by Paul Magrs
‘We sat up straight in bed, Mrs Adams and I, and we held hands, listening to this abominable racket. Annabel came from her room to sit with us. We three listened to the noise from downstairs … and the giggling. “Heeeee heeeee heeeeeee.”
‘I thought, if we kept still and didn’t draw attention, then they would forget we were there. After a while – we heard a closer sound. A footstep on the staircase. Then another, and another. We heard their fingers scratching at each of the doors in the hallway. And … at last the bedroom door. We sat up in bed, clutching one another. The door came squealing open.
‘One of them slowly poked his head round the door and into the room. He looked at us and we stared back. He looked like he was smiling at us. Purple, swirling eyes, like blood running down a plughole.
‘He was moving on horrid, twiggy limbs that actually creaked out loud. He said, “Now we’ve got you. Heeeee heeeee heeeeee.”
‘There was something so deathly about that creature’s voice when he spoke our language. He sucked all hope out of the air we were breathing.’
The meeting room was absolutely quiet.
Da broke that silence, asking, ‘How are you here to tell the tale?’
Mr Adams said, ‘The creature said my family and I would be spared that night if I came here to tell you all what the … the Martians wish you to know.’
Sheriff Baxter spoke up then. ‘I – I insist that you tell us what this message is, Vernon Adams.’
The shopkeeper said, ‘The creature told us he and his fellows have shrugged off their slumbers and are about to reclaim their world. The Martians are, in fact, coming back.’
Anger erupted to replace the fear. People got up on their feet and shouted stuff out. Mr Adams looked white and sweaty and I knew we hadn’t heard the full message yet.
The tableful of Elders weren’t shouting out. They sat there, very still and shrivelled.
Suddenly Annabel Adams was up on her feet. ‘He said they were going to eat us! Now they’ve got a taste for human flesh! That’s what the Martian wanted us to say!’
14
Some of the men said they wanted to go on the offensive, and take the fight to the Martians themselves. They started to stockpile weapons, dragging ancient blasters and dusty automatics out of their basements and polishing them up. My Da tried to make them see sense. ‘How will you find them? You don’t even know how many there are! How do you know you even stand a chance?’
That was one of the most frightening things about the Martian Ghosts. They were subtle and slippery and numberless. They came and went by darkness, sticking mostly to the shadows.
That long winter was a tough time. The Disappearances continued during the months of snow. Peculiar footprints were left over town and traced all over the Prairie. Our enemies were starting to care less about being secretive.
There were blizzards and we bolted and sealed ourselves into our homesteads. Ma and Da gave us homemade toys and gifts and we tried to recapture the magic of the great Christmases we had known when we were much younger, but it was hard. Knowing what was out there, wishing us ill.
We tried to celebrate for the sake of Hannah. She was only four and these were the times she would eventually look back upon. Would she want to remember us all being scared and miserable?
When the winter weeks drew to their dreadful close and people emerged again into the sunlight, it seemed that fewer of us were out and about in town. Rumour had it that certain families were so scared about the Martians that they had sealed themselves up in their underground shelters. They would stay down there until they felt the menace had blown over.
‘The fools,’ Da said, knowing that nothing but desert dust was going to be blowing over any time soon.
Then came the gossip that certain families hiding in bunkers had taken lethal poisons and ended their lives before the Martian Ghosts came and dragged them away. Sheriff Baxter did a roll call in the February and seventy people failed to answer their names.
Da was perturbed by this.
‘We have to stick together,’ he said. ‘That’s what humans need to do. We belong together.’
He went to the Elders and told them how we all needed to leave right away and find somewhere new to settle, and we had best do it collectively, en masse, altogether. Da spoke passionately and Sheriff Baxter tried to relay his ideas to the line of withered old men.
Late that night, I looked out of the attic window of Ruby’s house and I saw a single Ghost, dancing slowly down the road. It looked smaller and more graceful than the others. My heart went crazy, banging with terror, but my brain was telling me not to be fearful. This Martian Ghost looked like a child. I stared and stared as it came down the street and somehow it must have sensed me, because next thing it looked straight up at my window.
I tried to duck behind the dusty curtains but it was too late.
Then – the strangest thing. The Martian smiled at me.
This was how I came to meet Sook.
She wasn’t a child. I don’t know what she was – how old or anything. I just know that she was very different from the others, and that she wanted to talk with me. She beckoned me down into the dark street, waving those skinny arms.
Hardly knowing what I was doing, I left my bedroom and went downstairs, really carefully not to wake any of the others. I agonised my way through the house, wincing at the cold of the boards on my bare feet, wondering if those lit-up eyes were making me do things my waking self never would.
I stepped out into the chilly night.
I was in the street, about to come face to face with one of our deadly enemies.
Already I felt like I had always known Sook. I was never very good at making friends. Al always made that kind of thing seem so easy, but I never got the knack. But this time – at that very moment – I knew I was looking into the ravaged, alien face of a true friend.
She was purple in the Earth light. Her skin was corrugated and patterned so it looked a bit like when you cut into a red cabbage. Intricate and rough. She blinked at me, as if she was considering me and weighing up.
When she spoke I heard the words inside my head. They were very gentle and I didn’t think it odd that she spoke in English. ‘Come with me.’
It was the most foolhardy thing I’d ever done, and the most dangerous too. If I ever came back from this, Da would kill me. I recall thinking this and wanting to giggle as Sook took my hand in hers. It was dry and felt like gnarled tree bark.
She tugged on my arm and she started dancing off down the sandy road, which was still frozen solid. She was dancing and running at the same time, moving faster and faster, so that her thin, flapping feet were hardly touching the ground.
Miraculously, I was being drawn along after her. I was feeling lighter and faster than I ever had in my life. It was like we were both transforming into another substance. No longer pinky-brown or purple human or Martian flesh. We were waltzing and whirling through the frozen streets of town. I heard my Martian companion laughing – a light, breathy noise – and suddenly we were shooting far beyond the boundaries of Our Town.
We went out in the wilderness, heading west over crags and rocky outcroppings, lopsided hills and dried-out seas. I looked for the lake bed Toaster had cracked apart with Grandma’s eye, but it flashed by in a blur. Then we were tangled up in streams of frosty clouds, all sparkling pink, wrapping themselves about us. It hit me for the first time, properly, that we were flying.
We flew and I didn’t know how long it lasted or how far Sook had taken me away from home. Hundreds of miles, it felt like. I was looking down at maps and charts far more detailed and lurid than those hand-drawn efforts I’d examined with Da.
I saw that this was a whole world we were living on. A vaster, much more complex place than I had ever considered.
We flew over a plain of bulging monoliths and icy hummocks, where everything was trimmed in black, encrusted vegetation. I blinked and looked again, but already we had moved on. We flew over lakes
and mountains and mysterious forests and I thought about how much Al would have loved this. But it was me Sook had called out to.
By dawn she returned me to the dirty little road outside Ruby’s house. She set me down and then danced off again, turning to points of light and disappearing herself.
I was left standing alone. Sook had danced me right around the world, the whole shining circumference, and dumped me back here without us speaking more than ten words to each other. I knew her name was Sook. She knew mine was Lora. I knew I had never been so excited in all my life. I stood there alone for some time, shaking.
I let myself back indoors and sealed up the front door before the rest of the family could discover what I had been up to.
15
I’d never had friends of my own age. At the Homestead I worked with Da, and I had Hannah and Al and that was quite enough. Occasionally when we went to town I’d see other kids my age, but I never really had friends. Not to confide in or share with.
Maybe it’s weird Sook became my friend, what with her being a different species and all. To me she was just Sook. Our forays into the night never seemed like part of the life I led by day.
This nighttime creature was the most fabulous being I’d ever met. She was half-dream, half-real.
On our third or fourth trip into the night, she talked to me a little more. Until that moment, when her chiming, golden voice bloomed inside my head, it hadn’t struck me as surprising that she hadn’t said much as yet.
‘Have you told your parents? Do they know you come out to see me?’
‘No,’ I said aloud, and she turned those big purple eyes on me.
‘You needn’t tell them about me,’ she said. ‘They hate us, don’t they?’
‘They’re scared,’ I said, trying hard to speak the words inside my head. The hardest part was making them come out in a line, because my skull was swarming with thoughts that were all jumbled up.
We weren’t flying tonight. We were just walking into the wilderness and the parched scrubland. It was further than I’d ever been on foot. I was fascinated by the strange columns of stone and the weird trees.
‘They are right to be scared of us.’ She sighed heavily. ‘You know, don’t you? You understand what we do?’
I told her that I knew about the Disappearances. I said about Grandma and how we had found her leg and her eye.
‘How I wish my people wouldn’t do it,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to explain to them. I’ve tried to tell them that you are just people like we are.’
‘Of course we are!’ I burst out.
‘And you have your own feelings, too. You look after each other and care and you even … love each other.’
‘And what do they say?’
Her shoulders slumped. ‘I’m the youngest in our whole tribe. Of course they won’t listen to me. They scoff when I say humans have feelings.’
‘But we’re human!’ I cried out. ‘We … we invented feelings!’
Sook looked at me, frowning. ‘No, you didn’t. How could you?’
I didn’t know what to say to her. Then it came out in a rush, ‘But we invented everything! We’ve got, like, civilisation and rockets that brought us here. We’ve got Dickens and Michelangelo and … and…’
Sook smiled. ‘I hardly know what you’re talking about. But I like that you care enough to get cross, Lora.’
We walked through blue sand. The sky was creamy, starting to glow at the edges where the dawn light was coming.
‘Has there ever been a friendship like this before?’
‘Oh yes,’ Sook said. ‘All this time that humans have been on Mars. There must have been friendships before, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ I thought, inside my head. ‘We don’t really know anything about you.’
‘You will,’ promised Sook. Then she noticed the time and took hold of my hand, running down the steep dune we had just climbed. We were taking off again, into the sun.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. Flying through the dawn light. Sook kept tight hold of my wrist in her dry, wrinkled hand.
We touched down a few hundred yards from my home. No lights were burning yet. The prairie was one dark, sullen mass. The beasts were snoring. Sook smiled and left. I would slip into bed and pretend I’d been sleeping. All day I would be yawning again. Maybe I could sleep for an hour now and that would be enough.
I was almost at the door when something jumped out at me. I nearly peed. It was Al. He grabbed hold of my wrist, just where Sook had held me, except he wasn’t so gentle.
‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘I know what you were doing. I saw that … thing.’
I shook him off roughly. ‘You don’t know anything.’
‘It was a Martian.’ His face looked spiteful.
‘Ssssh!’ I drew him into the shadows of the porch. ‘You can’t tell anyone, Al.’
‘What are you doing?’ he squealed. ‘They took Grandma! They’re taking everyone! ’
‘I’m learning about them. I’m friends with her. I don’t know how yet. But I know it’s really important.’
Al was staring at me something dreadful. ‘How are you ever going to tell Ma and Da about this?’
‘I’m not in danger,’ I told him, but he didn’t look like he even cared about that.
He went, ‘You’re a betrayer, Lora. That’s what you are.’
I couldn’t make him see sense, whatever I said. All that day and for a week or so, Al kept out of my way. He kept playing with the lizard bird he had brought to our Homestead from Ruby’s house. He was training it to understand him and do tricks.
I was helping Da with the burden beasts, cleaning up their feet and scales and stuff one day, when he said, ‘You and Al had a falling out?’
‘He’s a boy,’ I shrugged. ‘They get funny sometimes. He’s at a funny age.’
This made Da laugh out loud. It was always a good feeling, making Da laugh. Then he looked at me. ‘Still, there is something different about you lately, Lore. I’m gonna be relying on you a lot in the next few weeks. When it comes time to be moving on I’ll be needing you to help and be strong.’
‘I know that.’ I stood up, to look taller and more sure about what was expected of me.
But, what if we went hundreds or even thousands of miles away? Would Sook still know where to find me?
Maybe when we went I wouldn’t be able to tell Sook about it. Maybe that would mean an end to our friendship.
It was like a clock had started ticking in my head and my heart.
16
I went out to work with Da in the fields. There was stuff to salvage before we abandoned the prairie. Da and I patrolled the perimeter and it hit me that the land had never really been ours. It had just been on loan to us for a little while.
Da said, ‘We got some good use out of this dry old soil. It kept us alive for these good years.’
It was like we were doing it honour by going round the edges and taking down Da’s electric fences. We were setting the land free, to turn back into wilderness again.
We worked quickly, plodding alongside Molly and George, collecting up any grain or shoots we found: precious scraps of life we could hope to transplant elsewhere. Some days when we went further afield we took the hovercart. It was old and kronky and the innards had corroded from the sand whistling through it.
That day we parked at the furthest perimeter. There we were, surveying the reaches of the cornrows, which had become visible again now that winter winds had stripped away the dunes. Da decided he wanted to take some pictures. He never said much, just used Al’s camera phone to take some snaps of empty ground.
When we walked back to the hovercart in the late afternoon, it was plain to see it was listing. The skirt had busted and there was no way it was gonna hover again without serious repairs.
Da sighed and muttered something about it giving up the ghost when we were so far from home. Next thing he was crawling underneath the hovercart
and starting to tinker with the insides. He was getting me to pass his bag of tools. I was proud because I knew all the names for those implements, and what they did.
This was no easy fix. The hovercart had gone very wrong. Da was under barely ten minutes before the anti-grav packed in completely.
The front end of the vehicle smashed down on his legs just as he was repositioning himself.
I stood there, frozen. Holding a tool. A tool I knew the name and purpose of. I stared at Da. He was rigid. Screaming till he was all screamed out. His voice was bubbling somehow. It sounded like blood in his throat.
I staggered over to him. What could I do? Could I get him out?
His face was coated in dark, sticky blood. He was in a fever sweat, panting like he was scorching hot. He spat words out past the bubbles of blood. He took a few seconds to fix his focus. Wild white eyes stared at me. Then he started to tell me what to do.
His jaw juddered. He was trying to keep calm for my sake.
‘T-Toaster,’ he said. It took every bit of his strength to get these words out. ‘Toaster can g-get me out of here. F-fetch him n-now, Lore.’
I couldn’t think of anything else to say but, ‘Yes, Da.’ Then I turned and I didn’t hesitate for a second. I ran faster than a mad Jack Rabbit over the dunes. I let my heels fly and my lungs burn as I pelted downhill.
I could save him, I knew I could. It was unthinkable that he was going to die today. I had to run faster across the prairie than I ever had before.
All the while I was shouting inside my head, ‘Sook! Come and help! You’ve got to help me, Sook!’
But there was no reply. The heat was still beating down. Sook would never come until it was dark.
Da was lying back there with no water. With his legs mangled and crushed and blood in his mouth, drowning him.
‘Sook! Will you come and help us?’
