The Watchers (22 page)

“You must leave here no
w
and go back to your world,” Rhiannon announced.

She held up her head and stretched her neck as she looked down at Keri sitting on the floor with Elizabeth in her arms. Keri would never let her go. “I’m not…”

"You will not dispute this." She spoke with the authority of a queen. "You must take these instructions as orders of the Watchers. You will perform your task and then if you succeed, Elizabeth will be returned to you. Until then, she will be safe with us, as are all the children."

Mia sat forward on her seat, resting her elbows on her knees. “All the children?”

“We have many here. Children who have gone missing from your world, who have been given sanctuary because they had nothing better to return to. They all live here and they are content. They know they are safe.”

Rhiannon raised her eyes to a maiden on her left. She left the room and returned seconds later with a woman and a child.

Tom jumped out of his seat as if he had been jolted by a bolt of lightning

The young woman gazed at Tom as if she didn't recognise him and then, as she recalled their meeting, she said falteringly. "You're Tom…Tom Stone." Her accent was smooth American, which seemed strange in that world under English soil.

“Fran!” He glided across the room to stand in front of her, not trusting what he was seeing. She held a child’s hand and yet she looked like a child herself, vulnerable and frightened. She was no longer the sexy, confident woman who had walked into Jay’s apartment that day a few weeks ago. This woman was a nymph now, dressed in long yellow silk with flowers weaved into her hair. She was exquisitely beautiful, but her face was pink, not like the pale faces of the maidens of Avalon. She had gentle lines around her eyes, moist lips, a pale pink blush on her cheeks and dimples when she smiled. Her hair was loose about her shoulders, falling in waves, like a Van Gogh ocean.

They spoke at the same time. “What are you doing here?” Then they laughed with their eyes questioning what they each saw.

Tom answered first. “I came with my friends.” He could think of no other reason to offer. Why was he there? He still didn’t know. “Don’t ask me why,” he said. “What about you, Fran? Why are you here? Why aren’t you with Jay?”

“Jay?”

He nodded furiously. “He came here to find you. He is in Glastonbury.”

She lowered her eyes. “Oh, I see.”

“You haven’t seen him?” Tom didn’t understand. The last time he saw Jay, he was on his way to Glastonbury to find Fran. Why was she here?

Fran took hold of his arm and pulled him closer. She whispered in his ear. "I will explain later when we have more time. I can't say anymore. Not now."

“Tell me,” he insisted. He couldn’t not know.

She lowered her eyes as the others in the room looked away. “One of the models…one of the male models…” She paused to allow him to guess the rest. Her eyes were welling up with fresh tears. “I was attacked. The Watchers found me and brought me here. It all happened so fast…”

Then he knew. Tom felt like crying himself. To think of her being hurt…he couldn’t bear it.

The girl holding Fran’s hand broke away and ran across the room to Elizabeth. The two children embraced as Keri stroked the hair away from her face. “Who are you?” Keri asked with the gentle voice of a mother.

“She doesn’t speak,” Elizabeth answered. “We don’t know who she is. I look after her, which is why I can’t leave. I could never leave her.”

“I think I know who she is.” Mia’s face glowed with the revelation they had found the little girl who had been abducted. “Her face was all over the newspapers a few weeks ago. Her name is Sarah. She went missing from her parent’s home in Taunton.”

Keri placed her hand under the girl’s chin and tilted her face upwards. “Are you Sarah?” The child nodded and began to cry as Keri cradled her in her arms and kissed the top of her head. Out of all of them there, for Keri, it had been the most emotional occasion of her life.

Rhiannon spoke. “You will take the child back with you. She will be your proof to the authorities that we have cared for her in our home. When you have completed your task you may return her to her family.”

Keri raised herself from the floor and took an indignant stance against Rhiannon. Sarah and Elizabeth remained on the ground hugging each other. “You say you are peaceful.” Keri was fierce. Her lips turned into a snarl as she opposed the woman who called herself a queen. “You preach to us about the way we live and yet you are prepared to use these children as a means to an end. One as a hostage…a bargaining tool.”

Rhiannon couldn’t deny the accusation. “We have no choice. You do not know what or whom you are dealing with. You are being asked to confront your government, to convince them to meet the Watchers on common ground. You must be motivated.”

“Motivated,” Keri shouted. “How dare you…”

“Enough!” Rhiannon stood and addressed the group. “Go now and receive instruction from Varquis. The man Jesus will go with you to the other side.” She offered a final warning. “Open your eyes. The future of mankind rests in your hands. If you do not achieve this challenge, the human race will be no more and earth will sicken for many years.”

She nodded towards the door. “Go now,” she said. “And do not fail.”

They tore along the motorwa
y
in Jay’s leased red Sierra. A balmy summer’s day had given way to an afternoon of uncomfortable heat and as the air con blasted through the vents, cooling their flushed faces, Jay asked Maggie where they were headed and why.

She took a moment before she answered. “It’s best I show you when we get there.”

“Give me something, honey. If it’s just for the benefit of entertainment!”

She scoffed and pulled out a couple of photos from the pile of papers sitting on her lap. They were aerial shots of crop circles. “These two were created in fields near Silbury Hill.”

Jay kept one eye on the road as he looked down upon the creations etched in green. One was of a structure that looked like a dangling palace with an orb above. He remembered seeing it on the local news a few years ago. The other depicted three images the same. To him they looked like flying tadpoles. “So what do you think they represent?”

She pointed to the orb above the dangling palace. “This represents Earth above the palace of Caer Sidi, underground.” She indicated three lines beneath the structure. “See these five droplets? They depict water, meaning that the palace underground probably sits upon a deep lake or something.”

“Or something?” he grinned.

She threw a scowl at him. "I'm so lucky to have you, American boy," she quipped. She swapped the picture with the other and pointed at the photograph. "These represent the metamorphosis of life, like caterpillars turning into butterflies… In their centre is an eye. Look, it is saying. See what is happening to your planet with your own eyes. Open them and watch the changes upon the earth."

Jay turned to look at her face and saw tears in her eyes.

“What’s up, hun?”

“Nothing,” she snapped back. “Just drive, will you?”

“What’s up?”

“I’m worried. What if I’m wrong? What if we get to Avebury or the Tor and find there is no entrance? There’s a chance of that you know. Then the solstice will pass us by and we’ll be nowhere. It will be too late.”

As the sat-nav guided them throug
h
country lanes to a place Jay had never heard of, he steered the vehicle around bends bordered by hedges and trees. He looked sideways at Maggie sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
Crazy old broad
, he thought. Frankly, Jay was tired. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and he had been in Maggie’s company for over twenty-four hours. The whole treasure-trail thing was becoming tiresome and he needed a break. “Look, Maggie, Honey. I think I might head back.”

“What? Are you crazy? We’re that close.” She illustrated the distance by putting the tips of her two fingers a half-an-inch apart. “Look, I know you don’t believe all this stuff, but I’m doing this for you.”

Jay saw a lay-by at the side of a road and pulled in. He switched off the engine and sat in silence as he contemplated the words he was about to use on Maggie. “For me?” he spat.

Maggie was silent, alarmed by his aggressive tone.

“You’re not doing this for me, sweetheart. You’re doing it for yourself. I’m just some guy you picked up, who you happened to manipulate into running you around this Godforsaken English countryside to pursue your irrational…yes, irrational, crazy ideas.”

“It’s not Godforsaken.”

His head spun to his left. “What?”

"This place. It's got Him in every tree and every bush and every blade of grass." Maggie's eyes looked like they were welling up.

“Well…I don’t mean it that way. But frankly, Maggie, you surprise me. I took you for a pagan.”

“There’s no difference.”

“Huh?”

"I don't believe in religion. I believe what I want to believe and I allow others to do the same. I don't go to church because my head is my temple and my heart is my altar. My eyes are windows of coloured glass and my hands are my offering. My footsteps are the aisle I walk down and my knees are what I lean on when I do wrong. I need no church to comfort me and I need no priest to tell me what is expected of my spirit."

There was silence as Jay thought about her words. She seemed slight and vulnerable sitting next to him with a hedge of hawthorns outside the car window framing her profile. "Except you ain't got no knees."

She offered him a smile. “One is enough.”

Jay took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition. “Okay, tell me why we’re going to where we’re going.” He checked his mirror and pulled away, allowing Maggie to illustrate her theory. Jay guessed he was a sucker for crazy pagan broads.

“You know I’ve been studying crop circles for years…well, ever since they started becoming abundant. They were recorded as happening in the sixties, seventies and eighties, but in 1990 there was a dramatic upturn. In 1999, at least 190 formations were documented, some say perhaps as an omen for the new millennium. It was a very exciting time for people like me and then the sceptics ruined it all by dismissing them as hoaxes. I didn’t listen. Like my religion, I had my own ideas and so I began this mission to try and decipher what they meant.”

Jay shot her a fleeting smile before he turned his eyes to the road ahead.

“A big majority of them are spirals, which kind of goes along with my theory of spiral entrances to the otherworld. Apart from that, I’m not sure they can be deciphered as an ensemble. I get more of an impression that they are the same messages being repeated over and over again. No two are the same, but if we ignored the first and then the next and the next, whoever is creating those works of art on our land, must surely want to make one we can’t ignore. At least that’s how I see it.”

Maggie took a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. “The trouble with that is most people are so jaded now, they’ve stopped looking. It’s as if no one sees anything anymore, like everyone’s so wrapped up in their own materialistic lives, nothing else matters.”

“Yeah, and I’m one of ‘em.”

"You're not so bad…For an American." She pulled out a map and opened it up. Most of it rested on the dashboard as she held it open with both arms outstretched. The crackling of the paper was becoming irritating. Jay wished she would stop moving it about. "See here. Most of the crop circles in this region occur around hills, okay? So, I began charting where the circles appeared in the Wiltshire area. Then I charted the stone circles, and hills and so on until I found an anomaly."

Jay’s eyes darted to the map opened up in front of her. On it were coloured stick-on stars and dots mapping out land features in the Wiltshire County. And around them, drawn with a black marker, Maggie had scrawled the Mandorla symbol.

“The top of the Mandorla peaks at a crop circle, which appeared at Lyddington castle. The bottom is where another appeared near Old Sarum, just here. Both places of immense interest.” She pointed to the lowest point and then she ran her fingers within the void of the almond shape. “There are masses of activity in this area within the Mandorla and of course, among others, we have Stonehenge, Avebury and Woodhenge. Alton Barnes and Alton Priors are smack-bang in the middle, and up here, as if a straight line is joining them all together, is Silbury Hill.”

"This is where it gets exciting," Maggie went on. "Just here, right next to the hill, appeared a crop circle in the shape of a Mandorla, with an eye in its centre." She elaborated with a smile. "I noticed it was strange because it wasn't symmetrical like most of the others." She pulled a picture of it from the underside of the map. "See here, there's a spiral shape at the corner, which looks to me like a staircase…going down. So, I positioned the shape over a Google earth image of Silbury hill and the staircase of the crop circle landed right here. I figured it was a map of where we would find the entrance to the otherworld. Here…going down these steps."

“Where’s that?”

“Swallowhead Springs. It’s a sacred place. I’ve been there many times on pilgrimages.” She turned her head as if she was waiting for a sarcastic comment from him. “Coach trips…with the other oldies.”

“Uh huh! Get that.” He grinned as he kept his eyes on the road.

She pointed to an area on the map. “A crop circle also appeared in the field here, right next to it. It was shaped like a flock of swallows flying north, pointing towards Silbury hill.”

“Okay. So...?”

“Well don’t you get it? Someone is trying to tell us that Swallowhead Springs is the entrance to the otherworld…to the Watcher’s world! It’s as if someone is guiding us there?”

“Why would they do that? Whoever they are! What would be the point of showing us how to get in?”

“Because it’s the end of our world as we know it. Or near as damned.”