Before you say, ‘Then he is barking mad,’ think hard about this. There are plenty of things they don’t tell us about. And Operation Majestic UK8, like its American counterpart, is one of those things. The reason you haven’t read about it, even in the official UFO journals, is that it has been kept so secret that not even the ufologists know about it.
Operation Majestic UK8 refers to a set of documents shown to Mrs Thatcher in secret in 1984. These documents refer to a spaceship that crash-landed on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides in the autumn of 1983. (Autumn, as you will have noted from this manuscript, is a busy time for the extraterrestrials.) An alien who was brought from the wreckage in a container to the Mill Hill Medical Research Centre survived in our atmosphere for three days, five hours and twenty-five minutes. According to the UK8 papers, a full-scale invasion of the earth was planned, although, from what the creature told them, the research scientists concluded that it would be eight or nine years before the ‘fleet’ was fully prepared.
The alien, who was, according to the scientists, ‘of humanoid form’, was from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear, identified subsequently by scientists as probably belonging to star system BG4543/2221 in the Beta Principis cluster. Mr Marr reckoned that he conveyed ‘certain information’ to the scientists, including that his planet was controlled by a creature. The creature’s name was Argol. Hardly anyone knew this apart from me and Mr Marr. How could Pike have possibly known? Wasn’t it likely that the thing that had got into him at the seance was really from the planet Tellenor? It hadn’t been like any other seance I had ever seen . . .
I thought about this the day after Pike went crazy. It had been a particularly bad day at school. ‘Dummy’ Maxwell had told me I had a ‘hunted look’ about me. I ask you! My dad always used to say that he didn’t pay teachers to make personal remarks.
I was sitting with my feet up, watching a film about a Puerto Rican mass murderer. First of all Emily Quigley came in.
‘All Daddy wantth you to do,’ she said, ‘ith to thay that alienth ith only an ecthpwethion! He thinkth tho highly of your thtwength!’
I ignored her. The Puerto Rican mass murderer was letting off a pump-action shotgun into a bus queue in downtown Los Angeles.
After a few minutes, she went out and Quigley came in, waving a piece of paper. He grinned madly at me and said, ‘Well, young shaver! This should sort you out!’
He put his hands on his hips and gave me a kind of larky look. ‘Why do you always look so sullen, fellow? Gosh! Jesus ain’t arf depressed at seeing his children down in the mouth, me deario!’
I kept my eyes on the screen. I never look sullen. Especially when I am watching Puerto Rican mass murderers. This one was now sobbing over his attorney’s shoes. Quigley waved the paper over my face.
When its flapping had started to irritate me, I snatched it from him and saw that it was ruled like a timetable. On it were written, in crude capitals, things like:
07.45-08.10 – HOOVERING
08.10-08.15 – CHRISTIAN WORSHIP
08.15-08.25 – BREAKFAST (optional)
I went back to looking at the screen. Events move swiftly in these films and it’s very easy to miss things. The Puerto Rican mass murderer was now in bed, surrounded by a crowd of admiring listeners, lawyers, policemen, close relatives and beautiful women. Obviously the only way to get respect is to make with the pump-action shotgun. You know?
Quigley reached forward and turned it off. I turned it on again. I was quite calm. At this moment, my mum came in.
‘Do you think,’ Quigley said to her, ‘that the little bloke should be watching this . . . ?’
‘Oh . . .’ said my mum. She sounded scared.
Behind her came Mrs Quigley, who was holding a frying-pan.
‘It’s only some rubbish about a Puerto Rican mass murderer . . .’ she said. ‘He’s got off by the blonde one in the wig, anyway!’
I knew she had psychic gifts, but I could not work out how she was so clued in to this film. Surely there was no way she could have seen it before.
Quigley started to pace up and down the room as the mass murderer, who had now leaped out of bed and on to the windowsill of his hospital suite, announced his intention of travelling the sixteen floors between him and the pavement without the aid of lift or stairs.
‘You, me laddio,’ said Quigley, ‘are on pindown! You will be picked up from school by Marjorie or me or your mother or all three of us from now on.’
I kept my eyes on the screen. I tried to imagine Greenslade and Marjorie Quigley together. I just could not do it, somehow. It seemed hard to believe they were in the same universe.
‘Golly, Simo, you are making it hard for us,’ Quiggers went on. ‘We want a pure boy that we can hold to our bosoms and we get a kind of . . . I dunno, matey . . . a kinda monster!’
The Puerto Rican mass murderer had decided to jump. His attorney’s girlfriend was holding on to his legs as he went through the things that were wrong with his life, in broken English. ‘Itta steenk!’ he was saying. ‘It alla steenk, thees life!’ I knew how he felt.
My mum and Mrs Quigley were now sitting on the arm of the sofa, their eyes glued to the screen, as Quigley paced around the room.
‘There is to be no hanging around the High Street and staring into shop windows,’ he went on. ‘There are to be none of those “hamburgers”, either.’
You could really hear those inverted commas click into place. What was he trying to do to me? We were talking Colditz here, guys!
‘There are no phone calls in or out. There are no little “subs”, and there are no trips to the newsagents’ either, me deario. Until you stop this upsetting talk and this . . . divisive rambling about . . .’
‘Aliens,’ I said, rather irritably. I knew he was trying to rile me, but I was determined to keep calm. I thought about sang-sang-dang, or the state of being a rose bush in early May. It helped.
On the screen they had let go of the Puerto Rican mass murderer’s trousers and he was on his way to the sidewalk, head first, at about seventy miles an hour. It was better for him, really. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who could have taken a long prison sentence.
‘ “Sin is a busy old thing when out! See how it travels, Lord, all round about!” ’ said Quigley, who often reaches for the wise words of Old Mother Walsh when things are getting tough.
After the mass murderer hit the deck, I got up and, resisting the temptation to fold my left forearm over my right elbow, make a prong of the middle finger of my right hand and then lift it in Quigley’s face while telling him he was a motherfucking asshole, I went to the door. ‘And don’t look so sullen, me laddio!’ he called after me.
Sullen? I wouldn’t know how to, my friend. I had risen above him and was now in the state of dung-hai, or complete and utter superiority to Quigley.
What was really getting to him was the fact that alien-fever was proving hard to eradicate in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. I thought about his notion that ‘alien’ was just another way of saying ‘devil’, or that Old Mother Walsh and her snake weren’t, actually, any more real, although just as powerful, as Argol and the things from Tellenor. It didn’t stand up. I don’t say I knew what was happening, but, whatever it was, it was real. You know? I hadn’t even dared go near Furnival Gardens since I saw my old man for the second time.
I would have to go down to Mr Marr’s house. And, with this new regime in force, tonight would probably be the last chance I had to do it. I decided to wait until they were all asleep. I lay on my bed with a computer magazine and, from time to time, went to the window and looked down at the darkened street. I could make out the spot where my dad had stood that night.
Down below, Quigley shouted goodnight at me and I shouted back, and, at last, my mum tiptoed to the door and, looking fearfully around her in case Quigley saw, blew me a little damp kiss. ‘You can be so sweet, Simon,’ she said, ‘but you’re such a stubborn thing!’ I
didn’t answer. I might have provoked even worse charges. Then she said, ‘You’re so like him. You’re so like poor, poor Norman!’
Quigley was always the last to go to bed. His routine was monumental, guys. When everyone was in bed he would go round to every window, double-check if it was locked and then, before he came upstairs, place a few key obstacles in the path of any potential intruder. I swear he was obsessed with burglars. He spent a lot of time swaggering about the place, flexing his muscles and telling everyone what he was going to do with those ‘foolish little feller-me-lads’ if they showed up.
I had to wait for what seemed like hours. But, eventually, after several tours of inspection of the windows and much talk of the need for Banham locks, Quigley, exhausted by his own vigilance, staggered to bed. Minutes later he was making a noise like a pneumatic drill. I slipped out of bed, got into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed down the stairs.
It was like a slalom down there. There was an ironing-board, two kitchen chairs and a couple of broken wooden boxes snaked around the front room. In the back kitchen was a dresser, three pails of water a yard or so apart and a small scattering of drawing-pins. In the front hall – in case any burglar should choose to throw himself through the fireproof glass in the window or slice through the mortise lock with a flame gun – was a selection of things to trip over. There was a rubber ball, a few of Emily’s textbooks and a sort of forcefield of nails resting heads down and points upwards towards the unseen burglar’s face. As I discovered this arrangement, I began to feel almost sorry for any potential thief. After fighting his way through all this, he would have to face an angry and almost certainly stark-naked Quigley.
The street was empty. In one house, on the corner, there was a light on in the front bedroom. A middle-aged woman, wearing what looked like a turban, was looking out at the night. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t see me. There was a warm wind on my face and hands as I made my way towards Mr Marr’s place.
I didn’t look up at the sky. But I really felt they were looking at me. Like you do in the supermarket sometimes, when you can sense something behind you and you turn and there’s this camera, mounted at the edge of a shelf, swivelling its one black eye this way and that, like some malevolent goblin at the door to a secret cave.
I didn’t look behind me either. They were here, weren’t they? They could be keeping pace with me, along Forrest Avenue, down Gladewood Road and across up through Park Crescent. Maybe they had got people in every third house. Maybe Mr and Mrs Lewis at 119 Cedar Avenue were not in their usual positions, snoring back to back in the bed they bought twenty years ago. Maybe they were out in the garden, walking around stiffly, expressionless as vacuum cleaners, as they prepared the Giant Pod for Argol of the planet Tellenor.
I had a feeling that, when Argol finally showed, he was going to look a lot more scary than Leo Pike. I had heard his soundbite, and he sounded like a man who meant business.
Looking in front wasn’t really safe either. Suppose Argol, or someone like him, suddenly leaped out of someone’s driveway to give me a taste of his galaxy’s latest in combat weapons? The Jura alien had had a lot to say about Tellenorean life-forms. Much of it, Mr Marr said, was just too horrible to tell me. He didn’t want me to have nightmares, he said. I thought about what they might be like. In a way, not knowing made it worse. I used to feel that way about Old Mother Walsh’s snake when I was a little kid. Now it’s something to laugh at, but then . . . I was feeling more and more like a little kid with each day that passed.
As I turned into Mr Marr’s I was shaking. I had to force myself down the street to his house. I had to force myself up the path to his front door. And, when I fitted the key into that lock, my hands were trembling.
Listen – no one could have got into Mr Marr’s. I had the only key. No one had forced any doors or windows, because they didn’t need to, did they? On Tellenor, according to the Jura alien, they have mastered the technique of passing through solid objects – one of the things Mr Marr said was worst about the Tellenoreans was that you never quite knew when they were there.
If it was them, they had been through the house very, very carefully. Since my last visit they had had another go. Someone or something had been through the fridge and taken away a few samples of earthling diet – a chilli con carne and a cold lasagne that was probably even now being scoffed by a load of blobs up in the ionosphere. They had also started to take away literature. They had been pretty systematic. Most of the stuff missing was from Mr Marr’s extensive collection of material dealing with invasions from other galaxies. And the huge file dealing with Operation Majestic UK8, which had taken pride of place in Mr Marr’s top-secret collection of UFO papers (in the cupboard under the stairs) was nowhere to be seen.
I thought about the police. But if these beings had left any fingerprints, I had the strong feeling they wouldn’t be the kind you get down at Scotland Yard.
He had kept the file under a pile of back numbers of the Wimbledon Guardian, because, as he said, ‘there were a number of people who would be only too happy to see all documents in the case suppressed’. At one point, I seem to remember, he’d kept the papers in the fridge – which is why the top sheet had a large blob of sweetcorn in the top right-hand corner.
Our Tellenorean friends had taken the Wimbledon Guardian as well as the UK8 papers. I didn’t like to think why they needed the local paper. By now, probably half the small ads in the current issue had been placed by aliens.
I was scared, though. I was really terrified.
And then, as I came out from under the stairs, I heard something moving upstairs. Two creaking boards, and that was it. I stopped. I listened hard. I could hear my heart tap against my ribs. My face suddenly felt very hot, and then, just as suddenly, very cold. There was silence. I wanted the silence to go on, but, as I listened, it felt as if I was racing it. That the thump of my heart was challenging it to go on and not to be broken by a . . .
Crrreak . . .
There was something up there. And, while I was not in possession of definite proof, my money was on it coming from somewhere a little further away than the Fulham Palace Road. As I changed from listening to walking mode, I tried to work out whether it had feet or flippers or ran on rollers. The noise had an insistent quality – like a small animal gnawing away at something or gathering food and stopping every few minutes to listen, as hard as I was listening in the dark of Mr Marr’s house.
I did not want to find out if it was friendly. If it was friendly, how come it was scurrying around stealing magazines and not coming out into the open and asking who was in charge round here? Everything seemed to indicate that it was our friend Argol, or some flunkey of his. I tried to remember if Mr Marr had ever said anything about how Argol looked. Was he a thing or a person? Hadn’t someone said something about his teeth? I was almost sure they had. His teeth! My Christ! The gnawing was starting again. Not content with stealing Mr Marr’s library, the bastard was chewing up his bedroom furniture!
Then I heard the humming. A high-pitched noise that seemed to come from the head of the stairs. It wasn’t the kind of sound an engine made – or a dishwasher or a television or any of the things I was used to seeing round the house. I only realized what it was when I got to the front door. It was a human sound, but unlike one I had ever heard before. It was more like the noise dogs make sometimes – a see-sawing musical phrase, as if it was talking to someone you couldn’t see. That was it. Human and yet definitely not human.
I looked up at the bedroom window as I closed the door behind me. I saw Pike’s face pressed to the glass. He looked as if he was lit from below, and his nose and cheeks were spread out in a white, lifeless slab against the window pane. But his eyes were glinting, as if he was looking at something no mere human could see. Or – and this thought only occurred to me when I was out on the street and running for the hill as fast as I could – as if there was something else behind his eyes, looking out at the world, w
aiting for the awful moment when it would start to take apart our little corner of the planet, piece by shabby piece.
22
They had done something to my dad. And now Pike was under their control.
The only comforting thing about this was that, although they were well placed to take over my brain, they had, so far at any rate, declined to take up the offer. Maybe I secreted some hormone that gave the average Tellenorean a violently unpleasant feeling. Or perhaps Argol had an enlightened policy towards young people. Maybe it was going to be like the Cultural Revolution in China, and we were all going to be given the chance to team up with the aliens. Certainly, if offered the choice between Quigley and an eighty-foot beige monster with a corkscrew head, I knew where my allegiance would lie.
I tried to remember what else the documents had said. A lot of them, of course, were so secret that Mr Marr couldn’t even show them to me. They were, he said, the kind of documents you eat rather than read. The guys at Mill Hill who had worked on the Jura alien had been very cagey about this, apparently, but I think Mr Marr said there was a lot of stuff about mind control. The Tellenoreans don’t talk the way normal people do. They just sit there by the fire projecting their thoughts into each other’s brains, like me and Greenslade. In fact, it was rumoured that one of the Mill Hill guys had had his brain messed around with by the visitor who screwed up the landing in the Hebrides.
The trouble with this alien business is that you cannot trust your senses. As Jenny Randles says in Abduction (according to Mr Marr, the only really reliable guide to the spacenapping phenomenon), ‘Of course I am making no assumptions about what it means to have been abducted [by aliens], but if some researchers are correct, many of you reading this book might have undergone an abduction experience without consciously realizing it.’
They Came From SW19 Page 19
