Once Upon a Starman

by Allie Marell

  “Wine.” A voice intrudes on his thoughts. Or are they memories? The recruits to Centrum Command were all orphans with no families to cry over the demise of a soldier in battle. So why does he dream of a mother and a father who mourned his loss?

  “Thank you.”

  Andra moves to the iron box in the hearth. Stokes it with the blocks he saw her gathering earlier and ignites them with paper and flame. Soon a comfortable warmth fills the small room and his taut muscles loosen.

  But with this softening the memories come. Images of a sad-faced woman patting a young boy’s head. The boy’s anxious eyes watching a male in military camouflage walk the garden path to mount a green troop transport vehicle. The young child waves, tears pricking his eyes.

  Daddy will be back for Christmas this year, a soft voice reassures him. And he’ll bring you presents. The voice drops to a whisper. Don’t worry. Santa will bring you what you wanted.

  Santar jolts in the chair, wine sloshing onto his uniform pants. Andra watches him, tense with trying not to react, her fingers white on the stem of her glass.

  “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head. “A memory. That is all.” A troubling memory. Is this who he was? If not, why do these images plague him?

  “From...” Andra almost looks embarrassed at the words she’s having so much trouble saying. “From outer space?” she says, resolutely.

  “I think not.” He stares into the rich red of the wine. “It’s all tangled up with the figure, the toy. There’s a youngling, a male child...”

  “Tell me.” Andra sinks into the wider chair facing the hearth, next to the cat curled into a warm ball. She takes a sip of her wine. “I’m listening.”

  Dare he bare his heart to her? His soul? It sounds outlandish to his sharply trained mind. He deals in logic, certainties. Rights and wrongs, not shadows and elusive existences flitting alongside the life he always knew.

  He’s still holding General Jo. His talisman now as much as hers. If he keeps it, the child Oliver will be disappointed. It’s what children do when they don’t get what they want. It stays with them all of their lives, a festering memory.

  “Do you believe any of my story?”

  Andra lifts her legs, tucking them under her, eyes softened with concern. Hair flowing over her shoulders, small hands clasping the wine glass.

  Brown hair. The colour is brown. And her beauty is in her strength. In the way she’s willing to listen to this rambling, displaced male who SA NT AR12 the cold, hard soldier would have incarcerated on sight.

  “I believe that to you, it all feels real,” she begins and then glances at him to gauge his reaction.

  “I’m starting to believe it is real.” He shakes his head, thinking over the recent episodes of his apparent growing madness. “The memories started to feel more real than my everyday life. Can you understand that?”

  Andra’s hand strays to stroke the sleeping cat’s neck. “I’m trying to. Let’s see how General Jo factors into this. What happened to your hand, by the way?” She points at the two fused fingers of his right hand. “Battle injuries?”

  He lifts his hand, turning it in front of his eyes. “Trauma suffered as a youngling, resulting in two fingers that operate as one, so they always told me.”

  “You poor thing.”

  There’s genuine sympathy in her eyes. But something’s not right. Santar frowns as another memory breaks free. “I never questioned it, but now...”

  “What?” Andra leans forward, sympathy turning to concern.

  “I think I was born this way, Andra. I believe they lied to keep me from the truth of who I really was.”

  Alien. Misfit. Freak. The taunting labels echo in his head, along with images of a young boy striking out at his tormentors. The boy’s cheeks burn with shame as he pushes the deformed hand inside his sleeve. A woman strokes his head, telling him she loves him even more for it.

  “Are you sure you’re not a selkie? Legend says they do the fused fingers thing.” Andra lets out a nervous laugh, shakes her head. “Forget I said that. Try to think back, Santar. To a Christmas long ago. Maybe you had an action toy like General Jo and you’ve forgotten about it.”

  He pulls the figure from the wrapping. It feels too familiar in his hands, as if he’s touched it before.

  Or gazed with longing at the toy standing in a mock up battle field in a retail establishment window.

  “Perhaps,” he concedes and takes a long sip of his wine. “The memory emergence became like an epidemic in the force. An unwanted result of only drafting in orphans and strays, so they said. We were bound to have memories of the lives before we were found.”

  “Found?” She’s a good listener and more than he deserves after the terror he inflicted on her. The hot bath cleansed his spirit as well as his body and he’ll be forever grateful for the small favour.

  “They told me I was found wandering a desert after a transport crash. The military took me in. They preferred to recruit those without family. That way there were none to grieve or claim compensation when we died in battle.”

  “That’s terrible.” Andra’s face contorts into an appalled mask. He watches her visualise the youngling wandering, crying amidst a smoking wreckage.

  Exactly the way they told it to him.

  But it never happened that way.

  His eyes stray to the terminal on what looks like a desk behind Andra’s long chair.

  “It that a PIT?”

  Andra twists in the chair. “A what?”

  “The personal interface terminal on the desk. Can I use it to search the sonic interwebs?”

  “It’s a laptop and yes, feel free if you need to search for something.” She slides from her seat, circling the chair to lift the interface lid. “You need to find out where you live, Santar. Then you can go home.”

  “I thought I knew where I lived.” He pushes from the chair, draining the wine glass. Moves to lean over Andra, seated in the chair before the desk. Her fingers fly over the keys in what he recognises as a password input and then the screen lights up with an image of a smiling boy flanked by two females.

  “That’s Oliver on the screensaver,” Andra says without turning around. “That’s his mother, Emma. Before the crash.”

  “The child expecting the toy?” He searches the male child’s face, picking out hope and the eternal optimism of youth. A thing so intangible it’s impossible to hold on to.

  “That’s him.” She turns then to flash him an accusing stare. “Imagine his disappointment on Christmas morning when I have to tell him Santa messed up?”

  “Who is this being with my name? I should know, but it eludes me.”

  Andra spins around the chair, and her face is lit with real mirth. Though he sees no humour in the situation.

  “Well, He’s this bearded guy who lives at the North Pole with a whole lot of elves and once a year, on Christmas Eve, he goes around the world in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. Nine, if you count Rudolph. As bizarre stories, it almost tops yours.”

  “But this being does not always get it right.” He murmurs the words with a quiet certainty, another fragment of memory slotting into place. “There’s a small boy somewhere still waiting for General Jo.”

  “And I think he’s still inside here.” Andra leans over, pausing before placing a tentative hand over his heart. It quickens to her touch.

  “Perhaps.”

  “So will you give me back the toy?”

  Santar remains silent, unwilling to make promises he may be unable to keep. Weighing up his own need against that of the smiling child.

  Andra does not push. “Carry on searching, Santar. I’m going to finish up dinner.”

  Jess the dog glances comically from one to the other, as if unable to decide who holds his allegiance. Andra settles it with a flick of her chin.

  “You’re on guard, Jess.” The dog immediately drops at her feet. “Look after the guy. Stop him from hurting himself.”

  Santar’s
only half listening, his fingers already keying in commands, learning the search engines and sorting through data.

  Missing children. Fused fingers.

  His first few searches cast a wide net. He trawls through stories of circus freaks, experimental procedures and details of surgical correction methods. Speed reading through the listings, he sees patterns and threads, refines the search and then he sits back staring at the screen?

  Alien abduction in the 1950s.

  An odd tangent leads him to a conspiracy theory site and something clicks in his head. Memories of white, blinding light. Strange figures in black, moving around him.

  More than one soldier in his corps remembered that feeling of floating, sometimes right out of a bedroom window, and then nothing...

  He’s breathing hard, knowing all at once exactly what happened to the small boy found wandering in that fictitious wreckage. He’s typing on auto pilot now.

  Alien abduction hotspots in the UK. The Rossendale Valley. It takes him less than five heartbeats to discover Andra’s cottage location.

  The Lancashire moors. A part of the same valley. When he awoke on those moors, he was coming home.

  Sometimes they came home.

  His fingers tremble as he types in another search. Missing children, fused fingers Lancashire.

  Surprisingly, there are three hits spanning the past sixty Earth years. So he wasn’t the only one. But only one disappeared a week before the festival of Christmas.

  Andra comes in and stands silently behind him. He feels her hand on his shoulder, reassuring as she reads the screen.

  December 20th, 1959. The Rossendale Press reported the disappearance of eight-year-old William Chapman last seen when his parents put him to bed that night. William was looking forward to Christmas, his distraught mother said. He was a good boy who had no reason to run away.

  “You think that was you?” Andra presses close to his side in an effort to read the small print on the screen. “If anyone has our son, please give him back to us. We miss him so much and just need to know he’s safe. Oh, Santar, that’s so sad.”

  He’s only half listening, mesmerised by the crying woman, her dark hair tied up in a rolled knot, the stony-faced man in uniform by her side. Flanking them are two other males in a plainer darker uniform. They look like law enforcement officers.

  “My parents?” It’s half statement, half question. So many pieces of the puzzle fit, yet others remain tantalisingly out of his reach.

  “Santar.” Andra gentles her voice. “They can’t be your parents. Did you notice the date? 1959? That would make the abducted kid what, sixty-eight years old now. How old are you? I’m guessing in your late thirties?”

  “In my profession we measure age as a biometric measure.” His fingers flash over the keys, changing screens, calculating and converting. “Time doesn’t always pass in a linear fashion. Given my periods of stasis, dimensional fluxes and time zone convergence I could well have been away from the earth for this long.”

  “If you were abducted in 1959, you’d be collecting your pension now.”

  Her eyes are full of soft concern, no doubt for his mental state.

  “Then how do you account for this?” Tracing a finger over the incriminating words, he slides an arm around her shoulder, pulling her in close. Feels her shiver in his embrace. But she must see this.

  “He will be easy to identify from the two fused fingers on his right hand. A defect of birth. If anyone spots such a child, please call...”

  “Oh.” Andra blinks and he can almost hear her mind scrabbling for a suitable explanation, an excuse.

  “Are you sure you’re not fitting the facts to the story in your head?” She seems in no hurry to move from his embrace. Her soft warmth is a comfort, something he desperately needs right now.

  “The story was there, waiting for me. A male child with fingers like mine. A week before the festival of Christmas. A present he never received.”

  He lifts General Jo from his place beside the keyboard. Studies it closely, willing it to speak and tell him what happened.

  “Oh, Santar.” Andra leans her head on his shoulder, her voice heavy with pity and sorrow. They rest like that for a long moment, watched by the faithful hound, warmed by the roaring blocks in the metal fire box. A languid contentment seeps into his veins, relieves his aching muscles.

  He’s reacting in another way, too. As a male would to any female. Andra pushes off him, running fastidious fingers through her hair, avoiding his gaze.

  A small apologetic smile and then she has an idea.

  “YouTube. Try YouTube. There might be some archived footage of abductions from the period. But Santar, only look if you really need to know. From what I’ve seen, you’ve been traumatised enough.”

  He’s already searching, finding a grainy newsreel of a couple standing outside a stone dwelling on a windy moor, the female’s hair all awry, the male holding her arm, another hand at her back as if she might fall if he let go.

  If you’re out there, William, please come home. Your presents are still under the tree. We got what you wanted. Remember what you wrote to Santa?

  “Come and eat.” Andra’s urging him from the chair, leaning over to hit the sleep button, while he continues to stare at the darkening screen.

  “You’re too young to be William Chapman.”

  “Not if I was taken by an alien race. Time moves differently in space. I’ve even seen it go backward.”

  His statement renders her mute. As if she can’t work out whether she’s the crazy one or he.

  “You’ll feel better after you eat.” Now it’s her with an arm around his waist, ushering him from the room. William Chapman. Is that whose memories are pushing at the once-locked doors in his mind? Was he harvested and fed new memories by Centrum Command?

  “William Chapman was waiting for General Jo.” He sits at the table, stomach growling for food. Head spinning with this new information. It all fits but one thing. The name. Of all the latent memories appearing in his head, William Chapman has yet to appear.

  The food is good. It seems he likes this spag bol. His brain is sure of that. He wipes sauce from his mouth with a paper square, feeling a lot better for a full stomach. Andra pours him more wine, his third glass now, and the effects are already dimming his ability to think clearly.

  His eyelids droop as he watches Andra feed a crust to the begging dog. At some point, the cat wanders into the kitchen to sit politely beside an empty dish. Andra opens a pouch of meat and drops it into the dish, clatters about collecting plates and eating implements. He sees it all through a haze, his mind full of William Chapman and his last Christmas on earth. His body, weakened by the crash, a day spent guarding Andra’s door in frigid temperatures, is at the end of its endurance.

  If the child was harvested, then that child might be him.

  He’s waited this long. It can wait for another sunrise. Yawning, he welcomes the cocooning waves of sleep. His cloudy mind is clearing, the mists blowing away. But his reasoning powers are shot and as Andra wisely cautioned, he’s too ready to believe, to grasp at any plausible explanation that might bring him the peace he craves.

  “Come on,” she says. “You need to sleep. I’ll show you to the spare room where you can crash for the night.”

  Rising from the chair, he scrapes it across the tiled floor and follows like a sleepwalker to the kitchen door. Weaving like one inebriated now, like the end of an arduous mission where all he wanted to do was flop into his bunk and fall into a restoring, dreamless sleep.

  No drugs here to fend off the dreams. He will dream this night.

  “I need to fetch the toy. To keep it close.”

  “You carry on upstairs. I’ll fetch it for you.”

  Half way up the stairs, the phone trills. Andra is behind him, General Jo in one hand, head cocked listening to the phone ringing. She runs on ahead of him to pick up a handset in one of the bedrooms. Standing at the door, he watches her jaw clench as she g
rips the phone in her fist.

  “Look, we already had this conversation. I don’t have a General Jo to sell. Please don’t call me again.”

  Before she can slam down the phone, he’s across the room, taking the phone from her rigid fingers. Pushing the handset to his ear.

  “I thought I made myself clear today. Obviously I was remiss. No, don’t interrupt me. Just listen. From now on you will be dealing with me. If you make the mistake of calling this number again, you will regret it. Do you understand?”

  The anger clears his mind. How dare they be so bold after this morning’s confrontation?

  “Which button to switch off the phone?”

  “The red one.” It’s Andra’s turn to be dazed. When she throws the darkened window a cautious glance, veering too close to fear, he stabs the off button and takes her by the shoulders.

  “I will repay your kindness. Worry not, they won’t get anywhere near you.”

  She shakes her head, her voice wavering on the edge of hysteria.

  “I can’t believe all this fuss over an old toy.”

  He steers her to the bed. Pushes gently on her shoulders until she’s seated on the striped coverlet and then he sinks beside her. “Is it more valuable than you realised?”

  “I knew it was rare. But never for a moment did I think it was this much of a collectable.”

  “Some beings refuse to take no for an answer,” he says, stroking the back of her tight fist. He withdraws his hand, thinking he should not be so bold. She’s frightened enough.

  “They obviously want it badly.” She looks up at him, her green eyes full of question. “Should I just sell it? Oliver will survive. And they said it would buy me a new roof.”

  He shakes his head and takes up the toy she dropped onto the covering. “I will not allow you to sell it. Especially not to those rogues. Andra, it holds answers I need to unlock. I must keep it close.”

  She nods. Weary, too, he realises. “Okay, take it then. Stick it under your pillow and dare them to steal it. Oh, and I’ll send Jess in for the night. He’s not much of a guard dog, but he’ll at least whine if any intruders come near.”