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The Wannoshay Cycle
Chapter Three Joshua's first reaction to seeing the alien ship for the first time was to lean as far backwards as he could without falling so he could get a good look at it. At first the ship appeared cubical in shape, but as his eyes adjusted, Joshua could see more and more angles making up the exterior of the hull as he walked closer. The ship had at least six vertical faces that bent at the top to form a sort of peak. The unfamiliar angles of the dented ship made his eyes ache. "Good Lord," he whispered. As they walked closer, he could see grayish foam clustered around the many rents and tears in the hull, while power leads, cables, and thick wires of human design wrapped around the exterior like spider webs. Scaffolding encircled the perimeter of the octagonal ship, and eight crooked spires sprouted from the top of the ship. Most of the spires stretched out far enough to touch the plastic bubble-tent surrounding the ship. Men and women in dark green uniforms walked across the scaffolding, and their shouts died away when they saw him and the young private. Petersheim moved toward an open hatch just below the middle-most projection of the ship. The spires made Joshua think, for some reason, of the points on the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Joshua followed the soldier, his legs suddenly heavy. As soon as he stepped inside the flat black metal walls of the ship, his breath was taken away by the cold. Instead of the institutional odor outside the ship, he could now smell something tangy and earthy, as if a handful of heavy-duty rock salt had been thrown into a fresh puddle of mud after a rain. The odor made the air of the ship feel too close. Petersheim pulled out a hand light and popped it on. The light flickered red, and then glowed orange, illuminating an irregularly-shaped alcove containing a pair of rounded openings. "They're down there waiting for you, padre," the private said, pointing at the door on their left. "I'll take your camos, sir. They want you to meet him with your priest suit on, for full effect, I guess." Joshua slipped off the camouflage coveralls with a pang of regret and a shudder of cold; he'd left his coat in the car, and he was enjoying the sensation of nano-fiber covering him, making him feel almost invisible. The private took the suit and handed him the light. "I'm not authorized to go any further," he said, pointing toward the left-hand opening and the cold corridor on the other side of it. "Don't worry—you'll see better once your eyes adjust. The smell doesn't ever really go away, though. Good luck, Father." Joshua thanked the private as the young man walked out of the ship. Inhaling the strange, loamy odor, he left the alcove and entered the cold hallway. After a walking for over a hundred feet, his instincts telling him to turn around before and after each step, he turned into a room bathed in blue-gray light. Inside the room stood Colonel Cossa, along with four other people. A large woman in a gray jumpsuit had her back to Joshua, leaning over someone resting on what looked like a black metal chair. Two armed soldiers were positioned with their weapons lowered on either side of the woman. The rest of the room was bare, just flat black walls, black floor, and black ceiling, all absorbing the light instead of reflecting it. "Lieutenant," the colonel said in a low voice. He reached out a slender hand and tapped the woman in the jumpsuit. The woman flinched in surprise at his touch, and then sucked in a sudden, harsh breath. "You're dismissed for now, Lieutenant." The large woman stepped back and turned, nodding at Joshua. He began to nod back, surprised at both the paleness of her round face and the sweat covering it, and then he saw who she'd been standing over. This fifth being was not a human. Wrapped from top to bottom in bandages, it was leaning on a twisted piece of black metal that seemed to have been pulled up from the floor of the ship. Not a human. Joshua looked at the being's too-short legs and the short, twitching cords on the being's head that slipped out of their wrappings like snakes or fingers. Alien. Colonel Cossa stepped forward with a smile. At some point the pale woman in the jumpsuit must have walked past Joshua to leave the room, but he hadn't even noticed. "Glad you could make it today, Father," the colonel said as he shook Joshua's numb hand. "One of our language experts," he said, nodding at the hallway where Joshua had just came from, and where the woman in the jumpsuit must have just gone. "She's been working with a team of five others to help get our new friends up to speed with English. It's been a challenge, but we're seeing the results at last. Especially with this fellow," he added, looking over at the creature in the middle of the room. Joshua let go of the colonel's hand and let his own hand drop to his side, useless. His whole body felt useless in the presence of this mummified being. The alien's salty, inhuman aura filled his nose and mouth, flooding his senses until he felt like he could even see and hear it. "We would've invited you here sooner," the colonel continued, "but the red tape was significant. Plus we had to keep you shielded from the media and other ... elements." "I think I know what you're talking about," Joshua said, finding his voice at last as he thought about the Creature from the Black Lagoon outside the encampment. He tried to smile, but his lips stuck to his teeth, making him feel like he was grimacing. He forced his lips together again. The colonel nodded at that and turned to the creature leaning on the black metal structure. The long-armed, short-legged being was bouncing slightly, giving off more of the salty smell he'd noticed the instant he entered the ship. Salt, and something almost sweet, underneath it. "But now," Cossa said, "I want you to meet the Wannoshay we've named Johndo. As in John-space-Doe. Johndo, this is Joshua. He's a priest. A man of faith." "Their skin is extremely susceptible to heat and sunlight," Cossa said. "The wrappings protect him from the air and sun while he adjusts to our environment. We've been supervising the work on drugs that will help him and the rest of the Wannoshay adapt." Joshua fought back a sudden urge to run from the black-walled ship, away from the soldiers and the tall alien—the Wannoshay—with its musky smell. "In any case," Cossa said, "Johndo has informed us that he and his people need to talk to someone affiliated with religion." "Right," Joshua said. He remembered this fact from their Netstream conversations. He felt as if his brain was starting to function again. Joshua tried to swallow. When he realized that all eyes in the room were trained on him, he cleared his throat. "How can I help?" "Talk to him," the colonel said. "Get him to tell us all he can about his people. Why they're here. What they want. If more of them are coming." Joshua nodded. "So. Where do we begin?" Before the colonel could answer, Johndo straightened up with a series of cracking sounds. The musky tones of his odor had gone away, replaced by a sweeter smell, like vanilla, though the smell of salt remained. Once he was standing upright, nearly seven feet tall, Johndo made a high-pitched humming sound. And then he opened his lipless mouth. "Wannoshay," Johndo said. His voice was lilting and high-pitched, almost whistling from his mouth. He reached a wrapped hand behind him until he found the twisted piece of metal. He leaned on it again, as if standing upright left him unbalanced, and then he raised his bandaged hands toward Joshua. Four stubby gray fingers, tipped with black claws, peeked out of the bandages. Joshua swallowed, blinking rapidly. His could feel his heart beating too fast, but he managed to meet the alien's gaze and lift his lips into the semblance of a smile. "Wannoshay ha' weagh shun," Johndo said. Joshua focused all of his attention on the alien's words, and with a jolt of recognition he realized the alien was speaking English, talking about what must have been the weak sun of his home planet. He nodded and smiled without grimacing this time. "Wannoshay ha' cyguls of longh ..." ("darkness" was symbolized by a four-fingered hand held over the gap in the bandages where Joshua assumed the alien's eyes were, the hand dropping slowly like a sun sinking against the horizon). Johndo's arms spread wide as he spoke of the cold nights, his four-fingered hands reaching out to the dark metal walls, almost brushing the soldier next to the colonel. "Wannoshay shun, dhyingh ..." Johndo continued his story, and Joshua was able to piece most of the events together, though the effort was tiring. He found it easier to understand the alien when Johndo used a combination of gestures, intonations, and the occasional spoken word to get his point across. With the cooling of their planet, the People (from the forceful way Johndo said it, Joshua felt the word needed capitalization) moved below ground, into caves, turning their backs on the upper world. After a few minutes more, once he'd grown familiar with the way Johndo spoke, Joshua could've sworn he heard Johndo's low, warbling voice inside his head, even when the Wannoshay's mouth didn't move. The People dug deeper and deeper into the earth with their tools and clawed hands. They built new homes underground, close to the warm, fresh-water springs protected from the cold above. And there they stayed, until they found ... someone... Joshua was leaning forward, on the verge of losing his balance, when Johndo's words trailed off. The last thing the alien had said had sounded like some sort of name. Something like "my light." Or "twilight." Johndo lowered his head, as if he'd run out of words. "Who?" Joshua whispered. "Who did you find? What about twilight?" A shiver passed over Johndo's long body as soon as Joshua said that word, starting at his bare gray feet and rippling up through his bony torso and stopping at his lipless mouth, which was almost hidden in his face. His sweet smell was turning salty again. "Johndo?" Joshua said, stepping closer. "Easy, Father," the colonel said. The warning in the veteran soldier's voice cooled Joshua's curiosity. He'd forgotten about the colonel, not to mention the two other soldiers in the room who now had their pulse weapons resting in their arms. "For now," Johndo said in a slow, deliberate voice. "Now we live here." Inhaling Johndo's shifting scents of vanilla and salt, Joshua realized the Wannoshay was no longer talking aloud in his graceful mix of words, gestures, and intonations. Johndo was talking directly to him, inside his head. The priest felt both violated and awed, even as his face grew hot. "I am glad, Joshua, grateful you came to us. I needed to talk, but only with one of your people's Elders. Not a warrior, not a student of battle. Only an Elder like you, for you are aware of the soul of a people. Only an Elder knows what must be taken on faith." Joshua's ears began to ring. He placed a hand on his chest, where an old pain had started to grow. That high-pitched voice inside his brain was overwhelming. He felt sweat cover his forehead despite the cold of the ship. "Know a people's soul," Johndo said with another full-body shiver, "and you know their true history." His voice was fading inside Joshua's head, while his short-fingered, bandaged hands began to quiver at his sides. "Tell me more," Joshua whispered without moving his lips. "Please." But Johndo the Wannoshay was no longer talking. Trembling, his shoulders sagged, and the hint of skin Joshua could see under the layers of bandages was gray mixed with traces of pink, like scar tissue. Putting all of his weight against the flexible black metal behind him as if exhausted, Johndo let out a hissing breath. He stopped trembling and inclined his head toward Joshua. Your turn, that look said to him. Looking over at the colonel and his fellow soldiers—one of whom, he now noticed, had been recording the entire conversation with a small lapel camera—Joshua took a deep breath and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He held the cold air in his lungs and let the smells of the alien fill his nose. Then he exhaled and began talking. "The world was created in six days," he began. "And on the seventh day, God rested." He pointed up, his face still warm. "After that, things became interesting." Stopping for breath half an hour later, he'd covered most of Genesis mixed in with some Darwin, and he was now following that with a condensed version of the New Testament. Johndo seemed to be listening intently, and Joshua did his best to not lose the thread of his narrative whenever the tall alien's body rippled with more of his convulsive movements. He let out a long breath and felt the ache in his chest diminish. But before Joshua could continue, the Wannoshay made a clawed fist and punched the metal structure on which he was resting. The black metal dented, then oozed back into shape until the indentation disappeared. Colonel Cossa, standing just a few feet away, stepped forward, as if he'd been waiting for such an action. "That's enough for today, Father," he said. "Good work. We'll leave Johndo here, and I'll get you back to your church. But first I'd like to show you something." The ship felt cold again, bone-chilling and damp as a cave. "It's for his own good," the colonel said, touching his arm to lead him out of the room. "Otherwise he'd injure himself. We think it's some sort of reaction to the warmth of our planet. Plus they have a low stimulation threshold, and I think he probably passed it about ten minutes ago." The colonel tipped him a wink that Joshua couldn't comprehend. "He's never communicated so much in one day with us before. Even with the team of linguists. Now, come with me, please, Father." They turned away from the sight of Johndo's exposed gray skin, mottled now with purplish-red splotches. Johndo was giving off a keening sound, somewhere between a moan and a shout. Joshua shuddered as he was led down a sloping passage away from the haunting sounds in the meeting room. At the bottom of the hall stood three more soldiers, wearing full body armor and armed with pulse rifles. At their feet was a thick, ugly hatch made of a bluish metal so unlike the smooth, unshining black metal of the alien ship that it had to have been made by human hands. Two of the soldiers turned the wheel at the top of the hatch and lifted it while the third squatted down in front of the opening. Her gun was aimed straight into the widening gap. A sharper smell of mud mixed with salt drifted out from the other side of the hatch. Joshua felt his heart drop. In the back of his mind he'd been wondering this about the aliens all afternoon, even as Johndo told him about their dying sun, their migration to the caves, and their mysterious discovery far beneath the surface of their frozen planet. "What is this?" Joshua said, his voice a croak. "Just take a look," the colonel murmured from beside him. "So you know what we're dealing with here, Father." Barely breathing, Joshua leaned closer toward the dark opening in the floor of the ship. A soft humming came from below, but the sound was not caused by any sort of machine. This humming came from something alive. This was where the rest of the Wannoshay had been hidden. The rest of the People. "A light, Private," Cossa said, and the young man on their right popped a hand light. An orange glow filled the small room and the hole at their feet. At first all he could focus on was the cave where the aliens were gathered. Feeling slightly light-headed, he saw that tunnels extended away from this main cave that was easily fifty feet wide, its walls made up of black, hard-packed Illinois dirt. Bitter cold rose up from the cave and its tunnels like a wintry wind. Did they dig all these tunnels in the past two months? Hundreds of aliens, hundreds of the People. How could this be? Joshua wanted to ask about all of this to Cossa, but once again, his mouth wouldn't cooperate. He stared downwards, unable to blink, and looked at the mass of aliens looking up at him. They flinched away from the light, and a handful of them swung their long arms, striking those closest to them and causing a ripple of movement that was quickly quieted. Their skin was an uneven, pale gray color, as if they'd never been in the sun, and something looked wrong with the long, oval shape of their heads. Other than the wrappings on their hands, these Wannoshay had no bandages or wrappings covering their bodies. Too many. The aliens pushed closer to the opening, and Joshua pulled back. He stared dumbly at the strange vertical growth on their foreheads and their writhing hair, until his eyes lost focus. There were too many of them to have all fit in this ship. His next thought, to his lasting shame every time he thought about that day later, was one of fear: Disease. Don't get too close—you'll pick up whatever sickness that these beings carried with them from their world. Leprosy. Contagion. As he stared, wrestling with his own fears, the aliens below him stopped pushing closer. They looked up at him with their oval faces and black eyes and closed mouths. Silent. And then, at the same time, as if choreographed, the vertical growths in the middle of each of their foreheads quivered and opened, exposing a black, sideways eye. "Close it," he whispered, hands in front of his mouth and nose. "Please turn off that light and close the hatch. Please." The colonel pulled him gently back from the edge of the hole, and the three soldiers let the hatch drop back to the floor, sealing the hole again. The black, liquid metal of the floor shook from the impact, buckled, and then flattened again. The slam of the closing hatch reverberated in Joshua's ears all the way back to his church, and that hollow sound would echo in his chest and in his mind for many weeks to come. Back to the main Wannoshay Cycle page |
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