Harbinger by Jack Skillingstead

with a clipboard was waiting for me.
    By noon the following day I was completely overwhelmed. Calls had to be placed, legal issues dealt with, papers signed, decisions made. Adult decisions. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see an adult. A couple of times I picked up the phone and started to call Nichole, but couldn’t bring myself to dial the number. I’d betrayed her. And worse, I’d betrayed something bigger than her, some mystic bond.
    I looked at the card Langley Ulin had given me. It was thick gray cardstock with a series of burgundy numbers embossed on it. A phone number, nothing else. Impulsively, I picked up the phone again and dialed. Probably I would have hung up after a couple of rings. I was that iffy. But it didn’t get to a couple of rings.
    “Hello, Ellis.”
    “Hi.”
    “How are you handling things?”
    “Not that great,” I said.
    “Yes, I understand.”
    That voice. So comforting.
    “I’m—” My throat tightened with emotion.
    “Ellis, why don’t you let me handle the arrangements.”
    I breathed out.
    Two days later I was sitting on a folding wooden chair next to Mr. Ulin in the little cemetery in north Seattle where my mother and brother were already buried and where my father was about to be interred. Dad’s casket rested in front of us on a covered frame work. I was uncomfortable in my new black suit. Besides us, there were about twenty people in attendance. A few of them looked vaguely familiar. Everyone must have thought Ulin was my uncle or something. I had no real uncles, and the one aunt I was aware of lived in Massachusetts and wasn’t anywhere in sight. Aunt Sarah was a little intense about funerals. She had stayed at my house for a couple of weeks after my mom and brother were killed, and was mostly hysterical the whole time, which had frightened me. I’d mentioned that to Mr. Ulin, and maybe that was why she wasn’t there. I said, in a low voice, “Who are all these people?”
    “Friends of your father. Former co-workers, for the most part.”
    Afterwards the men all shook my hand and the women gave me brief consoling hugs. Some of them said they remembered me from when I was a baby. It started to rain. Everyone left. Mr. Ulin and I sat in the limo.
    “Home?” he said.
    I was staring out the open window, across the grass, at my father’s casket. Now I’d seen my entire family put in boxes. I never again wanted to get within a hundred miles of a funeral. Never.
    “Or would you like to come with me now?” Ulin said.
    I looked at him. “Come where?”
    “First to a facility in Oregon. No, nothing like that hospital you were in.”
    “What kind of facility?”
    “A medical research facility. There will be some tests and a few invasive procedures. I can’t promise you won’t be uncomfortable at times. But after that, if things appear as promising as I believe they will, you can come and live very comfortably in a little coastal village for a while. Perhaps a long while. You’ll have everything you could want or need.”
    “Would I have to live there?”
    “For a time. It’s a controlled environment, Ellis. A safe environment. You would be my employee. Everyone in the village is an employee, or a relative of one. And of course you will be very well paid.”
    “For doing what?”
    “That would be largely determined by the results of the tests I mentioned. Essentially we’d be harvesting various organic samples.”
    My mind skipped over that one. I looked out the window. The casket gleamed darkly in the rain. A couple of guys in work clothes stood discreetly off to the side, waiting for us to leave. I wished I could talk to Nichole, but she felt gone to me, as gone as a dead person.
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
    “Good choice, Ellis.”
    The smoked glass window slid up and the car began moving.
    Snapshots:
    —My first ride in an airplane, and me glued to the window of the Lear, watching the world I’d known my whole life shrink away into dollhouse