The Watchers

by Neil Spring

  Somewhere in my mind a machine beeped, somewhere else a voice said, Hurry, she’s slipping away. A moment later I felt the same black fear that had possessed me in Selina’s old room at the Haven Hotel. Not a fear, the certainty that I would never see her again.

  What the hell is happening to me? My perspective had shifted like in a dream. I was no longer watching the scene; I was part of it – in Selina’s hospital room, in her body, watching the doctors and nurses crowding around, feeling her pain, her fear. Seeing nothing but bleak darkness as she passed out of this world.

  Selina!

  I couldn’t speak; I could only tilt my head back and dare to allow a final image to slide into my mind: her coffin sinking into the ground, fistfuls of earth dropping on top.

  My eyes snapped wide open, a voice in my head saying that there was only one word to describe the vision I had just experienced, a word that frightened me to half to death.

  Premonition.

  – 33 –

  Sunday 13 February 1977, two days until the sky watch . . .

  I was in my room at the Ram Inn. After the episode downstairs I really didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t face seeing Randall either so I’d rearranged our meeting for Monday. My thoughts returned to Selina’s notebook, which I’d left in the drawer next to my bed.

  I was looking for a pattern, any sign of reason or intelligence behind the fantastic events I was uncovering. I couldn’t shake my suspicion that Father O’Riorden had been holding back on me, that some dark secret was buried the heart of the Havens, perhaps a secret connected with its military history. I flicked to the last page of the notebook, a page I had already read many times.

  According to Colonel Corso there exists a highly secret report associated with the UFO sightings – someone called Jack Parsons. This report fell into the hands of a group of people who call themselves the Parsons Elite. Who are they? I have no idea. The report warns that UFOs – whatever they are – are dangerous. Deadly. But who wrote this report? Who leaked it?

  I read the entry twice, three times, threw the notebook onto the bed and said, ‘Fuck this!’ then dialled the number of my old office in Parliament.

  With no one to manage his office any more, I was surprised Bestford answered at all, and even more surprised that he was sober, given the state I had left him in.

  ‘Robert? Thank God you called. Where are you?’

  ‘The Havens. Wait. Why were you expecting me to call?’

  A brief silence. A long silence.

  ‘She went into surgery Saturday afternoon. The damage to her brain was worse than they had anticipated. I’m sorry, Robert . . .’

  He trailed off. I said nothing. Stunned. And then the shock dissolved into something worse, a sort of disgusted bitterness at whoever, or whatever, was responsible.

  Deep inside me was an intuitive understanding that I had come to a crossroads. One route led out of the Havens, back to London. The other route led not just to the truth behind the Happenings but a deeper truth about myself. The feeling of foreboding was almost overwhelming.

  ‘Please, say something, Robert.’

  What I felt when I heard his hoarse voice wasn’t anger, as I had expected, but a peculiar relief – relief that he was still there, my only link to the world I had left behind. More importantly, my only link to a best friend it turned out I had hardly known.

  ‘She was tired of fighting, Robert. Her blood pressure started to rise and she slipped away.’

  I know. I felt it. I saw it.

  ‘Robert? You there?’

  I felt a sting of sympathy for my old boss as his voice cracked. That probably explains why I allowed our conversation to spin out as I sat on the edge of the bed listening to him ramble. He talked about Parliament. He talked about tensions with the Soviet Union. He talked about the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The only thing he didn’t talk about was how his drinking problem was going. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to ask; I just didn’t care as much as I once had. In the background Big Ben chimed the hour as Bestford shared with me that there had been a spate of alarming UFO sightings over Russia. Luminous bodies over many towns emitting rays of light. ‘They think it’s us or the Americans. Now the prime minister is considering an order to shoot down anything similar that appears in our skies.’

  ‘That sounds escalatory to me,’ I said.

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  There was an awkward pause which Bestford rushed to fill. ‘I was afraid, I was a coward. And you were right,’ he added. ‘The committee, the inquiry, they were absolutely the questions we should have been asking. Colonel Corso was a link to a mystery unfurling in our own constituency.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s about the committee inquiry any more, Paul.’ I glanced down at Selina’s notebook. ‘What’s happening here goes far, far deeper. Selina’s inquiries were extensive, and they didn’t stop with the UFO sightings.’

  ‘I know. I turned a blind eye to the fact that they were storing nuclear weapons at Brawdy. But there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘What did Selina’s work turn up?’

  A long pause. Then Bestford said, ‘Robert, you don’t sound too well.’

  ‘I’m fine, really. Tell me.’

  ‘OK.’ I heard a heavy sigh over the line. ‘Selina was afraid something was wrong in the village. With the people. She thought the constituency was under surveillance. She thought that priest might be a spy.’

  I remembered what the admiral had said about the Soviets monitoring the area.

  ‘We know that Father O’Riorden has communist sympathies; perhaps he is more involved that we realize. After all, who better to employ? a priest has a unique form of access to communities and their people.’

  Perhaps that was true, but it wasn’t what was worrying me the most. ‘What else did Selina tell you, Paul?’

  ‘She thought she might have discovered something about the Jackson murders.’

  ‘Did she mention any names?’ Silence. ‘She thought Randall might be mixed up in it, didn’t she?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Someone told me,’ I said, struggling to suppress my anger. I couldn’t believe Bestford had held this back from me along with everything else.

  ‘Listen. I wanted to tell you, Robert. I almost did before you left. But I was afraid how you’d react.’

  ‘You should have been more bothered about lying to someone who has never shown you anything but loyalty,’ I said bitterly. ‘What else did Selina tell you that you kept from me?’

  ‘Selina may have been right about O’Riorden but she became too paranoid. She thought there were forces in the village that meant to do her harm, thought she was under surveillance.’ Bestford’s voice sounded heavy, almost mournful.

  ‘Well, perhaps she was right,’ I said, remembering the powerboat explosion, the panic, the flames. ‘Perhaps someone did mean to harm her. Harm both of you.’

  ‘Not that again,’ Bestford said, annoyed, though there was a trace of something else in his voice. Doubt? Fear? ‘Robert, what happened in Parliament was an accident.’

  But I didn’t think he really sounded convinced, not any more. As I scanned the tantalizing passages in Selina’s open notebook, I certainly wasn’t. ‘She knew about a confidential report on the sort of things people have been seeing down here.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘She also mentions a name. Jack Parsons.’

  Silence spun out between us.

  At last Bestford said, reluctantly I thought, ‘Jack Whiteside Parsons was an American genius. A scientist so esteemed they even named a crater on the far side of the moon in his honour.’

  ‘And what was his connection with the Havens?’

  ‘Are you familiar with a post-war project known as Operation Backfire?’

  Perhaps as
a former employee of the chair of the Defence Select Committee I should have been. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Our dirty secret. The British government, along with the Americans, protected some Nazi scientists in exchange for access to German rocket technology. As part of the arrangement the Americans threw in the expertise of their very best. Parsons was a rocket scientist and former naval intelligence officer who helped lead NASA into deep space.’

  ‘And he came here? To Pembrokeshire?’

  ‘Yes. To the missile testing range at Apperporth. Less than a mile from Broad Haven.’ Another in the long list of local military establishments. ‘The missile launches at Apperporth were overseen—’

  ‘By Parsons.’

  ‘Correct,’ Bestford said. ‘Though his involvement in all this was necessarily classified above top secret. You see, Parson’s work with rockets wasn’t the only way in which he attempted to shape the future of humanity. By the end of the war many in the military-industrial complex in Britain and America regarded him as something of a mad scientist.’

  ‘Why, Paul? What did he do?’

  ‘Parsons was a student of Aleister Crowley. I’d be surprised if that name means anything to you. Am I wrong?’

  He was. Hadn’t I read something in the newspaper or heard something on the radio about Aleister Crowley? His name made me think fleetingly of black masses, the number 666 and satanic images from horror movies. It also made me think of something Randall and said about animal mutilations, but I didn’t want to say so.

  ‘Robert, you there?’

  I snapped back. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Following Crowley’s teachings, Parsons came to believe in the reality of magic as a force that could be explained through quantum physics. He experimented with the occult.’

  ‘He was mad,’ I said, though I was far from sure.

  ‘No doubt. But Parsons devoted more and more of his time to witchcraft, convinced that he could summon powerful spirits.’

  Now I remembered the symbols and the incantation I had seen at the church.

  ‘He even reported paranormal events in his home, phenomena he believed were a direct product of his rituals: poltergeist activity, disembodied voices, even apparitions.’

  I could tell Bestford was sceptical from the way he lightened his voice. It was the same tone he adopted whenever political opponents tried convincing him of their views.

  ‘What happened to Jack Parsons?’ I asked.

  ‘Died in an explosion at home. The files on his death are still classified, but there is every reason to believe that before he visited Wales he was working on some very peculiar experi­ments in the California desert.’

  ‘What sort of experiments?’

  ‘Secret experiments conceived by Crowley. The available records refer to “a project to advance humanity”. That’s what Selina discovered, Robert. That is what she imparted to me. And that is all I know. I swear.’

  My mind spun. Selina here in the Havens, stepping ever nearer the end of her life. Not knowing what was behind the strange sightings. Selina interviewing the locals, witnesses like Martin Marshall, and establishing connections with similar events at RAF Croughton in 1963. Selina asking questions about the American facility and the Jacksons, the sort of questions that stirred up local tensions, according to Frank Frobisher, but she hadn’t let that stop her. There was a reason Bestford had always left constituency business to Selina. She was more tenacious than the best journalists I knew, and when she wanted to get to the bottom of something she didn’t stop digging.

  ‘Robert, I do know your nerves can be bad. When you’re stressed. If Selina’s death risks making you unwell, if you need something to set your mind on—’

  ‘I need to finish what she started here, Paul. And not for your sake. Not for Selina’s either.’

  It was the right answer. The only answer. Partly because at that instant I cared about everyone in the village I had once called home. I cared like I had never cared before. I had never felt so determined to help them, and I was confident I could. But I also cared about my recent premonitions and buried memories, the ugly ones that seemed intent on clawing their way back up the longer I stayed here.

  ‘Paul, is it possible that Jack Parsons conducted occult experi­ments here in Pembrokeshire?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ A pause. ‘But anything’s possible.’

  *

  After Bestford hung up, I cleaned myself up, then checked the door, then checked the window, then checked the door, then got undressed, then checked the window, the door, and finally got into bed, though I knew I wouldn’t sleep. The only thing preventing me from calling Araceli to see if she was OK was knowing I might wake Tessa. Still, the urge to call was punishingly strong as I lay there, gazing up at the cliff and the dark shape of the Haven Hotel.

  There must be a rational explanation for all this. That was the thought in my head, which I knew the admiral would tell me if he were here, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe. I had been a sceptic for so long, but I was running out of explanations for what was happening in the Havens. Could it be that some of it, even all of it, was real? The UFOs, the silver-suited humanoids, the Black-Suited Men . . . Day-by-day events and people were forcing me to edge closer to belief in . . . what?

  I had been sent here to investigate the sightings and prove that the Americans were responsible. After all the stories, all the twisted tales Randall had subjected me to, I’d vowed never to listen to such nonsense again – there was always a rational reason if you looked hard enough. But despite the many strong personal reasons I had for succeeding in that mission, what I had uncovered was leading me to an altogether different conclusion.

  The children aren’t normal. People here are changing. Their minds are changing.

  I wanted to push away the thoughts, but I couldn’t. Was the sighting at the school part of a bigger plan? Some sort of subtle programming process maybe?

  No, Robert. That’s crazy. Because if that were true, it would mean that the UFOs are linked to some sort of controlling force, some psychic force. And that’s mad.

  What was it Bestford used to say? All evidence is for it, but all reason is against it?

  Then what? Spectres of our own worst fears. Yes. The shimmering silver giant was a teenager’s science fiction image; the intimidating men from the government issuing threatening warnings were lonely impersonators. And as for the facility on the cliffs – an oceanographic research centre . . .

  I rolled on my side. I could just make out the dark windows on the top floor of the Haven Hotel. A light blinked on. I wondered what Araceli was doing.

  A noise at the window. I sat bolt upright. You’re fine. Nothing can get in.

  A stone bounced across the floor. I leaped out of bed, startled. And yes, afraid. It was a black pebble, warm to touch. My heart began to pound. Where the hell had it come from?

  The roof rattled. Then shook with the force of what sounded like hailstones. More pebbles? My mind was razor sharp. Which is why it was hard to doubt my own eyes, to deny what was now taking form at the locked bedroom door. An awful shape. Dark, like a shadow with dense substance.

  My breaths came in short, quick gasps. I could run. Take Selina’s journal from the drawer and go. But something was keeping me in that room. Something had come for me, wanted me to stay.

  So I did.

  God help me, I did.

  Against every rational instinct, my mind started recalling the instructions uttered by Randall all those years ago:

  Don’t study them.

  Don’t invite them in.

  Too late for that. I froze. It wasn’t fear that paralysed me, though I was now desperately afraid – it was a force, a low vibration I recognized from childhood. An intense green light flooded the room. And in that moment of sheer terror I thought clearly: This is the shadow of an ancient evil.
>
  Concentrate, Robert.

  Two possibilities – equally terrifying. Either something really was in the room with me, or I was imagining the spectre. And if I was imagining it, then that was a sure sign I was heading the way of the mental hospital.

  It’s not real . . .

  But if not a hallucination, then what?

  There was another possibility of course. An almost unthinkable possibility.

  ‘A memory,’ I heard myself whisper, and the combination of those words and the threatening apparition before me forged an instant connection with a long-buried recollection. Something so awful I had suppressed it.

  ‘Show me,’ I whispered to my own unconscious.

  The room tilted, time swivelled. And in a white flashback I glimpsed the jagged image of my parents arguing. Dad becoming violent, his eyes desperate. ‘It’s got to be done!’ he yelled as Mum, tearful, backed away, shaking her head.

  The memory folded into another. It was shortly before they died. I was in bed at our house on base, watching my bedroom door creep open, watching a figure slip in. My father.

  ‘You must come with me, son.’ His voice was very stern, and even though I trusted him, I pulled the bedclothes up to my chin.

  Then I was back in the present, back in the Ram Inn. Alone.

  ‘My God,’ I said aloud, picturing my father’s face. ‘We really did go somewhere. What did you do to me, Father?’

  – 34 –

  Monday 14 February 1977, one day until the sky watch . . .

  ‘Sleep well?’

  Randall’s smile was razor sharp with sarcasm as I slammed shut the creaky passenger door of his Hillman Hunter. The car stank of damp, and the dog hair on my seat was already clinging to my jeans.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve still got this car.’

  ‘I can’t believe you think that’s important. You heard about what they found up on the cliffs?’