The Grays by Whitley Strieber Read Free Book Online Page B

wrong?”
    “All right. Fine.” He got up, crossed the room, and went downstairs.
    She heard him shut the door to the basement that Dan had finished for him when he was five. It was boy heaven down there, with an X-Box and a TV/DVD combo and a hulking but powerful Dell computer, plus his dinosaur collection, all of them painted with the utmost realism, and his train set, HO-grade, which had lighted houses, streetlights lining the streets, and lighted trains. He would play trains in the dark down there by the hour, muttering to himself in the voices of a hundred train men and townsfolk, all of whom he had invented, all of whose lives evolved and changed over the years. Katelyn thought of the train set as a sort of ongoing novel, and that her boy was a word genius as much as he was a math genius.
    The care he lavished on everything he modeled came from his ability to concentrate. Even when he’d been little, he hadn’t been clumsy. When he was eight, she’d discovered while cleaning up one day that the tiny human figures in his train set all had different-colored eyes, they had been that carefully finished.
    She had loved him so, then, looking down at a tiny suited figure with a tie so small that you had to look under a magnifying glass to see the design he’d painted on it. And then you would hear him deep in the night talking to himself, and you would realize that he was reciting a book he’d read, maybe even years ago, all from memory, just to enjoy it again.
    Conner and Dan had celebrated the completion of the room by putting a plaque on the door: THE CONNER ZONE .
    She and her husband had celebrated in quite a different way, later thatnight. This was your garden-variety tract house, as isolated as it and its three neighbors were, and the walls were tract-house thin. They did not feel that this extremely sensitive child needed to overhear the sounds of sex in the next room. And on that night, at last, they had been able to use their bed the way a bed was meant to be used, instead of being as still as possible, wincing at every squeak, and keeping their cries to a whisper.
    “Dan,” she said, walking into the kitchen where he had begun trimming ribs, “there’s something kind of ugly going on. Paulie’s having a party and Conner’s not invited.”
    “Jesus.”
    “They’re actually outside playing with flashlights, which I kind of have the feeling is on purpose.”
    “Kids are cruel.”
    “Listen, incidentally, I had an e-mail from Marcie Cotton about you.”
    “Oh?”
    “They’ve reached the point of asking general-faculty opinion.”
    “Oh, God.”
    “I gave you a great report.”
    “What a relief.”
    “Come on, what else would I do?”
    “Tell the truth like everybody else. I’m dull as dishwater in the classroom.”
    “No, you’re actually interesting. It’s physiological psychology that’s dull. In the hands of most profs, it causes birds to die in the trees outside their classrooms. At least yours just fly off.”
    “Dull is dull. I should’ve used puppets or worn costumes.”
    “I would have preferred almost any other referee, frankly.”
    “Yeah, you and me both. But I can handle her . . . maybe.”
    “Not too much.”
    Dan went to her, embraced her. “You’re my girl.”
    There came a sound from below—a crash.
    “He just kicked the wall,” Katelyn said. “Like father, like son.”
    “Maybe a mano a mano would be good.”
    One of the most precious things about this Dan Callaghan whom her heart had whispered to her to marry was that he was a genuinely good father—not an easy thing to be for a boy as challenging as their son. But Conner’s brilliance and demanding personality also made him fascinating, and she thought that the rewards for loving their boy were substantial. “Maybe a mano a mano would be very good,” she said.
    As he went downstairs, he noticed that the Conner Zone sign had been removed from the door, leaving some areas of peeled paint that would have to