Aliens In The Family

by Margaret Mahy

  "Run!" she yelled at him, waving the stick. "Run, Bond. Dora—get him out of here. Make him run in the right direction." Her tone carried an urgency that made Dora automatically obey. She seized Bond's right hand, Lewis took the left, and they hurried him along the bed of the stream between the narrow banks. Jake's fingers tightened around her stick. "Run!" she screamed again.

  "What about you? What will you do?" Dora cried back, panic-stricken, retreating obediently despite her anxiety for Jake.

  "I'm okay," Jake replied. She was being swept along by a storybook idea, but there seemed no other choice. Every moment they gained meant something real to Bond, a little more time in which to return to his School.

  "Jake!" called Dora, "Come on!"

  "Just get Bond out of here!" bellowed Jake. "I've got the stick."

  Now the quivering became a convulsion. The world twisted and writhed beneath Jake's feet. Jake was flung from side to side and rolled over and over. All light began to flow out of the world as if a plug had been pulled out somewhere letting all the brightness drain away. She fell against the rocky wall—but it was rock no longer. It grew soft and vanished under the impact of her shoulder. The black shapes before her were also changed. They became white shapes and Jake felt as if she was inside a camera, living in a photographic film where light and dark were reversed.

  "You can't hold us off with sticks," a voice scoffed. It was one of three people now confronting her. He had a shock of hair that was probably white in real life, and glaring yellow eyes with the pupils running across the eye, not vertically as in a cat's eye.

  "Bond?" asked one of the others.

  "Gone!" Jake replied, brandishing her stick in front of her as if it was a sword. "He's gone!"

  "Go too!" cried the goatish man. "Run after him." All at once Jake realized that the longer she kept talking, the more time Bond might have, wherever he had gone.

  "I have to take care of people," she began, waving her stick madly and babbling at these unnatural beings. "At home I look after my mother and my grandparents. I cook and I work the chainsaw to cut the wood. It's become a habit to me now. I'm looking after Bond. I'm looking after Dora and Lewis. I'm..." The man took a pace towards her and Jake struck at him with her stick. Where it touched him it burst into flames causing the nerves in her arm to jump wildly so that her whole arm jerked upwards, holding the stick aloft like a flaming torch. As the light of the fire fell on her opponents she thought at first that they were not very different from ordinary men... then she saw with shock and despair that they did have vital differences. They had wings. Bond had not mentioned this.

  "He's not here," said one, "we're wasting our time." They rose and swept past her like a storm cloud. The flame flared and then was extinguished. In the darkness Jake felt them all go by but there was nothing she could do to stop them. They did not hurt her, but she cowered below them as if they were a storm of knives which might cut her to pieces. She had done all she could, and had been defeated as she had known she must be. Now she was entitled to rest, or that was how it seemed to her as she lay in the dark. Then she found herself wondering where the trees were—where the stream had gone. Time had jolted again and this time she was completely lost in it. Something moved in the dark. Jake went stiff with a different fear. Something stepped and snorted beside her and she felt a hairy serpent fall out of the air, twisting over her chest and across her face. It was followed by a velvety touch, and hot breath. Her nose was filled with a scent she recognized but could not immediately name.

  A moment later she knew what it was. There was a horse standing beside her in the dark. The hairy serpent was only a tethering rope. Jake screwed up her eyes tightly, waiting for the horse to tread on her. Instead it made a faint whickering sound. It was pleased to find a friend. Slowly Jake sat up and took hold of the rope. She pulled herself to her feet, and began clumsily to pat the horse's neck and sides. It was saddled and bridled but the bit was out of its mouth and the stirrups were hitched up. She could not yet see it, although other shapes were gradually becoming visible, outlined in silver, evidence that they belonged to another time from her own. Lost in time, chanted a voice in her mind, but she ignored it. She had had Bond and Lewis and Dora to look after, and now she had a horse too. It seemed too much. Holding the rope in one hand, feeling the way ahead with what was left of the smouldering stick, Jake began to move on again but in the dark she had no direction.

  "Dora!" she called aloud but there was no reply. Not that she really expected there would be. Earlier they had used the stream to guide them but now Jake could not find anything to follow. Sometimes she stood still, feeling the horse snort anxiously down her neck as she waved the glowing stick in front of her. She knew it must be one of the Rackham horses but which one she was unable to tell. After a while she moved on again—and walked straight into a rock, striking her knee with the sort of bang that hurts like an electric shock. Once again all her nerves seemed to jump in sympathy, and she felt slightly nauseous. Crouching down by the rock she rested her forehead against it, her face contorted with pain. After a while as the pain subsided, a thought came to her. She had banged her knee on an edge. The rock was knee-high and flattish on the top. She manoeuvred the horse as best she could, and realized that it was not quite as dark as it had been a moment ago. When the horse moved its head she could actually see it as a silver outline against the night. Jake raised her eyes. There was a red light, faint but angry, up in the air which made her wonder if the sun could possibly be rising from behind unseen hills. Feeling her way gingerly, inch by inch, Jake climbed onto the rock and threw herself across the horse's back.

  "I can't ride," she told it, "so please be good." It moved nervously as she kicked and scrambled herself into a seated position in the saddle, a surprise for her horse-riding muscles which thought they had finished for the day. Once up on the horse, Jake could see something she could not have seen before—another patch of light, whiter and more like a street lamp than the red glow overhead. While she stared at it the horse put its ears forward and edged towards it, so that she glimpsed the shape of its head again. There was something familiar about its ears, but one pair of horse's ears probably looked very like another. As they came closer and closer to the white light, Jake began to make out first shapes and then people. She could not see Bond, but she had found Dora and Lewis—and found them in terrifying company.

  Fifteen - The Three Stones

  When the sudden darkness fell, Dora, Bond and Lewis had struggled around a bend of the creek bed and were hurrying as fast as they could. Solita, bumping at Bond's side as he ran, continued to reel off numbers and co-ordinates. Bond could not possibly be taking note of them thought Dora, but she was quite wrong. He could listen and remember even as he ran. The mathematical instructions being relayed to him were like a set of building blocks, and by using the ideas they held he was able to make a structure which began to form a definite pattern. As he ran, the pattern affected him. He could feel his bones contracting and felt a change come upon him.

  "I must stop," he said despairingly. To be so close to being rescued by the School and then to be caught by the Wirdegen seemed a bitter blow, but he knew he could not carry on during his metamorphosis.

  "Hide!" commanded Dora, as she stopped and clasped her hand dramatically to her side as though she had been shot or had the stitch. In truth she was perfectly all right—out of breath perhaps, but able to run further if she needed to. "Hide behind those bushes and Lewis and I will guard you." It was then that the darkness came, and the world pitched like a ship at sea. "Oh dear," sobbed Dora. "Oh dear, oh dear." She continued saying this until everything grew still once more. "Where are we?" she cried aloud.

  Lewis answered from so closely beside her that he took her by surprise. "It's stopped," he stated. "Was it an earthquake?"

  "A time quake," Dora replied, but the thought of it made her feel even worse. There was a little light coming from somewhere. It was Solita still whispering and shining faint
ly in the dark.

  "The stream's gone," said Lewis in a small voice. "We've gone back a million years."

  "We'll have to be real eagles. They used to be here a million years ago," said Dora. She blindly drew him close to give him a comforting hug, misjudging his whereabouts in the dark and banging her nose on his ear.

  "We've left Jake behind with only a stick to defend herself," said Lewis. "It was my fault. But she made us go."

  "How could it be your fault, silly?" asked Dora.

  "Because of the spy hiding in my head," Lewis replied. "He looked out through my eyes and listened with my ears. He called the others and I couldn't stop him!"

  Before Dora had time to think about this or do more than squeeze Lewis's hands reassuringly, there was a breathy roar in the air. They were no longer alone. Dora promptly ducked her head down with her arms wrapped across it as though she feared something might fall from above into her hair, but in actual fact she was trying to squeeze herself down so small that no-one would notice her. "Go away!" she cried in a muffled voice. "He's not here."

  "Bond!" said a voice, and at the same time the stone around Dora's neck began to burn and tug as if she was a compass and the stone was the needle trying to point to a secret north of its own.

  "Show yourself, Bond!" demanded another voice, then all around them the dark began to wail with voices calling "Bond, Bond, Bond" until it sounded as if they were besieged by a tribe of hundreds. All Lewis and Dora could do was clutch each other and stare up at their enemies. The sky had begun to redden a little. Light was coming from somewhere.

  "We don't want to hurt you, Bond," said the first voice loudly, "but unless you deliver yourself to us, we will feel free to hurt your friends who are crouching at our feet."

  Bond was not far away. Unlike Dora and Lewis, he could see in the dark. He knew that the stream and trees had vanished, and that they were now in a world of stone facing the hills over which they had ridden earlier, but in a much more stark and jagged form. He also knew that in another few minutes the structure of the numbers he had been given and the Xu formula would come together and the School would be able to put out a wave keyed to this particular pattern which he could follow back through the layers of the atmosphere, through space, to the waiting School. He gripped the Companion tightly. But Dora and Lewis remained at the feet of the Wirdegen.

  "Solita," he said. "If I go to help them, can you... can you destroy me if... if you need to. I can't leave them, but neither must I allow myself to be used by the Wirdegen."

  "Destroy?" Solita repeated. The mechanical voice sounded different, unexpectedly alive and emotional. "Destroy..."

  "Quickly!" Bond snapped. "Before I have time to reconsider."

  "I can destroy," Solita said faintly.

  "Wait until I give the word," Bond ordered as he walked into the faint circle of radiance cast by his pursuers. Dora would not have recognized him had it not been for one thing—the blazing kiss-of-fire hair. Bond had changed shape and colour, but the kiss-of-fire hair burnt on relentlessly. The Bond who stood before them now appeared as a slim, winged creature whose neck was covered with lacy scallops—no longer beautiful, no longer familiar, but still the essence of a friend.

  "Let them go," he said firmly. "Let them walk away. They're only accidental friends." As he spoke his image seemed to change still further. He was altering continually.

  "You said there were no accidents," Dora cried rather incoherently. "You said it was all a pattern."

  Bond turned his flaming head to catch her words. The stone burned at the base of her throat looking as if it was emitting light, and there on Bond's chest shone his own stone, restored to him once more. The light increased as if the two stones, neither of them now in their true time, were trying to add something to the argument. The air trembled around them.

  The goatish man sighed, apparently with relief. He put his hand on Bond's shoulder; a hand which had longer fingers than a hand ought to have. "Come with us now, Bond!" he said triumphantly. "Confess yourself a victim. You no longer look anything like a hero." Bond's altered face, with his huge eyes and flat nose, turned towards the speaker so suddenly that Dora thought he had been surprised by something, though she could no longer read his expression.

  "How did you know I wanted to look like a hero?" Bond asked slowly and quietly.

  "You are trying to waste time," the man said, "but we know that within a few more moments you could simply dissolve away back to your School leaving us empty-handed. Take him away."

  But within the next few minutes everything changed.

  The first thing that happened was that Jake charged at them out of the night riding Cooney and looking even more like the Lone Ranger without her cowboy hat than she had ever looked with it. She clung to Cooney's mane with one hand letting the reins hang loosely about his neck, while with the other hand she swung the tethering rope as if it was a lasso, making straight for Bond and his captor. Caught unawares the goatish man looked up and released his grip on Bond who quickly moved away from him. Cooney shied one way, and Jake fell in the opposite direction, tumbling down to land flat on her back at Bond's feet, while Cooney trotted a few steps away then stopped and looked back as if expecting praise and a treat of apples.

  "Stay away from us," Bond shouted at the goatish man. "If I say the word my Companion here will destroy me. None of us can win." At these words Bond's enemies turned towards him, and Dora thought they looked afraid. "Besides," continued Bond, "all this—it's been part of the test, hasn't it?"

  There was a brief silence. "Part of the test?" repeated one of the enemies.

  "When I left the School my teacher was the only one who knew I wanted to look like a hero. It was a joke—but you must have come from the School to know about it," he announced, half jubilantly, half angrily.

  Jake picked herself up, looking at Bond incredulously. Dora voiced her thoughts. "You mean they're your friends?" she cried in disbelief, while Bond and his opponents stared steadily at each other. It was Solita who spoke.

  "Notice of threat!" she said. "Major object anomaly is imminent." Even as she said this there was a flare of new light. Off to Dora's right three young men had come out of the darkness and now stood shielding their eyes, dazzled and amazed at the scene before them. Two were dark and one was fair, yet they were dressed alike in a mixture of traditional Maori and European clothes.

  Historical men, thought Dora, for they reminded her of pictures from a history book. Outlined in broad bands of silver light they stood there, lips moving, obviously talking to one another although no sound reached the group standing around Bond. A fantastic possibility flashed into Dora's mind. She saw with amazement that the fair man wore an identical stone in his ear to that which hung around her own neck, the same stone that hung around Bond's neck like a worn splinter of green. A moment later she felt as if she had been seized in a soft but unyielding vice. The air grew solid about her as though she had been set in glowing glass. Bond, already in his true shape, did not change dramatically but his 'opponents' did. Sprouting upwards like columns of light they became patterns in which remarkable shapes moved, looking sometimes like faces, sometimes like birds, and sometimes like the letters of an unknown alphabet. Fixed as they were, Jake, Lewis and Dora could all see each other. Some time later, Dora would think that that was the moment she began to lose her fear of never looking good enough, but all she could think of now was that Jake looked beautiful and human, and she could tell that Jake was thinking the same thing about her. In spite of their differences, they were inhabitants of the same planet after all.

  Hanging from Bond's shoulder, Solita was the only one able to speak. "We shall now return to the School," she said. The columns of light all moved together, melted into one another and became one, widening to engulf Bond who stood set in their light like a red-headed goblin caught in a rod of amber. The stone around his neck glowed in a ghostly fashion. It glowed in the ear of the fair historical man, and Dora felt it burn her own ski
n.

  The children were surprised when Solita addressed them in their own language. "Bond will be safe," reported Solita. "I speak with the voice of the School. You have fallen under the power of a dislocation field brought about by the simultaneous presence of one object in three different times. It has created what we call a local paradox. As Bond returns to his School there will be another jump in time and you will all be set free. You must then be patient and in due course your own time will reassert itself. Bond's memories of you will be recorded. You will become part of the Galgonquan Inventory. But now we must resolve this knot and say goodbye. Thank you. You have been brave friends."

  Solita began to emit a sound which was like nothing the three children had ever heard before. It was musical and soft, but seemed to go right through them as though their very bones had become harp strings. Its effect on the Galgonqua was stranger still. Their colours left them. They grew transparent, a tall column of glass. In the last second Bond half turned towards them and his lips moved, but no words came, only a faint, far-off murmur like the sound of the sea, and then they were gone. A door had shut. Bond was on one side of it and Jake, Dora and Lewis were on the other. There was a little jump—nowhere near as violent or frightening as the previous one. The light changed suddenly. They still stood in darkness, but were surrounded by a mysterious silver lace as if the world had become a puzzle of shining wire.

  "The other men have gone too," remarked Lewis. "The Maoris."

  "You know who it was, don't you?" Jake turned-to Dora. "It was Sebastian Webster."

  Dora had already worked this out but rebelled against the knowledge. "It can't have been," she cried.

  "It was. It all fits in," said Jake. "The first jump by the waterfall took us back to Webster's time, and then the next one dragged him and his friends back with us. That was the earthquake. We were his vision... we were the mannikins!"

  Dora knew Jake was right. She and Lewis and Jake and Cooney had been ghosts. Having always been frightened of the haunted valley, she now knew who it was that haunted it. It was herself she had been afraid of all the time.