Cold Skies: A Psychological Thriller

by Zoe Drake

  Bhaskar made a goofy face, as if Gareth had told him a joke. “Well, only you know the answer to that one! The experience is purely subjective, to each individual.”

  Gareth sighed. “That’s not really… well, look. You described what an NDE feels like, but what actually happens to the patient?”

  “Like I said, nobody knows. Some doctors believe that the ‘tunnel effect’ is caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. As it shuts down there is a slow narrowing of awareness, everything goes dark, apart from the narrow pinprick of light that could represent the person’s mental activity. As it happens, I don’t believe that’s the complete truth… but even if the whole thing is due to physical changes in brain chemistry, that doesn’t matter here and now. What does matter is the subjective significance of the experience to the individual concerned. Mr. Manning, do you really want to find out what’s bothering you?”

  “Why – yes,” Gareth declared. “Yes, I do. I want to put this behind me, and get on with my life.”

  “In that case, to put it behind you, first we have to get it out in the open where we can see it…” Bhaskar frowned. “Although I made that sound rather confusing. Do you have any objections to being hypnotized?”

  “Eh? What for?”

  “Because something is making you anxious, tired and irritable, and causing certain recurring images to appear in your dreams. If whatever it is won’t come to the surface of its own accord, then it’s possible to go digging for it. We have a good chance of uncovering it through hypnosis. That is… if I have your permission.”

  Images of TV stage hypnotists flashed through Gareth’s mind. Punters who barked like dogs, ate imaginary bananas, snogged people who weren’t there. It was one thing to get your body checked out by a doctor; it was another thing entirely to let that doctor inside your head.

  The prospect of losing control made Gareth fidget uneasily. “I’m not sure if it’s worth all that trouble.”

  “Of course, I understand if you’d rather not,” Bhaskar said briskly. “I can book you in for another standard session, and we can talk through the thing more, with some straightforward relaxation techniques.”

  Oh yes, thought Gareth, and how much is all of that going to cost?

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go for the hypnosis, and see what happens. I agree.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Manning. Have you ever been hypnotized before?”

  “No.”

  “Can I give you a brief session now, to see if you’re resistant to suggestion?”

  “Right now? You mean, to see if it’ll work on me? Well… okay. No time like the present, I suppose.”

  “Thank you! I’m going to record the whole proceedings, so you can hear everything that goes on, and you can listen to it right after we finish. Remember, there is nothing to worry about; this is only a medical tool for a specific kind of job. Are you feeling comfortable?”

  Gareth straightened his spine, put his head back, and rested his hands on his knees. He focused on the muscular tensions in his body, like he would before a game of rugby, to make sure everything was in good working order… Shoulders, neck, toes, jaw, all those parts of the body that had been wound up like springs over the past week or two.

  Relax, he told his body, relax.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he said, as confidently as he could.

  Gareth was on his feet, leaning on his crutches, his skin filmed with sweat and a rank smell in his nostrils.

  Bewildered, his gummed-up eyes searched every corner of the office. Dr. Bhaskar was still behind his desk, silent, a look of concern on his face. Gareth turned around to look behind him, and then realized with a surge of panic that he didn’t know what he was looking for. It felt like someone had left the room a few seconds ago, someone who’d been talking but now – had vanished.

  “What did you do to me?” Gareth said, his voice a hoarse croak.

  “We encountered a little resistance, that’s all,” Dr. Bhaskar said calmly. “It’s nothing to worry about. Sit down and relax, Mr. Manning. I attempted to take you back a few days as a safe and harmless experiment, but you went straight back to the accident without any prompting.”

  He reached over to the small tape recorder, and pressed the button for rewind. “I’ll play you the recording, and you can hear for yourself.”

  Gareth gingerly sat in the armchair once again and looked at his watch; almost twenty minutes had elapsed since the doctor had put him under with the initial relaxation technique. Twenty minutes on tape, nailed down like a confession at a trial. Bhaskar stopped halfway through the rewind and pressed the play button.

  The first thing Gareth heard was Bhaskar’s question; “Where are you now?”

  The answer was in a soft, hoarse voice that Gareth barely recognized as his own. “I don’t know.”

  Gareth listened in horrified fascination to the questions, and his own voice stubbornly refusing to cooperate, repeatedly saying “I don’t know”. And then–

  “It’s not my fault,” Gareth said on the tape, “It’s because of the voice.”

  “What voice, Gareth? Whose voice? What does the voice sound like?”

  “Get out. The voice is telling me to get out.”

  Bhaskar switched off the tape. “That’s when you stood up and tried to walk to the door. You almost fell over, so I told you to come back, and wake up.”

  Doctor and patient looked at each other in silence for a few seconds, and then Bhaskar gave a broad, strangely childish grin.

  He tapped his own temple with his forefinger and said, “There’s definitely something going on in there, Mr. Manning.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wednesday, March 20th

  “Nothing like a nice drive in the country, is there?” Caroline quipped, as the windscreen wipers struggled with the sleet. “Oh, yes. When it comes to a choice between a new dress from Modes or a drive in the Fens, I know which one I’ll choose. Yippee.”

  “I always say I love you for your sense of humor, don’t I?” Gareth replied. “I guess I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.”

  “Finish!” Jenny yelled, from where she was strapped in at the back. She waved an empty packet of pickled onion flavor Monster Munch in a gesture of triumph.

  They were driving out of Wardy Hill, along the narrow and mostly featureless road that led to Witcham. The car was surrounded by a huge, brooding sky with clouds that smothered the sun with their uniform greyness. It was hard to see the distinction between land and sky; at the horizon there were almost no trees or houses, and the drizzle of the clouds merged with the ground beneath. The hedgerows were low, dark, and bristling with twigs, and the ploughed mole-black earth gave way to rough clumps of grass at the edge of the road. Dykes and ditches shimmered along the road ahead of the car.

  “We’re almost there, I think,” Gareth observed.

  “How can you tell?”

  It was quite a valid point. Besides the featurelessness of the landscape, at the time of the accident it had been pitch dark, and his memories of what happened afterward were seriously scrambled. How could he tell where the accident had been?

  A twitch of movement made Gareth shift his gaze downwards. He saw his reflection in the wing mirror, staring pensively back at him, and he couldn’t help himself reaching up a hand to touch his face, that had looked so reddened, blotchy when he’d been in hospital. I’ll know it, that’s all, he thought. I’ll know it when I see it.

  After a while, Gareth started craning his neck, peering outwards at the road that threatened to last forever. There wasn’t much traffic coming either way, but there was at least some evidence of human habitation, with signs indicating the presence of Witcham two miles ahead.

  “Slow down,” Gareth cautioned.

  Up ahead, he saw it; a turning off to the right, a lane running straight as an arrow, bordered by a ribbon of iron-grey.

  “That’s it,” he said flatly.

&nb
sp; Caroline pulled the car over onto the grass verge, carefully letting the wheels go over the side of a rut. She fussed around with umbrellas and the catch on Jenny’s safety-seat. While she grumbled quietly, Gareth got out of the passenger seat, steadied himself on his crutches, and stood under the mournful Fenland sky.

  Raindrops burst like tiny balloons upon his face. The keening wind made sudden whirls in the sedge, the long grass struggling in graceless pirouettes.

  Caroline and Jenny got out to stand alongside him, hunched into their overcoats, with Caroline holding a large multi-colored umbrella over all of their heads. Mother and daughter seemed to be competing as to who could say “Brrrrr!” the loudest.

  “I can take a hint,” Gareth conceded. “Wait in the car, if you like.”

  “No, it’s alright.” Caroline’s West Country accent slipped out across the last word again. Gareth felt strangely cheered. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I want to go through this with you. Then it won’t be so rough, will it?” She reached up to give him a peck of a kiss. He smiled back in mute gratitude once more.

  Limping across the drab, wet gravel, Gareth looked to both left and right. No sign of any skid-marks; but then again, the accident had taken place almost six weeks ago.

  Crossing to the opposite edge of the road, Gareth stood on the verge and looked out towards the misty horizon. After a moment, he cast his gaze down into the chill, steely waters of the ditch.

  If there were any movement of the water, it could not be detected. It looked stagnant and dead. What lay underneath? Weeds, tin cans, rusting bicycle wheels?

  A car, sliding into the reeking ditch, upside down, the roof gradually settling into the muck at the bottom? The driver, slowly drowning in the freezing grip of the water–

  “Caroline,” he said. “Could you come here a minute?”

  “It’s true what they say. This cold doesn’t half make you want to go to the loo,” Caroline chatted as she pulled a shivering Jenny across the road. “It’s – Gareth? Oh, Gareth, come here.”

  She pressed against him and pulled his face towards hers, the two of them becoming a fugitive island of warmth in the uncaring vastness of the Fens. “Gareth need a hug,” Jenny said, and promptly joined in, grabbing them both around the waist, and sheltering from the rain under Gareth’s down jacket.

  “I’m alright,” Gareth said quietly, wiping the tears from his face. “Honest, I’m alright. Like that doctor said, it makes you think about things. It makes you realize how lucky you are.” He turned his face towards Caroline, and looked at her searchingly. She had her eyes half-closed, and her lips half-open, her face tilted up to him. He kissed her, roughly, urgently, feeling the heat of her tongue in his mouth, and he was swept by a feeling that constricted his chest and drew more stinging tears from his eyes.

  Relinquishing the kiss, Gareth stared out over Caroline’s shoulder into the blank landscape. He felt numb, as if the rain had scoured the inside as well as the outside of his skin, leaving him clean but somehow empty. Feelings fought for attention in the space inside his skull, and one thing gradually coaxed itself into awareness. It was something that should not have been there, one niggling little detail beginning to annoy him, like the ticking of a clock…

  “Caroline, hold on a minute.”

  “Mmm? What?” She lifted her head, her eyelids drooping under the weight of blurred mascara.

  “Can you see that? Over there?”

  They both looked out over fields that yawned with drabness. “Erm, what am I supposed to be looking for?” she asked.

  Gently easing himself out of Caroline’s and Jenny’s clutches, he limped across the road and onto the soft peat of the field beyond. There was no hedge to stop him. After about fifty yards, he looked down at the mark that had claimed his attention.

  It was a ring of discolored earth, about five feet in diameter. He bent down to examine it. It wasn’t a patch of stubborn frost; the soil was hard and shiny, with some kind of ash lying on top…

  Caroline and Jenny appeared beside him. “I’ve seen this before,” he said.

  “Are you going to tell us where?” Caroline asked.

  “At Winslow’s farm,” he said grimly. “The day after we saw… those things. The day the horse died.”

  “Yeah, all right,” she said, nonplussed. “Are you trying to scare Jenny?”

  Gareth smiled. “Listen to us! First the big romantic scene, now it’s like we’ve been married for forty years.”

  “You’d drive me round the bend after being married for forty minutes. Can we get back in the car? Or are there any other fascinating bits of soil or grass or dirt you want to look at?”

  It was only a few minutes drive to Witcham, but it didn’t really feel as if they were leaving the wilderness; the dourness of the landscape and the weather had overtaken and possessed the town. The windows of the houses glittered dully like frozen ponds. The low stone houses hunched together, as if the wind had told them a secret never to be shared.

  “God, fancy living out here,” Caroline muttered as they cruised down the high street. “It would do my head in.”

  “Oh come on, it’s not that bad,” said Gareth. “Most people would pay a fortune to move out of Cambridge and get a place out here. Commuter’s paradise, this is. With a decent park and ride system on the edge of the city, you’d never have to worry about traffic again.”

  “No, you’d only have to worry about the locals climbing over your garden fence and peering through your windows.”

  “Well you can talk, with your village idiot accent.”

  Caroline’s eyes flashed serious warning signals. “I have not got a village idiot accent!”

  “Eyes on the road! Eyes on the road!” Gareth nudged the steering wheel, and waved an apology at the car that drove past them as they neared a bend in the main road.

  “Wait a minute,” he muttered. “Caroline, sorry about that, you know I love your accent. Could you slow down and pull in over there?”

  “Where?”

  He pointed. The Church of St. Peter had swung into view ahead.

  “If you’re going to tell me you’ve got religion, you can walk back to Cambridge,” Caroline said with a pout.

  “That church. I went there before, a couple of days before the accident. The vicar there is… an interesting guy.”

  “Careful, Gareth, Jenny’s sitting in the back.”

  “What?” Jenny asked, her head jerking upwards from her picture book.

  “No, not in that way,” Gareth said hastily. “He’s… very intelligent. He’s different. He’s… kind of…”

  “Kind of that bloke over there?” Caroline pointed to her left.

  From the back of the church, a dark-clothed figure had appeared, and with a horror-movie sense of timing, walked past the gravestones towards the place they had parked. As Gareth and Caroline stared through the windscreen, the tall figure gave a little dip of his head in unsurprised recognition. The minister had very pale skin that made his beard and close-cropped receding hair look even darker in comparison.

  “Don’t laugh,” Gareth warned.

  It was too late.

  “I knew all about the accident quite soon after it happened,” The Reverend Michael Rose was saying. “There was some scuttlebutt in the village the next day, about a car crash nearby. When the verger got the evening paper, he pointed the story out to me. Your name was in it.”

  Warm as toast, Gareth and Caroline sipped hot milky tea in the vicar’s lounge. Through the open door to the drawing room, they watched Jenny playing happily with the toys that Rose kept for Sunday School.

  “Of course I was shocked when I realized you’d been in the crash. We had prayers for you in the services for the rest of February.”

  There was a pause while that sank in, and then Caroline said quietly, “Thank you.”

  Hearing the sincerity in her voice, Gareth felt something blocking his throat, stinging
his eyes like the winter wind had. He coughed and also expressed his thanks.

  “So can I ask you, out of curiosity,” Rose continued, “What happened to your colleagues after that?”

  “The Skywatch was abandoned. They felt they couldn’t really carry on after the accident. Thinking about it now, the police could have investigated, accused us of doing something reckless, but they didn’t really ask. Dr. Bennings had already got the results he needed, anyway. He went back to the States, and Littlewood’s waiting to hear from him. But we did… get results.” Gareth glanced at Caroline, expecting a warning sign, a shake of the head, but her expression didn’t change. “We… saw something.”

  “Indeed?” The vicar leaned forwards in his armchair, his hands tightening around his mug of tea. “What did you see?”

  “I… I’m not going to say it was a spaceship. But it was something real, and all of us saw it. But those rumors, Mr. Rose… they were true, and I tell you, it wasn’t marsh gas or someone’s imagination.”

  Rose nodded eagerly, then declared, “And sometimes horror chills our blood

  To be so near such mystic Things,

  And we wrap round us for defence

  Our purple manners, moods of sense…”

  Gareth stared at him, then at Caroline as she continued the poem.

  “As angels from the face of God

  Stand hidden in their wings,” she finished, and grinned at both of the men now staring at her. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” she said. “I’m retaking my English Lit A-level at night class.”

  “Most admirable.” The vicar beamed at her.

  “Mr. Rose,” Caroline continued, “If it really was a UFO, what would that mean to the Church? I mean, do you think aliens from other planets have immortal souls? And if they worshipped a God, would it be the same God as the Christian God?”

  Rose sucked air into his cheeks, staring hard into the middle distance, trying to compose an answer.

  “Well… it’s difficult to speculate about these things, especially when we could be barking up the wrong theological tree, so to speak.”