Cold Skies: A Psychological Thriller

by Zoe Drake

  “Oh yes, and that’s only getting started on the weird stuff we’ve got right here on Earth. What would happen if something in a humanoid space suit with arms and legs walks out of the UFO, and then later we find out the space suit is actually filled with a travelling colony of ants? Or Portuguese Man O’ War? Or slime mould?”

  Gareth started to laugh. “It would probably take one look at us and think that we’re the funny-looking ones.”

  “Well, we are!” Andy replied, without missing a beat. “Even compared to other apes, human beings are. Other primates would think we look weird because we walk around on two legs and not four, have short arms, and really big heads. We’ve got more in common with how the young animals look than with the adults.”

  “So the apes think we look like… big hairless baby monkeys, doing a silly walk?”

  Andy was laughing too. “Yes, all we need is a tin cup and an organ grinder!”

  At 3 am Gareth found out that Littlewood had another passion beside UFOs: cricket.

  They went back into the barn to get the bat, ball and stumps from the sports bag, and moved the cameras and tripods back out of harm’s way. They put the crease in the area of the Skywatch with the stumps in front of the barn door. Andy went in as backstop; Gareth and Littlewood tossed to see who would bat first, and Gareth won. A few minutes later, after some ruthless bowling from Littlewood, Gareth realized that he’d probably come off worse from the deal. Bennings and the students went in to field, with the students shouting the rules to Bennings as the game went along.

  Someone had just thrown the ball back to Littlewood when Andy stepped closer and grasped Gareth’s arm, his bangles rattling in the cold air. “Just a minute,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “Where?”

  Andy pointed upwards, and Gareth looked in the direction of his hand.

  “It’s a star,” he said.

  Then he realized that the ‘star’ was moving.

  He narrowed his eyes and blinked several times, trying to stop the cold air from getting to his tear ducts. He heard sounds of alarm and concern from the other Skywatchers around him, the game of cricket instantly forgotten. He felt a cold tide of disbelief flowing through his body as he realized that they’d seen it too.

  He realized the white pinpoint of light was part of a larger object. Not a cloud, something rectangular, maybe the size of a rugby pitch. There were other lights; dim red glows along the bottom of the shape.

  He heard Andy’s voice next to him. “Gareth, the camera!”

  “Oh yeah. Right.” Andy was already snapping away.

  He pressed his head to the rangefinder and adjusted the focus with stiff fingers. Yes… whatever he was looking at, the camera registered it too! He brought it into further clarity and pressed the shutter release.

  Whatever he had in the lens was now as big as a two-story house, and it blotted out the stars as it moved. The lights along the side of the shape kept changing; they were a series of lines, or bars, a band of various colors that blended into each other. It was totally silent; the voices of the Skywatchers grew in volume and excitement, but there was no sound from the sky, no noise of engines.

  I’ve got to keep it in focus, Gareth thought. If I take the camera off it, the thing will disappear.

  The second the thought had crossed his mind, the shape jumped out of the range of the lens. Gareth lifted his head. The object was flashing across the sky, toward the horizon, almost faster than his eyes could track it, moving at impossible speed.

  Then it was gone.

  The patch of land outside the barn erupted into shouts and cheers.

  “That was about five hundred feet up–”

  “No, one thousand.”

  “About seventy five feet long, forty feet wide–”

  It was a plane, Gareth told himself. It had to be an airplane.

  But he knew that a craft made by humans should have had engine noise that he could hear; and no known airplane could fly from one point to the horizon in only a couple of seconds.

  Gareth was startled to feel a hand clapping him on the back, and he tore his gaze away from the sky to look round, to see Bennings at his side, eyes wide, grinning like a lunatic.

  “Congratulations, Gareth,” he said. “You’ve just seen your first UFO.”

  Gareth tried to smile, but couldn’t, and Bennings was already walking away, to speak to Littlewood. Although the rest of the Skywatchers were jubilant, Gareth felt light-headed, and scared.

  What he had seen and photographed had been no aircraft, or star, or hallucination.

  The thought hit him as he stared at the camera in his hands; everything has just changed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Friday April 5th

  My name is Gareth Manning.

  In this journal, I am attempting to write down some of the extraordinary things that have happened to me since the beginning of the Skywatch project. I hope that you will share my experiences, and come to understand… no, wrong word. Come to experience… I’ve said that already… the strange and mysterious world of… no, that’s Arthur C. Clarke. The disturbing, unpredictable, and sometimes terrifying world of… oh bollocks bollocks bollocks.

  Putting down his pen and closing the newly purchased W. H. Smith’s notebook, Gareth left his armchair and lay down on the carpet of the room where he was temporarily staying. There was some physical relief, but not much; he felt the tension stretching across his shoulders and down his spine to his legs and inner thighs, his muscles smarting and aching. It had been too early to start rugby practice again. Way too early. But it was something that had to be done, even if he had taken it easy, and had only been on the pitch for fifteen minutes.

  It had felt like he’d been given his old car back, after weeks of driving a new, unfamiliar model. On the pitch, running through the crisp, stinging air and hurling himself against the world.

  Through the floorboards came the unsurprisingly loud sounds of Dave’s TV. Occasional knocks and footsteps indicated the movements of the owner of the house. The smell of cooking chili con carne wafted into the room.

  Climbing gingerly to his feet, Gareth went downstairs, following the sounds. Through the open door to the living room, he saw Dave in the armchair, feet up on a stool and watching One Foot in the Grave on TV.

  “Fancy a beer, mate?” Dave called, upon seeing his guest.

  “Thanks.” Gareth entered the kitchen, pulled a can of Carling Black Label from the fridge and ripped it open. After dithering over the chili con carne on the sideboard, he selected an apple from the fruit bowl, rinsed it under the tap, and went through to sit down on Jim’s sofa.

  “Can’t do it,” he announced.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “That Dr. Bhaskar told me to keep a journal. Write down my thoughts from day to day, especially my memories of the accident, to see if anything comes back. I can’t do it, mate. I can’t concentrate. I don’t know where to start.”

  “I don’t belieeeeve it!” declared Victor Meldrew from the TV screen. Both Gareth and Dave laughed at the same time.

  “I told you, mate,” said Dave through his guffaws. “If you watch it long enough, he’ll say it. Every week, regular as clockwork. Good old Victor, the miserable git.”

  Dave stared at the TV and sipped thoughtfully from his engraved tankard.

  “So what do you think I should do?” asked Gareth.

  Dave glanced at him sideways. “About what?”

  “About this journal. I can’t get it together to write anything.”

  Dave sniffed. “Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Organize your thoughts. It’s part of your therapy. I know it’s hard, but you ought to give it a try.”

  “I could put down the facts of the crash and my hospital treatment, sure enough,” Gareth replied, “but that’s not what’s bothering me. It’s the explanation of things. I’ve tried to write it down, but every time I do it strikes me
as how mad it all sounds. It’s Loony Tunes, mate.”

  Dave gave him another sidelong glance and turned the TV volume down, using the remote that seemed to be grafted to his left hand. “Why don’t you have a go now? You could tell me about it.”

  “Really?” Gareth paused and took a long swig from the can. He stopped polishing the fruit against his trousers and looked down at it as if seeing it for the first time. “What kind of apple is this?” he asked.

  Dave gave him a curious glance. “Evelina. It tastes a bit like Golden Delicious.”

  Gareth turned it over and over in his hands and then took a large bite. “Well,” he began through a mouthful of apple, “the human brain is a funny thing, right? If it’s damaged or something goes wrong, it could cause all kinds of hallucinations, yeah?”

  Dave nodded and belched softly.

  “But the thing is,” Gareth continued, “what if those hallucinations seem to exist outside of the mind? What if they were real?”

  “What do you mean, ‘real hallucinations’? There’s no such thing.”

  “I mean if other people can see them, too.”

  “Don’t be daft. If you hallucinate, how can other people see it?”

  “Well, you know. There are things we don’t understand yet. Mysterious things, like UFOs.”

  Dave pulled a face. “Aw, you’re getting ideas because of that job you went on in the Fens. That Skywatch thing with those UFO people. Don’t let it get to you.”

  “Yeah, but what if there really is something to it? What if there were some evidence?”

  “I don’t know about that, mate. What I do know is when you started working with them, you called me up and told me what a dodgy group of buggers they were. I remember that.”

  Gareth finished munching on his apple and took the core through to the kitchen. After disposing of it in the bin, he returned to the living room and said, “I saw something, Dave.”

  Dave sat up straight, looking confused. “What? I know I said I’m on a diet, but the Chinese takeaway was–”

  “No, I don’t mean in the rubbish bin. I saw something in the Fens, before the accident. I saw what I believe to be a UFO. And other people saw it too.”

  Dave looked at him shrewdly. “Really?”

  “Straight up.” He snorted with embarrassed laughter. “And that’s where the UFO was, as well. Straight up.”

  There was silence as Dave searched Gareth’s expression with his gaze, looking for clues. “So, you’re telling me that you went looking for UFOs, and you actually saw one?”

  “That’s right. No joke.”

  Gareth sat down in the armchair again, and Dave twisted around to face him. “Well, what was it like?”

  “It was… a bit scary.”

  “A real UFO, eh? Wouldn’t it be great to go for a ride on one of them?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  After falteringly describing the shapes that he and his colleagues had seen, Gareth went on, “If you think about it, it doesn’t sound so stupid. I mean, how old is the Universe? Billions of years? And there are millions of galaxies with millions of suns, and some of those suns might have planets like this one. It’s pretty reasonable to say there might be other people in the Universe. And they might have some way of travelling by instantly skipping from one place to another, like, from the other side of the universe, to… here. Planet Earth.”

  “That’d be handy for avoiding the M25,” muttered Dave. “Well, I dunno. There could be UFOs… loads of people say they’ve seen them, and they can’t be all loonies…”

  “Oh cheers, Dave!”

  Dave grinned. “You know what I mean. Hey, that reminds me of something.”

  Gareth watched, surprised, as Dave leant forward, a new light in his eyes. “What?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t know about UFOs, but I’ve seen my grandma’s ghost.”

  “Never.”

  “Yup. When I was a kid, up in Gateshead. I don’t exactly remember seeing her ghost, but I could feel her, you know, I could feel her there in that house, after she passed away. I heard voices and I smelt her clothes, and somehow I knew it was her. I wasn’t scared; it was a happy feeling, like she was telling me that she was all right, and she still cared about the rest of her family.”

  Gareth sucked in a deep breath, staring back at Dave.

  “I’ll tell you what.” Dave lowered his voice conspiratorially. “There was one time when I was about ten years old – and this has always stuck in my memory, because it was so weird – I was in my grandma’s house, and I was running up the stairs to get something from the bedroom, and all of a sudden I ran smack into this thing in front of me. It was like a wall – but softer – and it threw me back down a couple of steps. But there was nothing there! Whatever it was, it was invisible. I couldn’t see anything. I ran downstairs, really scared, and came back a few minutes later, but whatever it was had gone. I could go right up the stairs and into the bedroom, no problem.”

  While Dave had been talking for the last few seconds, a key had been rattling in the lock of the front door. Cold air swept through the living room, and Trish stood in the doorway to the parlor, in her spring coat and hat, holding her briefcase.

  “Hello, boys!” she said brightly.

  “Hello, love,” Dave called.

  Trish walked in to give Dave a chilly kiss on the cheek. “The chili’s in the pot,” he said. “The match is on in five minutes.”

  “Lovely,” she said, rubbing her face to get it warm.

  “Can you video it for me?” asked Gareth.

  Dave sat up, a startled look on his face. “You’re not going to watch it?”

  “No, my back’s really playing up today. I think I’d better lie down for a while. Er, thanks for the chat, mate. I… I appreciate it.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dave’s head lolled as he turned back to the TV. “Funny old world, innit? But don’t let things get on top of you, mate. Don’t think about it too much.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  *

  Such was the sanctuary that Gareth had found, in the week following the SIAP visit. He had appealed to Dave and Trish to let him stay at their place for a few days, so that he could get away from the Oakington house. The reason?

  “Nightmares, mate. I can’t get any sleep when I’m there. My doctor says that I’m still not over the accident yet, so a change would do me good. Only for a short while, like.”

  Caroline had been very supportive; but then, she could hardly criticize him, after the rows that had followed him asking to move in with her.

  “Gareth, if this was the answer to your problems, of course I’d say yes! But it’s not the answer, is it? You have nightmares staying at my place as well, and you sometimes wake up Jenny in the middle of the night. If you move in, we’ll both end up as nervous wrecks.”

  So Dave and Trish both agreed to let Gareth sleep in their spare room for a couple of weeks.

  The first thing Gareth had done was to take them out to dinner. They protested and said they’d do anything to help out a friend, but Gareth was also insistent.

  Even though he tried to show his gratitude, he realized Dave and Trish would never know exactly how grateful he felt.

  They would never know that on the night before he asked them, Gareth had sat up all night, in his kitchen, half-naked and shivering. Holding a carving knife, and sitting where he could see both the back door and the kitchen windows, his free hand digging into his thigh so deeply that his fingernails broke the skin.

  When the sun finally came up, Gareth had called Littlewood. The other man’s voice changed from suspicion to gobsmacked surprise when Gareth explained what had happened, although he couldn’t say very much when his teeth were chattering and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps.

  Littlewood turned up forty-five minutes later, bringing a variety of equipment in his car.

  “I’m going to inspect your house,” he declar
ed.

  They gingerly stepped through every room, with Littlewood holding a flashlight and compass, his camera slung around his neck. Gareth was wearing his tee-shirt and shorts and still holding the knife, although Littlewood tried to persuade him to put it away.

  There were no signs of forced entry.

  Littlewood looked out at the front yard, and then walked through to the back. With an excited yelp, he led Gareth out through the back door into the untidy garden, and pointed over to what looked like a circle of faintly discolored grass.

  “They’ve been here!” he exclaimed, his face reddening even further. “Gareth, they’ve been here!”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you for the last half hour,” Gareth muttered hoarsely. Looking around, he noticed the curtains of the house next door along were twitching spasmodically. Maybe it was time he put down the knife.

  And put on some clothes.

  “We’ve got to take samples of this,” Littlewood said. “My bag is in the car.”

  At Littlewood’s suggestion, Gareth stayed inside to make two mugs of hot sweet tea, as the UFO hunter took a spade from the shed and dug up sections of lawn, placed the turf in plastic Ziploc freezer bags, and sealed them.

  “You’ve had a Night Visitor,” Littlewood stated when he sat down and claimed his tea.

  Gareth blinked slowly. “Yes. I know. But what was it?”

  “Like I said, it was – well, Night Visitor is a generic term for this kind of experience. It happens to the victims in their own homes, they feel paralyzed, very frightened, and they feel they are in the presence of some entity – some living presence – that appears to be examining them.”

  Littlewood hunched over the table, gabbling into the other man’s face. “Gareth, your abduction is following a pattern. All the hallmarks are there – everything that points to the one answer, which is alien intervention. Gareth, they’ll have to believe us now.”

  “Following a pattern? You mean… you could have expected this?” Gareth nearly panicked as a thought struck him. “You mean there’s more of this to come?”