The Watchers

by Neil Spring

  I pressed down on the accelerator, clicking the radio on before quickly silencing the Carpenters singing ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’. I swear the irony wasn’t lost on me. On another station the weather announcer was suggesting listeners avoid long-distance travel. My spirits sank.

  Keeping my eyes on the road, I thought about the Havens and wondered whether the place had changed. Who are you kidding? I told myself. Places like Little Haven and Broad Haven never change. Which is why people like you run away.

  Now I was returning as an outsider. A fierce sceptic. To a community that was perhaps already caught up in Cold War paranoia . . . or something worse.

  That the Havens were steeped in superstition I had known ever since school. I remembered the whispered warnings about the mad woman living in the hotel on the cliff almost as vividly as Grandfather’s tales of giants in the earth and fires in the sky. Rumours everywhere. Publicans, shopkeepers, teachers, parents – all urged me in hushed tones to avoid certain parts of the coastal path and certainly never to walk down to Monks Cove, where the shore is nearest Stack Rocks Island.

  And now these UFO sightings. What had Selina learned from speaking to the witnesses? And how had she connected the events in Broad Haven with Colonel Corso and the incredible occurrences that had taken place at RAF Croughton in February 1963? UFO sightings then, UFO sightings now. Nuclear weapons hidden all down the coast. Were the people seeing a secret American aircraft, as the admiral had told me, or was there something else besides?

  I had to know, but as I glanced again at the drawing on the seat beside me of the strange helmeted figure with the blacked-out face, I was certain the mystery had nothing to do with flying saucers or people from other worlds.

  I saw Selina’s pale lips in my mind’s eye, forming the words: Their faces were made of shadows.

  I blinked to banish the image but it surfaced again almost instantly, the way my dreams had been doing since I’d begun to skip my medication. Dreams about my childhood mainly, the time before Ravenstone Farm when my parents were still alive.

  I was seven when Dad was posted to RAF Brawdy. That was February 1959, before I knew anything about Ravenstone or how my life would change a few years later. I can still remember the view as we came down towards Newgale, waves breaking over the rocks and Newgale Hill in front of us. Mother would say that only God could create a setting so beautiful. I loved sitting on the cliffs overlooking the sea, the long hot summers of exploration, the bright yellow mustard field across the street from Brawdy’s front gate, the evenings in our front gardens when my friends and I would wait to wave at RAF pilots as their Sea King helicopters came in to land – elated if they waved back at us. Sometimes our fondest memories are of things better left behind.

  At school the other children would ask me about life on base. Any missiles? Any secret planes? The truth is, life on base was the only life I had known: regimented, disciplined, ordered. There were times when I might have convinced myself I was just the same as the civilian children, but never quite. Because at the end of the school day I went home to a removed, self-contained life. On base we had our own shops, our own tennis court, even our own indoor bowling alley! No wonder we felt important.

  Brawdy soon became the place I called home, and for a time I was happy there. Dad was doing well; Mother found a job working as a nurse at the St Thomas Green GP surgery. Life was good. I began to think we wouldn’t have to move, ever again. The Americans changed all that.

  They came about a year later, planting their own bases up and down the coast. Mother hated them; she raged about them, was instantly suspicious about what they were doing. She joined the protests outside RAF Croughton the following year. The American bases in Britain were above the law, she said. The Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases with their placards and their marches became her obsession, and she never stopped questioning my father about what ‘those bloody Yanks’ were up to in Wales.

  Dad, in contrast, was tight-lipped about his work, hesitant to speak out like Mum. After working on high-energy pulse theory, whatever that was, he was made public correspondence officer, which he said meant dealing with public concerns, but Mum translated that as ‘turning bad news into good’. He was strict, entirely intolerant of dissent. I guess he needed to be. In the military a man’s career can be blighted by the smallest mistake. He wasn’t completely incapable of relaxing, though; he used to ride the most amazing Norton motorcycle and when I was good he would take me out on it, even if it was cold and raining. I think now that he needed that motorcycle, that somehow it helped him believe he could escape.

  He did not escape west Wales. He died there. They both did.

  In the lead-up to the protest Mum and Dad had been arguing for days about something he wasn’t telling her. Some top-secret report he had read and wouldn’t share. He said she would ‘never understand’, that she was too stubborn, ‘like your father’. She had certainly inherited the old man’s spirit. His conviction.

  I thought about Dad shouting at Mum when he realized she was heading to RAF Croughton to protest against the thing it was his job to protect. I thought about her coming home from hospital afterwards, the patch over her left eye and the way she told us she couldn’t remember. Even after her arrest, her injuries, she remained dedicated to her cause. Watching her struggle around at home, that was painful. I didn’t like the expression of contempt on Dad’s face when he looked at her either. ‘You don’t ever bloody give up, do you!’ he shouted. She didn’t. And maybe that conviction was partly responsible for their untimely deaths.

  The morning of the day they died I had woken to hear them arguing again. What about? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I had a horrible premonition that it was about me.

  That afternoon bodies were washed ashore in the aftermath of what became known locally as the Great Flood, the result of an unusually wet winter. The police found their car at Grandfather’s house and muddy tracks leading down to the same field I was explicitly forbidden to enter. The field that opened onto the coastal path. There was a way down to the beach too.

  Why they were out there in such terrible weather and what they were doing was a mystery to everyone but especially to me. Mum had never much liked the sea. She wouldn’t have gone near the coastal path unless there was an extremely important reason. Or unless someone had forced her to.

  Forced. That was how I felt now as my car took me back towards the scene of this nightmare. I thought I was probably inviting another avalanche of grief but I kept my eyes on the road anyway.

  *

  I drove until I began to feel hungry. I had left England behind me, crossing the Severn Bridge. And now, for the first time in my journey, I felt a serious change in the weather. Ahead of me the road stretched into the greyest horizon, and by the time I reached Cardiff that grey had faded into darkness and the storm was showing its true power, sending snaps of lightning forking across the heavens as distant thunder growled.

  I was already planning my course of action for when I arrived in the Havens. There were some things I had to do, including speak with my grandfather and find out what he knew about all this. Either he was blessed with psychic powers, which I didn’t believe for a moment, or maybe he was working with the Americans, helping to cover up test flights of a prototype aircraft? An equally unlikely explanation. Whatever was happening, I was curious to hear what the children would tell him. Curious too to hear first hand what they thought they’d seen. And then there was the journalist, Frank Frobisher, what did he know?

  My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. Would I really have to go back to Ravenstone Farm – where pictures on the wall turned on their own, where something had tried to get in, where something had woken us in the night? Was that really what had happened?

  Hard to remember. Not surprising, given I’d tried so hard to put the past behind me.

  If only I could
have remembered what happened that night, everything that was about to happen to me in the Havens would have made a great deal more sense.

  My Ford Cortina was doing its best. Port Talbot whizzed by, then Neath and Swansea. By the time I reached Carmarthenshire, the wind had got up to a gale pummelling the car. The headlights flickered, dimmed. I peered through the windscreen into the hammering rain and worried what would happen if the vehicle lost power altogether, leaving me stranded miles from anywhere. Squinting at the road through sheets of rain barely hindered by shrieking wipers, I realized that I hadn’t seen any sign of habitation for miles, not since I’d passed the lights of a small petrol station.

  Something is coming, something is coming . . .

  The thought came from nowhere.

  Everywhere around me was in darkness now. A sign at the roadside gleamed in the beam of my headlights. Nantycaw Hill. A steep climb, but there was no traffic ahead of me, or none that I could see. To my right a grassy verge. I took the incline, shifting down another gear, pressing hard on the accelerator until I had just about cleared the hill.

  And that was when I saw the light overhead. A globe – a ball – glowing red as it bounced swiftly across the sky.

  I slammed on the brakes, heard a terrifying screech as the car skidded on the slippery road. I dragged down on the steering wheel, but too hard. There was an awful sensation of spinning, any sense of control lost. The Cortina spun on, on . . . until finally it shuddered to a halt at the roadside.

  I sat frozen, listening to the rain drumming on the car roof, squinting into the pitch black. Finally my trembling hand tried the key in the ignition. Nothing. The headlights flickered and died. I tried the radio but got only hissing static.

  What now?

  Boom!

  The ferocious sound had come from above. So loud that if you’d told me someone had punched a hole in the sky I’d have believed you.

  What I didn’t believe was the buzzing sound erupting all around – like nothing I had ever heard. It set every hair on my arms standing on end.

  What was this, some sort of freak electrical storm?

  Thud!

  I held my breath at this sudden new sound.

  Thud, thud. Something striking the car roof.

  Hands on the steering wheel, knuckles turning white, I sat perfectly still, holding my breath and listening intently.

  It would have been easy to stay in the car, because that’s what common sense was telling me to do. Only there was nothing commonsensical about this event. And curiosity can be our own worst enemy.

  Pushing open the door against the pressure of the wind, I let myself out into the wild and ragged night, my long dark raincoat flapping around me. The thudding, slapping sound was louder up ahead. I turned and splashed towards it, disorientated by the persistent low-frequency hum.

  Where the hell is it coming from?

  As if to answer my question, there came suddenly another booming retort that echoed across the sky. And my car came to life, engine growling, lights blinding me. And still the rain thudded down . . .

  I stared uncomprehendingly around me.

  Fish! Black fish everywhere. The ground was covered with them, scores of flapping, gasping creatures.

  ‘That’s . . . impossible,’ I heard myself say over the hiss of the wind.

  Something struck my face. I could feel myself about to retch as I looked down at a large fish at my feet. Then another, and another, pelting me from above.

  I bolted for the car and locked myself in, drenched and shaking uncontrollably. Switched on the heater and reached for the wiper control to turn them off.

  In moments the rainwater built up on the windscreen, hiding the impossible sight of fish falling from the heavens, hiding the sight of . . . everything.

  Thick. Dark. Engulfing.

  – 14 –

  Thursday 10 February 1977, Nantycaw Hill, Pembrokeshire

  The siren jolted me from a jagged sleep.

  Drowsy, I opened my heavy eyelids and squinted against flashing blue and red lights.

  ‘Sir! You all right?’ the officer said loudly through my passenger window, rain streaming down his face.

  I wound down the window and saw morning had come.

  ‘Yes,’ I managed to reply, looking down at myself. ‘Yes, I think so. What time is it?’

  ‘It’s noon, sir.’

  I started with surprise. And then I saw the fish covering the ground in front of the car.

  ‘Strangest bloody thing I ever saw!’ exclaimed the officer. ‘You think birds dropped them?’

  Is he for real?

  ‘There was a storm,’ I replied, remembering hazily. ‘Birds couldn’t fly in that sort of weather.’

  His eyes were scanning the surreal mess. He stooped to pick a dead fish up off the ground, examining it at the side of my car with an expression of fascination and confusion.

  I had read that sometimes, during severe storms, small tornados could form and come down over ponds and lakes. I told the police officer this, who dropped the dead fish and gave me a questioning glance. ‘You spent the night out here? Alone?’

  ‘I . . . Yes, I guess so,’ I heard myself say. ‘After the fish . . . I must have fallen asleep.’ But I had no memory of falling asleep. No memory of anything in fact, after the extraordinary rain.

  The police officer was shaking his head again. ‘Bloody weird.’ He looked at me contemplatively for a moment. ‘And where are you heading, sir?’

  I shook my head, clearing the haze. ‘Umm, St Brides Bay. Broad Haven, Little Haven.’

  His head jerked up. ‘You live in the Havens?’

  ‘No, no. Just visiting.’

  ‘Aren’t many visitors care to make it out to the Havens in winter. Unless . . .’

  A radio was summoning him to his car. ‘Take care,’ the officer instructed as he backed away.

  ‘I’ll drive safely,’ I assured him.

  ‘No, I meant in the villages,’ he said. ‘Take care in the Havens.’

  *

  The ten-year gap that separated me from the Havens had closed within a single day. My head was thudding as I surveyed the community that had once been my home. I knew what I was feeling, homesickness – just a different type. I felt sick to be home.

  The road ahead sloped down towards the cluster of houses around the bay. The sea beyond was so murky and grey it was impossible to discern where it ended and the sky began. And in the distance, half a mile out to sea, an outcrop of rock rose menacingly from the waters.

  Stack Rocks. In the back of my mind I heard Grandfather’s warning to me as a child: You stay away from Stack Rocks.

  Then, on the far side of the bay, high up on the cliffs, something caught my eye. I rolled down the window, still murky despite the cleansing rain, for a better look and caught an icy blast. There it was again, a sharp flash of white light. This time I really focused and fancied that against the background of the sky I could now discern many smaller, twinkling lights arranged in a line along the cliff. RAF Brawdy. But it wasn’t a runway I recognized. It was new.

  At the bottom of the hill I turned left into the strong sea wind, driving past a small collection of seafront shops – a pub, an ice-cream shop, a cafe – all apparently deserted. This was Broad Haven. The rain had stopped but the road ahead was strewn with broken branches and leaves, which whipped and rolled with the gale. Putting the car into first, I powered up a steep hill, which fell away on one side into a rough cliff. And then, immediately on my left, a great rambling building stood out against the sky: the Haven Hotel.

  After all these years the old place still struck me as having an air of foreboding, standing defiant against the elements, but weathered and battered and crowded with shadows. The winding driveway was in poor repair and the hotel’s peeling wooden sign at the roadside had been badly d
efaced.

  There were other stories about the hotel. Stories I had forgotten until now.

  On many winter evenings the children who lived there would chase a yellow balloon through the woods in the grounds. It floated among the branches, back and forth, back and forth, bright and yellow and shining. Like a tiny sun. They tried to catch the thing, oh they tried, but it never allowed them to get near.

  My car rounded the cliff before the road dipped again, bringing me to the tiniest of hamlets – Little Haven. Fishing boats tethered in the cove bobbed on grey waters. The place seemed deserted but for a smudge of house lights through the drizzle and sea mist.

  Suddenly a sign of life. An elderly man appeared right in front of my car, crossing the road.

  I stiffened. Please, don’t let it be him, don’t let it be Randall.

  I was struggling to see and breathing hard. What would we say to one another?

  It wasn’t my grandfather. I expected to feel relieved. What I didn’t expect was to feel a modicum of disappointment. I’m still in his grasp. Even after all this time the old man is still messing with my head.

  The elderly gentleman who wasn’t my grandfather but had still given me quite a jolt was heading towards a small shop with a sign in the window and a red postbox out front. The light from within kindled hope. I braked, jumped out of the car and followed him into the warmth, hopeful that I would find a public telephone. It would be a good place to start anyway; shops like this traded on local gossip.

  The bell jingled as the door shut behind me.

  ‘Hello. Do you know where I could find Frank Frobisher?’

  The stout woman behind the counter eyed me warily over a stack of unsold newspapers. I guessed she was somewhere in her sixties, slow moving, with a puffy pillow face and beady black eyes. Those eyes were shrewd and unwelcoming, but it was her blue-tinged lips that I kept looking at. Dead slugs. ‘You’re not the first, you know, coming here this week, asking about him. Why’s he so popular?’