They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  ‘Listen, Quigley,’ I said, speaking in a clear voice, ‘Jesus Christ is out of the picture. When beings from another planet get started on you they will laugh at your beliefs. You’ll be like some savage to them, clutching a wooden idol.’

  Although they could all hear me, no one responded to this remark. Quigley looked more than usually Christian.

  The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist was arranged in a huge circle around a large pile of groceries. The produce did not seem to be of high quality. The recession seemed to have hit Harvest Festival rather badly, I thought. I saw a lot of tins of spaghetti. Old Mother Walsh had urged her followers to ‘bring living things and offer them to the Lord’, and there is an account somewhere of the Sisters of Harmony sacrificing a sheep. These days people bring hamsters and terrapins and rabbits and dogs, but nobody quite has the nerve to pin them down on a slab and cut their throats. As we sat down a little way away from the rest of the group, I saw a small girl waving her hamster’s cage at the sky. ‘There You are, God!’ she was shouting. ‘There’s Hairy! You can have him if You want!’

  There are a lot of children at Harvest Festival. It’s quite a jolly occasion. Looking at it now, I suddenly started to feel old. Older than anyone else there. A group of little kids were doing what is called the Carrot Dance, over by the groceries. It’s a crazy thing where one child pretends to be a carrot and the others top and tail him and put him in boiling water. As I watched them, I thought about all the crazy things the people I’ve grown up with believe and do. How we bury people, how we marry people – First Spiritualists are always married as close to 3 February as possible, and, when the bride has made her vows, someone pours a bottle of milk over her head (‘to feed her young’) – how we pray, how we hang sheets out of the upstairs window to celebrate a birth, how we seem so utterly and completely deranged and yet feel so utterly and completely sane.

  For a moment I wondered whether the First Spiritualists are any crazier than other people. People who pride themselves on being rational won’t walk under ladders. Famous physicists talk about God without really knowing what the word means. Much of the faith of my mother and father’s church would seem bizarre or laughable to Greenslade and Khan. But to me, standing there in the autumn sunlight, it suddenly seemed natural and comforting. Maybe because, at last, I had finally lost it. I was no longer part of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. My dad was dead, and he was never coming back.

  Over by the birch trees, Mervyn Finch had started to play his squeezebox to Vera ‘Got All the Things There’ Loomis, and a few of the adults were dancing the old dances that have been passed down for nearly 200 years. Old Mother Walsh’s ‘Rabbit, Skip O’er the Lump of Bacon’ and, my personal favourite, ‘Who’s Away to Jesus?’ Hannah Dooley was pressed close to Sheldon Parry, the born-again television director, crooning softly to herself. Clara Beeding was chatting amicably to the man with the wart. The sun was over the rim of the Common now, and there was the beginnings of darkness in the tangled trees.

  ‘Danth with me, Thimon,’ said Emily’s voice at my elbow. I looked down at her as the music grew louder. She was so full of hope and decency and trust. And that voice! Emily was, according to her mother, an absent-minded girl, but she never forgot to lisp. Why not? I thought to myself. This is the last time I’ll be part of these people. I took her hand and led her into the centre of the dancers, as the light failed over Wimbledon.

  24

  We went through every dance in the book that night. We even did ‘Goodbye to Clonakilty’ (a title no one in the church has ever been able to explain), and, when it was quite dark, the group over by the trees lit a fire and we went into ‘Ella Walsh’s Foxtrot’ or ‘Bless the Lord and Shame the Devil’. You grab your partner by the waist and sort of waddle for a bit, then stamp four times, hard with each foot, on the ground. It’s a dance designed for fat people who are not light on their feet. After you have stamped, you raise your right hand and, for some reason, shout, ‘Shame the Devil!’ Except at Christmas, when some people yell, ‘Stuff the Turkey!’ I usually try and say something different from both of these. Such as, ‘Rinse the Saucepans!’ or ‘Phone Your Auntie!’

  In the slow bits, I moved away from Emily and waggled my ears. It’s something I have only recently learned to do, and she seemed to appreciate it.

  As the music pounded on, I pulled Emily this way and that across the baked earth. It was almost dark. Over to our left, in the field that lay between us and the road, was the shape of a horse. A solitary man walked his dog home, up in the direction of the Windmill. And, all around us, people were swaying and shaking, clapping and singing as the beat grew wilder and wilder.

  Emily cannoned into me, her face red with pleasure. ‘Why do you believe in alienth?’ she said.

  ‘Because I think they’re there,’ I replied.

  She grinned. ‘Thatth why I believe in Jethuth!’

  I grinned back.

  ‘Why believe in alienth, though?’ she went on. ‘Alienth are thuch a complicated thing to believe in!’

  I thought this was rather a shrewd point. Maybe away from her mum and dad she was capable of being a human being. I shrugged. ‘You’ve got to believe in something,’ I said, ‘and I believe in aliens.’

  I couldn’t stop dancing with her. I moved with her, close, towards the centre of the circle and that crazy pile of groceries. I took her by both hands and I started to swing her in a circle, singing as I went, shouting the words of the song over and over again.

  Quigley wasn’t dancing. I saw him by the camp-fire, standing next to my mum, watching me hungrily. Maybe he thought he was going to get me back into the church, but what I was doing was strictly pagan. I was dancing for dancing’s sake, not for Jesus’.

  I was almost at the centre of the group when I saw the light in the trees. It was a reddish glow, moving unsteadily towards where we were at a height of about fifteen or sixteen feet. It would weave towards us then veer away crazily. Sometimes it would stop and shine downwards, as if it was scanning the earth for something. Then it would move off on course again. I could see a vague shape behind it.

  I was the first to notice it. Then Emily, following the direction of my gaze, watched the light, or lights, as they swayed through the trees towards us.

  Mr and Mrs Ian Gilliemore, who were taken from their Hillman Avenger on the night of 24 September 1958 and subjected to scanning by a ‘big light’ from a group of midgets in the traditional green cloaks, reported seeing ‘a sort of dancing light’ just before the midgets struck. They said the light moved in just the way this one seemed to be doing.

  Other people had seen it now. A guy next to me was nudging his friend and pointing at the trees. My arm was tingling, like it’s supposed to do when the Neptunians come at you through the undergrowth, foetal implants in hand. I went hot, then cold.

  Word was spreading among the crowd. Even Mervyn, whose hands were flying across the keys of his accordion, was seen to gape up towards the thing dancing like a huge firefly in the dusk. The music slowed and then stopped. People stopped dancing and stood in silence looking over at it. They looked just the way they did when they turned to the altar on Sunday mornings. There were whispers, too. ‘They’re here!’ I heard one man say. And another, ‘It’s true! They’ve come!’

  Quigley, who was now standing next to Mrs Danby, a little away from the rest of the congregation, was watching open-mouthed. Next to him, I saw my mum push her grey hair from her temples. There was an expression on her face I hadn’t seen in a long time. She looked hopeful. She was eager to welcome whoever was coming to her out of the darkness. She was going to exchange knitting patterns with the Visitors, and ask them if they would like a hot drink after their 17-million-light-year journey to Wimbledon. That was the most common look on people’s faces. Hope. Stronger than you saw it in church. More various, shifting, fading, like the light at the end of a day, as the lights came closer and closer towards us.

  Maybe they wanted
the groceries. You know?

  Were they lights, or was it just one light? It seemed to have changed colour. It was white now, and behind it you could see the shape. It didn’t stop but came on towards us out of the trees.

  Next to me a woman gasped, ‘It’s here . . . It’s . . .’ Emily clutched my hand and stepped back. Now it seemed at least twelve feet in height, roughly humanoid in shape and wearing what looked like a plastic bucket on its head. Its legs – if it had legs – were covered in what looked like a large brown sheet, and the light seemed to come from a kind of lamp attached to the back of what could, or could not, be its head.

  As it came on across the grass, quite a few people dropped to their knees and pressed their palms together in prayer. Emily held my hand even more tightly. ‘Jethuth . . .’ she was saying, ‘Jethuth . . . Jethuth . . .’

  I held my ground. Even at this distance, in the gloom, I could see that the thing on its head that looked like a plastic bucket actually was a plastic bucket. In fact, I thought I recognized the bucket. The large brown sheet was quite clearly a large brown sheet, and the thing at the back was none other than my bicycle light.

  ‘Roughly humanoid in shape’, was, too, a fairly accurate description. Because, as the creature swayed around in front of us, it was becoming obvious, even to the more short-sighted of the congregation, that we were looking at Leonard Pike. ‘I come’, he said from inside the bucket, ‘from the planet Tellenor!’

  There was quite a good reverb effect on his voice. The woman next to me was quite clearly not at all sure whether this was Pike. From the look on Quigley’s face, it was obvious that Pike was soon going to wish that Pike was not his name.

  I couldn’t figure this. If the Tellenoreans had got into Pike’s body, wasn’t this a slightly odd thing to make him do? Were they not as bright as we had supposed? Were they complete idiots? Or were they, perhaps, a nation of satirists? Perhaps they had come all those billions of miles for the purpose of taking the piss out of us.

  As I waited, Pike started to fall, jumping clear of the stilts that had been holding him up. The bucket, miraculously, remained on his head. ‘I come,’ he said again, ‘from the planet Tellenor.’

  He was losing his audience. ‘And I come from Epsom, mate!’ said a voice at the back. There was a gust of laughter.

  Pike, aware that the bucket was not helping him, removed it. The effect was startling. In the darkness, Pike’s face, illuminated by the bicycle light, looked positively ghoulish. He was breathing rapidly, and his pinched, chapped little face was urgent with venom. He looked crazy with fear.

  ‘He was taken,’ said Pike. ‘He was taken from the grass. Here on the Common. And I can prove it.’

  With a shriek, he pointed his finger at Quigley. ‘He’s lied to you,’ he said. ‘He’s a liar and a fraud. He’s a cheat.’

  Quigley looked white.

  ‘Ask him what he’s done with the money! Ask him what he plans to do with Mrs Danby’s money! Ask him where it’s gone!’

  Quigley didn’t speak. He started to open and close his fists, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘They are here!’ said Pike. ‘Follow me! Don’t follow the liar and the cheat! Follow me! I’ll take you to the spot where they took him! I’ve looked through the accounts! Follow me!’

  If Quigley had ever had a chance of regaining his grip on the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, he had lost all hope of it now. There was an awful conviction in Pike’s voice. You just knew that what he was saying about Quigley was true. You knew.

  Quigley just stood there, his immense arms loose at his side as the mass of the congregation, murmuring among themselves like extras in a bad production of a Shakespeare play, swept after Pike as he turned and, bucket in hand, ran off across the Common towards the spot where Mr Marr had been sitting the night the aliens came.

  25

  He was yelling something as he ran. Something about somebody dying. I couldn’t tell who. Something about how he, Pike, was guilty. Guilty of what, though?

  As we got to the narrow road that runs past the spot where Mr Marr used to watch the night sky, he turned and held up his hands towards the stars. ‘Help!’ he screamed. Once.

  I’d heard (or was it seen?) that cry before. Where was it?

  ‘Help!’ yelled Pike, again.

  Of course. On the mirror in Mr Marr’s bedroom. HELP! scrawled in lipstick.

  The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist was, as its leading members were fond of saying, on the move. It was, literally, going places. Every single member of the congregation was haring through the bushes of Wimbledon Common in search of flying saucers. If ever there was a flight from the true religion, this was it.

  We stopped on one side of the narrow road. Pike was on the other, jumping up and down like a man with a swarm of bees in his underpants. It was as if he was on the other side of a river that no one knew how to cross. And the road had the look of water, silvered under the rising moon.

  Pike was pointing to the grass near to where Mr Marr had been sitting that night. ‘Look at it!’ he yelled. ‘Look at it! It’s where they landed!’

  One or two of the braver spirits moved closer to the road and peered across at the grass. You didn’t see it at first, but you saw if you held your head at the right angle. About twenty yards from where Mr Marr had been sitting, the grass had been flattened. It lay as if some giant hand had combed it out and then blow-dried it, in a perfect circle.

  It was curious. No one wanted to cross the road. It was as if there was a force field there. As if Pike was behind an imaginary glass wall, cut off from the rest of the church. As he railed on at us, more and more people came up to the edge of the tarmac, looking across at him, helplessly, in the moonlight.

  ‘I’m guilty,’ Pike was saying. ‘I’m guilty too. Jesus, forgive me. Oh forgive me, Jesus!’

  ‘Jesus forgives you,’ said someone over to my left.

  This was standard with the First Church. You went out – you had a good time. You drank gin. You coshed old ladies. You embezzled church funds. And Jesus forgave you. But Pike looked like a man who would not, could not, be forgiven. As if whatever he had done had cut him off from the mercy he had been seeking for so long.

  ‘It was here,’ yelled Pike, ‘on the road! Here!’

  I looked at Quigley, who was standing well away from the crowd. His face was still that dead white colour. He was looking at Pike as if he expected him to change shape, to flower into some awful creature.

  ‘I’m a murderer!’ yelled Pikey.

  He moved towards us across the road. Instinctively – as if faced by some poisonous animal – people moved back a little. Pike stopped in the middle of the tarmac. Somewhere, over on the other side of the Common, a truck moved up from below the hill and, headlights hooded, started across towards Parkside.

  ‘I’m a murderer!’ yelled Pike again.

  ‘Leo,’ came a voice that I recognized as my mum’s. ‘You’re not a murderer!’

  Pike’s face reddened with fury.

  The truck turned right by the big houses at the south edge of the Common and started along the straight stretch, where we were standing. Pike turned and saw it. For a moment I thought he was going to stand there facing it, daring it to stop. Then he moved back towards the circle in the grass on the other side of the road.

  ‘Who did you think you murdered?’ called my mum, in a bewildered tone.

  The truck was coming closer. You could feel the earth shake as it changed down, ready to turn out into Parkside.

  Pike’s face was distorted with anger. ‘Marr, of course. I murdered Marr, you morons! Right here I murdered him!’

  His lips puckered up. ‘It was . . . it was like spacemen took him. It was. He was lying here. He was dead in the road. I wasn’t driving fast, honestly! When I came back, he was gone. He was lying here.’

  He gestured towards the centre of the road. He seemed very intent on showing us the precise spot where Mr Marr’s body had lain.
That was all that seemed to matter to him. Then, with a blitheness I had never associated with Pike, he stepped two paces back into the path of the oncoming truck.

  It hit him in the chest. The guy was quick on to the brakes, but not quick enough for poor old Pikey. By the time the truck had stopped, Leo was under its offside wheel and starting the long, complicated journey to the spirit world.

  It’s some consolation to reflect that of all the UK citizens undergoing the death experience, Leo was probably the one most prepared for it. He had spent nearly all of his forty-eight years in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, and during that time he had witnessed literally thousands of encounters with people from the Other Side. He had never missed a seance or a service, and he died, as Mr Toombs said the next Sunday, a 100 per cent, fully operational Christian.

  But his death and the mystery surrounding it spelt the end for the church in which he had worshipped for so long. It wasn’t the Wimbledon Crop Circle, as the shape in the grass came to be called, that destroyed it. Most people agreed that Pike had been out the night before working on it with an industrial fan. It was tiredness that finished the First Church. That, and the fact that it lost faith in the nearest thing to a charismatic it had had since Rose Fox. In fact, people seemed to be losing interest in aliens. One by one, over the next few weeks, they just drifted away. You could see it in their faces, minute by minute. They were getting that worried look you see on people’s faces on the Tube. They were becoming, at long last, ordinary.

  The elders started to investigate Quigley and the church funds the day after Pike’s death. The Quigleys were still living with us. Gordon Brunt and his friends had taken away a wall without putting in the proper structural support, so the whole of the left side of Château Quigley had collapsed. They had also done something terrible to the boiler, and discovered dry rot in the airing-cupboard.

  I heard a lot of the commission of inquiry. One night I heard Quigley shout, ‘Would you bleed me dry?’ All I heard of the answer was the low bass of Mr Toombs and the nasal falsetto of Roger Beeding. But, from Quigley’s face when he came out, I gathered that that was precisely what they were intending to do with him.