The Watchers (16 page)

– 21 –

We sat at a dining table, Araceli and I. She poured me a drink, and I thanked her politely. I pretended not to notice the dust on the tablecloth. I pretended not to notice the floorboards above us creaking again.

She was pretty, I noted as I took a sip of the wine and waited for her to speak. Not beautiful, but striking. Tall for a woman and slim, but not a waif – she looked strong. She glanced at the painting again – the lighthouse that seemed so oddly familiar – then at Randall, still stationed at the towering Gothic window, and I saw her swallow. Then she began.

‘Just after Christmas, after the light came – the light that chased us in the car – Tessa was so terrified she was trembling. The doctor had to give her a sedative. But afterwards she changed, became so remote. Disconnected. She wasn’t sleeping and could barely take one step outside the front door. After a week I was able to take her down to the school, but the teachers made me come and collect her at lunchtime. They said she . . . frightened the other children.’

The strange chant the children had made in the meeting came back to me:
Kcab gnimoc era ew rof
.

Araceli ran a hand through her hair. ‘Don’t you see? I just want my baby girl again. And I want an explanation from whoever is responsible. The weird light that chased our car did this, but the Happenings in these villages began long before that.’

I stared into her distraught, pretty face and felt something. That nagging familiarity again that made no sense.

‘Tell me how your family came by this place.’

She saw my eyes roaming the depressing dining room, and a look close to embarrassment broke across her features. ‘Mother used to say that the hotel found her. She moved here from Italy. It’s been in my father’s family for generations.’

‘He doesn’t live nearby?’

She dropped her eyes. ‘When my parents separated he moved away; his job took him overseas. Mother tried to make a business of it.’

‘And now it’s just the two of you? You and Tess? Alone.’

‘We manage fine,’ she said, looking me straight in the eye. She anticipated my next question. ‘Tessa’s father was a soldier, American.’

‘And where’s he now?

‘He left.’ There was a weary sadness in her eyes, a loneliness that struck a chord in me.

‘Wait,’ Araceli said abruptly and tilted her head to the side, listening.

At the towering window Randall straightened. Upstairs, the footsteps had ceased. Tessa had gone to bed at last. But Araceli didn’t seem ready to relax.

‘Sometimes Tessa listens at the doors,’ she whispered, ‘or wanders around the hotel, looking for her.’

‘Her?’

Araceli held up a hand. ‘Shh!’ She approached the door that led into the musty hallway and pressed her ear to the wood, before unlatching the door and peering out. ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said at last.

I offered her a smile, though inwardly alarm bells were ringing. I was beginning to wonder if Araceli was afraid of her daughter. Or something in the hotel.

I glanced at Randall. He was watching me. I wondered why he’d gone so silent.

Araceli had returned to her seat and now seemed eager to talk. ‘I took over the running of the place when Mum died seven years ago.’

I already knew that Araceli had grown up in the Havens. Maybe that was why her face resonated with me so strongly. It wasn’t just that I had seen her in the newspaper; it was something else. ‘What school were you at?’

‘I was taught at home. My mother didn’t want me mixing with other children . . .’ She smiled awkwardly as if that could lessen the peculiarity of her mother’s wishes.

‘I wanted to increase the number of rooms, get the place going again. The east wing particularly.’ Her self-conscious look told me she was embarrassed by her failure. ‘You saw the scaffolding, I suppose?’

I offered a smile, nodding.

‘The roof is unstable – it leaks.’

I was surprised the entire building didn’t leak. ‘It’s a colossal amount of work for just you.’

Her weary eyes travelled over the empty chairs and dusty tables. ‘I wanted to make the hotel viable in the winter months – set up a supper club, you know. But, well –’ she shook her head ‘– these days people tend to stay away. You’ve heard the stories, I suppose? About my mother?’

‘No,’ I said flatly, hoping the lie didn’t show.

‘There’s no need to be polite. If you’re local then you’ll have heard,’ she said. ‘When my father left he didn’t leave us with much.’

I looked away and saw that Randall had fixed her with a cold stare.

‘The history of the house itself doesn’t help. Apparently it’s haunted by a white lady.’

‘Like every old hotel on a cliff,’ I said with a smile.

She dropped her voice and said seriously, ‘Do you suppose bad places can attract bad things? Bad people?’

‘Absolutely,’ Randall answered grittily.

‘Military aircraft or not, it’s clear there’s something very wrong in the Havens,’ Araceli said slowly. ‘Something rotten here. I can’t explain it. I’m not sure you’ll find anyone who can.’

I brought the conversation back: ‘So, you had a bright light chase your car. Your daughter saw the craft at the school. Anything else?’

‘A few days before Christmas I saw a light circling the woods at the back of the hotel.’

‘What time was this?’

‘The early hours of the morning. I felt the light before I saw it. There was a tremble in the air. I had a look from my bedroom window, and there it was, in the air, a blue light like a blowlamp, just circling over and over. It hurt my eyes just to look at it. I thought at first it might be a helicopter, but there was no sound at all. Then it just blinked out – almost like a lighthouse.’

‘You mean, it was pulsing?’

She nodded, and again I remembered the lighthouse from my dreams. The sensation of waiting and watching.

‘Well, perhaps it was some sort of beacon?’ I said, smiling reassuringly. ‘The lighthouse at Dale?’

She shook her head. ‘I waited a whole hour to see whether it would come back. The hotel was in darkness. The lights weren’t working. We’d lost all power.’

‘That seems to happen a lot around here,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I know you said that there’s an explanation . . . but in that moment I felt . . . I’m trying to tell you these . . . things are not from here.’

She hadn’t said ‘from outer space’ but I had the definite sense that was what she meant.

‘There’s something else. But first . . . I don’t want anything I tell you to go any further, OK? People will think I’m mad.’

I promised to treat whatever she said in confidence, and I meant it.

She sighed. ‘OK. The light didn’t just disappear. It landed. In the field out the back.’

‘Was it rather like an egg?’ Randall asked.

‘Here, give me a pen and I’ll draw it for you.’

I handed her the pen I kept in my inner jacket pocket and watched, intrigued, as she took a paper napkin from the table and shakily sketched the shape of an object like an upturned frying pan.

‘Here, you see, this is how it was.’

‘So it was just sitting there on the ground?’ Randall queried.

‘Yes, like the craft down at the school. And nearby, between the object and the gate at the far end of the field, there were these . . . figures, moving.’ She clamped her hand over her mouth for a few seconds. ‘I thought someone was trying to break in. I keep some chickens down there, you see. So I had another look through the binoculars. And, well . . .’

‘Tell us about the figures,’ Randall said in a coaxing voice. I could tell he was intrigued.

It was a few moments before she was able to continue, but when she did, she spoke slowly. ‘All this time, as I was watching them, the windows were vibrating. Even my teeth seemed to vibrate. I felt this terrible pressure in my head and shoulders. And those monstrous figures, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were huge!’

‘Giants,’ Randall said softly. His eye caught mine and I felt a shiver of memory pass over me.

‘They were shining – I mean, their clothes were shining. It was like a ripple effect. Shimmering. Some sort of suit that covered them from head to toe. And their arms were long, too long. One of them was stooped over. I thought it was measuring something.’

‘Did you see their faces?’ I asked.

‘There were no faces! Nothing. Just a black space.’

That made me think of the sketch that Selina had given Colonel Conrad Corso and the menacing figure he claimed had appeared on the night of the protest at RAF Croughton back in 1963.

Their faces are made of shadows.

Somewhere in the Haven Hotel pipes creaked. Outside a gust of wind moaned.

I shivered. ‘Right, well, let’s keep in mind why we’re all here,’ I said at last. ‘To find out what people have been seeing, what landed at the school. What landed behind your hotel then flew away.’

‘Except it didn’t fly away, did it?’ Randall’s eyes narrowed. ‘Be precise, boy! What actually happened?’

‘It disappeared,’ said Araceli. ‘Vanished on the spot.’

‘Exactly!’ he said, snapping his gnarled fingers. ‘It. Just. Disappeared. UFOs do the same thing. They vanish and reappear somewhere else in the sky without ever crossing the intermediate space.’

‘What’s your point?’ I asked.

Randall’s voice was thoughtful. ‘These phenomena bend our minds. What if they can bend space and time as well? What if these phenomena don’t so much fly into our world as slip into it?’

‘Inter-dimensional?’ Araceli ventured, and when Randall nodded, her eyes opened in surprise.

This was too far-fetched for me. I had to get Araceli to stop listening to my grandfather’s wild theories. He was derailing the whole interview. Already I could feel a strong connection to this woman. I wanted to know her. I wanted to find out who she was. And to do that, I knew I needed to show more of myself. Offering my most reassuring smile, I said, ‘I’ve lost someone, someone very close to me. The state they left her in –’ I shook my head ‘– she might as well be dead.’

‘What happened?’

I spoke very slowly about the sequence of meetings that had led me back to the Havens. I didn’t mentioned the admiral in front of Randall, but my story was easy to tell without that detail given that they had both seen the explosion on the Thames in the news.

‘So you see I need to know what happened to my friend. I believe she may have stumbled onto something of military significance to the US, something they don’t want anyone investigating. And I believe you might have done too.’ I paused before asking, ‘What did Selina ask you?’

But before anyone could say anything, there came a huge rumbling explosion that rattled the windows and the bottles behind the bar.

‘There! You hear it?’ cried Randall.

Of course we had. The sound wasn’t only beyond the glass, in the crowding darkness; it trembled in the walls of the old building. In the floorboards.

‘It’s
them
,’ Randal hissed.

‘Yes, it’s them,’ I said defiantly. ‘The Americans. That was a sonic boom.’ I wheeled to face Araceli, remembering what Frobisher had told me about night-time activities at Brawdy. ‘The base is only ten miles from here.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘If we’re quick, if we leave now, we may see some activity on the runway.’

‘I can’t leave Tessa.’

I nodded. Of course she wouldn’t leave her daughter.

Randall’s determined eyes were riveted on me as I made for the door. ‘There’s absolutely no point! They won’t allow you anywhere near.’

‘There you go again,’ I almost shouted. ‘Well I lived on that base, remember? I know how close you can get. Come with me?’

Randall’s stare faltered for a second. If he thought I was extending an olive branch, he was wrong; I hadn’t forgotten that he was a piece of this puzzle. Maybe if I got him on his own, he would tell me what he knew.

‘Come on,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘They’ve got a lookout tower now. Heat sensors in the ground. We’d need to take the utmost care.’

Suddenly I was remembering burning rubber again. A pulsing yellow beam from a distant lighthouse. I hadn’t even realized my eyes were clamped shut until I opened them again.

‘You all right?’ I heard Araceli say.

I tried to focus on her lips. ‘Yes . . . umm, yes, thank you.’

But that wasn’t really true because the hazy memory was still there.
Somewhere . . . we went somewhere.

She raised her eyebrows in concern. ‘For a moment you reminded me of Tessa. The way she blanks out.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I’m fine.’

I thought of the way Tessa had screamed in the school hall and those words she’d chanted that made no sense at all.

Randall was shaking his head. ‘If this village knew what I knew—’

‘What
you
know. You seem to talk about it an awful lot but never explain anything! Does it make you feel important? Does it give you some sort of weird kick to know more than the rest of us?’

He gave me a black stare, his jaw working.

‘Well suppose I’m right,’ I continued. ‘Suppose that the electrical interference in the village is due to some sort of experiment they’re conducting up—’