The Kid Who Came From Space

by Ross Welford

  ‘Yes, now!’ I shouted.

  People had noticed, and one or two nudged one another and stopped singing. I had no choice. I grabbed the lid of the piano and slammed it down on the keys while Iggy’s mum yelped and pulled her hands out just in time. There was a loud bang as the lid shut, a rattling of Cora’s bangles, and Suzy ruffled her feathers in disapproval. A few seconds later, the singing wound down.

  ‘Ethan! What on earth …’ began Mam, pushing her way towards me, but I wasn’t listening.

  Instead I turned to everyone in the bar and said, ‘Tammy’s gone missing! Her bike’s by the side of the road but I can’t find her anywhere.’

  A murmur went around the bar. Someone at the back who hadn’t heard me said, ‘Oi! What’s happened to the music?’ and someone else said, ‘Shhh!’

  Then Dad, who was dressed as a toy soldier, came from behind the bar and held his hands up. ‘All right, all right,’ he said calmly. ‘What’s going on? Ethan?’

  And so I told him again what had happened, and how I’d called for Tammy and how her bike lights were still on, and how Scottish Sheila hadn’t seen her. It was all spilling out of me so fast that twice Dad had to say, ‘Steady on, son. Slow down.’

  Then I looked at Mam, and as our eyes met, I had never seen a person look so fearful. The colour had drained from her face: she was a ghostly grey.

  Two minutes later, the bar was emptying as people ran to the car park and got in their cars.

  ‘You take the forestry trail, Jack!’

  ‘I’ll go up the north road – come with me, Jen.’

  ‘Did she have a phone with her?’

  ‘Has anyone called the police?’

  ‘Meet back here in half an hour, yeah?’

  ‘Have you got my number? Call me if you find her!’

  … and so on. It seemed as though the whole village leapt into action, with cars going in different directions.

  Dad seemed to be coordinating things, or at least trying to, but it was all pretty hectic. I was sort of caught in the middle of it without having anything to do. Gran was pulling on her running shoes and a head torch: she said she would run her regular forest path that a car couldn’t go up. And through the chaos I looked across the bar to see Iggy sitting on the piano stool, his eyebrows practically knitted together with worry, his hands twisting his cap in front of him. His mum, Cora, stood next to him, looking forlorn in a red-and-white Santa hat.

  ‘Mel,’ said Dad to Mam, ‘why don’t you stay at home?’

  ‘No!’ protested Mam. ‘I’m coming to look for my daughter!’

  Dad looked at me next. ‘You OK to stay, Ethan? In case she comes back here?’ He glanced over at Cora Fox-Templeton and they exchanged a look that somehow left Cora in charge as the ‘responsible adult’.

  She nodded and the bell on her hat jingled.

  ‘Keep your phones on. Don’t leave the pub,’ said Dad, pulling on a coat over his soldier outfit. ‘We’ll let you know when we have found her.’

  When. I liked that.

  And so it was that Iggy, his mum, his chicken and I went into the pub lounge to wait for Tammy while the search got under way.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. It’s not as if I knew either of them all that well.

  Eventually, Iggy said, ‘They found my father.’

  I looked at him quizzically.

  ‘He went missing when I was little. He was found two weeks later, living rough in London. So, you know …’

  ‘Is … is he OK?’ I said.

  His mum was looking out of the window, not seeming to listen.

  Iggy nodded. ‘Yes. He’s got another family now. But he’s coming to see me after Christmas, isn’t he, Cora?’

  Cora turned to him. ‘He said he’d try, Iggy. It’s a long way, and you know what he’s like.’

  Iggy looked downcast, and I was embarrassed, so I took out my phone and tried to call Tammy for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Hi, this is Tammy. I’m not here so please leave me a message!’

  The worst thoughts were going through my head. She’s been kidnapped. She’s been killed …

  But I still could not think of who would do that, or how.

  So I told them both the story again. I left out no details this time. I told them about going down the path, and hearing a humming noise and seeing a column of mist …

  They listened, and nodded thoughtfully. Then my phone went and I saw that it was Mam calling. I tried to tell myself not to hope for good news. But just as I had imagined Tammy would come out of the woods fastening her jeans, I could not help wishing it would be Mam saying, ‘We’ve found her’.

  Instead it was: ‘No news. We’re coming back. The police are coming and will want to speak to you, Ethan.’

  I was looking at Iggy – when he heard the word ‘police’, he kind of flinched. I knew already it was bad. But that was when I was certain.

  Iggy Fox-Templeton. He’s about to be a big part of this story. I ended up getting much closer to him than I ever thought I would – or even should.

  He is ‘the kid who set fire to the school’. Except I was there and he didn’t. It’s just that ‘the kid who set fire to a litter bin’ doesn’t sound as good.

  According to Mam and Dad, he is ‘a bad influence’, because of that thing with him stealing crisps from the pub storage shed. Dad told his mum, who didn’t seem very concerned. Dad didn’t do anything more about it because we were new to the village and he says a new pub landlord can’t go around making enemies. ‘And he calls his mum Cora, for heaven’s sake,’ said Dad with a sneer. ‘Mad old hippy would be closer’ – and Mam tutted at him and told him not to be so mean.

  I’ve only been at the school since September, but Iggy has either truanted or been suspended from school so many times already that he’s pretty much never there.

  And most recently he set fire to the bin in the east playground.

  It wasn’t serious. No one was hurt, although I suppose they could have been, and he’d have got away with it if Nadia Kowalski hadn’t split on him. He had already made an enemy of her, though, so she was out for revenge.

  It all started in a physics lesson with Mr Springham. He was going on about the refraction of light. Or reflection. Or both – I can’t remember. All I do remember is that Iggy had moved himself to the front and was watching, fascinated, as Mr Springham used a glass flask of water to bend a beam of light into a single point. He even wrote something in his notebook, which I had never seen him do before.

  The next day he was sitting behind me on the school taxi-bus.

  Tammy was in the seat in front of me, next to Nadia Kowalski. There’s about six other regulars on the bus and I don’t actually know them much: they’re in different years and they were either chatting to one another or playing music or on their phones.

  ‘Greetings, Tait,’ Iggy said, leaning over my seat. This was in October, a few months after we had moved to Kielder and I kind of knew him a bit. Apart from Tammy, he’s the only other kid near my age in the village. He’s older than me and Tam by a year or so, but is still in Year Seven because he’s missed so much school.

  ‘Wanna see my Death Ray?’ he whispered, casting a sidelong glance at Tammy and Nadia.

  Without waiting for me to answer (I was going to say ‘yes’ anyway – I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a Death Ray, whatever it might turn out to be?), he shuffled past me to sit next to the window.

  ‘Promise you won’t say anything?’ he said.

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ I said without thinking.

  Then he took off his glasses and said, ‘Wait till we stop.’

  It was really warm that day: more like August than October. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A few minutes later, the taxi-bus stopped at the end of a farm lane, and we knew we’d be waiting because the girl who lives there is nearly always a minute or two late. The driver turned off the engine and everything was still. Iggy fumbled in his bag and brought out a small, round gl
ass flask exactly like the one Mr Springham had used in his ‘bending light’ demo.

  ‘Hey, is that …?’ I began.

  ‘Shh. I’ve just borrowed it. Watch.’

  He held the flask against the bus window, then took his glasses off with his other hand, moving them to and fro near the bottle.

  The sun shone through the bottle and the thick lenses of his specs, and formed a sort of long triangle of light on the back of the seat in front of us, with a brighter circle at the top of the triangle. As Iggy angled his glasses into the light, the circle became a sharp point of brightness, which he controlled by moving his glasses about. Slowly, he moved the point of light until it cleared the seat back and rested on the neck of Nadia Kowalski.

  ‘It’s physics,’ whispered Iggy, like he was suddenly an expert. ‘The lens of my specs concentrates the sun’s light into a central point which will become very hot. Watch.’

  We didn’t have to wait long. Only a few seconds later, Nadia squealed ‘Oww!’ and her hand shot up to her neck. She looked left at Tammy, and then back at us.

  Iggy had put his glasses back on and was drinking water from the flask.

  ‘Did you … did you just …?’

  Iggy and I looked at each other, and then back at Nadia, our faces composed in expressions of wide-eyed innocence.

  ‘What?’ we said together, and she turned back.

  On her neck I could make out a tiny burn-mark from Iggy’s ‘Death Ray’. Also from her neck, I could tell she was blushing furiously because everyone had turned around to look when she squealed, including a boy called Damian from Year Nine who everybody knows Nadia is crazy about.

  With a cruel smirk, Iggy got ready for another go, slipping off his glasses and holding them up, but at that moment, the bus’s engine started again. The vibration of the bus made it impossible to hold the point of the Death Ray steady.

  But he wasn’t going to give up. Twenty minutes later, we had arrived at the school gates. The engine went off, and everybody stood up.

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Maureen, the driver, who always refused to open the doors until she’d completed some form she had to fill in on a clipboard.

  Iggy seized his moment, whipped off his specs, and focused the Death Ray on the back of Nadia’s knee.

  She wasn’t moving and the point of light was sharp and bright. She was actually talking to Damian Whatsisname and flicking her hair when, suddenly, she shrieked loudly.

  ‘Aaaaaaow!!’ The stack of books in her hands fell to the floor, and everyone stared as she bent down to rub her leg.

  As she bent, she headbutted Damian in the chest, knocking him into the kids behind him and causing Maureen to shout, ‘Watch it, you’s lot!’

  I managed to keep a straight face, but Iggy couldn’t. He was spluttering with laughter.

  Eventually, we filed off the bus, and heard Damian saying to his mates, ‘What a weirdo she is!’ easily loud enough for Nadia to hear.

  Tammy sidled up to me. ‘That was mean of you,’ she said, but I think she was trying not to smile.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘It was Iggy’s Death Ray.’

  Tammy shook her head and tutted. ‘She’ll get him back. Just you wait.’

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  At break, Iggy hangs out with some older boys, although I don’t think they like him much because I heard them mocking his accent once when he wasn’t there. Anyway, after lunch I was walking through the east playground and there was a group – mainly boys, some girls – gathered in the top corner. I recognised one or two of them as being Iggy’s so-called friends.

  I heard Iggy’s voice say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: behold the mighty power of the Death Ray!’

  There was a long pause.

  I heard someone say, ‘Come on, get on with it.’

  Then someone else said, ‘Hey, look!’

  There was a cheer, followed by a plume of smoke rising into the air, and then everybody started to run away from it. I saw Iggy putting his glasses back on and I knew what had happened. The contents of the wire-mesh litter bin were fully ablaze; heaven knows what was in it for it to go up so fast, but the hot weather must have made everything tinder-dry.

  As the crowd dispersed, though, I saw the flames flickering up to a wooden noticeboard with flaking paint and that had started to catch fire as well. I thought it best to make myself scarce and had sort of melted back into the crowd as Mr Springham strode at top speed towards the litter bin, holding a fire extinguisher.

  ‘WHO DID THAT? WHOEVER IS RESPONSIBLE WILL HAVE HELL TO PAY!’

  Nadia got her revenge by telling everyone about Iggy’s Death Ray, and how he had used it to set fire to the litter bin. It soon reached the ears of the teachers. It earned him another suspension from school, plus detentions and letters home for everyone who had watched and encouraged him. Of course, they were all furious about this and I don’t think it did Iggy’s already fragile popularity any good at all.

  And Iggy? I didn’t see him much after that, even though we live in the same village. I mean, we’d never exactly been besties anyway but Mam and Dad were hardly going to encourage me to hang out with him now, were they?

  Then shortly before Christmas, Tammy and I saw Iggy down by the jetty, and he had brought a chicken with him. Like, a live one.

  Tammy had declared that it was the annual final of Stones in the Lake. (Best of five games, loser buys the winner a muffin from the school tuck-shop.) It was two games each, and it was all down to my last throw. I drew my arm back, determined to win this one, and as I threw with all my strength I heard the shout, ‘SUZY!’ and it put me right off. I knew before my stone hit the water that I had lost and I swung round angrily to see who had shouted. Tammy was giggling like mad.

  ‘Who was …’ I began, and then I saw Iggy emerge from the path, followed by a small, ginger-coloured chicken. He was putting the chicken down then walking away and the chicken was staying put, just like a dog. Then he called, ‘Suzy, come!’ And the chicken got up and hopped over to him!

  Tammy said, ‘Awwww!’ like it was a cute kitten. Iggy saw us watching and came over. I was still cross about losing at Stones in the Lake, and I tutted quietly.

  ‘Chickens,’ he said. ‘Cleverer than you’d think, you know? Suzy: sit!’

  The chicken stopped and crouched down. Tammy gasped and gave a little clap.

  ‘Where did you get him?’ I said, warily.

  ‘Her,’ Iggy corrected. ‘My dad says I should have something to look after. You know, to make me “responsible”. He said he looked after chickens when he was in rehab.’ He added air quotes with his fingers and seemed completely unembarrassed about his dad. ‘As if! Anyway, I rescued her from old Tommy Natrass who didn’t want her cos she only lays teeny-tiny eggs. Don’t you, Suzy?’

  Suzy looked up at the mention of her name, just like a dog does. Tammy and I both laughed, and Tammy squeezed my arm and said, ‘Oh, that’s so cuuute!’ in a squeaky voice, and then hummed her favourite song ‘The Chicken Hop’ all the way home. That evening, Mam had made chicken pie for tea. Tam said she wasn’t hungry.

  So, that’s Iggy and Suzy. The next time I saw them was when I nearly broke his mum’s fingers with the piano lid.

  It was two hours after I had burst into the Stargazer with the news of Tammy’s disappearance. By now, lots of people were milling around and talking to each other or on their phones. Others, who had gone out in their cars to search the roads that head north to Scotland, or south to Hexham and every other direction, were coming back, shaking their heads sadly. Mam hugged me so hard and got me to tell her what I had seen yet again.

  Shortly afterwards, a police car pulled up on the driveway and two officers got out. I had already heard that the little police station in Bellingham, twenty miles away, had closed down for the Christmas break.

  I heard Dad talking to them in the entrance as they came through to the bar.

  ‘Yes, sir – we’ve driven up from Hexham.’

&
nbsp; ‘Only two of you?’ said Dad. He was still in his toy soldier outfit, but nobody mentioned it.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve, sir. Our staff are stretched, to be honest. But we’ve pulled in a highway patrol to help – they’ll be here soon. First thing is to establish what sort of a case we have here.’

  And so began the interviews that were to continue, on and off, for days. People were coming in and out, and Dad tried to manage it all. There were calls of ‘Any news?’, and the sound of people’s mobile phones pinging and ringing.

  Iggy and his mum had left with wishes of good luck, after Cora had sat with her eyes closed for a minute and meditated for ‘positive energy’ – which was nice of her, I guess, if a bit embarrassing.

  I sat with Gran in the pub lounge with the fire going as she took shaky sips of tea. I told the police officers everything and they wrote it down in their notebooks.

  Then I got to the bit about the noise by the water …

  ‘Wait, Ethan,’ said the woman officer who I had decided was quite nice. ‘Tell me again: why did you go down to the water?’

  I shrugged. ‘I just followed the path. I just … wondered. I was worried, scared for Tammy. And there was the noise.’

  I tried to imitate the noise for them, but I couldn’t really duplicate it. The two officers looked at each other, then wrote in their notebooks.

  ‘Speedboat?’ said the male officer to his colleague.

  She thought for a moment till I said, ‘It definitely wasn’t a speedboat.’

  ‘A drone, then?’

  I suppose it could have been a drone, I said, thinking who would be flying a drone in the dark?

  ‘All right. Thank you, Ethan,’ said the woman officer, standing up. She addressed her colleague. ‘Kareem, we’ll take the car and secure the path and the little beach with tape. That’s a potential crime scene.’ She spoke into her radio. ‘Mike Two Lima Bravo, any sign of that Traffic Patrol unit for the potential Miss-Per in Kielder?’

  ‘With you in estimated ten, sergeant,’ came the radio reply.

  Dad went out with another man in his car to search down by the maze. The maze is shut in the winter, but you could easily get in if you wanted to, though I had no idea why Tammy would want to do that.