by Zoe Drake
“Or are extracted,” added Littlewood.
“It’s like fairy gold. There are tales of travelers who encountered the little people and having won their favor, received gifts of fantastic jewels and riches. When exposed to daylight, that treasure turned into worthless tin or lead.”
“Like the balls of light that draw travelers off the path, into the darkness,” Bennings joined in. “A deliberate practice of mischief. Brian, think of those UFO contactee cults, over the years. How often have they claimed to have been taken on flights across the galaxy, and given correct predictions – only to find that the really big predictions, the ones they’ve been told are the most important, never materialize?”
Littlewood nodded dumbly, with what looked suspiciously like a pout poking from underneath his moustache.
“It’s my contention,” Bennings expounded, “that both UFOs, fairies, and spook lights are the same thing. Manifestations of a form of energy capable of somehow influencing human consciousness. When people encounter this energy-field, and then undergo hallucinations and periods of missing time, they interpret the experience in terms of their own cultural framework.”
“But what about all the evidence you’re ignoring,” whined Littlewood. “What about the crashed vehicles? What about the cattle mutilations?”
“I don’t really want to get into that again,” Bennings demurred. “That’s not within our brief.”
“Because you’re trying to explain everything in terms of geology,” Littlewood continued. “Well, it’s a little too pat. You might as well put SBMVs down to your earthlights theory as well.”
“What are SBMVs?” asked Gareth.
“Sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” said Littlewood and Bennings, both at the same time.
Gareth couldn’t help rolling his eyes.
“Catholic theology states that Mary was taken into Heaven in her physical form,” Littlewood stated, with a knowing wink. “You know what that means.”
“Look, to change the subject slightly–” – and Bennings turned at the laugh he got from Laura from his overly tactful approach – “I’d like to bring Gareth in on something here.”
Gareth blinked in alarm. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Thought you might like to see these. Have you got them, Laura?”
“You mean the Cottingley photos? Yes. For a long time, the only known case of fairies being caught on film.”
“Eh?” Gareth was handed a selection of A4 grainy black and white reproductions; probably photocopied from a book and enlarged. He looked through them.
In one, a girl in a white dress sat on the grass in a forest, wearing a conical patterned hat looking suspiciously like a stereotypical witch’s hat. Her white dress stood out in stark contrast to the dark mass of trees in the background. She was gazing downward, smiling, at a peculiar creature that seemed to be climbing onto her lap. The creature looked like a tiny man, with round body and spindly legs, one leg raised high in motion. It had a small wedge-shaped face with beady eyes and a hat very similar to the girl’s.
The second photo was a close-up of a girl – a different girl – in a different part of the forest (the same forest?). She also wore a white dress, but wasn’t wearing a hat, and had long blonde ringlets cascading down her shoulders. Her smiling face was turned to the left of the picture, where she seemed to be admiring a tiny woman with wings, suspended in the forest air, her arms and legs frozen in a dancing pose.
His eyes went to the captions:
Photograph taken by Frances
Fairly bright day in September, 1917
The “Midg” camera
Distance 8 ft
Time 1/50th sec
Photograph taken by Elsie in August 1920
“Cameo” camera
Distance 3 ft
Time 1/50th sec
“These pages are photocopies from the 1979 printing of The Coming of the Fairies, by Arthur Conan Doyle,” said Laura.
Gareth blinked. “The guy who created Sherlock Holmes?”
“The very same. Although Holmes dedicated himself to the cause of logic, Doyle was obsessed with spiritualism and psychic phenomenon.”
“Fakes of course,” Bennings said. “But they fooled a lot of people when they were first published.”
“They’re quite good,” Gareth admitted, “for the time. But you wouldn’t be able to pull that off now.”
“In their defense,” Laura stated, “the two girls who faked those pictures – Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths – said they’d done it because they could see them when they went out to play in the forest, and tried taking pictures, but the fairies wouldn’t show up on film. So they drew these on card and cut them out, to show their parents what the little people looked like.”
“Cute,” said Gareth. He put the copies carefully back on the table and spoke into the ensuing silence. “So after all that, what have we got? What’s our latest theory?”
Bennings opened his mouth, but hesitated, glancing around the table.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said, and began to laugh uproariously.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tuesday April 16th
The animal that gave Lion Yard its name was a distant, shabby cousin of the beasts in Trafalgar Square, colored a preposterous shade of red and perched on a plinth above the heads of the Tuesday shoppers. Beneath it, a young girl in an Afghan jacket and dreadlocks played the fiddle, tapping her Doctor Martens in time to an old Irish folk ballad.
As he approached the girl, Gareth felt his own hand squirming in his trouser pocket as he mentally counted his change. He walked past a group of loitering language school students and dropped the coins into the violin case as he passed her. The girl looked up, smiled at him and nodded, still playing. Looking down at the coins as they landed, Gareth noticed another dreadlocked and gangly youth sitting cross-legged behind the girl, his hands idly stroking the lean, muscular Labrador nestling in his lap. As Gareth walked on, he heard a muttered “Cheers, mate,” floating like a soap bubble through the crowd behind him.
Those calm, disinterested eyes…
Gareth stopped near Dixon’s and, in a poorly lit section of the display window, studied his own reflection. What had that girl’s boyfriend seen? What had the girl herself seen?
Hair and moustache badly in need of trimming. Burton jacket, and Pepe jeans starting to fray at the knees. Someone identical to the rest of the shoppers crowding through the badly designed mall on their precious weekday spree.
What would the fiddler and her boyfriend do if he suddenly walked back and sat down with them? If he asked for their names, their backgrounds, why were they here? They’d ask him for more money, he answered himself. Or they’d accuse him of being a plain-clothes cop. Or maybe they would just ignore him, get up, leave, and go busking somewhere else.
Gareth turned the desire to speak to them over and over in his mind, as his sweating fingers had turned the change over and over in his pocket. In the shop window, the crowds behind him were reflected as shadowy, half-finished figures. His eye was caught by the garish National Lottery poster in the window of W H Smith’s opposite. A disembodied hand with an extended index finger pointed in his direction. Above it was the slogan, IT COULD BE YOU!
A sudden, inexplicable feeling brought a sourness to the back of his throat and smarting tears to his eyes. He walked briskly out of the mall, the bag holding his new camera lens in his hand.
He was going to be late, he thought, if he didn’t hurry. Time was one thing he couldn’t seem to fit into his life at the moment. The position of hands on a watch, the question of queues in Marks & Spencer’s, the possibility of Caroline waiting at the car and becoming more and more irate. That was all it came down to. So many things that lurked around the corner, or a few streets away. Things that pulled Gareth towards them at a trot as he ducked across the road into Hobson Street, thinking to cut a few seconds off his journey by slipping throu
gh the department store.
Compared to the main shopping street, the narrow alley behind Marks & Spencer’s was deserted. Gareth walked rapidly down Hobson Street, noticing how strange it was that the hustle and bustle of the shoppers had vanished so completely. It felt as quiet as a winter Monday morning. Nobody here except an elderly lady at the end of the street, turning the corner and gone. One car, coming towards him at a crawl. An old Triumph Herald.
A Triumph Herald.
The sour taste in his throat was getting worse, like acid reflux, and he could even feel the membranes drying up. Something twitched and plucked at the hairs beneath his shirt. He marched on and tried to keep his eyes fixed on the pavement, but couldn’t escape the feeling that the car was sliding purposefully toward him. The silence mutated into an oppressive buzzing in his ears.
Gareth increased his pace, doggedly watching the pavement lapped up by his feet. Despite himself, he glanced behind him, and stopped in shock and disorientation. The car had somehow jumped closer and was only six feet away. The door nearest to him was slowly opening…
The door was slowly opening…
Come with us.
The interior was so dark it was as if the car itself had spoken.
Come with us.
Gareth held up his hands, the bag from the camera shop bobbing in front of him in a pathetic attempt to hide his face. The open car door yawned like a pit, and he fought to keep his balance, fought against tumbling into the shadows inside the Triumph Herald.
You will not be allowed to continue doing this.
Another door opened, this time a door in the wall behind Gareth, a sudden release of pressure as if an airlock had been cracked. He pushed past a middle-aged couple who had stepped out onto the street. Ignoring their sharp, scornful rebuke, he fled up the stairs and into the moist warm air of Boot’s the Chemist.
Before he knew it, he’d reached the other end of the drugstore, and the double doors leading out onto Sidney Street. Stay in the crowd, an animal instinct told him. Whoever they are, they can’t get you here. Too many people around. The crowd was a comfort, a smoke screen, a warm embrace of other normal human beings to lose himself in.
But Caroline was waiting for me…
Caroline, and Jenny…
Oh God, if they knew where I’d be, would
they be looking for Caroline too?
Who the hell are they anyway?
Pushing through the double doors, Gareth turned left and broke into a run. To get to the car park, he had to maneuver through the people clogging the narrow thoroughfare of Sussex Street, past the bikes, the prams, the students, the families. He jogged at a steady pace, his arms swinging and pumping and pulling him onwards, his recently healed leg sending out shooting pains of protest.
He turned into Jesus Lane and flung himself down the road. Caroline would be waiting on level three of the multi-story car park. He slowed his pace and hit the buttons of the lift, cursing the doors as they slid together, too slowly.
He burst onto level three and looked desperately around, trying to remember where her Toyota had been parked. This side looked familiar… no, was it the other direction…
There! There she is!
Standing by the open door of her Toyota, passing a bag of Liquorice Allsorts inside to Jenny on the front seat. Four plastic Sainsbury’s bags were lined up beside the car as if for inspection.
Jenny waved a mitten in greeting.
“You shouldn’t have run,” Caroline said as he approached. “We’ve only just got here ourselves.”
Gareth leant against the side of the car, to get his breath back and to ease the pain in his leg. His ragged breathing echoed harshly from the stark concrete walls.
“Gareth, are you all right?” Caroline asked, her tone abruptly changing.
“Triumph Herald.” His tongue felt thick and furry, as if he hadn’t spoken for weeks. “They sent it for me. A Triumph Herald.”
“You ordered a taxi? What for?”
“No, no, listen. It was those guys again. The guys who were hanging around my house.”
“What?”
“They drove up to me in the street and tried to get me into their car. Well, I think they did. They said ‘Come with us’. It sounded pretty much like a threat. I ran off and came here. You haven’t seen them, have you? Here?”
“Seen who?” Caroline shook her head in bafflement, picking up two shopping bags and handing them to Gareth. He took them automatically and stood there talking, as she opened the car boot.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see them clearly. It was too dark inside, they must have had tinted windows. They could have guns. I mean some police are armed, aren’t they? If they’re from the military, they’re bound to have guns. We’d better have a look around your house when we get there, to be on the safe side.”
“I’ll do it myself, then,” Caroline muttered, snatching the bags held limply in his fists and dumping them into the boot. Gareth broke off his garbled commentary, as she furiously piled the other two bags in and slammed the lid down with a noise that echoed around the car park.
Caroline climbed into the driver’s seat, helping Jenny through to the back, and Gareth sat sheepishly in the passenger’s seat next to her. “Is something bothering you?” he asked gently.
“Something bothering me?” she snapped, slapping the steering wheel with both hands. “Well, thank you for noticing! I’ve been all the way around Sainsbury’s with Jenny, so I’ve had to watch her every second, while buying food – half of which you’re going to eat, because you treat my place like a hotel, and I even have to drive you back and forth because you – you refuse to drive any more, Gareth. Why don’t you think about someone else for a change? Why do you have to be so selfish?”
Gareth put his head back, hissing through his teeth. “Oh, shit.”
“Don’t you swear at me, Gareth Manning! Jenny’s in the back. And this is not S – H – I – T. This is something I’ve wanted to say to you for weeks, and God knows why–”
“I know, I know! I wasn’t swearing at you, darling, I was – oh, never mind.”
They drove back to Caroline’s house, with Gareth playing half-hearted games of I Spy with Jenny, peering around from her child’s safety seat.
I Spy. I spy something beginning with B. A black car following us. Gareth flicked nervous glances between Caroline’s set jawline to the rear view mirror. Okay, so he was being selfish. He’d been asking people to run around after him, especially Caroline, but only because of the situation. This was – abnormal. Nobody really understood how abnormal it was.
Maybe he was a bit intense at the moment. Maybe he’d been taking a lot, instead of giving. He glanced again sideways at Caroline, watching her viciously tug on the clutch.
If only I could step outside my own head… to stop being myself, even for one minute…
When they arrived, Gareth couldn’t stop himself from mentally cataloguing every car in the street parked near the house. No Triumph Herald, and nobody waiting on the front doorstep.
As they were unloading the shopping bags onto the kitchen table, Caroline paused and looked directly at him.
“Gareth,” she said quietly, “Has this got anything to do with your mother?”
“My mum?” Gareth stood still, a frozen lasagna in his hand. “Has what got anything to do with her?”
“I mean – oh, God, your face! Don’t get all stressed out on me again. I mean, the problems you’ve been having. I thought it might be because you’re still upset about your mum and that’s making you feel worse, because you’re not admitting it to yourself. Do you see what I mean?”
A drop of molten ice trickled from the cardboard across Gareth’s thumb. That’s interesting, he noted, in a moment of abstract clarity. I don’t feel the cold. I can’t feel anything in that hand. He stooped to put the lasagna into the freezer drawer.
“Are you saying that because I’m upset about my mum,
I’m seeing things? Or making things up?”
“Well, it’s a suggestion. What do you think?”
“I think these things have happened before, to other people,” Gareth said defensively. “There’s some kind of pattern. Someone witnesses a UFO event, reports it, and then these guys show up. Men in black suits, with black hats.”
“Black suits and black hats,” Caroline repeated. “Like the Homepride flour commercials? So because you’ve seen a UFO, you think your life is in danger from a giant Homepride Man? Is that it?”
Despite himself, Gareth snorted with laughter. “Well, seeing as you put it like that… yes. Crazy, isn’t it?”
He watched Caroline continue to put the groceries away with great efficiency, and then said, “I’ve got another appointment with Dr. Bhaskar tomorrow.”
“Good,” she said flatly. “You need to talk to someone. I mean I try, Gareth. I know you’ve got problems, but getting all paranoid around me and Jenny, then being ultra-defensive about it – it’s not helping things, is it?”
He shrugged. There was no way to defend himself against the charge of being defensive.
“Look, I’ll take care of this,” she said. “Can you take Jenny into the front room?”
“Sure.”
At least this is one person who’s still on my side, Gareth thought ruefully, as he followed Jenny into the living room. He picked up the remote and flicked through the channels, looking for something that would interest her. He noticed Jenny take up a position on the sofa, then plump up the cushion next to her, as if she were preparing a seat for someone.
Just a minute…
“The angels saved your life, didn’t they, Gareth?”
She wasn’t surprised. She’d said it like it was the most ordinary thing in the world–
“Who’s that seat for, darling?”
Jenny looked at him and pouted, as if wondering why he needed to ask.
“Jenny.” He sat down on the sofa, next to the empty cushion, leaving the space open between them. “Can you see angels?”