Chapter 4

“You’re so lucky you get to watch TV for homework,” Jane murmured, peering down at where Cami lay on her bedroom floor. She’d taken over the bed, a fleet of textbooks and binders surrounding her. “The only thing I’ve gotten to watch was a documentary about the history of asylums.”

“That sounds depressing,” Cami remarked. “Weren’t those, like, super inhumane and stuff?”

Jane nodded. “Super inhumane. One guy actually had to leave the class to throw up. There was all this footage of the inmates running around covered in--”

Cami turned up her laptop's volume, until her ears were flooded with crackly laugh tracks. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Fair enough.” Jane leaned against the wall, chewing the lid of a highlighter. “What’s the show you’re watching about?”

“It’s about a housewife, her husband, their two kids, and all the little adventures they get into.”

Jane’s brow quirked up. “Wasn’t that last week’s show, too?”

“Yeah, but in this one, the wife talks back sometimes. So it’s considered really controversial.” Cami sighed, twirling the earbud cord around her finger. “Apparently things get really interesting in the sixties, and women get to be protagonists. And there’re these things called magicoms, which have monsters and witches and stuff.”

“Still pretty white, though?" Jane ventured. "And painfully heterosexual?"

Cami groaned. “You bet. Gay people seemingly haven’t been invented yet, but there’s maybe one show about a Black woman, I think.”

“That’s cool. What class is this for, again?”

“TV and Social Change. It’s a Comms class.”

“Nice.”

And just as the two of them had gotten nestled into a comfortable silence, it was interrupted. A warm, sonorous hum filled the room. It didn’t seem to come from any real direction, like every cell in the air was singing along.

“What the hell is that?” Jane breathed. “You’re hearing it too, right? I’m not crazy?”

Cami shook her head. “Either you’re not crazy, or we’re both crazy.”

A light poured in through the window, dyeing Cami’s bedroom silver, as if the moon had come to rest in her backyard.

Except it was late in the afternoon.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Cami asked.

“That we’re probably going to get murdered?”

“That we have to investigate this.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the hum grew louder, grew layered. A high, shimmering chorus joined in, an arpeggio that sounded almost like windchimes.

The two of them tiptoed downstairs, past Cami’s dozing mother, towards the door to the backyard. With every step, the hum pulsed, a sensation Cami felt deep in her bones.

Maybe they were going to be murdered, but what a way to go out.

Cami opened the door, shuddering as her bare feet hit cool, dewy grass. Normally, the sensation would send her skin crawling, but now, she barely felt it.

“What is that?” Jane breathed, squinting into the trees.

As Cami’s eyes adjusted, she saw what could only be a celestial being. At the core of the radiant light was a humanoid figure, one that stood tall and resplendent. It was like an entire constellation had been condensed into a body. The entity bore no features save for its silhouette, though a humanoid one, with arms, legs, and a head.

It stood at the edge of the backyard, which gave way straight into the forest beyond. Had it crawled up from the creek? Crashed down from the heavens?

“It’s beautiful,” Cami whispered.

The creature turned its featureless face towards them. How could something so blank offer such a burning stare?

It raised a long arm, splaying out its thin fingers. The song grew louder, more complex as more voices joined in.

Cami felt lighter than air. Like she was gliding across the yard, towards the beckoning stranger.

I always wondered what it’d be like to be taken by aliens, she thought. Who would’ve guessed it’d be so relaxing?

The world grew dark as she was engulfed by the forest canopy, what little light the dusk had offered disappearing. Cami stumbled as the earth beneath her grew unsteady. As she grew closer, the figure grew clearer. It did have a face, after all. Two wide, round eyes that shone like molten gold. Long, pointed ears. A literal ear-to-ear grin, one that bore row upon row of knife-sharp fangs…

That’s not good, some distant part of her brain remarked. But of course, her feet kept moving, one step after the other, until…

“Hey, Cami, snap out of it!”

Her left arm jerked back so hard Cami thought it’d pop out of its socket. The woods came into focus, and Cami noticed that she stood at the edge of her yard, overlooking the creek, right at the edge of its drop. It wasn’t a fatal fall by any means, but it would’ve left her scraped and muddy, which was arguably worse than at least some forms of death.

“What just happened?” Cami asked, her eyes fixed on the trickling stream below. These days, she avoided the creek. Though it’d once been a wonderland of pretty rocks and leaves to press, she didn’t have the time for it anymore. Also, it just felt… different. Smaller. Claustrophobic, almost.

This definitely wasn’t helping.

“I think some kind of folie à deux,” Jane said. She was panting, her hands clutching at her blouse, a hallmark of an oncoming panic attack.

Cami, straining to lighten the mood, scoffed and asked, “Since when do you speak French? I thought you hated French and going to an immersion elementary school is why you have an anxiety disorder.”

“Oh, I hate it more than walking face-first into a wall, but it’s a psychological term.” She reached for her phone. “It translates to ‘madness of two,’ and essentially means when two people have a shared psychotic break. Hallucinations are pretty uncommon in shared psychosis, but not impossible.”

While Cami’s mental state was definitely questionable, last she’d checked, psychosis wasn’t a problem. “So, what, two perfectly healthy people just randomly hallucinated the same thing?”

“I wouldn’t say either of us are perfectly healthy--”

Cami scoffed. “Jane, there’s no way this wasn’t some kind of supernatural encounter. We have to tell everyone at Freakspotters.”

Jane sighed, and Cami actually watched the various thoughts and feelings flash across her face in a medley of conflict and confusion. “I don’t know. What if we sound crazy?”

“Then two people think we’re crazy,” Cami replied with a shrug. “Of course, they’re two people who joined a supernatural club, so I feel they have a high threshold for this kinda stuff.”

“Craziness?”

“Yeah.”

Another sigh, but after this one, Jane straightened up. That was a good sign. “Okay, we can tell everyone at Freakspotters. But I don’t want to talk about this for the rest of the night. At all. Promise?”

“Fair enough.” Jane had always been the type to process things internally. While Cami got over things by spilling her guts to anyone who reached out, Jane bottled things up until the storm settled. Cami had long ago stopped trying to understand, but she respected it. “Wanna head inside? Dinner should be soon.”

“Sure.”

But as they stepped out into the clear air of the yard, the light barely changed, just going a tint brighter and donning a silver hue.

Cami looked up, and to her surprise, the moon hung above their heads, an entourage of stars twinkling around it.

“Wasn’t the sun only about to set when we saw that light?” Jane asked, her voice timorous. “When did it get this late?”

“Missing time!” Cami exclaimed, resisting the urge to leap about and scream it at the top of her lungs. “Jane, this is totally aliens. That encounter we had couldn’t have been so short but so long any other way. Something supernatural is up.”

“I thought we had a promise, Cami.”

“Fine, fine. We’ll call it a night.”

~

“Did you two fall asleep up there or something?” Cami’s mother teased. “I probably hollered at you for two minutes straight that I made dinner, but I didn’t get a response.”

Cami forced out a laugh. “Sorry, Mom.”

“College is exhausting,” Jane added, a bit half-heartedly.

Neither of them could meet her mother’s steely gaze. It was much easier to stare at their late dinner, macaroni reheated in the microwave. Cami grimaced as she took a bite: it was still cold in the middle.

It’s worth it, she told herself. This is terrible, but you almost definitely saw an alien, so it’s worth it.

“I assume Jane’s staying the night?” asked her mother.

“Indeed I am,” Jane said, forcing on a grin. “If that’s alright, of course.”

“Please, Janey. You’re like a second daughter to me.”

Jane chuckled, and Cami cracked a smile: her mom was the only person who could call her Janey and live to tell the tale.

“Thanks for the food, though, really.” Jane stood with her bowl in hand, and Cami did the same. She hadn’t eaten much, but she wasn’t exactly hungry. Her racing mind had pushed her past silly things like hunger and exhaustion. All she knew was that she had to make it to Freakspotters.

~

Some dishwashing and small talk later, Cami unlocked her guitar case.

“It’s almost midnight,” Jane groaned. “I have a class at ten tomorrow. Can’t we just sleep?”

Cami shook her head. “I need to write this down.”

“Write what down?”

“The alien song.”

Jane leaned forward, slapping a hand down on the case’s lid. “No, no, we agreed we wouldn’t talk about this for the rest of the day.”

Cami jerked a thumb towards the clock on her nightstand. “It’s gonna be tomorrow in five minutes. Like you said, almost midnight.”

“This is one of those days where your quirky mind that takes everything literally is more obnoxious than charming.”

Smirking, Cami pulled her guitar case out of Jane’s reach. “Good thing this day is over in four and a half minutes, then.” And yet, meeting her friend’s eyes, she couldn’t help but soften up. “If you want, you can have first dibs on the bathroom. So you don’t have to be around. Have one of your weirdly long showers.”

“They’re not weirdly long. I just have a lot of hair.”

That much was beyond argument: Jane’s hair, even braided as it was right now, rested at the small of her back. “It’s a straight-up melee weapon,” Cami muttered. More than once, Jane had whirled around and smacked her in the face with it. “Give it all the care you need. I’ll just be here, transcribing alien music.”

“Don’t hyperfixate yourself to death.”

Cami waited until her friend was out of earshot to say, “A little late for that.”

Her hand floated to the guitar’s neck, plucking the top string. An E note. The song had started on an E or something close. She played the note a couple of times, humming along out of habit. Truth be told, she needed to work on her ear training. At this point in time, striking the right note felt about as feasible as catching the morning fog in her hands. The notes were something intangible, and she always knew when she was wrong but couldn’t quite figure out how to get it right.

Eventually, though, after some fruitless flitting around the fretboard, she found the second note. And then the third, and so on.

“You should write this down,” Jane remarked.

Cami almost jumped out of her skin. She whirled around, careful not to drop her guitar. “How long have you been standing there?”

“I just got here,” she assured her. “Seriously, though. It’s nice.” She’d already changed into her pyjamas, her hair a damp braid resting on her shoulder.

“It’s just an arpeggio.” Cami reached for her phone. I should write this down. “But it sounds like it, right?”

Jane nodded. “It’s kind of creeping me out, to be honest.”

“Good thing I’m done.” She thumbed in the notes: E, F#, A, C#. “Efac,” she muttered. “Wonder what that means.”

“Probably that we’re going crazy.”

“Probably.” She didn’t want to think so, but how many explanations could there be for this kind of thing? All of a sudden, she needed a distraction. “Wanna watch more bad old sitcoms with me?”

Jane cracked a smile at that. “Always.”