Cold Skies: A Psychological Thriller

by Zoe Drake

  Gareth became a member of the City Library, and took out as many books on UFOs and abductions as he could at one go. Some of them were lurid and outrageous, some were more restrained, almost reasonable, and contained interviews with stories that sounded similar to Gareth’s and the witnesses he’d interviewed himself.

  Where are these abductees right now, Gareth wondered. What kind of lives do they have?

  Despite his curiosity, he found it hard to concentrate on the large pile of books on his living room coffee table. In fact, he found it difficult to concentrate on a lot of things. The lack of sleep was getting to him. His irritation was increased by the fact that he couldn’t even trust his TV set; even on Sky, the reception sometimes warped and buzzed, becoming a snow-crash of migraine proportions.

  Littlewood had called every night since Gareth had made his confession. He was like a child with a new toy. Gareth understood how the man felt, having his obsession suddenly made reality, and some of his advice was genuinely useful. Even so, the man’s naked enthusiasm made Gareth feel more than a little pissed off.

  March 30th arrived, and Gareth resigned himself for a night away from the pub, because he was going to give up his Saturday night and return to the cold, wet, flat, godforsaken place where he nearly died.

  He didn’t dare tell Caroline.

  At eight-thirty, two cars pulled up outside Gareth’s house. One was Littlewood’s Ford Mondeo, the other was a fancy Toyota Land Cruiser. Gareth went outside to watch the newcomers park.

  The men from SIAP were quite a contrast to each other. Patrick Johnston reminded Gareth of Littlewood’s army of student volunteers from the Skywatch. He was shorter than Gareth, had gold-rimmed glasses, wore a chunky sweater under his jacket, and the fluffy beard around his cheeks failed to conceal the ruddy sheen of his complexion.

  Roger Walcott was a tall Jamaican-British man who wore a dark suit and a blue shirt that fitted very well with it. He had thinning hair, and a sharp face with narrow, almost lashless eyes. His voice had a deep, melodious tone to it as he performed the introductions. “I’m a lecturer at Sussex University, and Patrick is an engineer at Marshall’s. Nice to meet you at last, Mr. Manning.”

  Gareth pulled out a beer for everyone except Johnston, who was the designated driver for the night. Seated in the living room, they went through the plan for the evening.

  “So we’re going back to the site of the Skywatch – and then the accident?” Gareth asked.

  “That’s right,” Walcott confirmed. “Obviously, we won’t be able to see a lot – and no, we’re not expecting to see those UFOs – but it’s important to get an idea of the site at times and conditions similar to the original sightings. That means we can take all of the environmental factors into account.”

  “So you’re going to come back and look at the site in the daytime?”

  “Of course. Next weekend, or whenever is convenient.”

  “What did Mr. Winslow say?”

  Littlewood smiled apologetically. “He said it was okay for us to go onto his land, but he won’t be meeting us. He still feels upset about, you know, the horse.”

  Gareth looked at his visitors. “Do you two know about the horse?”

  “Oh yes,” said Johnston. “Brian has briefed us on everything.”

  “Do you have any ideas on what killed it?”

  Littlewood shrugged. “Last week Winslow told me that the vet said it was heart failure – which doesn’t mean anything.”

  Gareth nodded. “Do we have to stay out all night?”

  “No.” Head-shaking all round. “We could,” said Walcott, “but that would be inconvenient and uncomfortable for you, and all of us really. It should take about a couple of hours, if we get some decent measurements.” He took a long draught of his ginger ale and leaned forward eagerly. “Now then, about those photographs…”

  “I showed them the Polaroids,” Littlewood said. “Would you mind?”

  Gareth slid the cardboard folder from under the pile of library books. As he did so, he noticed the look of disdain on Johnston’s silent face as the man’s eyes lingered over the covers.

  Opening the folder, Walcott took out the prints and both men shuffled through them, peering carefully.

  Johnston looked up and said, “You said the other film is being examined in the USA?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We’d like to examine these prints ourselves, is that all right?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Gareth glanced down at his empty beer glass. “Are we ready to go?”

  “Just a minute,” said Littlewood apologetically. “Gareth, er – do you mind if – er, do you mind showing them the marks on your body?”

  Gareth stared at the visitors for a few seconds, who looked back at him with unreadable expressions. Then he stood, pulled up his sweater and T-shirt, and showed them his midriff.

  Johnston and Walcott got to their feet and leaned in close, both staring at the marks around his navel. Go on then, have a good look, Gareth thought, seething with embarrassment.

  Johnston produced a fountain pen and performed a few rough measurements by holding it up against the red, angry mark. “You’re had these ever since the accident?” he asked.

  “Yes. Everyone, including me, thought they were caused by the crash.”

  “Even your GP?”

  “Yes, basically he was as clueless as everyone else.”

  “Do you have marks like this anywhere else on your body?”

  “I had what looked like sunburn on my face for a few weeks afterwards, but it’s gone now. There’s a little bit left on my neck.”

  Straightening up, Johnston and Walcott were brought into close focus as they peered at Gareth’s neck.

  “You mean there? That bit that looks like nettle rash?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Manning.” The two investigators exchanged glances as Gareth readjusted his sweater. “Thank you very much indeed.”

  The Land Cruiser was warm and comfortable as they left the lights of Oakington behind them and plunged into the long black tunnel of the cold Fenlands night.

  “Your psychologist,” Johnston said as he drove, “has apparently uncovered memories of your abduction under hypnosis. Is that correct?”

  “That’s what it seems like.”

  “Do you mind if we look at the transcripts of what you said? They could be extremely important.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be confidential? Between doctor and patient?” Gareth replied.

  Walcott turned in the passenger seat and gave Gareth a withering look. “We know about doctor-patient confidentiality, Mr. Manning. However, that depends on you. If you think it’s important, you can allow others to read it.” With a shrug, Walcott turned his attention back to the void beyond the windscreen.

  “Let me explain the classification system we use at SIAP,” Johnston called over his shoulder. “It uses four basic classifications, and was devised by Dr. Jacques Vallee.”

  “He was the French scientist in Close Encounters,” Littlewood said excitedly.

  “You mean the character played by Francois Truffaut was based on him,” Johnston corrected. “Anyway, there are four basic classifications, and your case shows elements of all four, Mr. Manning. There’s FB, which means Fly-By. Then MA, or Maneuvers, which means an aerial object displaying some kind of continuous flight. AN describes any kind of anomalous event. Then there’s CE… Close Encounters.”

  “There’s another code system we use as well,” Walcott continued. “It’s the SVP credibility rating for sightings that we investigate. S, for source reliability. V, for visits made to the site. P, for possible explanations.”

  “Source reliability?” asked Gareth. “You mean me?”

  “That’s it, Mr. Manning. You’re the source. We’re getting this straight from the horse’s mouth,” declared Johnston, “If you’ll pardon the expression. Sorry.”r />
  I’ll bet the horse is sorry too, Gareth thought.

  After about an hour, something familiar slid by in the darkness – the skeletal bars of the farm main gates. The Land Cruiser slowed down and began to crawl, rocking and bumping, down the rutted footpath to the barn.

  “That’s it, up ahead,” called Gareth.

  The shack lay in the glare of the headlights, looking abandoned and miserable. Gareth stared at it for a few minutes while the others fussed over the equipment. He savored the warmth of the car, the soft ambient glow of the dashboard, everything safe, everything ticking over nicely. Then Johnston cut the engine, and the lights, and Gareth opened his passenger door and stepped out.

  The wind wasn’t as claw-sharp as it was for the original Skywatch. A strong north-easterly wind still bullied them, but their coats (and anoraks) were putting up a fight.

  Gareth watched the men from SIAP get their bearings. He stood between the car and the barn, on the edge of open space, the dark flatness broken only by the slender row of what Gareth remembered were poplars. If they were intended to be a windbreak, they weren’t doing their job.

  The night was silvery and clear, and the gelatinous sky was clogged with stars. To his left, the central farm buildings looked warm behind their illuminated windows. Gareth wondered if the Winslow family were watching the intruders with renewed suspicion – or if they had stopped caring.

  “Mr. Manning – Gareth? Would you like to come with us?” Johnston called.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  Littlewood waved his arms around as he indicated to the two strangers the previous pattern of events.

  As Gareth breathed out, a fine mist drifted between him and the other men. It hung for a few seconds, like cobwebs on the wind, and was gone. Gareth turned slowly in a circle, scanning the darkness for detail. To the right of the poplars, behind a hedge, were the dark bulks of what Gareth knew was a grain silo, and one of those farm buildings without walls that always looked like a roof on skinny legs.

  Lost in thought, Gareth wandered around the back of the barn, swallowed up by its featureless shadow. He looked around to fix his vision on something tangible, clapping his gloved hands together for warmth, and then he walked around the barn to rejoin the others.

  They weren’t there.

  Oh great, Gareth thought. Littlewood’s taken them off on a tour somewhere. Well, they could have asked me.

  “Hello?” Gareth called. The wind took the single word and fled, the sound expanding, pushing the boundary of the darkness outwards, until the bubble burst and the dark silence flooded back. Silence, with no conversation, no sounds of the others. Even the traffic seemed to have stopped.

  Bollocks, thought Gareth. I’m going back to the Land Cruiser. At least I’ll be warm.

  The car had gone.

  He stood quite still, feeling the bitter cold eat through his jacket to bite at his shirt.

  Surely I would have heard the engine if they had driven off?

  The car had gone.

  Turning to face the darkness, Gareth cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled “Hello!” as loudly as he could. He waited for an answer, or at least an echo.

  Instead, he saw something spark in the distance like a bedroom light being switched on. Could somebody have heard, all the way over there? No… and there were no houses in that direction…

  It moved.

  At first, Gareth thought his own body was unconsciously swaying, but he remained perfectly still and he still saw it. Something floated, like a single glowing ember from a bonfire, pure white, carried across the Fens by the wind.

  He felt an icy sweat ooze across his chest and down his armpits, but he remained where he was and stared across the flat landscape. The object gained definition, as if it had a light, tenuous substance. It was pale, shapeless, like a plastic carrier bag blown by the wind, like a sheet torn from a washing line in a storm.

  Gareth took a few steps backward.

  The thing skimmed across the Fens, staying close to the ground. It floated across the shadowed earth, over the grass and the fields, occasionally flicking to the left or right like a balloon tugged by a child’s hands, but always returning to the center of Gareth’s vision, on a trajectory bringing it ever closer.

  Gareth turned and ran for the hedge.

  He ran across hard clods of earth that threatened to trip him at every step, he ran with his arms up to protect him from the unseen branches that might pluck at his eyes. He turned his head and saw something round and white and bloated, bobbing close to the ground. He put his head down and sped around the other side of the hedge–

  “OOOPH!”

  -and smacked into something that took the wind gushing out of his chest, and sent him sprawling into the hard-packed dirt. The thing he’d collided with keeled over backwards and lay flat out.

  “Gareth!” a familiar voice yelled.

  Rolling onto his front, Gareth crawled commando-like under the hedge, peering out to scour the Fens around him.

  “Did you see it?” he yelled. “Has it gone?”

  Littlewood, nursing the fallen Johnston, looked up at the sky sharply and called, “See what? More of them?”

  From his grubby vantage point, Gareth scanned the dark, ploughed land as far as he could see. He smelt the rusty tang of the dry earth; he saw the lights of the farmhouses embedded in the horizon like jewels on velvet.

  Whatever had made him run was gone.

  A pair of polished, elastic-sided boots suddenly blocked Gareth’s strategic line of vision. “What exactly did you see, Mr. Manning?” came Walcott’s voice.

  “I don’t know. There was something hovering close to the ground.”

  “Would you like to come out from under the hedge?”

  Crawling past the twigs that snagged at his coat and trousers, Gareth stood, and was swamped by a sudden feeling of indignation and anger. “Where the hell did you get to?” he asked the three of them.

  “What do you mean?” Walcott said. “We were looking for you.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “You ran away,” Littlewood declared, helping Johnston get to his feet. “I turned around and saw you running off, in that direction.”

  “Don’t be daft! It was you who ran off. I walked around the back of the barn and when I came back, you’d gone. And the car–”

  Gareth stalked back to the front of the barn and looked.

  The Land Cruiser was exactly where Walcott had parked it.

  The windows of the farmhouses glowed merrily. The noise of the traffic was back, the constant rush to get from somewhere to somewhere else.

  “I don’t feel very well,” Gareth announced.

  On the way back to Cambridge, there seemed to be little to say.

  After some perfunctory questioning, Walcott and Johnston seemed eager to close the investigation. “We’ll come back in the daytime,” Walcott had said, “and when you’re feeling better.” Johnston said nothing, sitting in the passenger seat, grimacing and massaging his ribs. I didn’t hit him that hard, thought Gareth.

  When they got to Oakington, Littlewood got out with Gareth and fussed around, walking with him to the front door.

  “Gareth,” he whispered on the porch, his small eyes gleaming. “Be straight with me. Did you really see something tonight?”

  “Of course I did! Do you think I’d bloody make it up? I don’t make a habit of running around at night like a lunatic!”

  Littlewood glanced back at the Land Cruiser, idling by the curb. “I’ll have a talk with them tonight before they leave. Put them straight on a few things. I’ll tell them you’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  “Stress! They’re supposed to be the experts, aren’t they? Don’t they know what this feels like?”

  Littlewood waved his hands in placating gestures. “Gareth, try to get some rest. But before you do, could you write down what happened tonight? It could be very useful. W
hile it’s still fresh in your mind.”

  Gareth nodded angrily. “I’ll call you.”

  “Tomorrow, if that’s okay?”

  Gareth finally closed the front door and listened to the purring of the Land Cruiser rise into a growl as it pulled away from his house. He looked at his watch: almost eleven o’clock. I guess the neighbors are at their windows, hiding behind the curtains and making a few guesses, he thought.

  Gareth walked through the living room, flicked the TV on, then went into the kitchen and cracked open a beer. Like hell am I writing it down, he thought. I wish I could forget it.

  “But what did happen?” he asked out loud. Why did I make such a prick of myself, running around and crawling under a hedge?

  He took a long swig of beer. Either the whole thing was a mistake, and he only saw a plastic carrier bag caught in the wind…

  Or there really is something out there in the Fens. Something alien that can interact with us.

  But why didn’t the others see it? What happened to the car? And when I was freaking out, where had Littlewood and the others gone?

  In answer, the TV hissed and crackled, as if a rogue transmitter were hijacking the airwaves. Gareth picked up the remote and ruthlessly surfed the satellite and broadcast channels.

  He tried, but he couldn’t watch anything all the way through. He switched the TV off and went upstairs. He counted out the sleeping pills, felt them slide down with the glass of tap water.

  He changed into a t-shirt and boxer shorts and got into bed, the light of the moon passing through the two windows into his room. The large window looked out onto the back garden; the smaller side window, above his head, onto the driveway and his car.

  As there were no clouds, the light from the moon was very bright. He had pulled the curtains across both windows, but they were still radiant with the reflected light. Gareth began to breathe deeply, going through Dr. Bhaskar’s relaxation exercises, feeling himself drift away…

  Hypnagogic flashes jerked his limbs, sent his eyes and face twitching.