Voices in Stone (17 page)

Colours were travelling through the ground. Except they weren’t colours, they were something else.

Nerves in the land, Merlin had said.

Next to her, Gray was gasping for breath, his face a mask of terror. They were in the middle of an empty field, but he was twisting and turning, staring wildly around.

“Do you see them?” he asked, his voice cracking and high.

“Yes,” she whispered. Shades of red and orange, green and blue, purple, pink and yellow. Zigging and zagging through the ground towards her, bringing a sigh of words:

I won the race thought it would be bigger I’m on top long walk beautiful place hold in my stomach curse her cows make my baby well let him love me warmer weather.

On and on, the words she’d heard through the standing stone, prayers and pleas made to a piece of rock in the woods.

“What do we do? How do we stop them?” shouted Gray.

She tried to focus on his question, but the colours were hypnotic, like oily rainbows on water. She put her fingers in front of her eyes, trying to shield the sight, cutting the colours into a cross-hatched pattern.

“What are you
doing
?”

“I…” She didn’t know, but that wordless part of her mind did. She wiggled her fingers, finding a point, a speed of movement matching the flicker of the colours in the ground. They flashed upwards, creating mirror images of herself, an infinite hall of mirrors…

A psychic sees what is really there.

“No!” she said.

“What? What is it?” cried Gray, looking terrified at her. But she didn’t have time to answer, she had to focus her attention, bend her mind around this corner. She stared through the moving net of her fingers, trying to understand what was hidden.

A pattern. Like the ripples from a stone dropped into still water.

She lifted her head, looking out over the gently rolling hills, the shape beneath them becoming clearer. A hidden layer, the one she’d seen when she’d stood with Gray in the rocky bed of a dried-up stream. She hadn’t given it much thought then, but now…

She breathed out a sigh.

Ship.

Its curves blended perfectly to the contours of the hills. It was covered by layers of soil and earth, grown over with trees and grass. She peered through her fingers, trying to catch the truth of it. Not just a ship, this was something more alive than that. Merlin was right! There were nerves in the land; thoughts made of colours, mapping the shape of a something huge, blended into the hills. It was miles across, this ship-creature, far too big and strange to be anything human. Understanding leaped from the part of her brain that had no words, fixing onto one word that explained it all.

Alien.

Every cell in her body instinctively knew it. This couldn’t possibly be from Earth.

And now she understood the standing stone too. A piece of this enormous ship, raised up by prehistoric farmers. Their memories made sense at last – the clouds smashing apart and everyone looking up in open-mouthed wonder – they’d witnessed an alien spaceship landing. No, it had seemed more chaotic than that. The craft had crashed from the sky, falling like a wounded bird, huddling itself into the safety of the earth’s crust, safe from harm…

And now people were digging it up…

The quarry was where this had started for Gray. The shapes he’d seen must have been the alien, trying to send a message through the stones and earth it had slipped underneath. A creature trying to speak in a language learned through thousands of years of listening to the people who came and wished at the standing stone.

“You’re hurting me,”
she whispered. It was a cry for help.

As if in relief at being understood, colours poured in through her fingers. She had a dizzying sense of time stretching and expanding to take all of her life into a single heartbeat. For the alien creature, the crash had happened very recently, and the diggers had arrived there a moment
later, scraping and churning, causing a pain the creature couldn’t fathom.

“It hurts?” Isis asked.

An answer came in words learned so laboriously.
I scared.

It feared the roar of explosions, rocks flying up, of being disintegrated in a future it could foresee but couldn’t understand.

It’s a mining company, she wanted to explain, blasting its way into your body, taking away the valuable metals that make up your skeleton. But she didn’t, because the alien couldn’t understand these things. She imagined its answers:
What is mining? What is a company? What is valuable?

Instead it pressed on her, overwhelming in its fear, confusion and desperation.

Helphelphelphelphelphelphelphelp.

“Isis!”
Gray screamed, but she couldn’t answer, couldn’t stop either of them from falling.

Silence and blackness. No sound, no air. On and on. I thought it would never end.

And then… the slow-moving shift of stars. A distant gleam ahead of me, getting brighter and brighter. A yellow star, with its circling dance of planets. One of them, so beautiful. Glowing like silver, even from so far away. Except that’s wrong. It was… like a beautiful tune. No, that’s wrong too!

It was… like coming back from a long journey and getting somewhere you recognise, knowing that soon you’ll
be back home. That was what Neptune was like for them, they could smell-touch-taste-hear-see-feel-love it.

Earth was a kind of shortcut, I think. Like, when you have to cross the road, and you can’t be bothered to go all up the way to the traffic lights so you risk crossing over where you are.

The risk went wrong for one of them.

Them?

My dad always says the movies haven’t done us any favours, because we think we know what aliens and spaceships look like, when in fact that’s just Hollywood. He says we think life is only like ourselves. But there are billions of stars, just in our galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies. Anything is possible. A creature made of rare metals, flying between the stars.

You saw it?

I was with him in the silence and blackness. Flinging out from one star, gliding to another. They can feel our sun’s
gravity like… how swallows migrate thousands of miles, and they always get to the exact same spot, you know?

Or maybe it’s more like whales, singing their way home.

And the shapes by the standing stone, all those visions of yourself, what were they?

He was just trying to talk to me, the only way he knew how. Scared, trying to show me something I could understand. I mean, he’d only been on Earth a couple of thousand years, which is like… I don’t know, a few minutes for them? It’d be like you trying to learn a whole new language in a few seconds.

At last you are telling me something interesting. Of course, we knew the dust from the quarry induced hallucinations, but we had not identified the reason. Now I understand. A mineral-based organism would continue to exist in the minerals absorbed from the dust into your body, making you, by some measure, part of its body. Your bones were its bones.

Perhaps Isis had talents unusual enough to allow her to perceive the creature without assistance?

So the value of what you destroyed was greater than I previously thought. Such material could have been used for communications, weapons, perhaps even space travel. It would have brought our sponsors great wealth.

I didn’t destroy anything, I keep trying to tell you.

The evidence only a few miles outside of this town makes a liar of you. How do you explain that?

They were on the ground, sitting in a tangle of legs.

Gray’s eyelids lifted open.

“You’re hurting me
,” he said, his eyes wide with wonder.
“Please stop. Listen. Help.”

“Are you all right?” Isis whispered.

He shook his head, laughing. “All those things that looked like me. Everything they said. It was a message.”

“Merlin thinks there are ley lines here,” Isis answered with a smile, “but it’s thoughts.”

The field was full of them, the swirl and circle of colours seeming to drift within the land. She could see far more clearly now, but they were still unreadable, still alien. She turned back to Gray. “You weren’t seeing
ghosts, you were seeing her trying to talk to you.”

Gray was lost in his own thoughts, gazing at the hills and fields around them. “Everything me and Dad have been looking for. All those nights we spent staring up at the sky.” He pressed his fingers onto the ground, as if he’d never seen it before. “There was an alien already here.”

“Beneath your feet,” said Isis.

Gray kept his hand on the grass. “This whole valley is
alive
. That’s why no one can explain why the rare earth metals are here. Mr Watkins went on about the geology not matching and all those different theories about how it happened. No one said the obvious, that it’s not from Earth.”

Isis crinkled her brow. It seemed so evident now, but before – how could anyone even have guessed?

“They’re mining her,” she said, “because they don’t even know she’s here.” Isis could feel the quarry, like a hot poker against her skin. “And it hurts.” The machines were cutting into the alien, a being of metal and stone, killing her bite by bite, turning her body into the ingredients for smartphones and computer screens. “They’ll kill her, won’t they?”

Gray looked up. “The alien’s not female.”

“Yes she is! Definitely! Her name is—” Isis stopped. She’d been told, only moments ago through their link, but there wasn’t a human sound to match the name. “It means the sparkle of sunshine on the ice crystals in a comet’s tail… I think.”

Gray made a face. “He
just
told me, and his name means the crash of a meteor onto the rocky face of a moon, actually.”

“The alien isn’t a he…”

“It’s not a she!”

They paused.

“Maybe she’s both?” said Isis.

“Maybe he’s neither?” suggested Gray.

“Hey, man, what are you doing?” came a shouted voice from behind them.

Isis and Gray pulled themselves out of their tangle, standing up awkwardly. Instantly embarrassed. A tall, thin man was running across the field towards them, his thick wedge of dreadlocks bouncing at his back.

“Merlin?” said Isis.

He reached them quickly, running to a stop and frowning anxiously.

“Whatever you’ve done, you’d better not hang around.” He pointed towards the trees and the road behind. Isis caught a flash of fluorescent yellow. “There’s security guards swarming all over. I saw them from way off. Saw you too, and put it together. They’re headed this way.”

“We ran from the roadblock,” said Gray.

“Every time I meet you two, you’re escaping from someone.” Merlin tilted his head. “I like that, shows you got sense.”

“We’re not escaping,” said Gray. “We need to get into the quarry.”

Isis looked at Merlin. “Will you help us?”

He folded his arms. “Sorry, man, no can do. I’ll take you out of harm’s way. I’ll ring for your parents or whoever.”

“We don’t need to go home!” said Isis.

“The quarry’s dangerous,” said Merlin, shaking his head.

“Please…”

“It’s not a playground in there! I’d be crazy taking you in.”

Beneath them, colours shifted, and through the patterns Isis could read the creature’s pain and fear. She wanted to lie flat on the ground and spread her arms, to whisper words of comfort into the grass.

How could she tell Merlin what lay beneath them, that his ‘ley lines’ were actually the thoughts of a creature as large as the landscape? A living ship, a life made of stone, a star-beast? None of which really described something she could barely imagine.

Someone in a yellow jacket emerged from the woods behind them, and let out a shout.

“You said the earth was calling us,” Isis said desperately to Merlin. “You said we were here for a reason! Well we know what it is – we have to—” She stopped; how could she ever explain?

“I’m glad you’ve got connected, man, but even though it’s shut down, cos of the protest, the quarry’s still dangerous.”

“If it’s shut down, we’ll be perfectly safe!” said Gray.

Someone else joined the figure at the edge of the trees. Two yellow-jacketed men were heading out into the field.

“Please?”

Merlin sighed. “Okay. Cos there’s something about you two, I can tell. So I’ll take you for a look, but that’s all. There’s a place where foxes dug under the wire, takes you up above the quarry.”

A wave of gratitude coloured the field in ripples of hundreds of different shades.

“You! Stop there!” shouted one of the yellow-jacketed men.

“Better hurry,” said Merlin.

They set off running, following Merlin, their footsteps landing in pools of rainbows.

It was muddy getting under the fence, and I got a rip in my school blazer from the wire. I hardly even noticed doing it though, because all these versions of me were calling,
Graaaaaayyyyy, Graaaaaayyyyyyy.

Now I knew they weren’t zombies or ghosts, but only an alien trying to talk, they were almost funny. Especially the babies, toddling about.

We lost the security guards easily enough because Merlin knew his way round the valley way better than they did, and soon we were back in the woods. We scraped our way underneath the fence and Merlin led us between the trees and tangles of bramble.

Almost between one step and the next we passed from
autumn woods into open space. The woodland had been cleared, all the trees cut down in a wide area around the quarry. Most of that side of the valley was nothing but circles of pale, newly cut tree stumps. From where we were standing, among the sawn-off remains, I had a whole new view of the quarry. I could see that where the diggers had been working was only a tiny part of what was planned, judging by how far back they’d cleared the woods.

The alien me-ghosts shuffled their way out of the trees, filling every space around me on that hillside. They looked into the quarry, and all began whispering.
Hurtinghurtinghurting
.

Isis winced, like she’d heard them.

“Will the protestors be able to stop the mining?” she asked Merlin.

“For a bit. Hours, days maybe. After that…” He shrugged.

“Why aren’t you there then?” I said to him, feeling angry. If he cared, like he said he did, he should’ve been with the protestors, trying to make a difference.

He tucked his dreadlocks behind his ear.

“I never said I was a protestor. Those guys down there won’t stop what’s coming, not with big money and the
government behind it. But someone’s gotta see it happen, man. Someone’s gotta walk every footstep of these woods, and remember all the trees and plants, the birds and the insects that live here.” He bent down and gently stroked a patch of moss on what was left of a tree trunk. “Even the moss. Someone’s gotta remember, so it can be mourned.”

“You can’t just let things happen and then feel sad!” I said.

“Sometimes that’s all there is.”

I tried to think what we could do, my brain going forty miles a minute. “What if we told everyone?” I said to Isis. “What if they knew the truth?”

“How would we do that?” she asked.

“Stu could get it out through the Network. Release it to the papers and stuff. Then they’d have to stop the mining, wouldn’t they?”

It felt like the answer, for about ten seconds, until Isis said, “No one would believe us.”

“Yes they—” I stopped, because I knew she was right. Me and her, how would we get anyone to take us seriously? A girl suspended from school for saying she can
see ghosts, a boy whose dad is a well-known UFO nut.

“We better get back,” said Merlin. “Now you’ve seen the quarry up close, I wanna get you out of here.”

But every one of those faces, all the different ages of my life, they all turned and looked. Eyes wide, hands reaching.

“We can’t leave the alien,” whispered Isis. “She’s frightened. She’s all alone.”

I wonder if we could have told Stu and got people to believe us? Maybe it would’ve been enough. Whoever was behind the quarry, they would’ve stopped if they knew they were killing a living being.

BE QUIET!

No more chats, Gray. Just you telling me what I need to know.