by Michael Kerr
Inside the ship, Chelon was slammed into the bulkhead with such force that his tentacle-covered head burst open on impact, spilling his green life fluid over the dull metallic superstructure. Only Galor survived the violent incident, but was seriously injured: Cephalopods were not built to withstand such trauma.
“Status?” Galor said to the computer as the light source failed.
“EMERGENCY. MAIN DRIVE INOPERATIVE.
IRREPARABLE. AUXILIARY POWER TO LIFE
SUPPORT PODS ONLY.”
Billy saw the shiny triangular-shaped object appear as it rebounded from the trunk of a lofty spruce, where Scout had tossed it with his muzzle. He walked over to it, knelt down and picked up the SRV, unaware of what it was. He could only think that it was a toy. It was approximately ten centimetres long, felt as smooth and as cold as stainless steel, and reminded him of a large arrowhead. It had a transparent screen in what could have been a cockpit of sorts at the pointed end. Tucking the ‘toy’ into his pocket, Billy turned to where Scout was pawing at his nose in obvious discomfort.
“Let me see, boy,” Billy said, cupping the dog’s head in his hands. There was a single spot of blood. He had probably caught it on a thorn or a piece of sharp stone. It was nothing serious.
After searching for another forty-five minutes, Billy gave up and headed for home. Whatever he had seen had not been visitors from the stars. His imagination had got the better of him.
Back in his bedroom, Billy undressed, placed the small metal object on the top of a chest of drawers near the window, and climbed into bed. As he slept, his mind conjured up the mutant forms of small, grey-skinned aliens with oversize heads and black, almond-shaped eyes. They were stood at the forest edge, looking across the meadow towards the house. And behind them, a large area of the conifers had been flattened by a giant silver disc, which was encircled in a neon rainbow of light, radiant in the surrounding darkness. It was a wishful dream, born of disappointment; a scene that Billy had wanted to be reality.
Galor waited. Jostled in blackness deeper than interstellar space, he could do nothing but stay in a restraint seat. Eventually there was stillness. He released the safety bands that held him and slithered to the main viewport and looked out, to see a landscape that defied any logical definition. A vast smooth plain stretched away from the ship, and beyond that were mountains of unnatural shapes. All that he could recognise was the Earth moon, somehow suspended within the Delphic confines of a large rectangular frame.
Galor turned on the emergency distress beacon – which with its own power source would transmit indefinitely – and then went aft to ease himself into a sleep pod. As he slipped into a chemically-induced hibernation, he hoped that not only a rescue ship, but an invasion force would be sent, to negate the aggressive life forms on this hostile planet.
15
A FAMILIAR VOICE
It was one hell of a send-off. The small church was packed, and there were many more people outside it, standing amongst the headstones and crowding the narrow gravel paths. The finale was Harry Secombe singing I’ll Walk with God; though the speaker system was inadequate and the tape of the late ex-Goon sounded tinny and hollow, echoing around the stone pillars and escaping up into the high, vaulted ceiling of the nave.
All in all it was a fine funeral. The rain held off, and the sullen nacre clouds lent a fittingly solemn ambience to the proceedings. The coffin was subsequently carried aloft, out into the cemetery, and as it was lowered into the dank, rectangular hole in the ground, Father Donovan began to pray, hardly glancing at the pages of the missal he held before him; knowing the spiel by heart.
The whole episode was all very dreamlike. Ben still found it very strange to be dead, and thought that attending his own interment might somehow help him rationalise his current state of being. He walked through a tree and paused to look around the gathering. His parents were front and centre, holding up quite well, though pale-faced, stiff-lipped, and with red-rimmed eyes. But they had grit and would save any tears they had left to spill for when they were back within the privacy of the small bungalow on Chapel Lane, where they had lived for more than thirty years.
Ben turned his attention to Amy, his wife...uh, widow, now. She looked sexy in black, holding onto the short veiled hat with both hands, to stop the swirling October gusts of cool air from whipping it off her hair, which was as golden as the sycamore leaves that fell like tears from the soughing branches.
They’d hired a room above the Conservative club in Canal Street, and Ben was already there when they started to arrive. He sat in a quiet corner and listened to the footsteps on the stairs, and the murmur of voices. There were tables laden with heaped plates of sandwiches, sausage rolls, pork pie, and all the fare needed to fill the stomachs of the living. It was a little strange that people still had an appetite at such a distressing point in time.
Ben quickly quit the chair as his sister, Gwen, dropped into it with a large gin and tonic grasped in her pudgy hand. She was a big girl, and the chair creaked and groaned under the weight she put on its joints. Not that he would have been crushed, or even felt her. He just didn’t like being absorbed by others, and did his best to avoid passing through them. It reminded him that he had no corporality. Only a few other dead people he’d met could see him, and they usually just walked, or floated past him, preoccupied with whatever sad thoughts they had as they attempted to come to terms with their demise. He needed to set things right and move on. Staying around the living was more than a little depressing. They were all rushing towards their own date with destiny, and he somehow thought that their fleeting mortal existence was rather pointless, in the greater scheme of things.
Ben had not been ready to die. Few people – young or old – ever are, discounting some who were suffering terminal and debilitating illness, and suicide bombers and other assorted nutters. At just twenty-four, he had been embarking on married life, planning to have a family, and wrongly assuming that he had all the time in the world to make countless memories. But he had been robbed of the precious commodity that time was by a drunk driver who had left the road and...he couldn’t remember. He knew that the car had hit him, but being tossed into the air like a rag doll, to land in a crumpled broken heap on the ground after smashing into a concrete lamppost for good measure, was a blank. He had found himself standing next to his lifeless body, looking down at it, wondering what was happening. The experience was traumatic. Heavy shit! Only the screech of tyres on the road had concentrated his mind. He saw the white Astra – with the fresh dent in the bumper and bonnet, and a cracked windscreen – take off towards the town centre. It crossed his mind that he should be angry, but he wasn’t. But he was determined to see the driver held to account for his actions. Maybe if the man had stopped and stayed at the scene, then Ben would have entered the dazzling white tunnel that formed in front of him. Instead, he stepped backwards, away from it. He could see a coin of brightness at the end of the glowing tube; knew that he was supposed to walk towards the light, to enter the next phase of whatever lay ahead, but turned and ran away from it instead, confused and needing to think it through.
Now, watching Amy talking to all the family and friends who were offering their sympathy, Ben wondered if she would have a long and happy life, and whether they would ever meet again in another time and place. It was so bloody frustrating. She couldn’t see, hear or feel him. There was no way he could make contact. Why not? He could still see and hear the living world, but was apparently now forever apart from it, with no substance. He was a revenant, beyond the physical plain he had been a part of.
Saying good-bye to ears that were deaf to him, Ben drifted out through the wall of the building and made his way to the home of Graham Lynch, the man who had caused his untimely death.
Graham gulped another large mouthful of Scotland’s finest export and refilled the glass, spilling some of the amber nectar as he set it down with trembling fingers onto the coffee table in front of him. He hadn’t slept properly in
over a week, since he had mown down the young man, panicked and driven off. He couldn’t get the picture out of his mind: the wide-eyed look of surprise on the man’s face, just before it slammed into the windscreen. Dear God, he was so sorry. But turning himself in to the police wouldn’t change a damn thing. He had been well over the limit when it had happened, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the dash, and had lost control of the wheel. In the gloom of late afternoon, no one had even seen him drive off. He had driven home, put the car in the garage and hadn’t taken it out since.
The local news came on. The talking head mentioned that Ben King had been buried that day, and showed footage of the coffin being carried into the church by pallbearers; the camera lingering dramatically for long seconds on the stony faces of his bereaved parents and young widow. Graham snatched the remote up off the arm of the settee and hit the standby button to wipe the image from the screen. He couldn’t bear to face the aftermath of his terrible deed. Squeezing his eyes shut against hot tears, he vividly recalled the dull thunk that Ben King’s body had made as it met the front of the car. In his mind’s eye, he watched Ben somersault upwards, then come to a juddering stop against an unyielding concrete post and slide down it.
He took another drink to deaden the pain. He would get past it. If he stayed drunk, then he’d be okay and, with time the event would lose its freshness and become just one more bleary memory to put behind him. Graham had always taken refuge in the bottle to deal with bad situations, not having the gumption to realise that it was the booze that got him into them in the first place. He was now fifty, looked a decade older, and was testing his liver’s patience to the limit. Scotch had cost him his marriage, countless jobs, and was now responsible for his being in this mess. Liquor was like a loaded gun. And guns didn’t kill people; the people that held them did. Many things were lethal in the wrong hands.
Eventually falling into a fitful sleep, Graham was blissfully unaware of Ben sitting in one of the easy chairs in the corner of the room.
Ben studied the man who had robbed him of his future. Instead of being consumed by rage and hatred, he almost felt sorry for the scared little nonentity, whose life was spiralling down like so much dirty bath water into the plug hole. If it had been the need for revenge that had kept Ben from getting on with death, then he now knew by seeing Graham that living could sometimes be harder to face than dying.
He waited, not aware of how much time passed.
Graham woke up chilled to the bone, his teeth chattering. The room felt as cold as a deep freeze, and a hoar frost coated every surface. How could that be? He reached for the tumbler, needing a drink, but the glass was welded to the tabletop by ice particles. He wrenched it free, and then began to moan as writing began to appear through the layer of white on the smooth pine surface.
Ben was amazed that by using the end of his finger he could pen the message. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the horrified expression on Graham’s face.
Do the right thing, Graham, or I’ll haunt you ‘til the day you die, he wrote, and then willed the half empty bottle of Johnny Walker to lift up from the table and hover in front of Graham’s face, before sending it whirling around the room twice, to finally smash to pieces against a wall.
“I...I didn’t mean it,” Graham wailed before passing out.
Ben left the squalid house and its sad occupant, and wandered aimlessly through the town centre. He briefly contemplated going to Amy, to use his new-found power of spirit writing to contact her. But he knew that to do so would be cruel. She had a life to live, and the last thing she needed was to be burdened with the knowledge that he was still floating about in the ether, watching her. He paused outside a Chinese takeaway, read the menu and tried to imagine what it had felt like to be hungry, but couldn’t.
“What are you doing, Benji?” a familiar voice said from behind him.
He whipped round to see his late grandfather standing on the pavement.
“Grandad?”
“Yes, son. You shouldn’t be here; you know that, don’t you?”
Ben nodded. He felt like a little boy again, back when everything had been so perfect; when he had not suffered loss – apart from his pet mouse, Mikey, dying – or known of all the woe that embraced living.
“C’mon, Benji, I know a great place where we can go fishing, just like we used to. There’s nothing here for you and me.”
Ben grinned, ran to his grandad and hugged him.
Holding Ben’s hand, Albert King led his grandson across the road, and walked into the circle of light that formed in the doorway of Barclays Bank.
16
THE WAITING ROOM
Rooks tumbled about the sky like black and tattered windblown rags, under swollen October clouds that formed a solid leaden chain stretching unbroken to the horizon.
Louise trudged out from the village, along the narrow lane that led to where a footbridge still spanned the grassy-bottomed cutting that had once been laid with wheel-polished steel tracks.
Pausing, Louise rested awhile, until the dull ache in her brittle lungs and tired muscles abated enough for her to proceed. The journey was becoming more difficult to make of late. Her heart pounded so hard that it was a loud drumbeat in her ears. For a few seconds she believed that she may pass out, or perhaps succumb to heart failure. But there was no force on earth that would stop her from attempting to reach her goal.
Could this really be the seventy-first time that she had made the annual pilgrimage?
It took all of her dwindling strength to climb the steps to the top of the bridge. Stopping again, Louise looked down to the deserted platform, to seek out the exact spot where George had kissed her goodbye at this out-of-the-way railway station, back in 1943: A farewell kiss. It proved to be the last time she had ever seen him. They had stood together where she now paused, to be enveloped by clouds of grey steam and coal fire smoke as a locomotive passed beneath them.
Onward. Crippled joints screaming in protest. Down the steps at the far side of the bridge, and out onto the crumbling, weed-riddled platform, to make her way along it until she came to the door-less black maw that led into the waiting room.
That was a fine and proper name for it, Louise thought: The Waiting Room. A room to shelter in; to mark time and twiddle your thumbs, hoping that the train you expected would not be delayed or cancelled, and that the person you were so desperate to be reunited with would be on it. Railway stations held a bittersweet place in Louise’s heart and soul. They could be joyous venues, bringing together families, friends, sweethearts, and couples who had been separated. But hugs and kisses and tears of happiness mingled with the sadness that others experienced when the train departed, to swiftly take loved ones farther away by the second.
Before entering the room that smelled of damp and decay, Louise hesitated in the doorway to look round it, before making her way across to a bench seat that had miraculously survived, almost intact, and was still fixed to the wall. Taking a newspaper – that she had bought at the village shop – from a plastic carrier bag, she opened it to place over the dust and grime-covered seat, before sitting down with a tremulous sigh of relief.
How on earth could she suddenly be over ninety years old? The time had in one way flown by, and yet in another had seemed an eternity, dripping as slowly as cold treacle off a spoon on a winters’ morning. This room was where George had said: ‘Don’t worry, Lou, I’m like a bad penny. I’ll be back before you know it, I promise’.
The tears welled up to sting her rheumy eyes. George had not kept his promise. The troop carrier he had sailed on had been torpedoed by a U-Boat, and all but a few dozen of the soldiers on board had gone down with it.
They had married just two weeks before George had left on that fateful voyage. With the unsullied optimism of youth, they had dared to envision a bright future in which they would have a family, and do so many other things together. One part of their dream had materialised, though. Louise had been pregnant, and born fatherless, th
eir daughter, Julie, had grown up with only a handful of black and white photographs to look at, of a father she could never know, or love.
God! Julie was now in her late sixties; a mother of three adult children of her own, and with seven grandchildren.
Louise had not remarried. She truly believed that she and George had been soul mates. Allowing another man into her life would have in some way interfered with her undying love and treasured memories. There had never been any room in her broken heart to accommodate new love. The memory of George had not diminished. He had in some way remained vividly alive to her, just a heartbeat away. And with Julie to raise, and then the extended family that came along, she had not been lonely, just alone in her own mind.
Closing her eyes, Louise let the ambience of how this forlorn casualty of the Beeching cuts had once been: remembered that George had bought tea and scones from the refreshment bar next door, and that they had settled to eat and drink on this very bench. A wood-burning stove – long since removed – had belched out enough heat to blacken the metal plate on the wall behind it. And there was the sound of a porter pushing a squeaky-wheeled barrow laden with luggage, and an indistinct tinny voice announcing imminent departures and arrivals.
My, how handsome George had looked in his uniform. His craggy, even features and clipped moustache reminded her of how Clark Gable had looked. And his blue eyes had twinkled with indefatigable humour. In George’s company, Louise had felt that no harm could ever befall them.
Had she really ever been that slip of a girl, with flowing auburn hair and a peaches and cream complexion? There was little to commend being as old as she now was. Aches, pains, and general wear and tear took its toll. Most of her tomorrows were now yesterdays, and what had once been effortless to do, was now a trial by arthritic fire. But here, and only here in this waiting room, time became suspended. She was in a place that somehow, despite its state of disrepair, retained a certain magical quality that defied any limitation of space and time. Of course, she knew that it was only a product of her still vivid imagination. That her disposition was elevated by the familiarity of her surroundings, and the fact that George felt closer to her here than anywhere else, was a balm to her melancholy spirit.
