Interference

INTERFERENCE

Eric Luke

Copyright © 2012 Eric Luke

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-63348-006-3

No one would have believed... that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...  that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. 

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

"Of what origin is this ever watchful monster

that waits to feed on the pain of disenchantment?"

Carmen Dean, The Wait

        PART I

JIMMY

Centerville, California - 1938

Jimmy Morton saw something he would try to forget for the rest of his life.

He would wake at night, sheets drenched with sweat, stomach so tight with pain that he would lie curled up, wrapped around the core of this moment of fear, this thing that laid open his every weakness, every selfish desire: the three times he’d stolen candy from the counter at his dad’s store, the time he’d peeked at Mike Morgan’s sister undressing at the pool, the time he’d pretended to shoot the neighbor’s cat Tom with his BB gun and slipped and pulled the trigger, Tom screaming at him and limping from then on.  In the dead of night he knew in his heart that this fear would always be with him, gazing into his soul, tearing him open, knowing him completely.

Twenty-seven minutes earlier he had been lying on the floor of the living room, listening to the radio and tracing the patterns of the carpet. 

He lay on his stomach, the radio rising far above him like the Emerald City spied across a field of poppies, the dial light a beacon shining into the upper regions of the room's atmosphere, calling out to other planets in the shadows of space somewhere up near the ceiling.   

He turned his head to the left side so his good right ear could hear the radio.  His left ear didn't work anymore, not since his dad had popped him one for hearing a bad word when he was seven.  Not even saying it, just hearing it.  They were waiting at the one traffic light on Centerville's three-block Main Street, Jimmy actually feeling kind of proud that his dad was taking him along somewhere, just the two of them out on some business like two grown up men, when an old guy who needed a shave had yelled to another man something about a duck, and next thing he knew his dad had reached across and whacked him hard, right in the side of the head.  Remember, Jimmy, he'd said, his voice stern but warm with a father's advice. Words are dangerous.  The right word at the right time can kill you.  Of course he'd meant the wrong word but Jimmy knew what he meant.  Then the blood had dripped down his cheek from his ear and his father's eyes got cold and distant, like he was running away from something.  The infection had shut down that ear but good.

The program was boring.  Dance music or something by Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra.  Ramon Raquello was no Captain Midnight, and this show was definitely not I Love a Mystery, or The Shadow, or any of the shows that were a part of his life just as much as school or dinnertime or brushing his teeth in the morning.  Those characters were so real that he pretended sometimes they were walking with him on the way to the school bus, and they were about a hundred times better than any kid at school.  A million.  Just because he couldn't hit a stupid ball with a stupid bat.  How well you could do that seemed to decide how much people liked you.  He'd seen new kids hit the ball once and rocket to playground stardom, while there he was still sitting on a bench by himself, reading. 

Jimmy didn't think of himself as lonely, but he definitely liked the people in the adventures in his head more than anybody he'd met so far in the real world.  It was so hard to put together the words to bridge the empty spaces between himself and other people.

He closed one eye and watched his finger following the patterns of the carpet, like he'd done since he was a little kid, tracing the blood-colored paths as they branched and branched outward, until his fingertip was so far away, the patterns so tiny that he couldn't follow them anymore.  Then his finger would return and venture out again down another road toward the mysterious horizon.  He was so bored with the dance music.

But dance music was what his parents were in the mood for.  What was it called, a samba or something?  His dad had taken off his jacket for once and called, Come to your man, Irma! and since they'd had some glasses of wine his mother actually laughed, pretended to be a fancy dancer and pulled him out of his chair.  He had to admit it made him kind of happy to see them like this, but at the same time very, very nervous.  When they'd been drinking wine, which was just about every night, they would be happy for a half hour.  Then his mom would make some remark about how they weren't where they should be, something about the store, and his father would start to sound like a politician making a speech, about how owning a general store in this community wasn't something to sniff at, and she would say that he wouldn't have said that when they got married, that he would have spit on people with a job like this, and then they'd fight over every choice he'd made that had brought them here, to this town, to this house, to this moment. 

It reminded Jimmy of his finger following a path through the patterns in the carpet, the blood red roads, out to a dead end.

They were in their happy time right now, but it felt like something balanced on an edge, waiting to fall and break. So he really bit his lip when the music was interrupted by an announcer.  This had never happened before.  Tomorrow night was Halloween and in between the shows the KCTR announcer had been making stern, annoyed reports about local boys and firecrackers, and a fire in a chicken coop on the Bryson farm out near Highway 99, but that was all local; you could tell because the announcer's voice sounded smaller somehow.  This interruption was from New York, where the big shows came from.  Jimmy sat up as he focused in on it.  The man was saying something about... explosions on the planet Mars. 

Just the sound of the word Mars was enough to make him forget his nervousness about his mom and dad.  He had checked out Princess of Mars and the rest of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books from the library so many times that the librarian had started calling him The Martian when he walked in.  He had even made his own Martian chess pieces out of clay from the rules in Chessmen of Mars, though he'd never found anybody to actually play with.  He knew enough not to ask his father.  But to hear the words Mars and explosions in the same sentence.  It was almost too much.  Unfortunately it really was too much for his parents' happy mood.

His father started complaining about these modern times when you couldn't even finish a song without some interruption about something happening millions of miles away, not even on earth, for crying out loud, and his mother got annoyed with his father for getting annoyed.  The report was short and when the music started again Jimmy looked up at them sharply.  They stared at each other, like they were remembering something that had happened in private, and his dad offered his hand like a nobleman at a ball, his mother gave in like she always did, as if she were putting something away inside her, and they went back to dancing, though this time with no smiles.  Jimmy let out a sigh, retreated to the sofa, pulled up his legs and hugged a big throw pillow, watching them.  Then another announcer broke in and the evening was ruined for good.

His father was just about to turn off the radio and take out his bottle of Scotch, which from the name seemed like it should taste like butterscotch, but didn't at all, when the report finally caught his attention and he sat down frowning.  His mother threw one of those dead looks at his father's back that only Jimmy ever noticed, then retreated to the kitchen, putting on her apron and starting the dishes.  The announcer was interviewing a scientist with a deep voice in an observatory, who was guessing what the explosions were.  Jimmy was riveted.  He pulled up a footstool and sat close to the radio, smelling the Scotch on his father's breath as he leaned forward in his chair too.

His father had reached the bottom of his first glass when the report came in about something hitting the earth, and when they switched to a remote broadcast from a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, he called, Irma, get in here.  Listen to this.  She came into the doorway, folded her arms, and they all stared at the radio. 

The reporter was in a crowd surrounding the object, a meteor that had fallen out of the night sky, crashing into the farm, digging a deep pit.  The police and fire engines were all on full alert, and the same deep-voiced scientist was there too.  It made Jimmy feel good to hear him, as if he would be able to explain this, keep things calm.  As a metallic, grinding sound started to come from the pit, neither Jimmy, his mom or dad were actually seeing the radio.  They were all standing in the crowd at the farm in Grover's Mill. 

As they realized that the sound was something actually unscrewing from the top of the meteor, Jimmy suddenly felt his excitement turn to... something else.  The butterflies were still in his stomach but now they were gnawing.  Jolted back to his living room, crouching on a footstool on a cold October night on an isolated farm in Centerville, California, he glanced at his parents' faces to see how serious this was, and saw that they were really nervous.

His father suddenly polished off his glass and smirked.  I don't buy it. 

What don't you buy, Alfred? his mother said quietly, as if she were asking something she might get in trouble for, as Jimmy had so many times before he learned to stop asking questions.  He was frustrated with his mother for not knowing this by now.  There aren't fake news reports.  There's no such thing.

This one is.  And they're going to be facing a lawsuit, trying to pull a stunt like this.  He looked at her with his head tilted back, the way he did when he thought he was winning an argument.  "What are you saying?  Put it into words.  This is an invasion... from Mars?"

Jimmy stared at her.  Those were exactly the words he'd use.  She ignored his father and turned back to the radio. 

His father grunted, but his eyes unfocused to stare into the distance as he lost himself in the image of a group of men approaching the meteor in the pit, carrying a white flag.  Jimmy  hunched closer to the radio as the men advanced step by step, then froze as with a rumble something started to rise out of the meteor.  With a roar, a flash of light, the men burst into flame, screaming as they burned alive, flesh roasting, the crowd panicking, running. 

With a burst of static the transmission went dead.

In the perfect silence, Jimmy couldn't breathe.  He had just heard someone really die.  He'd listened rapt as plenty of bad guys got shot by the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet, but his mind always jumped to the actor standing at the microphone making a strangled noise and probably laughing about it after.  This was real.  These men had been alive a second ago, and now they were blackened bones and ash.

His father chuckled.  But stopped a moment later as all the lights in the house went out. 

He heard a sharp little intake of breath from his mother.  She was afraid of being in the house in the dark.  She was always leaving the lights on in all the rooms and his father was always turning them off, and she would retreat to her bright bedroom, angry at his father about where his job had taken them: to an isolated farm house in the middle of the wide, dark fields with nobody around for miles.

They sat in darkness, waiting for the lights to come back on.  Jimmy got up and carefully walked to the big front window.  Miles away, downtown Centerville was always visible at night as a glow silhouetting the trees, faintly lighting up the clouds above.  When the thick ground fog set in it really got eerie, the flashing neon sign for the diner that Mr. Benson was so proud of sending up bursts of blue and red, reminding Jimmy of a sorcerer firing off spells, maybe opening a doorway to a magical kingdom.  Sometimes he turned out the living room lights and just sat staring at the glow, his mind drifting away 'til his mother came in and nervously turned on the lights or his father asked him what the heck was wrong with him, sitting in the dark.

Tonight there was no glow.  All the lights in town were off too. 

The whole valley was dark.

Then a flash lit up the sky.  An instant later a rolling, thundering blast shook the house, rattling the walls, followed immediately by a deafening burst of interference from the radio.

A glass tipped over in the kitchen and smashed on the floor.  His mother let out a shriek and his father used the same word that had made him hit Jimmy in the ear.

Jimmy stared out the window, dazed by the image seared into his retina.  It had been bright as day for one instant, the countryside lit up, the trees and telephone poles throwing stark shadows.  In the negative picture he was trying to blink away, he could still see the point the flash had come from, somewhere  out in the fields.

His mother started to sob hysterically, trying to catch her breath with little hiccups.  It's happening.  It's happening here too.  He waited for his father to tell her to stop being so silly, but there was only silence from the darkness where his father sat.  A second flash lit up the room, freezing his parents in place like a flashbulb, his mother's mouth open, eyes wide in panic, his father gazing skyward, glass of Scotch frozen halfway to his mouth.  It was the first time he'd ever seen this expression on his father's face.  Unbelievably, it looked like his father didn't know what to do. 

A second explosion of thunder rolled through the valley, shaking the house worse than the first time. 

His father dropped his Scotch.  Come on, he said, grabbed his coat, and started for the front door.

#

The Cadillac Sixty Special let out a shriek of grinding gears as his father pulled out of the driveway onto the road into town. 

What's happening, Alfred? his mother asked, and he could hear the tears in her voice now.

I don't know.  How would I know? his father was almost shouting. From the back seat Jimmy stared at the back of his father's head silhouetted by the dashboard lights, glancing nervously from side to side as he drove.  His neck looked thin, the bump at the top of his spine sticking out.  Jimmy realized that he hadn't let himself become completely scared because he believed his father would know what to do.  But with a strange feeling growing in the pit of his stomach he saw that his father was not as big as he'd always thought.  His father looked like a scared little man.

They'll know what's happening in town, his father said, sounding like he was calming himself, loosening fingers which had been gripping the steering wheel so tight they had turned white.  His mother sat silently staring ahead at the road rolling under them, caught in the only light in the whole pitch black world, bracing herself against the dashboard as if she expected something to appear in the distance and suddenly flash toward them, flying through the windshield.

Something did appear at the far range of their headlights. 

It was the billboard for the radio station.  It showed a radio tower broadcasting electric bolts over vibrant green fields of crops, a banner proclaiming "It's your choice!  KCTR mostly carried news of things happening around the valley that farmers would be interested in, and played music his mother and father both hated.  His mother called it fiddle music fit only for hayseeds" and his father didn't listen to music anyway.  Jimmy liked KCTR because it played some of his favorite adventure shows.  Though he knew that they didn't actually make the shows at the station, that they were somehow passed on from the big cities, he still looked up the road whenever they drove past and wondered about what kind of strange science went on in there.  There was a fence all the way around the field with a locked gate, the small building flanked by huge radio towers rising into the sky.  The place looked like a top secret government headquarters and was completely fascinating.

He was the only one staring up the road to the station as they drove past, so he was the only one who saw it.  The flash was so bright, the blast of thunder so deafening, that his father nearly drove off the road.  His foot instinctively slammed down on the gas and his mother screamed as they leaped ahead, heads whipping back, Jimmy thrown off the back seat to the floor, where he lay, staring, unable to clear the vision burned into  his mind's eye.

He had seen something in the flash.  No matter how much he told himself it was his imagination, which so many people had told him was overactive, the image etched in his mind was so undeniably real that he couldn't doubt it without questioning his own sanity.  It was as real as anything that had ever been inside his head. 

Even after they'd made it into town and the police chief had reported to the small crowd in his father's store that an overload at the radio station had caused the flashes and blown a transformer that had taken out the power for the whole valley, and they all laughed about the timing with the Mercury Theatre's Halloween production of War of the Worlds, even after all the grownups denied being scared, their laughter just a little too loud, Jimmy couldn't make the vision go away. 

Unnoticed, he crawled into his secret corner behind the comic book rack and curled up, making himself as small as he could, shaking until he thought his teeth would crack.

He knew now that the world was a nightmare that could burst open at any moment, that the life he had known was the illusion, that there were other things behind it that were much more real.  Things waiting to come through.

He couldn't stop himself from blinking, trying to clear the image from his vision.

Frozen in the instant of the brilliant flash an immense shape unfolded over the radio station.  The air itself, darker than night, churned and boiled in three monstrous columns rising to the heavens, where a mass of writhing limbs whirled in a blinding, chaotic frenzy. 

Ancient, alien, godlike, it stared into the world from somewhere else.

Its vast, magnificent gaze swept down to find him in the back seat of the car.

It opened his soul.

ethan

Downtown Los Angeles - Now

Ethan Harding stood in the kitchen of his downtown loft and stared at the cup of coffee, the fragile surface shimmering in the sunshine streaming down through the skylight. 

Huh, he commented to no one in particular.

This pretty much defined the word coincidence. 

He'd chosen the audiobook currently playing in his earbuds because the main character's name was Ethan Harding.  But that wasn't the only reason it had grabbed his attention on the website.  These audiobooks were self-recorded by the authors, downloaded by subscription to reside on his smartphone, carried with him through the day.  Most were unprofessional, but there was a fascination, especially for an unemployed sound engineer like Ethan, in listening to the hiss of the low rent recording equipment, the resonances of the cheap microphones, the preprogrammed quality of the homemade MIDI music themes.  You could hear trucks driving by outside wherever it was being recorded, someone closing a door in another room of the author's house.  For some reason he always imagined the authors in basements.  Some were roughly written too, but there was always an energy, a focus that he found compelling, sometimes touching.  It took an amazing amount of time and effort to write a novel, especially with all the crap life constantly threw at you. 

There were hundreds available on the website, many attempts at standard genres of sword-and-sorcery, zombie apocalypse, vampire teen romance, or Cthulhu dimensional invasion, but some had that idiosyncratic twist verging on obsession that made them more personal than the works of many more polished, processed authors.  The thing that had caught his eye about BREAKTHROUGH by Anonymous, aside from the main character's name, was the setting.  Ethan Harding the audiobook character lived in a loft in downtown Los Angeles.  And according to the audio currently playing in his ears, he too was standing in his kitchen drinking a cup of coffee.

The beginning of this first chapter had revealed the author's voice as quiet, straightforward, sometimes intense, but only as needed for the narrative.  The quality of the recording was semi-professional with a minimum of room hiss, though sometimes a strange swell of interference would drown out the narration for a moment. 

For the fifth time Ethan examined the file information on the smartphone display.  The fact that the author chose to be Anonymous was odd in itself.  Most of these authors were eager to promote themselves, to become one of the very few audiobook stars who broke into the legitimate publishing world and achieved the holy grail of a Hollywood sale. 

Then there was the whole XGF thing.

He couldn't bring himself to call her name to mind.  So she had become the ex-girlfriend, the XGF, a label, a category.  This way the chance of recalling her face was less likely.  Because the problem was, of course, her face caught in moments of their life together: her absent-minded smile as she toweled her hair dry in the morning; her challenging, one-eyebrow-raised appraisal as he launched into another attempt at telling a joke they both knew he'd never get right in a million years; her vulnerable, sad look as she slept, hands pressed together under one cheek like an ideal of sweet childhood slumber from the 1950's.  The pain was almost unbearable. 

They had broken up four and a half weeks ago after a two year relationship, the second year living together on the west side in an old Spanish duplex with a cat and a parakeet who hated each other.  The sunshine on that broad westside street was bright in the mornings and diffuse in the cool afternoons.  After he moved downtown with its hard, gritty light that sharpened everything to a knife edge, somehow amplifying the percussion of the factories and warehouses, memories of the westside sunlight broke his heart as much as anything.

It had all started to go south when the world decided that the post-production sound mixing studio he worked for was no longer needed.  Big Sound of Hollywood was never big enough for major releases, and the mid-to-low to low-low-low budget films that were their bread and butter suddenly discovered that a kid with a laptop could do a passable mix.  These days a kid with a laptop could do just about anything passably.  And Ethan, along with so many, many others, suddenly found his skills at a console, honed over decades of finessing the tiniest water splash or coaxing the perfect timbre out of an airplane engine, were an echo in the vaults of film history.

His XGF had been let go from editorial two weeks prior, and they all were waiting to see where the axe would fall next.  Well, turned out it fell on the whole damn building.  They all went out to lunch at the Formosa Cafe and raised more than a few glasses to the lost art of the mix.  Quiet Shane and funny Ron and the father of them all, Barry.  Barry, whose first mix had actually been with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, when they took the industry by complete surprise and all those asshole executives started wearing Nehru jackets and beads, growing their sideburns out and hair down over their collars.  And here was Barry, sloshed in the dim little bar, overweight and sad, voice shot from cigarettes, completely irrelevant, without a clue as to what came next, his team of younger men, his family of sons in exactly the same circumstance.  What a time to be alive.

Ethan vowed to himself again to call Barry, but knew that he wouldn't.  He had called Ron once, but Ron's humor was just irritating when there wasn't a reason to be funny.  None of them were finding work.  There were no openings at the big houses, which were up against the same problem.  Films were becoming more and more like three ring circuses that came through town once or twice a year, always to the same Cadillac post-production facilities.  Those guys were holding onto their jobs so tightly Ethan could almost hear their knuckles cracking over the phone when he sat down for the first of many grim sessions of job hunt calls.

So he set about the long, painful job of reinventing himself.  The old Ethan had to be sloughed off like molt.  As yet the shiny new Ethan had failed to emerge. 

His XGF had not been on board for the process.  She was on to her next editorial job within weeks.  People would always need to know where shots were, whether they were digital, analog, or scratched on a cave wall with a stick.  It was Ethan's rarefied skills that had gone the way of the dodo. 

One irony that was not lost on him, among so many ironies these days, was his collection.  Back when he had money to burn (three months ago, for Christ's sake), he had enjoyed collecting extinct sound equipment:, an 1857 Phonoautograph, an Edison cylinder phonograph, a Graphophone, a few Webster wire recorders, early home reel-to-reel recorders, boxes of Speak-O-Phone aluminum disks of early radio recordings.  These treasures of collecting that he used to love for the pure owning of them had become the weight that had finally sunk the relationship. 

After weeks of vague dissatisfaction with everything he did or said she had asked him to find a way to get rid of this useless junk that was just gathering dust.  It felt like she was denying his entire history as well, and they had a major fight about it that the relationship never came back from.  Her eyes were always more guarded after that.  She never let herself be vulnerable to him again. 

Two weeks after the fight Ethan had found the downtown loft, the perfect setting for his fantasy of rejuvenated bliss, but it had become another issue they fought over.  She saw the re-gentrification as a wave of posers and flakes as bad as anything the film industry could vomit forth; he saw it as a chance for rebirth.  The retrofitted warehouse, now home to a warren of actual artists, stoned poets and photographers, was just what he was looking for.  He thought.  He knew deep down in the pit of his stomach as he stood in the dim kitchen, staring at his coffee cup caught in the dusty ray of sunlight, surrounded by this truckload of useless junk that had cost him a fortune, that he had become the centerpiece of his own collection.

And God help him, he could not get her out of his head.  In spite of a self-image so pitiful and weak he wanted to kick himself in the ass, she had become a part of his thought patterns.  The paths he used to forge so logically through the maze of problems at the mixing board, branching out to solve minor details, rejoining the major artery to emerge triumphant, even warranting  an impressed nod from Barry, had become absolutely circular, and he was trapped.  He kept coming back to her again and again and again. 

In his head she walked hand in