by Clive Harold
She was relieved when they left, and she settled back on to the sofa for much-needed rest. Maybe she'd feel better when she woke.
*
What's that?' Pauline started out of her sleep, as a hand touched her gently on the arm.
It was Keiron. 'Telephone, Mum,' he explained, 'sorry to have to wake you... 'That's all right, love.' She looked at her watch
.
'Havens above, it's nine o'clock. Why didn't somebody wake me? I've got the dinner to make. Oh, no...'
She got to her feet. Keiron was beaming proudly. 'Dad said to leave you be. We got the dinner between and we're all going to have an early night. Dad said he'd even help us all do the washing up!' She smiled. She had a good family.
'Pauline?' Billy looked around the door, from the hall. He was scowling and holding the telephone in an outstretched hand. 'Come on love - it's your mum, she's holding on...'
She took the phone. 'Hello, Mum. How are you? All right? And Dad? Layann behaving herself, is she?'
There was a long pause.
'Mum?'
'Sorry. Yes, Pauline, I'm here. Look, love, that's why phoning. Yes, Layann's here, but she's not all right.' She didn't just come visiting because she wanted to, but she was frightened of staying up at the farm...
'Oh no, why?' Pauline shook her head. 'It can't be what's been happening here. I just can't believe that. She always been less frightened than the rest of the kids and in any case, she's said nothing to me...' She held the telephone tighter. For so long, she and Billy had tried to shield the children from the worst of what was happening for fear of just something like this.
'No, Pauline, it's not just that,' insisted her mother, 'there's more...
A pause. 'Listen, love, I didn't know whether to tell you this, or not. Normally I'd have put it all down to a child's prank, or over imagination, or a bad dream, but Layann was so frightened when it came to going to bed tonight, that when I asked her what the matter was, she blurted out what I'm about to tell you. As I said, normally I'd have ignored it, but bearing in mind what's been happening up there for the last few months and especially the state your arm'sin, I just had to tell you. According to her, she woke up last night in your bed - not long after you'd both turned in for the night - and she'd heard a noise in the room like rustling paper. When she turned over, she saw what she described as a silver hand - just a hand drifting through the door opposite and over to your side of the room, where it touched you on the arm. Then it drifted slowly out of the room again. She said she was so frightened that she didn't dare move at the time, but when it had gone, she tried to rouse you but you were obviously so exhausted, she couldn't get you to wake up. Or that's what she thought at the time...
Pauline's mother waited for a reaction. There was none. 'Pauline, are you still there?' She heard only sobbing. Then the phone went dead.
Billy came back into the room. 'All right, love? Feeling better?' Then he noticed the state she was in.
'My God, love. What did she say to you? What's the matter?'
He took her by the hand. She was trembling furiously. She
looked up at him, her eyes red from the combination of the crying and the ultra-violet irritation. 'We've got to leave here before it's too late, Billy. We've got to leave this place... Then she fell into his arms.
FIVE
June 7th, 1977.
Great. They all looked absolutely great. Billy smiled contentedly at the sight of his children resplendent in their red, white and blue fancy dress, ready the Jubilee Day party at the next farm. Almost every child in the neighbourhood would be there, he thought to himself, but they'd have to be a bit special to match his brood. He looked over to Pauline, busy putting the finishing touches to Joann's ribbons. When she had finished, she kissed her youngest on the forehead, then patted her bottom to indicate that it was time for her, Layann and Keiron to be on their way. Never had a day of celebration been more welcome, he mused. Such distractions couldn't be more timely.
The last few weeks had been murder. Nothing strange or frightening had happened directly to them, thank the Lord, but the after-effects of what had already happened were bad enough. It had been a week before the twins' rashes had subsided and Pauline's eyes had recovered, and for another 2 weeks before her arm was back to normal.
Then, of course, there was the effect on the family of at had happened to Blackie. They had all been terribly saddened when he had had to have the dog put to sleep, although they understood perfectly why he had to do it. There was just no way Blackie could have stayed with the family or gone to another home. The effect of seeing the figure at the window that night had quite simply driven him insane. His behaviour had grown progressively more erratic and unpredictable as the weeks went by. More and more he'd spend time running dementedly around in circles, snarling and with his hackles raised; he refused to leave the house and when forcibly put out at night, he howled continuously at the same empty spot outside the window where the figure had stood. They all loved him, but he was getting worse and was now at peace.
For the rest of the family, life was now a little more settled - not that it seemed to be for the rest of the neighbourhood. Strange reports were still coming out in the local papers of inexplicable sightings of strange figures and mysterious flying objects, but though he and Pauline had taken careful note of what was going on, they had tried to keep it from the children, not wanting to frighten them further.
Rosa, of course, had telephoned again, to say that since she'd seen the strange craft and figures outside the hotel, she'd twice seen an orange globe of light pulsating outside her bedroom window, swinging like a pendulum, for long periods of time. What she'd described - and the mesmeric effect it had on her - had corresponded exactly with the light that Pauline had first seen and the one that had followed the car that night. Rosa was now so frightened that she said she was going to write to her Member of Parliament for help, demanding that he find out if all the mysterious things they had seen were something to do with the Brawdy RAF Base adjoining the hotel. If it was, she didn't want to know anything else. If it wasn't - and they didn't know what it was either - she was going to demand they find out and give her assurances that they were safe. If they couldn't make that assurance, she said, they were going to leave the hotel.
Billy smiled to himself. Good old Rosa. That was the Spanish blood in her, the, fiery Latin temperament showing. Maybe he and Pauline should have shown similar mettle in demanding that the authorities do something to help them.
Strange, he thought to himself, how his reaction to the latest UFO reports in the area had altered from his original tonguein-cheek scepticism to complete acceptance. Well, perhaps it wasn't so strange. After all, how could he disbelieve anything, after what he and his family had been ng through? How could any of the people who had red similar - albeit individual experiences retain their cynicism? It would be impossible. What they were seeing was so stark, so vivid, so obviously real.
One Milford Haven businessman, together with his wife one of his neighbours, spent five minutes looking through binoculars at what he described to the local paper being: 'a silvery craft the size of an airliner with a dome the top' flying in a zigzag formation over his house, laughed about UFOs for ages, 'but the sight of the blasted thing has changed my views completely,' he'd gone to say. 'I'm not some nut case or crank, I just believe I see with my own eyes. I've travelled the world and many things in my life, but I'd never seen anything like that before...'
Billy remembered how he'd laughed when he first read that. It was a laugh not of ridicule, but of sympathy, mixed with despair. He knew, so well, how desperate the man feel, trying to get people who hadn't seen such things with their own eyes to accept that he actually had. Never was the old adage seeing is believing so appropriate. Other reports sprang to mind. There was that old-age pensioner in Milford Haven - a retired council worker who was well known for his dour, downto-earth manner - who had been so stunned by what he had seen, he had only told the l
ocal paper his story on the understanding that he remained anonymous, for fear of being ridiculed. He knew what he had seen and was quite adamant about it, but also knew others would probably never believe him. Billy sympathised. His story was as fantastic as the one he and pauline had to tell.
He had apparently been woken up at 5 o'clock in the morning recently by a pulsating light was shining into his bed-sitting room in Milford Haven. When he'd looked outside, he'd seen a giant, silver, egg-shaped craft swinging like a pendulum across a distance about thirty or forty feet, at roof-top level. Thirty feet from the craft, he claimed, 'a spaceman' was suspended in the air like a free-fall parachutist. He was, he said, absolutely clear about what was happening because he watched them both hanging in the air above him for a full forty minutes before they drifted away out of sight. His reaction had been the same as Billy's, the Milford Haven business-man's and that of countless others in the area: he didn't believe in UFOs before. 'I thought it was all a lot of bloody nonsense. I thought people were making up stories or imagining things. Not now, though. I know exactly what I saw, and that's that...'
He might have done, thought Billy, but he was right to 'retain his anonymity. People rarely believed in what they hadn't seen for themselves - that was the trouble. That's what worried him when it came to any likelihood of getting help in an emergency
- who would believe him? What had to happen before even the cynics would take seriously what was happening in the area? Goodness only knows, when even an RAF officer on leave reported seeing a UFO in starkest detail, and people wouldn't take the phenomena seriously. The local paper had reported how he had described seeing 'a fairly large, circular object, covered in lights and moving as though it was manned, flying very low over the River Cleddau – picture at a speed of approximately one thousand miles an hour...
He sighed to himself. Somebody had better start doing something to find out what was happening, before something serious occurred. It wasn't so much the mysterious sightings in the sky that troubled him - and many people -it was the regular reports of strange, spaceman-like figures in their midst, and seemingly trying to make some sort of contact.
*
He watched Pauline putting the finishing touches to the children's clothes. Lord knows, he thought to himself, my family might be at risk. He and Pauline and the kids, not to mention their nephew and Rosa, had all described encounters with these alien figures, and who knew what it was leading up to? Only a few days ago, one of Keiron's friends - Stephen Taylor, a young man regarded by everyone who knew him as being a nice, honest, well-behaved - had reported yet another encounter. Billy remembered the newspaper report vividly. Stephen had been back to his home from his girlfriend's house when seen a dog racing out of the darkness towards him and past him, as though something was chasing him. A little further on, he'd noticed that the lights of a farmhouse that he normally saw on his right-hand side were blotted out by something. Looking closer, he'd been able to make out a giant silver, dome-shaped object that filled up half the field and gave off a dim light from its underside.
'I'd leaned on the gate and was studying it, when I heard a sound like someone treading on dried leaves,' he'd related later, 'and I looked to my right, in the direction of the noise. Standing very close to me was a 'figure that like a very skinny human being about six foot tall and had high cheek-bones like an old man's and large, glassy eyes, a bit like a fish's - round and glazy. Over his mouth he had a box-like contraption and a tube leading from this over his shoulder. He was wearing something very strange, a sort of one-piece suit of something that was transparent, but somehow not transparent, with a sort of ziplike attachment down the middle of it. I didn't notice more, because I took a panicky swing at it and started run. I ran all the way home and never looked around till I got there. When I got home, something very odd happened. I went to pet our Pomeranian dog, - picture right but it snarled me and I couldn't get near it. Its hackles were up and it frightened and terrified of me. We had to put it outside the night until, by the following morning, it was back to being its normal, affectionate self.
Billy shuddered as he recalled the story. He didn't know the lad personally, and the lad knew nothing of the experiences the family had had recently, because he had told nobody, but so many little details were familiar to him. That sound he described as being like 'somebody treading dried leaves'. Hadn't Layann described a sound like 'rustling paper' when that silver hand had come into the room that night and touched Pauline? And the description of what this figure was wearing. All right, there was no helmet this time, but he himself remembered, from first-hand experience, that zippered, onepiece suit that 'looked transparent but somehow not transparent'. And that dog that came racing out of the darkness and the boy's own dog being frightened of him and threatening him? Memories of Blackie came flooding back.
Pauline's voice suddenly startled him out of his day-dream. 'Billy? Wake up, love. Everybody's ready. I'm just going to run them down to the party. You'll be back in the cow sheds by the time I get back, won't you?'
He nodded. 'And Clinton,' she said, turning to her eldest, 'you'll be staying here, right?' Billy smiled. This was more like the Pauline he knew: brisk, efficient and effervescent. She was still far from her normal self - still obsessional about drawing the curtains even before the light went and still uncharacteristically frightened of the dark - but was far more composed and had seemed to have come to terms with the situation far better than she had done before. He just hoped it would last - and would be allowed to.
Please, he thought to himself, let none of them see any more mysterious space craft or alien figures. He watched them leave, then made his own way back to work in the cowsheds, leaving Clinton to enjoy some of his day off the way he liked it most - quietly on his own...
Pauline pulled the car up outside the farm. She'd only stayed a couple of hours at the party and had then acted like any discreet parent, and left the children to their own devices.
It was a good job Clinton was in. She'd forgotten her keys again. She rang the doorbell and waited.
*
Nothing.
Strange, she thought. Clinton was normally so quick to answer the door. Rang again.
Nothing. Then a voice. A whisper.
'Clinton? What are you playing at? Let me in this instant...' She heard the sound of the newly-fitted safety chain slid back. The door opened and Clinton was standing there, white as a sheet and looking badly shaken.
'Oh, Mum, it is you...
'Course it's only me. Who else were you expecting?'
'I thought perhaps it was those two men, come back again...'
'What two men?'
'You know darned well which two men.'
'Clint, what are you going on about?' She was getting cross now. He looked at her, a bewildered, troubled expression on face. 'You know, the ones in the car that passed you, as you drove in...' He insisted.
It was Pauline's turn to look bewildered. 'Listen, Clint,' she told him, 'I saw nobody, passed nobody in the drive as I arrived...' She couldn't mistake a look of near panic on his normally passive face.
'But Mum, you must have passed them. Just a couple seconds
- quite literally - before you pulled up outside, had left, up the drive. There's only room for one car get up and down that drive and there's no other way or out of the farm, so you must have passed them, mustn't you?'
Now Pauline felt a bit panicky herself. 'Who are "they", Clint?' 'Two men... or rather they weren't really men, not human I
don't think - who just came to the house. I saw them arrive in
this enormous silver car. Well, I say car, it was like no car I ever saw before. Anyway, one of these "men" stayed in the car and then I saw the other coming up to the house. I could see them both quite clearly and both of the "men" were identical; both with dark coloured suits on, both very tall and thin, both with dark, slicked-back hair and abnormally large foreheads. The one who walked up to the house glided rather than walked, hardly
moving his arms. I tell you, ma, it was all wrong. It looked right enough on the surface, but when you looked closely at it all - the car and the men -there was something wrong, something unreal about it. It was like an illusion. It really frightened me, that's all I know. I didn't wait to find out, I can tell you - I locked the front door immediately, then the back door, and went and hid upstairs...'
He shook his head, eyes downcast, as if ashamed of his fear. Pauline reached out and squeezed his hand reassuringly. She hoped that he wouldn’t notice that she, too, was trembling. If Clint had been frightened, she knew it must have been with good reason. He was the eldest of her children and proud of the fact. He'd witnessed little or none of the phenomena that the rest of the family had and had therefore shown no fear at all - up until now. He was used to opening the door to all sorts of people at the farm - friends, relations, strangers - and had been for years. If these 'people' had frightened him, it must have been with good reason.
'He tried the front door, then the back door, but I wasn't about to open them,' he was saying, his gaze still overted from hers, 'so then he went next door to speak to Carol...'
Pauline went cold. 'Carol? Carol spoke to him? My God, is she all right?' She panicked for an instant. Carol - a nurse who rented a little cottage adjacent to the farmhouse - was away such a lot that she'd been spared everything that had been happening to them and she and Billy and the family had been sure to keep it all from her, not wanting to frighten her. All she knew about what had happened at the farm was what she had read in the local papers, and after the incident of the light chasing the car and the figure at the window, they hadn't spoken to the papers, so she knew nothing. But now, this.