Corpus earthling

by Louis Charbonneau

The westbound freeway reached the intersection of the automatic ocean causeway. I made the necessary instrument adjustments and shot out over the water onto the broad cement lanes that followed the coastline to the north, a modern eight lane platform suspended on pilings a quarter mile from the shore. There was a manual drive highway just inland from the beach for slow and local traffic, but if you wanted to make speed you took the causeway out over the—

It struck me like a blow below the belt. Water! The dream! A senseless, terrorized animal, I found myself scrabbling at the door, trying to force it open. The same automatic controls which guided the car along the road also froze the doors while the car was in motion. I came out of that first blind moment of panic and sat rigid in the seat, my eyes fixed on the white ribbon of pavement directly in front of me, refusing to look to either side at the black, pounding surf. Headlights rushed at me on the inbound lanes and hurtled past. The engine whined and wind buffeted the speeding car, but I imagined that I could hear above these sounds the crash of waves below me.

Revulsion came, bitter self-recrimination, contemptuous denunciations of my own animal fears. You're going to see Laurie, I told myself. There's nothing to be afraid of. You won't have to go near the water. You won't be alone. The nightmare of drowning is a phantom of the night, symbolical only, a graphic representation of your subconscious fear of sanity. Face it. Recognize it. Accept it.

But the voice, I thought. The voice of command. The alien mind. That is real. I have heard it while I was awake and fully rational. That was no dream symbol. That was real.

But was it? Hadn't I investigated every one of the suspects, the four ordinary young people who were supposed to be possessed by some incredible thing from Mars? Hadn't I convinced myself that each one was innocent? Wasn't it about time that I began facing the irrefutable facts, admitting that the weird plot against me was a fantastic concoction of a sick imagination, revealing a not very unusual hidden desire for self-destruction?

I grew calmer. In that moment the terror of insanity seemed less horrifying than the spectre of a vicious alien force that could possess and destroy me. At last I looked toward the shoreline at the familiar sight of waves rising to a white crest and toppling over to wash upon the beach. I had seen this a thousand times. It was nothing to be afraid of. It couldn't touch me.

I was nearing the stretch of beach where Laurie's trailer should be. Numbers flashed by at each of the ramps connecting the causeway with the shoreline road. I pushed the lane change button that would shift the car into the slower outer line of traffic. At the next ramp I turned off. The automatic controls cut off as soon as the car sped onto the ramp. My hands were sticky on the wheel and my arms quivered with tension, but seconds later I was turning onto the beach highway. I began to feel safer now that there was no longer any water under me.

The road rose and dipped with the curvature of the land. Crowding the hills to the right, on the inland side of the road, were luxurious beach apartments and nests of trailer courts, their lights creating a rich pattern in the darkness. Most of the choice land along the beach itself had been usurped by beach clubs and expensive resort hotels, except for an occasional luxury group of trailers. It was in one of these, the Beachcomber Trailer Lodge, that Laurie's trailer had a uniquely desirable front row site.

I parked off the road on a bluff overlooking the trailer village and the beach. Walking down, I could hear the rolling thunder of the surf, and each reverberating crash caused my body to flinch in the way that, watching a fight, you will seem to feel the thud of a telling blow. I tried not to think about the limitless black plain of water stretching beyond the narrow strip of beach.

Laurie's was a crisply modern mobile home with a large window facing the shoreline. Most of the surrounding trailers were dark and there was the stillness of the empty and unused about them. There were few cars about and only a couple of helicopters on the landing strip near the road. This was mostly a weekend resort, I concluded, for those who could afford the extreme luxury of a home in town and a summer or weekend hideout at the beach. At this season of the year, many of them were undoubtedly deserted.