Free Visitors by R. L. Stine Page B

going?” I asked.
    “To the attic,” Dad replied. “We can’t hide this from you any longer.”
    Dad unlocked the door. We stepped inside the attic.
    Then Mom opened the closet door. She reached in. A warm blue glow spread across the room.
    The glow brightened as Mom pulled out a square thing about a foot tall and a foot wide.
    I stared at it in amazement. It was some kind of screen, like a TV screen. Only it held a holographic image.
    It showed three people—a male, a female, and a baby. They looked almost exactly like humans, but something was different about them.
    They all had curly coarse brown hair. Their faces looked so much like mine. And then I realized whatwas weird about them.
    They had no ears . And they all wore short tops over stomachs that had no belly buttons .
    “I’ll never forget the night we found you,” Mom began.
    “It was twelve years ago. I saw a weird light in the sky,” Dad told me. “Like a pale blue glow.”
    “It was so close, and getting closer,” Mom added. “We walked into the woods, following the light.”
    “We came to a clearing. I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Dad said. “I thought I was dreaming.”
    “A clearing?” I said. “In the woods behind our house?”
    Mom nodded. “There was a huge spaceship. It was shaped like an eight. The ship was so hot it burned a mark on the grass. Sometimes I wonder if the mark is still there.
    “We were so terrified at first, we ran away,” Mom said. “But then we were curious. We went back into the woods. But the spaceship was gone.”
    “It had left that big mark in the grass,” Dad said. “And lying right in the middle of the mark we saw something small. Something alive.”
    “That’s when we found you, lying there in the grass,” Mom said. “You were so cute! And so helpless!”
    “Your mother picked you up and that was that,” Dad said. “It was love at first sight. We were crazyabout you. We wanted you to be our son.”
    “You mean you found me in the woods?” I asked. “But what made you think I was an alien?”
    “This hologram,” Mom explained. She pressed a button on the frame of it. The people inside the picture began to move.
    “Please take care of our child,” the woman in the picture begged. “He is the last of our race still alive. If he dies, our people will be extinct.”
    “He is The One,” the man said. “The aliens who destroyed our planet will come after him one day. He is The One to defeat them. Our last chance…our one hope.”
    The figures stopped moving. I stared at the baby in the picture. “Is that…me?”
    Mom nodded. “And those are your real parents.”
    “But what happened to me? I don’t have any ears in that picture.”
    Mom and Dad exchanged glances. “That’s right,” Mom said. “When we found you, you had a hole on each side of your head.”
    I touched my ears. It had never occurred to me there was anything strange about them.
    “We had a surgeon work on you secretly,” Dad explained. “He gave you ears to cover the holes in your head. I always thought he did a great job.”
    “And what about my outie belly button?” I said, staring at the picture. “Did that grow in later?”
    Mom shook her head. “We had the surgeon add that, too. I don’t know why he gave you an outie. I guess it was easier to make than an innie.”
    I stared at the picture again. “So this is why you’ve been acting so mysterious and strange,” I said. “That night you went out and you wouldn’t tell us where you went. Where did you go? Why were you so late?”
    “We’re sorry if we frightened you,” Dad said. “We just went for a drive. We sat in the car, talking about you. We were trying to decide what to do. We weren’t sure if we should tell you where you came from.”
    “It was so hard for us,” Mom added. “We’ve wanted so much for you to be a normal human boy. We knew that as soon as you found out you were an alien, you could never be normal again.”
    I laughed.