While Dan guided me back to the guest room upstairs, I began to worry for Richard’s safety. What were those people downstairs? Were they people at all? What does Dan know that I don’t seem to have the slightest idea about? All the questions and more puzzled me. Puzzled me more than the video games we decided to partake in as a means of distraction from the events in the kitchen. “Dan?” I said. “Yeah?” “Um, do you know something I don’t?” He seemed to freeze, letting his guy die on the left of the split screen in a rather gruesome fashion. I gave him a concerned look, a look that said, “Tell me what you know so that I could understand.” He didn’t budge or even blink. “It’s nothing you should be concerned about. Richie’s got this under control, just like always.” “What about that night in the-” “After that night, always. Before, I’m not entirely sure.” “I understand.” Dan told me this story of how Richard got into a bit of trouble a few years prior. At the time, he was still working as an assistant to Mr. McCarthy in a nearby community college. Richard was grading some exams when out of the blue, a huge flash of light appeared out of his backyard, or at least, close enough to it. He thought it was just lightning from an oncoming spring storm, but he saw these figures in the darkness. They were animal-shaped, yet they moved just like people. I don’t know what happened afterwards, but Dan assured me that “Richie took care of the situation, and they left.” I’m not entirely sure of what taking care of the situation meant, but knowing Richard for the past year, I was highly skeptical something good was to come out of it. Upon seeing his face stretch into a grin, I saw something inside him I’d never known: satisfaction. He wasn’t the type to be satisfied so easily, even around the holiday season. During Christmas the year before, he smiled and felt the warmth of giving time and presents to others, not just exam grades. There was always a smile on his face every second of that day, but on occasion it wavered and not from fatigue. He explained to me as follows: “You know, Ms. Wernet, I’m glad you decided to come by. It’s just that I’ve been getting a feeling that I’ve been meaning to do something. I’m just not sure what it is I need to do.” “I’m sure you will figure it out in due time.” “Oh, I hope so. I will hate to put this nagging feeling off any longer.” I felt I knew what he needed to do, and those creatures downstairs had to be involved. They had to be. I played a few more rounds of a generic FPS when I heard the kitchen door slam shut. “I guess he got it taken care of?” “Yeah,” Dan muttered. We played for a few more minutes, knocking each other in the shoulder at every victory. Shortly before I clobbered his avatar with an RPG, I heard Richard’s voice reverberate up the stairs, down the hallway, and into the open entrance of the guest room. “I believe we have company!” No shift in tone, no standard inflections. If I wasn’t worried before, my heart made the transition for me, pumping blood as fast as I finished my game. I looked to Dan, whose drooping eyes and jutted lower lip were plenty reason for me to go downstairs alone. Richard tapped his foot while waiting for me to appear. I rounded the corner and saw the bodies of the four creatures that I had met only thirty minutes prior. “Keira, help me carry them to the basement.” I was in complete disbelief that Richard would or could do such a thing. His face crawled into a scowl every second I hesitated on my actions. Surely, there was something either off about Richard that I hadn’t noticed or about the four creatures passed out in contorted poses. “Well?” He meant business, which was disheartening considering Halloween was a day of fun. This could all be an elaborate ruse set up by Richard to keep me on my toes, even after class. The realistic costumes could be from the art department, and the people just very good actors. Dan was nonchalant enough for how messed up this all appeared to be. I decided to follow along with his ploy, in case he had something even bigger set up for me. I dragged the person in the rabbit costume down first. I admired her bold sense in fashion, a fishnet pattern engrained in a plain green t-shirt. Maybe I’ll ask her for some tips after this all blows over. I threw her comatose body over my shoulder, stepped down the cement staircase into the cool, damp basement, and set her down on the far side of the wall. Richard came down with one of the guys, the blue-haired vulpine. We exchanged glances, and he nearly floored me while I gave a light smile. Dropping the guy four feet to the floor, he cornered me into the inner edge of the door frame into the wall on my left. “Is this all just a fucking game to you?” he asked, clearly showing off how wide his eyes can get. “It’s not?” “No, it is not,” he said, enunciating every syllable like a father does to a kid after the kid doesn’t realize he did something wrong. “These creatures are not from here. They are aliens, extraterrestrials, people not of this world. Why do you think those costumes always moved in sync with their mouth and eye movements?” “They were just really good costumes that you got for a…prank?” “What makes you think that these tails, these ears, every fiber of their being, was all just a clever prank?” “It’s Halloween!” A grand sweep of my arms punctuated my sentence better than my tone did. Richard took my face in his hands and closed in, whispering. “Keira, these people are not us. They aren’t even people. These are aliens. They want us as slaves, food, or something even worse than that. Explain to me why they showed up at the back door. If I were executing a prank, I would have them coming from the front, make it silly and whimsical and shit. And knowing my schedule, I have no time to organize something this elaborate. So I must ask you, will you help me subdue these creatures?” Aliens? I know Richard isn’t the most level-headed person, but claiming that the four people I had met were from some other planet was ludicrous in and of itself. Although, he did mention his schedule. He put off about two hours of his required collegiate duties just to host this get-together with Dan and me. He knows me. He knows most of my tics because that’s what his job requires of him: accurate interpretation of students to create a custom study schedule for each. He was eerily good when it came to this sort of thing, always took situations at face value. This literal take on life makes it even scarier when realizing that calling these people aliens would be preposterous if he was joking. He was telling the blunt truth; at least, I believed so. I couldn’t believe what I was thinking: there are actual aliens, real-life space invaders, in this basement at this very moment. Maybe their fear was the ruse all this time, and then they strike, like in horror games. I’m not ready to be scared like this, even on Halloween. This situation was something I had never thought I would see in my own lifetime, not even when I was still sleeping with my “security dog.” These aliens could have venom or poisonous skin or a hunger for human flesh or…now I’m starting to sound like Richard. “Yes, I will,” I spoke with impressive certainty. “Great. Drag their bodies to the wall and line them up. I’ll get some duct tape to restrain them.” “What if they wake up and they just spit acid to dissolve it? What then?” “Then it was nice knowing you,” he droned with sarcasm bleeding through. “Now, help me!” After what seemed like half an hour—and Dan had come down the stairs, saw what we were doing, and promptly climbed back up—the four aliens were lined up with their arms tied down to their sides, unconscious and limp. I hope they were unconscious. They all looked like life-sized stuffed animals. The unrealistic colors on each of them, besides the rabbit, were evidence. The leftmost alien, the wolf, had a solid crimson muzzle and a striped tail whose tip was probably dipped in pale blood though that coloring could have just been the dim lighting. The alien next to “her” had striking blue hair, the white fox, and a spiked choker brace. I thought it was a weapon, so I carefully removed it and gave it to Richard for safe keeping. The most unusual of the bunch was the alien on the far right: a purple-coated creature with the tail of a fox, muzzle of a cat, and ears somewhere in between. The pale, pink paw pads in his hands (assuming it was male) had a reddish stripe crossing from his thumb to his little finger, and I realized that they all had humanoid hands. Creeped out by the similarities, I shuffled away from the scene and left those creatures to “sleep off” whatever Richard had done. Richard sat in the living room with his head facing the floor and his arms crossed and limp over his lap. He muted whatever new game show had played on primetime, and before I sat by him, I watched a woman from Connecticut win nearly two hundred thousand dollars out of sheer luck. “Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we got some of that?” “What?” Richard asked. “Some of that money? If we even had half of that, you and Dan could pay your tuition at a good college and not ever have to go to that wreck of a place that calls itself an educational institution.” “But we wouldn’t have met you.” “Met me? Now I’m wishing you hadn’t. Thanks to them, you both are getting caught up in this. They know me. They must have known me to visit my home.” “Who can blame them though?” I inched closer to him and rubbed his back, his face unmoved. “You take care of us like we’re family. Well, Dan is your roommate, so you kinda have to. But with me, you invited me here, treated me like a friend when a year ago from today, I thought you were just a stuck-up geek. Now I can tolerate your stuck-up geekiness. Not to say your geekiness is a bad thing.” A chuckle arose from Richard’s mouth, and he lifted his head to watch the show. Good thing, too, since the contestants were on the final round. I hope we get through this conundrum soon; I want to see Richard enjoy himself again without any more alien thoughts.