by Brian Aldiss
He paused. There was a dragging noise on the landing upstairs, a board creaked.
‘Who the devil’s up there?’ Grendon growled. He made towards the stairwell.
‘Don’t go, father!’ Nancy screamed, but her father flung open the door and made his way up. Gregory bit his lip. The Aurigans had never ventured into the house before.
In a moment, Grendon returned with a monstrous piglet in his arms.
‘Keep the confounded animals out of the house, Nancy,’ he said, pushing the creature squealing out of the front door.
The interruption made Gregory realise how his nerves still jangled. He set his back to the sawdust-filled parody of a goat that watched from its case, and spoke quickly.
‘The situation is that we’re all animals together at present. Do you remember that strange meteor that fell out of the sky last winter, Joseph? And do you remember that ill-smelling dew early in the spring? They were not unconnected, and they are connected with all that’s happening now. That meteor was a space machine of some sort, I firmly believe, and it brought in it a kind of life that – that is not so much hostile to terrestrial life as indifferent to its quality. The creatures from that machine – I call them Aurigans – spread the dew over the farm. It was a growth accelerator, a manure or fertiliser, that speeds growth in plants and animals.’
‘So much better for us!’ Grendon said.
‘But it’s not better. The things grow wildly, yes, but the taste is altered to suit the palates of those things out there. You’ve seen what happened. You can’t sell anything. People won’t touch your eggs or milk or meat – they taste too foul.’
‘But that’s a lot of nonsense. We’ll sell in Norwich. Our produce is better than it ever was. We eat it, don’t we?’
‘Yes, Joseph, you eat it. But anyone who eats at your table is doomed. Don’t you understand – you are all “fertilised” just as surely as the pigs and chickens. Your place has been turned into a superfarm, and you are all meat to the Aurigans.’
That set a silence in the room, until Nancy said in a small voice, ‘You don’t believe such a terrible thing.’
‘I suppose these unseen creatures told you all this?’ Grendon said truculently.
‘Judge by the evidence, as I do. Your wife – I must be brutal, Joseph – your wife was eaten, like the dog and the pigs. As everything else will be in time. The Aurigans aren’t even cannibals. They aren’t like us. They don’t care whether we have souls or intelligences, any more than we really care whether the bullocks have.’
‘No one’s going to eat me,’ Neckland said, looking decidedly white about the gills.
‘How can you stop them? They’re invisible, and I think they can strike like snakes. They’re aquatic and I think they may be only two feet tall. How can you protect yourself?’ He turned to the farmer. ‘Joseph, the danger is very great, and not only to us here. At first, they may have offered us no harm while they got the measure of us – otherwise I’d have died in your rowing boat. Now there’s no longer doubt of their hostile intent. I beg you to let me go to Heigham and telephone to the chief of police in Norwich, or at least to the local militia, to get them to come and help us.’
The farmer shook his head slowly, and pointed a finger at Gregory.
‘You soon forgot them talks we had, bor, all about the coming age of socialism and how the powers of the state was going to wither away. Directly we get a bit of trouble, you want to call in the authorities. There’s no harm here a few savage dogs like my old Cuff can’t handle, and I don’t say as I ent going to get a couple of dogs, but you’m a fule if you reckon I’m getting the authorities down here. Fine old socialist you turn out to be!’
‘You have no room to talk about that!’ Gregory exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you let Grubby come here? If you were a socialist, you’d treat the men as you treat yourself. Instead, you leave him out in the ditch. I wanted him to hear this discussion.’
The farmer leant threateningly across the table at him.
‘Oh, you did, did you? Since when was this your farm? And Grubby can come and go as he likes when it’s his, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, bor! Who do you just think you are?’ He moved closer to Gregory, apparently happy to work off his fears as anger. ‘You’m trying to scare us all off this here little old bit of ground, ent you? Well, the Grendons ent a scaring sort, see! Now I’ll tell you something. See that rifle there on the wall? That be loaded. And if you ent off this farm by midday, that rifle ont be on that wall no more. It’ll be here, bor, right here in my two hands, and I’ll be letting you have it right where you’ll feel it most.’
‘You can’t do that, father,’ Nancy said. ‘You know Gregory is a friend of ours.’
‘For God’s sake, Joseph,’ Gregory said, ‘see where your enemy lies. Bert, tell Mr Grendon what we saw on the pond, go on.’
Neckland was far from keen to be dragged into this argument. He scratched his head, drew a red-and-white spotted handkerchief from round his neck to wipe his face, and muttered, ‘We saw a sort of ripple on the water, but I didn’t see nothing really, Master Gregory. I mean, it could have been the wind, couldn’t it?’
‘Now you be warned, Gregory,’ the farmer repeated. ‘You be off my land by noon by the sun, and that mare of yours, or I ont answer for it.’ He marched out into the pale sunshine, and Neckland followed.
Nancy and Gregory stood staring at each other. He took her hands, and they were cold.
‘You believe what I was saying, Nancy?’
‘Is that why the food did at one point taste bad to us, and then soon tasted well enough again?’
‘It can only have been that at that time your systems were not fully adjusted to the poison. Now they are. You’re being fed up, Nancy, just like the livestock – I’m sure of it! I fear for you, darling love, I fear so much. What are we to do? Come back to Cottersall with me! Mrs Fenn has another fine little drawing room upstairs that I’m sure she would rent.’
‘Now you’re talking nonsense, Greg! How can I? What would people say? No, you go away for now and let the tempest of father’s wrath abate, and if you could come back tomorrow, you will find he will be milder for sure, because I plan to wait on him tonight and talk to him about you. Why, he’s half daft with grief and doesn’t know what he says.’
‘All right, my darling. But stay inside as much as you can. The Aurigans have not come indoors yet, as far as we know, and it may be safer here. And lock all the doors and put the shutters over the windows before you go to bed. And get your father to take that rifle of his upstairs with him.’
The evenings were lengthening with confidence towards summer now, and Bruce Fox arrived home before sunset. As he jumped from his bicycle this evening, he found his friend Gregory impatiently awaiting him.
They went indoors together, and while Fox ate a large tea, Gregory told him what had been happening at the farm.
‘You’re in trouble,’ Fox said. ‘Look, tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll skip church and come out with you. You need help.’
‘Joseph may shoot me. He’ll be certain to if I bring along a stranger. You can help me tonight by telling me where I can purchase a young dog straight away to protect Nancy.’
‘Nonsense, I’m coming with you. I can’t bear hearing all this at secondhand anyhow. We’ll pick up a pup in any event – the blacksmith has a litter to be rid of. Have you got any plan of action?’
‘Plan? No, not really.’
‘You must have a plan. Grendon doesn’t scare too easily, does he?’
‘I imagine he’s scared well enough. Nancy says he’s scared. He just isn’t imaginative enough to see what he can do but carry on working as hard as possible.’
‘Look, I know these farmers. They won’t believe anything till you rub their noses in it. What we must do is show him an Aurigan.’
‘Oh, splendid, Bruce. And how do you catch one?’
‘You trap one.’
‘Don’t forget they’re invisible – hey, Bruce,
yes, by Jove, you’re right! I’ve the very idea! Look, we’ve nothing more to worry about if we can trap one. We can trap the lot, however many there are, and we can kill the little horrors when we have trapped them.’
Fox grinned over the top of a chunk of cherry cake. ‘We’re agreed, I suppose, that these Aurigans aren’t socialist Utopians any longer?’
It helped a great deal, Gregory thought, to be able to visualise roughly what the alien life form looked like. The volume on serpents had been a happy find, for not only did it give an idea of how the Aurigans must be able to digest their prey so rapidly – ‘a kind of soup or broth’ – but presumably it gave a clue to their appearance. To live in a space machine, they would probably be fairly small, and they seemed to be semi-aquatic. It all went to make up a picture of a strange being: skin perhaps scaled like a fish, great flipper feet like a frog, barrel-like diminutive stature, and a tiny head with two great fangs in the jaw. There was no doubt but that the invisibility cloaked a really ugly-looking dwarf!
As the macabre image passed through his head, Gregory and Bruce Fox were preparing their trap. Fortunately, Grendon had offered no resistance to their entering the farm; Nancy had evidently spoken to good effect. And he had suffered another shock. Five fowls had been reduced to little but feathers and skin that morning almost before his eyes, and he was as a result sullen and indifferent to what went on. Now he was out in a distant field, working, and the two young men were allowed to carry out their plans unmolested – though not without an occasional anxious glance at the pond – while a worried Nancy looked on from the farmhouse window.
She had with her a sturdy young mongrel dog of eight months, which Gregory and Bruce had brought along, called Gyp. Grendon had obtained two ferocious hounds from a distant neighbour. These wide-mouthed brutes were secured on long running chains that enabled them to patrol from the horse trough by the pond, down the west side of the house, almost to the elms and the bridge leading over to West Field. They barked stridently most of the time and seemed to cause a general unease among the other animals, all of which gave voice restlessly this forenoon.
The dogs would be a difficulty, Nancy had said, for they refused to touch any of the food the farm could provide. It was hoped they would take it when they became hungry enough.
Grendon had planted a great board by the farm gate and on the board had painted a notice telling everyone to keep away.
Armed with pitchforks, the two young men carried flour sacks out from the mill and placed them at strategic positions across the yard as far as the gate. Gregory went to the cowsheds and led out one of the calves there on a length of binder twine under the very teeth of the barking dogs – he only hoped they would prove as hostile to the Aurigans as they seemed to be to human life.
As he was pulling the calf across the yard, Grubby appeared.
‘You’d better stay away from us, Grubby. We’re trying to trap one of the ghosts.’
‘Master, if I catch one, I shall strangle him, straight I will.’
‘A pitchfork is a better weapon. These ghosts are dangerous little beasts at close quarters.’
‘I’m strong, bor, I tell ’ee! I’d strangle un!’
To prove his point, Grubby rolled his striped and tattered sleeve even further up his arm and exposed to Gregory and Fox his enormous biceps. At the same time, he wagged his great heavy head and lolled his tongue out of his mouth, perhaps to demonstrate some of the effects of strangulation.
‘It’s a very fine arm,’ Gregory agreed. ‘But, look, Grubby, we have a better idea. We are going to do this ghost to death with pitchforks. If you want to join in, you’d better get a spare one from the stable.’
Grubby looked at him with a sly-shy expression and stroked his throat. ‘I’d be better at strangling, bor. I’ve always wanted to strangle someone.’
‘Why should you want to do that, Grubby?’
The labourer lowered his voice. ‘I always wanted to see how difficult it would be. I’m strong, you see. I got my strength up as a lad by doing some of this here strangling – but never men, you know, just cattle.’
Backing away a pace, Gregory said, ‘This time, Grubby, it’s pitchforks for us.’ To settle the issue, he went into the stables, got a pitchfork, and returned to thrust it into Grubby’s hand.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Fox said.
They were all ready to start. Fox and Grubby crouched down in the ditch on either side of the gate, weapons at the ready. Gregory emptied one of the bags of flour over the yard in a patch just before the gate, so that anyone leaving the farm would have to walk through it. Then he led the calf towards the pond.
The young animal set up an uneasy mooing, and most of the beasts nearby seemed to answer. The chickens and hens scattered about the yard in the pale sunshine as if demented. Gregory felt the sweat trickle down his back, although his skin was cold with the chemistries of suspense. With a slap on its rump, he forced the calf into the water of the pond. It stood there unhappily, until he led it out again and slowly back across the yard, past the mill and the grain store on his right, past Mrs Grendon’s neglected flowerbed on his left, towards the gate where his allies waited. And for all his determination not to do so, he could not stop himself looking backwards at the leaden surface of the pond to see if anything followed him. He led the calf through the gate and stopped. No tracks but his and the calf’s showed in the strewn flour.
‘Try it again,’ Fox advised. ‘Perhaps they are taking a nap down there.’
Gregory went through the routine again, and a third and fourth time, on each occasion smoothing the flour after he had been through it. Each time, he saw Nancy watching helplessly from the house. Each time, he felt a little more sick with tension.
Yet when it happened, it took him by surprise. He had got the calf to the gate for a fifth time when Fox’s shout joined the chorus of animal noises. The pond had shown no special ripples, so the Aurigan had come from some dark-purposed prowl of the farm – suddenly, its finned footsteps were marking the flour.
Yelling with excitement, Gregory dropped the rope that led the calf and ducked to one side. Seizing up an opened bag of flour by the gatepost, he flung its contents before the advancing figure.
The bomb of flour exploded all over the Aurigan. Now it was revealed in chalky outline. Despite himself, Gregory found himself screaming in sheer fright as the ghastliness was revealed in whirling white. It was especially the size that frightened: this dread thing, remote from human form, was too big for earthly nature – ten feet high, perhaps twelve! Invincible, and horribly quick, it came rushing at him with unnumbered arms striking out towards him.
Next morning, Doctor Crouchorn and his silk hat appeared at Gregory’s bedside, thanked Mrs Fenn for some hot water, and dressed Gregory’s leg wound.
‘You got off lightly, considering,’ the old man said. ‘But if you will take a piece of advice from me, Mr Rolles, you will cease to visit the Grendon farm. It’s an evil place and you’ll come to no good there.’
Gregory nodded. He had told the doctor nothing, except that Grendon had run up and shot him in the leg; which was true enough, but that it omitted most of the story.
‘When will I be up again, Doctor?’
‘Oh, young flesh heals soon enough, or undertakers would be rich men and doctors paupers. A few days should see you as right as rain. But I’ll be visiting you again tomorrow, until when you are to stay flat on your back and keep that leg motionless.’
‘I understand.’
The doctor made a ferocious face. ‘You understand, but will you take heed? I’m warning you, if you take one step on that leg, it will turn purple and fall off.’ He nodded slowly and emphatically, and the lines on his face deepened to such a great extent that anyone familiar with the eccentricities of his physiognomy would be inclined to estimate that he was smiling.
‘I suppose I may write a letter, doctor?’
‘I suppose you may, young man.’
Directly Doc
tor Crouchorn had gone, Gregory took pen and paper and addressed some urgent lines to Nancy. They told her that he loved her very much and could not bear to think of her remaining on the farm; that he could not get to see her for a few days because of his leg wound; and that she must immediately come away on Hetty with a bag full of her things and stay at The Wayfarer, where there was a capital room for which he would pay. That if she thought anything of him, she must put the simple plan into action this very day, and send him word round from the inn when she was established there.
With some satisfaction, Gregory read this through twice, signed it and added kisses, and summoned Mrs Fenn with the aid of a small bell she had provided for that purpose.
He told her that the delivery of the letter was a matter of extreme urgency. He would entrust it to Tommy, the baker’s boy, to deliver when his morning round was over, and would give him a shilling for his efforts. Mrs Fenn was not enthusiastic about this, but with a little flattery was persuaded to speak to Tommy; she left the bedroom clutching both letter and shilling.
At once, Gregory began another letter, this one to Mr H. G. Wells. It was some while since he had last addressed his correspondent, and so he had to make a somewhat lengthy report; but eventually he came to the events of the previous day.
‘So horrified was I by the sight of the Aurigan, (he wrote) that I stood where I was, unable to move, while the flour blew about us. And how can I now convey to you – who are perhaps the most interested person in this vital subject in all the British Isles – what the monster looked like, outlined in white? My impressions were, of course, both brief and indefinite, but the main handicap is that there is nothing on Earth to liken this weird being to!
It appeared, I suppose, most like some horrendous goose, but the neck must be imagined as almost as thick as the body – indeed, it was almost all body, or all neck, whichever way you look at it. And on top of this neck was no head but a terrible array of various sorts of arms, a nest of writhing cilia, antennae, and whips, for all the world as if an octopus were entangled with a Portugese Man-’o-war as big as itself, with a few shrimp and starfish legs thrown in. Does this sound ludicrous? I can only swear to you that as it bore down on me, perhaps twice my own height or more, I found it something almost too terrifying for human eyes to look on – and yet I did not see it, but merely the flour that adhered to it!