Van Meter did not have a name for it until the third night.
The first night it was only a light on the roof of the brick building downtown, a white beam that swept the dirt street the way a lantern sweeps a barn, except no man was holding it. U.G. Griffith saw it from his window over the hardware store and thought fire. Then the light moved against the slate, and the thing that carried it unfolded wings the width of a wagon sheet and dropped into the alley with a sound like wet canvas hitting a rail.
Griffith stood at the glass longer than was useful. He was a hardware man. He sold nails and stove lids. He was not given to visions. In the morning he told the others what he had told himself until the church bell: that he had seen a large owl and a trick of the moon. They believed him in the way a small Iowa town believes a man who keeps regular hours. They believed him less after H.T. Osborn saw the same light on the saloon roof, and after the doctor’s boy found three-toed tracks in the dust behind the implement shop, too long for a bird and too clean for a boy’s joke.
The smell came with the second sighting.
Not farm smell. Not the packing plant down the line. A thick animal stink that arrived before the wings did and stayed in the throat after the light had gone. It clung to curtains. It made horses stamp in their sleep. People shut their sashes. Van Meter was a town that left its windows up in early autumn, a town that trusted the air. It learned, in three days, not to.
On the third night a group of men waited with rifles because waiting with rifles was what men did when the world grew a new animal and the sheriff had no better language for it. They stood in the street with their collars up and their mouths shut. The thing landed on a rooftop as if rooftops had been invented for it. Bat-winged. Leathery. The body of something that had borrowed a man’s height and refused the rest of the man. From a blunt horn on the forehead the beam came, hard enough that Osborn said later he could not see the street, only the color of bone, only his own hands held up like a fool’s.
They fired.
The reports rolled off the brick and went out into the fields where the corn was coming down. Dogs answered from yards that had never minded gunfire in season. The creature did not fall. It did not even startle in a way that satisfied anyone. It gathered itself, the wings finding air with a sound too heavy for a bird, and went up. The light cut once across the water tower. The stink settled on the men like a coat they could not take off.
By the end of the week the town had a theory, which is not the same as an answer. An old mine shaft at the edge of things. A roost. Something that hunted the roofs because the roofs were high and the streets were full of faces worth a beam. Women kept children in after supper. The paper in Des Moines had not yet arrived to make it a curiosity. It was still only Van Meter’s problem.
They went to the mine before dawn.
What came out of the dark mouth of the ground was the same shape, and then, behind it, a smaller one, as if the first had not been alone in whatever room the earth had made. The light from the horn found the waiting men and pinned them to their own boots. No one claimed a clean shot. No one claimed courage that lasted past the smell. They watched the two forms lift and go back into the shaft as if the shaft were a house and the hour were ordinary.
After that week the Visitor stopped arriving on schedule. Van Meter went back to being a town of ledgers and church bells and talk about the price of hogs. The tracks washed out in a night of rain. The Des Moines paper printed a few inches and then had harvest to cover. The men who had stood under that beam did not talk about it in the store unless the store was empty. When they did talk, they talked around the light, as if naming the beam too clearly might call it down off a roof again.
Griffith kept the window shut on that side of the building until winter. He said it was the draft. His wife let him say it. She had smelled the curtain the morning after the first night. She had her own reasons for the latch.
The mine was boarded. Boards do not convince a thing that already knows a shaft. They convince the people who have to walk past it with a lantern and a story they have agreed not to finish.
They still tell it in Dallas County when the first cold comes and a light on a roof is not a lamp. A winged thing. A horn that blinds. A stink that arrives like a messenger. Bullets that found nothing they could keep. Two shapes in a hole in the ground, and a town that learned, for one week in 1903, that the sky over Main Street was not empty just because it had always seemed to be.
Van Meter did not need the creature to stay in order for the week to remain. It needed three nights of a beam where no beam belonged, and a town small enough that every man who saw it had to keep seeing the others who had seen it too.
The ones who look up at the wrong roof learn it in the same order.
The light that is not a lantern.
The wings on the brick.
The three-toed mark in the dust.
The smell that outlasts the shot.
And the mine mouth, at the edge of town, which is only boards until it isn’t.
