by Mick Jackson
They finally reached the cave and the hermit stared into it without much enthusiasm. Giles and Ginny worried he might be about to turn and walk away. But he shrugged, as he seemed to be in the habit of doing, and said that he’d seen worse. Then Ginny told him about the vow of silence, which she said she hoped that he would agree to.
‘Silence?’ said the hermit.
Ginny nodded. ‘Most hermits appreciate a little peace and quiet,’ she told him. ‘It helps them think.’
The hermit gave another shrug, which Ginny took as his consent on the issue. ‘Oh, and if anything interesting occurs to you while you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘you must feel free to share your thoughts with us.’
The hermit looked stumped. ‘How do I tell you what I’m thinking if I’m not allowed to talk?’ he said.
‘We’ll have some paper and pencils sent over,’ Ginny told him. ‘Just jot down any thoughts and leave them at the cave entrance. One of the staff will pick them up.’
They stood around for another few moments. Then Giles announced that he believed that they had taken care of everything and he and Ginny were about to leave when the hermit raised his hand, like a schoolboy.
‘About the bread and cheese,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Ginny. ‘We’ll send it over with the mattress.’ Then she brought her finger up to her mouth, as if that simple gesture effectively stifled every last word he might otherwise have uttered in his insignificant little life.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘as quiet as the grave.’
For the first couple of months the Jarvises were quite besotted with their hermit and would use any excuse to drop in on him. His hair had been quite lank and greasy to begin with, but as it grew, along with his beard and fingernails, he looked more like the wild man Ginny and Giles had imagined and became ever more popular with them. At dinner parties they would talk with great affection of their ‘noble savage’ and sometimes gather together great packs of guests to creep up to the cave and spy on him as he went about his contemplative chores.
For his part, the hermit was reasonably happy with the arrangements – at least to begin with. He had somewhere to sleep, even if it was quite damp and draughty. More importantly, he had a regular supply of food delivered to his front door. A plate of sandwiches would appear outside his cave first thing in the morning along with fresh fruit and the occasional buttered scone. But as the months crept by the quality of food gradually deteriorated. One day there was nothing but a bag of rotten apples waiting for him. A pot of mouldy old broth turned up the following week. Then he began to be given what looked suspiciously like the scraps from the Jarvis’s previous night’s dinner. And some days there would be no food at all.
But it was the silence that did the damage. The hermit had never been one for inconsequential conversation and, in fairness, there had been the odd day when he quite enjoyed the solitude. But his vow of silence soon became a burden. It hung around him like heavy chains. And after several months spent staring out at the dismal weather or huddled under his blanket against the cave’s cold wall he found his thoughts beginning to take unusual routes and strange diversions and his mind begin to unravel as it went along.
Giles and Ginny, meanwhile, had found a new distraction. Giles was dozing by the fire one night when his wife sat down and snuggled up beside him.
‘I’ve got some news,’ she said.
‘What’s up?’ said Giles.
‘Come summer,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t a new little junior Jarvis pottering about the place.’ And she made that little yelp which her husband loved so much and heard so rarely. ‘Daddy’s going to have himself an heir to the throne,’ she said.
The next few months were a frenzy of planning and preparation. Rooms had to be redecorated and converted into nurseries. Nannies and other help had to be interviewed and hired. Week by week, Ginny grew a little heavier and eventually became so exhausted that she spent most of the last month of her pregnancy laid up in her bedroom, before the midwife was finally called and duly delivered a baby boy named Jack who, if he only knew it, was bound for a life of suffocating wealth.
At that point any remaining interest in the wild old man in the woods promptly evaporated and all their attention was directed towards their son. Jack spent most of his days on his back, staring up at the ceiling until the face of a nanny or a mother or father peered in at him. He slept and fed; was changed and bathed. And late at night, in those moments before his mother reached him, his cries would carry through the nursery window – out into the darkness and deep into the woods.
The hermit’s messages had started out quite innocently, with maids returning to the house with bits of paper proclaiming
BETWEEN THE TREES ARE MORE TREES
and
A CAVE IS BUT AN OPEN MOUTH
But over the months they began to take on a more disturbed tone, with notes such as
TOO MANY INSECTS
and
THE DOG IS HOWLING IN MY HEAD
Some of his notes began to contain peculiar drawings; others were covered in illegible scrawl. But by then the Jarvises had grown quite bored, had told their staff not to bother them with his infernal rantings and had more or less washed their hands of him.
The first real sign of trouble was when the peacocks went missing. The maid who was sent out to try and round them up found their remains at the edge of the wood – two bloody carcasses among a few fancy feathers. It was a gruesome, if isolated, incident which sent a small shudder of fear right through the household. But there was no way of knowing exactly who or what was responsible. It could quite conceivably have been a fox. Over the next few days the hermit was seen wandering all over the grounds and acting most peculiar. With his long hair and long nails, he wasn’t the kind of fellow the staff wished to stumble across without fair warning. And when Giles found a note tucked under his car’s windscreen wiper which said simply
RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
he decided he’d had enough and sent some of the lads out to try and track the hermit down.
He wasn’t in his cave and there was no sign of him in the deer park, so the lads split up and went hiking off into the woods. An hour or two later one of them came running up the drive to report a sighting of the wild old man. Giles took down his shotgun, called all the men on the estate together and had his scout lead them into the woods to the spot where the hermit had last been seen. They spread out and swept up the hill. They followed the valley. Between them they had binoculars, food and water, as well as Giles’s anger to drive them on, but after three or four hours of leaping streams and hacking a path through the undergrowth they had nothing to show for their efforts, except arms and legs which were badly scratched by bracken and feet which were numb with cold.
They were out near a ridge and Giles was about ready to call a halt to the proceedings when one of the boys waved to get his attention and pointed over to the west. The whole party froze and stared out towards the line of trees on the horizon. But there was nothing there. Just the bare trees silhouetted against the cold, grey sky. Then a figure suddenly sprang up and darted from one tree to another. A gasp went round the lads and Giles brought his gun up to his shoulder. He closed one eye and waited. And when the figure next slipped out into the open he let both barrels go.
Every bird in the woods took to the sky in a mad clatter of flapping and cawing. The gunshots rang out for miles around. For a while, nobody dared move a muscle.
‘Do you think we hit him?’ Giles asked the others.
The boy beside him was quite convinced he hadn’t got within ten yards of him.
‘I think you may have winged him, sir,’ he said.
Then everyone ran up to the ridge where the figure was last seen moving. They looked hard but found no sign of him, nor any spots of blood.
‘Well, that should’ve scared the mad old rogue back to wherever he came from,’ Giles told the others. And, to a man, they all st
ood and nodded and agreed that it most definitely should.
It would be the last time Giles ever set eyes on the fellow. But for the rest of his days he would imagine himself back in the woods, bringing the gun up to his shoulder and doing a better job. For, two days later, when Jack’s nanny slipped out of the nursery to warm a bottle, the window creaked open. And as little Jack lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling an unfamiliar face swung into view. He saw a matted beard and long, lank hair hanging over him. He saw two hot, wild eyes look him up and down. And, at last, Jack saw a pair of hands with long, sharp fingernails reach down towards him – felt them slip beneath him and lift him up.
The nanny returned just in time to see the wild man ease himself out of the window, with the baby clutched to his shoulder. She screamed and, not long after, her mistress came running in to see what all the fuss was about. Ginny found the nanny still screaming and pointing towards the open window. She ran over to it. And the last thing she ever saw of her son was him looking back over the hermit’s shoulder as he disappeared into the woods.
Of course, the police were called and the locals were alerted. Search parties were given descriptions and sent on their way. Vast rewards were offered for the baby’s safe return or information which led to a satisfactory conclusion. And not surprisingly, the locals spent their every spare minute doing their best to claim the prize.
The Jarvises scoured the woods themselves but found no sign of the wild man. And, year by year, they came a little closer to accepting that they would never set eyes on their precious son again.
But from time to time there would be talk of a sighting – of some strange creature making his way through the undergrowth, clutching a youngster and, later, of the two of them running side by side. Five long years after they first disappeared, a local woman claimed to have come across two wild-looking creatures in a clearing near the edge of the estate and as soon as word got back to the house, she was summoned by Ginny Jarvis.
The woman stood in the library, looking quite intimidated, when the Jarvises walked in to meet her, just as they’d met the hermit all those years before. But Ginny insisted the woman sit on the sofa beside her and took her hand and told her to take her time and tell her all about the two figures she claimed to have seen.
The woman said that she’d only seen them for a matter of seconds before they noticed her and went scurrying back into the undergrowth.
‘All I can say’, she said, ‘is that one was fully grown – an oldish fellow. And the other small, just like a child.’
Ginny begged her to go on.
‘Both looked quite wild – with matted hair hanging round their shoulders,’ the woman told her. ‘And long, sharp fingernails.’
Ginny gripped the woman’s hand in desperation and asked if there wasn’t anything else she could tell her. ‘Did either speak?’ she asked.
‘Not at all,’ said the woman. ‘They were both as silent as the grave.’
Alien abduction
Sitting at a desk all day can be very demanding. Pretending to look as if you’re paying attention can be an almost impossible strain. The children of 4B were hot and tired and beginning to grow restless. And there were still twenty minutes to go before the bell was due to ring.
Theodore Gutch was watching the clock on the wall behind Mister Morgan – was watching the second hand slowly sweep around the clock’s circumference until it finally found its way back up to the twelve.
‘Twenty more of those,’ thought Theodore, ‘and I’ll be a free man. Free to do whatever I please.’
Theodore looked around the room for something else to occupy him. He considered trying to hold his breath whilst counting the drawing pins on all four walls – a little trick he’d very nearly pulled off a couple of days earlier and may well have had another crack at it, had he not been distracted by a flash of light through the window to his left. Now, there is every chance that the flash of light was caused by someone on the other side of town opening a window. As that distant window shifted on its hinges it could have momentarily caught the sun. To be fair, even Theodore Gutch knew this to be the most likely explanation. But the previous week he’d read a book about an army of Martians landing in a small town in America and wreaking all sorts of havoc. And with nothing better to do with the remaining minutes of this particular Wednesday, it wasn’t long before it occurred to him that the flash of light could just as easily have been the after-burners of some alien spacecraft as it landed in the playground in Lowerfold Park.
The threat of an alien invasion was certainly a lot more interesting than whatever Mister Morgan had to offer. Sometimes even Mister Morgan didn’t seem especially interested in what he had to say. Theodore glanced around the room. Across the aisle, Robert Pinner was staring at the palm of his right hand, trying to work out from the lines which crossed it how long a life he had left to live.
Theodore plucked a piece of paper from one of his notebooks, picked up a pencil and scrawled a few words on it. ‘A spaceship full of marshuns’, he wrote (Theodore was not the best of spellers), ‘has just landed in Lowerfold Park.’
Robert Pinner’s ruminations were rudely interrupted when a paper plane landed on the desk right in front of him. It made him jump and he looked round to find Theodore Gutch staring back at him, as if his eyes were about to pop right out of his head.
Theodore nodded at the plane. ‘Open it up,’ he hissed.
Robert ducked his head down behind the boy sitting in front of him (a boy named Howie Barker who had plenty of body to hide behind) and carefully unfolded the piece of paper. He read the message, frowned and looked back at Theodore, who was now nodding his head most gravely.
‘It’s true,’ he said, and did so with such conviction that Mister Morgan was obliged to stop in mid-sentence and ask Theodore if he might possibly refrain from talking when he was talking, as it rather interfered with his train of thought.
It doesn’t take long for a rumour to do the rounds – especially a rumour concerning alien invasion – and there are few situations better suited to a rumour spreading than a room full of children who are bored to tears. Every time Mister Morgan turned his back there was a great flurry of activity, as Theodore’s note and several new ones were frantically passed from desk to desk. One of the new notes stated, quite categorically, that ‘250 aliens’ had landed. On another, Colin Benson had drawn the actual spaceship – a pointy rocket resting on two wide fins. Beside it he had attempted to draw his own idea of an actual alien, but couldn’t get its head and arms quite right and in a fit of frustration had scribbled it out, which left the impression of a ghostly figure staring out through the interference on a TV screen.
With five minutes still to go before the bell, 4B was in a state of near-hysteria. Mandy Shaw thought she was going to wet herself with excitement. Barry Marsden gripped the edge of his desk so tightly that his knuckles had turned quite white. One or two children had taken the news quite badly. Others thought it was the most exciting thing to happen since the crisp factory went up in flames. A few pupils privately wondered whether the report was one hundred per cent accurate. But all were united in their determination to be on their feet as soon as the bell started ringing, to race round to the park and have a good look at this alien spacecraft for themselves.
Those last few minutes were fraught with tension. Mister Morgan could tell that there was something brewing: the whole classroom seemed to crackle with anticipation and everyone kept glancing over at the windows, as if they might catch sight of something unusual there.
‘Perhaps there’s going to be a fight,’ thought Mister Morgan. Mister Morgan quite enjoyed a little fight. He liked striding in and taking charge of the situation. ‘Break it up, break it up,’ he’d say, as he dragged the two boys off each other. But there hadn’t been a fight in the school playground for over a year and there was no point him asking the children what was going on. They never told him anything.
The moment the bell started ringing the
children were out of their chairs and flying down the corridor. Every girl and boy they encountered was told all about the Martian invasion and every one of them instantly chose to join their ranks, until a great stampede of youth was rumbling down the steps and out into the daylight, carrying with it anyone not quick enough to get out of the way.
They piled into the park. They went roaring past the bowling green. They went hammering down the path between the empty tennis courts. They charged through the rose garden, all the way round the duck pond and under the rows of horse chestnuts, fully expecting to find some silver spaceship at the other end. Every child had their own idea of what that spacecraft was going to look like. Some imagined a colossal rocket with steam quietly pouring off it. Some fancied a great silver dish, parked up on the tarmac, with its ramp already down. Some expected to find aliens playing on the swings and round-about, but when they finally arrived at the playground the place was deserted – devoid not just of alien life, but any life at all.
The children slowly came to a standstill. For a while, an eerie silence filled the air. Then disappointment began to set in – the sort of disappointment that can easily turn into anger – until one of the younger children finally opened his mouth.
‘Where’d they go?’ he said.
The silence settled back over the crowd. Then another, older boy shouted, ‘Someone’s taken ’em!’ And, just in case anyone hadn’t understood what he meant the first time round, he added, ‘Someone’s abducted the aliens!’
A disgruntled murmur swept through the hordes of children. The names of various organizations that might conceivably kidnap aliens were bandied about, until a young girl, with no previous history of trouble-making, lifted both hands to her mouth and called out, ‘Let’s all go down to the Town Hall!’
It was a suggestion which was most warmly welcomed. The Town Hall seemed like exactly the right place to take their grievance and everyone had so enjoyed charging through the park like a herd of buffalo that they were keen to go charging off somewhere else.