The Keith Papers

by Kevin Bennett

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

We were on the tour bus again, heading to another city, another small town, another college campus. Roadies and techies alternated naps with marijuana as lines swept past on the empty road.

And I was in the back, sitting at a table with the Guru, him in a robe. “You never answered my question, Keith,” he said. “Have you had union... congress... Have you banged a Starman?”

“I did answer. I told you no.”

“But for just a second you entertained the idea, didn’t you, Keith?”

I shrugged. “I... did think about what you said—”

“Would you like to?”

“What?”

“Have sex with a Starman?”

There was suddenly a coldness in the pit of my stomach.

The Guru stood, walked to the front of the bus: “Stop the bus. Stop right here!”

Some of the other cameramen raised eyebrows as the Guru passed in his red robe. Several roadies put down their smoking implements and cast stoned gazes on one another.

I stuttered: “Uh... I’m not sure—”

“Oh, don’t be a pussy. Everybody on this bus has met a Starman. Isn’t that right, Mort?”

Mort the driver shrugged and nodded.

I swallowed. “Why... why me?”

“Because you’re new, Keith. I need to know you’re one of us. Now, c’mon...”

“Uh...”

“I think you’ll be better for it.”

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t want to—”

“For Pete’s sake, Keith,” said Bill, who had emerged from one of the bunks to my immediate left. “Just do what the man says and then we can all get some sleep.”

Nods and mutters of agreement resounded through the bus, and I was reminded of the auditorium.

“Come, Keith,” said the Guru. And despite myself, I felt my legs following him.

We were near a field of wheat somewhere in Kansas, and the guru led me off the bus and toward a barbed-wire fence. And he jumped over it, and turned back to me, and I followed. We walked in silence for a moment. “Where are we going—”

“Shh,” he cut me off.

After a moment I noticed the wheat wasn’t brushing against my legs anymore, but I could still hear it crunching underfoot — we were in a clearing of some kind, but the wheat was still beneath my... my feet. It was bent over. There was a smell like tin or aluminum, or some metal — and I realized we were standing in the middle of a... a crop circle?

The Guru smiled wryly at me. “Keith, have you ever heard of the Nephilim?”

“Nephilim?” The word did ring true, though it took seconds for me to remember — Emmett Johnson, my old history professor. That’s where I’d heard the name.

“Yes, Keith. Nephilim. The Sons of God — but that’s not the translation. The word actually means something more akin to ‘outcasts’, but that isn’t true either. ‘The heroes of old’, as that arcane Bible puts it. Do you know what they are?”

I shook my head.

“Star Beings. The Starmen — they are the Greek gods; they are our gods, Keith. But not really. What they really are is... oh, it sounds so cheesy to say ‘ET’s’, or ‘aliens’; what they are is beings. Beings that are a hybrid of man and extraterrestrial. Their fathers came down, and they took men and women, and they had union with them, and the result were the Nephilim.”

Does it make sense that I was beginning to fear the Guru at this point? See, the thing about the Guru — he’ll say crazy things, but he always backs them up. And he was looking right in my eyes. Strange, I could see his pupils — but it was dark, wasn’t it?

Yes... I was curious about these “Nephilim.” Were they grey like all the ones in the movies? Or green? Did they have big eyes? And I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Then I felt the Guru’s hands on my shoulders. He said: “You want to meet them, don’t you?”

“Uh...”

“You want to have congress with the Nephilim, don’t you? You want to see them, and their young, and their plan — you want to open your mind, don’t you Keith?”

They were his ideas; his plans. I found I couldn’t look away. I could think about nothing else. And I realized the light that let me see the Guru — it had to be coming from somewhere... Where was it coming from?

“Yes,” said the Guru.

And I looked up, and I could see it shimmering, miles above, moving slowly, and then faster — right over us. My heart began to pound. The Guru’s hands still held my shoulders. Now his eyes were huge, black, without pupils; his hair started to rise and float from his head, and tingle — I saw sparks.

I trembled and gasped: “You’re — you’re one of them—”

He laughed — and you know what? That almost saved me. Because he had me hypnotized, you see. And when he laughed, it was like a jolt of electricity. The hold broke, just for a split second. Even as the spotlight descended from above and bathed the wheat in an eerie violet glow

And I ran.

I could still hear him laughing, but damned if I wasn’t sprinting out of that field as fast as I could; and not to the bus, either. Toward a line of trees in the distance, maybe two hundred yards. I think I might have been crying; I don’t know — how can you know what’s going on in that kind of panic?

I just ran. I didn’t think about breathing. I didn’t think about stopping. I didn’t think about anything, I just ran — and I was making ground. But then thoughts began to flashback and my stride broke. Thoughts of my years in film school, and how this was my first real job doing what I’d studied for years, and how good the money was, and how fun the first few trips had been... See, they weren’t my thoughts! They were his, they were “its”, they were “theirs.” I don’t know. I felt like a fool as I ran from the man, his laughter chasing me across the field.

The tears didn’t make me feel foolish, my fear did. His stupid red bathrobe and the unlawful entry of two strangers into a man’s field didn’t make me feel foolish; my fear did. Being in the middle of Kansas at night with a crew of people I hardly knew who expected me to bang an alien — that seemed like where I should be! My heart was berating me for running away, but my head knew better. And as I thought that, I seemed to hear Professor Emmett Johnson’s voice, giving one of the morals he always did at the end of class. That gravelly voice said: “The heart...”

What about the heart? What had he said...?

I stumbled and regained myself.

“The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can plumb its depths?”

Why was that, of all things, suddenly in my head?

There was another verse — that’s right. The Bible. He had actually forced us to read it to elucidate a particular argument...

And maybe it was this that gave me my next thought, because before I’d even made it fifty yards from the Guru, the lights were over me, and the strange thing about them was that they were entirely silent. There was no sound, only the wind. And the occasional cricket. How could a vessel that size — the thing was twice as big as our tour bus! I couldn’t get another look at it because I ran...

It was over me. And I felt it, and the lights got brighter and brighter and brighter — unbearably bright, and I felt myself rising, and suddenly I was thirty feet off the ground, and my arms and legs were going like I was still running — and I could see the image of the crop-circle slowly come into focus, and it was some crazy space-lettering or something, and my mouth went on automatic and I yelled: “Jesus Christ!”

And the thing dropped me, can you believe it?

It dropped me from its beam, it dropped me from the air — I had to be about thirty feet above the ground when this happened, I don’t know. Anyhow, it dropped me!

And I hit so hard I went unconscious.

* * *

I awoke alone in the field.

“Hey! Drunk! Why dontcha get up an’ git the hell off my property!?”

I squinted. A fellow in overalls and nothing else was pointing a gun at me. “Wha—”

“I said git up an git the hell off my property, before I call a’ damn po-lice, come in here an’ take you out—”

“Sorry,” I started to say, but he cut me off:

“‘Sorry’ ain’t gonna’ cut it, son. You sorry, you go unbend all my product, there. Now I got yer wallet, and I got yer ID, and I’m keepin’ ’em, and I’m givin’ ‘em to the po-lice anyhow, but I want you the hell outta here before I do anything else, and yer damn lucky I don’t jest shoot ya’ now—”

“For what—”

“For bendin’ all my wheat an’ trespassin’, that’s what; now git the hell outta here!”

He grabbed me by the collar — I was still wearing my blacks from the seminar the previous night — and he lifted me to my feet and planted a shoe on my behind, and I suddenly found myself motivated.

So I hit the road, and I walked.

The farmer hadn’t been lying when he said he’d taken my ID — and my wallet and the sixty bucks I had in there.

It wasn’t long before officer Bennett pulled over beside me on the highway, and picked me up, and brought me here, and had me fill out this report — it isn’t my fault I left my cell-phone on the tour bus. I’ve given you the number — call it again. It’s 777-555-2769. I don’t know why nobody’s picked up on it yet.

And it isn’t my fault I’m not on the roster for the Guru, and I don’t know what all else is going on. I don’t remember any more of that night, and I don’t know why they haven’t come back for me; the aliens or the seminar group. I don’t know why the ship dropped me — maybe they really were “Nephilim”, and so they were fallen angels or something, and my exclamation scared them off. I do not know.

I don’t know where they went, and I don’t know why the film school won’t acknowledge my attendance, but you can buy the tape of the last seminar, as soon as the Guru starts selling them on line, or wherever. And he says my name, I tell you. You’ll see for yourself. I’ll bet the cameras even catch me in the background.

I can’t remember anything else. And I don’t want to. I want to go home.

Why won’t you let me out of this cell? What do you want from me? Sheriff Bennett keeps laughing in my face and calling me a liar, and then he’ll yell at me, and then he’ll offer me a cigarette, and then he’ll cuss at me some more — somebody ought to tell him that “good cop/bad cop” has to be played by two people.

I’d love to make something else up, but I can’t. You already know my name isn’t in any of the town records, and I don’t even know what town this is! So as far as I’m concerned — oh, look at that, here comes Bennett. And it looks like he’s got that farmer who woke me up with him. Hope he has my wallet. My ID’s in there — who’s that in red? ...it’s the Guru. He can’t see m

* * *

The rest of the sentence is illegible, and neither the writer of this work nor “Sheriff Bennett” have ever been identified. While an obvious piece of libel against the esteemed Professor Emeritus Kahn, the discovery of these papers in the empty farmhouse of a one Michael Flatterstaff, who was known in his locality as a keeper of outlandish tall-tales regarding abduction and crop circles, makes it that much more mysterious and less reliable. It was discovered at least fifteen years after the passing of Mr. Flatterstaff, who, investigation has proven, was reliably documented as an illiterate.