The Planet Dweller

by Jane Palmer

CHAPTER 4

  ‘I’ve found a mushroom! I’ve found a mushroom!’ Vicky squeaked in her reedy voice as she danced round the outside of the fairy ring clutching her treasure.

  ‘Let me see,’ ordered Julia. ‘Don’t eat it!’ she added quickly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because horses come through this field,’ Julia reminded her as she saw Mrs Trotter and her black beast in the distance.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Vicky carefully put it in her pocket with the old pine cone and flint shaped like an arrowhead.

  Kitty held out a blue and yellow marble and waved it tantalisingly in the air before her. Without hesitation, Vicky surrendered the mushroom in exchange for the marble.

  Kitty popped the delicacy in her mouth and swallowed it.

  ‘Oh honestly - that could have had all sorts of dirt on it,’ Julia scolded

  Vicky resented the accusation that she could have poisoned her best friend. ‘It was clean. Mrs Trotter never comes down this far. She always goes past Yuri’s gate.’

  Sure enough, Daphne Trotter and her menacing mount seemed to be paying the unfortunate astronomer a visit.

  If Yuri had heard Daphne’s unusually silent approach he would have stopped polishing the frame of his reflector and beaten a hasty retreat.

  The first thing he knew about it was her cutting tones calling out, ‘I suppose that must be the only thing you bother polishing?’

  Knowing it was too late to dash inside and pretend he hadn’t heard her, Yuri’s dignity would only allow him to reply unenthusiastically, ‘Good afternoon Mrs Trotter,’ and he carried on carefully buffing his most precious possession.

  Daphne was hardly going to be put off by the disgruntled tone in his voice. ‘I see you haven’t done much about your garden yet?’

  ‘Why deprive field voles and mice of home?’ asked Yuri. ‘I like things the way they are.’

  ‘You know that cottage is under lease to whoever you rent it from, don’t you?’ She leant over the side of her huge black horse to peer threateningly down at him.

  ‘I have heard…’ muttered Yuri unsurely.

  ‘And I’ve discovered that one of the conditions of that lease is proper maintenance of the property by the resident,’ she informed him with relish, but he just shrugged his shoulders. ‘You don’t even know who owns the lease on this land do you, my little Russian misfit?’

  ‘I know it is not you, Mrs Trotter,’ Yuri said firmly, not seeing how she could counter that.

  ‘Not yet,’ she replied with the fixed smile of a crocodile. The duster fell from Yuri’s hand at the horror of what she was insinuating. ‘Don’t look so crestfallen, Yuri. I’m sure you must have another home in a polluted junkyard in the east of the old Soviet Union.’

  ‘I cannot go back there,’ he tried to explain, though he knew such appeals to her better nature would be exhausted before they found it. ‘Why hate me so much?’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Yuri,’ explained Daphne with the peculiar conviction of the hypocrite, ‘I just believe everyone has a place on this Earth - and yours isn’t here! Your people are a threat to the peace of the world and I don’t see why one of them should have the protection of this country.’

  ‘I and my people have little to do with policies our leaders pursue.’

  ‘Then that is their look out. You can find somewhere else to set up home if you like, but by the time I’ve finished, there’ll be no aliens residing here.’

  At that, pictures rose in his mind of Daphne Trotter riding out of the village the family who owned the Chinese take-away, Mr Singh the dentist and himself. She would probably even gallop down to Mr Cooper’s farm and set about the two anthropology students had she known they were staying there.

  ‘And don’t go running to Diana. She can’t help you. She’s got problems of her own to worry about,’ warned Daphne. ‘I’ll see you again tonight when I have the lease to the property, then I’ll find a young local couple who won’t be too idle to do some gardening.’ With a click of her tongue and prod of her heels into the horse’s flanks, she left the stunned Yuri looking helplessly after her and wondering if she hadn’t invented it all to frighten him.

  With little enthusiasm, he picked up the duster to carry on polishing the frame of the telescope, muttering, ‘Oh, Mr and Mrs Trotter, why did you decide to have that little girl? She is not healthy in head.’

  The children in the fairy ring watched Daphne gallop off and wondered what they had been talking about.

  ‘I think she was asking to have a look through his telescope,’ Lin suggested.

  ‘Oh, she was probably nagging him about his garden again,’ Julia told them, well aware of what sort of woman Daphne was; Diana was unable to keep her opinion of the creature to herself once one of her moods came over her. ‘She always is. But Yuri says he likes to keep it like that for all the wild animals to live in. I saw this tiny dormouse up there the other day, and a baby fox.’

  ‘They were probably hiding from Mrs Trotter,’ Tom remarked gravely. ‘They were hunting foxes the other Sunday.’

  ‘I think that’s very cruel,’ said Vicky wrinkling up her nose. ‘They teach us to be kind to animals at school, but one of our teachers goes out hunting as well!’

  ‘That hairy student called John who works at the museum told me that he belongs to a group who go around upsetting people who hunt foxes,’ Julia explained. ‘He and his friend put some aniseed down to confuse the hounds and the other Sunday Mrs Trotter got very upset. They say she still is.’

  ‘Why would she still be so upset about that?’ asked Kitty innocently.

  ‘Well… I don’t think it was that so much. On the way back her horse went and tipped her into the stinging nettles at the bottom of Yuri’s garden. She was stung terribly badly.’

  Vicky sighed thoughtfully. ‘The fairies should have kissed her better.’

  ‘If you were a fairy, would you have kissed her better?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I would have though it was more a job for the goblins,’ added Julia.

  ‘That was probably what she was telling Yuri off about,’ Vicky decided.

  ‘Serves her right for killing little foxes,’ said Lin. ‘I wouldn’t like her to come and kill our little puppy.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not likely to happen,’ Julia reassured him. ‘Your mother said that when it grows up it’s going to be a very big dog. It will probably be able to eat one of her hounds.’

  At that, Tom and Kitty began crawling about the ring on all fours, snarling and snapping at each other.

  ‘You’ll wake the fairies up doing that,’ Julia said.

  ‘Shall we listen to see if they’re talking again?’ suggested Vicky.

  After what she had heard the other day, Julia wasn’t that keen. She had felt too foolish to mention it to her mother, yet worried enough to wonder what could have caused the humming sound. ‘Perhaps they don’t like us eavesdropping,’ she warned Vicky. ‘They might even get angry if they knew we were here.’

  ‘Let’s all hold hands and ask them to come up to us,’ Vicky suggested.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Julia. She drove the two dog imitations from the centre of the circle and told them to sit up and hold hands.

  Yuri had lost interest in cleaning his reflector and stood idly, leaning on his partially suspended gate looking down the slope to where the children were playing. There was apprehension in his expression, brought on by more than the visit of the local bully.

  ‘Fairy, fairy, come and play,’ he could hear the children sing. Then they stood up to join hands and stomp round inside the fairy ring, swinging their arms in time to the repetitive chant.

  Yuri started slowly down the meadow towards them, as if every step they took increased some terror he had been nursing for years. He was about to raise his hand to warn them not to make so much noise when the grass in the centre of the fairy ring began to gently ripple. The children noticed as well and immediately stopped their game. Although they’d been calling on the
fairies to come and play, they had hardly expected the invitation to be taken up. Julia quickly snatched the younger ones out of the circle and stood rooted to the spot in hypnotised fascination.

  Being much younger, the others were far from terrified as a translucent shape full of squares, diamonds and circles materialised in the centre of the ring. It twinkled and sparkled at them like fairy treasure as though inviting them to come into its world. Kitty was so fascinated she took a faltering step forward to touch it.

  She was warned back by Yuri’s emphatic, ‘No! You must not move!’

  The web of different shapes twisting up and down in a complex spiral scared Julia. ‘What is it, Yuri?’

  ‘It is sort of strobe effect,’ Yuri tried to explain, just as alarmed as she was. ‘It is being projected from ground. Though you cannot see it, those shapes are really moving very fast. If you were to touch one of them it might cut your fingers off.’

  ‘But if it’s only a projection, my hand should go straight through it.’

  ‘Not with this. It is linked to something far above us.

  ‘How, Yuri, how?’

  ‘I cannot explain easily, Julia, but it will soon go,’ he replied, hoping that he was right.

  It didn’t fade though. If anything it became more intense.

  Julia could tell that its presence meant something terrible to Yuri. He carefully made his way about the apparition, moving as close as he dared, looking for a safe access point. Each time he seemed to find one, the spiral turned and barred his way.

  ‘Be careful, Yuri!’ Julia caught his arm and held onto it as he passed her. ‘You might be hurt if you touch it.’

  ‘There must be neutral point,’ Yuri muttered to himself and gently eased his arm away from Julia. ‘There must be place where it can be neutralised.’ Then he fancied he saw just such an opening. Yuri reached out towards it.

  The children instinctively stepped back.

  With a bright flash and loud ‘pop!’ Yuri was hurled out of the circle. Then the apparition disappeared.

  The astronomer lay so still and cold the younger children ran towards Diana’s garden screaming and shouting at the tops of their voices. Julia tried to find Yuri’s pulse as she had been taught at school and took off her cardigan to wrap it over his shoulders.

  Diana was lying on the settee in the living room after another attack of her voice, when four hysterical young children bounded in through the French windows as though Daphne’s hounds were after them. Unable to understand anything they blurted out in disjointed sentences, she hastily followed them into the garden and looked out into the meadow where Julia was kneeling by Yuri.

  ‘The fairies did it! The fairies did it!’ Vicky was saying over and over again, and the other three youngsters kept chipping in with equally unhelpful information as she dashed to them.

  ‘Something stunned him, Mum,’ Julia told her, sensing that it wouldn’t be wise to blurt out the whole truth too soon. ‘He’s terribly cold.’

  Diana knelt down to feel his skin. ‘Fetch the blanket off the settee, Julia. When he starts coming to we’ll get him inside.’

  ‘Is he very bad?’ inquired Tom, who had already removed his top hat in anticipation of the worst.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Tom. I’ve seen him in a worse state than this.’

  ‘Shall we run and fetch Dr Spalding?’ Vicky asked.

  Knowing a visit from that gentleman might result in making his condition worse or, at the best, leave him with another dose of tranquillisers, Diana told her, ‘No, I don’t think that will be necessary.’

  As soon as the blanket arrived, she wrapped it round Yuri and waited with fingers on his pulse until his eyelids flickered open.

  ‘Right, children,’ Diana announced. ‘The emergency is over. I think you can all go home now while Julia and I take him inside.’

  Reluctantly, Lin, Kitty, Vicky and Tom took their leave, looking back over their shoulders to see Yuri helped to his feet and guided into the living room. As soon as he was safely on the settee, the astronomer was overtaken by an attack of shivering that could have been diagnosed as the DTs by a less charitable person than Diana. At that moment she wished he would drink something that left a more obvious trace on his breath, then she could confirm beyond all doubt that his collapse had been due to alcohol rather than being stunned by irritable fairies. Wrapping the blanket more securely round him as he kept trying to pull it off, Diana pushed Yuri down onto some cushions and waited until he was capable of uttering words in English. As soon as he showed signs of wanting to make sense, Julia was sent to fetch another pint of milk.

  ‘What on earth have you been drinking, Yuri?’ were the first distinct words he heard.

  ‘Drink…’ he murmured unsurely, ‘I drink nothing...’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have passed out like that without some reason. Are you sure you haven’t been mixing gin with Spalding’s tranquillisers?’

  ‘I do not take tranquillisers either. I was right Diana - I was right!’

  ‘Right, Yuri? What about?’ she asked, unable to relate his rambling to what he had told her the other day.

  ‘It is terrible - This could mean the destruction of the Earth!’

  ‘Oh, Yuri. Wake up, you silly man. You only fainted.’ Diana waved some smelling salts under his nose and he gasped himself to full consciousness.

  Far from pacifying him, they seemed to make him worse. ‘There can be little time now!’ Yuri persisted, pushing himself up from the settee. ‘We must stop it! We must stop it!’

  ‘Stop what, you dumb-bell? Nothing terrible is going to happen. You dreamt it all.’

  ‘I saw it, though. I reached to touch it - It must be stopped.’

  Diana was used to Yuri’s strange flights of fancy and, because he wasn’t behaving rationally, didn’t take his raving to be serious. She wouldn’t let him move from the settee until he was much calmer and Julia had returned from the shop.

  ‘What did happen out there, Julia?’ she asked her daughter.

  Julia took a careful look at Yuri, then at her mother, and wasn’t sure what to say. The only thing for it was to tell the truth. ‘There was something in the fairy ring. It came up through the ground.’

  ‘Oh, Julia,’ Diana sighed in exasperation. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to calm Yuri down, not make him worse?’

  Steeling herself to look her mother in the eye, Julia continued, ‘We were playing in the ring, and Mrs Trotter had just been talking to Yuri.’ She hesitated as her mother sighed. ‘When I was dancing round with Vicky, Tom and the twins, something started to move inside the ring. Yuri came down and reached out to touch it. It was like a pattern growing from the ground.’

  ‘Oh, Julia ... Why are you always trying to cover up for Yuri? He’s not going to get into any trouble if you tell us what really happened. I don’t suppose it had anything to do with Mrs Trotter, did it?’ she added as an afterthought when she remembered the inbred expression of her horse.

  ‘Oh, no, she’d already gone.’

  ‘All right,’ Diana surrendered, ‘I won’t make you tell me if you don’t want to. He’s obviously going to live, but we’ll have to keep an eye on him until he calms down.’

  It took a good hour before Yuri would calm down and was capable of being taken back to his cottage. Diana made him eat a meal, and, with the promise that she would drop in later that evening to see if he was feeling any better, she returned across the meadow to her own world of hot flushes and the alien voice.

  Moosevan,’ she kept thinking to herself, even when the name was not being pushed into her brain. ‘Who or what can Moosevan be?’ As she reached the fairy ring where Yuri had collapsed, she inexplicably felt the urge to give it a very wide berth.