ET- Negative Effects while Dying

  The ages-old being slumped forward. His density was changing. He was like the core of a collapsing star, the force of Earth’s gravity fully upon him. He was becoming a black hole in space.

  Lance was hit with it too, his own form weighted down, so that his lowness became still lower and he crouched, like a rat, under E.T.’s other arm. “Look, he communicates through you. He belongs to you. But you gotta make it legal. My dad’s a lawyer. He’ll figure something out. We’ll be millionaires, we’ll go everywhere. Everyone will want to know us because we’ll be the most famous boys in the world. They’ll all want to meet E.T. And he’ll be ours!”
...

  “Do you have . . . any Swiss cheese?” Lance was in need of a fix. His head seemed very weird all of a sudden. He felt himself dropping through something deeper than he’d ever dreamt of. It was like that night on his bike, but in reverse; then he felt he could almost fly, and now he felt caught in dark, sticky substances that only Swiss cheese could control.

  “Somebody ate all the Swiss cheese already,” said Mary, looking at the little nerd suspiciously. She knew something was up with these guys—it was tugging at her mother’s intuition, but she didn’t want to push it. And—she had a sudden, splitting headache. God, she hoped it wasn’t early menopause. That was all she needed.

  She walked out of the room. Elliott quickly turned back to E.T. The old wanderer’s arm had fallen out from under the blanket. Horror crossed Elliott’s face as he looked at the color of it—a grayish shade, which drew his gaze hypnotically into warps of dreaming he wasn’t up to, at all.
...

  Elliott’s body felt as though it were made of chains, chains of iron holding him down. He felt heavier and heavier; his head was splitting, and dark depression weighed on him like a hundred thousand tons of lead. When the gray light of morning finally came, he pulled himself up and looked at E.T. The monster was like something drained, no longer gray, but white, a white dwarf.

  Elliott dragged himself into the hallway, and staggered down it toward Mary’s room. He pushed open the door, iron depression and cosmic loneliness all one to him now. He felt like an extraterrestrial, felt alien to himself, and he was afraid.

  Mary opened her eyes, looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything—is worth nothing,” he said, feeling the deep in-falling, the collapsing, the departing.

  “Oh, baby, that’s no way to feel,” said Mary, though in fact it was exactly how she felt too; all night she’d been dreaming she was underwater, unable to get to the surface.

  “I have something wonderful,” said Elliott, “and I’ve made it sad.”

  “Everyone feels like that now and then,” said Mary, trying for an appropriate platitude, but it was no medicine for her, so why should it be any better for Elliott? She patted the bed, indicating the space beside her. Warmth was better than words, but her body felt cold in the gray dawn, chilled to the marrow, and chillier still as Elliott moved in beside her.

  What was going on in the house? She sensed that there was something at its core, unnameable, horrible, gathering everything to it.
...

  “Don’t wake him,” said Mary, and pushed Michael with her, into the hallway. “Do you know what’s bothering him?” Mary tightened her housecoat. “He seems very depressed.”

  “Probably just school,” said Michael. “School is depressing.” The older brother glanced back down the hall. There was something wrong with E.T., there was something wrong with Elliott, and his own head was splitting.
...

  Mary took aspirin out of her housecoat. “All right,” she said. “Maybe you can snap him out of it.” She walked to the staircase, trying to shake her own stupor. Had she taken Valium by mistake last night? Her head felt like a lead balloon.

- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth, chapters 13 and 14