The Watchers (9 page)

Sarah

South of England

Ted Barrow was afrai
d
.
Adrenaline was coursing through his body at the same time as the sound of his heart beating inside his eardrums.

Sarah’s frantic moans were muffled by the tape around her mouth, allowing only her eyes to demonstrate her fear. Ted had told her to be still, like a good girl, but again she had disobeyed him.

His plan had been to take her in his truck to a place where he could hide her for a little while longer, in a small part of the woods adjacent to his property. It was a small shed, which he had once owned before he started selling off his land piece by piece. But now, with the police about to descend on him, he knew he had no choice but to make a dash for it, taking little Sarah with him.

It was lucky he had been in the barn when the police had crept up the lane in their squad car towards the farmhouse. They had even dimmed their lights. He had to chuckle. They’d have to get up earlier than that if they wanted to catch out ol’ Ted Barrow.

Before they got closer, he had taken Sarah's hand and pulled her through the back entrance of the barn and into the field beyond. Despite his age, he found strength in his limbs to pull her along, trundling over rough dark meadows. He had to stop when they were confronted by a hedge of knotted brambles, but Ted knew there was a wooden stye within the thicket somewhere.

He found it.

He moved some of the foliage and uncovered a wooden step, telling Sarah to climb over. And as he followed, stepping through the hedge to the other side, there was another open field with a small babbling brook at its side.

Sarah was whimpering as he pulled her down the embankment, and as his feet splashed into the cold water, he pulled her along, until the water covered her soiled white socks up to her scratched and bruised knees.

Ted was panting as he splashed his way along the tiny stream and even though he knew there wasn’t much further to go, he suddenly gave up as his energy became so cruelly spent.

It saddened him, the revelation of being unable to take her to the place where she would be safe. He had only wanted a few more days with her. Just a few more days!

He stopped and stepped out of the cold water, falling against the rough grass verge, realising he couldn't go on. He dragged Sarah down next to him and as she struggled, he pushed her face away, so he didn't have to look into her eyes. He pulled a plastic bag from his coat pocket. With a pain in his heart, he swiftly covered her head and secured the opening around her neck so that no air could enter to give her life. She was kicking and squirming until her small limbs gradually flailed. Within seconds, her arms went limp as she finally gave up the fight.

Ted saw their reflection in the babbling brook. It was no surprise. He had already sensed they were there long before then. They were giving him instructions. He had no choice but to lay Sarah’s head gently against the soil on the grassy bank.

Then he stood up to face them.

The watchers were waiting on both sides of the stream as the water ran through the centre of their circle like a silver arrow. Ted walked into the middle, listening to their words, unable to disobey and as he waded he watched the water cover his legs to his knees.

The Angels closed in. They were formidable, yet they were fluid and graceful, and as they neared him, cutting through the water with purposeful strides, they embraced him within the folds of their wings until Ted Barrow knew no more.

They crushed hi
m
until the remnants of his old, tired body dropped away in a cloud of dust to the water beneath their feet. His ashes floated along the stream in a darkened frenzy, where the water caressed the earth and swallowed him under its gushing tide.

Uriel moved to the side of the bank as his brothers waited. He stooped down and picked up the child, Sarah, into his strong, gentle arms. He took the bag from her head and rolled it into a tiny ball within his clenched fist until there was nothing left of it to litter the land. He locked his powerful lips to hers, so soft and yielding, and then he breathed gently into her mouth, slackened in near death.

She did not stir, but he could feel her tiny heart beating under her sodden clothes. Uriel lifted her up and carried her back to the place they called home; to Caer Sidi.

And as the earth around them settled back to its natural calm, one more sound in the distance broke the silence of the night. It was the sound of Ted Barrow’s one hundred pigeons, taking flight as they were released from their rotting confines.

End of Part One

"Perfect is my seat in Caer Sidi

Neither plague nor age harms him who

dwells within.

Manawydan and Pryderi know it.

Three organs play before it about a fire.

And around its corners are ocean's currents.

Above it the fertile fountain,

And sweeter than white wine is the

drink therein."

London

Keri Rains closed her office doo
r
and went back to her desk. She needed some privacy. The Prime Minister’s ‘open-door’ policy was becoming awkward for her and many other members of the house. In Keri’s opinion, the PM was trying too hard. Alice Burton wasn’t the first lady Prime Minister. She didn’t have to prove her worth by promoting herself as the people’s choice, not when she had already taken the majority in the election.

Alice Burton was already a week into her second term in office and again the walls were rattling under the weight of her reign. ‘A people person’ she called herself, but everyone who knew her, knew she was not. Just as she had in her first term, she was keen to try new policies, new housekeeping regimes and new staff incentives. She wanted to prove to the country she was all about people, ready to stand by the population of Great Britain and to turn the country around, to make it great again.

Keri sat down in her revolving leather chair as she picked up the phone. She dialled Harry’s number at work. “Harry Rains, please.” They put her through almost immediately.

“Hiya, kiddo.”

“How are you?”

“I’m okay. You?”

“You know.” They both knew exactly what each other meant. It was going to be Elizabeth’s birthday next week. And as they had both suffered the loss of their daughter, the upcoming event was on both their minds, as it was every year. “Yeah, I know.” There was a long uncomfortable pause before Harry spoke. “Look, Keri. This probably isn’t the right time...”

Somehow she knew what he was going to say. She and Harry had separated over a year ago. Their marriage hadn't survived the loss of their girl. They'd tried at the beginning, but eventually, they knew it was never going to be the same again. "What is it?"

“I’ve met someone.” He was cautious with his words, knowing what her reaction was going to be.

She wasn’t completely surprised. “Don’t, Harry…You need to think about Elizabeth here. What is she going to say when she comes home and sees you with someone else? She won’t understand.” Keri attempted to catch her breath, but her non-filtered emotions were spilling out of her mouth now. “We’ve got to try and keep things as they are, Harry. We talked about it, remember? We agreed.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

“You can. You can help it, for God’s sake.”

“Keri, it’s all right for you. You have enough faith in her coming home for the two of us. I can’t be as optimistic as you.”

“Bull.”

“Keri…”

“Are you coming next week or not?”

“I’m sorry…I’m not.”

“Fine. I’ll go alone.”

“Keri!”

She could hear in his voice the discomfort he felt. Good! “Don’t worry about it, Harry. It’s only her twelfth birthday. Nothing special!”

“Look, stay in town. We can have dinner, celebr...I mean, just be together in a restaurant, like normal bloody people.”

“Normal?” She wanted to slam the phone down so hard he’d go deaf. “What’s so normal about celebrating our child’s birthday, when we don’t know if she’s dead or alive?”

Keri could feel her voice breaking. She wiped a tear from the side of her eye. She wasn’t going to cry. She was too angry. “Look, Harry, don’t decide now. We’ve got a few more days. But, if you don’t come, I am going alone. Elizabeth was born on the solstice and so that’s where I’m going to be, just like we’ve always gone for her past two birthdays.” She took a breath. “And when that sun comes up over Stonehenge, I’m going to be praying for the both of us, because you won’t be there with me.”

Son-of-a…
she thought as she slammed down the phone.

Wiltshire, England

On the 1st June 2026, Mi
a
was once more at Stonehenge. It wasn’t so much a duty, but more like she knew she just had to be there. It had been a week since she last saw the Watchers; a week since Tom had emerged safely from the siege in New York City; and it had been a week since she’d begun her quest to seek out the Watchers so that she could see their world, maybe even stay there with them. If they’d let her. The only person she’d told about her decision was Tom. As far as her parents knew, she was off glamping with her friends from school. She’d asked Tom to go with her, but he wouldn’t entertain it. ‘
But I’ve told you all I know
,’ Mia wrote when she’d messaged him. ‘
How can you not want to come with me? How could you not want to get away from this crazy existence in this crazy world? How could you not want to be with them? How can you not want that?’
She didn’t get it.

His response was flippant, but that was just Tom.
‘What, live on a cloud or something? I don’t think so. I’d miss my X-box.”
She’d imagined him grinning at his own senseless wit.

He irritated her beyond belief. He wouldn’t take her seriously.
Yes
, not many people would just up and leave their family and their normal existence to go live with Angels. It was weird, but that was what she was prepared to do. She couldn't fight it. She didn't want to fight it. She just wanted to be with them. When she'd sat with Uriel and he'd told her about the Watchers and where they lived, she was breathless with excitement. Their world sounded pure and beautiful, not of this place, a dimension that no one could access unless the Watchers wanted them to.
‘It’s not like that. It would be more…spiritual…like heaven or something,’
she wrote.

‘
So, wait until you’re dead. You’ll see it then won’t you?’

‘I don’t want to wait that long.’

‘You could get run over by a bus tomorrow, then you’ll be happy, eh?’

She knew he was cross at her. He was lashing out because he wanted her to want to be with him, just as she’d always said she’d wanted. ‘
Well, I don’t care what you say. I’m going…if they’ll let me
.’

‘How are you going to get them to do that? You know what they said. They will contact you when the time is right. You’ve been at Stonehenge every night for a week and they still haven’t responded to your vibes.’

He’d highlighted ‘vibes’ with inverted commas. Sarcastic idiot!
‘They’re not vibes. I use a dousing rod to communicate through the ley-lines. It’s how I told you, Tom.’

‘
Look, hun, I’ve gotta go. Speak tomorrow, okay?’

‘What…? Oh, whatever, Stoney!’
she’d snarled as she pressed a button and closed him down.

When she’d stabbed her phone to turn it off, she hadn’t talked to him since. Who needed it?

Now with Charlie at her side, Mia was camped in an open field with a bunch of avid pagan worshippers and Glastonbury travellers, all waiting for the day of the summer solstice when the sun would rise and shine through the stones. It was the best place she could locate herself. The Watchers had told her the Henge meant something, that it was the place between life and death, perhaps a gateway to another dimension.
That
was her take on it. The summer solstice was pending. Where better to be if she wanted to reconnect with the Angels. Surely this was the place to be. There was no question in her mind.

a balmy Tuesday evenin
g
left her rummaging through the supplies in her rucksack. She put her hands on a large bottle of mineral water. ‘Yes,” she sang. She thought she’d run out. The final bottle was a life saver since she was dying for a cup of tea. Thirsty as a beached goldfish. When she looked up, a strange figure was standing right next to her. “God, you frightened the hell out of me.” She sat with her hand on her chest.

“Sorry,” he said.

By the looks of his clothes, he was a traveller. He was old, maybe sixty-five or seventy, she guessed, although if it hadn't been for the startling lines on his face from too much sun, he could have been younger. He was tall and thin and he had a straggled, knotted grey beard falling in two pieces from his chin to the length of his scrawny neck. There, entwined in his hair, and around his neck, strings of coloured beads dangled next to lengths of frayed leather twine holding various emblems and stones. On his head he wore a striped woolly beanie, pulled down over his ears where wisps of grey hair hung from the side and down his back, tied like the hair on his face. Even though the whites around his eyes had turned yellow with age, Mia was struck by the vivid blue of them. She imagined he would have been okay looking in his day. Now, however, he smelled, like he hadn't washed for a decade. Or four!

"Do you want something?" Mia asked. She was cautious as she always was when someone got too close to her on the overcrowded campsite. Those days, nowhere was safe when you were a girl alone. So said her father when he presented her with a rape alarm.

“Some tea,” he said. His accent West Country mixed with a hint of Welsh.

“Oh, sure. I have tea bags. Is that ok?” She took a handful of tea bags from her small supply box.

He held out some coins in the flat of his hand. “I can pay.”

"Oh! No that's okay. Take them. I was just going to brew up." Damn, that sounded like an invitation.

“And I have water.” His eyes went to a van, parked six random pitches towards the centre of the field. It was a relic of a bygone age, with hand-painted patterns, now rusted over, with some parts sanded and not yet sprayed. It reminded Mia of the Scooby-Doo van, from an old TV show they ran on Channel 4. It was definitely a relic of a flower power age. “I can bring you some,” he said.

“Oh, you mustn’t worry, I’m…” she watched him strut towards his van, “...fine!”

His back was slightly hunched at the shoulders as if he'd spent his whole life stooping at the waist, and his trousers hung off him, held up by a tightly buckled frayed leather belt around his hips. He had no backside to speak of.

She cleared away some cups inside her camp.
Camp!
It was a small inflatable tent with every possible modern-day home comfort. Hers, amongst the others in the field, felt like an advert for Camping World. Where others in the field burned real fires, Mia had a camping stove. Where others lit candles, she had a blue gas lantern. Where they boiled water from rusted cauldrons, she had a brand new shiny kettle, and where the other campers walked around in bare feet or old worn sandals, she kept her slippers on. Now that she was there, she just wished she hadn’t gone out and bought everything from new.
Thanks, daddy
.

The strange hippie man returned with a white plastic drum half-filled with water. “Hand me your kettle,” he said.

She obliged and watched him top it up before he screwed the plastic cap back on the canister and tightened it as tight as could be. His water was so precious he wouldn’t spill a drop.

“Thank you.” He stood watching her with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his jeans, as she turned on the gas under the kettle and perched on her little camping stool. “Okay if I join you?” he asked.

“Oh, yes…of course.” She proffered a hand to a patch of grass the other side of the stove.

“Are you sure?” he waited for her to assure him. She appreciated his manners a lot.

“Please…Take a pew.”

He lowered himself down and sat cross-legged on the grass. She noticed his brown weathers fingers, adorned with silver rings and embellishments. He had six beaded thongs around his wrist but no watch. “My name is Jesus,” he said.

“Huh? Excuse me?”

He nodded and smiled. “I’m used to that reaction. I had it changed by deed poll in ‘89.

Mia laughed. "My parents were around in the eighties." She thought of her mother and father, and how they were always so busy with their careers. It suddenly occurred to her to question why they hadn't talked more about the past. The last century was a vague memory to most people those days. Life had moved on, and not in a good way, some would say. In the nineteen eighties, the people were more liberated. Apparently, computers hadn't even begun to roll out in domestic homes, I-pods and I-phones were a futuristic device that would have been considered impossible. A mindset like that was hard to imagine. Her parents still had their old collection of CD's stored in the attic; round plastic discs that played ‘albums'. No one made albums anymore. Since the world recession of 2019, most of the music they listened to now were downloads from the Internet and while their quality of life had taken a sharp downturn after twenty-nineteen everyone just listened to old music and watched old TV shows. Since the entertainment industry had collapsed they had nothing new to call a trend. Although there was some talk of garage music making a comeback.

The kettle boiled. She switched off the gas and poured the steaming water into the two cups, where inside, tea bags dangled from a tagged piece of string. "So...um…Jesus," she struggled with the name. It didn't sound right. Kind of blasphemous! "Have you always been on the road?"

He nodded as he wrapped his stained nicotine fingers around the steaming cup. “All my life.”

“What about your family? Are you married?”

He bowed his head. “I had a wife but she died.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mia watched him look away, to the people gathering around their own campfires. Some were chanting and some were strumming guitars. Most of them were eating and all of them had a drink in their hands. The atmosphere in the field on the opposite side of the road to where Stonehenge stood was earthy and wholesome and pleasantly atmospheric. Over the past week, Mia had begun to feel like she belonged there, despite her brand new camping equipment standing out like a shiny new pin in a field full of aged artefact.

“Ever heard of the Battle of the Beanfield?” Jesus asked.

‘No.”

He plucked at a tuft of grass. "1985 it was. Forty-one years ago. There were about six hundred of us. We came every year for the solstice, but that year we were prevented from reaching the Henge. We still don't know why. We knew it was by order of the government. That was the Thatcher years. You weren't born then. Some said Maggie endorsed the attack."

“Attack? What happened?”

"The police were waiting for us. Thirteen-hundred of ‘em with riot shields and truncheons. They smashed our vehicles, hit our women while they carried children in their arms, and pinned the men to the ground like they were dogs..." He shrugged. "We were peaceful. The attack was unprovoked and unnecessary." He looked as if he was staring into the past as if he could see what happened in his mind's eye like it had happened yesterday. "I was twenty-two at the time and my wife was just nineteen."

He sipped his coffee and offered a nod of approval at the taste. He continued with his story. "It was a travesty. No one has ever got over it. It was one of those ‘public outcry' things, where the press got involved and the public offered an opinion of outrage, until the next event and they forgot about it and moved on. Everyone they arrested was eventually let go without charge." He shook his head and laughed with irony. "They filled up all the cells in the whole of the South-West, just to accommodate all those they'd arrested." He looked around him as he spoke. He did that a lot as if he was checking no one was going to rob him or his van. "There wasn't even an inquiry."

“And what about you…?”
That name of his
! She couldn’t say it. “What happened to you?”

“They took my wife away from me. Shanna, her name was. She was five-months pregnant and I watched them drag her across the field. I was pinned down on the grass with one of the copper’s boots on my head.” He pointed to a small indent on the side of his skull. “See that. That’s what those bast’...Excuse me. That’s what they did.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“We found each other two days later. Our van had been wrecked so we had nowhere to go. Then she miscarried.”

“Oh my goodness! That’s terrible.”

He pulled his hat off and offered a solemn nod of the head. Underneath, his greasy hair was thin on top and dark grey. “She died two years after that. Cancer it was. She wouldn’t have any treatment, so I brought her here to die. She went on the solstice of ‘88.”

Mia was staring into her coffee. She could see the sun going down in its reflection like a tiny orange ball of light rippling in her cup. She thought about Jesus and the hard life he’d had.

“You got any more of that tea?” Jesus asked as he ruffled Charlie’s hair.

“Yes! I most certainly have,” she said, resolute.