When the Sky Fell on Splendor(94)

Molly.

Not an alien at all.

A human.





THIRTY-FOUR



A PERSON.

The little girl who’d lived in the Jenkins House.

Who’d owned that red piano.

A person, a person, a person.

My heart thundered.

What did it mean?

Why did he have this girl’s picture? Was it stolen, like the drawings?

Trophies? I thought, followed by ARTHUR!

I stuffed the picture in my pocket and ran up the steps, rivulets of pain tracing up my ankle. Through the flickering light, I spotted Arthur’s bony frame just inside the first doorway. I choked out a wordless sound of relief as I ran to him, but he didn’t react to me.

I froze just inside the room, feeling like I’d missed the top step, when I saw why.

There were only two things in the room: a piano on the right wall and the massive hunk of metal in the middle, easily fifteen feet wide and five feet tall, a mess of twisted, melted, welded metal.

Right there in the middle of the floor, on the tarp where it must have been built—it never would have fit through the door, and it was so heavy the floor bowed a bit under its weight.

A Fibonacci spiral.

I felt like the fabric of the universe was coming apart around me, like all this would float away and I’d be suspended in endless darkness.

“It’s just like the one he was planning to build,” Arthur murmured under the terrible noise of the storm.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Mark bent over the table in the kitchen, late afternoon light spearing through the windows over the sink, catching in his hair and dappling his shoulders as he worked and sketched out the blueprint.

He was getting scrap metal from the mill.

A co-worker was teaching him how to weld.

“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not Mark’s. It’s a weapon. It’s—”

“Empty,” Arthur rasped. “Nothing but a spiraling tunnel. I crawled all the way to the center.”

My ears and throat and stomach suddenly felt like they were full of cotton. I swayed in the doorway, unsure whether it was the wind or my own imbalance making the world rock.

It had to be a weapon.

It had to be.

It had to.

“Just a stupid fucking sculpture,” Arthur said. “Just Mark’s sculpture.”

I moved deeper into the room, touched the dense exterior of the spiral. The way all its parts had been chopped up and redistributed gave it the look and feel of a fossil, something ancient, rough edges and sediment preserved for centuries but still solid enough you could push it off a short cliff and it might hold together through the fall.

Tears rushed into my eyes as I followed the spiral back to its end, the three-foot-high opening of the tunnel that twisted into the center of the sculpture.

I looked out the window, wiping my eyes. The woods below looked like they were raving, boughs lifted high and seizing low, snapping and flying and stabbing where they hit.

“It doesn’t do anything?” I croaked, turning to Arthur. “Why would he do this? Just to torture us?”

Not a weapon. Just some kind of sick game.

There was no weapon.

There was no alien.

There was no greater purpose.

We’d been wrong about everything, except that Wayne Hastings was dangerous.

Molly. A person. What had he done to Molly?

We’d misread everything, probably imagined half of it. We’d been exposed to something, maybe even an actual satellite, that night, and our subconsciousnesses had gone wild, filling in all the blanks, pulling bits of what we’d seen at the Jenkins House apart and teasing them into a full-blown story.

Arthur’s mouth hung open as he tried to find words. “I thought . . . This is really it, isn’t it? We’re not heroes. We’re not chosen. We’re just . . . us, like we’ve always been.”

The desolation in his voice and face was unbearable.

I couldn’t push down the feeling anymore that I’d disappointed him, that his whole life had been one disappointment after the next, just like Mom’s, and all the love I had for him could never make a dent in his pain.

I’d tried not needing him.

I’d tried letting him and the others help.

I’d tried being there so he could lean on me.

I opened my mouth—to say what? That we needed to go? Arthur knew that. He knew we were standing up here, risking our lives for nothing, and it struck me deep in my belly that I could drag him downstairs again with me, shut him up safe in the cellar with the others. But I could do nothing to make him want this life we had.

A downed power line snapped against the window, and the flickering lights finally went out, leaving us only with the sky’s eerie green light.

I turned away from him. “Arthur . . . we have to—”

His strangled cry cut me off.

I spun back as a dark figure slipped through the doorway and slammed Arthur backward into the wall. The two silhouettes tumbled to the ground, and as Arthur tried to scuttle away, the man snaked an arm around his throat, hauling him back while his other hand kept its grip on his hunting gun.

“What are you doing in my house, boy?” the man roared, his arm tightening so there was no way for Arthur to answer.

He shook Arthur again, his voice slurring out of him along with a sweet, grainy scent.