Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

A sharp pain in his chest brought him to his knees. He felt his body crumble and his forehead meet the ground. Rolling onto his back, he forced himself to breathe. He could not hear. The world was quiet. Above him stretched the dark blue expanse with the last lights of day fading to the west. His eyes searched for a point to fixate upon, but found none in the vast depth of the heavens. Again the pain in his chest - he cried out but could not hear himself - it sounded like a dull roar in his mind. His tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of his mouth. The pain in his chest worsened. He could feel his body revolting against whatever had happened.

A face - indistinguishable - appeared above him. A mouth moved - he could not hear what it said. He felt movement. His body was being moved. Again the pain shot through him, and this time it blinded and numbed him and drove him to the point that his consciousness faded. The sky, the face, the base - all fell away.

7.    Baker Island

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”

―

Phaedrus

Just north of the equator in the Central Pacific Ocean, about 1,650 miles south of Honolulu, rests a small, uninhabited atoll by the name of Baker Island. An unincorporated territory of the United States since 1857, its land area is less than one square mile, a mere pinprick on the globe. In the early 1900’s a brief attempt at colonizing the island occurred, and a lighthouse and several dwellings formed the colony of Meyerton. However, in 1942 the island was evacuated given its proximity to Axis powers, and subsequently, in 1943, the Allied Forces occupied it and used it as a temporary air base. For a few months the air base remained operational, but early in 1944 the island was abandoned, and left with a lone airstrip and scattered remnants of military buildings, equipment, and debris, all of which soon began to succumb to the creeping vegetation. In 1974 Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton designated the island as a National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the surrounding local waters that were rich with coral and aquatic species.

Occasionally, if they felt like it, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would send a representative to the island to document the status of things. Flat, overgrown, same military remnants. Lots of coral. White sands. One decayed submerged shipwreck now the playground for fish. Nothing different, nothing changed.

This is what the representative would write on paper, perhaps with a little more scientific detail, but in essence the same. In reality, though, when the representative landed the small aircraft and stepped down onto the deserted island, he had immediately wished he had never come. The singular lighthouse stood strangely out of place, a ghostly shell of civilization past. The grasses below his feet whispered in the breeze and the waves crashed up onto the beach, as if the island were breathing. And yet there was a strange silence, a lack of human noise, that filled his ears and made him think of nightmares he had dreamed when he was a child. The old rusted bulldozers creaked sometimes, and here and there were strewn archaic pieces of weaponry. Here a wheel, there a scrap of sheet metal. Some white birds flitted to and fro, looking at him sideways through their black beady eyes before whisking up into the air. The representative did not like this and as soon as he had taken some pictures and written some notes, he stepped back up into his biplane and sped away to Honolulu, where he quickly forgot entirely about the island.

On May 2, 2029, only one month after the representative had visited for his checkup, a Beech S35 Bonanza light aircraft circled around the island slowly, having approached from the north. It was a pale shade of green that matched perfectly the color of the grasses. Landing bumpily on the old airstrip, it came to a halt and two people spilled out of it, both in Air Force uniform. They wore sunglasses and looked around at the desolate island before them. Then, shouldering backpacks, they began to trek away from the airstrip towards the lighthouse. Walking easily, they seemed to chat cordially as they passed by housing remnants and pieces of rusty equipment. Reaching the lighthouse, they crossed just by it, and then, without a sound, disappeared. The earth appeared to have swallowed them up without a trace, and the slim grasses bent in the breeze, whispering softly.

An hour passed, and then two. The sun climbed up to the top of the sky and then began its journey to the western horizon, casting low shadows on the island as it neared its destination. Birds darted to and fro, catching fish and bugs, and the fish swam in and out of the shipwreck and the coral. Just as the shadows grew long and the sun dipped low in the western sky, there was a little movement, behind the lighthouse, and both of the visitors appeared, their figures slowly emerging from the earth. They made their way back to the aircraft, and climbing inside, rose into the sky and flew northwards until they became a speck that eventually vanished altogether.

Over the next few months this scene became very regular. The aircraft would circle, land, and then people would trek to the lighthouse and disappear. Sometimes, they stayed out of sight for days or even weeks, sometimes for only a few hours. Frequently they would bring packages and reappear without these items. Before rising up again into the air, they would pour more gas into the tank from little containers.

About two months after all of this began, one particular visitor