by Clive Harold
The figure at the window remained. Then it vanished, as he looked at it. Just vanished. It was Robert Morrison who reached the house first, swiftly followed by two young constables from Broad Haven police station. Pauline had heard them arriving and hurried the children down from upstairs, still in their night clothes, still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, completely unaware of what had happened as she had said nothing for fear of terrifying them.
She sat them together on the sofa, then joined Robert and the two policemen who were huddled in a corner where Billy was relating what had happened.
After what he had thought to be a light-hearted response to their cry for help, Billy had been surprised by the two young policemen's readiness to listen to his story.
'So you believe what happened?' he asked one of them, still scarcely believing it himself. 'Oh sure,' came the reply, 'we've been hearing too many strange reports for too long to dismiss anything now. There's definitely something very strange going on in the area. Some of our colleagues have even seen some very odd things UFOs and what have you. Besides, neither of us has ever seen two people as frightened as you two obviously are. Something obviously happened here...
Pauline and Billy, still hugging each other for mutual comfort, went over their story again.
'But you're not going to go outside and investigate?' asked Pauline, when it became clear that they had no intention of doing so.
Sorry love, no way,' came the reply, 'there would be no point. We don't know what we're looking for. We'll open the front door and have a look around the garden through...'
Pauline and Billy looked knowingly at each other.
'You're frightened, too, aren't you?' The policemen looked a little sheepish. 'Well,' said one of them in hushed tones, 'let's just say that you could do us a favour and leave the front door open while we're out there, so we can dash back inside quickly if anything happens. You see, if we do see this thing, we don't really know what to do - we'd probably end up sitting next to you, shaking, to be honest. I mean, how can you know what to do when you don't know what you're up against? You can defend yourself against another human being, but this?'
Pauline glanced up at Billy and then across at the kids, still sitting sleepily on the sofa opposite, and felt the tears coming up inside her again.
'Bill, listen to me,' she whispered to him, 'I'm not staying here with the kids a minute longer. Honest I'm not. It's not safe what with everything that's been happening - and now this. It's all leading up to something. Something terrible is going to happen here. You can take us all to my mother's house in Milford Haven, tonight...
She started sobbing again. Billy squeezed her reassuringly and nodded to the policeman to go over and distract the kids' attention.
Now, listen, love,' he said, trying to be as firm as he could without being unkind, 'don't start. If you do, you're going to frighten the kids. We've got to behave as normally as we possibly can. We'll explain why the police came tonight put the kids to bed and talk about the rest of it tomorrow. All right? The police have said they'll stay here for an hour anyway, just in case...
He squeezed her again. 'Now listen, nothing else is going to happen tonight, so why don't you wipe your eyes, steady up, and get the kids quietly off to bed. Meanwhile I’ll get Robert and the two policemen some coffee, OK?'
He watched her leave and usher the kids upstairs and then set about making coffee. They all needed it
*
Billy and Pauline huddled close to one another in bed that night, Pauline soon succumbing to the nervous exhaustion and sobbing herself to sleep, but Billy lying awake and chainsmoking for most of the night, his mind in a turmoil of confused and worried thought. Whatever his feelings might have been before, they were certainly different now. The realisation that all the mysterious things that had been happening to his family might have a direct connection with the creature that had watched him so intently through the window frightened him desperately.
Worse still, he felt there was more to come, and wondered if there would be anybody who could help them when it did happen. Whatever it was.
FOUR
'Damn the papers,' thought Billy as Pauline left the kitchen. She'd just about got over the worst of the shock at what had happened two nights previously - and now this.
He looked down at the newspaper. No wonder it had upset and worried her all over again. It worried the hell out of him. He hadn't been able to explain away the figure at the window as mere hallucination, as he would have liked to for they had found giant footprints in the flower bed the following morning and the rose bush outside the window was scorched to a cinder - but he had hoped that both of them would at least be able to forget the incident. Some chance. It might have been a terrifying experience for them, but to the Press it was obviously - and understandably-just a good story. Reading about it, reliving it all over again was the last thing they wanted, though. To make matters worse, the article wasn't only about their experience, either - it was about another UFO sighting, this time by Robert Morrison's wife, Julia, at the farm just down the road. He studied the article. Julia, the report said, claimed to have seen a large silver craft, over fifteen feet high and fifty foot across, and shaped like a jelly mould, standing in the garden close to their farm house. It was, she said, a bright sunny morning, just recently, and she saw it quite clearly. After ten minutes it rose noiselessly into the air and flew off leaving no traces behind it.
Billy put the paper down. Curious, he thought to himself how he still viewed such stories with scepticism, even after what he'd seen for himself only two nights earlier. Julia Morrison was certainly a serious-minded, highly intelligent and perceptive woman - a Reading University honours graduate with BSc in agriculture and an honours degree in agricultural botany - and was hardly any sort of person to fabricate such a fantastic story.
Paul-ne knew that as well as he did. That's what worried them. They both knew that the other was trying privately - however hopelessly - to explain away what they'd seen, but when someone like Julia claimed to have had a similar experience, it made the task virtually impossible.
He finished his breakfast quickly and called out to Pauline to tell her he was off down the milking sheds. The ringing of the telephone drowned out what he was saying and he heard Pauline answering it as he left by the back door.
Pauline knew the voice instantly. 'Pauline? It's Rosa, Rosa Grenville from the Haven Fort Hotel, across the bay...' She'd known Rosa ever since she and her husband, Frank, had come to live in Broad Haven six years ago and had taken over the splendid, castlelike hotel that overlooked St Bride's Bay, directly opposite them.
(Inserted picture of this bay) They were a nice couple - she an effervescent, buxom lady of Spanish descent, he, in strict contrast, the shy, retiring Welshman. 'Hello, love, how are you? It's been a long time since we spoke. How's Frank...?'
'Never mind that, now. Just listen, Pauline,' said Rosa, her voice trembling and agitated, the words coming in a torrent, 'don't say anything, just listen to this, listen to what happened last night...'
Pauline caught her breath. 'Now, Pauline, you're probably going to think I'm going crazy I'm beginning to think I am, myself - but last night, very late it was, I was looking out of the bedroom window and - right there, at the back of the hotel in the field, I saw this... this spaceship and these... er... creatures...
There was a momentary silence. Pauline said nothing in reply.
'Anyway, what happened was I went to the window- I noticed a bright light out there and for a minute it might be poachers you know how I've been losing my chickens - but then I saw this giant saucer-thing with a dome on the top of it and then these two figures came out of it. It was radiating a light, such a I've never seen before. Honest to God, Pauline, a heavenly light that once seen you'd never forget. It was like daylight out there, it was that bright. I could see everything clearly. Anyway, these two creatures - I've got to call them creatures because I know they weren't beings - started bending down,
looking at the ground, like they were measuring the ground or something. I could see them clear as anything, they were there for just twenty minutes and I was watching all the time. They didn't have faces, just sort of black spaces where faces should have been and they were tall, thin, fleshy looking. I was that frightened while I was watching them moving around out there, I can't tell you, but I couldn't stop looking. Then they got back into the dome of this thing, the light faded and the craft thing lifted into the air and shot off at a tremendous speed across the bay in your direction. I tell you, I still can't believe it, but I tell you one thing, I'm damn well going to find out what it was. I'm going to get on to the authorities - Brawdy Air Force Base, next door to us here - and find out if they know anything about it. They've got a duty to protect us from this sort of thing if we're in danger and I tell you, Pauline, it's frightened me out of my wits...
Silence. 'Pauline?'
Pauline took a deep breath and steadied herself. She felt sure her voice would tremble, and she didn't want to alarm Rosa further.
'Yes, Rosa, I'm still here...' 'Well, what do you think of that? You do believe me, don't you?'
'Of course, Rosa, of course I do. 'Frank says I shouldn't report it, but should leave it well alone in case people think we're mad. Maybe he's right, I just don't know, but I had to tell someone. Well, you do, don't you?'
Pauline was close to tears, but she fought them back.
'Yes, Rosa, you do. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to go now, really. Look, I'll call you back a little later, all right?' She put the phone down and began to sob. It was no use, she was going to tell Billy that they had to leave this place as soon they could. Too much was happening and whatever it was it was getting too close for comfort. As well as their own frightening experiences, hadn't other people - over one hundred of them - reported seeing strange craft and creature~ in their immediate neighbourhood over the last five months? And now, their nearest neighbour had seen a landed spacecraft outside her home. Where was it all leading? She knew, now, that she was too frightened to stay and find out. *
Billy stopped and leaned on the fence, surveying the panorama of his land. In front of him, the sea. Behind him, the white-washed fasade of the farmhouse bathed in the orange of the rising sun. All around him, rolling green fields, his 'cattle grazing, hedgerows alive with spring flowers.
Tranquillity. On the outside. But not within, beneath the surface. Where once everything was as predictable as the seasons, why was it now so bizarre, so confusing, so frightening? What was happening in the area – and why to his family in particular? It was making their lives a misery. The day after the story of the figure at the window had appeared in the local paper, the phone and doorbell hadn't stopped ringing from dawn until dusk; it was as if the whole world wanted to hear, first hand, what had happened. They'd all come calling local papers like The Western Mail and The Western Telegraph, national newspapers like The Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, The Observer, even The Times. Local television and the BBC had been after them, as well, waving contracts. Then there were the people from the British Unidentified Object Research Association and dozens of UFO enthusiasts demanding replies to letters or asking to come and sky-watch on the farm. Originally, both he and Pauline had felt obliged to report what they had seen and what had happened to them. But not anymore. Their lives were not their own anymore and there had been too many tongue-in-cheek comments, too many inferences that they were lying, too many blatantly insulting attempts to trip them up with clever questions. In desperation they'd even offered to take truth drugs or lie detector tests but their offers were never taken up.
And that wasn't the worst of it. Even the locals were overreacting. Pauline had been jibed at in the local shop with people saying things like: 'We'll be seeing you in a Smash commercial next, won't we love?' and laughing openly in her face. For his own part, Billy had suffered the opposite reaction. Down at a nearby garage, a local resident had confronted him hostilely, accusing him of frightening his family to such an extent that his mother refused to live in the area any more, and of bringing down the value of his land. 'You've damn well got to stop making up these stories,' he had said, 'you're frightening everyone so much...'
'Frightening everyone?' Billy had countered, 'how the hell do you think I and my family feel?' The man had been unsympathetic and had promptly thrown a punch at him.
No wonder Pauline was anxious to leave the farm. It was only by reminding her that nobody in the area had been injured by the craft or the creatures, that he'd been able to convince her that there was no danger in staying. Not that she'd really been convince. Nor, secretly, was he. But there was work to do and he was behind schedule already. There were extra chores to do because Clinton was being so bloody silly at the moment. Normally when Clint helped him on the farm it was his job to get the cows out of the sheds early in the morning after milking and put them out to graze. Normally. What he'd been up to yesterday was anybody's business. He'd come back to the milking sheds talking some nonsense about how he couldn't get the cows to go into Clover Park, the lowest field. He'd tried everything, but they simply refused to go. Eventually, he'd had to lose valuable time himself, leaving the cleaning of the milking machines, to go and do it himself. Mind you, Clint had been right about the herd being difficult. To begin with, they'd stampeded at him and damn nearly trampled him rather than go into the field and when he did eventually get them to go in, they'd stampeded all over the place in a mad panic. He was down near the field now, for fencing. He'd have another look to see what the matter was.
Funny how non-farming folk take grass so much for granted, he mused, as he paced across Clover Park. To a farmer, grass was like gold dust and to lose it to flood or drought was a disaster. Especially this grass. He bent down and picked a handful. Tall, thick, moist, it was. Perfect for grazing. And the cows would have known that better than anyone, so why on earth didn't they want to come in and...
He froze momentarily in his tracks. That was strange; there was an enormous dark patch of something, about fifty feet across, in the grass in front of him. He walked a little closer. A patch of swamp perhaps? No, it couldn't be - there hadn't been any rain. Oil spillage from one of the tractors? Not possible, there hadn't been any tractors in this field recently. What the devil could it be, then?
He walked on to the patch of ground and stood in the middle of it, then crouched down and stroked the palm of his hand along it. Incredible. Just incredible. A perfectly circular area of ground where all the grass had been scorched and flattened. What the hell could have happened there? He'd never seen anything like it in his life before. But the cows of course, this was the field they suddenly wouldn't go into.
The ground looked as though it had to have been scorched and flattened by something mechanical. Could it be possible? Some craft or other - like the ones that Julia and others had reported seeing? It seemed, as ever, impossible for him to believe in such things - a flying saucer landing and taking off from this exact spot on which he was standing - but what other sensible explanation fitted, bearing in mind all that had been happening recently?
But what should he tell Pauline? Should he tell her at all? He began walking back across the fields to the farm. He must tell her. He had to. She'd find out anyway and would never forgive him. They never kept things from each other and this was no time to start.
She was in the kitchen preparing the dinner when he got back to the farmhouse. Just seen the queerest thing in Clover Park, love,' he told her, trying to sound as matter of-fact as humanly possible, dirty great patch of burned and flattened grass, circular shaped...' he glanced at her, hoping that she wouldn't overreact. 'Damned if I can make out what it is Pauline said nothing, just carried on preparing the food.
'Nothing would surprise me now, love,' she said, looking over her shoulder and flashing him a quick smile.
Billy's expression must have given him away. 'Surprised I'm not shocked, are you?' she grinned. 'Well, I'll tell you - you're quite
right, they haven't actually done us any physical harm, have they, so why be so frightened of them?'
Billy nodded and gave her a knowing smile. That was more like the Pauline he knew.
*
A shame, thought Pauline, that Billy had to spend any time at all down at the cowsheds that evening. Dinner was a more relaxed affair than it had been for a long time and she would have liked an equally relaxing evening with him. Even the kids seemed to have been happier this evening, probably because the atmosphere was that little bit less tense.
Dinner over, she watched Billy get ready to walk down the drive to the sheds, but she didn't go with him as she often used to. She was frightened of the dark these days -or at least the dark around the farm - as the whole family seemed to be. He'd chided her for her silliness, but had understood. He'd never let the rest of the family know, but he was none too happy alone at night himself. He couldn’t even take Blackie with him. Ever since he’d seen that creature at the window, that damn dog hadn't been the same. He'd got a wicked temper, snarling at the slightest thing and preferring to stay hidden away indoors rather than go out. At night when he was put out, he'd sit and howl and snarl in the direction of the window where the figure was seen. Maybe, thought Billy as he crunched his way down the gravel drive towards the cowshed, the dog and the cows, too, do have a sixth sense. Maybe they know exactly what's going on - and even why it's going on.
Pauline watched him from the porch of the house as he disappeared around the corner. Rather him than me, going down there at this time of night, she thought to herself, closing the door quickly and stepping in out of the darkness. The children were so engrossed in something on the television, they scarcely noticed her walk into the room. They looked so sweet all lined up on the sofa, in order of age: Clinton, Keiron, Layann, Joann. Tomorrow was Sunday, her favourite day, with the whole family at home. Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she felt happier and more secure.