Invaders From Mars by Ray Garton Read Free Book Online

still shining stars onto his wall.
    The alarm clock beside his bed read 4:40.
    He had left the window open and rain was blowing into the room, bringing with it a biting chill.
    David suddenly felt rather dizzy. He realized, looking around him, that the planetarium by his bed was slowly beginning to turn, sending the stars around and around the room. He rubbed his eyes, still puffy with sleep, and blinked them several times, puzzled. He hadn’t flipped the rotate switch, and yet that was what it was doing. He sat up straighter in bed as the stars began to move faster and faster, creating a tornado of light around him. Soon they were no longer specks but silent streaks whizzing over the walls and ceiling.
    A bright flash of lightning filled the room with white and startled David; he pressed himself against the headboard and lifted a hand before his eyes. The lightning seemed to last a long time, much longer than usual.
    “Jeeeeez,” he breathed.
    Catlike hissing and spitting sounds made David look over the foot of the bed. The planetarium was spinning madly, shooting sparks and puffing smoke in little clouds. The room was suddenly black and silent except for the sounds of the storm outside.
    David kicked the covers aside and hurried to the window. He gripped the sash to pull it down when the rain stopped—not gradually, as rain usually does, but all at once, leaving behind it an eerie stillness.
    Pushing the window all the way open again, David looked outside and listened. Only the sound of water dripping softly from the trees could be heard. The moon and stars were gone, hidden behind dark storm clouds. It was so dark, David could barely see anything outside; the hill was just a dim shape in the distance.
    As he gazed out the window, David realized how tense he felt. Beneath his white pajamas, his limbs were rigid as sticks and there was a tightness in his chest that came only with . . . dread. Something was not right.
    The silence outside was too heavy, too thick, worse, even, than the silence that followed Mrs. McKeltch’s “One, two, three, four, five!”
    David leaned toward the window, palms flat on the sill, and waited, although for what he did not know. The whole night seemed to be waiting . . . for something.
    And then it came, a sound so sudden and loud that it ripped the silence jaggedly in two—a horrible, throbbing sound so deep and massive that David could not only hear it, he could feel it in the very marrow of his bones, in the windowsill beneath his hands, vibrating the air around him. David was so terrified that, for a moment, he could not move a muscle. His hands felt like lead weights when he finally lifted them from the windowsill and reached over his head, grabbed the sash, and pulled it down.
    It would not budge.
    With a frightened groan, David tried again, putting all his weight into it, lifting his feet from the floor, hanging, for just an instant, from the sash.
    The window was sturdy as stone.
    He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away from the window, then started to hurry down the hall and wake his parents, when the room slowly began to fill with a soft light. Brighter and brighter . . .
    David looked out the window again and his jaw hung loosely, his eyes became so wide that they felt like they might pop from their sockets.
    There were lights cutting through the cloud layer, solid bars of light that landed on the ground in bright circles, flashing with a strobe effect, each appearing then disappearing in a heartbeat, beams of bluish-white dancing in a strange, hypnotic rhythm so precise, so perfect, that it seemed important, significant.
    David gawked at the lights darting over the ground until something above caught his eye, something descending from the sky, easing through the thick clouds, something glowing and huge, so huge that its size alone filled David’s stomach with an icy ache. Its light diffused outward through the storm clouds, giving them a shimmering glow. It was a