The Watchers (37 page)

– 58 –

Stack Rocks Fort, St Brides Bay

Thunder split the sky. Shadows leaped at me from every corner of the dilapidated gun chamber.
Everything Grandfather did was for me
, I thought, and from out of the past my own demons reached with guilty claws.

Grandfather’s voice:
You were in a terrible way. Hysterical, kicking over furniture, writhing on the floor. You were a violent child, boy. But I brought you through the worst of it. On one occasion you lashed out at the other children in school.

‘He knew,’ I muttered. ‘All this time he knew.’
That’s why he was wary of me.

The admiral nodded as I looked at him desperately. The betrayal of the man I trusted and a woman I had come here to help had left me empty. Yet I wanted to feel anger and rage. He had told me my father had sacrificed me and my parents had been murdered. I wanted the rage to flare from me and burn the admiral.

And now Araceli was lighting black candles.

‘What does this make me?’ I managed to ask.

The admiral met my gaze. There was a horrible intent behind his eyes that could have been madness or determination. ‘The night your father exposed you to the sky spectres, your grandfather intervened, disrupting the process of demonizing you and Araceli. But something, some small residue, remained.’

‘What do you mean, “something”?’

‘Remember the strange disturbances in and around your home?’ the admiral asked. ‘Electrical appliances malfunctioning? Odd sounds? The telephone ringing at strange times? The spontaneous movement of objects?’

Only as a boy. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right, so I shook my head. I had always known that I was different to other people and felt guilty for it.

And there was something else. Grandfather had always regarded me warily; I used to think he hated me. But perhaps he was simply protecting himself from whatever abilities the process of demonization had awakened in me.

As I struggled to process this the admiral said, ‘Your anxieties – the buried memories – are the after-effect of psychic abilities induced in you as a child after your own sighting of a sky spectre. It’s not your own fear, anxiety and guilt that make you the way you are; it’s the anxiety and fear and guilt of everyone around you. Your brain is tuned to these neuroses like a radio. Your subconscious awareness of other people’s problems has consumed you.’ He came right up to me and added, ‘You should be thanking me. Without my guidance it might have driven you mad.’

Time halted with this revelation. The moment I inhabited felt like an eternity of loneliness. The admiral’s shadow wavered on the decrepit stonework of the chamber. Behind him I could see Little Haven flickering in the glow of an evil light, and as I pictured the sky watchers huddled in the darkness, I realized what was going to happen.

The admiral turned towards Araceli, who was looking out over the sea. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I remember the days when Robert was a bright young thing in the halls of power. Wilding, oh, that rising star, waging his war against the injustice of foreign weapons based in the UK. Battling scientific progress, demanding the abolition of nuclear weapons, calling for the accountability of American bases.’

He gave me a pitying look. ‘And look at you now. Trembling before the greatest weapon of all.’

I looked on as the admiral prepared to summon some unspeakable intelligence. ‘Begin!’ he ordered his daughter, and Araceli began muttering strange sounds that were almost exactly like the ones made by the children at the school. She was possessed, she had to be. God only knew how many times her father and his confederates had exposed her to the sky spectres.

The admiral said, ‘What do you feel now, old chap? Rage, despair?’

I didn’t need to answer, my emotions were graven on my face.

‘Good. That will help.’

Before the altar, the admiral closed his eyes and in a low, controlled voice began murmuring invocations.

For a very short moment everything was quiet.

From the official testimony of Emma Wheal, taken before the National Security Council in connection with the events of Tuesday 15 February 1977 in the Havens, west Wales

A: We felt this terrible rumble – that was when Stack Rocks opened up.

Q. Stack Rocks is about half a mile offshore from Little Haven?

A. That’s right.

Q. Could you see Stack Rocks from the pub?

A. In daytime, yes.

Q. But this was at night. How did you know the rocks had . . . uh . . . opened up?

A. Well, that’s the difficult part.

Q. Just tell the committee what happened in your own words, please, Ms Wheal.

A. A shaft of light came out of the sea, just off the headland next to Giant’s Point. Scared the life out of me. It lit up the whole bay. It was like a tower, beaming up.

Q. And this light was coming out of Stack Rocks?

A. Yes. All silver. Then it turned red. So bright.

Q. What time did this occur?

A. About quarter to midnight. That was when people were running around, screaming and shouting, you know.

Q. With excitement?

A. No. I thought we were having some sort of earthquake. And I followed the others outside.

Q. Why did you go outside if you were afraid?

A. The light . . . it drew you. You wanted to walk towards it.

Q. What happened after the light appeared?

A. After? That was when hell opened.

– 59 –

Stack Rocks Fort, St Brides Bay

A concussive column of light – silver then red – burst through the floor, passing up through the centre of the circle which enclosed the pentacle. My face stung with the rushing blast of fiery air.

‘He is coming,’ the admiral cried, personifying the obscenity that was about to appear.

I was only five feet or so away from the column of flaming light, watching the ripples of heat spiralling out of the floor. Araceli was staring into it, her eyes as wide as planets, and I realized the heat was drying my drenched clothes. To my disgust I found the sensation almost pleasant.

The gun chamber filled with a swirling mist and the putrid stench of sulphur. I didn’t want to look at the pentacle, but it drew my gaze as water draws a dowsing rod. The centre of the pentacle was a curtain of shimming radiance, and within that light, gradually taking form, becoming solid, was the shape of . . . something monstrous.

I looked with growing revulsion at the legs – not human legs. They were glimmering silver, as thick as pillars. And some sort of a face was taking shape, a diabolical cluster of interwoven shadows. I watched as gradually the light became brighter until the materialization was complete and towering over me.

‘My Lord Taranis,’ the admiral cried. ‘Welcome to your new domain!’

It looks just like the Watcher at the window
, I thought. A silver giant in a shimmering one-piece spacesuit. The mass of shadows where its face should have been had solidified to form a convex black visor, which glowed. The visor flickered with features that were at once recognizable and unfathomable: the face of a cherub, the face of a man, a lion and then an eagle.

It’s reaching for my mind
, I thought. And what I felt then was an emotion that went far beyond terror.
But why doesn’t it advance?
Why doesn’t it come for me?

The Watcher was so large, exuded such power, it should easily have breached the circle. But when it tried, it flinched back, as if an invisible barrier was stopping it.

The admiral addressed me: ‘Only your sacrifice can unleash the ultimate sky spectre.’

In those breathless seconds I saw what the admiral intended. Not by his actions or any words. I saw it in my mind: panic in the streets of the village, people running, falling over one another as the sky above them burned.

This awful ceremony, the admiral’s chanting of blasphemous prayers, his knife, had one purpose: my soul was to be offered to the Watcher, this
thing
that had possessed minds, projected fearsome images into the skies, invoked fear so that it might feed.

‘No,’ I pleaded, looking desperately into the eyes of the man I had always trusted.

The admiral raised his knife.

– 60 –

Darkness.

Then the distant crashing of the surf against the cliffs.

I was floating on seawater that should have been freezing and turbulent. A presence was watching over me.
‘You shouldn’t be here, Robert. It’s too soon.’ My father’s voice. Never a man who could show his emotions, but in this nebulous moment that was at once disconnected from the world and part of it, he had returned to me.

I saw the dark water around me break as a bony shape rose from out of the sea.

‘Dad?’

He looked diminished and frail, an echo of the sea, nothing like the muscular soldier who had yelled at my mother, demanded she give up her anti-nuclear protests. His teeth were black, the skin of his face split and raw in patches. ‘I should have listened to her,’ he said in a coarse voice. ‘I should have listened to your grandfather too. Son, I am haunted by shame for my mistakes.’

It was him all right. Only it wasn’t, couldn’t be, because my father was dead.

‘Where am I?’

Lying on my back on the still water, I could see the stars above, could hear the suck of the tide, could see the lights of Little Haven on the distant shore. But what was keeping me afloat? Why wasn’t I wet or cold or sinking? I didn’t care. I was alive. Somehow. But not physically. None of this was real. I was drifting in a space between two worlds.

‘I came to ask for your forgiveness. And to guide you.’ He looked at me with sorrowful eyes and said, ‘There isn’t much time.’

The way his form merged with the darkness and the water on which I was somehow floating was particularly unsettling. It made me think of ancient legends of creatures dwelling beneath the sea. And I understood that he wasn’t real.

‘You must understand how we died and why you are special.’

‘Then tell me.’

But I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what I feared the most. I only knew this: I had been wrong to blame Grandfather and I wished I could see him again and tell him so.

‘What happened to you and Mum?’ I asked through numb lips.

My father’s lifeless eyes were swimming with guilt and his once-handsome face was contorted in a way that communicated unspeakable truths. I was afraid, not of him, but of what he would tell me. Though I knew it was necessary for me to hear it. How did the old saying go?
Tell the truth and shame the devil.

‘It was the night of the Great Flood. December 1963. I think you realize there was nothing natural about that event.’

‘The sky spectres?’

He nodded sorrowfully. ‘They had been summoned. And your brain was coming to life in new, remarkable ways. But your mother –’ his eyes dropped ‘– it was as if all the torments of the world were at work in her body. It was ten months since Croughton, ten months since the protest and the arrests.’

My breath became shallow as I remembered Mum coming back to us afterwards, blind in one eye, her face horribly burned, disorientated. Forgetful. I remembered her nausea, vomiting and weakness. I remembered the painful blisters on her skin.

He nodded and said in a slow voice, ‘When I realized she had witnessed a sky spectre, I brought her to Ravenstone Farm. Randall would know what to do. But there was no controlling her. She ran from the house down to the cliffs.’

‘What then?’

‘Your grandfather had the courage and the faith to confront what I never could. As you will discover, if you go back.’ Under the stars in that other place, somewhere beyond the sea, my father looked down on me with an expression I had never seen him wear in life. ‘Go back. Warn the world.’

‘The world won’t believe me.’

Then warn someone who will. You’ve always fought for justice and peace, but your fears have paralysed you. Rebel now, my boy. Use your one true defence.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Faith.’

The air became tense and I felt the water beneath me solidifying.

‘Certain minds, minds like yours, can tune into the extra-dimensional world. You’re doing it now, Robert. Use it. You are not defeated.’

And I wasn’t. Not yet.

The ghostly shape of my father receded, merged with the glassy water and the darkness and the distant shore. The stars above me began to spin.