The Watchers (2 page)

Robert Wilding’s Statement

I

Secret State

‘The Earth is a farm. We are someone else’s property.’

Charles Fort

– 1 –

Friday 6 December 1963, Ravenstone Farm, west Wales

I remember the first time I laid eyes on the farm, rocking and jolting in the back seat of Grandfather’s truck, struggling to ignore the overpowering stink of damp dog fur as we passed down a narrow potholed lane bordered on both sides by skeletal trees.

We had travelled some ten miles from my family home in Brawdy, across St Brides Bay, near the military base where my father had been posted, and as the truck laboured through the many winding lanes and huddled coastal villages to bring us here, I watched the sun sink ever lower to the horizon and felt my spirits drop with it.

My parents had died in an accident and I was to be taken in by my grandfather, a man I had met only a handful of times. Mum and Dad had never brought me to the farm, even though we’d lived only a few miles away. Now, as we made our way down the narrow lanes towards the house, I couldn’t help wondering why.

‘Well, boy, here we are,’ said Grandfather, trying his best to be cordial with a grandson he hardly knew. ‘Home.’

The word sounded painfully hollow. I already knew that nowhere would ever feel like home again.

Hanging from the rear-view mirror: a small silver cross, attached to a beaded chain. I looked past it, through the dirty windscreen and saw the gloomy lane open into a small clearing, saw the wide fields slope down towards the cliff edge beyond. Directly ahead were dilapidated cattle sheds of corrugated iron, brown with rust, and immediately to the right, behind a low crumbling stone wall, the farmhouse. It had stood here at the edge of the Atlantic for hundreds of years, he told me. Once, perhaps, it had been gleaming white. Because I was a child I never thought to ask why my grandfather might be living somewhere so lonesome: miles from anywhere, in a place without road names, shops, a pub or even a phone box.

His truck crunched to a halt on the gravel next to a grey Hillman Hunter that had seen better days. I climbed out, feeling an odd pang of nervousness. Looking doubtfully around me, I scrunched my nose against the stench of manure. Listened. Somewhere beyond the fields the ocean roared, and from behind the farmhouse a bull groaned as if in pain.

‘Don’t mind ’im,’ Grandfather muttered, his rough voice offering scant comfort as he climbed down from the driver’s seat and opened the back of the truck.

Despite his age – mid-fifties – he was a strong man; he had to be to manage the chores of Ravenstone Farm alone. He had a fresh scar, jagged, on his left cheek, which caught the eye, and he was tall with a quiet confidence about him. Though on that crimson evening he inspired little confidence in me.

‘You like swings, boy?’ he asked awkwardly.

I didn’t but I nodded yes. Grandfather was staring to the side of the farmhouse, where rising from the overgrown weeds there was a slatted wooden seat suspended by two twists of rope on a rusty frame.

‘Your mother used to love playing on that thing.’

A sudden memory: me in my school uniform, eating breakfast in our kitchen, watching Mum in her jeans kneeling over a placard emblazoned with the slogan
BAN THE BOMB.

Grandfather’s voice jolted me back to the present.

‘That’ll be your room.’ Hunched in his shabby greatcoat, he was pointing with a hand that was red raw from the cold to a narrow window directly over the small arched porch that led into the farmhouse. ‘There’s quite a bit of damp. I’ll sort it.’

But I wasn’t thinking about the damp. I was thinking about the thick iron bars fixed over the glass. They weren’t just on my window. They were on
every
window.

‘This way, boy.’

I followed him into the narrow hallway, where the lingering animal odour was even stronger, the carpet hard and brown, and the wallpaper so cloudy yellow you could almost taste the cigarette smoke. Hanging next to the front door, a camera and a brown leather binocular case, and leaning very near this, in the corner, a double-barrelled shotgun.

Grandfather’s eyes fastened on me. ‘You’re not to touch that. Not ever!’

His face had turned stony. He watched carefully as I shuffled down the hall and peered into the small front room, where an enormous bookcase was filled with musty tomes. His study.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the stale air. I was intrigued by the newspaper clippings that plastered the walls, partly because I had never seen such a thing before, mostly because of the many black headlines screaming about ‘mysteries in the sky’. And that wasn’t all. A great picture hung over the mantelpiece, da Vinci’s
St John the Baptist
, immersed in shadow. An enigmatic smile touched the great saint’s lips as his right hand pointed skyward.

I gasped as a dark shape suddenly sprang from the shadows towards me. But it was only a spirited black Labrador, alert and lovable as he pushed his nose against my leg, tail beating furiously.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Jasper.’

‘Can I take him out, Grandfather?’

‘Not now . . . It’ll be dark soon.’ His hooded gaze shifted to the window and the purple sky beyond. ‘Upstairs now. Unpack.’

Waiting for me in the shadows that lingered strangely at the bottom of the rickety staircase was the small trunk my parents had given me the previous Christmas. Packed inside: history books and my new school uniform but none of the toy guns and army uniforms I used to play with. My childhood dream to be a soldier had died with my father.

‘Hurry up, boy!’

I did as Grandfather instructed.

God help me, I went upstairs.

*

That evening, as I lay on the steel-framed bed under woollen blankets that made my skin itch, I longed for sleep while unfamiliar sounds kept me from my rest: creepy, insistent, croaking rhythms that might have been frogs in the pond, high-pitched shrieks that might have been the cries of prowling foxes and, just to the side of the house, another sound, riding on the pitiless wind –
creak-squeak
creak-squeak.

Perhaps Mum had come to hate the farm where she grew up. She had certainly never mentioned it, and whenever I had asked her about her childhood her answer was always the same:
Better left in the past
. The memories brought stinging tears to my eyes and churned my stomach. These days I’d often wake up crying, and I had been dreaming a lot about my parents and all the things we’d never do.

My knees were tucked up to my belly as I stared at the ceiling, at the rough wooden crucifix nailed over my bed. Downstairs, I could hear Grandfather moving about, singing a hymn to himself, pleading for the souls of ‘unbelievers’. I closed my eyes and felt myself hardening against him. Against the undeniable fact that this man was all I had left in the world.

*

I woke to the birds’ dawn chorus chirpily greeting a new day and the distant rumble of a tractor. Grandfather was in the kitchen, leaning over an enormous Aga.

‘We’re going for a walk this morning,’ he said without turning. His attention seemed divided between the latest edition of the
Church Times
and the sizzling bacon in the blackened pan. ‘Down to the coastal path. I want to show you something.’

I had been hoping he might ask me how I was, how I had slept.

The truth was I’d slept badly. Since my parents’ deaths I’d been haunted by the same strange dream about a dark-haired girl with an oval face and a lighthouse throwing its yellow beam across the sea. Pulsing. I’d woken shivering with fear, too scared even to try to sleep again. But now, in the light, it all seemed very distant.

After breakfast we set off with Jasper down a muddy rutted track across the fields which surrounded us for miles. I sighed, wondering why I already felt a closer bond with the dog than I did with my own blood relative. But the truth was Jasper calmed me in a way that Grandfather did not. I would grow to love that dog, really love him. On a desolate farm far from anywhere, Jasper was one of the greatest gifts that a lonely little boy could hope for.

I could smell the sharp salt of the tide. As we reached the lower fields, near the cliffs, Grandfather quickened his pace, regularly glancing over his shoulder as if to check we weren’t being followed. Or watched.

Then, suddenly, he stopped.

‘Grandfather?’

His lead-coloured eyes were fixed on a large rocky outcrop half a mile offshore.

‘Stack Rocks,’ he whispered. ‘This is the nearest point. You’re not to come down here, not ever.’

‘But why?’

I felt his reproachful eyes on me. Something else was there too. Was it fear? Why should he be afraid?

‘Stack Rocks,’ he said again. ‘Sometimes the kids in the village ask the fishermen to take them out. But you must
never
go there – you stay away!’

My gaze followed his. The outcrop was barren except for a ruined fort on its highest point. Grandfather told me that in the last century the squat structure had been built to defend the shore. Later it had been abandoned and left to decay.

‘It is a dangerous place, boy. You understand?’

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, and an uncomfortable shudder crept over me as I watched him, for his eyes were now prominent and strained. Hunching forward to drop a hand on my shoulder, he continued speaking in a voice not much more than a whisper. ‘Our planet is haunted. And there are those who would do us harm.’

Suddenly, a distant memory – burning rubber. A yellow beam cutting through the darkness.

‘I don’t know what you mean?’ I said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘The forces of darkness are forever present. You must not hunt them or seek them. Understand? You must
never
invite them in!’

He was standing close. So close I felt suddenly overwhelmed by his presence, by his fierce and rapturous face. ‘Please, I want Mum and Dad.’

‘Your father?’ His tone turned bitter. ‘The mistakes he made will cost us dearly.’

‘But . . . but he was my dad!’

‘He was a monster!’

My heart was pounding. I wanted to strike him for talking about my father like that, but I didn’t dare.

‘The Book of Revelation tells us that fallen angels would strike thrice between the eyes and cause great suffering.’ He looked broodingly across the fields, the sea, and at Stack Rocks, then gave me a look so dark it made me shiver. ‘You must be protected, boy.’

Protected from what? From whom? We weren’t likely to have visitors at Ravenstone Farm – it was too isolated. I hadn’t even heard the telephone ring.

‘From the forces of darkness and the tricks of the Lawless One,’ he shouted above the rising wind. ‘From the fires in the sky and from the heat below.’

The cold seemed to rise from the sea and strike at my face.

Someone help me
, I thought.
He’s gone mad
.

Suddenly, as if in answer to my plea, a figure passed into view on the coastal path. A man in farmer’s clothes. He raised a hand in a gesture of hello.

Grandfather’s eyes held my gaze for a moment or two, then, ignoring the walker, he crossed himself, turned sharply and strode back towards the farmhouse.

I’m pretty certain it was at this precise moment that I decided I couldn’t trust my grandfather, couldn’t trust anything he told me.

The months dragged by. I enrolled at the secondary school in Haverfordwest but made few friends. I felt different to the other children. Not only were they oblivious to what life had dealt me, I also knew that none of them would be welcome at the farm and I would be ashamed to take them there. Grandfather never fixed anything or cleaned, so the farmhouse fell ever further into neglect, until even the television gave up the ghost. After school and at the weekends I was forced to create my own entertainment. So I began to explore. And what child isn’t intrigued by what is out of bounds?

I quickly found a favourite spot: down to the lowest field, through the barbed-wire fence and into the tangled bracken overlooking Stack Rocks, the best viewpoint over the Atlantic Ocean and RAF Brawdy.

I was scared of what Grandfather would do if he knew I went down there, but curiously not scared of the place. On the contrary, I felt strangely drawn to the spot. Connected somehow.

Stack Rocks Island pulled my gaze. Held it. Rising from the waters in three humps, the large outcrop resembled a mythical creature. None of the fishing boats went near, nor any birds. None I ever saw. Sometimes it seemed as though even the rain itself didn’t touch those rocks. And there was something odd about Ravenstone Farm itself, I had come to realize. Not the isolation of the place, but the way it
felt
, the way the air, even on the coldest days, warmed the skin, the way it pricked and crackled and made the hairs stand on end.

*

My mother and father were arguing again in our house on the base. Screaming at one another as I sat hunched at the top of the stairs wishing they would just STOP!

The perspective changed, and suddenly I was cold. Freezing cold and hunched in darkness, screaming to get away. But get away from what?

Suddenly, in the distance, across the rough sea, a pulse of yellow light: flashing, flashing.