by Ross Welford
Next to me on the pub’s worn sofa, Mam gripped my hand so hard that it hurt, but I said nothing.
The police sergeant said, ‘Mrs Tait, I’d like to take Ethan back to the path where Tammy’s bike was found. Do you have someone here with you?’
‘I’ll stay with her,’ said Gran. ‘More tea, Mel?’ she asked. ‘Or would you prefer something a little stronger?’
Mam nodded.
Outside, I got into the police car. A few minutes later, and we were bumping along the road that I had cycled along earlier. A group of people were standing by the overgrown entrance to the path, and the sergeant got out of the car and walked towards them.
‘Thank you, everybody. Kindly move away. We are securing this area for evidence. Please do not touch anything.’
‘Too late for that, sarge,’ said the policeman. He pointed to a man with a short white beard and a green camouflage jacket who was holding on to Tammy’s bike.
‘Please put that down, sir. We may need to collect fingerprints or other evidence.’
The man put it down roughly and it clattered on the ground.
I wanted to say, ‘Hey, be careful’, but people were already firing questions at the sergeant.
‘Any news, officer?’
‘Are there more police arriving?’
‘Will there be a search of the area?’
The sergeant tried her best to ignore them politely, and the two officers led me down the dark path, each of them holding a torch to light the way. But before we made it down to the little beach, a loud and angry snarling sound made us stop in our tracks. Then we heard the rustling undergrowth, and footsteps running towards us, and another bark.
‘Sheba! Sheba!’ came an angry voice from ahead of us, but it was too late and the dog stopped in front of us, growling.
I shrank back behind the policeman, but he was shrinking back as well.
The sergeant stood her ground and shouted into the darkness, ‘Call your dog off! This is the police!’
From the shadows a man appeared: the same man who had been holding Tammy’s bicycle, yelling, ‘Sheba! Come! Sheba! Sheba! She-baaa! Come!’
Eventually, the dog stopped growling and turned and joined the man. We all seemed to breathe out at the same time.
‘Sorry about that,’ said the man. ‘She’s a bit—’
The sergeant interrupted him. ‘Will you put that dog on a lead, please, sir?’ she said sharply. When the man hesitated, she added, ‘Now, please.’
It was a big German Shepherd, with a scar on its face and a patchy tail, and it sat while the man attached a length of string around its collar. I knew the man, sort of. Geoff something-or-other. He’s the security guard at the observatory on the top moor. He comes into the pub sometimes with another man who is his son.
‘Any news about the lass?’ said Geoff. ‘We came down here to look for ’er.’
We had emerged on to the little beach, where Geoff’s son was standing smoking a cigarette. I was still keeping a wary eye on the dog, who was pulling on her string lead.
‘No, sir,’ said the younger officer. ‘And this is now a secure area. We’ll have to ask you to leave and not to touch anything.’ He took out his notepad. ‘May I ask your names, please?’
The man who had been smoking threw his cigarette butt into the water, where it landed with a little hiss. He exhaled a plume of smoke and said, ‘Why do you need our names?’
The sergeant looked at him quizzically. ‘Just routine, sir. Is there a problem?’
Geoff shot his son a glance and said, ‘No problem at all, officer. We’re happy to help. My name is Geoffrey Mackay. G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y. Stop it, Sheba! This is also Geoffrey Mackay, Junior …’
He carried on giving his details and I moved away a few metres along the shore towards a rickety wooden jetty that extended a few metres over the water. That’s when I saw it, lying upside down on the black shingle, half submerged by the water.
The loose label from the present I had wrapped. On it was written: Miss Sheila Osborne.
This next bit is super sad. I’m just saying that to warn you because there is almost nothing worse than reading about someone else’s agony.
Dad, Mam, Gran and I were in total terror about Tammy that night as Christmas Eve tipped over into Christmas Day and all of the usual celebrations stopped. I don’t think anybody slept much. By 2am more police had arrived from Hexham.
By the time it was light, which was about eight o’clock, a huge group of people had gathered in the car park of the Stargazer, and were being coordinated by a police inspector in uniform and a man from Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue, who had turned up with twelve volunteers. They had all come out to help on a Christmas Day morning.
There was a Mountain Rescue Land Rover full of equipment. The two Geoffs were there as well, and Sheba was snarling at three well-behaved Mountain Rescue collies in high-vis jackets.
At one point, the permanent hubbub of the bar room died down completely and there was a silence, eventually broken by the pealing of the little village church’s solitary bell summoning people to celebrate Christmas morning. I thought about the vicar, Father Nick, looking out over the empty pews and wondering why nobody had turned up. (In fact, I saw him later. He had taken his vicar gear off and cancelled services in three other churches that he goes to just so he could join the search.)
The morning and the afternoon passed in a confused mash-up that combined periods of hope and activity. In the mid-morning we all spread out on the top moor and trudged through the snow with whistles and torches. Iggy joined us, and Gran in her winter running gear, and Cora; in fact, I think almost everyone in the village was involved in one way or another. They were kind: they didn’t intrude when Mam was crying, and told me, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll find her.’ The TV in the bar was turned off because virtually every channel was showing jolly Christmas stuff and nobody felt like it.
The weather up on the moors had worsened overnight. It had started to snow again, and everybody knew that that was not a good thing. If Tammy had somehow wandered off then she was not well equipped for a freezing night in the Northumbrian hills, even with her new puffer jacket.
That, however, was not the worst of our fears. There were worse options that nobody wanted to say out loud in case saying them out loud would somehow make them come true.
That afternoon, when we would normally be watching a funny film and eating sweets, I sat with Mam in the bar with its Christmas decorations and switched-off tree lights which suddenly looked like the saddest, most pointless things the world. We looked out of the pub window, which Tammy and I had sprayed with fake snow a couple of weeks earlier, and we watched as the people who run the sailing school on the other side of the reservoir pulled into the driveway with a small boat on a trailer with an outboard engine.
We knew what that meant. We knew it meant there was a possibility that Tammy had entered the water and not come out again. Drowned, in other words. Nobody needed to say anything, but when Mam collapsed in sobs, I did too, while Gran sat beside us and stared straight ahead, shaking her head sadly.
‘There’s shepherds’ huts up on the moors, you know,’ said Gran eventually. ‘They’re a bit further from where we searched. Perhaps Tammy …’
‘The Natrass boys have been up there already on their quad bikes,’ said Mam, flatly.
I thought the most likely thing – but I could hardly bear to imagine it – was that Tammy had been kidnapped. But why? I could not work it out, and I don’t think Mam could either.
Hours passed …
The Mountain Rescue teams returned …
The police continued to make enquiries and more police cars arrived, and a police Land Rover …
An ambulance turned up in case they found Tammy and she needed treatment …
Christmas Day stretched into a long evening. Dad came back with some of the people from Mountain Rescue and poured them all whiskies at the bar to warm them up. He had one himself,
and then another, and another. When it got late, some people drifted back to their houses and their elderly relatives, and their ruined Christmas dinners, and their little children who had not been told what had happened so as not to spoil their day.
And that day sort of stumbled into the next day, and I found myself playing a part in a drama that I had seen enacted before on TV, only this time it was real.
The pub was turned into an HQ. There were Come Back, Tammy posters printed and put up everywhere from Carlisle to Newcastle. Ted from the B & B, whose brother was a printer in Hexham, got a load of T-shirts made, amazingly fast, with Tammy’s face on them, and people wore them over their thick fleeces when we held a vigil outside the church.
Tea lights spelled out TAMMY on the ground, and people brought flowers and cuddly toys. The older kids from the school taxi-bus started singing Tammy’s favourite Christmas song, an oldie by a singer called Felina who died years ago. It’s supposed to be a funny song that goes like this:
‘Do-do-do-do-do the Chicken Hop!
Da-da-da-da-dance like you can’t stop!
Do-do-do the Chicken Hop this Christmas!’
Father Nick joined in, but it sounded completely wrong, even without the silly actions that go with it. I couldn’t sing along with them because I was too sad to sing a happy song, so I just stood and watched, massively aware that everyone was looking at me but trying to look as though they weren’t.
Soon (soon? It felt like a decade), four agonising days had gone past, and Tammy was still missing.
And still I felt, deep inside me, so deep inside me that I couldn’t even know if the feeling was real, that Tammy was alive. Somewhere.
Then, four days into our ordeal, Iggy Fox-Templeton came to the door with his fishing rod, trying to be normal, and everything got even less normal, if that was even possible. For that was when we met Hellyann: the strange, smelly creature who said she knew where Tammy was, and that we had to tell no one.
I wasn’t at all sure what to do, and I’m not sure you would have been either.
All right, do you want the long story of how I came to Earth, or the short story?
I shall give you the short story. The long story you will have to pick up along the way. Assuming we get there – at present there are no guarantees.
Anyway, here is the short story.
I, Hellyann, am eleven years old, and from another planet to yours. (I know, I know: it will all become clearer later. This is the short version, remember?)
I live in a world where human beings like you (but not like me, for I am not a ‘human being’) are exhibited in zoos. I think this is wrong for so many reasons and I must do what I can to put it right.
And that is how I ended up crossing the universe with two boys and a chicken.
A Note on the Translation
I wrote my part of this story in my native language and it was translated into English by Philip.
I now know that Anthallan does not sound much like a human language. To you, it sounds more like a series of grunts and squeaks and sniffs. My Earth friend Ignatius Fox-Templeton (Iggy) told me I sound like ‘a pug being strangled’ and he and Ethan Tait did not stop laughing for forty-two seconds.
Where the exact word does not exist, Philip, a robot, has tried to choose the nearest equivalent word so as not to interrupt the flow of the story.
(By the way, he is not a metal robot that walks around with a face and flashing lights. He is more … Well, you will find out.)
We are like you in many, many ways. For a start, we look quite like you. Not exactly like you, but still rather similar.
I have two legs, two arms and a head, and I walk upright. I also have a tail, but that is not really important.
It is hard, however, not to focus on the ways we are different.
So let us get the basics out of the way, shall we?
I suppose the main thing is that we are much, much more intelligent than you are. I am sorry if that seems rude, but it is a fact, and facts are important. To us, you are about as intelligent as Iggy’s pet chicken. That is why most people think it is all right to keep you in a zoo.
My home – my planet – is so far away from you that if I were to write out the number of kilometres it would take the rest of this page. Starting with 950 and following it with zero after zero, like this:
950,000,000,000,000,000,000 …
… and so on to the end of the page and maybe beyond. Of course, writing it out implies that there is only distance between us, but we do not calculate it like that. We measure both distance and time (they are related, as your Albert Einstein pointed out more than a hundred years go), plus a quantum-dimensional shift that enables us to ‘travel faster than the speed of light’, although we do not, not really. It is a dimension thing that, so far, is beyond your understanding. To be honest, I am not completely certain I understand it myself, although I do not usually admit this.
Think of it like this: can you explain to me how your ‘televisions’ work? I thought not. Intra-universal Shift is like that to me. I am happy to accept that it works, and to use it, without knowing all of the details.
Our world is clean. We have access to limitless energy that does not pollute.
It is conflict-free. We fight no wars because we have everything we want, and the Advisor makes all the decisions on behalf of everyone.
It is disease-free – and has been even since before the Big Burn, the planet-wide fire that raged for decades and killed almost everything.
We are the only creatures that inhabit it: the last ‘animals’ were almost all successfully eradicated centuries ago and those that were not perished in the Big Burn. The functions that some lower creatures performed (such as digesting waste products or enabling crop growth) have since been carried out efficiently, safely and hygienically by synthetic robots.
Compared with you, we are short-lived (thirty years, as defined by the revolution of your Earth around your sun, is very old, and is the practical limit of our bodies).
At eleven years old, then, I have lived about a third of my life. I finished school at seven, and I live independently.
So, at eleven years old, I am really – as you would say – ‘grown up’.
It was as a ‘grown-up’, then, that I found myself coming to your planet. To a small settlement on an island called Britain.
This was a dangerous idea. Not because of the Intra-universal Shift (what I believe you call ‘space travel’). That is unremarkable although prohibited by the Advisor. No, it is the reason I was coming that was dangerous.
You see, I had what you would call a ‘mission’.
A highly risky mission to rescue a girl from a human zoo on my planet, a gazillion-illion miles from Earth (that is a number made up by Iggy) and take her home.
If I failed – that is, if I was caught – I would be put to sleep for most of the rest of my life. Not only that, but the human being, in her miserable enclosure, would die in misery, and her parents and brother would live in misery, and that was not something I was willing to let happen.
And it was all because I have a heart: a heart which gives me feelings.
All of which makes it a shame that I did fail to rescue the girl, and ended up travelling to Earth alone.
You see, my mission did not get off to a good start …
I ached everywhere.
I had been well strapped in, but the first impact with the lake surface had jolted my neck hard. A water landing had not been the original plan. In fact, very little of what had happened had been in the original plan.
In the original plan, for example, I should have had a human girl, Ta-mee, next to me in the craft. I looked across at the empty space where she should have been and winced at the pain in my neck.
Still, I was alive.
The craft had stopped, and was floating, which I was relieved about. I know, it was designed to float but – as I had discovered – things can go wrong, and I did not like the idea of suffocating to dea
th in the craft on the bottom of this lake.
So not only was I alive, but the craft was floating, and I was sitting upright, breathing hard. So it was not all bad. Loosening the buckles around my legs and chest, I took a few moments to assess the damage. I started with my feet, wiggling all twelve toes in turn, then my ankles, knees, and so on up to my neck and down my arms and tail.
Nothing broken, but everything sore.
Next, I scanned the cabin interior. The large panel windows were whited out: I could not see out of them. There was a small instrument panel on my left which appeared to have been knocked out by the impact, but I was not very certain what most of the things meant anyway. Perhaps my copilot could help.
‘Philip?’ I said.
Philip did not respond, and I felt a surge of anxiety.
‘Philip?’ I asked again, and I hit some of the light panels more or less randomly, and completely ineffectively. Still, the instrument panel flickered to life, somewhat reluctantly.
CENTRAL POWER: 0.5%
(It did not actually say 0.5%. That is what you might call ‘Earth maths’ and we do not use percentages, even though they are fine for your purposes.)
But half a per cent was not good.
VI OPERATIVE
That was better news. The Visual Inhibitor was working, which meant the craft could not be seen from the outside, assuming Earth eyes operate more or less like ours (and we think they do, apart from this thing you have called ‘colour’).
‘Philip, clear the front screen.’
The front screen remained whited out.
‘Internal repair under way. Please wait.’ There was a pause and a bleep, then: ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area.’
‘What? Philip!’ I was both pleased and relieved to hear Philip speaking to me, but there was clearly an error somewhere in his voice system. I looked around the craft: where was the ‘bagging area’?
