by Neil Spring
I felt my uneasiness grow. ‘I feel like that sometimes,’ I said, remembering how I had known of Selina’s death before it had happened. ‘Like I’m aware of things I shouldn’t be.’
He looked straight at me, raising an eyebrow. ‘I was afraid of this. You’re remembering. It’s easier to forget when the past is hundreds of miles away and your focus each day is protecting the country. Serving government. But here, at the eye of the storm, the memories are closer, less easily suppressed.’
‘This place makes it worse,’ I admitted. ‘The farm never felt right to me.’
‘Aye, your mother used to say the same thing.’ He smiled fleetingly.
A picture rose in my mind: Randall dragging me into his study to pray. Had he done the same to Mum? Was that why she had stayed away?
‘What won’t you tell me?’ I demanded.
‘How much do you remember?’ he countered.
‘I remember Mum and Dad arguing. I remember it was something about me. I remember him taking me somewhere late at night, and a lighthouse.’ I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. ‘Afterwards, you brought me here. I remember the cross in the sky and Jasper. I remember you making me pray. I remember someone hammering on the door, you pointing your shotgun.’
His eyes met mine, and the memory travelled between us.
‘I was trying to protect you.’
‘From who? What?’
A haziness entered his expression. He blinked and it cleared. ‘Tomorrow isn’t the first sky watch; there was one planned for that night too. The people outside the farm were locals but members of a nasty association with a global reach. People like them have existed in this village for centuries. Members of a cult.’
A cult now calling itself the Parsons Elite.
‘Did they come for you,’ I asked, ‘or for me?’
Or did they come for the Parsons Report?
‘The less you know about it, the better – you’ll just have to trust me on that.’ He nodded towards the farmhouse, where Araceli was waiting, and sighed. ‘Her mother was a member of the cult, her father too, I believe. Evil places attract evil people. That’s why they bought the place. It drew them as it drew the Jacksons. That couple weren’t innocent either; they had blood on their hands, no doubt. Whoever finished them off did the world a favour.’
‘Please don’t tell me you—’
‘Killed them? Course not. But I imagine you’ve already heard differently down in the village. Who told you about all that?’
‘Frobisher.’
‘Oh, really? I thought it might have been that filthy communist priest . . .’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘You don’t trust a man who thinks Marxism is the future. That Russia is a land where dreams come true.’
‘How do you know he does?’
‘It wasn’t coincidence he arrived in this village when they upgraded the runways over at Brawdy. He’s different.’
‘And being different makes him suspicious?’
‘Don’t apologize for him. You can’t reconcile Christianity and communism. I look at that regime – its stinking corruption – and I see the devil. Father O’Riorden looks and sees the kingdom of heaven. Paradise! But it’s not a paradise. It’s shrewd and godless and cruel, with labour camps and show trials.’ He shook his head. ‘Who’d have thought that after the last world war we’d find ourselves living again on the brink of annihilation? In a land of nightmares.’
His passion was undeniable. Listening to his voice I was struck by the memory of my mother denouncing nuclear weapons as a reckless threat to world peace. My father – being a military man – hated her for that.
‘Assume you’re right,’ I said. ‘Assume there is a cult at work here in Little Haven. Why did they come to the farm? We’re out in the middle of nowhere.’
He was still holding back as if a truthful answer would inflict upon me irreparable harm, and that made me even more nervous.
‘This farm and its immediate surroundings – Stack Rocks, the abandoned airfield up the road at Talbenny – these areas are of intense interest to this group.’
‘Why? And what makes you an expert?’
‘You forget I served in the air force during the war.’
It suddenly dawned on me that he was referring to a specific military site in the area. But which one? The number of airfields abandoned by the RAF and converted to agriculture was almost as great as the plethora of shipwrecks in St Brides Bay. Randall could have been stationed at any of these, but there really was only one plausible candidate.
‘RAF Ravenstone?’
He nodded. ‘Nothing but isolated ruined structures now, less than half a mile from here. That substantial brick building near the turning for Dale? That was the operations block, part of a radar station where we tracked enemy aircraft.’
‘You were a radar operator?’
Randall nodded. ‘We had targets on radar that moved like nothing you’ve ever seen, but when you looked with the naked eye, they weren’t there. Unexplainable echoes. Some people refer to them as “angels”. I know them as sky spectres.’
My stomach jumped. That was the phrase from the Parsons Report, the document hidden in his study, the document that someone wanted – badly.
‘Definitely not German aircraft?’
‘Do you think a German aircraft could reach twenty-eight thousand miles per hour, come to a dead stop, then disappear?’
I was silent. Stunned.
‘That was my reaction,’ Randall said heavily. ‘We considered scrambling some planes before we realized they didn’t stand a chance in hell of keeping up. But I didn’t forget it. The target disappeared over St Brides Bay immediately above Stack Rocks. That’s when I decided to buy this farm. It’s the nearest property. And I imagine that’s why the atmosphere here always feels so . . . alien. ’
‘What about Grandmother?’
He smiled distantly. ‘Of course she died before you were born, but she left me when I bought this place. I became obsessed. I wanted to know everything I could about the sky spectres. And as soon as I began my studies, I was monitored.’
‘By whom?’
‘I never knew their names. Slender, dressed all in black. The telephone rang at all times, hissed and buzzed. Someone’s idea of a joke, I thought at first. I was wrong about that.’ He looked at me for a long moment. ‘What’s important is that you help me ensure that this sky watch tomorrow does not happen. You’ve seen what happens when people experience these things up close, the way they change. Imagine that happening en masse.’
I was imagining it, and it worried me enormously. At the same time I was thinking of Isaac Jones and his desperately ill father.
I was about to ask Randall if he was the author of the secret report I had left in his desk drawer when the cow we were watching groaned.
‘Help me with her,’ Randall said.
*
‘She’s out!’ Randall cried. His face radiated genuine happiness, pure relief.
For just over an hour we had worked side by side to deliver the calf. An exhausting tense experience, but a release because I had allowed myself to forget, just for a while, Araceli sitting in the farmhouse, Dr Caxton on his way and all the horrors of the farm and the village.
Randall was still smiling, his eyes on mine.
A question occurred to me, one I had pondered hundreds of times in the last ten years. Only now, with the mother licking her newborn calf at our feet, did I find the courage to ask it. ‘Why did you never cry? After Mum and Dad’s accident?’
His smile faded but his tone remained warm. ‘You never saw me cry. I had to be strong for us both.’
The memory of that time – the night of the Great Flood – caught in my throat. I looked away, suddenly angry. How could my parents have been so bloody stupid, so reckless, to go out on a night like that, to leave me?
Randall’s next question was careful. ‘Do you recall our sessions together?’
I shook my head, waited for more.
‘Those were bad times. You were in a terrible way. Hysterical, kicking over furniture, writhing on the floor.’
I stared at him. I thought this had to be bullshit.
‘You were a violent child, boy. But I brought you through the worst of it,’ he said gently.
My limbs had gone cold. I remembered anger, rage. Was that why I had been kept away from the funeral?
‘On one occasion you lashed out at the other children in school.’
I didn’t like what I was hearing, not a bit. But it sounded . . . right. The more he spoke, the more I thought perhaps I could reach fragments of memory that confirmed what he was saying: the stale scent of his study, my head tilted back as I sat in a deep armchair, his hypnotic voice.
‘I had to keep you safe, Robert. It was my duty.’
My mind filled with wisps of black memories, long buried . . . and there it was, the door handle turning, the dark profile I knew now was my father, creeping into my room. Taking me away.
Then Randall’s husky voice in the gloom – the voice of a reasonable man bartering with someone who didn’t know where reality begins and ends – was back in my ear. ‘If you decide to stay, if I can’t change your mind, then it’s important you face this darkness, boy.’
‘Listen to yourself!’ I shouted so suddenly he gave a start. The cow groaned. ‘Is it any wonder I’m so confused? Growing up with you and your secrets, I was a nervous wreck. I still am!’
I lost control. An awful jumble of half-formed, half-choked-back words spilled from my mouth before embarrassment took the place of anger. I crouched down in the milking shed, hanging my head so he couldn’t see my tears.
His heavy hand dropped on my shoulder. It provided unexpected reassurance. ‘Robert.’ I was momentarily shaken by the empathy in his tone. For the first time he really sounded like a parent. ‘Let’s try again, shall we? If you’re to face your fear you must understand it. Why are you afraid? Why must you constantly lock doors? Why did you never return to the farm?’
‘Because of what might happen,’ I heard myself say. My eyes closed and the memories crowded in.
‘Why? What do you fear?’
‘That they can see me.’
‘Who, boy?’
And suddenly the words were out. ‘Them,’ I heard myself answer. ‘The Watchers.’
– 44 –
Monday, Ravenstone Farm, 11.30 p.m.
I closed my eyes and saw the Black-Suited Men at the farmhouse door fourteen years ago. This memory wasn’t a momentary flicker; this was a lasting and harrowing image. Their hair was as white as snow, their lips so red they might have been covered with blood. I didn’t need to ask Randall what they were. The answer was already floating up: messengers of deception, harbingers of death.
When Randall had first uttered those words, when I was a boy, I had thought he was mad. I didn’t think that now. What I thought now was, Why had they come? When are they coming back?
These questions must have shown on my face but they never made it from my mouth. I was too stunned to speak.
‘The Lawless One will arrive with all power, signs and lying wonders,’ Randall said in a low voice. ‘He promotes false miracles. What we call flying saucers are really images from hell. The sky spectres, the Black-Suited Men, the silver giants – the world naively thinks of these phenomena as aliens.’ He shook his head. ‘They are here to deceive us. Demonic manifestations. Fallen angels.’ He nodded grimly. ‘The Bible refers to them as the Watchers.’
I had so many questions but the only one I could manage was, ‘Will they come again?’
‘I fear so. They have been summoned by the cult at work in this village.’
‘When will they come? Tonight, tomorrow?’
‘They will keep coming until they get what they want.’
‘Which is what?
He gave me a hard look. ‘Our souls.’
From overhead came a loud crack of thunder. As the rain began to fall, Randall helped me to my feet and studied my face for a long time. I studied his and wondered again about the jagged scar on his face. That scar was easily his most compelling feature and, looking at it, I sensed there was so much more to learn about him, so much more he might tell me if I only knew the right questions to ask. ‘We ought to get back inside,’ he said, ‘check on the girls.’
‘Yes,’ I said distantly. I was still thinking about what he had said as he slammed the gate to the cattle shed shut and shot the bolt: You were a violent child, boy. But I brought you through the worst of it.
Nerves still jumping, I followed him across the yard to the farmhouse. The outside lights blinked out behind us and we covered the distance in less than a minute. I was glad to get out of the rain and the freezing sideswipes of the coastal wind. I needed rest. The phone was ringing. There was no sign of Araceli or Tessa in the kitchen – I thought they must have finally gone upstairs to sleep. Grandfather went into his study to take the call. I headed for the stairs, but his words stopped me short.
‘Could you say that again? They’re not my cows, Gethin . . . Yes, I’m bloody sure.’
I stepped back to watch him from the hall.
‘An hour? No, impossible. I’ve just been with them . . . Yes, a bloody minute ago.’ Randall saw me in the doorway. ‘It’s Gethin over at Broadmoor Farm,’ he said, covering the mouthpiece. ‘He reckons my cows are on his land, right now, making a hell of a mess. All of them.’
‘He’s having you on,’ I said with a note of derision. ‘Or he’s mistaken.’
‘Well, he reckons they’ve been there for over an hour. He’s been phoning.’
Of course it was impossible. Not only had I watched Randall secure the milking shed just now, he’d triple-checked the bolt as well as lashed it with twine to be extra sure. There had to be another explanation.
‘Wait here,’ I said.
The freezing night air struck me as I plunged out of the front door again, running now, until the yard lights blinked on. Then I walked slowly. Suppose, just suppose, someone was watching me from beyond the trees that screened the farmyard from the fields. The same someone, perhaps, who had done that terrible thing to Jasper. I wouldn’t see them in the darkness through the glare of the lights. If they ran at me, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
There was no one. Yet some presence was with me. Nerves sloshed in the pit of my stomach as I approached the cowshed gate. My gaze fell on the bolt. It was still shot and lashed with twine. One-hundred-per-cent secure.
I leaned over the gate and into the darkness, flicked on the light switch.
Vanished off the face of the earth.
All of them.
But that wasn’t quite true, because if our nearest neighbour was to be believed the herd was a mile away, scattering grain everywhere and trampling all over Broadmoor Farm.
Randall was still holding the phone in his hand when I re-entered the farmhouse. When I told him his cattle were gone he looked both confused and afraid. ‘I . . . I really don’t know how this happened, Gethin,’ he said, ‘but I’m coming to get them. Now. I’ll herd them back myself.’
It would have been churlish of Gethin to insist on that, considering the lateness of the hour, so it was a relief to hear that he was willing to wait until morning.
Randall thanked him, sounding dazed, and dropped the phone into its cradle.
*
When Dr Caxton arrived, around midnight, I greeted him warmly and with genuine relief. Despite our differences, I felt I was at risk of losing perspective on everything that had happened and was eager to hear his opinion on the cattle as well as whatever new information he had gleaned.
‘I’m not going to deny it’s extremely strange,’ he said, taking a stool in
the kitchen. ‘Some sort of intruder driving the cows off would seem the likeliest explanation, but still . . .’
There was no route the cows could have taken to reach Broadmoor Farm other than the lane out of Ravenstone Farm which ran immediately adjacent to the house. If one hundred and forty-two cows had passed the house, we would certainly have heard them. And even if we hadn’t, they could never have covered that distance so quickly.
‘They moved a mile in a matter of minutes,’ I said.
The psychologist shook his head. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘But how did they get there?’ Randall asked, rapping his hand on the table. ‘They can’t possibly have crossed any of the fields because of the electric fences.’
Dr Caxton had brought with him a small leather bag from which he removed a thick bundle of notes. ‘How are Araceli and the little one faring?’
‘They’re upstairs asleep,’ I answered. I had gone to check on them after Randall had got off the phone.
Randall was sitting at the head of the kitchen table, his penetrating eyes fixed on our visitor. ‘Remind me of your qualifications,’ he said, and Caxton straightened at the sharpness in his tone.
‘Ah, well, it might interest you to know that I am related to one of the greatest psychical researchers ever to have lived.’ He listed his father’s greatest cases and Randall seemed to know immediately to whom he was referring.
‘The man was a charlatan. A fraud.’
‘Perhaps,’ Dr Caxton said, keeping his voice level. ‘But in many respects he was a diligent researcher and a committed investigator. Ruthlessly sceptical.’
‘The acorn never falls far from the tree, does it?’
We didn’t have time to squabble like this. ‘You said on the telephone you had something important to tell us?’ I reminded the doctor.
