Read Online A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin - Free Book Online Page B

now, John, just look—all those bluey lights flickering from the cabin windows! Those weren’t there before, I’ll swear! Oh, isn’t this exciting! Let’s get a bit closer.”
    One step, two steps across the damp grass, and then, “Watch out!” she’ll shriek. “Get back! Get back! The tentacles! Run, John, run! My God, they’re reaching right across the lawn! Get back inside! We must lock all the doors and windows!”
    Or something of the kind. I don’t know, actually, if Sheila watches this kind of programme, but they can’t be difficult to make up. And in any case, there’s another way she could play it, an easier way—much, much easier now I come to think of it. Yes, that’s the one she’ll choose:
    “John, oh John dear, if only you’d arrived just two minutes earlier! It’s gone! It’s just absolutely gone! I saw it with my own eyes, it rose straight off the lawn in a vertical take-off (or wouldn’t Sheila know about vertical take-offs?) and then it suddenly changed direction, almost at a right angle, and whooshed off northwards (or southwards, or whatever) at fantastic speed, and was out of sight in seconds! Look, I’ll show you where the grass is all flattened out, and stones have been knocked from the rockery …”
    And there, in the last of the goblin light, we’d lean down, heads together, pretending to examine these nonsensical traces of the thing.
    Smiling to myself, curious to guess what innocent irregularities of turf or flowerbed she was going to conjure up as evidence, I slipped round the side of the house, down the narrow cement-paved passageway where the dustbins are kept, and pushed open the gate that led into the back garden.
    *
    The whole lawn was a huge raw crater of upturned earth and clay, nearly three yards in diameter, the displaced soil heaped up round the rim into a sort of miniature rampart about two feet high. The floor of the thing, as I stood staring incredulously down into it, was shallow, and rough as a ploughed field.
    For long seconds I just stood there, rocked by a disbelief so intense that my thought processes were simply at a standstill. Whether such an upheaval could, or could not, have been produced by some extra-terrestrial object was simply beyond my power even to wonder.
    But presently, in response to some inbuilt, robot-like impulse of curiosity, I found myself stumbling in a dazed sort of way round and round the rim, back and forth across the moonlit clods, my eyes darting hither and thither, sharp as a hawk’s seeking God-alone-knows-what. Some sort of clue to the mystery, I suppose; but since I had no idea what sort of thing I was looking for, everything—but everything —seemed to fill me with dread. A sliver of glass in the moonlight, an odd-shaped stone, the edge of a rusty tin—each and all of these things had the power to set my heart thudding, my brain spinning. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before I began indeed to see the little green men dancing before my weary eyes, hear the tinny little Martian voices in my singing ears …
    *
    It seemed like hours, though I daresay it was really only a few minutes, before the police came. Within minutes one lot of them had dug up poor Brian’s body from the floor of the crater, whileanother lot had me in for questioning. Sheila must have phoned them as soon as she judged, from her vantage point at some darkened upper window, that my footprints must by now be just about everywhere in the wet clay. It must have been quite a laugh for her—me babbling on about a flying saucer, while all she had to do was to deny flatly the whole absurd rigmarole, and repeat her perfectly plausible story about having been roused from sleep by strange noises in the garden.
    Clever. But not (I am hoping and trusting) quite clever enough. She had overlooked one thing: that it would have been quite beyond the power of any one man to have dug earthworks on this sort of scale in just the couple of hours that had elapsed