The Watchers (36 page)

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

by Dr R. Caxton (Clementine Press, 1980) p.180

11. p.m. Outside the Ram Inn, close to the sea wall, the elders were still muttering and swaying, but with greater passion. I could hear them in spite of the rain, which had begun to drive down in torrents, and in spite of the lifeboat station’s emergency siren.

‘To do thy will shall be the whole of the law.’

Pritchard was correct: there was a secret group in the village that had been waiting for the call of the Watchers in the sky. It was in part thanks to them that the demons had gained a foothold in the minds of the local populace. I was about to tell Frobisher we should leave when I saw his eyes darken and fix on the sky. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he whispered.

We watched, tense with fear, as a red fireball dropped from the sky and swooped, stopping over a boat in the bay. Another joined it. Hanging motionless together, they were like a pair of demon’s eyes.

I dragged my eyes away. ‘Don’t look, Frank,’ I said, but it was no good. His head was tilted back and he had begun to walk towards the Giant’s Point. ‘Frank!’

Slowly the people on the beach began to move as one – up the slipway, turning at the post office and walking out along Giant’s Point. More than a hundred people. No one broke away; no one spoke except for the elders in their circle: the teaching assistant, the postmistress, the landlord of the Ram Inn. ‘To do my will shall be the whole of the law . . .’

A police car screeched to a halt behind me, its blue lights flashing in the dark, Sergeant Blakemore’s pale face behind the windscreen. He got out but then did nothing, just stood there, gaze locked on the lights above the water.

Just then lightning ripped across the sky, and against the dark, on the nearest hill, the Haven Hotel stood out in sharp relief. There was a single light glowing in a ground-floor window. Someone was up there. My brain and body made the decision in unison. I turned into the streaks of rain and headed for the Haven Hotel.

– 55 –

At Stack Rocks Fort the sky boomed and everything shook. Jagged shafts of light flashed through the casemates and the air vibrated. Through the nearest opening I could see the glow of something in the sky reflecting off the sea and, beyond, Little Haven drenched in an eerie flickering light.

‘What’s happening?’ I shouted just as the red globes falling from the sky began to track across the bay.

‘They’re heading for RAF Brawdy,’ the admiral said.

But they weren’t just heading for the base; they were heading for its nuclear weapons. Suddenly I could see how everything was connected – what part those weapons were to play in all of this, if the admiral had his way.

‘We will watch as a new era begins,’ said my former mentor reverently, ‘and I become its master.’

‘We’ll all be destroyed in any explosion,’ I said.

‘No, I am protected. I am promised a long, long life.’

‘What if you’re wrong? What if they won’t be controlled?’ There wasn’t a doubt in the admiral’s eyes, not even a glimmer. ‘You’re so certain the Watchers will give you what you want. Immortality? Power?’

He nodded. ‘Now I am dying, but they will reward me with everlasting life.’

‘You’re sure they’ll bargain? You’ve opened a portal to hell. Or somewhere worse.’

‘I bring the ancient deities, I am completing Jack Parsons’ work.’

‘Just listen!’ I screamed. ‘Jack Parsons failed. He may have raised these powers but he was destroyed. Why should you succeed?’

‘Because of the prize I have won for them.’

‘And what prize is that?’ I asked.

‘You.’

All the air was punched from my chest.

‘You are our selection. You are the moon child.’ His voice was unsettlingly calm. He looked down at the blade in his hands.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured.

The admiral came nearer. ‘You had to come here of your own free will. That was essential to the ritual. That is why we needed Araceli – to lure you here.’

She looked up at her father. I saw tears shimmering in her eyes. This time they were genuine.

‘I’m sorry to say you’re going to die tonight, Robert, just like the Jacksons.’ He saw the question on my face and nodded. ‘When they threatened to expose our plans, they had to be silenced.’

‘But they were members of the Parsons Elite?’

He nodded. ‘They complained when they realized they weren’t to assume positions of power. They needed to be silenced.’

‘Like you silenced Howell Cooper, the headmaster?’

The admiral nodded, feigning sadness. ‘Poor Howell. His suicide was a great sadness to the order. You see, old chap, when he realized how he had been used against his will, he objected strenuously. His soul was taken and damned. We had to show him what he had done, hold a mirror to his crimes. Just like your parents.’ He looked back towards the mainland. ‘They died over there, you know, up on the coastal path, very near where the Jacksons were killed.’

My stomach dropped. For a moment I couldn’t speak. I felt faint.

‘No . . . My parents died in the Great Flood. Their bodies were washed ashore.’

He looked down at his knife. ‘But it was not the water that killed them.’

– 56 –

I felt his disclosure rip through me like white lightning.

‘You complete bastard,’ I said in a low, trembling voice. ‘You manipulative, twisted bastard.’

His thin lips curved into a smile.

‘
Tell me!
Tell me who killed them.’

‘Oh Robert. All your life combating war, fighting the good fight, striving to complete your mother’s good work, never pausing to consider what took her from you in the first place. You were so easily convinced it was the Americans – or the Russians. Look how easily led you are, how blind you were to the truth. Your sins are multiple and they have followed you here.’ He listed them on his fingers: ‘Self-deceit, stupidity, pretentiousness. No one should be protected from the consequences of their own stupidity.’

‘What did you do to them?’ I managed to ask.

Araceli bowed her head.

‘Like your grandfather, your mother understood very well the dangers of dabbling with the occult. And living with a man on a military base intimately associated with the subject, it was something she came to know a lot about.’

I raised my head slowly, defiant but also resigned. Here it was at last, the truth I had been running from since the day they died.

‘Based at Brawdy, it was inevitable your father would read the Parsons Report – your grandfather circulated it at the highest level there.’

‘
Randall
circulated the report?’

‘But your father showed wisdom, foresight. The potential of that report spoke to him, as it spoke to me.’ The admiral smiled. ‘I’d wager your grandfather will regret circulating that document for the rest of his days.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Do you know what your father did? When he realized the limitless power available to him through worshipping the Lawless One? He joined our order, even involved his own family. The ritual of initiation requires the sacrifice of an innocent. A child who is selected for exposure to demonic manifestations. You.’

He paused for a moment, and I felt a sensation of awakening within me. It was similar to the sensation that had accompanied my visions, except it was stronger.

‘The exposure left you damaged; you were mentally scarred, anxious, made worse when your parents died. But your grandfather’s religion, his devotion to you, gave you some protection. He helped you to forget. But now –’ the admiral’s tawny eyes gleamed an eerie yellow ‘– your grandfather is nowhere to be seen, and you have no faith. No hope.’

The sky cracked. I was incapable of speech. My head was whirling.

‘Remember that day, old chap? The sun was setting over St Brides Bay. Your mother was away at the Croughton protests. And that night your father asked . . .’
whether I wanted to ride with him on his motorcycle.

The memory broke in as it had done many times over the years. The difference now was it had colour and sound: the radio announcer was saying something about Harold Macmillan, and I could taste the sausage and egg that Dad had made me for dinner.

‘Do you remember going with him, Robert? Do you remember he . . .’
whispered to me about that place. The women damned as witches, put on trial there and burned. The children who had chased a yellow balloon through the woods in the hotel grounds. A balloon . . .
‘that floated among the branches, back and forth, back and forth . . .’
a balloon, bright and yellow and shining. Like a tiny sun.

My eyes flashed open and I whispered, ‘I remember!’

‘But you
didn’t
remember, did you?’ The admiral’s voice was soft, hypnotic. ‘You forgot. Because your grandfather was watching. He saw what your father had exposed you to – what he had arranged – and when your parents were dead and gone, he kept you safe. Helped you. And in your ignorance you repaid him with hatred.’

He gazed at me with a half-smile on his dry lips, and the dreaded memories flooded back.

We went somewhere.
I’m seeing it again, all of it. Reliving it in my head.

– 57 –

February 1963

Eleven years old.

Mum hasn’t returned from RAF Croughton. When she does she’ll have forgotten what happened there and how she lost her sight in one eye.

Dad entering my bedroom. I see the whites of his eyes as he tells me to get out of bed, to get dressed.

His heavy bike wobbling underneath me as we get on; the catch of the ignition and the snarl of the engine. We’re flying, I think, as his bike rips along the coastal road, Dad leaning over the handlebars, head low.

It’s a clear night, oddly warm for a winter’s evening.

‘This way.’

We leave the motorcycle in the shadows of the Haven Hotel to walk through ancient trees and wet leaves, twigs snapping beneath our feet.

After a short while we enter a clearing. And I freeze. Five figures – hooded and robed – stand before me in a circle.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Dad whispers. ‘Stand in the centre.’

I don’t want to. In the middle of the circle are dark silhouettes I can’t make out clearly. Logs perhaps?

I look back at my father with pleading eyes.

‘Do as I say, son.’

The robed figures part and beckon me forward, but I only manage a few faltering steps. Something makes me look up. Dangling from the gnarled branches overheard is an assortment of broken wooden crucifixes.

‘Dad?’ I say, looking around me.

No sign of him but the five hooded figures have become six.

‘Get in the circle,’ a woman’s voice commands.

Though every muscle screams against it, I obey.

I see now that the dark shapes in the circle are not logs but the eviscerated corpses of three black Labradors. The creatures have been blinded; their eyes are nothing but black holes.

My stomach lurches sickeningly and I’m screaming now: ‘Mum!
Mum! Help!
’

‘Shut up!’ Dad barks, and I obey.

One of the dogs is still alive. It whimpers, one paw twitching.

‘Sit down on the ground,’ says the woman’s voice.

She isn’t talking to me.

A dark figure advances from the shadows, kneels beside me on the tangled floor. A girl on the verge of adulthood. She looks me in the eye. It’s Araceli. Her expression is pained, her hands clasped behind her back.

‘It’s time,’ one of the figures says, and the three figures in front of me break the circle to stand behind me.

I stare ahead into the gaps between the trees, back in the direction from which we came. Towards the sea. Towards Stack Rocks.

Araceli doesn’t move.

‘Keep looking that way,’ Dad instructs, and that’s when I catch the light in the distance, flashing through the spikes of dark trees. ‘Don’t move.’

His words sweep away any hope of escape. I squint hard, listening to my breathing, focusing on the light. A sickly yellow light.

I think perhaps it’s a lighthouse, because that’s what it looks like, but I know it’s not. It’s bright, brighter than Venus. And it’s moving.

The hooded figures chant faster, harder: ancient words, evil words charged with power. My impression is that they are causing this light to exist; they are calling it. This thought strips away any vestiges of calm and leaves me with the most awful sensation of helplessness.

‘Here they come,’ Dad whispers.

From Stack Rocks the light arcs across the sky – it is astonishingly quick – leaving no trail. No sound.

For a moment there is just darkness. Then it is above the trees directly ahead of me, slowly descending. It’s an enormous eye, I think, winking at me. It appears to be dripping molten metal, and as it falls it swings with the motion of a pendulum, scattering beams through the trees.

Next to me Araceli begins to cry.

I call out. No response. They’ve gone, I think. The adults have left us here.

There is a sudden blistering flash, so hot across my face I assume the yellow ball has exploded, but when I open my eyes I see that I am wrong. The light hasn’t exploded; it has transformed. I’m staring at a dome-shaped object, some sort of craft. It’s at least twenty feet wide and dark grey with a rough surface. It looks mechanical.

I feel my bile rise as a stench overcomes me. It arrives the moment the craft releases two balls – each about four feet wide and covered with spikes. They remind me of sea mines.

They come rolling across the tangled ground. Towards us. One ball connects with Araceli’s leg. She screams as its spikes dig in and I watch, transfixed, horrified, as the ball drags her towards the craft.

Araceli’s eyes scorch into me and nightmarish images flash in my mind: debauched ceremonies at her father’s hotel, men whispering unholy prayers, Araceli, just a teenager, tied down on the floor, animal guts spilled around her. And, watching from the shadows, my father. Araceli screams again.

The other spiked ball rolls towards me.

Suddenly someone grabs me, heaves me up. ‘You’re coming with me,’ Grandfather’s voice hisses urgently in my ear. He breaks into a run, stumbles, and we hit the ground with a thud. My head throbs, but I manage to open my eyes.

No sign of Araceli but the domed craft is still visible. So is the spiked ball. It rolls but not towards me; it heads for Grandfather.

‘No!’ The spike catches him; skin rips.

Then he is on his feet and pulling me up and away, but my head hurts and I am shaking and so he heaves me onto his shoulders and struggles through the maze of trees.

We reach his car, and he bundles me into the back. I stare at him blankly, at the blood, bright and flowing, from his torn-open cheek. The jagged cut looks painful. And I want him to feel the pain. I do not know why, just as I do not know how he had found us or for how long he had been watching.

‘I’m going back for her,’ he says coarsely. ‘Robert, my boy, your father will be punished and I will protect you. You will not remember this night.’

I close my eyes and surrender to his promise.