Page 2 of Tracked By the Possessive Alien

Edda makes a sound that is not agreement.

“You should know what he was,” she says. “Forty years he went out into that marsh chasing old ghosts. Wouldn't say what he'd found. Wouldn't say whether he'd found anything at all.” She taps the lid of the dish. “Eat that tonight. Not tomorrow.”

“Aunt Edda.” I don't know why it comes out that way. It simply does. “Did the ghosts kill him?”

She's already at the door. “He drowned,” she says. “In water he'd known since before you were born.”

The workshop takes me two more days.

I go at it shelf by shelf, because that is the only way I know how to face a thing this size, and because a small part of me is hoping to find something ordinary. A tax record. A letter. Proof that my mother's brother was a man and not a rumor with a mailing address.

On the third afternoon I try to drag the drafting table clear of the wall, and the floorboard under my heel gives. Not broken. Hinged.

Inside the gap, wrapped in oilcloth, are six journals smaller than the others, hand-stitched. And maps. Twelve of them, folded into quarters, each sealed with a button of wax pressed by the same mark: a circle with a notch cut out of the top.

They're beautiful. That's what stops me. Whatever else he was, my uncle could draw. Every map keys to landmarks instead of coordinates, so that each one reads like a set of directions given by somebody who assumed you would be walking. A dead cypress. A broken causeway. A fishing platform standing on three legs. Beneath each drawing runs a single line of the same wordless script that fills the journals.

All except the smallest, where Garrick wrote in plain letters at the bottom edge:

For whoever bothers to look.

I have been told my entire life that I don't leave things alone.

Garrick's skiff is tied beneath the house, flat-bottomed and patched in four places, and it takes me most of an hour to convince the motor that it's still employed. I push off at first light with the map sleeved in waterproof plastic and a satchel that gave up being clean sometime yesterday.

The landmarks are real. That's what unsettles me most. The dead cypress stands exactly where he drew it, split down one side, pale as bone against all that green. The causeway is a line of stones under six inches of water, and it turns south at precisely the angle he marked. He wasn't inventing any of this.

By midmorning I'm poling the skiff through a channel too narrow for the motor, hauling myself forward on handfuls of reed, and my curls have escaped the tie at the back of my neck and given up entirely.

The island is barely an island. A hummock of black soil and grass, maybe thirty paces across, ringed with reeds that stand taller than I do. According to the map, I want the north face, nine paces in from the water.

I dig for forty minutes. I hit roots, then more roots, then a mat of them so dense I have to cut through with a knife I found in a drawer that also contained eleven identical pencils.

Then the blade rings against something that is not stone.

It takes me another twenty minutes to clear it, and when I do I sit back on my heels and simply look, because there is nothing else a person can reasonably do.

It's a disc of pale metal, an arm's span across, set flush into the soil. No seam. No hinge. Ten thousand years of swamp have not put a single mark on it. At the center, worked into the surface, sits the mark from the wax seals.

I press my thumb into the notch before I let myself think about it.

The disc opens the way a flower opens, in six pieces, without any sound at all.

Inside, cradled in a material that has not corroded and has not dulled, lies a crystal roughly the length of my forearm. There is light moving inside it. Not a reflection. Not a trick of the sun through the reeds. Light that has nowhere to have come from, folding over on itself, slow as something breathing in its sleep.

I am an elementary school teacher from a town outside Portland, and I am kneeling in an alien swamp with my hands in the dirt, looking at something older than my species.

That's when I hear the voices.

They carry across water the way voices do, flattened and close, and there are at least three of them, and none of them are speaking anything I recognize. An engine idles somewhere behind the reeds. Something metal is set down on something metal.

I don't remember deciding. I have the crystal in the satchel and the satchel across my chest and the soil pushed roughly back over the disc, and I am moving low through the grass toward the skiff with my heart doing something I will absolutely be examining later.

The engine cuts out.

Whoever they are, they know exactly which island to come to. And unless my uncle told somebody, in a language nobody else can read, they should not know that at all.

CHAPTER 2