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When I have raised him to face level, I flip the chair over and he hangs upside down.
“Come on!” he yells.
“Start talking. ”
“No!” he yells. “They said they’d kill me. ”
I let go of the chair and it falls. The man screams but I catch him before he hits the ground. I raise him back up.
“There were three of them!” he yells, talking fast. “They showed up the same day we sent out the magazines. They showed up that night. ”
“What did they look like?” Henri asks.
“Like ghosts. They were pale, almost like albinos. They wore sunglasses, but when we wouldn’t talk one of them took the sunglasses off. They had black eyes and pointy teeth, but they didn’t look natural like an animal’s would. Theirs looked as though they had been broken and chiseled. They all wore long coats and hats like some shit out of an old spy movie. What the hell more do you want?”
“Why did they come?”
“They wanted to know our source for the story. We told them. A man had called, said he had an exclusive for us, starting raging about a group of aliens that wanted to destroy our civilization. But he called on the day we were printing, so instead of writing the full story, we put in a small quip and said more to follow next month. He talked so fast that we hardly grasped what he was saying. We were planning on calling him the next night, only that didn’t happen, because the Mogadorians showed up instead. ”
“How did you know they were Mogadorians?”
“What the hell else could they have been? We wrote a story about the Mogadorian race of aliens and lo and behold a group of aliens shows up on our doorstep the same day wanting to know where we got the story. It wasn’t hard to figure out. ”
The man is heavy and I’m having trouble holding him. My forehead is beaded with sweat and it’s a struggle to breathe. I flip him back over, begin to lower him. When he is within a foot of the floor I drop him the rest of the way and he lands with an Oomphf. I bend over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.
“What the hell, man? I’m answering your questions,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re too heavy. ”
“An
d that’s the only time they came?” says Henri.
The man shakes his head. “They came back. ”
“Why?”
“To make sure we didn’t print anything else. I don’t think they trusted us, but the man who called us never answered his phone again, so we had nothing else to print. ”
“What happened to him?”
“What do you think happened?” the man asks.
Henri nods. “So they knew where he lived?”
“They had the phone number we were supposed to call him back on. I’m sure they could have figured it out. ”
“Did they threaten you?”
“Hell, yes. They trashed our office. They screwed with my mind. I haven’t been the same since. ”
“What’d they do to your mind?”
He closes his eyes and takes another deep breath.
“They didn’t even look real,” he says. “I mean, here are these three men standing in front of us talking in deep, raspy voices, all in trench coats and hats and sunglasses even though it was nighttime. It looked like they were dressed up for a Halloween party or something. They looked funny and out of place, so at first I laughed at them…. ,” he says, his voice trailing off.
“But the second I laughed I knew I had made a mistake. The other two Mogadorians started towards me with their sunglasses off. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. Those eyes. I had to look, as though something was pulling me there. It was like seeing death. My own death, and the deaths of all the people I know and love. Things weren’t so funny anymore. Not only did I have to witness the deaths, but I could feel them, too. The uncertainty. The pain. The complete and utter terror. I wasn’t in that room anymore. And then came things I’ve always feared as a kid. Images of stuffed animals that came to life, with sharp teeth as mouths, razor blades for claws. The usual stuff all kids are afraid of. Werewolves. Demonic clowns. Giant spiders. I viewed them all through the eyes of a child, and they absolutely terrified me. And every time one of those things bit into me, I could feel its teeth rip the flesh from my body, I could feel the blood pour from the wounds. I couldn’t stop screaming. ”
“Did you try to fight back at all?”
“They had two of these little weasel-looking things, fat, with short legs. No bigger than a dog. They were frothing at the mouth. One of the men was holding them on a leash, but you could tell they were hungry for us. They said they would turn them loose if we resisted. I’m telling you, man, these things weren’t from Earth. If they were dogs, big deal, we would have fought back. But I think those things would have eaten us whole despite our size. And they were pulling against the leash, growling, trying to get to us. ”
“So you talked?”
“Yes. ”
“When did they come back?”
“The night before the next magazine went out, a little over a week ago. ”
Henri gives me a concerned look. Only one week ago the Mogadorians were within a hundred miles of where we live. They could still be here somewhere, maybe monitoring the paper. Perhaps that is why Henri has felt their presence of late. Sam stands beside me, taking everything in.
