The Watchers (34 page)

From
The Mind Possessed: A Personal Investigation into the Broad Haven Triangle

by Dr R. Caxton (Clementine Press, 1980) p.150

They stopped his heart. The priest was murdered in front of us.

Even before Father O’Riorden had dropped lifelessly to his knees, slumping face forward into the mud, Frobisher and I were running for his car, not looking back.

The cold sliced through me, made my hands shake as I struggled to open the car door. I felt certain Randall Llewellyn Pritchard wasn’t coming back, and I thought we would probably never see his grandson, Robert Wilding, again. The three shadowy figures were motionless, watching us from beneath the brims of their wide hats.

The engine growled. ‘What about Tessa?’ Frobisher asked.

My gaze jumped to where Tessa had stood.

‘She’s gone. Let’s get out of here,’ I said, and immediately hated myself. How could I not feel guilt? She was just nine years old. But she was not Tessa any more. Something else was in control of her – had taken control of Frobisher and me, made us throw Robert Wilding into the yard. Now we were free, we had to get to the village, help in whatever way we could.

The Black-Suited Men didn’t try to stop us, but I could feel their malevolence even as we left them behind and their forms shrank in the rear-view mirror. But then a dazzling red light was behind us, pouring ruddy phosphorescence into the car.

‘What the hell is that?’ Frobisher yelled, his gaze jumping between the windscreen and the rear-view mirror.

I twisted round in my seat. Powering through the air behind the car, half-filling the rear window, was a shining crimson orb, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, its surface continually flinging out threads of crackling light that whipped and flailed for yards around, before collapsing back to the surface of the sphere, utterly unaffected by the resistance of the air it rushed through.

‘Speed up, speed up!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t look at it, Frank!’

The zooming orb looked like a miniature sun seething with flares, but there was no mistaking it for anything remotely natural. Where the light it emitted touched my face, my skin itched and crawled, and I was filled with a mixture of fear and despair that threatened to overwhelm me. There were techniques I had learned from arcane books in my father’s library, texts like the
Pnakotic Manuscripts
and the
Diablonomicon
. A trance would amplify my strength of will, but I doubted it would be enough.

The light cut through the darkness, growing ever bigger. Blood red.

With an enormous surge of will I managed to wrench my gaze away and faced forward again, panting.

We had to go faster, but Frobisher had floored the accelerator. The suspension shrieked in protest as the car crashed along the unmade road. How he kept control of the car I’ll never know.

Suddenly, mercifully, a plan presented itself to me, appearing fully formed in my mind. If we couldn’t outrun the globe, that left only one option. We had to fight.

Luckily Frobisher’s attention was riveted to the road, distracting him from what I was about to do.

– 52 –

Monks Cove, St Brides Bay

Just fifteen feet long, the boat was speedy. Made of fibreglass and aluminium it was light too, which had made the task of dragging it into the water easier than it might have been. But the sea was choppy. Even though the boat had a motor, I was exhausted.

I was halfway across the black sea to Stack Rocks when I saw the shape of the ruined fort standing out against the sky. The place looked deserted. Then I saw a faint glimmer of a light, a torch possibly or a flame, in the top casemate, and with renewed courage I pressed on. What was I going to do once I got there? I had no idea. The only thing I was sure of was that going back wasn’t an option. No matter how bad things got or what I found out there, I wasn’t going to give in.

The sea picked up, waves slapping against the hull. It hit me that these weren’t normal waves. Normal waves didn’t erupt spontaneously from out of the ocean, and this part of the bay was sheltered from the worst of the winds. Then I saw it: a shining object in the sea no more than fifty feet away. It was cigar-shaped and at least a hundred feet in length, and as it ran silently and without a wake through the water it emitted a powerful blue and white glow. 

What the hell is that? A submarine?

A larger wave struck the boat; I lost my balance and plunged into the inky darkness.
I’m in the water with it.
I tried to swim, but the cold just gripped me, reduced my attempts to swim to wild, helpless thrashing. Then came a terrible realization: something was beneath me, rising,
something that would drag me down
. The massive object was almost upon me. The glow had turned from blue to an intense red.
Is this what Dylan Jones saw? Is this what turned him suicidal?

I was reaching for the boat. In the distance I saw the lights on the seafront, saw a boat moored in the bay. I shouted for help. Useless. I managed to grab the side of the boat. Waves pummelled me from all sides but I somehow held on. I gasped, overwhelmed by the need to get out of the water, and heaved myself up, collapsing into the boat.

I got my breath, raised my head. The object in the water had vanished.

I was certain it wasn’t a submarine, not just because there had been no engine noise. I simply knew. Pure knowledge had crept into my head. And even though I couldn’t explain how it was happening, I knew my mind was changing in an alarming way. Awakening.

I felt a moment of private triumph before getting control of the boat and turning it back towards Stack Rocks, which soon loomed nearer. I held on as the boat was battered by more rough waters, and just when I thought I could go no further, I saw the jetty.

From
The Mind Possessed: A Personal Investigation into the Broad Haven Triangle

by Dr R. Caxton (Clementine Press: 1980) p.156

The light grew even bigger. Redder than rage.

Frobisher kept his foot to the floor. The back end of the car fishtailed wildly as he shot us through a kink in the lane, threatening to roll the car.

‘Frank, slow down,’ I said, controlling my urge to shout.

A few hundred yards away the lane veered left, and there was no way we could make the turn at this speed. Hedgerows whipped past on either side like the oncoming cars on a motorway, herding us towards disaster.

Still the light followed. One thing might save our sanity: the possibility that all of this was an elaborate deception cooked up by the American military in their base up on the cliffs. An exercise in mind control, perhaps? Of course it wasn’t. But if I could convince Frank, if only for a moment, it might make all the difference . . .

‘It’s OK, Frank,’ I lied. ‘It’s not a UFO.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? Do you know what it is?’ he demanded, shooting me a suspicious, angry look.

‘Yes, it’s a prototype remote-controlled aircraft equipped with experimental weaponry.’

He glanced at me again, incredulous now. ’What?’ he yelled. ‘You knew? Why didn’t you say that before? You bastard, Caxton, what the hell are you playing at?’

The car hurtled towards the bend at a suicidal rate. I began to slow my breathing, closed my eyes and focused my thoughts on the memory of my father, a man who had once stared directly into the occult and allowed it to stare into him, a man who had spent countless hours confronting the unknown – challenging it, explaining it. A person I had never known yet had doubted all my adult life.

The symbols Wilding had shown me, the symbols from the church, flashed before my eyes.

The illusion of a cage of shadows within the car vanished in a blink, and the ruby light waned from pulse to pulse. And as the red glare within the car withered and died, so the illumination from the pursuing spectre began to dwindle.

Randall Llewellyn Pritchard was right: the best weapon against them was faith.

‘Slow down, Frank. You’re hallucinating. Those men at the cottage were soldiers. Special forces. They hypnotized us, made us suggestible.’

‘Suggestible,’ he echoed vacantly, oblivious to the irony, but as the bend rushed to meet us, he lifted his foot from the accelerator and pressed the brake pedal. The drums squealed, the dirt and gravel beneath the shuddering wheels rasped, and inertia threw us forward into the bruising embrace of our seatbelts.

The car didn’t stop, but slowed just enough to take the corner.

Frobisher yanked the wheel down to the left, the back wheels scythed around, skimming sideways over the rough terrain, and I thought for one terrifying instant that we would slam broadside into the bank that bounded the lane. But then he shifted down a gear and stamped on the accelerator, and the front wheels bit into the dirt, hauling the car out of the turn and into the next straight just as the offside brake light kissed the hedgerow, which exploded in a burst of leaves and plastic shards.

Frobisher’s terror had subsided, but it had been replaced with anger. At me.

‘What the hell are you up to, you shifty bastard?’ he growled. ‘And what the hell was that bloody thing? How do you know what the military are up to anyway?’

‘Er, well, that’s . . . I . . . I’m actually a journalist too, Frank,’ I stammered.

We weren’t in the clear yet, and it was crucial that Frobisher didn’t slip back into superstition and believe the truth about the sky spectres before we had reached the village. If I had to destroy his trust in me to guarantee that, it was a price I would pay.

‘Investigative. I’ve been looking into unsupervised air force and navy weapons programmes at Brawdy. Wilding was right. They’ve been conducting unauthorized weapons tests on civilians, and I intend to hang the bastards out to dry.’

He eyed me suspiciously, then said with unconcealed hostility, ‘So why didn’t you mention anything about this before? You let me think we were going to die, for God’s sake!’ He checked the rear-view mirror. ‘Where the hell has it gone anyway? And how did they hypnotize us?’

I could tell he wasn’t buying it. My brain raced to improvise. ‘It was a remote-controlled miniature aircraft, equipped with holographic lasers and a directed ultra-low-frequency infra-sound cannon.’

Silence. He gave me a look, straight and sceptical.

Darkness folded around us. Neither of us looked back, neither dared.

– 53 –

Stack Rocks, St Brides Bay, 11.20 p.m.

My teeth were chattering as I hurled the mooring rope, jumped from the boat down onto the jetty and tied the boat up with numb raw hands. I had a torch from the boat – that was something – but I was soaked through, hair plastered to my face, clothes soggy and heavy. And ice cold.

What now?
I asked myself, the wind gusting around me. The doors to the fort were at the end of the jetty, but they were secured with industrial-grade padlocks. I had to find another way. To the left of the jetty I could see the mouth of a cave. From certain angles, a plateau of rock concealed the entrance, so much so that from Little Haven it was not visible at all. I headed to the cave and peered into the darkness. Even though fear was pulsing in my chest, my throat, behind my eyes, I clicked on my torch and went inside.

‘Hello?’ The torch beam ran over glimmering stalagmites, mossy walls and sheets of water that were almost luminescent. ‘Anyone there?’

Silence.

I stood in silent wonder at the jagged walls of granite soaring above me. There was no telling how deep into Stack Rocks this cave went.

‘Araceli?’

My voice echoed around the cavern and I shivered. Anything could be watching me from the jagged crevices. There was a sudden crash, and I couldn’t help but cry out. I pivoted and saw what remained of Gethin’s boat on the rocks. The foaming sea was washing it away. It was hard to stay calm. The noise of the sea and wind set in motion another chain of disquieting thoughts:
This cave is going to flood, Rob. It’s going to flood and you’re going to drown.

My next few steps were more cautious. I ran my torch over the wall and glimpsed an opening in the rock. I went towards it. I could hear something. It sounded like chanting, a rhythmic drone that drew me through into a smaller space. I ran my hand over the walls and instead of jagged rock felt smooth concrete. Man made. A spiral staircase.

I took the staircase, close enough to the sound now to realize it was definitely a man’s voice, speaking in the manner of a priest: ‘I call thee, the one without human head, that did appear upon earth from the heavens, that did come by day and go by night, that came in the light and disappeared into the depths of darkness. In your name I dedicate this offering!’

I reached the top and crouched down. I had emerged into a cavernous circular chamber with a domed ceiling that may once have been used to house guns but was now given over to a very different purpose. There was a central stone pillar and the chamber’s curved walls were covered in symmetrical markings reminiscent of those I had seen in the cellar at the Haven Hotel. There were also drawings: of signs in the heavens too bizarre to be meteors, beings too large to be human. The floor was stone, littered with silver crucifixes and other objects, and marked with painted symbols around a circle that seemed to shimmer in the faint light coming through four gun casemates looking out across the sea and towards the Havens, which lay in the unnatural glow of something hovering in the sky. In the centre of the circle, before a stone altar, a pentacle had been drawn.

Inside it was Araceli.

She lay writhing beneath a man who stood over her, face obscured by the hood of a white robe, hand etching a shape – an inverted cross – in the air above her head.

‘To do my will shall be the whole of the law!’ the man cried, and without warning there came a sound to torture the ears: a bleating goat ringing shrilly with the wretched snarls of a prowling dog.

Then there was only a brilliant white light and silence.

*

When I opened my eyes the light had faded and the man had gone from the room but Araceli remained in the circle, unmoving, dark hair fanned out around her head. Her skin looked grey.

When I reached her side, touched a hand to her cheek, she looked up at me, dazed, and whispered, ‘Tessa? Is she OK?’

I didn’t want to tell her what I had learned about her daughter, wanted to spare her that. But I had no option now, after everything.

‘Araceli, I think Tessa is possessed,’ I said, hearing how alien these words sounded but not doubting them for a second.

Her expression didn’t change.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked, looking frantically back over my shoulder then all around me. There was no sign of the figure I had seen. ‘How did you get out of the house?’

‘When that thing was at the window,’ she swallowed, ‘I ran upstairs, held Tessa. The temperature rose. The roof had turned red. I could see through it, like it had turned to glass. I could see the sky, Robert, the stars. There was a red light in the sky. It made me feel drowsy. Then it glowed like a neon lamp, and a ray hit me. And I was here.’

It sounded incredible, but after all that had happened I was ready to believe it.

‘That man just now, who was he?’

She turned her head away.

‘I’m going to take you away from here,’ I said, taking her by the shoulders.

‘No, we can’t leave,’ she said. She felt heavy, lifeless, and instead of looking relieved to see me, she seemed fearful. ‘Don’t you see? They’ve brought us here because they need us.’

From the direction of Little Haven there echoed a distant explosion.

‘Come on,’ I said more urgently now, but she was still resisting. ‘Araceli, for God’s sake, there must be a way – somehow. If we hurry we can . . .’

I tried pulling her up, but she was a deadweight. ‘Let me go!’ she moaned. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’

A sudden, sickening realization.

They’ve brought us here.

I stooped over her, looking down into her dark eyes. I’d thought them beautiful before, but now I saw something else, something unnatural. The irises were black.

‘You had to come here of your own free will.’ There was a flatness to her voice. ‘The Demon’s Gate will open and we will be at peace.’

I shut my eyes, pulled a deep breath down into my lungs, held it.

‘Robert, you will understand,’ she whispered. ‘When you see him, he will explain.’

‘Who?’ I demanded.

She didn’t answer, just pointed. The robed figure was in the doorway. He had removed his hood.

‘Hello, old chap,’ he said.