Thank you so much for reviewing, Norma Jean (hahaha... great song choice! MCR, right? I love that! Thanks!) and Arwen Evenstar Umdomiel (Thanks! As for the answer to what happened to Madeline, read on! Hope you keep on reading, and thanks to the add to your favorites!)! I feel special. Two reviews, lol. Well, we went and looked at another property this weekend closer to home, but none of us like it (I don't like any of them). But, I figured I'd write a new chapter. Here ya go...

x x x

Chapter Three

It was sort of like waking up from a long night's sleep, only it was much more difficult. I had never been unconscious before, so maybe that was why.

First I felt myself breathing slowly in and out... in and out... Then my head felt as if it had become a rock as much as it was hurting; I didn't try to lift it up right away. It felt like a veil was being lifted... I was suddenly aware of a heavy blanket covering me, and the side of my face was laying on the cushions of what smelled liked the old couch my great-grandmother used to have at her house before she passed away. Was I back at the new house? Was I alive or was this a dream?

My eyes opened ever so slightly as I lay there lifelessly. My chest was hurting still. I don't know what happened last night, but I felt very exhausted and weak. I could tell that if I looked in a mirror I would probably be ghost white.

I opened my eyes a little more with a huge effort, and a quaint room slowly blur together. It looked somewhat old-fashioned but not neglected. A small girl was watching television intently in front of me, but I could not make out what she was watching exactly. I saw a staircase beyond that, but a tall figure suddenly stepped into the path of my eyesight. I wasn't afraid immediately for some reason as it walked towards me, but as it sat on the edge of the couch towering over me, my fear came back, and my eyes opened wide.

I clutched the blanket closer to me ready to scream. I was in the crazy farmhouse. They had taken me in to torture me so I could never tell anyone about them. The man I recognized as the one who wasn't shaking me to death last night raised up his hand to silence me, but I only pushed back into the couch more and more with some little gasps starting to come from me. He shook his head, putting his hand down. I stared at him very much afraid from behind the blanket. He didn't have much to say right away, either. He just looked at me a moment. I held my breath.

"How are you feeling?" he finally asked quietly. The alarm in my stare was going away a little bit. He didn't look crazy, but after last night, I just wanted to go home. I didn't reply. I was still unsure of everything. The man cleared his throat uncomfortably, looking from the little girl back to me. I stole a glance at her, too.

"Listen," he said very gently, "this is probably... a big misunderstanding." I agreed but did not interrupt. My eyes softened more, though. He continued. "You'll have to excuse my brother Merrill for last night... myself as well. We didn't mean to scare you, it's just... somebody's been messing around with our property lately, and it's got us all a bit on edge."

He paused, but I didn't say anything. He continued somewhat reluctantly. "I don't think you did this," he said straightforwardly. "But we have an officer here so we can report anything we saw, and if you'd come in the dining room and tell her your part of the story, maybe we can figure out what's going on."

I still didn't answer as he watched me, but I was willing to help since this guy at least looked sane.

"What happened to me?" I asked quietly, pushing on the uncomfortable pressure in my chest under the blanket. The man looked at me sullenly.

"We think you might have had a brief heart attack," he replied. "Are you diabetic at all? We didn't find any medical bracelets or anything on you when you collapsed..."

"No, I have heart cancer," I said. It wasn't quite as bad as it used to be - I was sort of getting use to saying it now to everyone. The man sitting there lowered his head and nodded understandably. He looked back up at me, taking a deep breath.

"Do you need to see a doctor?" he asked. "Do you need to take any special medications?"

I shook my head. "Stress just makes it worse," I explained. "I was terrified last night... I just need to calm down."

"I called your house up the road since you mentioned Thompson's Plot last night, but there was no answer," he told me. "So we kept you here for the rest of the night. I'm amazed you've woken up this quickly."

I nodded. My chest still thudded painfully, but then again I had never had a minor heart attack before.

"Do you think you might be able to come and answer some of Officer Paski's questions for us?"

I nodded again as I sat up slowly. Some of my muscles hurt from lying in an awkward position on the couch. The man removed the blanket from me and left it in a lump on the other end of the couch as I swung my feet to the floor. I was still in my dirty pair of jeans and nightshirt, and my hair was probably a mess still tied back in its ponytail, too.

I was barefoot. I looked around wondering where my shoes were as the man went over to the little girl watching television. Half way across the room, he pointed out of the living room towards the staircase and said, "Your shoes at next to the front door."

I stood up carefully, wishing I had a jacket or something to pull closer around me. I was a bit wobbly at first, but I stood next to the couch looking around as I found my balance again. There were pictures around the house, and a baseball bat with a golden plaque reflecting some sunlight was on the wall.

Feeling cold suddenly, I grabbed the blanket on the couch and wrapped it around me. I wasn't about to walk around a stranger's home in my nightshirt, anyways. I quietly approached the man pointing to half-full glasses of water on top of the television and speaking to the little girl. I watched silently but patiently.

"What's wrong with this one?" he said, pointing to the first.

"It has dust in it," the small girl replied.

"This one?"

"A hair."

"This one?"

"Morgan took a sip. It has his amoebas in it," she said matter-of-factly without removing her eyes from her cartoon. I managed a small smile now realizing all of the glasses of water sitting around the living room. It was sort of comical.

The man then rolled his eyes and turned around, ready to head into the dining room. I followed, trying to hide my smile, but he caught me.

"She does this all the time," he said. "She hasn't finished a glass yet. Even if I give her a small one."

My smile only grew at that, but I made it go away as I entered the dining room behind him. He stepped aside and sat in a chair, and I saw the police officer sitting at the head of the table. Next to the man was the other one that had shook me by the shoulders and yelled at me the night before.

He glanced up at me, and I could tell he still thought I was the one who had been terrorizing their plantation. I looked away nervously as I walked around the table, taking the only available seat next to him. He seemed more unstable than the other guy, and I felt very uncomfortable sitting next to him. It felt like he wanted to pounce on me with the glare he was giving me, but I kept looking at the table until conversation finally picked up.

"Sorry," the nice guy said to the officer who looked over at me with interest. "Last night when we were running around, we found…"

"Madeline," I said.

"We found Madeline," the man continued after my support, "and she may have a few things to tell you about the intruder as well."

Officer Paski smiled at me appreciatively. "Well that's very kind of you," she said to me, "but I don't believe I know you from around here."

"My family and I just moved up the road into Thompson's Plot a week ago," I said. "My family left yesterday to go back across state to finalize the sale of our home while I stayed to supervise the construction crew coming to work on the house later this week."

The officer nodded. "So you spent the night here?"

"That's our fault, Caroline," the man I had spoken to when I woke up said. "She passed out when we found her, her family wasn't home, so we brought her in for the night."

"Well, if she can supply me with something more descriptive than 'it was very dark…'"

"It was," the man agreed.

"You can't describe him at all?" Officer Paski asked. "Don't you think that's a little odd?"

Both of the men sitting at the table with me just stared at her until the man nodded and agreed. "A little," he had murmured. The lunatic sitting next to me kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. I looked at the table again.

"I don't know whether to look for a midget or a-"

"No, he definitely wasn't a midget," the man said flatly.

Officer Paski nodded as if we were actually getting somewhere now. "Okay… So he was tall?"

The man turned to the lunatic. Didn't he say that they were brothers? Wasn't his name Merrill or something? I still didn't know the man's name, but I looked over at the lunatic I assumed was Merrill as they tried to agree on a height for the intruder.

"I would say so," the man said finally.

"Probably," the lunatic added as they looked back at Paski.

"Over six feet?" she pressed.

Again, the two of them stared at her blankly. I tried to envision the figure again. It was funny shaped for sure… it looked sort of lumpy now that I thought about it.

"It was very dark," the lunatic Merrill, said somewhat confused.

"Yes it was," his brother agreed again.

I looked from them over to Officer Paski who turned to me. "Would you say he was over six feet?" she asked me.

"No taller than seven," I supplied uneasily. Paski scribbled something into her little notepad and looked back up at me expectantly. "He was pretty tall," I added stupidly. But I recovered with, "Six seven, six eight… somewhere around there possibly."

I felt lunatic Merrill glaring at me again.

"You don't look that tall," he scoffed suddenly in my direction. His brother and Paski looked immediately from him to me, and I just lowered my head angrily. Paski was ready to attack me with questions, but the nice man hissed Merrill's name reprimandingly and spoke up.

"It's fine," he said. "Merrill thinks that since we found her in the backyard she's the one who's been terrorizing us-"

"Come on, Graham!" the lunatic said, raising his voice. "She was running around and freaking out when we caught her! She's not telling us something! She did it!"

"Did you do it?" Officer Paski asked me.

"No," I said. "I've just moved here and I saw someone up on their roof when I was taking a walk last night-"

"It was two in the morning," Merrill said, pushing his comment in. "That's way passed curfew. Plus it's too dark to see anything without a light."

"It is," Paski agreed.

"I didn't know," I argued. "I just moved here, and I haven't left my house since we got here!" I looked over at Merrill with some disgust. "He keeps asking where Lionel is," I said, motioning towards him. "I don't know anybody named Lionel."

"Lionel Prichard is a prankster known county wide," the man I now knew as Graham from Merrill's outburst said. "He likes to scare people and mess around, but I wouldn't think you'd know him."

"And how do you know that?" Merrill asked him.

"Stop it, Merrill," Graham said warningly. "I don't think she was capable of getting on the roof while you had a vice grip on her arms."

"There were others," Merrill tried to argue. "She had help. She would've needed it to make the crop circle. That is, unless she's had practice at it…"

"Merrill-"

"Look, we don't know anything about her," he said to Paski, ignoring his brother now. "She says she moved here a week ago, and the vandalism started two days ago. All I'm saying is that she would have had plenty of time to meet a troublemaker around here and help them do this to us. And isn't it just convenient that none of her family is home?"

"They went back across state," I said loudly, leaning towards him with a dangerous glare. He returned it without hesitation.

"Were you upset about moving here?" he asked me.

"What business is that of yours?"

"Well hormonally challenged teenagers do get angry and take things out on people that don't deserve it," he said evenly.

"Are you implying that I made a crop circle in your corn and jumped on your roof because I'm mad about having to move?"

"It's a motive."

"Yes, well emotionally unstable madmen will think of anything when they can't find an answer to their problems."

The rage in his eyes was building as we stared at each other, but mine only narrowed. I waited for him to rise out of his chair and hit me so Paski could haul him off.

"I- I see what you mean, Merrill, but just hold on a second," Paski suddenly said to avoid things getting ugly between us. "I thought you and Graham told me that this was a male you saw on your roof?"

Merrill slowly began to lean away from me, but the visible beam of frustration and hate we were shooting at each other with our eyes did not break right away.

"We did," he said distractedly before finally looking up at Paski. Satisfied with my success, I turned and nodded as a testimonial. "But she could still be involved," he added quickly.

I let out a deep breath, trying to calm down.

"How certain are you that it was a male?" Paski asked.

"Oh, I don't know…" Merrill said with a hint of sarcasm. "I don't know any girls who can run like that. Except maybe Miss Innocence here," he added as I silently fumed. "I don't know her that well."

Ignoring his comment, I spoke up. "Officer Paski, if you would have seen it, you would've believed us when we say that it was a guy."

"But I wasn't there, so I can only go by your descriptions," she said.

"But he looked masculine," I said. "He just… looked like a guy. He was tall and built-"

"I don't know," Paski interrupted with doubt as she leaned back in her chair. "I've seen some of those women on the Olympics. They can run like the wind. Some are really built up, too."

"This guy was on our roof in, like, a second," Merrill said after a moment of flustering with his words. "Our roof is ten feet high."

"I can't jump that high," I got in as casually as possible to the conversation

"I bet you can't…" Merrill muttered sarcastically under his breath.

"They have women's high jumping in the Olympics," Paski said, trying to reason with us. "They got these Scandinavian women who can jump clean over me."

"I'm not Scandinavian," I interjected quickly. "Just for the record. Mostly German bloodline."

"Caroline," Graham said softly, "I know you're making a point, but I just don't know what it is," he admitted. I didn't really see that she was making a point, and nor did Merrill; we were too busy seeing who could get the nastiest glare in last before officer Paski started talking again.

"An out-of-town woman stopped by the diner yesterday afternoon and started yelling and cussing because they didn't have her favorite cigarettes at the vending machine," she told us. "She scared a couple of the customers. No one's seen her since."

"Til now," Merrill murmured. I looked over at him angrily.

"I don't smoke," I said dangerously.

"Prove it."

"My point is," Paski said loudly, overriding our bickering, "we don't know anything about the person you saw, and we should just keep all possibilities available."

"Dad, where's the remote?"

I looked over at Graham to see the little girl that was watching the television earlier standing in front of him innocently. Graham looked at the little girl and spoke softly, trying not to be rude while Paski was here.

"I don't know, baby," he said quietly to her. "Why don't you check under the sofa cushions?" It seemed good enough for now, and the little girl walked back into the living room silently. Merrill opened his big mouth again.

"Excluding the possibility that a female Scandinavian Olympian was running around outside our house last night, what else might be a possibility?" he asked sarcastically. "You know, she could still be involved," he said, motioning towards me. "We just found her in the backyard after hearing all of this crap going on outside. She was there."

"Maybe it was just the wrong place at the wrong time," Graham said on my behalf. I thanked him silently. "We haven't even heard her story yet."

"Go ahead," Paski said, her notepad at the ready. I took a deep breath and sighed before beginning.

"I was out walking by myself," I started with a little white lie (I was not about to say I was spying on them with binoculars). "I was passing this house when I saw something on the roof, so I stopped and tried to figure out what it was."

"What did you think it was?" Paski asked.

"A burglar," I said without hesitation. "But as I looked at it, it looked stranger and stranger. Almost inhuman."

"Inhuman?" Paski repeated.

I nodded. "Big head, really tall, big upper body… and in the blink of an eye was off the roof."

"Then what?" she asked.

"I heard noises behind me," I said. "So I ran until I ended up in the corn fields. I kept running, and then I came to a clearing, and then to another… I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it was a crop circle."

"It was," Graham said. "We reported it two days ago."

"Well, after that, I started running in another direction because the noises were getting closer and more numerous behind me," I said. "Then I fell into their backyard after stumbling out of the field, these two came running out of the house screaming and scaring me half to death, and while he was shaking me," – I pointed to Merrill – "the figure was up on the roof again and off."

"I still say you helped," Merrill said.

"What happened after the thing jumped off the roof?" Paski asked.

"I passed out. And I woke up here."

"Sounds like it should check out," Paski declared after a moment, rereading what she had written. Then, she turned to Graham and Merrill. "Was anything stolen last night? She said she thought it was a burglar."

Graham and Merrill looked at each other, but both of them replied negatively. Again, Merrill began to talk.

"Okay," he said. "I was out of line with the whole female-Scandinavian-Olympian thing. It's just… I'm pretty strong and I'm pretty fast. And I was running as fast as I could and this guy, he was… he was just toying with us."

"And I'm still a suspect?" I asked blandly.

"Yes."

"You were running at me so fast I couldn't think and you just said that the guy was faster than you," I said. "Tell me how I work into that."

"Maybe you're Superman's girlfriend," he said.

"And maybe you're just insecure because you can't explain it," I fired back, lowering my voice when I saw the little girl coming back in from the living room. She turned to Graham again.

"There's only food under the sofa," she said.

Graham looked away somewhat embarrassed. "Baby, why don't you change the channel on the television?" he suggested aside from our conversation again.

"I did," the girl replied.

"And?"

"Same show's on every channel."

That sounded strange. All of us sitting at the table looked at each other until Graham got up and followed her into the living room. We all gathered around the television curiously to see a huge crop circle taking up the screen with a 'breaking news' banner across the bottom of it, but we couldn't hear what was going on. A small boy was in the room now as well.

"Bo, turn the volume up," Graham said.

The girl obeyed without word, and I leaned into listen from behind Merrill.

"--Images were shot yesterday afternoon by a thirty-four year old local camera man in Kerala, a southern city of India. It is the eighteenth reported crop circle found in that country in the last seventy-two hours," the anchor said.

I stared in disbelief. Everyone was silent.

It had to be a hoax…

"Crop circles first emerged in the late seventies with the renewed interest in extraterrestrial life," a new voice said as a map of India was shown with markers of where these crop circles had been discovered. "They died out by the early eighties; dismissed as hoaxes." I sighed in relief.

"This new resurgence is wholly different." I felt my stomach plummet at those words. What was so different?

"Elements of it are unexplainable. The speed and the quantity in which it has appeared implies the coordination of hundreds of individuals over many countries... There is only a limited amount of explanations," the anchor continued in a shaken tone. I swallowed a bunch of nerves down hard as I stared at the things the television was showing us.

"Either this is one of the most elaborate hoaxes ever created, or basically... it's for real." The words rang in my head as I stared fearfully at the TV. I even wanted to jump a little when the boy standing next to the little girl murmured the word 'extraterrestrials.' He took out an inhaler and used it while I myself felt faint as my chest thudded some more.

"I knew I wasn't going to like it here…" I mumbled.

"What in God's name is going on?" Paski whispered, voicing all of our thoughts.

I stood there speechless as the news continued to show crop circle after crop circle. My mind didn't really comprehend it at first. Aliens… Extraterrestrials… but what about all of the ones that were proven hoaxes? It was unbeleiveable. Aliens?

As we stood there feeling very small, Graham and Officer Paski moved out of the room, leaving me there with Merrill and the two kids. Both Merrill and I were thunderstruck and numb as we stood there.

"So now what?" I asked breathlessly. "Am I the Crop Circle Santa Claus?"

Merrill didn't reply. We watched a few more crop circles flash on TV before slowly looking over at each other. He was wrong, and I was waiting for him to say it, but he didn't. He just stared at me wide-eyed before looking back at the television.