"That hurts like h.e.l.l. Right there, where your thumb is."

"It's a crick. You must've pulled a muscle."

Silence. My neck and shoulders, too, had been comforted by my mother's supple hands. Every so often the springs spoke, announcing a movement. Then my father's voice came back. "I had another nightmare about that man in the car."

"I figured so."

"I was lookin' at him in that car, with his face beat all to pulp and his throat strangled with a wire. I saw the handcuff on his wrist, and the tattoo on his shoulder. The car was goin' down, and then... then his eyes opened."

I shivered. I could see it myself, and my father's voice was almost a gasp.

"He looked at me. Right at me. Water poured out of his eyeholes. He opened his mouth, and his tongue was as black as a snake's head. And then he said, 'Come with me.'"

"Don't think about it," Mom interrupted. "Just close your eyes and rest."

"I can't rest. I can't." I pictured my father's body, lying like a question mark on the bed as Mom kneaded the iron-tight muscles of his back. "My nightmare," he went on. "The man in the car reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingernails were blue. His fingers bit hard into my skin, and he said, 'Come with me, down in the dark.' The car... the car started sinkin', faster and faster, and I tried to break loose but he wouldn't let me go, and he said, 'Come with me, come with me, down in the dark.' And then the lake closed over my head and I couldn't get away from it and I opened my mouth to scream but the water filled it up. Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Oh, Jesus."

"It wasn't real. Listen to me! It was only a bad dream, and everythin's all right now."

"No," Dad answered. "It's not. This thing is eatin' at me, and it's only gettin' worse. I thought I could put it behind me. I mean, my G.o.d, I've seen a dead person before. Up close. But this... this is different. That wire around his throat, the handcuff, the face that somebody had pounded into putty... it's different. And not knowin' who he was, or anythin' about him... it's eatin' at me, day and night."

"It'll pa.s.s," Mom said. "That's what you tell me whenever I want to worry the warts off a frog. Hang on, you tell me. It'll pa.s.s."

"Maybe it will. I hope to G.o.d it will. But for right now, it's in my head and I can't shake it loose for the life of me. And this is the worst thing, Rebecca; this is what's grindin' inside of me. Whoever did it had to be a local. Had to be. Whoever did it knew how deep the lake is. He knew when that car went in there, the body was gone. Rebecca... whoever did this thing might be somebody I deliver milk to. It might be somebody who sits on our pew at church. Somebody we buy groceries or clothes from. Somebody we've known all our lives... or thought we knew. That scares me like I've never been scared before. You know why?" He was silent for a moment, and I could imagine the way the pulse throbbed at his temple. "Because if it's not safe here, it's not safe anywhere in this world." His voice cracked a little on the last word. I was glad I wasn't in that room, and that I couldn't see his face.

Two or three minutes pa.s.sed. I think my father was just lying there, letting Mom rub his back. "Do you think you can sleep now?" she finally asked him, and he said, "I'll try."

The springs spoke a few times. I heard my mother murmur something close to his ear. He said, "I hope so," and then they were silent. Sometimes my dad snored; tonight he did not. I wondered if he lay awake after Mom had drifted off, and if he saw the corpse in the car reaching for him to drag him under. What he'd said haunted me: if it's not safe here, it's not safe anywhere in this world. This thing had hurt my father, in a place deeper than the bottom of Saxon's Lake. Maybe it was the suddenness of what had happened, or the violence, or the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were terrible secrets behind closed doors, even in the kindest of towns.

I think my father had always believed all people were good, even in their secret souls. This thing had cracked his foundations, and it occurred to me that the murderer had handcuffed my father to that awful moment in time just as the victim had been handcuffed to the wheel. I closed my eyes and prayed for Dad, that he could find his way up out of the dark.

March went out like a lamb, but the murderer's work was unfinished.

III The Invader

THINGS SETTLED DOWN, AS THINGS WILL.

On the first Sat.u.r.day afternoon in April, with the trees budding and flowers pushing up from the warming earth, I sat between Ben Sears and Johnny Wilson surrounded by the screaming hordes as Tarzan-Gordon Scott, the best Tarzan there ever was-plunged his knife into a crocodile's belly and blood spurted in scarlet Eastman color.

"Did you see that? Did you see that?" Ben kept saying, elbowing me in the ribs. Of course I saw it. I had eyes, didn't I? My ribs weren't going to last until the Three Stooges short between the double features, that was for certain.

The Lyric was the only movie theater in Zephyr. It had been built in 1945, after the Second World War, when Zephyr's sons marched or limped back home and they wanted entertainment to chase away the nightmares of swastika and rising sun. Some fine town father dug into his pockets and bought a construction man from Birmingham who drew a blueprint and marked off squares on a vacant lot where a tobacco barn used to be. I wasn't there at the time, of course, but Mr. Dollar could tell you the whole story. Up went a palace of stucco angels, and on Sat.u.r.day afternoons we devils of the common clay hunkered down in those seats with our popcorn, candy, and Yoo-Hoos and for a few hours our parents had breathing s.p.a.ce again.

Anyway, my two buddies and me were sitting watching Tarzan on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. I forget why Davy Ray wasn't there; I think he was grounded for hitting Molly Lujack in the head with a pine cone. But satellites could go up and spit sparks in outer s.p.a.ce. A man with a beard and a cigar could jabber in Spanish on an island off the coast of Florida while blood reddened a bay for pigs. That bald-headed Russian could bang his shoe. Soldiers could be packing their gear for a trip to a jungle called Vietnam. Atom bombs could go off in the desert and blow dummies out of tract-house living rooms. We didn't care about any of that. It wasn't magic. Magic was inside the Lyric on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, at the double feature, and we took full advantage of getting ourselves lost in the spell.

I recall watching a TV show-"77 Sunset Strip"-where the hero walked into a theater named the Lyric, and I got to thinking about that word. I looked it up in my ma.s.sive two-thousand-four-hundred-and-eighty-three-page dictionary Granddaddy Jaybird had given me for my tenth birthday. "Lyric," it said: "Melodic. Suitable for singing. A lyric poem. Of the lyre." That didn't seem to make much sense in regards to a movie theater, until I continued following lyre in my dictionary. Lyre took me into the story-poems sung by traveling minstrels back when there were castles and kings. Which took me back to that wonderful word: story. It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication-whether it's TV, movies, or books-begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.

The Lyric.

"Stab it, Tarzan! Stab it!" Ben yelled, and that elbow was working overtime. Ben Sears was a plump boy with brown hair cropped close to his skull, and he had a high, girlish voice and wore horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. The shirt wasn't made that could stay tucked into his jeans. He was so clumsy his shoelaces could strangle him. He had a broad chin and fat cheeks and he would never grow up to resemble Tarzan in any girl's dream, but he was my friend. By contrast to Ben's chubby exuberance, Johnny Wilson was slim, quiet, and bookish. He had some Indian blood in him that showed in his black, luminous eyes. Under the summer sun his skin turned brown as a pine nut. His hair was almost black, too, and slicked back with Vitalis except for a cowlick that shot up like a wild onion at the crease of his part. His father, who was a foreman at the sheet rock plant between Zephyr and Union Town, wore his hair exactly the same way. Johnny's mother was the library teacher at Zephyr Elementary, so I suppose that's how he got his affinity for reading. Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads. He had a nose like a Cherokee hatchet and a small scar warped his right eyebrow where his cousin Philbo had hit him with a stick when we were all playing soldiers back in 1960. Johnny Wilson endured schoolyard taunts about being a "squawboy," or having "n.i.g.g.e.r blood," and he'd been born with a clubfoot to boot, which only doubled the abuse directed at him. He was a stoic before I knew the meaning of the word.

The movie meandered to its conclusion like a jungle river to the sea. Tarzan defeated the evil elephant poachers, returned the Star of Solomon to its tribe, and swung into the sunset. The Three Stooges short subject came on, in which Moe wrenched out Larry's hair by the handfuls and Curly sat in a bathtub full of lobsters. We all had a grand old time.

And then, without fanfare, the second feature began.

It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The t.i.tle came up on the screen: Invaders from Mars. The movie looked old, like it had been made in the fifties. "I'm goin' for popcorn," Ben announced. "Anybody want anythin'?" We said no, and he negotiated the raucous aisle alone.

The credits ended, and the story started.

Ben returned with his bucket of b.u.t.tered popcorn in time to see what the young hero saw through his telescope, aimed at the stormy night sky: a flying saucer, descending into a sand hill behind his house. Usually the Sat.u.r.day-afternoon crowd hollered and laughed at the screen when there was no fighting going on, but this time the stark sight of that ominous saucer coming down silenced the house.

I believe that for the next hour and a half the concession stand did no business, though there were kids leaving their seats and running for a view of daylight. The boy in the movie couldn't make anybody believe he'd seen a flying saucer come down, and he watched through his telescope as a policeman was sucked down into a vortex of sand as if by a grotesque, otherworldly vacuum cleaner. Then the policeman came to visit the house and a.s.sure the boy that no, of course no flying saucer had landed. n.o.body else had seen this flying saucer land, had they? But the policeman acted... funny. Like he was a robot, his eyes dead in a pasty face. The boy had noticed a weird X-shaped wound on the back of the policeman's neck. The policeman, a jolly gent before his walk to the sand hill, did not smile. He was changed.

The X-shaped wound began to show up on the backs of other necks. No one believed the boy, who tried to make his parents understand there was a nest of Martians in the earth behind his house. Then his parents went out to see for themselves.

Ben had forgotten about the bucket of popcorn in his lap. Johnny sat with his knees pulled up to his chest. I couldn't seem to draw a breath.

Oh, you are such a silly boy, the grim, unsmiling parents told him when they returned from their walk. There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Everything is fine. Come with us, let us go up to where you say you saw this saucer descend. Let us show you what a silly, silly boy you are.

"Don't go," Ben whispered. "Don't go don't go!" I heard his fingernails sc.r.a.pe against the armrests.

The boy ran. Away from home, away from the unsmiling strangers. Everywhere he looked, he saw the X-shaped wound. The chief of police had one on the back of his neck. People the boy had always known were suddenly changed, and they wanted to hold him until his parents could come pick him up. Silly, silly boy, they said. Martians in the ground, about to take over the world. Who would ever believe a story like that?

At the end of this horror, the army got down in a honeycomb of tunnels the Martians had burrowed in the ground. The Martians had a machine down there that cut into the back of your neck and turned you into one of them. The leader of the Martians, a head with tentacles in a gla.s.s bowl, looked like something that had backed up out of a septic tank. The boy and the army fought against the Martians, who shambled through the tunnels as if fighting the weight of gravity. At the collision of Martian machines and army tanks, with the earth hanging in the balance...

...the boy awakened.

A dream, his father said. His mother smiled at him. A dream. Nothing to fear. Go to sleep, we'll see you in the morning.

Just a bad, bad dream.

And then the boy got up in the dark, peered through his telescope, and saw a flying saucer descending from the stormy night sky into a sand hill behind his house.

The End?

The lights came up. Sat.u.r.day afternoon at the movies was over.

"What's wrong with them?" I heard Mr. Stellko, the Lyric's manager, say to one of the ushers as we filed out. "Why're they so darned quiet?"

Sheer terror has no voice.

Somehow we managed to get on our bikes and start pedaling. Some kids walked home, some waited for their parents to pick them up. All of us were linked by what we had just witnessed, and when Ben, Johnny, and I stopped at the gas station on Ridgeton Street to get air put in Johnny's front tire, I caught Ben staring at the back of Mr. White's neck, where the sunburned skin folded up.

We parted ways at the corner of Bonner and Hilltop streets. Johnny flew for home, Ben cranked his bike with his stumpy legs, and I fought the rusted chain every foot of the distance. My bike had seen its best days. It was ancient when it came to me, by way of a flea market. I kept asking for a new one, but my father said I would have to do with what I had or do without. Money was tight some months; going to the movies on Sat.u.r.day was a luxury. I found out, sometime later, that Sat.u.r.day afternoon was the only time the springs in my parents' bedroom could sing a symphony without me wondering what was going on.

"You have fun?" my mother asked when I came in from playing with Rebel.

"Yes ma'am," I said. "The Tarzan movie was neat."

"Double feature, wasn't it?" Dad inquired, sitting on the sofa with his feet up. The television was tuned to an exhibition baseball game; it was getting to be that time of year.

"Yes sir." I walked on past them, en route to the kitchen and an apple.

"Well, what was the other movie about?"

"Oh... nothin'," I answered.

Parents can smell a mouse quicker than a starving cat. They let me get my apple, wash it under the faucet, polish it, and then bring it back into the front room. They let me sink my teeth into it, and then my dad looked up from the Zenith and said, "What's the matter with you?"

I crunched the apple. Mom sat down next to Dad, and their eyes were on me. "Sir?" I asked.

"Every other Sat.u.r.day you burst in here like gangbusters wantin' to tell us all about the movies. We can't hardly stop you from actin' 'em out scene by scene. So what's the matter with you today?"

"Uh... I guess I... don't know, exactly."

"Come here," Mom said. When I did, her hand flew to my forehead. "Not runnin' a fever. Cory, you feel all right?"

"I'm fine."

"So one movie was about Tarzan," my father plowed on, bulldog stubborn. "What was the other movie about?"

I supposed I could tell them the t.i.tle. But how could I tell them what it was really about? How could I tell them that the movie I had just seen tapped the primal fear of every child alive: that their parents would, in an instant of irreversible time, be forever swept away and replaced by cold, unsmiling aliens? "It was... a monster movie," I decided to say.

"That must've been right up your alley, then." Dad's attention veered back to the baseball game as a bat cracked like a pistol shot. "Whoa! Run for it, Mickey!"

The telephone rang. I hurried to answer it before my folks could ask me any more questions. "Cory? Hi, this is Mrs. Sears. Can I speak to your mother, please?"

"Just a minute. Mom?" I called. "Phone for you!"

Mom took the receiver, and I had to go to the bathroom. Number one, thankfully. I wasn't sure I was ready to sit on the toilet with the memory of that tentacled Martian head in my mind.

"Rebecca?" Mrs. Sears said. "How are you?"

"Doin' fine, Lizbeth. You get your raffle tickets?"

"I sure did. Four of them, and I hope at least one is lucky."

"That's good."

"Well, the reason I'm callin' is, Ben got back from the movies just a little while ago and I was wonderin' how Cory is."

"Cory? He's-" She paused, and in her mind she was considering my strange state. "He says he's fine."

"So does Ben, but he acts a little... I don't know, maybe 'bothered' is the word I'm lookin' for. Usually he hounds the heck out of Sim and me wantin' to tell us about the movies, but today we can't get him to talk. He's out back right now. Said he wants to make sure about somethin', but he won't tell us what."

"Cory's in the bathroom," my mother said, as if that, too, was a piece of the puzzle. She cast her voice lower, in case I could hear over my waterfall. "He does act a little funny. You think somethin' happened between 'em at the movies?"

"I thought of it. Maybe they had a fallin'-out."

"Well, they've been friends for a long time, but it does happen."

"Happened with me and Amy Lynn McGraw. We were fast friends for six years and then we didn't speak for a whole year over a lost packet of sewin' needles. But I was thinkin', maybe the boys ought to get together. If they've had an argument, maybe they ought to work it out right off."

"Makes sense."

"I was gonna ask Ben if he'd like Cory to spend the night. Would that be all right with you?"

"I don't mind, but I'll have to ask Tom and Cory."

"Wait a minute," Mrs. Sears said, "Ben's comin' in." My mother heard a screen door slam. "Ben? I've got Cory's mother on the phone. Would you like Cory to spend the night here tonight?" My mother listened, but she couldn't make out what Ben was saying over the flush of our toilet. "He says he'd like that," Mrs. Sears told her.

I emerged from the bathroom, into the well-meaning complicity. "Cory, would you like to spend the night at Ben's house?"

I thought about it. "I don't know," I said, but I couldn't tell her why. The last time I'd spent the night over there, back in February, Mr. Sears hadn't come home all night and Mrs. Sears had walked the floor fretting about where he might be. Ben told me his father took a lot of overnight trips and he asked me not to say anything.

"Ben wants you to come," Mom prodded, mistaking my reluctance.

I shrugged. "Okay. I guess."

"Go make sure it's all right with your father." While I went to the front room to ask, my mother said to Mrs. Sears, "I know how important friendship is. We'll get 'em patched up if there's any problem."

"Dad says okay," I told her when I returned. If my father was watching a baseball game, he would be agreeable to flossing his teeth with barbed wire.

"Lizbeth? He'll be there. 'Round six o'clock?" She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to me, "They're havin' fried chicken for dinner."

I nodded and tried to summon a smile, but my thoughts were in the tunnels where the Martians plotted the destruction of the human race, town by town.

"Rebecca? How're things goin'?" Mrs. Sears asked. "You know what I mean."

"Run on, Cory," she told me, and I did even though I knew important things were about to be discussed. "Well," she said to Lizbeth Sears, "Tom's sleepin' a little better now, but he still has the nightmares. I wish I could do somethin' to help, but I think he just has to work it out for himself."

"I hear the sheriff's about given it up."

"It's been three weeks without any kind of lead. J.T. told Tom on Friday that he sent word out all over the state, Georgia and Mississippi, too, but he hasn't come up with a thing. It's like the man in that car came from another planet."

"Now, there's a chilly thought."

"Somethin' else," my mother said, and she sighed heavily. "Tom's... changed. It's more than the nightmares, Lizbeth." She turned toward the kitchen pantry and stretched the cord as far as it would go so there was no chance of Dad hearing. "He's careful to lock all the doors and windows, where before he didn't care about locks. Up until it happened, we left our doors unlocked most of the time, like everybody else does. Now Tom gets up two or three times in the night to check the bolts. And last week he came home from his route with red mud on his shoes, when it hadn't rained. I think he went back to the lake."

"What on earth for?"

"I don't know. To walk and think, I suppose. I remember when I was nine years old I had a yellow cat that got run over by a truck in front of our house. Calico's blood stayed on the pavement for a long time. That place pulled me. I hated it, but I had to go there and see where Calico died. I always thought that there was somethin' I could've done to keep him alive. Or maybe up until it happened, I thought everythin' lived forever." She paused, staring at pencil marks on the back door that showed the steady progress of my growth. "I think Tom's got a lot on his mind right now."