What Could This Be? (Part 1 of 2)

[u/JaxR_Writer]

“I love what you’ve done with the place Paul, I’m not sure how you could have done this place up any more perfectly for this,” said Teri.

“Yeah man, crazy that you built it all yourself too. Could’ve called for my help if you needed it. Not like I’ve been working on anything useful lately,” said Curtis with a smile as he turned back to his wife Teri, who promptly popped him in the back of the head.

“Thank y’all, and I was happy to do it. I’ve been big into any project I can get my hands on since, you know,” I said. Both Teri and Curtis had been two of my best friends since high school, and even though I had originally been friends with Curtis first; there was a natural transition as we welcomed Teri to our high school friend group. Teri was short with red hair, while Curtis is probably a little over 6 feet tall with pure blonde hair and blue eyes. Curtis was always the looker of my high school class, while Teri was the typical head cheerleader type.

“Nothing wrong with that. What happened was a big deal, so I say build away. Every man needs at least one good hobby,” said Curtis.

“May not always be the healthiest way to deal with a divorce but at least you’re doing something productive, might as well come by and build this at our house too,” said Teri jokingly as another one of my friends, Ronny Gonzalez, son did a cannonball straight into the pool dusting the three of us lightly with water.

“I’d be fine with that, as long as you’re good with all of this at your house too,” I replied as I motioned around at all that was going on around me.

It’s the 4th of July and I was throwing probably the largest party I ever had. I have a small two-bedroom bardominiuum style square house, but I just finished installing a huge wood deck that wrapped around the side of my above-ground pool. The deck took a solid three weeks to build, was 500 square feet and was about five feet off the ground, but it was worth it to provide the scene before me. There are a total of about 15 people here tonight, including about three couples of friends that I’ve known from either high school or church. Along with my parents and my sister, and a couple of guys that I knew from work.

Even more important though was the fact that today was the 6-month anniversary of my wife leaving me. It had been a dark, looming cloud over essentially everything I did or said since then. I loved and I suppose I still do love my wife, but I could have handled a divorce for lack of intimacy or just us growing apart. I could have even handled it if I found that she had been having an affair, but what did happen was what made it my worst nightmare. I came home from work and she was gone.

For the six years that we had been married she had nearly always been right at the door waiting for me with a smile and a kiss unless she was going to be somewhere in which she would have texted me and let me know but I didn’t see her car in the driveway. I opened the door to no one which I didn’t find absolutely crazy but as soon as I approached the refrigerator my heart sank into the floor with a feeling that I thought would kill me or at the very least make me want throw up in reaction.

It was a letter that was all of about three paragraphs long and in short said that we were through and she was leaving and never coming back. She didn’t say where she was going or who she would stay with, just that we’d never see each other again. It was a complete shock to my system. Of course, things had seemed stale between us, but I certainly never thought that that would happen.

What was even worse was that I didn’t chase after her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her or even that I didn’t want to try to find her, but I wasn’t sure how to. I tried to text and to call her several times, but she had blocked me on everything. After a while, I wasn’t sure if it mattered. She had clearly moved on, and there wasn’t really anything that I could do about it. I had given up. After about a month of doing little more than surviving; I put our house up for sale and decided to move into this house, which we had been using as an Airbnb.

Life had finally begun to feel normal again, or at least as normal as it could be. Looking around from the grill, it was a perfect night with the sun within an hour of sunset, people sitting around talking, swimming in the pool, and a fresh round of hot dogs coming. I finally realized that I had what I needed. My love life was gone, but I’d find love again. For now, I’m surrounded by people that care about me. And in the moment, that’s all that matters.

“Thanks Paul, great party. With that pool we’re going to have to come over more often,” said Jennings Bryant who was my next-door neighbor at my old house but also was a member of my church at Creekside Baptist Church just down the road.

“Thanks man, sure y’all are more than welcome to come over whenever y’all can. Are Greg and them back with the fireworks?” I asked as I flipped over a couple more hot dogs on the grill.

“They should be coming back about now, I figure. They left about 20 minutes ago, it seems like,” replied Jennings as I nodded in reply as he walked back after taking a hot dog back to his spot next to the pool. There was a table to my right which had a spread of buns, burgers, and hot dogs with the typical array of slices of cheese, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and onions alongside a couple of pitchers of both lemonade and sweet tea. I might have overdone the food and the spectacle. I had overcooked the crowd of 15 and strung red, white, and blue lights and bunting all around the deck, house, and pool, but to me it was worth it. My ex-wife, of course, wasn’t around to see it, but I was having fun. Even if she couldn’t see it; I knew that I could, and that was really the only proof that I needed.

Just then a red Ford F150 truck pulled up through the driveway, which led to the front side of the house. This was where the rest of the 10 other vehicles were parked at the side of my driveway, which ran about a football field through a clearing that separated my house from the road. After a couple of minutes, Greg Sisons and George Nolan, both holding a couple of baskets of fireworks with everything from sparklers and bottle rockets to mortar shells.

“Hey y’all, bout’ to shoot them off?” I asked them as they walked by after I looked up to see that the sun was just about to set.

“We will in just a bit, is it okay if we drag around here that table from your front porch to shoot them off of?” asked Greg.

“Sure, be my guest, Brother Greg,” I replied with a smile as I continued to man the grill. Brother Greg and Brother George were respectively the preacher and music leader at Creekside Baptist Church just down the road where I went. It was very possible that, being as though those two were my preachers, they had tried to pay special attention to me. This was probably because what they had heard about my situation, like any good preacher would. Despite what might seem like pity from them, I had become good friends with both Greg and George’s families in the last six months. This was mostly the reason for them and their wives’ presence at the party tonight.

For the next 15 minutes the sun continued to go down. It was cascading orange sunset across my yard and shining through the trees, drifting across the field that separated the road from my house. During this time, both the ministers moved my square red picnic table that sat on my front porch over to about 40 yards off to the right of where I was at, while everybody continued to take turns swimming and swopping by grabbing food.

“Everybody ready!?” yelled Brother Greg towards the rest of the crowd as he, George, and Jennings had successfully strung together the fuses of a couple of fireworks. Which I hoped would end up being a sort of redneck genius way to successfully launch a whole set of fireworks at one time and not be a sort of redneck nightmare with a slew of blown-off fingers and burning grass.

Brother Greg’s request was greeted with the entire pool party crowd giving an enthusiastic ‘Yeah!’ along with a couple of ‘Hell Yeahs!’ which caused a brief disapproving glance back at the crowd from Brother Greg. Immediately George lit the fuse on the far right of the table holding fireworks, which was followed by George and Greg running away from the table as I could hear that all too familiar sound of the fuse sizzling before the fireworks shot off.

The way they had set up the mortar shells to go off, they had set up five canisters next to each other so one would shoot up and then the next one two seconds later until all five had gone up. Then Greg and George went up and refilled the canisters, along with firing off other types of fireworks every once in a while.

The fireworks shot up into the air with the familiar whiz of the shell flying up above us, followed by the shell blowing up in the air and puffing out a beautiful circle of red, green, blue, and white. I was so far very impressed with the show that the two ministers were able to pull off, thinking that they must have had a lot of experience with fireworks. I’m sure they probably did, given that they both had kids and were probably used to administering their own personal fireworks shows at their houses every 4th of July and New Year’s Eve. Watching the fireworks fly and Greg and George scrambling to reload the fireworks, it made me briefly think again about my ex. We hadn’t talked much about having children, but we were in our mid-30s, so we easily could have had them, I suppose. After taking a brief glance around at the couple of other families that were here, it gave me a sudden sense of regret and guilt. I was happy at this moment, but I had no one to share it with, and times like this were what made being a family most fulfilling.

Suddenly, as I was looking up at the sky at the fireworks; I saw something I didn’t recognize. It looked like a microscopic streak of lightning, but from my vantage point, it was exactly in the middle of the circle of white sparks of fireworks from the recently launched mortar shell. The streak of lightning didn’t last long. I probably only saw it for half a second, but it was off-putting to me because there was something that seemed unnatural about it. It didn’t exactly look like lightning. It looked so small in the sky, and there didn’t seem to be a cloud in the sky, much less a thunderstorm.

I looked around and it didn’t seem like anybody else had noticed this lightning streak across the sky. At least if they had, they hadn’t seemed to have the same sense of confusion that I had about it. This made me think that what I had seen was probably just some form of heat lightning, which was common in the summer, but it still didn’t quite make sense to me why the lightning was so small.

The fireworks continued for about ten more minutes when the firework loot that the two ministers had acquired had all run out. I was more than fine with this because I love fireworks just as much as the next guy, but they get boring after about ten minutes or so of seeing the same thing shoot into the air.

“Great time tonight, Paul, thanks for having us all over,” said Jennings as he walked by me and patted me on the back. This was followed by most of the group getting up and either leaving or starting the process of leaving with the exception of a couple of people. I didn’t mind since most of these people had been here for hours and I was starting to miss my alone time. After another 15 minutes, everybody had left but my parents and sister, and it was getting close to 10 pm.

“Great time son, I must say that I’m really happy for you. It’s been six months you know,” said dad as I walked over to the three of them that were still sitting in chairs that were on the deck right next to the pool. My sister still had her swimsuit on with a towel wrapped around her, even though I’m pretty sure she was in the pool for only a couple of minutes all night.

“Thanks dad and thank y’all for coming. It means a lot to me,” I replied.

“You know it’s still not too soon to start thinking about meeting someone, them grandbabies don’t make themselves,” said mom with a smile as both her and dad along with my sister stood up off the pool deck to make their way out.

“I don’t know about that mom, y’all may be waiting a while. I’m pretty sure Megan’s going to be working on that faster me,” I said looking towards my little sister who was recently engaged a couple of months ago although they hadn’t nailed down the marriage date quite yet.

“Come on now, I got at least 3 more years,” said Megan as she held up three fingers before giving me a hug goodbye.

“It better be at least three years, or we’re all going to have some problems,” said Dad as they had all started walking through the back door to go back through the house.

“Y’all go easy on her now; I’ll see all y’all on Sunday. Probably going to just hang around the house and clean up stuff tomorrow,” I said as I waved them goodbye. They had walked through the kitchen and living room of the house to make it out the front door and to my dad’s truck. They lived only about five minutes from here and had come over earlier in the day.

They waved goodbye and drove off to go back home. My sister lives in Birmingham, but she had come down during the 4th of July holiday and stayed with my parents while her fiancé had to stay home and work the weekend. They had been at my house for something like 9 hours, along with everybody else being at my house for at least three or four hours, so I was ready for the night to be over for the most part. However, there was a part of me that knew I would miss the company just like I had missed the company every day for the past six months, but it was all part of the healing process. I couldn’t continue to rely on being around people to fill the void; I had to learn how to be on my own.

I woke up the next day with a splitting headache which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I was sure to get them from time to time. I looked out the window from my bedroom, which looked out over the part of the yard where fireworks were shot last night. I saw the surplus of leftover firework canisters that were all partially blown apart with black char marks over them on the table and on the ground.

I looked over at the alarm clock and saw that it was a little past 9:30, which was perfect for me since I had my day planned out ahead of me. At about 3, I’d watch the Atlanta Braves game. After that, I would go work out at the gym and come back and cook and be lonely, I supposed. For now, I would have no feelings of overwhelming dread though because I had stuff to do, and chores were what sometimes kept me going. I put on my outside shoes that I kept next to the door and walked outside into the intense, sunny, and humid 85-degree South Alabama weather.

I walked around the front side of the house to assess the damage and trash that I’d have to clean up. As I walked over to the pile of used fireworks, I saw a couple of scraps of regular trash like plates and cups, around the pool deck. I had put out a huge garbage can for everybody last night, which sucked since I saw that the whole garbage can had turned over and had rolled all the way to the other side of the pool.

I turned back towards the front side of the house and paused when I got to the right side of my front porch; there was something in the grass that caught my eye. It was in the patch of grass that was in the maybe 3,000 square feet space that separated the driveway from the house. I was over 30 yards away from this thing that was in the grass, but I assumed that it was just a piece of debris from the fireworks the night before. It was on the other side of the yard so it still wouldn’t have been completely out of the ordinary.

I approached whatever this was that was sitting in the grass, and as I got closer, I could tell that it was all black. Almost like a matte black. I got next to it and saw that it was a perfectly rectangle piece of metal, or at least it looked like metal. I bent down to get a closer look at the peculiar piece of metal, and it didn’t seem all that strange. It was sitting in the shade, so it was cool to the touch. There wasn’t anything that unfamiliar about it at first. It looked almost like it had been cut out of a truck door and left in my yard although I didn’t really know anyone that drove a black vehicle, so I wasn’t sure if that was the case.

I picked up the sheet of metal and it was super light, probably at least half as light as I thought it should have been and I did one of those weird elbow jerks that you do when you pick up something lighter than you think it should be. I turned the sheet over and saw that the other side looked nearly identical except that there were two thin white lines that both ran diagonally parallel to each other across the sheet of metal. The white lines almost looked like string, except for the areas of black that surrounded the two white lines. It was almost as if they were both raised off the sheet of metal.

There wasn’t anything that really seemed all that strange about this it, but I looked at it for a while standing in my yard just turning it over and looking at the solid black sheet of metal in my hands mostly just trying to figure out what it was or where it might have come from. I looked around at my neighbor’s house which was a couple of football fields away in the direction of the front side of my house and to the left of my house closer to the main road and wasn’t sure how it could have come from their yards either. This piece of metal was likely too heavy to have floated over here from someone else’s yard; maybe someone put it here?

I took it inside and laid it on the couch, and was on my way to the kitchen to get some garbage bags and came back towards the living room to get my headphones to listen to some music at least while I got some work done. I paid no mind to it for the next 25 minutes or so while I went outside and did my chores of putting away all the used fireworks and garbage off the side of the pool deck.

I came back inside and looked over at the piece of metal lying on the couch as I was sweating like crazy, and I was about to get a drink of water before going back out there to finish the job. I was about to walk out to the road to the trash can anyway, so I decided to take the piece of metal with me. I made the walk out to the road with a couple of black garbage bags. I figured that it wouldn’t serve me much good anyway, probably came off somebody’s car or something.

I tossed the two black trash bags that I had in my right hand in the trash can and gave the sheet of black metal one last look. I turned it over and was about to toss it in the trash as well, but I noticed something; it was like a flash coming from the metal. The two white lines that ran across the sheet diagonally were flashing like a little stream of white light could be seen going from one side of the metal to the other. For the longest time, all I did was just stand there by the road and stared at the little lights flashing across the sheet of black metal.

After about 5 minutes, I composed myself and started walking back to the house. One thing was for sure, and that was I had to figure out what this thing was. Even though I had some chores left to do before the Braves game came on, I decided to go to the computer and see if I could find anything about this thing.

I started with the simplest thing I could think of and just looked up online “black sheet of metal with two white lines running diagonally across it.” What turned up from that search was mostly things like corrugated metal roofing and other things like wall decoration that, of course, had nothing to do with or looked anything like whatever this thing that I had was as I looked down at it again. It had stopped flashing those little lights that ran across the white lines before resuming a couple of minutes later. It was already the most bizarre thing that I had ever seen, but the little lights almost had a hypnotic quality to them. I even had to stop myself from staring at the thing after a couple of minutes.

I realized that I still had some real work to do and I couldn’t sit here and stare at the thing all day, so I put the sheet of metal under my bed, and that seemed to help me get back to my day. I finished cleaning up, ate lunch, and then watched the Braves lose to the Orioles.

Not much happened with the rest of my night as I had went for a little run after the Braves game was over followed by a quick shower before settling into the typical boring nightly routine of watching a movie or so on Netflix. That intermingled with playing the guitar or something creative. It seemed like a lonely life, but I had grown to find enjoyment in the little things that made me happy in the last six months. In the deepest parts of my depression, it seemed like something as small as reading a couple of chapters in a book I liked or even cutting the grass might have been the only thing stopping things from getting even darker in my life.

I settled into bed as I always did after my nightly routine of checking all the locks, brushing my teeth, and reading 10 pages of a book I was into. I put a bookmark in the book and turned off my lamp, which was to the right of my bed. Bringing a close to another day. This routine might have made me feel like a 70-year-old lady, but it was all of what I had. And with every growing day, I found contentment in that. I’m 35 and I live alone with no kids, work at a paper mill, and the love of my life vanished from my life without a trace. My future didn’t really seem to register with me in that moment, but it was also not something that I was going to let myself worry about.

I struggled out of my sleep and looked over at the alarm clock and to no surprise it said that it was only 3:34 am. It wasn’t surprising since this was almost exactly within that 3 to 4 am time period that I always woke up to a bathroom visit for. Another five minutes passed and I was back in bed in a sleeping position then I heard something. Of course, this is a metal roof building and I sleep in silence. So, there were going to be sounds every once in a while, but I had grown to recognize almost all of them. From pine straw dropping on the roof to frogs croaking outside. This was different, almost like a whisper. The more I heard it, the more I realized that it sounded exactly like a whisper. The soft sound that I could hear in the bedroom sounded exactly like someone leaning down and whispering in my ear, except I couldn’t really understand any words coming through; it was just sound. Almost like a different language.

I quickly got up and turned on the lights in the bedroom, breathing heavily as I had an idea that maybe I had left my phone’s Bluetooth headphones on or something. I figured that I would at least find something that was obviously going on and making noise because I had no idea at that moment.

At the time I was more scared than worried, so I hadn’t grabbed the shotgun. I just continued to look around the house, turning on and off all the lights in the house before looking under my bed. That really should have been the first place I looked. All I saw were the usual dusty boxes and things, but right in front of me was the black piece of metal that I had found in the yard and stuffed under the bed. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before, but the piece of metal now had a light glow to it, not like it would have illuminated the whole room but almost in a way like those old glow-in-the-dark stars that people used to put on their bedroom ceiling as kids.

I didn’t know what to think now. I knew that I wasn’t necessarily scared anymore, but had the whispering that I had heard really come from this piece of metal? It seemed like there was no way that the two could have been related, but there was nothing normal about this thing. I had to figure out what it was.

Just about six or seven hours later, I hadn’t slept a second since seeing that glowing piece of metal under my bed, but luckily it was time for church. It gave me at least something to take my mind off this thing. As soon as I saw it glowing, I turned on the lights and held the metal sheet up to it to get a closer look. Then I walked outside and, sure enough, it was glowing outside in the dark. I went to the kitchen and poured water on it, and it was as if I hadn’t poured anything on it at all. Water does tend to slip off most metals though, so I filled up my bathtub and put the sheet of metal flat on top of the water expecting it to immediately sink to the bottom like any heavy piece of metal that isn’t specifically designed to do so would. Despite that belief, it stayed true to the surface of the water and didn’t sink, floating on top as if it were a piece of wood or something.

After that, I decided to do the opposite; maybe it was made from something more similar to wood. I didn’t see how, but I figured that if it was, then it would catch on fire. I went outside at 6:30 on Sunday morning and turned on my garden hose and placed the black sheet of metal on top of my burn pile, which still had the remains of the last fire I had burnt just a couple of weeks ago. I held a lighter up to the piece of metal, and not a single thing happened. It was just like when I had poured water on it; it was as if I hadn’t held a flame to it at all.

Even further frustrated with this piece of metal, I went into my little shop that I had just finished building a couple of months ago, which housed a lot of my power tools. I was bound and determined to learn something about this thing, even if I had to destroy it in the process. I had been big into welding art a couple of years ago and had gotten into welding together random pieces of metal that Julia would bring me. I figured if this thing is some type of metal, then it must have some type of melting point, and I was going to find out what that was.

I lit the flame and put on my welder’s goggles, and went to work. I wasn’t big into metallurgy, but I was a mechanical engineer and did know that there weren’t many common metals that had a melting point even past 1,500 degrees, but the flame I had going was on its way to nearly 4,000 degrees. Even at the top end temperature of my little welding machine, the extreme white flame was doing basically nothing to the piece of metal. It was so hot that the flame started to melt the aluminum of the table saw that was under the sheet metal even without the flame directly touching it, but this freaky black piece of metal still wouldn’t budge.

As I sat in church hearing Brother Greg speak on some passage from 2 Corinthians, I tried my best to pay attention and even take notes. But I really couldn’t think of anything else at the moment other than what that thing was.

I spent the rest of the day obsessing over this newfound life I had in trying to figure out what the piece of metal was, I thought about telling someone else about it at church or to call my neighbor over since it was Sunday and I figured that he wouldn’t be doing much anyway. I thought better of it because I still had some tests that I wanted to try out on it before I told other people about it.

I took the piece of metal back into my shed and tried to run it across the table saw, which I could still see a small indentation from earlier that morning when some of the table had melted. The piece of metal had so much resistance to the table saw that the saw blades themselves started flattening out, nearly destroying the saw before I pulled away the metal. I had only a couple more things that I could even think to do to it and one was to drill into it. I got out my hammer drill, which was built to drive screws into concrete. I drove straight into the metal and it all but destroyed my drill bit. I threw my hammer drill to the side angrily and picked up my 30-pound sledgehammer and brought it down onto the black sheet of metal now lying on my shop’s concrete floor.

The recoil from the sledgehammer hitting the metal just about broke my wrists, I laid the sledgehammer to the side and for near about another 10 minutes I just sat there in silence in my steaming hot metal shed simmering in the middle of the south Alabama July heat. I just stared at this ridiculous piece of metal; I couldn’t understand why it was making me so angry or why I was trying so hard to figure out what it was in the first place.

I finally had enough of sweating, so I went back inside and left the sheet of metal back in the tool shed. It was only 3 in the afternoon, but I went straight into my bedroom and lay down on top of my unmade bed, which was left distraught from the sleepless morning that I had endured earlier.

I woke up and scurried to the bathroom as I was surprised to find that it was dark outside. Hadn’t I fallen asleep sometime around 3 PM? When I got back into the bedroom, my alarm clock read 3:17 AM. I had been asleep for a whole 12 hours; that was ridiculous. I know that I was tired from obsessing over that stupid piece of metal but…that piece of metal. I now realized that even though that thing was still out in the shop that it must have had some type of power over me or something. Despite that, I left the piece of metal in the shed and filled my last couple of hours before going to work trying my best to relax by turning on the TV in the living room.

I was able to take my mind off the object for a while, but I was going to take advantage of the fact that I worked at a paper mill surrounded by engineers and might would know or at least heard of what I was dealing with here.

The metal, of course, was not very big and small enough to fit in my backpack that I took into work every day with my work laptop that I’d take home on the weekends. I made it through the gates without this thing making some bizarre noise or magnetic pull or something like I was worried that it might and I was soon into my office with it.

I had my own office and an office building with the typical windowless rooms and white walls, and my next-door office neighbor was a man that I knew well named Thad Coleman. He was a strange guy, but he was an electrical engineer and clearly brilliant. Maybe he wouldn’t necessarily know about the metal, but whatever energy the thing seemed to give off might have at least be something that Thad had heard of before.