I used to look at the water tower in Coronation and wonder what, exactly, it was waiting for.
By daylight it was only a water tower, which is what sensible people called it. It stood there on its stilts like a dutiful public servant, holding water for baths, dishwashing, and the general maintenance of civilization. But at night it became something else entirely.
It rose above our small town like a silent mechanical watcher, too big to ignore and too still to trust. I began to imagine that it might be a beacon, sending signals into the sky to attract visitors from some distant and unpleasant corner of the universe. Perhaps it was not storing water at all. Perhaps it was storing instructions.
Or worse, perhaps the tower itself was the spacecraft.
That was the thought that stayed with me. Maybe the whole thing was a kind of Trojan Horse with four steel legs, planted in the middle of our lives so long ago that everyone had stopped noticing it. Adults are gifted that way. If something looks official enough, and has been standing around for a few decades, they assume it belongs to them.
I wasn’t so sure.
Aliens, I reasoned, might possess astonishing patience. They might not swoop down in fire and trumpet blasts the way one hoped they would in the movies. They might prefer to wait. They might hide in plain sight, inside a town water tower, letting generation after generation grow used to the idea that a giant metal object looming over their rooftops was perfectly normal.
At night, lying in bed, I could picture them in there. Not little green men exactly, but something smarter and more terrible. Creatures with too many joints. Creatures who understood boredom at a level no human could endure. They were simply waiting for the proper signal, or planetary alignment, or mayoral weakness.
The tower never moved, which only made it worse. If it had shifted even six inches in the moonlight, I could have screamed, pointed, and died vindicated. But no. It remained perfectly still, which gave it the terrifying advantage of plausibility.
By morning it would be a water tower again, innocent as a church casserole. People would drive past it without a glance. Dogs would bark. Lawns would be watered. Someone would mention the weather. And there it would stand, full of either water or unimaginable purpose.
I never solved the mystery.
For all I know, the invasion was postponed. Or perhaps Coronation was judged too small to bother with. Even aliens, one assumes, have standards.
Still, when I think of childhood fear, I do not think first of ghosts or monsters or the things supposedly under the bed. I think of that water tower, high above our little town, pretending to be useful.
And I still suspect it knew exactly what it was doing.