Gaining courage, I asked, "Did you find any?"

You glanced down at the torn up floor and said nothing.

Awakening once more, I gaze into the greater darkness, the great hole in s.p.a.ce, the black mouth that swallows stars.

Accelerating, close to the speed of light, the winged ones bear me into that darkness. Colors shift, stars streaming like some brilliantly luminous fluid, rippling from red to golden to unbearably brilliant violet.

It's not enough to say that you changed my life, Justin. You were my life. I would have told everyone on campus of your genius, whether they wanted to listen or not, but you commanded me to keep everything a secret, because the world wasn't ready yet, you said, because misunderstandings could happen, because it could be the end of the human race if somebody screwed up.

Yes, you told me that. I took it as par for the course.

Call me Opie. Call me Renfield. Call me whatever you like.

So I learned to deceive, to hold things close, to walk through life as if the mundane things around me mattered, when I knew how trivial they were. I got straight A's. I gave up trying to become an artist. I studied science, then accounting. It didn't matter. My parents though I was "coming down to Earth at last."

Ha ha. I don't remember if we ever found time to laugh at that one.

Justin, I think the most amazing revelation of all to me was not that you and your family had shared visions of alien worlds, or had even spoken, treated with, or served intelligences from Beyond, but that you were from Vermont too, silly as that sounds. We were almost neighbors, but I'd grown up in Brattleboro, which is a little nothing town, where, yeah, kids rode skateboards and played pinball (before there were videogames) and watched the same reruns of The Andy Griffith Show on television that everybody else did.

You, on the other hand, were raised way up in the hills, but were by no means a rustic, being privately tutored by your rich, eccentric daddy, who was a man of great culture and education, like his father before him and his before him, all of them devoted to, yes, "research" which had something to do with gardens of ice and winged creatures from outer s.p.a.ce. That your father had perished, when the family mansion burned down, or exploded, or just plain vanished didn't seem to have discomfited you too much. You had his bank accounts. And his talents.

You told me a lot more that summer, when I brought you home with me. On the train on the way up, you told me the whole story, like a story, and so I tell it like a story, because it seems, as we do, entirely fictional: that the Outer Ones or Old Ones or whatever you want to call them had descended from the sky into the Vermont hills sometime in the remote past. They were described in various Indian myth cycles, and in folklore whispered from generation to generation. It was rumored, too, that sometimes they recruited human agents, or even spokesmen, and that one day, when it pleased them, they would make themselves known to mankind, and history as we know it would come to an end.

Their purpose, no one had ever figured out. Some guessed it was mining, but what kind of rock would be worth journeys over quadrillions of miles and millions of years?

You didn't think it was that at all. Your theory was that other ent.i.ties lay sleeping in the Earth, vast powers that orthodox science had never suspected, nor could ever conceive; that the Outer Ones came to speak with them, to exchange dreams, and humanity was no more a part of the process than if the greatest scholars and philosophers and poets had come together for some vast, sublime conversation and all these sages just happened to be infested with fleas, and we were the fleas.

"Maybe we can join the flea circus," I said.

"Maybe we already have," you replied.

Now the really funny thing about that trip and that visit was how my parents treated you.

Father gave you his bluff, hearty handshake and a slap on the back.

You turned to me and smiled gently.

At dinner, that first night, Mother said, "Brian, I am so glad you are starting to make friends. I was worried about you for a while there."

Father put down his fork, but still spoke with his mouth full. "That's it, son. We want you to be normal."

How very funny.

Then you and I announced we were going "camping." Mother took us aside and said, "Justin, I trust you because you're Brian's friend, so I just want to ask you to look after him." That was funny too.

The unfunny part came later. Off we went, with backpacks and tent. We spent several days in the woods. The air was so wonderfully clear. The sky at night was intensely beautiful, as it is in Vermont, so far from the cities. But you and I looked at the stars in a different way, knowing that among them, or beyond them lay the Gardens of Ynath, where the Outer Ones might carry us in transcendence and glory, where we might live forever and know all the mysteries of the cosmos.

That was your promise to me.

That was what I hoped for, longed for.

And my mother thought we were off being "normal."

We came to places where ancient stones stood in strange circles, where, you told me, the Indians, and some wild, degenerate white men once danced naked on moonless nights, hoping to draw down the Outer Ones to accept barbarous sacrifices. We came to a hill filled with noises, where rocks somehow pressed together beneath our feet, making a trembling, muted thunder.

And by the edge of a broad stream, in the white sand, we found the tracks, where something had walked, leaving prints like pairs of crab claws pressed into the ground.

I knew that certain people who ventured too far into such places often did not return, or if they did, they were so changed in subtle, terrible ways, that it would have been better if they had not.

But we were not afraid. We had our visions. In our dreams, we reached to the very edge of the Gardens of Ynath, and we heard its whispers.

Then it happened. We camped before the mouth of a cave on one of those moonless nights which the local people had once learned to dread, and out of that cave rose what first seemed an enormous cloud, but which resolved itself against the stars into thousands of winged, flapping shapes, huge things, trailing long limbs and tails, like winged jellyfish I thought, no, like flying crabs, but really like nothing anyone has ever described or put into words or ever could.

We had sought them out. We found them. You stood up. You waved a flashlight and shouted, "Here I am! Come and take me! I want to go!"

I. Me. Me. Me. Meaning you, Justin Noyes. Just one. Singular.

I think that was how the spell broke. If you'd said "Take us," oh, how the whole history of the world might have been different- "Take me!"

I wasn't your friend. I wasn't even your instrument anymore. Was I ever more than an excuse to get back to Vermont?

"Take me!" you cried out, and they swarmed over you like a tide. They reached down. They took you.

But about dumb little Opie? Did you notice? Did you wonder?

No, I don't think you noticed or cared that I huddled there in the tent, s.h.i.t-scared, motionless, that somehow, when the time was upon us I wasn't ready to go, that I thought back over all sorts of incoherent things: games I'd played as a child, my electric train set, collecting b.u.t.terflies, what I was learning in school, the names of all the presidents, anything, everything that bound me to humanity, to the Earth.

I wasn't ready. At the crucial moment I turned away. I buried myself under a sleeping bag.

And I dreamed terrible dreams all that night, and it seemed to me that great swarms of the Outer Ones poured down from stars, bearing metal tubes of some kind, perhaps weapons, which released a gas, a darkness, which covered over the Earth's cities. The lights went out one by one, until all the world was still, and then the stars began to fade; and I saw the Outer Ones descending upon me at last, reaching out with those sharp, double-claws of theirs; and they spoke among themselves, making a humming, buzzing noise, and I was no more a part of the conversation than a flea would be.

When I awoke screaming in the morning, you were gone.

I left the tent where it was. I wandered for what must have been several days in a delirium. When I finally made it back home, bruised, cut, starving, my clothing torn, one of my shoes missing, I fell into my mother's arms and couldn't say anything for quite some time. At last I was able to say that there had been a misunderstanding, and that you, Justin, weren't coming back.

And my father just shook his head and said, "What did he turn out to be? Some kind of f.a.ggot?"

But you did come back, didn't you?

I am getting ahead of myself.

Justin, this is the part of the story where the hero grows up.

Childhood ends. Things change.

And then I became normal.

I became more normal than you could have ever imagined. I banished my dreams, my visions. By sheer force of will, a force you probably never suspected I had, I turned from the Gardens of Ynath, and looked upon them no more.

And when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

You might even say that I developed a backbone, a sense of self-worth, a separate ident.i.ty.

Suffice it to say that when I went back to college the following semester, I became aggressively normal. I worked hard, dressed plainly, earned good grades, got drunk at the occasional fraternity party, and voted straight Republican when Ronald Reagan was running. I moved to New York after graduation, where I could hide from the brilliant stars beneath the city's glare, and never gaze up at the Gardens of Ynath. My last concession to my allegedly artistic nature was an attempt to become a set-designer for an Off-Off-Very-Off-Broadway theater company, but before long I ended up keeping the accounts for them, because I really did have a talent for numbers, and when the accounts were all straight goose-eggs, I moved on.

Later, I met Melanie, who worked in banking, and was even more normal than I. I took her once to my parents' place in Brattleboro, but she hated Vermont, the country air and the possibility that there might actually be things (insects) flying in it, which she had never experienced growing up in Jersey City; so we were an obvious match and married soon thereafter.

And, yeah, we made lots of money, bought a big house in Queens, raised the statistically normal 2.5 children (I exaggerate but slightly), and together we kept statistics, became statistics, and brought into the world more little statistics, and, in short, had a life.

It wasn't a great life. But it was a life. It was ours. Melanie was a good woman. I think I even loved her.

And then you came back, returned to Earth, came out of hiding, or whatever.

I remember that I first heard of you in what was doubtless intended as a comedy spot on a late-night "fact" show of the sleazier variety: THAT'S INCREDIBLE. VERMONT GURU SAYS HE HAS BEEN ON ANOTHER PLANET FOR YEARS AND NOW HAS A MESSAGE FOR ALL OF US.

You had commanded me, once, to keep these things a secret, because the world was not ready. But now? Talk shows, tabloids, a best-selling book which was the biggest thing since that last one about the guy who was abducted and b.u.g.g.e.red by aliens disguised as giant peanuts or some d.a.m.n such.

You started a religion. You gathered hundreds of followers, then thousands to your old estate in the Vermont hills, until the place was dotted with tents and swarming with reporters and cops and unhappy locals. Was this going to be another Waco, Jonestown, what? The story went that you were waiting for the world to end in 2000 and everybody was going to be carried to Heaven in a flying saucer, or at least that's how the newspapers told it.

And then you started writing to me. I don't know how you got my address, but you got it, and the letters started coming. I burned the first as soon as I realized who it was from. I intercepted several more before Melanie found them, but of course she did find them in the end, and so we sat up one night at the kitchen table over coffee and I told her the deep dark secret of how I had known this real weirdo in college and maybe even a.s.sociated with him for a while.

But I was better now, I a.s.sured her. I was normal.

A great revelation is at hand, you wrote. Come and join us. Be a part of the glory of transformation.

"Sounds like he thinks he's Christ," Melanie said.

"Something like that."

"And you hung out with this guy?"

"He wasn't quite as wacky then."

But you wouldn't leave me alone. You got on my e-mail and sent me vaguely threatening letters, all of which boiled down to Join me now before it is too late.

Frankly I was glad when that raid happened, when your "compound" got flattened by the Feds looking for guns, drugs, wild s.e.x orgies, abused children, or human sacrifices, none of which would have interested you-or your Masters-in the slightest. I was glad, not because I ever wished you any ill, but because I wanted to be rid of you, and I thought I was. Never mind that three prosecutors in a row died of heart attacks, and none of the witnesses would talk, and your followers just dispersed and went back to their lives as if they had awakened from some long dream, the victims of collective amnesia.

Never mind that. You dropped off radar. Good riddance. Gone. I went on with my normal life.

And it was only a year ago that I got your postcard, postmarked Vermont (of course), which made me so very afraid.

Opie, you wrote, I know I have made mistakes, and there are misunderstandings, but I know too that you will come back to me and join me on the Great Journey, because They who have directed and shaped our lives all this time have ordained it so. Don't resist. Obey your dreams and all will still be well. But do not stray from the path, for the dangers of the dark s.p.a.ces are very real.

What the h.e.l.l was that supposed to mean to a normal guy like me? I think you knew. I think you, the Outer Ones, somebody made it mean something, as I strayed from the ordained path, into the darkness.

I don't have to tell you then any of the details about how, as he approached school age, my son Matthew had motor problems and speech problems and was declared autistic by the time he was six. Nor do I have to tell you about Matthew's big sister Carol, who had been such a sweet child, but now went with a very different crowd in highschool and came home with her nose pierced, then with metal things dangling from her lips. When I said something she just stuck out her tongue and there was what I can only describe as a p.e.n.i.s-shaped cufflink screwed right through the middle of it. Tatoos followed, chains, leather, spikes, drugs, the foul language, and the enormous boyfriends who looked like killer androids out of some trash movie, who threatened to break my f.u.c.king back f.u.c.king in half if I ever laid a f.u.c.king hand on f.u.c.king Spike (which was what Carol called herself now) like, f.u.c.k, you know?

Her mother and I wept for her and at the same time were afraid of her and almost wished her dead, just so it would be over.

But it wasn't over, was it, Justin? Just one more turn of the f.u.c.king screw, like, you know, when business failed, even in these prosperous times, and we had to sell the house, and daughter Carol flipped us the bird one last time and vanished on the back of a motorcycle. And then there was the small matter of Melanie coming down with lymph cancer at a statistically unlikely, early age; which metastasized; and on the night when she died, when I sat for hours by her bedside in the hospital and held her hand and whispered little stupid nothings that she couldn't hear anyway; on that night of all nights I fell asleep, finally, out of sheer exhaustion, and dreamed for the first time in a very long time of deep s.p.a.ces and dark planets.

I dreamed that I was hanging naked, like a trapped insect amid the frozen spiderwebworks of the Gardens of Ynath, beneath the brilliant stars in a black sky. And I heard the whispers of many voices, of those hanging there with me, frozen forever, suspended against time until the ultimate ending of the universe, and I conversed long and profoundly with a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who had found his way hence four thousand years ago, and with an artisan and scientist of medieval Italy who had delved into forbidden mysteries and contrived to be carried off one step ahead of the Inquisition; and I spoke too, with a member of the beetle race which will succeed mankind on the Earth two million years hence, and with minds which had never known or imagined our species at all.

For in the Gardens of Ynath there is no time, and the future is as negligible as the past.

I dreamed of all those minds and voices, and it seemed, in my dream, that all of them were glorious and transfigured and greatly expectant; and also, I think, in part, afraid, of the one who is to come at the end of time, who was described to me in a manner I couldn't quite understand as the Darkness (or Chaos) that walks like a man, before whose feet we shall all, in the end, fall down in abject worship.

Such was my dream, and when I awoke alarms were going off and all the TV monitors around Melanie's bed had flatlined and the nurse hauled me aside to make room for frantic doctors and their useless ministrations.

I almost felt that you were with me in the room, Justin, and I cannot believe it was a coincidence that I reached into my pocket and took out your postcard, and read the address: a rural route, familiar zip code, the old Akeley place. I think you were there. I think you guided me as I walked out of the hospital unchallenged, as if I were invisible, and looked up into the bright New York sky and saw, hovering above the parking lot, one of the Outer Ones, like a crab or a jellyfish with mebranous wings, waiting, visible for just a short time before it faded into the glare of the city lights.

We sat by candlelight at the table inside the old farmhouse, and you said to me, "It's all lies, Opie. c.r.a.p."

You wept then, and I looked at you with terror and amazement.

"No," I said. "You can't mean that."

"I mean all this messianic garbage, the idea that They were watching over us and guiding us and would take the faithful few off to the Gardens of Ynath to dwell in glory and wisdom forever-"

"I know," I said. "I read your book."

"All c.r.a.p."

"Well what is the truth then?"

"This."

And you showed it to me. You reached under the table and lifted up something heavy, then thumped it down in front of me, the black stone, square, about the size and weight of a bowling ball, covered on all its surfaces with very worn, hieroglyphic writing. When I saw it, when I ran my hands over it, I knew that it had not been manufactured on this planet, and I knew, too, what it was; for I had seen such things in my dreams.

In the Gardens of Ynath there is a great altar of pale, powdery stone, with many niches in it, where such objects are placed, and some of those niches are empty.

"It's all too absurd," you said. There were tears on your face, gleaming in the candlelight. You looked very old then, exhausted, defeated. "The purpose of this entire exercise, the reason for the manipulation and ruin of generations of human lives, was not to uplift the human race with any G.o.dd.a.m.n cosmic message or to reward any faithful believers, but simply to recover this stone. It is one of five brought to Earth millions of years ago. One was recovered in Wales in the late 19th Century. All of the others have storied histories. This one was found, and lost again, in the 1920's. I can't give you all the details. I don't know them. There was a lot of intrigue, subterfuge, something about a fake being sent away by rail freight, intercepted as it was supposed to be, a decoy... I don't even know why they want it. For reasons they've never bothered to tell us. s.h.i.t.... They went through such trouble for decades at a time, when all this while, the f.u.c.king thing was buried under the floorboards of this farmhouse. Old Man Akeley fooled them, recovered it, or never lost it, and stashed it.... Somehow they never figured it out. That was his last victory over them, before...whatever happened to him. Well, the only thing that makes any sense, when you think about it, is that the Outer Ones are just as stupid as we are."

"No," I said quietly. "For once I must tell you that you've got it all wrong. For once, at last, I am the master and you are the acolyte."

You merely turned to me in a daze and said, "What?" or maybe it was "Huh?" before I hefted the black stone and brained you with it.

I did so because I understood what you could not, that it isn't a matter of messiahs or movements or even of serving them in some semi-intelligent way. It's about joining the flea circus. They carried you off, because you promised them the black stone. But you did not have it, so they brought you back, to complete your trick. Now you have. That stone is a ticket to the Beyond. Not out of grat.i.tude will they take the bearer of the stone off with them, but for reasons of their own. It is not the faithful who shall be transported, but whoever holds the ticket, that's all.