Descent (6 page)

The man turned to the Grey.

‘Take him back,’ he said.

‘Wait,’ I said.

But there was no waiting. The Grey gestured with its hand. I found myself involuntarily stretched out and unable to move; and, seconds later, watched the craft dwindle as I fell.

Then I was in my bed, naked again under the duvet, with the Grey looking at me as before. It raised a hand, waved, and was gone. The time, to my complete lack of surprise, was 03.36.

The next I knew was morning.

07.30, and the sun well up. I rolled out of bed and padded to the window. A fine Sunday morning with a haze just rising from the Firth of Clyde. I stuck my face in the skylight opening and took a deep breath.

When I remembered, I almost banged my head on the edge of the window. Shaken, I stepped back and sat down on the bed. Jesus. What a weird dream. But I didn’t recall it like a dream. It had none of a dream’s evanescence, or its combination of awkward transitions and scraps of vivid, unnecessary detail. It was as if everything had literally happened. Yet there was no evidence. I turned back the duvet, and found no trace even of a wet dream. Dried blood on the pillowcase showed I’d had a nosebleed in the night.

I remembered the Grey at the foot of the bed, and looked over my shoulder with an uncanny dread, as if it might be behind my back. It wasn’t. I leaned sideways and peered over the end of the bed. The floor where I’d seen the Grey stand was stacked with old books and magazines, dust-furred outgrown trainers, and the jutting corner of a cardboard carton of old toys. There was no way anyone or anything of the creature’s apparent height could have stood there. I wasn’t sure this was a relief, but at least it confirmed that whatever had happened in the night had not happened physically.

If, of course, that distinction meant anything any more.

I stepped into slippers, pulled on my dressing-gown, and went out on to the little landing. As I turned to back down the stair-ladder I had another moment of dread, and turned round more sharply. Nothing, of course. I backed down the stair-ladder, glancing twice over my shoulder, gripping the handrail hard. In the bathroom mirror I saw that I had dried blood across my upper lip and left cheek. As I washed it off I remembered the Space Sister’s chill fingertips touching my mouth, and wondered with a shudder if the tingle I’d felt had been of some device being slipped surreptitiously into my nostril. The delusion, or memory, of small metal implants was common in the abduction accounts I’d read. I hated the thought of being hag-ridden, of being haunted and afflicted for life as so many were, by that obsession.

After I’d washed, shaved, gone back up to the attic, and dressed, I checked on my phone that Calum was awake and online. He was, so I gave him a call. He responded within a couple of seconds, pinging that he’d keyed to visual. I took the phone from my ear and looked at the screen from which Calum peered at me, bleary-eyed.

‘You’re up early, man.’

‘You look like you haven’t slept,’ I said.

‘Naw, I slept fine.’ Calum rubbed his eyes, then frowned at me. ‘You over yon trippy thing fae last night?’

‘Far as I know, yes,’ I said. ‘Had … a bit of a weird dream, though.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Uh, I dreamed about … some kind of alien abduction scenario, sort of thing.’

Even on the small screen, I could see Calum’s momentary start. Then he gave a short hoot of derisive laughter.

‘Little green men an’ that?’

‘No. It was grey. A Grey. You know, the usual. Then two who looked human.’

‘Did they dae the usual probe?’ He sounded more amused than concerned.

‘No,’ I said.

‘So what happened?’

‘They just – talked. About the importance of reason and compassion, something like that.’

Calum rubbed his chin, rasping stubble enviably darker and more abundant than the chin-fluff I’d just soaped and scraped.

‘Did it aw feel like it was real?’

‘Uh, no,’ I said. This wasn’t true.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Say what knocked us out was ball lightning or something. That could affect your brain, right? And we all have these ideas about UFOs and aliens and that, and—’

‘Yes,’ I said, interrupting. ‘That’s just what I was thinking myself.’

‘Aye, well, good.’ Calum smiled. ‘And if what it got you dreaming was peace and love hippy shit instead ae a probe up the arse, it says tae me you’re in good mental health. Much as it pains me tae admit, Sinky. And you look like you’re none the worse for it. So let’s just keep quiet about this, right?’

‘Oh, aye,’ I said. ‘No point talking about it, is there?’

‘None at all. I’ll no tell if you won’t.’

‘OK.’ I made the lips-sealed gesture. ‘See you tomorrow.’

Calum nodded. ‘Aye. Unless you get taken away in the meantime.’

‘I don’t think the aliens actually take people away,’ I said.

‘I didnae mean them,’ he said. ‘I meant the men in white coats.’

‘Ah, fuck off.’

‘You too, mate.’

We grinned at each other and rang off.

I set up my tablet and searched online. The first thing I checked, of course, was whether anyone else had seen the light in the sky. No local UFO reports that I could see, though across the country there had been the usual dozens of sightings that day. As my search widened, I found myself back in the old familiar online network of rabbit holes. Abduction accounts had peaked way back in the 1990s, but the steady trickle in the decades since then were more than enough to bewilder. I narrowed the search by setting high credibility parameters and rigorous semantic parsers to screen out irrelevancies, rubbish, and speculation. Still overwhelming. Sifting that flood of hits by the specific features of my own experience – the light in the sky, the appearance of the occupants, the uniforms, the embarrassing sexual encounter and the secular humanist platitudes – returned nothing.

I relaxed the criteria a bit, and found enough to keep me reading for hours. Fortunately for my state of mind, I didn’t have hours. Shortly after I plunged into the morass of claim and counter-claim I was startled by my mother’s voice calling from below: ‘Ryan! Do you want a Sunday breakfast?’

‘Yes! Thanks, I’ll be right down.’

‘Get washed and dressed first,’ she said.

‘I am,’ I called back.

Hastily I closed the search and locked the screen, then swung down the stair-ladder, to land with a thump just in front of my mother. She was dressed for church, the main reason the rest of the household didn’t get much in the way of a Sunday lie-in. I planted a morning kiss on her surprised cheek and left her to try to rouse Marie.

Dad was in the kitchen, grilling bacon, a weekly treat we could now barely afford, but a kind of compensation for our early rousing. He looked well-slept, fresh-shaven, bright-eyed from a brisk walk to and from the shop.

‘Good morning,’ he said, with a wary smile.

‘Morning, Dad.’ I clapped an arm across his shoulders. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

‘Butter the rolls,’ he said.

I could see him eyeing me as I opened three warm rolls with the breadknife. (Marie was in a vegetarian phase and would be having cereal with soya milk.)

‘What?’ I said, picking at a corner of foil on the butter.

‘You all right?’ he asked. ‘Better this morning?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

He turned off the grill, and busied himself with kettle and tea.

‘Sleep all right?’

I put down the table knife and looked straight at him.

‘Not too well,’ I said. ‘Had some weird dreams.’

‘Huh!’ His scornful snort was followed by a smile, more normal this time. ‘I’ll bet! Still, no harm done by the looks of it.’

He glanced around the side of the dining-room doorway, checking that Mum and Marie weren’t down yet.

‘Between you and me, though, don’t do it again.’

‘Do what?’

His eyelids pinched.

‘Don’t act it,’ he said. ‘I’m talking to you man to man. When I was … a bit older than you, in my last year at high school I think, I mean the summer just before I went to uni, I dropped some acid.’

He looked like he expected me to be impressed. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘What do you mean, “dropped acid”? Like, an industrial accident?’

He shook his head, then glanced around again. ‘Swallowed a tablet of LSD.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘What was it like?’

‘I think you know damn well what it was like.’

‘Like last night? I mean, yesterday evening.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said, in a now-we’re-getting-somewhere tone.

I found myself scratching the back of my neck.

‘Um, well, if you want to know it was something like that …’

‘Aha!’ he said.

‘But it wasn’t, uh, that.’

He looked disappointed. ‘So what was it?’

‘You might find it hard to believe,’ I said.

‘Try me.’ He didn’t sound keen to hear it.

I took a deep breath. The dining-room door opened.

‘After breakfast,’ Dad said.

Sunday breakfast together was one of these odd family traditions that you grow up with and are later embarrassed to discover aren’t shared by your friends’ families. We sat on stools round a shoogly little table in the kitchen, ate bacon rolls – or, in Marie’s case, sulkily munched cereal – and drank tea. The conversation was likewise predictable.

‘So,’ Mum said brightly, ‘who’s going to church with me this morning?’

That was how she always said it: ‘this morning’, as if there were Sunday mornings when any of us did come with her. I had dim memories of sitting beside her in an oaken barn of multi-coloured light and a smell of peppermint breath and perfume and elderly ladies, watching a bearded man in a green and gold cloak say incomprehensible things accompanied by elaborate gestures from behind a carving of an open book on a stick. I also remembered playing with other small children in a corner of the church, around a big low table covered with white plastic and well supplied with scrap paper, felt-tip pens and blunt-ended scissors. None of this, nor even the biscuits and orange juice, had been enough for me to want to continue going, as soon as I was old enough to understand that I didn’t have to. Marie had stopped going about the same time as I did. There was no conflict over it: our mother’s Scottish Episcopalianism hadn’t driven her to object when it became plain that Marie and I had more in common with our father’s no less genteel agnosticism. If anything, Dad had seemed the more disappointed, not surprisingly as our withdrawal from divine service meant he had us on his hands every Sunday morning.

‘Not today,’ said Dad.

Marie mumbled something negative around a mouthful.

I looked at my mother. Diffused, refracted sunlight from the kitchen window lit up her face and made her hair a halo. She was wearing a neat grey trouser suit and a high-necked white blouse with a small silver cross on a silver chain glinting on its front. A glance down at the table showed the mugs, stained with the unavoidable minute dark dribble from each drinker’s lower lip, and the half-eaten rolls on side-plates on the scuffed Formica, lit as if from within and suffused with Eucharistic significance and the binding energies of sub-atomic interactions.

At the same time I was suddenly so overwhelmed by the contrast between what I was seeing and what I remembered from the previous night, the sinister, sordid, sticky squalor of it that so belied the soothing scientific-minded words the Space Sister had mouthed, that I felt about the prospect of church like I might have felt about a bath or a shower.

I looked up again at my mother and said, ‘Yes, I’ll go today.’

She blinked. ‘Really? You don’t have to, you know. Are you sure?’

She sounded almost worried. I smiled, both to reassure her and in amusement at how very Anglican it was that her first reaction to my unexpected response to her stock invitation was to try to talk me out of it.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I said. I looked sidelong at Dad, who chewed his roll and sipped his tea and looked straight ahead. ‘Uh, it’s not that I’m suddenly interested in church per se, so to speak, as that I, like, had a bad dream, I mean a really bad dream last night and it sort of creeped me out and I just suddenly there had the feeling that going to church would help to clear my mind, sort of thing.’

At this point everyone was giving me worried looks.

‘You sound just like you did last night,’ Marie said.

‘No I don’t,’ I said.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Mum said.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

And really, I was. I knew I wasn’t in the same glissade of thought as I had been the previous evening. My mind felt fine, and under my control.

‘I’ll see you after you come back,’ said Dad. ‘I still want to talk to you.’

I drained my mug of black tea. ‘No probs, Dad.’

I sat through the service entranced. The congregation had changed since my childhood, or perhaps my childhood memories were distorted – it could hardly have been all elderly ladies even then, what with the number of small children that also featured in my recollections. Now, though statistically middle-class, middle-aged and white, it included a score of people who looked like they lived on the street, and rather more members of the Pure Race – all, even the handful of obvious refugees, very respectably dressed – than you’d normally find in one place anywhere else in Greenock, as well as a couple of dozen people around my own age, who seemed to know all the hymns and responses, and fortunately didn’t know me.

‘Well, what did you think?’ Mum asked me, as we walked back from Union Street up through the sloping streets of Greenock’s West End.

‘I didn’t think,’ I said, feeling awkward. ‘I just sort of let it … wash over me.’

‘Cleared your mind of the bad dreams, then?’

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘I feel better. A lot better.’

‘So,’ she said, wryly, ‘you got some benefit from it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked down, and realised I was mooching. Any moment now I’d be kicking a pebble, like some surly kid. I straightened my back and took my hands out of my pockets. ‘That doesn’t mean I’ve started believing in it, though.’

Mum sighed, in part theatrically. ‘Up to a point, you know, you can benefit without believing.’