PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series)

by W. A. Harbinson

  Beth went to see her doctor and told him she felt tense and couldn’t sleep, though she didn’t mention the real cause of her problem. When Valium was prescribed, some of her tension slipped away, but even the sedatives didn’t help when, watching Nichola playing with Tanya in the park, she lost consciousness again and awakened to see three men in black suits talking to both children. When Beth rushed towards them, the men, too distant to be made out clearly, glanced in her direction, then hurried away to melt into the trees around the edge of the playing field. When Beth, her heart pounding furiously, asked Nichola what the men had wanted, her daughter replied: ‘They asked if my mom was Beth Randall. I said, “Yes,” and they just looked at each other without saying anything else. Then you came along.’

  ‘If those men ever come near you again,’ Beth warned Nichola, ‘you run away and come straight to me. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, Mom.’

  Beth’s nightmares then became more vivid and frightening. She dreamed that the men in black had abducted Nichola. She had another dream about Dwight disappearing and never being seen again. Mostly, however, her dreams were composed of hallucinatory, fragmented recollections of that great circle of black ash around the garage once run by Dwight; the look of stark terror on the dead Frank Bancroft’s face; herself stretched out on what she felt was a surgical bed of cold metal, staring up at a ring of faces, some human, others part-metallic and dreadful: small creatures with alien faces and steel claws for hands; then curving, steel-grey corridors, a room filled with severed human heads and other bodily parts; and then herself strapped to a chair with a metal cap on her head; and, finally, white-painted steel panels sliding apart to reveal panoramic windows and, beyond them, a vast, desolate terrain of ice and snow.

  The dreams, though fragmented, were relentless in the terror that they created for her, making her jerk awake, screaming, bathed in sweat, to be held and rocked by a concerned, helpless Dwight.

  ‘It’s real!’ she once sobbed. ‘I know it’s real!’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Dwight replied. ‘You’re just having bad dreams, Beth.’

  But even he didn’t sound convinced.

  In fact, Dwight was, at that point, being torn between his real concern for Beth and his rage against those who were doing this to her. It was a deeply personal kind of rage, focused on the men in black, because he now believed absolutely that they existed and were responsible for what was happening to her. Yet even as his anger grew and he determined to fight back, he was frustrated because the men in black made no more appearances.

  Instead, worse things happened.

  The first manifestation was similar to Dwight’s experience in the motel outside Albuquerque, only this time it happened right outside his own home.

  Beth had taken some Valium and was still having trouble sleeping, with Dwight holding her in his arms, when the latter felt a distinct rise in temperature, heard a bass humming sound from outside, as if directly above the house, then was startled by the violent shaking of the bed as striations of brilliant light beamed in through the window. The bass humming sound grew louder, then turned into a vibrating presence, a faint pressure, as the room shook even more violently, with framed pictures swinging crazily on the walls and ornaments falling off chests-of-drawers and cupboards. Nichola cried out in her bedroom. ‘Mom! Dad!’ Though sedated with the Valium, Beth tore herself from Dwight’s embrace and ran into Nichola’s bedroom as Dwight rushed to the window and looked out.

  He stared into a dazzling radiance. It was beaming down from above the house – so bright he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Cursing, he fumbled blindly at the window catches, to unlock them and open the window. As he was doing so, the bass humming sound cut out, the room stopped shaking, and then, when he opened his eyes, he was able to see clearly again.

  Moonlight was shining on the untouched back yard. Nothing else. He opened the window as Beth returned to the bedroom, one arm around the sobbing Nichola’s shoulder, patting her head reassuringly with her free hand. Dwight stuck his head out of the open window and looked up as high as he could, trying to see directly above the house. He saw a shrinking light, what might have been a shooting star, then it blinked out abruptly, leaving only the starry sky.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Beth was repeating consolingly to the sobbing Nichola, where they now lay together on the bed. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart.’ But it wasn’t all right. In fact, it was just beginning. During the final week before the press viewing of the Avrocar, as if as a warning to Dwight, the visitations occurred every night for five nights in a row, with the house shaking more each time, the noise growing louder, the inexplicable pressure becoming stronger, the contents of the house flung about and smashed, as if by a poltergeist. As Nichola howled in Beth’s arms and the latter shrieked for the manifestations to stop – not knowing who or what she was shouting at, but staring fearfully at the closed window – the striations beaming in from outside would start flickering like strobe lights, the rate increasing every second, until Dwight, Beth and Nichola saw each other as bizarre, jerkily moving figures in a disorientating, constantly changing, chiaroscuro filled with hellish noise and applying an indefinable pressure upon them, making them feel that their heads and hearts were going to burst.

  Sometimes the burners on the cooker would come on of their own accord; other times water would pour out of the taps, flooding over the rim of the sink and onto the floor; then the electric lights, radio or TV would come on inexplicably, adding to the general bedlam and visual chaos.

  Each night was worse than the one before, with the lights brighter and flickering faster, the bass humming sound deeper and increasingly physical – an infrasound – and the pressure around their heads tighter and giving them headaches. Each night, when the phenomenon had ended, Dwight would either jerk the window open and stick his head out or run on to the front lawn to see what had caused it – and each time he only saw what he thought, or imagined, was a tiny light shrinking until it disappeared directly above the house, leaving only the stars in the night sky.

  By the fourth day of the final week before the press viewing of the Avrocar, while the outside of the house remained normal, the grass on the front lawn and back yard was singed black. Remarkably, there was no damage to any of the neighbours’ houses and tentative enquiries produced no sign that the neighbours – their houses all spaced well apart – had heard or seen anything unusual.

  ‘If this happens once more,’ Dwight told Beth when they were tidying up the latest mess of broken glass, picture frames and ornaments caused by the violent shaking of the house the night before, ‘I’m going to send you and Nichola to stay with your folks.’

  ‘Every night,’ Beth said, practically whispering, as if talking to herself, not really there. ‘Why every night?’

  ‘I don’t know, honey.’

  ‘They don’t attempt to get near us. We never see them. What do they want?’

  We don’t even know who ‘they’ are, Dwight thought, but I better not say that.

  ‘One more time,’ he said instead, ‘and you’re out of here. You and Nichola both. I don’t know what it is, how it’s happening, but I’m getting you out of here.’

  ‘I’m not going if you don’t,’ Beth said.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Dwight insisted.

  The fifth night was the worst of all. The visitation came so late that they thought it wasn’t coming, and Beth was actually slipping gratefully into sleep. It was just before four in the morning and she was lying between Dwight and Nichola, who was now too frightened to sleep in her own bed. Dwight was still awake, looking sideways at the two most important people in his life – his wife and daughter – choked up to see them sleeping together, when he suddenly turned cold, then hot, and heard that familiar bass humming sound. At first shocked, then plunging into a cauldron of rage and despair, he reached out to Beth as her eyes opened wide, changing instantly from drowsiness to terror. Even as Beth let out a moan and turned to em
brace the awakened, frightened Nichola, the bass humming sound became louder, an almost physical vibration, and the whole room began to shake, with the framed pictures again swinging crazily on the walls while ornaments and other bricabrac rattled and fell to the floor. As Nichola cried out, ‘Mom! Dad!’ and Beth held her close, pulling the sheets over both of them, light suddenly beamed in through the window, illuminating the bedroom, and then turned into a chiaroscuro flickering on and off with a rapidity that was totally disorientating.

  ‘Bastards!’ Dwight bawled.

  As if in response, the bottom end of the bed leapt up in the air and banged back down on the floor. The lamp on the bedside cabinet became a fountain of crimson sparks and then exploded with the wires spitting blue and yellow flames. Instinctively, Dwight rolled off the wildly rocking bed, jerked the plug of the lamp from its socket, then smothered the flames with the shirt he had draped over a nearby chair. Nichola was wailing in terror under the bedsheet, being comforted by Beth, as Dwight crawled on hands and knees across the floor, showered in debris from the plaster exploding out of the ceiling and raining down upon him.

  More cracks spread across the ceiling. The bed jumped up and down liked a crazed beast. The floorboards creaked, screeched and then snapped apart under the magically heaving carpet. Though dazzled by the flickering patterns created by what seemed like strobe lights, Dwight still managed to reach the door of the bedroom. Glancing back, he saw that the bed had stopped rocking and the ceiling was no longer raining broken plaster. Knowing that Beth and Nichola, no matter how upset, would be all right, Dwight, in a fury that obliterated his terror, jumped to his feet and ran across the living room, heading for the front door.

  As he crossed the living room, more cracks zigzagged along the ceiling directly above him, as if tracking his movements, showering him once more in falling plaster and clouds of powder. Even here, the furniture was jumping, lightbulbs were exploding, and the mysterious light was pouring in through the windows, still flickering rapidly. Disorientated by this, Dwight repeatedly bumped into furniture and once turned in the wrong direction, but eventually, by groping his way along a wall, he reached the front door. Without hesitation, not caring if he lived or died, he tugged the front door open and rushed outside.

  What he saw there stopped him in his tracks.

  The lights beaming in through the windows of the house and flickering on and off rapidly were coming from disc-shaped metallic objects no more than three or four feet in diameter and hovering in mid-air by the windows. The instant that Dwight, still in his pyjamas, rushed out of the house and stopped, frozen by shock, on the lawn path, the lights blinked out and the disc-shaped objects started spinning. The speed of their spin increased until they became no more than silvery-white blurs. Then they suddenly ascended vertically, as if shot from a cannon.

  Looking up, Dwight nearly fell backwards with shock when he saw the small, spinning discs vanishing into what appeared to be an enormous black hole inside an even bigger circle formed by multicoloured lights that winked on and off rapidly, to form a dazzling kaleidoscope. Approximately 150 feet wide, that circle was exerting a downward-thrusting pressure that seemed to press heavily upon Dwight.

  Glancing about him, he saw that the stars were visible outside that great circle of flashing lights and that directly below the lights, on the ground – at least what he could see of the ground where it wasn’t broken up by fences and sections of the other house – grass and dust was being sucked up to quiver frantically or billow in a curved line that obviously formed another circle matching the one above.

  No sooner had Dwight noticed this than the flashing lights blinked out, leaving only a black hole about 150 feet wide and definable only by the stars surrounding it. Then, with a speed that confused Dwight’s visual senses, the black hole shrank, letting the stars rush back in, followed by an abrupt flaring of lights hundreds of feet up. The flaring light than shrank and vanished altogether, leaving only the darkness. Now, where that great hole had been, there was only the normal, star-drenched sky.

  The grass and dust that had been sucked up in a matching circle had settled down again and the downward-thrusting pressure inside the circle could no longer be felt.

  Realising that he had just witnessed the ascent of some kind of enormous, circular UFO and that the small discs had flown back into it before it ascended, Dwight hurried back into the house, through the living room and into the bedroom. He found Beth and Nichola embracing under the bedsheets, both frightened, though unharmed.

  Convinced that the visitations were not only a means of warning him off his UFO investigations, but were also related to the forthcoming press viewing of the A. V. Roe man-made flying saucer, the Avrocar, Dwight believed that the night before the viewing, tomorrow night, would be the worst of all.

  ‘I want you to take Nichola and go spend the night with your folks,’ he told Beth the following morning, as they sat side by side on the sofa in the wrecked living room. ‘I think you could both be in real danger. The effects of that... whatever it is... have been worse with each successive night, and I’m afraid that tonight the damage will be even greater – so I don’t want you and Nichola here.’

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ Beth said, rubbing her bloodshot eyes and looking haggard. ‘I’m convinced that sooner or later they’re going to enter the house and take you away. I’m sure that’s what it’s all about.’

  ‘If they do, I want to be here, Beth. I want to know who they are. I can’t run away now.’

  ‘If they take you, you’ll never be seen again.’

  ‘That’s a chance I’ve got to take, Beth.’

  She clung to him, sobbing, begging him not to stay, but after comforting her, he

  made her call her folks, Joe and Glenda McGinnis, and arrange to spend the night with them, in their home at the far side of Carillon Park. She was still sobbing as she packed an overnight bag for herself and Nichola, but she managed to gain control of herself when Dwight led her and Nichola out to the car and kissed them goodbye.

  Dwight watched the car move off along the road and then disappear around the corner at the far end. It was six in the evening.

  Returning to the house, which Beth had spent all afternoon carefully tidying, Dwight poured himself bourbon and then took an armchair in the living room, waiting for nightfall. The telephone rang. When he picked it up, Beth told him that she was in her parents’ home, that the short drive had passed without incident, and that he was to call her, no matter the time, when the visitation had ended. Dwight promised to do so, then he put the phone back on its hook and finished his bourbon. Two more were poured and a few more hours passed before the sun sank and darkness prevailed. Dwight kept the lights out. He waited patiently for the visitation. He sat in that empty room until dawn broke, but there was no visitation.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said on the phone to Beth at nine the next morning. ‘Not a damned thing. How about you?’

  ‘The best sleep I’ve had in weeks,’ Beth replied. ‘I feel like a new woman.’

  ‘It’s as if they knew...’

  ‘They knew. They know everything, Dwight. I’m convinced I was followed as I drove here, but they didn’t do anything. I think they’ve been warning you off – maybe because of today.’

  ‘The Avrocar.’

  ‘Yes. They were letting you know that they know what you’re doing and don’t approve of it.’

  ‘But they didn’t come last night.’

  ‘The warning’s over. I don’t think they’ll come back. At least not tonight or in the immediate future. They’ll do what they want, when they want, but it won’t be tonight.

  If they’d wanted to stop you going to that press conference, they’d have done it last night. We’re coming home, honey.’

  ‘You do that,’ Dwight said.

  He put the phone back on its hook, leaned against the wall, covered his face with his hands and sobbed tears of relief.

  Later that day, Dwight flew to Washingto
n DC, where he was collected by Tony Scaduto and Bob Jackson, then driven to the Army Transport Museum at Fort Eustus, Virginia. There, in a large, gloomy hangar-sized room that contained no other exhibits, with a whole pack of journalists and photographers, the latter including Jack Judges, who had first photographed the sole exhibit on display by flying illegally over the base, he was shown the formerly secret, now unclassified, man-made flying saucer prototype, the Avrocar.

  What he, and the others assembled, were shown was an experimental, piloted aircraft, forty feet in diameter and weighing 3,600lbs, that combined the characteristics of air-cushion machines: a crude flying saucer based on the principles of the jet ring and, according to the Army press officer, barely able to rise above the runway during its recent test flight.

  It couldn’t possibly be mistaken for what had come down over Dwight’s house the previous evening.

  ‘This is bullshit!’ Dwight whispered to Scaduto and Bob Jackson. ‘Just another red herring.’

  ‘Apart from the disc-shaped platform of this aircraft,’ the Army press officer informed them, standing beneath the Avrocar where it was dangling at an angle from the ceiling, ‘the most revolutionary feature of the prototype is the use made of the gyroscopic effect of a revolving power plant to acquire stability. As you can see...’ he pointed to the dome-shaped Perspex cabin in the middle of the disc-shaped body... ‘the pilot is seated in a central Perspex capsule that can be ejected should the aircraft find itself in difficulties. A gas-turbine power plant of unconventional design revolves around this capsule at several hundred revolutions per minute. A stationary wing containing a series of slots in the leading edge, which feed air to the turbine, surrounds the rotating power-plant housing and forms the rim of the aircraft. Part of the intake of air is compressed, fed to combustion chambers in the wing, and ejected through a series of exhaust orifices lining the outer rim of the disc. The remainder of the airflow is fed over a series of vertical deflector vanes in the flattened trailing edge of the aircraft for control purposes. A tripod-type launching gear was planned to enable the saucer to take off vertically, but with the negative results of the test flight, the work never even went that far.’