Alien invasion... Will it ever happen? Has it already?
Here's a short story I wrote for Hawk & Cleaver's 'The Other Stories' podcast.
I’ve got used to hiding, I’ve been doing it for most of my life. Luckily, I’m a nobody. No hobbies or interests and not a single friend. All I have are my linear days, from work to home and back again, eating and sleeping and masturbating and staring aimlessly out of windows and into screens and at my sunken eyes in the mirror.
I know how it got this bad. I drifted into mediocrity and obscurity and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. I slipped down into the mundane depths and I’ve been wallowing there for years, not enjoying it, which would be ridiculous – but living with it.
Not finding it hard to get up in the morning or to smile at a colleague or to tell the shop assistant to have a good weekend. None of them knew how pathetic my existence had come to be. They wouldn’t be interested anyway.
If I was hit by a car while crossing a road - my ID left in my wallet at home or if I died of heart or liver failure on my sofa within those familiar four walls, I’m not sure anybody would notice.
I didn’t go to the office for four whole days once and I felt nervous about calling in to tell my supervisor that I was feeling unwell, and when I returned nobody said a word. My payslip was the same as it had always been at the end of the month and there were no repercussions about my absence. It was like I was a ghost.
That’s why I felt no fear when I saw the lights again. I heard the voices that sounded like a choir of a thousand children singing words from an ancient language that I couldn’t understand just like I had the first time. I went to them because I knew that they were calling to me.
They remembered me. They’d come back for me. I’d seen them for the first time as a child, when I stood in the garden of the house where I lived with my parents. They hovered still in the sky and pulsated and screamed when they flew off into the darkness. They were monitoring me, but after my parents died they didn’t return.
Not until my teens, where I had continued to live in the same house but now with my grandparents, who had thought it was best that I stayed in familiar surroundings after such a terrible tragedy.
The lights appeared again but they looked different this time, it was as if they’d aged a century. It’s hard to explain, but the brightness that they once had that burned my eyes and made my skin feel hot had gone. It was like staring into the eyes of an elderly person with dementia – what was there had gone forever and can never come back. A candle burned out.
It was then that I learned they were a beacon. They brought warning to me of something awful that was to happen. The first time it had been my parents’ death, but the second time I didn’t want to find out. So I ran, and I’ve been running ever since.
Years upon years upon years had passed and fear had turned to frustration and frustration had turned to anger, or something like it. Now the anger has worn away somewhat to something that feels more like curiosity. Why had I been chosen?
When the lights returned outside of my ground floor flat window, hanging in the sky, finally catching up to me after so long, I felt relief.
I suppose I should have been scared. Fucking terrified, in fact. But it wasn’t fear that I felt, not at all. It was an overwhelming sense of calm.
Even though I knew exactly what was happening, I knew that I couldn’t fight it. I didn’t even want to. I could have struggled, maybe even pulled myself free of the restraints, but I didn’t.
I just stared up into the milky white light and revisited a memory I often would, although I’d usually be staring at a mould spotted ceiling in the early morning while I did, putting aside trivial worries like what the traffic was going to be like on the way to work or if I had enough money left in my account to pay my electric bill.
The memory was something simple, something my mother had said to me over breakfast one morning when I was thinking about taking a knife to my wrists if I had to endure the punishment of the spiteful at school for one more day.
I remembered burnt toast and spilled orange juice in my lap.
‘I love you and I’m proud of you. You’re a good boy.’
There was a smell of burning hair and a wet slap that sounded like a flap of skin. It hurt a lot and I wondered why they hadn’t taken me the first or second time they came to me.
I must have passed out because when I came back to consciousness I wasn’t lying on the ground or waking up in my bed like any normal day, I was walking.
I crossed the street, but the block of flats I once called home had gone, replaced by a much taller white building and an oddly angled glass tower reaching up towards the clouds. I could see furniture and people within it, peering out from the glass like ants in a farm.
It was strange, because even the street looked different – cleaner somehow. The paving slabs were new and even the tarmac was the shiny kind of black it usually was when it is fresh, no more than a few weeks old.
I looked around for a sign to confirm that I was at my address and not just lost, but I couldn’t see one. I could just see an enormous curved plasma screen at the side of the street displaying weather information and stock market stats (which have always been like a foreign language to me).
I made it to work on autopilot, not entirely sure if I had made the journey on foot or on the usual bus. When I arrived I noticed the building had been completely refurbished, everything clean and sterile, white walls and large panels of glass. My office wasn’t the same and all of the people working there had been replaced, everybody looking so young.
One of them said something about my outfit and another asked me who I was. They all looked at me like I was a crazy person.
At least they looked at me.
Ben Errington
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