The Shimmer

One day after school, Warren was alone-which was what it felt like whenever he was in the living room with his grandfather- playing a video game that had a lot of floating, drifting balls of light. His grandfather shocked the hell out of him by speaking.

“The lights.”

Warren dropped the video game control, turned toward his grand- father, and gaped.

“I saw them,” the old man said.

“You can talk?” Warren asked in astonishment.

His grandfather didn’t seem to hear him. Instead the old man just kept talking, his voice hoarse. A lot of it Warren didn’t understand- stuff about Texas, an airbase, lights, and an underground research station.

“Rostov.” Whatever that meant.

“Ears bleed. Nose. Tear ducts. Burns. Time sped up. God help me. Alice.” That was the name of Warren’s grandmother. His grandfather began to weep.

Warren ran to get a Kleenex and wiped his grandfather’s bearded face.

“It’s all right, Grandpa. I’ll help you. What are you trying to say?”

Warren’s grandfather stopped talking then. It was days before Warren realized that when he’d wiped his grandfather’s tears, he had stood between his grandfather and the balls of light in the video game.

His parents thought he was lying.

“No, he talked for five minutes,” Warren insisted.

“What about?”

Warren told them.

“Lights,” his father said. “My mother talked about the research he’d been doing down in Texas, something about lights.”

“Texas?”

“Outside a nothing town called Rostov. His father had something to do with lights, too. Way back in the First World War. I never figured it out.”

“Aren’t there some letters?” Warren’s mother asked.

“Letters?”

“Between his father and mother. I remember Alice showed them to us. According to her, Edward treasured anything to do with his father because he was just a toddler when his father disappeared,” she said. “Some of the letters came from France during the First World War. They mentioned something about lights.”

“Yes, I remember now. Where did we put Dad’s stuff?”

After a twenty-minute search, they found the letters in the bottom of a box in a closet. They took them into the living room and clustered around the white-bearded figure in his rocking chair.

“Yep, look at this,” Warren’s father said. “‘I dream about the lights. I can’t wait to come back and find them.’ January twentieth, 1918. Wow. Dad, what do you know about this?”

But Warren’s grandfather was again catatonic.

The next afternoon, as Warren played the video game, his grand- father pointed toward the floating, drifting lights and began to tell a story that he’d kept locked within him since 1945-about a secret facility under a remote airbase in Texas and a weapon of unknown power.

Spellbound, Warren felt as if electricity straightened the hairs on his arms. From then on, he told his friends that his father had chores for him to do after school. He hurried home and put on the video game. As the floating, drifting balls of light appeared, his grandfather talked increasingly about the lights.

But one day, when Warren rushed home, his mother met him out- side and told him to be quiet because his grandfather was asleep in the bedroom. This disappointed Warren because he wanted to hear more about the lights and what had happened that terrible morning in 1945.

He played a video game, got bored, and decided to see if his grand- father was awake. Opening the door, he found that the bed was empty. A window was open.

He called his mother, who hurried home. Although the two of them drove along every street on Fort Bragg, they couldn’t find him. Military policemen widened the search. The police outside the base widened the search even farther.

Hospitals, shelters, churches, parks. Warren’s grandfather wasn’t at any of them.

“How the hell can an old man disappear?” Warren’s father demanded.

“I think I know where he went,” Warren said.

“Maybe he figured out where Alice is buried and decided to visit her,” Warren’s mother suggested.

“No. He went to Rostov,” Warren said.

“Rostov? Texas?”

“The airfield where he got hurt. He’s always talking about it. I think that’s where he went.”

“How could an old man get to Texas?”

“I’m not saying he got there. I’m just saying I bet that’s where he went.”

The police sent a missing-person bulletin to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all the states between North Carolina, where Fort Bragg was located, and west Texas.

Three days later, the Rostov police chief phoned. Yes, Warren’s grandfather had managed to get there. He’d been found at the old airfield.

He was dead.

78

Raleigh felt the table beneath his head begin to vibrate. In the darkness, he straightened. The room seemed warmer, enough to make him sweat.

Of course it’s warmer, he thought. The generator failed. The air conditioner isn’t working.

But if that’s the case, then the air-circulation pump isn’t working, either, he realized. The only oxygen I can get is in this room.

The darkness made him imagine that the room was smaller than it was.

Relax. Take slow, calm breaths. There’s plenty of air.

The ringing in Raleigh’s ears persisted, aggravated by the earplugs. The noise-reducing headphones pinched the sides of his head. Sweat trickled from under them. He wiped the sweat away with his hands.

Thirst made him wish that he’d thought to put bottles of water on the table while the light was dimming. When he came to his feet, the darkness intensified the scrape of the chair. He turned to the left, ex- tended his arms, and shuffled across the floor, pawing the empty space. Sooner than he expected, his fingers touched the smooth metal of the filing cabinet.

No problem.

The bottles of water were in the top drawer. He groped inside and tucked three of the bottles under his left arm. He gripped two energy bars with his right hand and shuffled back toward the desk.

He bumped a sharp corner. Cursing, he quickly set down what he carried and rubbed his throbbing hip.

The accumulating humidity made his nostrils moist. After wiping them with a handkerchief, he felt his way around the table to where his chair again made a screeching sound. He took three long swallows from a bottle of water, wiped moisture from his lips, tore open the wrapping on an energy bar, and suddenly felt queasy.

The water he’d swallowed had an aftertaste, as if there were metal in it. Was it starting to turn bad?

Will it make me throw up?

The metallic taste became stronger.

Sweat trickled down his face. As the table continued vibrating, the darkness seemed less absolute, perhaps because his eyes were adjusting. He could almost see the water bottles.

Of course. I’ve always had great eyesight.

The blackness developed shades of gray. He definitely saw the outline of the bottles. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ringing in his ears was sharper, and the metallic taste almost made him gag.

The bottles were coming into view, but a haze surrounded them.

Damned sweat’s getting in my eyes. He wiped them with the back of a hand, but the bottles remained blurred, even though the gray of the room was now so pale that he could see a hint of the table.

And the energy bars.

And his hands.

The effect was similar to the way night fades just before dawn. Through blurred vision, Raleigh was able to distinguish the filing cabinet. He saw walls and the metal door across from him, every- thing still hazy.

Again he rubbed his eyes to clear them of sweat. The room was now light enough that he could see colors, the orange wrappers on the energy bars, the blue labels on the water bottles, the red on his hands.

Red?

Drops of blood covered the table. His shirt was blotched with it. In dismay, he realized that the metallic taste hadn’t come from the water and the moisture on his face hadn’t been sweat. It was blood ru