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You
should definitely take him. I’ll throw in his bowls and a year’s worth of feed.
I can have him shipped. UPS does animals, don’t they? Or if you want to pick
him up and drive him, I can—”
    “Shipping
him UPS. Ha ha, that’s a good one, Mr. Trilby.” Dennis pointed at Winchester,
who had backed away from the window and was swiveling his head back and forth
in what Nicholas suspected was the animal’s silent laughter. “I thought Toby
was drawing a big dog or something. Never guessed it was an alpaca. Right on.
Way cool.”
    “How
about two years’ worth of feed? And I’ll throw in gift certificates for the
Olive Garden.”
    “Wish
I wasn’t such a commitment-phobe,” Dennis said, a little wistfully.
    Nicholas
leaned closer to him and murmured, “We could look into counseling.”
    Dennis
resumed his seat at the nook. “Where’d you get him?”
    With
a sigh, Nicholas handed him the prepared tea. “His previous owners abandoned
him. Winchester was apparently too lazy to walk any farther than my property. I’ve
been stuck with him ever since.”
    “He’s
got a goofy face. It’s cute.”
    Nicholas
took a seat opposite the other man. Resigned to small talk with a stranger, one
of his least favorite activities, he said, “This is your first time in Hightop?
The weather is terrible right now. You’d think it’d keep any sane person off
the mountain.” He thought about what he’d just implied but shrugged it off. “The
festival organizers seem determined to see it through, though.”
    “Oh,
yeah, it’s great.” Dennis wrapped his hands around his mug. Silver rings
adorned four of his ten fingers. One of the rings sported a large, dull, black
stone. Obsidian? Onyx? “It’s cool just being up here, you know? You never know
what can happen.”
    Rocky
Johnson’s dead body flashed before Nicholas’s eyes. Yes, the charm of the
unexpected.
    “I
mean, aliens could show up any moment, right?” Dennis’s expression turned
dreamy. Nicholas imagined the look did double-duty for when Dennis was stoned. “I’ve
done a lot of alien chasing but I’ve never felt as close to them as I do up
here.” He suddenly slapped the table with his hand. “You did it, man!”
    Nicholas
dropped his scone. “I’m innocent!”
    “You
were abducted and came back! Do you know how many people can claim that? Like,
I bet it’s less than half a dozen.”
    “Oh,
that.” It was Nicholas’s turn for his eyes to glaze over as he retrieved his scone
from where it had rolled across the table. “Yes, it’s a very interesting story.
Or at least it was the first eighty or so times that I told it.”
    Dennis
wasn’t to be thwarted. “So how did it all go down? Were you just, like, hanging
out when aliens came knocking on your door? Ha! Like me, right? Tell me, man. I’m
hanging on every word.”
    Nicholas
fidgeted. Lately, he’d begun entertaining the idea that talking about aliens,
maybe even simply thinking about them, summoned their presence much like a Ouija
board supposedly called down spirits.
    “It’s
boring and anticlimactic.”
    “I
swear to you,” Dennis said, laughing, “I’m not going anywhere until you tell
me. No way could I leave without knowing. You’re my hero!”
    If
he hadn’t already been wearing a target on his back, courtesy of the police,
Nicholas might have thrown the contents of his cup in Dennis’s face and tossed
the disoriented man out into the snow for saying such a thing. As it was, he
ground his molars for a few seconds before gritting out, “I was in bed reading.
A bright light formed in the ceiling. I was hoping for a brain aneurysm, but
instead I was levitated from my bed and pulled through the roof of this cabin.”
    “They
displaced matter for you.” Dennis’s jaw dropped. “That’s some serious physics!”
    So
Nicholas had been told by every nerd in Colorado. “I don’t remember anything
after that.”
    Dennis’s
expression shifted from that of an awestruck fan to