§ § § -- October 28, 2000

"Mom, I just want to hit the pool," complained Zachary impatiently, already going through the contents of his suitcase in search of his swim trunks. "It's gonna be my last chance till next summer, and I don't care about Kyle's fantasy anyway."

"What, you don't care about getting Dad back?" Kyle demanded incredulously.

Zachary rolled his eyes. "Course I do, stupid. I just don't see any reason I have to be there when you tell Mr. Roarke your goofy flying-saucer story. I've already heard it three hundred times and I don't want to hear it again."

"Look, you little moron—" Kyle began, but their mother emerged from the bedroom just then, frowning wearily.

"Enough, boys," she said, sighing. "Go ahead, Zachary, but for heaven's sake, once you get to the pool, stay there so we can find you later after our appointment with Mr. Roarke." Zachary nodded eagerly, found his trunks and shut himself in the bedroom to change. Bonnie turned to Kyle and smoothed back his hair, making Kyle automatically duck aside to avoid her solicitous touch.

"Knock it off, Mom," he said ritualistically.

Bonnie smiled tiredly. "Son, try not to be disappointed if you get the same reaction from Mr. Roarke that you've gotten from everyone else. You know most people think UFOs are fiction, and that people who claim they've seen one are a little…well…"

"Nuts," Kyle filled in, with the demeanor of one who's heard it all before. "Mom, I don't think Mr. Roarke's gonna react that way. The rumors are always flying about this place—how anything in the world can happen here. So why not a UFO landing, too?"

"I don't think Mr. Roarke can just call one down on command," Bonnie said, aiming for a joking tone but not quite getting there.

Kyle turned to regard his mother. "Mom, don't you miss Dad?" he asked.

Bonnie's face fell and she half turned away from him. "Kyle, believe me, I miss him every single day," she said, quietly but fervently. "Not a day has gone by since he vanished that I haven't wished he'd come back. But each day, I lose a little more hope. Most missing persons don't come back alive after a certain length of time, and it's been five years. I doubt Mr. Roarke's going to have any more answers than the police did, or the private detective, or that group of half-crazed ghostbusters you got in touch with last year."

"The ghostbusters were Zachary's idea," Kyle said. "Wrong group completely. We should've called in some people out of Roswell or something."

Bonnie groaned and let her head fall back. "Kyle…"

The sound of a knock on the door precluded whatever she might have said, and Kyle instantly lost interest in the conversation, sprinting to answer it. He grinned at Roarke and Leslie, his face once more filled with hope. "Hi, Mr. Roarke, Leslie."

"Hello, Kyle," Roarke said, and Leslie smiled at him. Kyle shut the door behind them and trailed them back into the main room, while Roarke and Leslie greeted Bonnie and everyone took seats. Roarke glanced at Bonnie, then Leslie, before focusing on Kyle, who perched on the edge of his chair with an overeager mien about him. "Perhaps," he suggested with gentle humor, "we should simply let Kyle tell his story without further ado."

Kyle grinned sheepishly. "Well, it's just that nobody else has ever believed me," he explained. "I figured, since they never listened to the truth, you were my last and best hope for some kind of help."

Roarke regarded the boy kindly. "I can make no promises, Kyle," he said, "but before I try to draw any conclusions, why don't you tell me exactly what you saw the night your father disappeared."

Kyle opened his mouth, but just then the bedroom door opened and Zachary emerged, wearing fire-engine-red trunks. "Oh, man, time for Kyle's dumb story again," he groaned theatrically. "No offense, Mr. Roarke and Leslie, but I'm outta here."

"Remember what I told you about staying at the pool," Bonnie called after him as he ran for the door.

"Yeah, yeah, Mom," Zachary yelled back and escaped, the door drifting shut in his wake. Bonnie shrugged and gave Roarke and Leslie an apologetic look, which they both acknowledged with amused smiles.

Kyle cleared his throat, and all eyes went to him. "Can I start now, Mr. Roarke?"

"By all means," Roarke said with a nod.

"Okay…" Kyle drew in a deep breath. "It was just before school started. It was one of those really clear nights when you can see practically every star in the galaxy, you know? I had my window open and I was lying in bed, trying to go to sleep, but I had like two days left of summer vacation and I wasn't really happy about going back to school. Anyway, so I was awake, and Mom and Dad were getting ready to hit the sack too. Dad would go out to the end of our driveway every night and close the gate in the fence, and I heard him walk out the door to do that. Mom came back down the hall and checked up on Zachary and me like she always does, and I pretended to be asleep so I wouldn't get the third degree." He cast his mother a glance, and Bonnie smiled slightly, just for a second. Clearly, Roarke and Leslie realized, she'd heard this story before as well.

"So I heard Mom go into hers and Dad's room and shut the door, and I kept my eyes closed…I hoped maybe it would help me get to sleep. A few minutes went by…and then I saw all this red on my eyelids, like you do when you've got your eyes shut while you're lying in the sun. I opened my eyes, and my whole room was filled with this weird light."

"How, precisely, was it 'weird'?" Roarke asked.

Kyle hesitated before he spoke. "Well…it's hard to describe it. I mean, I can see it right now in my memory, but I'm not sure how to tell you what it looked like. I guess the best way to say it was that it was kind of swirly, silver-glittery-like. Kinda like when you shake one of those goofy souvenir water globes and all this white flaky stuff floats around inside." He looked up to gauge Roarke's reaction, and Roarke nodded comprehension. "In a way, it made me think of the special effects on Star Trek when they're beaming somebody up. And see, my whole room looked like that, sparkling off the walls and the ceiling and the floor and all the furniture. It felt like I was right in the middle of it, but when I reached out and tried to touch the glittery stuff, it was all just thin air.

"So I jumped out of bed and ran to the window, and for a second I was almost blinded by this thing. But then I saw it—this great big disk-looking thing. It was maybe the size of half a football field, I guess, and it was kind of hanging overhead maybe a hundred feet off the ground, and all this blue and pink and purple and green and yellow light was blinking on and off on the bottom of it. And there was more of that glittery stuff in the air, all over our front yard, like a blizzard or something." Kyle leaned intensely forward. "And way down by the gate, I saw this…beam of light, like a spotlight, shining down there, and I saw my dad standing right in the middle of it."

"You're sure it was your dad?" Leslie asked.

"He was the only person down there—it couldn't be anybody else. There was a human silhouette right in the middle of this beam of light, plain as anything. And right while I was standing there staring at my dad in the middle of that light, all of a sudden he kind of swooshed up, really fast, and he was just gone. And then the beam of light went out, and the glittery stuff went poof and disappeared, and this disk thing whooshed up into the sky and popped out of sight. And all that happened in maybe five seconds flat."

Roarke and Leslie looked at each other, both expressionless; then Roarke turned back to Kyle and asked, "What did you do then?"

"I didn't do anything right away," Kyle admitted. "At first I was just staring into the sky, trying to see where the disk thing went, but it was gone and all I could see were stars. I thought maybe it'd come back, but it didn't. And that was when Mom came out and caught me out of bed, and she gave me heck for it." He grinned again, and Roarke chuckled in sympathy. "That's when I tried to tell her about the disk and all the light, but she said I must have been having a dream."

"If there was that much light," Leslie said curiously, "why were you the only one who saw it? It should have flooded the whole house, the way you describe it."

Bonnie sighed. "I was in the bathroom in Eric's and my bedroom," she explained with some reluctance, "and there aren't any windows in there. It was built that way on purpose to serve as an emergency tornado shelter in case we can't get to our storm cellar in time. So I never noticed anything."

"You heard nothing?" Roarke questioned.

"There wasn't any sound," Kyle said. "I mean, there was so much light it was like daylight, but the whole time I can remember the crickets chirping like crazy, as if nothing was happening. If I'd been blind, I'd never have known anything was going on. So Mom didn't believe me, being in that bathroom, and Zachary slept through the whole thing, so I was the only person who saw what happened."

"I don't know if he really saw anything or not," Bonnie said, shooting Kyle a quelling glance when he opened his mouth as though to protest. "He's always maintained he did, but I've never been sure it wasn't just a vivid dream. But then Eric never returned from closing the gate, and I decided it was Kyle's way of trying to explain his father's disappearance."

"I told you," Kyle said with a pleading look at Roarke. "Nobody believes me. Nobody's ever believed me. They all say I was dreaming or just making it up. When I told the cops my story, they did go around asking the neighbors questions, but they didn't see anything either." He scowled. "All that light and stuff, and I'm the only one who saw it. No matter who I told, they just humored me. We hired a private detective after the cops gave up…and that guy actually patted me on the head and told Mom I had a great little imagination and might be a terrific sci-fi writer someday."

"I wouldn't have agreed to this trip," Bonnie said with a heavy sigh, "but there was one thing that's stayed with me. Kyle's story has been totally consistent every time he's told it. If he were making it up, the details would have changed. Of course, it's just as likely he's describing his dream as he remembers it—"

"Mom," Kyle exploded, "I wasn't dreaming!"

Roarke lifted his hands. "Please, calm yourself, Kyle," he said, and Kyle sagged in his chair, falling back so that he slouched grumpily. "Mrs. Satterfield, what did the police find when they investigated your husband's disappearance?"

"Nothing," Bonnie said a little bitterly. "Not one blessed thing. We hadn't had rain in a long time, so there weren't even footprints to show he'd gone down to the gate. No tire tracks from a vehicle, no signs of a scuffle, no nothing. For all I know, the ground opened up and swallowed him."

"There'd have been a hole," Kyle argued stubbornly. "Or at least the signs of one."

"Kyle, we've been over this so many times, I could recite it in my sleep," Bonnie said wearily. "I'm at the end of my rope with this whole thing. Frankly, Mr. Roarke, I'd just as soon step back and let you deal with Kyle alone—maybe you can make him see reason."

Roarke regarded her for a very long minute, long enough that Bonnie began to look apprehensive. Then he said, very simply, "I believe your son, Mrs. Satterfield."

Bonnie's jaw dropped, and Kyle rocketed out of his slouch, his face alive with relief and excitement. "No way! You really do, Mr. Roarke?"

Roarke smiled and said, "Yes, I really do." He noticed Bonnie's flabbergasted look and said kindly, "The universe contains many strange and inexplicable things that are too often dismissed out of hand. You mentioned, Kyle, that your family had hired a private detective. What other avenues of assistance did you look into? Were you ever visited by anyone from the government?"

"I wouldn't let it get out," Bonnie said, still eyeing Roarke as if she were as unsure of his sanity as of her son's. "I really didn't want a lot of attention coming down on us. The local media might have treated it as a novelty story and there'd have been endless ridicule. I might not believe Kyle's story, but I didn't see the need for him to suffer persecution for what he's convinced he saw. So no, we never heard from government people, no Area 51 or anything like that. The police filed away Eric's case as unsolvable; the private detective took a very unhealthy chunk out of our savings before he decided there was nothing else he could do. He never found anything either. And then Kyle brought in a group of self-described ghostbusters…"

"Mom," Kyle said with the strained patience of one dealing with a fractious toddler, "I told you, that was Zachary's idea, not mine. It wasn't ghosts that took Dad, it was aliens." He met Roarke's amused, quizzical look. "Zachary was being funny. Last year he got hold of a bunch of crackpots who claim they can ferret out ghosts, like in that old movie, you know. They had a great old time banging on pots and pans and lighting candles and incense and reciting weird-sounding nonsense chants, but that's all they did."

"They actually expected us to pay them for their efforts," Bonnie put in, tossing a disgusted glance at the ceiling. "When we found out Zachary had called them, I saw to it that their pay came out of his saved allowance. Up till then he half believed Kyle's story, but since that time he's dismissed it entirely and won't even listen to it anymore."

Roarke and Leslie both chuckled again, and Roarke settled his seated stance, looking thoughtful. Bonnie and Kyle watched him expectantly, and Leslie waited in silence. After a time Roarke focused on Kyle. "So your fantasy is to see an unidentified flying object."

"Well," Kyle admitted a little uncomfortably, "I know that's what I said in my letter, but the truth is, I want to see the one that took Dad. I want that thing to come back here so I can ask those aliens why they took Dad, and why they won't let him come back. I mean, we need him more than they do."

Roarke stared at Kyle, his features expressionless at first before growing gradually doubtful. "Too little is known about these occurrences," he said slowly, as though speaking to himself, "and there is no indication as to whether the various alleged UFO sightings on record are instances of appearances by the same ship, or different ones. If I could possibly call an alien ship here to Fantasy Island—which I must stress to you is unlikely in the extreme, if not altogether impossible—there is no guarantee it would be the one you tell us abducted your father. Do you understand, Kyle?"

"You mean you can't give me my fantasy?" Kyle asked, dismay radiating from him.

"I didn't say that," Roarke said. "In fact, UFO sightings are not unknown on this island, though they are extremely rare. I will do what little I can, but as I told you before, I can make no promises. However difficult you may find it to give, I am afraid I must insist on your patience in the matter."

Kyle let out a long slow breath and gave Roarke an ironic look, asking wryly, "Do I have a choice?"

Roarke's return look was equally wry. "Not much," he said.

Kyle reacted with a mildly startled expression, precipitating quiet laughter from the adults. Roarke cleared his throat slightly and continued, "For the moment there is quite a bit of research I must do, and the best thing you can do now is relax and try to enjoy yourself. Follow your brother's lead and take a swim at the pool, or you can rent a horse or a bicycle, or spend time on the beach. When I have something more to tell you, I'll contact you, or have Leslie do so. All right?"

Kyle nodded, then tensed suddenly. "I almost forgot," he exclaimed. "Please, Mr. Roarke, wait just a minute." He waited long enough for Roarke's nod before jumping to his feet and running into the bedroom.

"What else can we do here?" Bonnie asked.

"We have an amusement park, which I'm sure Kyle and Zachary would both enjoy, and if you're inclined toward that sort of thing, there is a casino. We have as many spectators there as gamblers, so you need not feel as though you must participate. When you and the boys are hungry, you can choose from the pond restaurant or the hotel," Roarke said. "There is room service as well if you don't feel like going out."

On Bonnie's interested nod, Kyle came back with a small photo album which he gave to Roarke. "What's that?" Leslie asked.

Kyle focused on her. "There's not too much in it, but it's kind of a scrapbook. After Dad vanished, I kept all the newspaper articles that came out about it. Most of 'em are from our local paper, but the story got out as far as North Platte and even Lincoln and Omaha, so there's a few from those places too." He stood beside Roarke's chair, watching their enigmatic host slowly page through the collection, skimming the articles. Without comment, he handed the book to Leslie when he was finished.

"It did stir up the reporters for the first few weeks after Eric vanished," Bonnie confessed. "I mean, I guess it couldn't do anything else, especially since he left no trace at all behind. One of those articles even says it was as if Eric Satterfield never existed at all, he disappeared so completely."

Leslie paused on an article that had appeared in the North Platte newspaper. "Uh, excuse me, but Kyle…what's the drawing that's with this article?"

Kyle turned in surprise, got a look at what Leslie was staring at, and nodded. "When the North Platte reporter came out to do a story on Dad's vanishing act, he asked me to draw what I remembered seeing that night." The drawing, which had been printed with the article, showed a representation of what presumably was the interior of Kyle's bedroom, with the suggestions of furniture and a square that Kyle told her was his window. "I'm not really much of an artist, but I did the best I could."

Leslie examined the little dots liberally scattered all over the drawing. "I guess it really did look like a blizzard, from the way you drew it."

Kyle shrugged and said, "Like I said, I can't really draw—and I did that when I was eleven, a few weeks after Dad vanished, so it's even worse because of that. I know it looks like little black spots, but it was really little silvery glittery flake-looking things." He met Leslie's gaze and shrugged again, looking a little helpless. "I wish I could draw…or better yet, I wish I could paint, and then I could have shown what it really looked like, in color."

"That's all right, Kyle," Roarke said. "I have a very good mental image of what you are trying to get across. You've given me some good material to work with, and that's more help than you realize." He arose, which Leslie took as a cue to close the album and hand it back to Kyle before standing up herself. "As I mentioned earlier, when I have something more for you, I'll get in touch with you."

"But Mr. Roarke…what kind of research can you possibly do?" Bonnie asked. "I don't go in much for this UFO stuff, but I know there's not a lot out there, and I'm sure it won't take you very long. And, well…don't take this personally, please, but I have to be totally honest with you. I just don't see how you can fulfill Kyle's fantasy."

"Just leave that to me, Mrs. Satterfield, and enjoy yourself today," Roarke said with a smile. "Let me put it this way: there is more to my brand of research than merely combing through historical archives. Please don't trouble yourself about it, all right?"

Bonnie nodded a little dubiously. "Well, okay, then, we'll leave it in your hands. Thank you for coming out and listening to Kyle's story, both you and Leslie."

"Not at all," said Roarke warmly. "Please excuse us…Leslie?" The two exited, leaving an excited Kyle and a skeptical Bonnie.

"Mom, come on," Kyle insisted. "If anybody can do it, Mr. Roarke can."

"But we don't even know that Mr. Roarke can," Bonnie countered, watching Kyle's face fall as he realized the truth of his mother's words. She went to him and squeezed his shoulder. "I just don't want you pinning all your hopes on maybes when even Mr. Roarke himself said he can't make any promises."

Kyle shrugged and said stubbornly, "Well, I'm choosing to believe. Maybe we better go to the pool and make sure Zachary's still there."