by Mark Edwards
Epilogue
I tread the crooked path to the top of the hill.
The first colours of spring are breaking through, and the world smells fresh, new. Reborn. The sun is sinking and the sky turns cobalt. Soon the stars will come out. And I will watch.
I will watch the sky.
The bodies of Marie Walker and Andrew Jade were never found. I phoned around the news agencies that first day – or rather, I got Simon to do it – to check that it wasn’t a mistake, that they hadn’t just omitted two names from the list.
‘That’s the funny thing,’ one news editor told Simon. ‘That guy who saw the whole thing swears blind there were thirteen people who walked over the cliff, but they only found eleven bodies. I guess they must have been swept out to sea – or the old guy miscounted. Easily done, isn’t it?’
I watched the news for weeks afterwards, expecting them to say that two bodies had been washed up on the beach, but it never happened.
The story was big news for about a week. The police quickly located the farmhouse, and pictures of the empty rooms appeared in all the papers. The media made a big fuss over the fact that there were some very young girls involved. When they found the alien porn sites on the internet they almost exploded with excitement. The government promised to look into it. Samantha O’Connell’s books temporarily went to the top of the bestseller lists. Everyone who had ever had any contact with Andrew was interviewed and his university past was dredged up.
There was great debate over the missing bodies. The coastguard explained that it was possible they had been carried away to sea, but very unlikely. Many people thought Andrew and Marie must have planned their escape, fooling their fellow pact members. A lovers’ tryst, they called it. The witness was old, had been busy operating his new mobile phone when the group jumped. Had Andrew and Marie broken free of the line and saved their own skins? Most people thought so.
A lovers’ tryst. Could that be true? Had Andrew chosen Marie over Cherry?
Had Marie chosen him over me?
Meanwhile, the ufology community had its own ideas about what had happened.
Contact had been made. Andrew and Marie were the only true chosen ones, and they were, at this moment, among the Chorus, the first humans to join an extraterrestrial culture.
The mystery had been taken away from me. It was no longer mine to solve alone.
By Christmas, the fuss had died down. The story had been replaced by some other tragedy. I hear there’s going to be a BBC documentary screened soon. Simon said I should talk to them, give my side of the story, tell them what I know. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to be dragged into it.
The Vox Humana story tied in with stories from across the world. Government agencies in Japan, Italy and the USA planted undercover operatives in a number of known alien abduction cults. Each of the cults was raided on the very same day that Andrew’s thirteen walked towards the edge of Beachy Head.
In Oregon, an undercover FBI agent called Rick Delaney gave evidence against a cult known as the Loved Ones. The cult’s leader, Lisa Mendelsohn, and five men were arrested for fraud, deception, harbouring known criminals – and the murder of a British citizen, Gary Kennedy.
I couldn’t believe it – Rick, an FBI agent! He had fooled us all. And part of the evidence included the flash drives Zara had fetched from her house, which contained details of everyone who had ever been part of the Loved Ones, of the money and possessions they had signed over and the enormous shopping spree it had funded – cars, diamonds, houses, cocaine, and so on – to bring criminal prosecutions against Lisa.
I scoured the reports, in print and on the Net, but there was no mention of Zara.
Maybe she never went back after dropping me at the airport, although it seemed unlikely. Some dark nights, at four a.m., when my soul howled with loneliness and I imagined Marie and Andrew together, I thought about going back to America and finding her.
There had been a connection there. We had both lost people we loved. I should go out there, find her, start again. But then morning would come and I’d change my mind.
Because I’m getting on with my life. I’m healing.
Healing.
Bob Milner asked me to go back and work for the Herald. I said no. I’ve found a much better job. The Sunday Telegram wants me to work as a features photographer on their magazine. It looks like my ambitions might be fulfilled after all. Marie would be proud. It should be exciting: a new life, a new start. A new me.
A week or so after the suicide, I went to visit Marie’s mum. She was back home and had good news: her cancer was in remission.
‘Waiting for the all-clear from the oncologist,’ she said, attempting a smile.
She made us a cup of tea and we sat out in the porch, on wicker chairs, looking out at the birds hopping about in the bright winter sunshine. She thanked me for searching for her daughter, and I said sorry that I was unable to bring her home.
‘I think she’s still out there,’ she said. She stared at me, an imploring look that made me uncomfortable. ‘I’d be able to feel it, wouldn’t I, if she was dead? And they would have found the body.’
I began to say ‘Not necessarily,’ but she talked over me. She looked exhausted, puffy bags drooping beneath her eyes. ‘She’s either out there somewhere,’ she said, gesturing at the garden and beyond, ‘or she’s out there.’
She looked up at the sky.
And that’s the end of my story. Later tonight I’ll go home and feed Calico, who seems to have settled since Marie’s final disappearance. He doesn’t stand on the windowsill any more. He seems content. Maybe he knows something I don’t.
Or maybe he’s just a cat, with a short memory.
I will never forget Marie. She was the sun at the heart of my system; she was the fire in my personal hell. She changed me. She showed me the summits and the depths, the zenith and nadir of love. I am scarred and scared – it will be a while before I am able to open myself up again, expose myself to hurt. But I know I will. I know how sweet love can be, and I couldn’t go the rest of my life without tasting that sweetness again.
I will only ask one thing of any future lover: that they don’t believe in aliens.
Except . . . I don’t mean that. It’s my attempt to make a joke out of what I’ve been through (although, to be honest, it’s one of the things that stops me going out to find Zara). I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it all, to squeeze some meaning, some lesson, from my experience. To think about what Marie did in a rational, unemotional way.
Andrew accused me of not believing in anything, an accusation I had already aimed at myself. What makes me different from people like Marie and people who go to church, or join cults, or become protestors or jihadists or risk their lives for a cause? I have no religion, no great political passion, no creed that governs my life. I don’t belong to any organization. I vote, but I have never marched.
Marie’s mum told me that, from when she could first talk, Marie was ‘always asking questions. She’d want to know everything. Why did God allow people to suffer, did animals go to Heaven, why do we have wars? All the usual stuff kids ask. There were a few Muslim kids in her class, and Hindus. They talked about going to the mosque or the temple. And Marie wanted to know why we didn’t go to church, started pestering her dad and me. So I took her – her dad moaning about what a waste of time it all was – and she loved it. Loved singing the hymns, reading all the Bible stories, talking about Jesus like he was a pop star or something. It was sweet. But then her dad stopped her going, told her it was all a load of crap, that he didn’t want his daughter to be a “Bible basher”.
‘After he left us, I thought maybe she’d start going again. But she wasn’t interested any more. She wasn’t interested in anything, I thought. Until the aliens. It started with a book she got from the library about these people who said they’d had experiences . . . you know, all the stuff she went on about. And that was it. It was like there was a hole inside her, a space, that neede
d filling. Marie had a need to believe in something different, something better.’ She paused before making a final declaration. ‘I blame her dad.’
It’s easy to think that anyone who becomes a born-again Christian or gives up their life to become an animal rights protestor, or who joins a cult like the Loved Ones, is searching to fill the hole that Marie’s mum talked about. That they do it because they have something missing in their lives.
And perhaps there’s an element of truth in that – but what about the rest of us? Are we content, fulfilled, happy with our lot? What about me? Before I met Marie I was drifting, going through the motions, getting by day to day, like most people. My basic needs – food, shelter, water – were met. But the closest I got to spiritual ecstasy was watching my football team win the league, or buying a cool new phone. Why didn’t I join a church or take up a cause?
Where was the meaning in my life?
Here is what I’ve concluded. That just because I don’t believe in anything doesn’t mean I believe in nothing. I am not a nihilist. I have rules, guidelines, morals, ethics, a code by which I live my life. I have dreams and desires. I want what most people want: a decent job, enough money to stop me worrying about getting into debt, someone to love, someone to love me back. I want kids some day. I want a family, friends, people to care for and who care about me. I want to look back on my life and feel I tried hard, that I took opportunities when they came, that I was a good person, that I didn’t waste my years on this planet.
I do believe in something. I believe in people. I don’t care if it sounds sappy, but I believe in love, in its redemptive and transformative powers. And I believe in myself. Or, at least, I know myself – far better now than before I met Marie.
Maybe that was the difference between Marie and me. She didn’t believe in herself. She felt she needed rescuing, but for reasons of nurture or nature or both, she never built the self-belief that would give her the strength to save herself. Instead, Andrew became the person she saw as her saviour. That was her tragedy. Because I believe the only person who could save Marie was Marie herself. All I could have done was help, and my failure to do so will haunt me until I die.
Having said all that, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Marie was saved. Maybe she found the fulfilment, the peace, she sought. Perhaps she’s out there now, happy, all her dreams come true.
I may never know, but I hope that she found what she was looking for, even if it was in her final moment on Earth.
I lie on my back on the cold, damp grass. I close my eyes. I can hear the sea below me, and the seagulls swooping over the rocks.
The world becomes dark and I open my eyes. As always, the brightness of the stars surprises me. But now I know the names of the constellations; names that Marie taught me. That we invented. My eyes roam from star to star, and I try to imagine where she might be. Is she up there somewhere, looking down? There is still a large part of me that says no, that favours other, more rational explanations. But when I concentrate – when I really listen hard – I can hear the singing, the choir, the Chorus.
And somewhere among the choir, I hear a human voice.
Author’s Note
Thanks for reading What You Wish For. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did and can spare a few minutes to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, I’d be very grateful. I love hearing from readers and you can contact me by email ([email protected]), via Twitter (@mredwards) or on Facebook (facebook.com/vossandedwards). I promise to respond.
This book has had a long journey to publication. I started writing it way back in the 1990s, when I still had a good head of hair and was first pursuing my dreams of being a writer. At the time, The X-Files was massive, crop circles were always in the news and Babylon Zoo were at the top of the charts with their Spaceman song. Aliens were big, and that influenced me when it came to writing this book.
When I returned to the book recently, I tore the whole thing up and started again, rewriting it from scratch. But I decided to keep Marie’s obsession with aliens – even though I could have changed it to something more fashionable.
Because What You Wish For needn’t have been about alien abduction cults. This novel is about belief, and Marie could have belonged to any number of belief systems: religious, political, spiritual. For the record, my views are more like Richard’s than Marie’s. I am a rationalist. I want to see the hard evidence before I believe in something. It seems unlikely – impossible, even – that the Earth can be the only planet to harbour life. But I don’t believe that grey, large-headed aliens regularly visit us and abduct people.
(Though at the same time, I hope they don’t have Kindles on other planets. That some intelligent otherworldly being won’t read this book and decide to pay me a visit . . .)
I have deliberately left the ending of What You Wish For open. What do you think happened to Marie and Andrew? The truth is out there, as somebody once said . . . And I’d love to know what you think.
For those of you who read The Magpies and are still wondering what happened to Lucy, she has a small part in Because She Loves Me, published September 2014. Because She Loves Me is similar to The Magpies in theme and tone, although this time the terror is even closer to home. I can’t wait for everyone to read it.
Until then, thanks again for reading this book.
Mark Edwards
Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
My wife, Sara, for being a wise and honest reader and for everything you do to allow me to pursue my dreams.
Louise Voss for excellent suggestions and insight as always.
Jennifer Vince for yet another striking cover. (If you’re looking to hire an excellent book cover designer, Jennifer can be contacted via www.jennifervince.com.)
Isabella Tan for the cover image and Sarah Ann Loreth.
Julia Gibbs for proofreading the manuscript. Julia can be found on Twitter @ProofreadJulia.
Sam Copeland, my fantastic agent.
Emilie Marneur and everyone at Amazon Publishing.
Andrea Walker for helping me come up with the title.
Sue Vaughan for the ‘Fifty Shades of Greys’ joke!
And everyone on the Voss & Edwards Facebook page (facebook.com/vossandedwards) for your constant support, help, enthusiasm and all-round awesomeness.
About the Author
Photo © Mark Earthy
Mark writes psychological thrillers. He loves stories in which scary things happen to ordinary people and is inspired by writers such as Stephen King, Ira Levin, Ruth Rendell, Ian McEwan, Val McDermid and Donna Tartt.
Mark is now a full-time writer. Before that, he once picked broad beans, answered complaint calls for a rail company, taught English in Japan, and worked as a marketing director.
Mark co-published a series of crime novels with Louise Voss. The Magpies, his first solo, topped the UK Kindle charts for three months when it first released. Since its success, the novel has been re-edited and published by Thomas & Mercer. Mark is now writing his next spine-tingling thriller, to be published in late 2014.
He lives in England with his wife, their three children, and a ginger cat.
He can be contacted on:
Twitter: @mredwards
Facebook: www.facebook.com/vossandedwards
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE CLOSE ENCOUNTER
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART TWO STARING INTO SPACE
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
PART THREE VOX HUMANA
23
24
25<
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Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author