They Came From SW19 (24 page)

I was scared. But not just by Quigley. I was scared because if what Quigley had said to Pikey was true and he really
didn’t
know Mr Marr, how come he had access to his full name and date of birth? The only person in the world who knew those was me. For some reason he hated that middle name of his. It was almost as closely guarded a secret as Operation Majestic
UK
8.

Oh yes, there is such a thing. That was the real reason I was sweating as I went to bed that night. Operation Majestic
UK
8 is
dynamite.
Nobody else, apart from those directly involved – and, of course, Mr Marr – knew about that stuff. It’s dangerous even to mention it to people, according to Mr Marr.

But Pike knew about it. If it
was
Pike talking. Not someone or
something
using his poor little body to give us a dreadful warning.

You may find this hard to believe, but Operation Majestic 12 really happened. You can look it up in
The UFO Report
, by Timothy Good, if you like. It’s the most convincing evidence we have of an alien invasion of this planet, and a matter of public record.

In 1952, according to the American nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, a top-secret briefing document for President Eisenhower was leaked to the public. It revealed that the wreckage of a flying saucer was allegedly recovered seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Admiral Hillenkoetter’s report for the CIA noted, among other things, ‘that the characteristics of the human-like bodies were different from homo sapiens; that there were strange symbols on portions of the wreckage which had not yet been interpreted’. And ‘that it was strongly recommended that Operation Majestic 12 be kept accountable only to the President of the United States’.

There is objective evidence that something odd did happen near Roswell in 1947. We know for a fact that the area was sealed off and that army and rescue services were called to the scene. And that no one, not even the press, was allowed near. Stanton Friedman, who has years of experience in the design, development and testing of advanced nuclear and space systems, concludes, in his 1990 report, that
the leaked documents are genuine.

Before you say, ‘Then he is barking mad,’ think hard about this. There are plenty of things they don’t tell us about. And Operation Majestic
UK
8, like its American counterpart, is one of those things. The reason you haven’t read about it, even in the official UFO journals, is that it has been kept so secret that not even the ufologists know about it.

Operation Majestic
UK
8 refers to a set of documents shown to Mrs Thatcher
in secret
in 1984. These documents refer to a spaceship that crash-landed on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides in the autumn of 1983. (Autumn, as you will have noted from this manuscript, is a busy time for the extraterrestrials.) An alien who was brought from the wreckage in a container to the Mill Hill Medical Research Centre survived in our atmosphere for three days, five hours and twenty-five minutes. According to the
UK
8 papers, a full-scale invasion of the earth was planned, although, from what the creature told them, the research scientists concluded that it would be
eight or nine years
before the ‘fleet’ was fully prepared.

The alien, who was, according to the scientists, ‘of humanoid form’, was from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear, identified subsequently by scientists as probably belonging to star system
BG
4543/2221 in the Beta Principis cluster. Mr Marr reckoned that he conveyed ‘certain information’ to the scientists, including that his planet was controlled by a creature. The creature’s name was
Argol.
Hardly anyone knew this apart from me and Mr Marr. How could Pike have possibly known? Wasn’t it likely that the thing that had got into him at the seance was really from the planet Tellenor? It hadn’t been like any other seance I had ever seen . . .

I thought about this the day after Pike went crazy. It had been a particularly bad day at school. ‘Dummy’ Maxwell had told me I had a ‘hunted look’ about me. I ask you! My dad always used to say that he didn’t pay teachers to make personal remarks.

I was sitting with my feet up, watching a film about a Puerto Rican mass murderer. First of all Emily Quigley came in.

‘All Daddy wantth you to do,’ she said, ‘ith to thay that alienth ith only an ecthpwethion! He thinkth tho highly of your thtwength!’

I ignored her. The Puerto Rican mass murderer was letting off a pump-action shotgun into a bus queue in downtown Los Angeles.

After a few minutes, she went out and Quigley came in, waving a piece of paper. He grinned madly at me and said, ‘Well, young shaver! This should sort you out!’

He put his hands on his hips and gave me a kind of larky look. ‘Why do you always look so
sullen
, fellow? Gosh! Jesus ain’t arf depressed at seeing his children down in the mouth, me deario!’

I kept my eyes on the screen. I never look sullen. Especially when I am watching Puerto Rican mass murderers. This one was now sobbing over his attorney’s shoes. Quigley waved the paper over my face.

When its flapping had started to irritate me, I snatched it from him and saw that it was ruled like a timetable. On it were written, in crude capitals, things like:

07.45-08.10 –
HOOVERING

08.10-08.15 –
CHRISTIAN WORSHIP

08.15-08.25 –
BREAKFAST
(optional)

I went back to looking at the screen. Events move swiftly in these films and it’s very easy to miss things. The Puerto Rican mass murderer was now in bed, surrounded by a crowd of admiring listeners, lawyers, policemen, close relatives and beautiful women. Obviously the only way to get respect is to make with the pump-action shotgun. You know?

Quigley reached forward and turned it off. I turned it on again. I was quite calm. At this moment, my mum came in.

‘Do you think,’ Quigley said to her, ‘that the little bloke should be watching this . . . ?’

‘Oh . . .’ said my mum. She sounded scared.

Behind her came Mrs Quigley, who was holding a frying-pan.

‘It’s only some rubbish about a Puerto Rican mass murderer . . .’ she said. ‘He’s got off by the blonde one in the wig, anyway!’

I knew she had psychic gifts, but I could not work out how she was so clued in to this film. Surely there was no way she could have seen it before.

Quigley started to pace up and down the room as the mass murderer, who had now leaped out of bed and on to the windowsill of his hospital suite, announced his intention of travelling the sixteen floors between him and the pavement without the aid of lift or stairs.

‘You, me laddio,’ said Quigley, ‘are on pindown! You will be picked up from school by Marjorie or me or your mother or all three of us from now on.’

I kept my eyes on the screen. I tried to imagine Greenslade and Marjorie Quigley together. I just could not do it, somehow. It seemed hard to believe they were in the same universe.

‘Golly, Simo, you are making it hard for us,’ Quiggers went on. ‘We want a pure boy that we can hold to our bosoms and we get a kind of . . . I dunno, matey . . . a kinda
monster
!’

The Puerto Rican mass murderer had decided to jump. His attorney’s girlfriend was holding on to his legs as he went through the things that were wrong with his life, in broken English. ‘Itta steenk!’ he was saying. ‘It alla steenk, thees life!’ I knew how he felt.

My mum and Mrs Quigley were now sitting on the arm of the sofa, their eyes glued to the screen, as Quigley paced around the room.

‘There is to be no hanging around the High Street and staring into shop windows,’ he went on. ‘There are to be none of those “hamburgers”, either.’

You could really hear those inverted commas click into place. What was he trying to do to me? We were talking Colditz here, guys!

‘There are no phone calls in or out. There are no little “subs”, and there are no trips to the newsagents’ either, me deario. Until you stop this upsetting talk and this . . . divisive rambling about . . .’

‘Aliens,’ I said, rather irritably. I knew he was trying to rile me, but I was determined to keep calm. I thought about
sang-sang-dang
, or the state of being a rose bush in early May. It helped.

On the screen they had let go of the Puerto Rican mass murderer’s trousers and he was on his way to the sidewalk, head first, at about seventy miles an hour. It was better for him, really. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who could have taken a long prison sentence.

‘ “Sin is a busy old thing when out! See how it travels, Lord, all round about!” ’ said Quigley, who often reaches for the wise words of Old Mother Walsh when things are getting tough.

After the mass murderer hit the deck, I got up and, resisting the temptation to fold my left forearm over my right elbow, make a prong of the middle finger of my right hand and then lift it in Quigley’s face while telling him he was a motherfucking asshole, I went to the door. ‘And don’t look so sullen, me laddio!’ he called after me.

Sullen? I wouldn’t know
how
to, my friend. I had risen above him and was now in the state of
dung-hai
, or complete and utter superiority to Quigley.

What was really getting to him was the fact that alien-fever was proving hard to eradicate in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. I thought about his notion that ‘alien’ was just another way of saying ‘devil’, or that Old Mother Walsh and her snake weren’t, actually, any more real, although just as powerful, as Argol and the things from Tellenor. It didn’t stand up. I don’t say I knew what was happening, but, whatever it was, it was
real.
You know? I hadn’t even dared go near Furnival Gardens since I saw my old man for the second time.

I would have to go down to Mr Marr’s house. And, with this new regime in force, tonight would probably be the last chance I had to do it. I decided to wait until they were all asleep. I lay on my bed with a computer magazine and, from time to time, went to the window and looked down at the darkened street. I could make out the spot where my dad had stood that night.

Down below, Quigley shouted goodnight at me and I shouted back, and, at last, my mum tiptoed to the door and, looking fearfully around her in case Quigley saw, blew me a little damp kiss. ‘You can be so sweet, Simon,’ she said, ‘but you’re such a stubborn thing!’ I didn’t answer. I might have provoked even worse charges. Then she said, ‘You’re so like him. You’re so like poor, poor Norman!’

Quigley was always the last to go to bed. His routine was monumental, guys. When everyone was in bed he would go round to every window, double-check if it was locked and then, before he came upstairs, place a few key obstacles in the path of any potential intruder. I swear he was obsessed with burglars. He spent a lot of time swaggering about the place, flexing his muscles and telling everyone what he was going to do with those ‘foolish little feller-me-lads’ if they showed up.

I had to wait for what seemed like hours. But, eventually, after several tours of inspection of the windows and much talk of the need for Banham locks, Quigley, exhausted by his own vigilance, staggered to bed. Minutes later he was making a noise like a pneumatic drill. I slipped out of bed, got into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and headed down the stairs.

It was like a slalom down there. There was an ironing-board, two kitchen chairs and a couple of broken wooden boxes snaked around the front room. In the back kitchen was a dresser, three pails of water a yard or so apart and a small scattering of drawing-pins. In the front hall – in case any burglar should choose to throw himself through the fireproof glass in the window or slice through the mortise lock with a flame gun – was a selection of things to trip over. There was a rubber ball, a few of Emily’s textbooks and a sort of forcefield of nails resting heads down and points upwards towards the unseen burglar’s face. As I discovered this arrangement, I began to feel almost sorry for any potential thief. After fighting his way through all this, he would have to face an angry and almost certainly stark-naked Quigley.

The street was empty. In one house, on the corner, there was a light on in the front bedroom. A middle-aged woman, wearing what looked like a turban, was looking out at the night. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t see me. There was a warm wind on my face and hands as I made my way towards Mr Marr’s place.

I didn’t look up at the sky. But I really felt they were looking at me. Like you do in the supermarket sometimes, when you can sense something behind you and you turn and there’s this camera, mounted at the edge of a shelf, swivelling its one black eye this way and that, like some malevolent goblin at the door to a secret cave.

I didn’t look behind me either. They were
here
, weren’t they? They could be keeping pace with me, along Forrest Avenue, down Gladewood Road and across up through Park Crescent. Maybe they had got people in every third house. Maybe Mr and Mrs Lewis at 119 Cedar Avenue were not in their usual positions, snoring back to back in the bed they bought twenty years ago. Maybe they were out in the garden, walking around stiffly, expressionless as vacuum cleaners, as they prepared the Giant Pod for Argol of the planet Tellenor.

I had a feeling that, when Argol finally showed, he was going to look a lot more scary than Leo Pike. I had heard his soundbite, and he sounded like a man who meant business.

Looking in front wasn’t really safe either. Suppose Argol, or someone like him, suddenly leaped out of someone’s driveway to give me a taste of his galaxy’s latest in combat weapons? The Jura alien had had a lot to say about Tellenorean life-forms. Much of it, Mr Marr said, was just too horrible to tell me. He didn’t want me to have nightmares, he said. I thought about what they
might
be like. In a way, not knowing made it worse. I used to feel that way about Old Mother Walsh’s snake when I was a little kid. Now it’s something to laugh at, but then . . . I was feeling more and more like a little kid with each day that passed.