MINISTER QUESTIONED ABOUT HOSPITAL SECURITY – Times
BOY DISAPPEARS FROM CHILDREN’S WARD – Guardian
ARE OUR CHILDREN SAFE ANYWHERE? – Mirror
THE TALE OF A COAT – Independent
STARLIGHT, PERHAPS – Casselton Courier
The papers carried the story of the disappearance of Patrick Derwent and his son, Thomas, every day for a fortnight. The father had been the first to vanish, after an accident in which a tanker crashed into a post office van. His son had later been somehow spirited away from the hospital where he was being kept in for observation because he seemed unable to speak or to identify himself. The facts, however, proved so hard to come by that there came a point where the police were forced to ‘scale down enquiries’. Here was a case that might not be a case at all and was proving totally insoluble . . .
On Tuesday the twelfth of January, the postman arrived just as Matthew was getting ready to go out. He rang the doorbell and Matthew hurried to answer him. Alison was upstairs.
‘Parcel,’ said the postman.
‘To sign for?’ said Matthew.
‘No,’ said the postman. ‘It was just too big to go through the letterbox.’
He handed it over. It was a large floppy package wrapped in soft brown paper.
‘Thanks,’ said Matthew, taking it with both hands and wondering what it could be. A sender address would have helped, but there was none.
Matthew tore open the wrapping on the kitchen table and out fell a whole bundle of newspapers. There was no note to say who had sent them or why. Matthew spread them out on the table and leafed through them one by one. There was a fair assortment of national papers; there were even two editions of a little local paper from Casselton, one that would not normally be seen as far south as York. Whoever had sent them had not troubled to cut out or even mark any relevant stories, just crammed the whole lot into the package so that at first it looked meaningless.
Matthew went back over the bundle and read the headline story. It seemed the obvious thing to do. And it was the right thing! The story that had attracted so many journalists was not just mysterious; for Matthew it was very, very important.
‘I just don’t know what will come of this,’ he said to his wife when she came downstairs. He gestured to the pile of newspapers. ‘It’s a good job they came after Nesta went to school.’
Their daughter knew nothing about the terrible problem Matthew was about to discuss. She knew very little about her own background at all. Her parents were meant to tell her later, when she had reached maturity. Then would be the time. That was what had been agreed.
Like everyone else in the country, Alison had seen on TV the reports of the disappearance of the man and his son – it had been quite a prominent news item for a day or two, but she had not connected it with herself at all. It was just another odd story. It was only when Matthew showed her the newspaper articles that she realized the full implication.
‘Why so many newspapers?’ she had asked at first when she saw them strewn over the kitchen table.
‘They carry different versions of a story that is of concern to us. Or maybe it would be better to say that they tell the story from different angles. They don’t actually contradict one another as regards the facts. You’ll see,’ said Matthew. ‘Read this one first.’
He passed her last Thursday’s Courier. This was the local Casselton paper but its headline was the most intriguing. The article beneath it filled a whole page. For this, and for other reasons, it seemed to Matthew to be more dangerous than the others. ‘Starlight, Perhaps’ was all about the two people who had disappeared in Casselton.
It was a long article, much longer than any of the reports in the national press. It bore the by-line Shaun Trevelyan. His London editor, who favoured the succinct and factual, had dumped Shaun’s article. A friend on the Courier had been more obliging. It was, after all, a good piece of local news.
Shaun had interviewed practically everyone involved in the affair: the tanker driver and his mate who had been in the road accident that had started it all; nurses and doctors in the hospital where the boy, whose name was given as Thomas Derwent, had been placed when he was in a state of shock after seeing the crash; the villagers in Belthorp where Thomas and his father, Patrick, had lived. And finally, he had approached their friend and neighbour, Stella Dalrymple. She it was who, when asked if she could throw any light on the mystery, had replied with the words that gave the reporter his headline: ‘Starlight, perhaps . . .’ She had closed the door on the young reporter, telling him nothing more. But those two words were quite enough. Shaun Trevelyan had an ear for the music. He was ready to believe that this really was the tale of an alien presence on the planet Earth.
Thomas Derwent had appeared on the local TV channel before his disappearance, a little boy lost whose father was missing. In that interview, the boy had screeched some strange, sound-distorting words at the microphone. These were never repeated on national television because they were not transmittable. Gerry Potterton, the local television reporter, had given Shaun a tape of the ‘foreign’ words the boy had screamed at him, in a voice so strange that the sound system had collapsed under the strain of it. Vateelin Tonitheen Ormingat. That was all the boy had said, just those three words, over and over again, growing louder each time he said them. To decide on their orthography had taken over an hour of listening to the flawed recording. There was no way of conveying the tone and the accent: ‘Vateelin’, ‘Tonitheen’ and ‘Ormingat’ were the best they could manage.
‘There’s worse,’ said Matthew, putting aside the earlier papers and turning to the copy of the previous day’s Courier. ‘Read this letter.’
He put the paper into Alison’s hands.
Dear Sir,
With reference to the story about the boy who went missing from Casselton General Hospital in the middle of the night – I met him. He was in the next bed to me. He spoke to me in his own language. It was hard to understand. But I think the words in the article mean who he is and where he comes from. He told me his name was Tonitheen and that he came from Ormingat. His voice was very, very strange, but he used some English words. I was the only one there who could hear him properly. I have very good hearing. He said ‘I am’ but it sounded odd. And he said ‘and I come from’. So what he really said was ‘I am Tonitheen and I come from Ormingat.’ I thought he said ‘Organmat’ but could be wrong. He never mentioned ‘Vateelin’ to me.
I believe he is an alien and that he comes from another planet in outer space. I offered to help him. If he reads this, I want him to know that I will help him any time he needs me. I liked him. But he might have gone home to his own planet now. Maybe Vateelin is his father and took him away.
Yours truly,
James Martin (aged 10)
Hedley Crescent, Casselton
Alison gasped as she read it.
‘How could he get so close to the truth? And what was that child Tonitheen doing telling everyone his name? It is obvious that he and his father are, like us, visitors to Earth. But we are meant never to be known or recognized. They must surely have known that!’
All it needed now was for the UFO enthusiasts to get on the trail!
‘There’ll be trouble,’ said Alison after she had finished reading. It was clear that even if the police were no longer actively interested, it was not a matter that would be totally forgotten. The boy’s father had disappeared into thin air at the moment when the tanker driver and his mate were sure that they had run him over. All that he left behind was a strip of sheepskin torn from his overcoat. And it was this coat that had been found on the hospital bed after the boy vanished.
‘Nothing like this has ever happened before,’ said Matthew, looking anxiously from one paper to the next. ‘I don’t know what sort of danger it puts us in, but there will be repercussions, that’s for sure – especially for us. Casselton is less than a hundred miles away. Our people are clearly concerned. Why else would we have been sent these papers?’
Alison raised her eyebrows, as much as to say, How do you know who sent them?
‘Who else would be sending us newspapers like this?’ said Matthew. He had already looked at the postmark on the package but it was too blurred to read.
Matthew’s next home contact was not due till the first of June. For fourteen years, he had followed the strictly laid down routine. His annual holiday was always arranged around it. Now he felt sure that there would be some earlier communication.
He looked up at the kitchen clock.
‘I’ll have to go to work now,’ he said, ‘but I’ll arrange to have the rest of the week as holiday. This is an emergency.’
Alison went with him to the front door.
‘What about Nesta?’ she said. ‘Will she need to know?’
‘I think so,’ he said, looking at his wife quite vaguely as if he weren’t quite sure of anything yet. ‘I don’t see any other way. There’ll be a follow-up to those newspapers. You must see that.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alison. ‘It might all blow over. We could leave it a week or two.’
‘Common sense tells me that it won’t,’ said her husband. ‘Those newspapers tell us that it won’t. Besides, it is only bringing forward what would have happened in any case six years from now.’
‘You think we’ll be recalled?’ said his wife, startled at the thought of the upheaval. She was loyal to Ormingat. There was no question about that, but Earth had been her home for so long now. And it wasn’t such a bad place after all, especially not England, and, most especially, not York.
‘I feel sure we will,’ said Matthew. ‘All this publicity makes our recall inevitable. You know how careful they are. They will not jeopardize two hundred and fifty years of quiet research.’
He put one arm around her shoulders.
‘And look at it this way,’ he added. ‘We do love our real home. Our time here has often felt like exile. And as for Nesta, you did as you were told. Somewhere in the back of her mind is the story of the Faraway Planet. She will easily relate it to the truth you tell her now. She is a very intelligent girl.’
As the door closed behind her husband, Alison thought to herself how simple life would be if everything were as black and white as Matthew managed to paint it. The psychologists of Ormingat might be right: it might work as they had said it would. But there was the possibility that they could be wrong.
My poor Nesta, she thought, this is the wrong time and the wrong way for you to learn the truth!
The story of the Faraway Planet that Nesta had been told in her baby years had been deliberately made to sound like a fairytale. Even the real name of the planet had been left unspoken.
How well her mother remembered telling her daughter that bedtime story!