Free The Shimmer by David Morrell Page A

seeing.
    Amazingly, another rock moved. A patch of sand shifted slightly as well. A section of the sunken ship turned to the side, and one of the plants started walking across the bottom of the tank. The green spikes on it were actually tentacles. Years later, when Page was being trained at the New Mexico police academy, he thought back to that afternoon when he'd realized that there could be a huge difference between what the eyes saw and what was truly before them, that the world was not always what it seemed. Unfortunately, he later discovered, ugliness too often was the truth of what was before him.
    But not that afternoon. Excitedly, he began counting the creatures he suddenly noticed. They were everywhere, it seemed.
    "One, two, three."
    "Four, five, six," his father said.
    "Seven, eight, nine," his mother joined in, laughing. That was the summer before she was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her.
    His father predicted that there were a dozen cuttlefish in the tank, but in the end Page counted eighteen, weird, ugly-looking creatures with a strange name for a squid, who'd learned to conceal their ugliness and after a while began to seem beautiful. Within minutes he wasn't able to see the sand, rocks, underwater plants, or replica of the sunken ship because so many cuttlefish were in the way.
    "How do they hide like that?" he asked his father, grinning in astonishment.
    "Nobody knows. Chameleon lizards are famous for being able to assume the colors of objects around them. Spiders can do it, too. But nothing's as good at it--and as quick at it--as cuttlefish."
    "Magic," Page said.
    "Nature," Page's father corrected him.

    Chapter 19.
    Page remembered that long-ago afternoon as he strained to look at the darkness beyond the fence while the crowd of strangers before him marveled at things he didn't see. Some complained that they didn't know what the others were getting so excited about, and Page understood their frustration. Was he witnessing a mass hallucination, some kind of group delusion in which people convinced one another that they were seeing something that wasn't there?
    But Tori hadn't been with a group when she'd first seen it, and she hadn't been with a group when she'd come here alone after so many years of remembering and dreaming. If there was a delusion, she'd brought it on herself.
    Or maybe I'm the one who's deluded, Page thought. Hell, all those years and I couldn't even get my wife to share something so important that it brought her back to the middle of nowhere.
    But he had to stay calm.
    Remember the cuttlefish, he told himself. Remember what your father told you. "Sometimes we see only what we expect to see. Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way."
    Lord knows, I need to learn to see in a new way.
    The reality Page thought he knew had been turned inside out. The marriage he'd thought he had, the life he'd prized--nothing was what it had seemed to be.
    Why? Page shouted inwardly. How could I not have seen this coming?
    He rose from the bench and stepped to the edge of the observation platform. Vaguely aware of Costigan leaning against the post near him, he stared over the heads of the people in the excited crowd and concentrated on the darkness.
    Again he noticed the specks of distant headlights approaching along the road from Mexico. But that couldn't be what the people in the crowd were thrilled about. They were pointing in a different direction altogether.
    He studied the brilliant array of stars, surprisingly much brighter and more varied than he was accustomed to in Santa Fe, which was renowned for the clearness of its night sky. Maybe they were why the government had built the radio telescopes nearby. But the people in the crowd weren't pointing toward the stars--their rapt attention was focused entirely on the horizon.
    What do they think they're seeing? Page wanted to know.
    Remember the cuttlefish, he urged himself.
    He focused on the darkness across the grassland.
    And