed to go to. His stomach and waist had broken out in gooseflesh, and he realized he was still only wearing his black Speed-O. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been lying there, but he did know something felt quite different.

He turned toward the house and that’s when he saw them—luminous little eyes floating in the glassless kitchen windows.  The hooded Jawas on planet Tattoine would later give him a panic attack when he’d see Star Wars at the movies as an eighth-grader; that same set of beady red eyes spied on him from the inside of the Earl’s Court house. Lee flinched as he took note of the windows on other floors, as other eyes began to collect there. Within a minute there were no less than two hundred eyes looking out from the windows. Lee sat there a moment, focusing on his breathing, trying to decide whether to take flight or wait and see whether someone would come out to him, until one by one, they went away.

Jeff finished reading the Grey Fox briefings that discussed Lee’s experience and stared vacantly up at them both.  “Just to be clear, this happened—” Jeff gestured toward the yard. “—right over there?”

“That’s right,” Lee said.

“The Grey Fox got involved relatively quickly,” Chris said. “There had been a hotbed of activity here during the sixties. By ’70 when our friend had his run-in, my father was ready to go. It was only a matter of time until someone got too close.”

“Your father was in the Grey Fox?”

“Is,” Chris said. “My grandfather was. He passed away a couple years ago. But dad is Senior Advisor of Field Operations these days. The 1970 case out here with Lee was his first assignment.”

“So many more questions I have,” Jeff said, shaking his head. 

“And you have every right to ask them,” Chris said. “Really, anything. The truth is, Jeff, we’re all under an extremely high level of government clearance. You included now. The information exchanged here is as privileged as it can possibly get. And it would be wonderful if you would cooperate with me. Could we take a look at the yard?” 

Jeff considered for a moment, and stood up from the table.