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“What would be in it for us?” Hornfly leaned forward in his chair and pointed at Bobby. “You know what’s wrong with your kind? You always go for the easy answers. Aliens, zombies, gigantic apes, gigantic reptiles, gigantic insects, crooked greedy businessmen. Your movies suck because, in art as in all things, you go for easy answers. Life on Earth is more complex than your kind can imagine.”
“That’s unfair,” said Bobby. “We’re very imaginative.”
“Watch your mouth, boy. We are incapable of unfairness. We lack the faults of your kind.”
“You’re very full of yourselves, aren’t you?”
Hornfly’s eyes narrowed. “It is merely the truth of ourselves.”
“That’s your position, is it?”
“Our position? Soon we will disgust ourselves by looking so human that you’ll not know we’re among you. Then will come the Day of Fun when we will exterminate every last one of your kind.”
“You could kill us all in one day?”
Hornfly looked a bit crestfallen. “It’ll take eight or ten months, maybe as much as a year and a half.”
“Then why do you call it ‘the Day of Fun’?”
“It sounds more inspiring than ‘the Year and a Half of Fun.’ We want it so bad, we need to think it’ll happen in twenty-four hours.”
“What were those things in the church basement?”
“Mistakes in manufacturing.”
“That’s all you’re going to say? How many weird mistakes in manufacturing do you make? What does that even mean? The Day of Fun is actually a year and a half, half-formed people are ‘mistakes in manufacturing.’ You don’t make sense. It’s all stupid talk.”
The wriggling hair stood straight up on Hornfly’s head, and his face presented an expression of great offense. “We are smarter than Alpha. Beta is smart. Alpha is stupid. They do absurd things to people on the third floor. Absurd things!”
Bobby looked at the ceiling. “There is no third floor.”
“Not here, you stupid, stupid boy. Not the third floor here. You are tedious and too stupid to live. If you were comatose on the third floor, they would get nothing worthwhile from your tiny brain. Right now, right here, Wayne Louis Hornfly could squash you like a ripe grape between our thumb and forefinger. Or burst upon you and destroy you from the inside out. But then the disappearance of a child would have to be explained. Nothing so agitates your species as the disappearance of a child.”
Bobby intuited that the time to pivot and run had arrived, but curiosity was such a powerful desire that he stood his ground. We should also consider that the human brain is not fully developed until one’s early twenties and that a fourteen-year-old does not have a full grasp of the fragility of human life.
Bobby said, “What about Pastor Larry? He must know what you are. Why does he allow you here? Why is he involved with you?”
“Surely you are aware there are those of your people who hate all humankind. He’s one of those. He wants to save theplanet by curing it of the human plague. Okay now, Bobby, Bob, Roberto—you need to go home to bed and have a nice dream.”
Bobby indicated the book on the table. “What were you reading?”
Favoring his visitor with a broad smile full of green teeth, licking his lips with a purple tongue, Wayne Louis Hornfly said, “We were reading about blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death. As useless as your kind is in all other ways, when you write tales of blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death, you create thrilling narratives that are deeply moving and inspiring.”
Hornfly rose from the armchair. By going vertical, he made the room seem smaller. He towered, loomed, glowered.
Bobby backed up a step.
“Oh,” Hornfly said, “how we would like to burst upon you and spread our filaments throughout you, into every organ, into your brain, our filaments and felts, until you have fed us all you have.”
“Nice meeting you,” Bobby said, pivoted, and ran.
In room 208, Rebecca thrust up from her bed, electrified by the recovered memory that wasn’t her own, that was Bobby’s memory shared with her psychically, which is a concept that one will not find in a novel by, say, Hemingway or Faulkner. This was an experience that would have scared most people, but after the life she had led thus far, Rebecca could not be easily frightened.
However, the encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly brought her a moment of enlightenment. Since returning to Maple Grove,she had been enlightened about one thing or another more often than during the seventeen years she’d spent in California. In the entertainment business, enlightenment was achieved only with the assistance of a guru or recreational drugs, or a personal trainer, or attendance at the Burning Man festival—all of which she’d avoided. In this case, she suddenly realized that her obsession with cleanliness had its roots in her adolescence, perhaps in encounters with the mysterious, filthy Hornfly and others like him—or maybe also from a traumatic incident involving a large volume of muck so putrid and disgusting that it would affect her psychology for the rest of her life.
“Breakfast with Bobby and Spencer in five minutes,” her phone reminded her.
Flashback to 7:10 and cut to room 212.