Night Talk by George Noory Page A

interior designer because he had little interest in the apartment. It was hollow to him because it was just a place to sleep, to camp out in between shows and for entertaining. There was little of him in it.
    He felt more at home where he could walk barefoot in the sand than on the plush carpeting of a martini penthouse. A little north of Malibu he had a weathered beach house that had been pounded by wind and surf and roosted on by gulls long before he walked the earth. He had felt at home there the moment he walked in and bought it as a place to think and recharge on the weekends as guest hosts ran the show.
    He was on the road so often with speaking engagements he didn’t get a lot of time at either place he hang his hat. When he was in town, he enjoyed having a date and interesting guests to his beach house. He moved freely around people, that’s what made him a good talk show host, but he also would hang back at a party with a glass of wine and study people rather than be in the limelight. He was so used to extraordinary people and ideas that pushed the envelope swirling around him that he found small talk a bore.
    He turned on his cell phone after he entered. He didn’t remember turning it off on the street, but he must have after getting the strange call. A voicemail signal popped up and his guts clenched. Another phantom call from the dead? Someone asking about Ethan? He was too beat, too raw and empty inside to hear from someone calling out of curiosity because they’d heard about the suicide on the news.
    The moment he heard a Jamaican accent he knew it was Rohan, a best-selling author who, like a rock star, went by one name. Rohan was a media personality in the area of alien abduction. He claimed he had been abducted and examined by aliens during a university sleep and dream experiment. The experience involved a strange encounter with what appeared to be a woman on the surface but that Rohan realized was an alien taking the form of women —Rohan observing changes in the age, look, color and shape of his partner as they had sex.
    Writing about it turned out to be a money machine for him. He’d been on the show a number of times to talk about his experience, always emotional about being violated. Rohan was angry that he had been used as a guinea pig. “The teachers running the program sold my soul to aliens,” he said in the opening to his book. “To the professors it was no different than parting out the organs of someone close to death so they can get rich.”
    Accusing the university of selling people to aliens sold a lot of books.
    â€œIt’s started,” Rohan said on the voicemail. “They killed Ethan because he got too close to their secret objective. Now they’ll come after the rest of us who can expose them. Any one of us can be next but agitators like you and me will be first on their list to eliminate. We have to stick together or they’ll pick us off like Ethan, one by one. Don’t call me—I made this call from a neighbor’s phone because they’ll be listening in on my calls. We need to talk, to figure out what to do before Murad’s creatures get us. Get over here so we can talk.”
    The words came out at the speed of bullets in a tone frantic with fear and paranoia. There was enough slurring to make Greg wonder what he had been drinking or smoking before he made the call.
    Rohan’s allegations about aliens were nothing new—he was constantly on the run from things from the dark side sent by Carl Murad, the psychology professor who oversaw the sleep experiment and who Rohan claimed was in league with a secret entity that was seeking world domination.
    There were two strange things about the timing of the call. Rohan had made it twenty minutes after Ethan jumped, fell, threw himself out the window or however it would be described. The ambulance had hardly arrived by the time Rohan called. Far too early for Rohan to have