The Abduction

 

 

As I lay in bed, looking up at the night sky through a glass pane above my bed, images and sounds flash through my head. I stared at the stars, which looked like bright diamonds, pinned to a black curtain and I could hear her voice in my mind.

“Daddy,” she screams. “Daddy, help me.”

I tried to focus on the stars, began counting them, tried to decide if they were actually stars, or planets. They begin to blur and swirl, easing in and out of focus. My stomach lurched and I rolled over and pressed my face into the large pillow that I shared my empty bed with.

The volume of her voice in my head increased and I plowed my face deeper into the soft pillow until I could barely breathe. I’m not sure if my mind rebelled against me at that moment or if it was my fault for depriving my brain of needed oxygen, but somehow, I passed out. The dream that I’d fought so valiantly to keep away came rushing in on me, catching me off guard.

All at once, it was a few days before again. My wife, Stacy was lying in bed beside me; a book perched against her bent knees. I’d just shut off my laptop and set my alarm. Midnight was only minutes away and I had to get up early for work the next day.

“You going to sleep,” I asked her, but I already knew the answer. She was really into that book and probably wouldn’t put it down until she passed out, or the sun came up; maybe not even then. I gave her a peck on the cheek and rolled over, hugged my pillow and began to drift off. A little after two in the morning, I woke up to the sound of Olivia calling for me.

“Daddy…! Daddy, help me!”

Usually, when I first wake up, it takes a while for me to get my bearings. Sometimes, I’m almost to work before my head clears completely, but that night, I came awake fully alert, shot out of bed, ran down the hall, and threw open her door. What I saw in her room, terrified me.

Olivia was floating above her bed, screaming. I couldn’t make out her features because the room was filled with a bright light that seemed to pour from the walls. A cracking sound, like an electric discharge flashed through the room and somehow, the bright light became brighter. I could see Olivia’s face then, pleading for me to help her, reaching her small hand out toward me. A second round of crackling light shot through the room again. That’s when I saw them, standing around her bed.

I don’t know how many there were, I didn’t bother to count. I ran at the small form that was closest to me and tackled it.

When I was a kid, I did some pretty dumb stuff. One of the dumbest things I did was strip my stereo wires and attach a different plug to them and then try to plug it in. The electric shock that I got sent me flying across my bedroom and left holes in my fingers and palm that took months to fully heal. The shock that hit me when my body fell against the small creature was worse.

My world went black. When I came to, I was lying on my back in my daughter’s empty bedroom. She was gone…my baby girl was gone.

The normal things that usually occur after a child goes missing happened after that. The police were called first thing. I talked to the investigator while Stacy sat, wrapped in a blanket and crying uncontrollably. I felt like I should’ve told the cops about the lights and the strange little men, but had no doubt that they wouldn’t have believed me. The investigator took copious notes and then flipped his pad closed.

“Is there any reason that Olivia may have wanted to run away?” he asked me.

My mouth gaped open.

“She’s four years old,” I said. “She doesn’t even know what that means.”

He asked me a few more questions that didn’t make sense and then left, vowing that he’d do everything in his power to find our daughter. I didn’t expect much; I knew that wherever she was, it wasn’t anywhere that the police could search.

When the police and neighbors are all circling around like buzzards, it gives the parents of a lost child hope. They spouted off about their various plans of action and told us not to worry, and after a while, we began to believe them. Then, they all left and my wife and I were left with our new found hell, the emptiness that resided where our daughter used to be. 

Stacy and I both called in to work that day. Both of our bosses completely understood and told us to take all the time that we needed. We spent the day sitting on the couch, holding each other and crying; our cell phones close by. It was a long, torturous, agonizing wait for nothing. As we lay in our beds that night, knowing that neither of us would ever be able to fall asleep. I broke down and told her about the abduction.

Stacy listened attentively as I talked, wiping tears from her eyes and nodding. When I told her about the bright lights and the little men, she frowned slightly, and then began crying again.

“It was a dream,” she said after I told her how bad I felt that I couldn’t save our daughter.

I turned my face from her; all of a sudden I couldn’t look her in the eyes. She grabbed my chin and made me look at her.

“Baby,” she said, “it was just a dream.”

It was my turn to break down. The tears poured out of me and I thought they would never stop. Stacy pulled me closer to her and somehow, that made it worse. I failed and I knew it. It took her a few days to understand that; when she did, she left.

Three days after Olivia was abducted, I woke up and found a note sitting on Stacy’s pillow. She wrote that she couldn’t look at me and not think about Olivia. She needed some time to grieve and stuff like that. What it really said was that our daughter was gone, it was my fault, and she didn’t want to look at me or be around me; that’s how I read it anyway. I crumpled up the note and threw it on the floor. Then, I grabbed my phone off of the night stand and tried to call her. I wasn’t surprised when her voicemail answered. I threw the phone on the floor next to the note, and then had to get it when I realized that I needed to call in to work again.

I dialed the office and told them that I’d be taking the two weeks of vacation that I had saved up. They knew that my daughter was missing and didn’t try to protest; that done, I crawled back onto my bed and drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up just after noon, the sun was shining on my face because I forgot to close the sky-light. I reached up and touched my face, felt the fresh sunburned skin, and pulled my hand back. I decided to ditch the shave for the day and just get dressed. I grabbed my phone and dialed the detective to ask if there was any progress.

“We have some pretty good leads,” he said. “I’ll call you if I learn anything new.”

I hung up with him and went into the kitchen to make some coffee, then dialed Stacy’s number again and hung up on her voicemail. Alone in the house for the first time in years, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was going crazy thinking about Olivia and losing Stacy didn’t make things better. I decided that some work would probably occupy my mind, for awhile at least; so I went down into the basement to organize it like I’d told Stacy I’d do weeks before. I figured that if she did come back, she would at least see that I did that…I at least did that.

The basement looked like a landfill. Boxes, full of Christmas ornaments and lights were stacked in the center of the floor, along with various other boxes of crap. I stacked them all on one side of the room, planning to organize them later. I worked hard for about fifteen minutes, until one of the smaller boxes fell over, spilling a sack of pictures onto the floor. I tried not to look at them, quickly shoving them back into the box, but my eye caught on Olivia’s baby picture and I lost it. I sat down in the center of the floor, staring at that picture, and wailed.

I can’t do this right now, I thought to myself after it seemed that all of my tears had left me. I slid the picture back into the box and stacked it on top of the others, then pulled the small string that hung down in the middle of the room, turning off the light. As I began to ascend the steep staircase, I heard a rustling sound coming from behind the place where I stacked the boxes. I froze for a second, listening to see if the noise came again; it did. I stepped back onto the basement floor and pulled the light back on. Then I went to my work bench and grabbed my claw hammer off of the two nails that hung it in its usual place and approached the stack of boxes.

Holding the hammer at the ready, I put my foot around the back of the stack of boxes and slid them out of the way. I lurched backward in horror as a small figure shot out from behind the boxes and ran toward the work bench. I didn’t think; didn’t have time to think. I threw the hammer as hard as I could and hit the running figure in the back of the head. It went down hard, smacking its face on the cold basement floor.

It didn’t move as I approached its small, sprawled out body. The creature wasn’t wearing any type of clothing that I could see, unless its skin was actually some kind of alien suit. It looked clammy and wet, its skin the deep gray of cigarette ashes. I pulled a large zip-tie off of the top of the work bench and grabbed the thing’s arms. I was surprised that even though they looked like they were wet and slimy, they were actually pretty dry. I zipped the zip tie a little and then put the creature’s tiny, very human looking hands together, slipped the zip tie over them, and then zipped them tight. I rolled the thing over onto its back and gasped at the sight of its face.

When I was a kid, I saw a movie about a man who turned into a fly. The grossest part of the fly-man to me was its eyes. They were un-lidded, black and smooth. The creature’s eyes were like that, but smaller; yet they still seemed to cover a good portion of the top part of its face. Where its mouth should’ve been, was nothing but that smooth, cigarette ash colored skin. I thought that if it could speak; it must use some orifice that I couldn’t see.

I left it lying on the basement floor and went into the house to get a couple of chairs from the dining room table. When I returned, I lifted its small frame onto one of the chairs, grabbed some rope from the side of my work bench and tied it up. I placed the other chair in front of it. I knew it was still unconscious, not because the un-lidded eyes didn’t open or blink, but because what passed for its chin was resting on what passed for its chest. I sat down in the chair opposite the thing and stared at it, waiting.

I waited for a good half hour and then became worried. Had I killed it? I leaned forward and felt along its neck for a pulse. Just around its throat, I felt it, a small beating sensation that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I looked at my watch and began to measure its pulse, counting its beats while looking at the second hand. I had been a medic for a couple of years in the Army and taking a pulse was one of the few things that stuck with me after I got out. When I finished, I looked back at the creature and was so shocked to see its black eyes staring back at me that I fell backward in my chair.

“Let me go,” it said.

Said? That wasn’t it exactly. It was more like a thought in my head than a sound.

I got up off the floor, pulled the chair back upright and sat down again; a little further away than before.

“Did you say something?” I asked.

It cocked its head at me; first to one side and then the other.

“Let me go.”

I didn’t see anything move when it spoke. I wondered if it could read my mind as well. I concentrated as hard as I could on the thing and thought; can you hear me? It didn’t think at me again, but nodded its head slightly. My mind was blown, but at least I knew that it could communicate. I leaned forward in my chair, clasped my hands together, and said “Where’s my daughter?”

The creature didn’t answer me. It appeared to be looking around the basement, taking inventory of all the crap down there. I asked again; “Where’s my daughter?” Still, it ignored me.

The thought that I’d gone completely off the rails had occurred to me, but at that point, I didn’t care. I was sitting in my basement, talking to an alien that I’d tied to a chair and I was okay with that. I had to figure out a way to make it tell me what I needed to know though, or I would have gone nuts for nothing. I stood up and walked around to the back of the creature’s chair, grabbed it by the sides and turned it around to face the work bench. Then, I walked over to the work bench and began taking down all of the most frightening looking tools I could find, laying them down, side by side on the bench top. I chose a pretty good selection of box-cutters, needle-nose pliers, screwdrivers, and a couple of small saws, and then I retrieved the hammer from the floor and added it to the collection.

I’d heard the expression about feeling like a kid in a candy store before, but I never fully felt that feeling until I gazed down at my selection of tools and tried to decide which one to use first. My hand grazed over the top of the dangerous looking items, halting once over the screwdriver, once over the hammer, and then coming to rest on the handles of the needle-nose pliers. I picked them up and turned to face the alien. I could feel the smile spreading across my face as I approached the chair, ducked behind it, grabbed the creature’s hand and pressed the small cutting blades of the pliers around the base of its index finger.

“Where’s my daughter,” I asked.

Silence… the creature remained still and quiet.

“Have it your way,” I said, and cut off its finger.

I expected to hear the creature screaming in my mind, but that didn’t happen. It didn’t writhe in pain or beg for mercy either. What the creature did do was promptly grow back another finger. I looked down on the floor and saw that the first finger that I’d cut off was still lying by my feet. In the place where I cut the finger from, was a brand new one. I put the pliers around the base of the newly grown finger and cut it off. The finger seemed to fall in slow motion to the floor as I watched it drop and then land with a bounce next to its counterpart on the floor. That time, I did hear something from the creature in my head, but it wasn’t words, it was laughter.

I looked around the thing’s body for something else to cut off, perhaps something that won’t grow back, but I couldn’t see anything useful. Other than toes that would’ve probably proven to be as useful to me as its fingers, the thing had no other protruding appendages. Where we have ears, it had a couple of holes on each side of its head. Where we have a nose, it had a small raised area in the center of its face with a couple of holes at the bottom. I pulled its legs apart and was disappointed at what I found there too; nothing; smooth skin all the way to the back. I didn’t look at its backside but I knew that there was probably just a small orifice there as well; nothing of practical use, unless I wanted to be an alien rapist, which I didn’t.

I gave up; dropping the pliers next to the thing’s two disembodied fingers and turned its chair around again. It looked at me with that quizzical head cocking thing it does.

“You can’t hurt me,” it said. “Just let me go.”

“I’ll let you go after you bring my daughter back, you son of a bitch.”

“You will never see her again…”

I had enough of the creepy bastard. I got up from my chair and walked over to light-string and grabbed hold of it. Before turning off the light, I thought of one last question.

“Will they come for you?”

The thing’s cackling laugh rung through my head; I could actually see its head rocking forward and back as it cracked itself up. It looked eerily human just then.

“Yes,” it said between fits of giggles. “They’ve been watching you this whole time through my eyes…hearing you through my mind. They’ll come for me soon.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said, and then shut off the light.

When I reached the top of the basement stairs, I cast a final look down into the darkness where I knew the alien thing was, then closed and locked the door.

The basement door was located right off of the kitchen, which was convenient because that’s where all of the alcoholic beverages were. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold beer, popped the tab, and drank down the entire can in one, long gulp. I crushed the can in my hand, threw it in the nearby trash bin and then pulled out another fresh Soldier. I took the second beer to my room and cracked it open while I laid back on my bed, wondering what I could do to make the aliens bring my daughter back to me. I took a long swallow of the beer, set the half-empty can on my nightstand, and rested my head back on my pillow. The sky-light was still open and I could see millions of stars, spread out above me.

At some point, I fell asleep, probably from suffocating myself with the pillow to get away from the sound of Olivia’s screams in my head. When I came to, a couple hours later, Olivia’s screams were still there… echoing. It’s messing with me, I thought; trying to drive me crazy. I sat up in bed and nearly jumped out of my skin when something across the room moved with me. My heart steadied when I realized that it was just Stacy’s vanity. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. My face looked dark from the growth of hair that was threatening to burst out into a full bushel if I didn’t shave soon. Then, I looked at the mirror itself…I’d found my answer.

The Alien acted as if it didn’t see me when I hauled the large mirror down into the basement and turned on the light. It would’ve been impossible to tell if the creepy thing was even awake if its head wasn’t propped up straight on its frail looking shoulders. I placed the mirror against the chair, facing the creature and then stepped behind the alien, making sure that we were both visible in the mirror’s reflection. I had to make a few adjustments, but I finally got us both centered just right. It was important to me to make sure that the fans out in the rest of the galaxy got the best picture quality I could give them. I secretly hoped that the image was in hi-def for what I was planning.

I went to my work bench, picked up the small hand saw and put it in my left cargo pocket, and then I picked up the box cutter and carried it back to the alien. While it watched me in the mirror, I clicked the small lever on the side of the box cutter, increasing the blade size so that it could be easily recognizable in the reflection of the mirror. Stepping behind the creature again, I put the blade up to the alien’s cheek and looked at our reflections.

“Bring back my daughter,” I said.

The blade cut deep into the alien’s cheek. Unlike when I cut off its fingers, the alien jerked in his chair as I slid the blade downward, opening a deep groove into its face. It began to convulse and shake. I had to let go of its neck to avoid receiving a cosmic head-butt. When I stepped back, I was glad that I’d let go. A large blast of electric current shot out of the thing’s head and hit the overhanging light, blowing it out. I fumbled in the dark until I found what I was looking for. In less than a minute, the basement lit up again, but from a battery powered lantern instead of the overhead light, which was completely destroyed. There was a burn mark on the ceiling where the light used to hang down. I put the lantern on the floor next to the alien’s chair and went back to my work bench. After fumbling around for a few seconds, I found my rubber gloves and put them on.

There was a small electric burst, when I cut a deep groove into the alien’s other cheek too, but it was nowhere as powerful as the first.

“Losing your juice; huh?”

I put my hand on the thing’s shoulders and looked at our reflections in the mirror again. The alien’s dark gray face was splattered with a blue-greenish sappy fluid that I could only assume was his blood, but he was still recognizable.

“Bring back my daughter.”

There were no sounds in my head, no more squirming from the gross little creature. I let out a quick sigh, dropped the box cutter to the floor and then pulled the saw from my cargo pocket, held it up in front of the mirror, and gave the home audience my brightest smile.

“I wonder what your brains look like…”

I placed the edge of the saw blade against the upper part of the creature’s forehead, gave a short pull, and opened a large gash in the front of its head; then I heard it scream for the first time.

Its scream seemed to last forever in my mind. I covered my ears, but couldn’t escape it. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I slapped the alien as hard as I could across the face. The screaming stopped. If I was a scientific kind of person instead of a cable installer, I may have hypothesized that the creature’s nerves were all bundled up in and around its big, fat, gray head. Of course, I didn’t need to be scientists to test that theory.

I put the saw blade back where it had been, against the fresh cut that I’d made, and felt the creature shudder.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Shit just got real.”

I pulled back on the saw and heard the creature’s scream inside my head again. I thrust the saw forward and then pulled it back. The little gray bastard nearly came up out of the chair.

“Bring me back my daughter!” I screamed at the mirror, and sawed a little deeper into the creature’s head.

Its screams grew so intense that it felt like my own head was going to explode. Tiny sparks flew off of it, but it was nothing more than static discharge at that point. I felt the saw blade slide along the alien’s skull and dug it in a little deeper. A warm trickle flowed down my neck. I reached up, touched it, and pulled my hand back. My fingertips were covered in blood. My ears were bleeding, but I didn’t care; I’d gone too far to turn back. I took another pull of the saw and felt my eardrums burst from the pressure as the alien’s screams filled my head… and then the room disappeared into a haze of bright light.

The light was everywhere. The light was everything. All of my senses were gone. I couldn’t see; I couldn’t hear. It pulsed brighter and brighter and then went out as fast as it had come. When the light vanished, so did my little alien friend. I looked at my own face in the mirror and couldn’t help but laugh at my own reflection. My face was covered with a combination of the alien’s blue-greenish blood and my own. I laughed until my ribs hurt, and when I couldn’t utter a single chuckle more, I sobbed.

I wept in a puddle of alien blood until I passed out from emotional exhaustion. When I regained consciousness, the basement was lit up by the sun’s light, pouring in from the side windows. I got up and went back up into the house. I made my way to my bedroom and caught a glimpse of something red and white as I walked passed Olivia’s room. I took a double-look and saw her, sitting on her bed in the same colorful pajamas she’d been wearing the night she was abducted, playing with her dolls. She saw me in the doorway and rushed to me, a big smile on her face.

We hugged for as long as we could. It was probably a lot longer than I think, but it seems that in moments of pure joy, the clock spins like an airplane propeller. I picked her up and carried her to my bedroom, grabbed my cell phone, and texted her mother. Stacy didn’t reply to the text, but came bounding through the front door less than fifteen minutes later. She was home, they both were. I held them in my arms and promised myself that I wouldn’t let either one of them go again.

The hearing loss was permanent. Every day after that, I’ve had to use closed caption on the television and rely on texting rather than the telephone, but to me, it was worth it. Deafness was a small price to pay for having my family back. I also took some joy in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one to have permanent scars. Somewhere, out in the universe, was a small, gray man, who may have healed all of his physical scars, but would no doubt remember me for the rest of his life. I hope he does… him and his whole damn species.