Flies are scavengers. Do you know how a fly feeds? It can't eat solid food, so it vomits digestive juices onto the carrion and stamps it in - probably defecating at the same time - then it sucks the mixture back up its feeding tube.
When it's had enough, it lowers its abdomen and deposits a cluster of eggs. From these emerge larvae, which gorge on the now putrefying carcass.
All very well if the thing's already dead.
But if it isn't ...
'Want to go out, boy?'
The dog's tail rotated like a windmill as it began an excited dance with its front paws. It's baggy smile and lolling tongue declared that, Yes, it wanted to go out, and could it be done with the utmost possible haste because it's peanut-sized bladder couldn't be kept waiting too long.
Clive Maguire put down his newspaper, stood up with lethargic effort, and walked through into the kitchen. When he opened the back door, a blur of black fur immediately shot passed his legs.
'That desperate, eh?'
The cool night air caressed Clive's face, enticing him out onto the paving area that Patsy liked to call a Patio and he preferred to call a Yard - a remnant from his working class upbringing, she said. He breathed in deeply, filling his lungs whilst looking up at the stars twinkling in a black velvet sky. He hadn't realised how hot he had become in the house, sitting in front of the flickering coal fire he'd lit when the hot summers day had turned into a chilly summers evening. It was still a chilly summers evening, and the cool night air quickly seeped into his bones, making him shiver, making him want to go back into the house and get warm again.
'Here, boy,' he called down the garden.
There was the rustling sound of a dog circling the oak tree by the far hedge. Clive couldn't see the black Labrador in the dark, but he knew Leo would shuffle around the tree trunk five or six times, sniffing the ground like an insane vacuum cleaner before finally deciding on a perfect spot.
'Come on,' Clive urged, 'Anywhere will do.'
The minutes slowly ticked by. Clive glanced at his watch and frowned, noticing how late Patsy was tonight. Her shift at the old people's home finished at ten, and it was getting on for eleven now.
Just when he'd decided to start worrying, two shards of light appeared over the crest of the hill and came down the lane that ran passed their isolated cottage. Clive walked across the patio/yard to the back gate, unbolted it and pulled it open. It would, he thought, save Patsy from searching through her absurdly large handbag for door keys she could never find, and save him a journey through the house to open the door when she finally admitted defeat and rang the bell - even then, she'd remain on the doorstep looking sheepish, with one hand still rifling through the contents of her bag as if she still had time to find them even though he was holding the door open for her.
The headlights swung into the driveway and pulled up on the left hand side, perilously close to the conifer hedge. Clive waited and watched the still-idling car with mildly exasperated amusement. She would, he knew from experience, sit in the car hauling on the hand-brake for a while, clutching at it with both hands even though it pulled up like a hot knife through butter. Then she'd begin a struggle to get the keys out of the ignition.
The headlights went off. Now, Clive thought, smiling, there would be a moment or two for her to remember where she put her handbag, a final look around the interior to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, and then ....
The drivers door swung open and Patsy finally clambered out.
'Alright, love?' he called out to her.
She broke into a beaming smile of welcome and waved at him standing by the back gate. Then she slammed the car door shut, opened it, slammed it shut again, and tried three keys on a keyring holding three keys before finding the right one to lock it with.
'I swear you're getting worse,' Clive laughed.
'Early senility,' she said.
'Hereditary insanity,' he replied.
Patsy tore herself away from the car, still looking somewhat perplexed, as if she'd forgotten something, then said, 'I wish you wouldn't talk about my family like that, Clive.'
'It's common knowledge that none of you have a single memory cell between you. Must be a flaw in the genes, or something.'
'I'll floor you in a minute,' she threatened.
'Promises, promises!'
She gave him a mocking scowl as she tottered passed him on ludicrously high heels.
'I don't know how you manage to walk around in those things, Pats.'
'A matter of necessity, darling.' She stood on tip-toe to brush his cheek with a kiss. She smelled of perfume and antiseptic. 'I cripple myself with shoes like this so I don't have to stare at peoples nasal hairs all day. It's like living in the land of the giants sometimes.'
Clive locked the gate behind her. Patsy's petite frame, still slim and shapely in middle age, walked halfway across the patio towards the back door, then she stopped, turning to look down the garden at a Labrador she couldn't see. Leo was still shuffling maniacally around the oak tree.
'How long has he been out there for?' she asked.
'Mere minutes,' Clive said.
'Oh, he'll be ages yet. We might as well sit down and wait for him out here. I could do with a breath of fresh air after dealing with bedpans all day.'
She sat on the wooden seat Clive had made in his shed last summer. Ignoring his chilliness, Clive sat beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders and drawing her against him. He kissed the top of her head.
'So, how has your day been?' he asked.
'Horrendous. How was yours?'
'The same. Why don't we retire and become reclusive slobs?'
'You're already a slob, Clive.'
'Flattery will get you nowhere, woman.'
Leo came bounding up to them at that moment, only the whites of his eyes showing at first until he broke into the glow cast from the kitchen window. He sat at Patsy's feet with his pink tongue lolling and his tail swishing the paving stones like a furry brush.
'Hiya, mutt.' She patted his broad head. 'And what have you been up to today?'
'Well,' Clive drawled, 'He dragged poor Helen around the village for an hour this morning, then spent most of the afternoon eating my slippers, chewing a chair leg, and tearing the paper off the hallway wall. For desert, he ripped the draught stripping off the kitchen door, so we'll have gale force winds blowing down the hallway come winter.'
'It's not Leo's fault we have a half inch gap at the bottom of the door.'
'Go on,' Clive huffed, 'Blame me.'
'You were the one surrounded in wood shavings when I asked you to take a slither - a slither - off it to stop it catching on the new floor covering.'
'So I got a bit carried away.'
'A bit!'
'It doesn't excuse Leo the loopy lab devouring everything in sight.'
'He's just bored,' Patsy said, 'He doesn't like being left on you own all day, do you, boy?'
'Then we'll retire and save a small fortune on harassed doggie-minders and draught excluders.'
Leo, sensing he was the subject of conversation, lifted one muddy paw onto Patsy's lap as if begging for forgiveness, although his smiling face didn't look at all contrite. He pushed his luck by bringing up his other paw whilst Patsy was still fighting with the first one, then stood up on his back legs and mercilessly slobbered her face.
'God, Leo! Your breath stinks.'
Clive gently pulled him off. The dog lay down on the paving stones with his head between his paws, looking up at them with those sad brown eyes.
'Are you hungry' Clive asked his wife.
'No. I had some unidentified sustenance in the work canteen.'
'Cup of tea, then, to wash away the taste?'
'The taste will remain forever, but a quick prayer for my stomach wouldn't go amiss.'
'Dear Lord,' Clive boomed, looking up at the stars, 'Please have mercy on my wife's innards ... Good grief!' he cried suddenly. 'What's that?'
Patsy followed his gaze. A bright blue light, almost as big as the full moon, was speeding across the firmament just above the hill beyond their garden. Clive stood up to watch it. Leo jumped to his paws, his body rigid and bristling as a low growl erupted from his throat.
'Easy, boy,' Clive said, not taking his eyes off the object.
The luminous sphere moved across the sky from west to east at an incredible speed. Then it suddenly deviated from its straight path and arched upwards and backwards, shooting from east to west until it was directly above Simmonds hill. There it hung, motionless for long seconds, as if someone had painted a second moon on the sky's surface. Slowly it began to rise towards the roof of the heavens, came to a tentative halt, and then dropped like a rock.
'It's going to crash!' Patsy shrieked, jumping up and gripping Clive's arm.
Clive was aware that he had sucked in a huge amount of air without exhaling, making his lungs ache with the strain. He continued to hold it, not daring to breath, as the blue light plummeted towards the earth. He waited for the impacting explosion, but it didn't come. Instead, the glowing object narrowly averted disaster and veered away from the ground at the last possible moment. Clive exhaled, whistling through his teeth.
The object rose again, higher and higher, faster and faster, stopping as abruptly as an arrow hitting a target above the summit of the hill, where it hovered silently. They could just make out spots of brighter, coloured lights flickering on and off within the luminous blue orb.
'Clive?'
'It's probably a helicopter, or something' he said, anticipating her question.
'Bloody big helicopter.'
'Maybe a jet, then. One of those harrier jump - '
'Clive, I think it's a UFO.'
'Don't be silly.'
'I'm telling you, Clive. It's a UFO.'
Clive said nothing. They continued to stare in amazement as the huge blue sphere flickered against the backdrop of a million diamond studs. It flashed on and off, vanishing and reappearing in rapid succession, like a beacon, like strobe lights in a disco or the flickering frames of an old black and white movie.
'I don't hear anything,' Patsy whispered.
'It's probably too far away.'
'But we can hear hikers yakking their way across the top of that hill.'
'Distance can be deceiving at night. It's probably miles away.'
The dazzling ball grew bigger.
'It's coming this way!'
Leo started barking. Patsy tightened her grip on Clive's arm. Clive held his breath again, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.
The object did such a fast U-turn away from them it left a thick blue line in its wake. It was travelling at an incredible velocity and moving erratically, shooting left, shooting right, zigzagging backwards and forwards like a glowing ball on elastic.
Then it vanished beyond the hill that overlooked their garden.
'Clive, what - ?'
'Shhh.' Clive took a step forward. Leo was still barking like a mad thing. 'Quiet, boy,' he commanded, and Leo fell silent, lowering his head and drawing back his lips to growl uneasily.
Clive felt an intangible fear creeping through his body as he stood there waiting, listening, trembling.
'The cold,' he lied, when Patsy looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes. 'It's just the cold.'
But he was frightened, too, of that thing he's witnessed shooting through the air with such amazing speed and agility. He's never seen anything like it before.
And then, as they all stood on the patio at the back of their remote cottage, it came. The noise. Avalanching over the hill came the sound of something hard and heavy hitting the earth with an impact they could feel beneath their feet. They heard the distant cracking of trees, and the night sky glowed momentarily, giving the crest of the hill a hazy blue halo that silhouetted the topmost beeches. Darkness swallowed it up, and then there was a muted explosion that came and went like a hundred simultaneous shotgun blasts without echo.
'I'm scared.' Patsy said.
Leo whined nervously, glancing up at his owners before looking back at the hill with his fur still bristled on his back.
'I'll go and take a look.' He started towards the gate at the bottom of their garden, but Patsy held his arm tight and pulled him back, saying, 'You're not going anywhere near that thing.'
'There might be survivors,' he said. 'You're a nurse, you could help.'
'Taking care of alien life forms isn't my speciality.'
'Don't be ridiculous.'
'You saw it!' she cried. 'That wasn't a normal aircraft!'
'But we can't just ignore it?'
'Then let someone else deal with it.' Clive scowled at her. She scowled back. 'I mean it, Clive. If you want to help, call the police, or the air-force, or something.'
'But - '
'Clive, you are not leaving me here on my own while you go traipsing off into the forest in the middle of the night looking for something that doesn't belong on this planet.'
'I think you're overreacting.'
'I'm being cautious.'
Clive saw the raw desperation in her eyes and, with a sense of relief he wasn't proud of, he nodded his head in agreement and went into the house.
Patsy remained standing outside with Leo for a moment or two longer, staring up at the night sky. The dog didn't lower his ruffled guard when she stroked the top of his head, and she had to call him several times before he reluctantly followed her inside.
None of them saw the second light fall from the sky.
* * *
The dying embers crackled in the fireplace. 'Did you get through?' Patsy asked, when Clive came into the living room.
'Eventually. They've had several calls reporting the crash, and they're sending out a couple of police officers to take a look.'
Patsy sipped at her tea, staring at the orange glow in the grate. Clive sat in the opposite armchair and picked up his newspaper. Leo was sprawled out on the floor between them, twitching nervously in his sleep. He raised his head at intervals, lifting his ears and making a weak attempt at a bark, before flopping back down to resume his unconscious twitching.
'Quite an eventful night,' Clive said. 'Shall I put the television on for a while? The news channel might bring us back down to earth.'
Patsy continued to stare unblinkingly into the fireplace without giving any indication that she had heard him. Clive shook the newspaper open, making her jump. He apologised, read for a little while, then burst out laughing, making Patsy jump again.
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind is on tonight,' he chuckled. 'Do you fancy watching it?'
He stopped laughing when he looked across at Patsy, and saw that she was crying.
* * *
Two cars came to a halt in the lane, and three policemen alighted into the inky black night. Two stretched and yawned laboriously. For them it had been a long and boring shift. The other officer, wearing shiny-peaked cap with a chequered band, moved immediately into the line of trees on the left hand side of the road, waving a torch at the ground in front of him.
'C'mon, you two,' the sergeant said, vanishing into the dark pillars of the forest. 'Lets get this thing over with, then we can all go home.'
PC Harris screwed his hat onto his head and glared after his departing superior. 'What's he doing out here?' he muttered. 'S'not like him to get involved in any dirty work.'
His partner, PC Williams, didn't reply. He was privately pleased to have the monotony broken by this bit of excitement. He leaned in through the open drivers window, and took two torches off the dashboard. Turning both on to check that they worked, he handed one to Harris.
'I know what this wild goose chase is all about,' Harris grumbled. 'It's that dotty Mrs Freeman reporting green Martians in her back garden again. I don't know why we bother.'
'It's not Mrs Freeman this time,' Williams said. 'You heard the report on the radio. A lot of people claim to have seen this plane crashing. We have to check it out.'
'Mrs Freeman had instigated mass hysteria, that's all.'
Harris huffed indignantly as they both followed the sergeants pendulous torchbeam like obedient children. Once waist high in the undergrowth, Harris tripped over a hidden tree root and swore profusely under his breath, cursing Mrs Freeman, the sergeant, and his partner for being so bloody diligent. Joe could easily have said they were on another call and saved them both the trouble of tramping through a forest in the middle of the night. He didn't need this crap at the end of his shift.
'Hey, sarge,' he called out. 'What exactly is it we're looking for anyway?'
'Anything on the ground that looks like it belongs in the air.'
'Very funny, sarge.'
'It wasn't meant to be funny, Harris.'
They staggered through the vegetation and did battle with invisible ditches for ten minutes of so, before the sergeant stopped and suggested they split up. Harris tutted and immediately veered off to the right, where a discernible dirt track led into shadowy oblivion. It seemed the easiest route. William's went right, the sergeant carried on ahead.
Harris had only gone a little way down the path before a terrible, empty silence fell upon him like a lead blanket. It was an unreal silence, as if the rest of mankind had buggered off to another planet, forgetting to take him. And it was so bloody dark; a deeply black darkness stained by looming grey shadows. This wasn't his scene at all. He didn't belong in this world of murky silhouettes. He'd applied for a transfer because he'd grown weary of dealing with all that violence on the city streets, and moving to the country had seemed like a good idea at the time. His wife, Ann, endorsed this view by saying how much better it would be for the children, who settled into village life as if they'd lived there all their lives. But he didn't think he'd ever get used to this night duty. It was too dark in the country at night, with vast acres of emptiness everywhere, and the perpetual silence was more than he could stand.
The silence was suddenly punctuated by the hoot of an owl that shot through his senses like a bullet. Harris stopped dead in his tracks, straining to catch the reassuring sound of his colleagues cracking branches and rustling leaves underfoot, but even this audible contact quickly faded away.
The darkness seemed like an impenetrable barrier, his torchlight like a thin needle of light floating in oblivion. Branches creaked overhead, and the ground rustled as if things were scampering passed. Rats? he wondered, trying hard not to imagine hoards of them rampaging through the weeds all around him. He moved on, cursing the trees, the owl, and the imaginary vermin, wishing he'd never left the city despite its escalating crime. He liked the city, liked working in a concrete metropolis where danger lurked behind every corner and tramps vomited all over his shoes. At least there were lights and people everywhere. Here there was nothing. Not even the full moon could penetrate the thick canopy overhead.
He tried not to admit it, but he was afraid. He, an experienced police constable who tackled violent thugs and controlled seething crowds of football hooligans, a father who told his young son there were no monsters under the bed, felt fear lift up the hairs on the back of his neck. Some small animal ran across his path, and he only just managed to stop himself from screaming out loud.
'Get a grip, man,' he whispered to himself.
The path meandered around a sharp bend and veered back towards the road. Harris sighed and launched himself straight ahead into the undergrowth - the rodents lair - praying that the rats were friendly and wouldn't be too pissed about his invasion of their territory.
With head lowered, he made his way through the vegetation, pushing through leaves that looked like huge cabbages and trying, with some success, to pick out tree roots and foot-tripping clods of weeds with his torch. He glanced up, planning the route ahead, and thought he saw something move, thought he saw a fleeting shadow disappear behind a tree to his right. Holding his breath and listening to the throbbing silence, Harris quickly cast his torchbeam from one gnarled tree trunk to the next, convinced something ducked behind each of them before his light arrived.
'Some animal,' he muttered, 'It's just some animal.'
But, feeling nervous and tense, he wasn't able to convince himself that it was an animal foraging for food in the middle of the night. Were deer nocturnal? he wondered. Did the forest harbour any of those big cats he'd read about in the newspapers?
Were badgers vicious?
Tentatively, Harris moved forward, casting his light from left to right, right to left, like a manic white pendulum. So intent was he on illuminating all of his surroundings at once, he didn't check his path. His feet suddenly encountered a ledge, and subconscious instinct was the only thing that saved him from stepping out into nothingness. The weeds and the ground fell away at his toes, and he found himself perched on the edge of a steep precipice.
'Bloody hell!'
He carefully leaned forward and peered down the shaft of torchlight which barely penetrated the darkness below. A foul stench rose up from the depths; a rotting, acrid smell that caught in the back of his throat and made him cough. Groaning, he raised a hand to his face and imagined some dead animal decomposing nearby.
Then another smell assaulted him. That of smouldering, of something singed, like the smell of burnt ozone when an electric fuse blows out only stronger, much stronger. And, as his eyes focused, he saw wisps of grey smoke curling up through his beam of light. There was definitely something burning down there. The plane? The crashed aircraft?
Harris' heartbeat pounded, and a surge of adrenaline increased his excitement. 'HEY, SARGE!' he yelled out, 'I'VE FOUND IT!'
A distant voice cried, 'Where are you?'
'OVER HERE. THIS WAY.' Harris saw threads of light weaving their way through the forest behind him, followed by the sound of bodies crashing through the undergrowth. 'QUICK, HURRY UP. I'M OVER HERE.' He waved his torch towards them. 'I THINK IT'S ON FIRE. I CAN SMELL BURNING BUT I CAN'T SEE ANY - '
A bright blue light suddenly exploded all around him, silencing Harris as effectively as a hand clamped over his mouth. Night instantly turned into day. He spun around, and was stunned to see a luminous object rising up from the bottom of the chasm. His body tingled and turned rigid as he gazed at the enormous sphere. Its brilliance burned his eyes, its circumference defied his comprehension. He could move, couldn't blink, could hardly breath.
Harris fell to his knees with his mouth hanging wide and his eyes unable to tear themselves away from the glowing object even though it hurt to look at it. The radiant ball rose slowly and without sound. Harris vaguely heard someone call out his name, but the voice seemed to come from far, far away.
The sphere levelled with him and hung motionless in the air not two metres from where he squatted in the dirt. It seemed to be looking at him, studying him, accepting his reverence like some magnificent deity. The sight of it filled Harris' vision and his mind. He was aware of an intense heat burning his face, penetrating the thick material of his uniform and washing over his flesh like hot syrup, but the discomfort was nothing compared to the awesome terror which kept him pinned to the ground.
The seconds stretched into timelessness, and then the sphere slowly began to rise, increasing its speed smoothly and silently. Its enormity diminished only slightly as it crashed through overhanging branches and opened up a path to the skies above. A falling mass of wood and foliage cascaded down upon Harris' head, and his paralysis finally broke when a thick branch whipped across the side of his face and thudded heavily onto the ground beside him.
He hauled in a lungful of scorched air, and screamed, 'SARGE!'
His eyes stayed glued to the round light as it shrank deep into the cloudless sky, becoming a second moon, a bright star, and finally a pinprick quickly swallowed by the heavens.
'Harris? Harris, where are you?'
'He's over here, sarge,' Williams called out, reaching Harris first.
Harris was still on his knees, arms limp at his sides and his mouth hanging open. He was surrounded by twigs and branches, and his startled face stared straight up at a hole in the leafy canopy.
'What happened?' the sergeant asked.
Harris didn't answer, didn't move. The sergeant shone his torch at him, and saw that the constable's face was red raw and blistered.
'Harris?'
Harris turned his head to look at the sergeant with wide, blank eyes. His lips moved and struggled to form words. His voice, when it finally came, was thin and cracked. 'Light,' he gasped. 'Huge light.'
'We saw it through the trees. What was it?'
'Huge ... light.'
'Where is it now? Where did it go? Harris, listen to me. Where was it and where did it go?'
Harris raised his face and resumed his inspection of the sky. The sergeant sighed and placed a hand on his shoulder.
'What's the matter with him?' Williams asked..
The sergeant shook his head. He tilted the radio attached to his lapel, and said, 'D7 to control.'
'Why is he all burned up like that?' Williams persisted.
'Go ahead, sarge,' the radio crackled.
'Ambulance required on north-east side of Simmonds hill. PC Harris has received ... ' He glanced again at Harris, at the blood raw skin stretched and split across his face and the red gashes on his cracked lips. ' ... Third-degree burns,' he said, avoiding Williams questioning gaze, 'Requires urgent medical attention.'
'Right away, sarge,' the radio crackled. 'Any other casualties?'
'None found, as yet, but we'll keep looking for any survivors. Jesus!' he said to Williams, 'What is that smell?'
Both men swung their torchlights around, searching for something dead on the ground nearby. The sergeant stayed by Harris as Williams moved towards the edge of the precipice.
'It's coming from down there, sarge.'
Gripping his nose tightly between finger and thumb, Williams leaned forwards and peered down into the dark chasm.
'Sarge!' he said, quickly stepping back, 'Sarge, I think there's something down there.'
* * *
They went to bed soon after. Within minutes of snuggling down under the covers like two fleshy spoons, Clive heard something driving down the lane outside the cottage. Thinking it might be more police cars, or one of the cars he'd seen earlier returning to the station (and he could phone to find out what was going on), he threw back the covers and hurried to the window.
It was just an ordinary car, its headlights cutting through the darkness and rising up Simmonds hill as if it were a plane taking off.
The bedsprings squeaked. 'Come back to bed,' Patsy urged, her voice groggy from the pill she had taken.
'In a minute, love.'
'What are you looking at, anyway?'
'Nothing.'
'Interesting nothing, is it?'
'No, not really.'
'Then come back to bed.'
'I will in a little while. You go to sleep.'
She rolled over noisily. Clive continued to stare out of the window, seeing nothing except blackness and the pinpricks of light from distant stars. It seemed unusually quiet out there tonight. Was it always this quiet? He'd never noticed before, never had cause to notice or had his nerves so on edge before. He thought anything normal would seem sinister tonight.
Maybe it was just his imagination, but the atmosphere did feel strangely charged and heavy with anticipation; like the calm before a bad thunderstorm, like the very air he breathed was waiting for something (bad?) to happen. He couldn't shake off the feeling of expectancy, of dread. It was as if the whole world had taken a deep breath and was holding it, waiting.
He stared out of the window with that inexplicable fear throbbing through his veins. It was a fear he'd only experienced once before, when his younger brother had slipped over the edge of a cliff on a family trip to the seaside. He vividly remembered lying down on the cliff's edge, crying and screaming and trying to reach out for Thomas's white knuckled fingers whilst the salty wind tossed his hair and battered against his face. He could remember that feeling of absolute terror as he waited and waited for what seemed like forever for his dad to come and rescue Thomas before Thomas lost his grip and fell to his death.
He had that same terror now, subdued beneath the surface but just waiting to burst forth and overwhelm him as it had done when he was twelve years old.
Why? Why did he feel that way now?
Clive realised he was breathing fast and heavy, steaming up the glass. He sat down on the wide windowledge and peered through a clear pane, trying to piece his scrambled thoughts together as Patsy murmured quietly in her sleep.
He couldn't stop thinking about Thomas, about how he'd been unable to reach out to him as he dangled above the frothing sea, about how he'd tasted tears on his tongue and salt on his lips as the wind blew the sea-mist into his face and howled like laughter in his ears.
He'd been helpless then, and he felt helpless now. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself, he knew that what they'd seen slashing an erratic path across the sky earlier hadn't been a helicopter or a plane. He wanted, so desperately, to believe it had been something normal, but it wouldn't slot comfortably in his mind.
So, he asked himself now, for the millionth time, what could it have been? A UFO, as Patsy claimed? An alien spacecraft? A flying saucer?
'Ridiculous!' he said out loud. He didn't believe in flying saucers, in life after death, or ESP or God or anything he couldn't see with his own eyes or touch with his own hands.
Only he had seen it. An inexplicable light in the sky, a light travelling at incredible speed and crashing behind the hill at the foot of their garden.
And Leo hadn't liked it. And Patsy had been so edgy about it, which was unusual for her as she never got worked up about anything.
No, he told himself, shaking his head clear. There had to be a perfectly rational explanation for what they had seen, he was sure of it. He just didn't know what the perfectly rational explanation was. Yet.
Clive sat on the windowledge for a long time, trying to ignore an uneasiness that refused to be ignored, to dismiss a fear that wouldn't be dismissed. He was tired, that was the problem, he decided. He should go to bed, forget all about it, leave the thing alone and fall over the blindingly obvious answer in the morning. Things were always so much clearer in the calm light of day. Those enormous problems that kept you awake all night usually shrivelled into insignificance by dawn. He should go to sleep. But he was too tense to sleep, and the longer he stayed awake, the tenser he became.
Clive looked back at the dark shape of the bed in the room, and sighed heavily. The last thing he felt like doing was going to bed and going to sleep. Insomnia had obviously found a home for the night. He considered taking a couple of Patsy's pills, but couldn't be bothered to move off the ledge to get them.
He looked out of the window. A bat fluttered passed, startling him. He watched the shadow of its wings circling over the garden, and then his mind flashed up the question, Are you sure its a bat?
'No, its a flying pink elephant,' he scoffed.
What was it he'd read in one of Patsy's magazines? Some people who claim to have been abducted by aliens often dreamed about owls, or tigers, or some other animal, to block out their real experience. But that, he thought, was assuming aliens existed in the first place, which he didn't believe, so the thought was pointless, as were most of his thoughts at that late hour.
The bat flew up towards the window again. Dracula, he thought, grinning. Dracula is coming to claim me, or Patsy. If I had the choice I'd go for Patsy, but who knows, maybe my blood is better.
Flapflapflapflapflapflap.
Yes, any moment now he's going to perch on the outside ledge and turn into Christopher Lee. Wonder if there's any garlic in the kitchen, or an ancient crucifix hidden in the -
The bat crashed into the window right in front of Clive's face. Clive was so stunned by its sudden close proximity and by the sight of its leathery wings splayed momentarily against the glass, that he cried out in alarm.
'What is it?' Patsy gasped.
'Nothing,' he said, as calmly as he could manage with his heart thumping madly in his chest. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you.'
'I wasn't asleep.'
'Try taking another sleeping tablet.'
'They're not sleeping tablets, they're mild sedatives.'
'Take another sedative, then.'
'It wouldn't help, not with you moping around the bedroom like a lost ghost. What was that noise, anyway?'
'Me, acting stupid,' Clive said.
'No, the other noise, like something hitting the window.'
'It was just a bat.'
There was a prolonged pause. Clive thought she had drifted off again, until she mumbled, 'Bats don't usually fly into windows, do they?'
So she was playing Is This Normal game, too.
'The wind blew it,' he said.
'What wind? I don't hear any wind?'
'Go back to sleep.'
'I can't!' He heard her bouncing around in the bed, followed by a long drawn-out sigh. 'What are you looking at out there, Clive?'
'Nothing much. Just a couple of green Martians running amok in the garden. Oh no!'
'What?'
'They're eating your clematis!'
'That's not funny, Clive,' she snapped. 'You have a very sick sense of humour.'
'Sorry. I just thought you might want to know about our back garden being invaded by little green men, that's all.'
'Stop it!' A pillow came winging its way across the room, splatting softly against the wall and missing him by miles.
'Sorry, sorry,' he laughed. 'You're so touchy.'
'I'm tired, Clive.'
'Then go to sleep. And don't you worry about a thing, I'll find a way to destroy them before they take over the world - '
A second pillow hit its mark and wrapped its pliable body around the back of his head, pounding his forehead against the window.
'Did that hurt?' Patsy asked.
'Yes.'
'Good. Now come to bed.'
'Give me three good reasons why I should sleep with such a nasty, pillow-tossing woman,' Clive asked.
'Because I'm cold and lonely and in desperate need of a cuddle.'
He smiled, and was about to slide off the windowledge when something snagged the corner of his eye. A flickering. A movement.
A light.
He swung back, squinting his eyes to peer through the glass and moving his head when his breath misted up a pane.
'Clive?'
Above Simmonds hill, a single blue light rose high into the sky.
'Clive?'
He stared at it cutting a straight path up into the heavens, and watched it vanish amongst the stars.
'Clive!'
He turned away, his mind racing as he clambered back into bed and took Patsy's soft body in his arms. He lay there, awake and confused, rigid with the fear that had exploded within him like molten larva.
It wasn't the same light.
He knew, on some instinctive level and without a shadow of a doubt, that the light he'd just seen was not the same light they'd witnessed earlier.
