Chapter Seven

I prepared carefully for my visit to Howe End. Bacon, check. Some fresh eggs – only slightly stolen from Caro’s bantams – check. A packet of shortbread biscuits that had languished at the back of my cupboard since Christmas but, hell, never mind, these were men weren’t they, and since when did men worry about things like ‘best before dates’ when they lived in a house that looked one step away from typhoid-central.

I brushed my hair and put on a pair of black jeans. Even with my romantic track record and current aversion to anything with a penis, I still felt I owed it to my ego to appear presentable in the face of Phinn and Link’s above-standard looks. After a last mirror consultation, which reassured me that I still had my face on the front of my head, I pulled on my boots and headed along the street towards the farm.

Riverdale village ran along both banks of the River Dove. It lay several miles from the nearest town, on an outflung arm of no-through road that cut into the moors then looped back onto the main A road. Narrow, one house wide on either side, and crowded together at the end nearest me, where the continuous run of what had been farm workers’ cottages were crammed together. The majority of the village was hemmed in, corralled at one end by the sheer rise of moorland and at the other by the medieval bridge that spanned the occasionally vicious river.

Between bridge and moor lay a half acre of village green, more grey at this time of year. It housed the maypole, which rose from the grass mound like a huge, priapic excrescence with a weathercock on the top, a metal fox which swung with a rusty, grating noise to indicate wind direction. Beyond the bridge the houses spaced out more, were larger and more expensive and finally petered out altogether, leaving a stretch of fields between them and Howe End. The houses were all similar in style, if not in design, silver-grey brickwork presenting a stolid front to the world and eaves straight out of the gingerbread school of architecture; central front door and small windows all the better to keep out the wicked east wind.

Howe End broke that mould by being made of red brick and set at a different angle to the rest of the buildings, as though trying to sidle through the village. It meant walking almost all the way around before I reached the door, moving beneath the elder and blackcurrant bushes whose branches hung with moisture and newly emerging leaves and where the air smelled of crushed greenery with a faint whiff of muck-spreader.

In the absence of a knocker I pounded with a fist on the door. I heard the echoes dying away and wondered why anyone would choose to squat out here. There must be empty flats in York, or some old warehouse somewhere, and anyway, wasn’t squatting desperately out of fashion these days?

In the absence of any reply, I stepped out of the porch and shouted up at the front of the house. ‘Phinn! Link!’

There was a sound above me and I looked up to see a window open squeakily slowly and a tousled dark head emerge. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s me, Molly.’

‘Yeah, that’s why I didn’t ask “who are you?”. I can see it’s you.’

I stood further away from the porch so I could see him properly. He was leaning out of the window with both arms on the sill, hair careering around his face in the breeze and another day’s worth of stubble on his chin. It was annoying that he could look so good and so rough both at the same time. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

‘All right.’ He showed no sign of movement other than to settle himself more comfortably against the window frame and to try ineffectively to swipe his hair from his eyes. ‘Go on.’

‘Can I come in?’ I jiggled my carrier bag. ‘I brought you some breakfast. Bacon and eggs?’

‘Mmmm. Bribery. I think I like it. Kick the door hard, it’s not locked, it just sticks.’ And the head vanished back inside the room to the squealing sound of the window being refastened.

By the time I’d kicked and forced my way into the kitchen Phinn was coming through the other door, yawning and bedraggled in jogging bottoms and fleece top. ‘What time is it, anyway?’ He stretched, the top rode up to reveal a couple of inches of flat stomach with a sketching of hair covering it, and I suddenly became very interested in the contents of my bag.

‘About ten.’

‘Early call then?’ He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and I suddenly noticed his eyes, very black and slightly amused.

‘Phinn, this is farming territory. Around here ten is nearly lunchtime. Anyway here’s the eggs and bacon, I’m no good with naked flames, so you’d better do the primus thing.’

He raised an eyebrow but lit the primus and hauled around in a few cupboards until he found a frying pan. It looked a bit sooty and we both stared at it for a moment.

‘Anything you’ve not caught as a result of sleeping on the floor in this place is probably something you’re immune to by now, so I say go for it,’ I said and laid the bacon in a single layer over the base of the pan.

He rested both arms behind him on the worktop. ‘Okay. Bacon is cooking, therefore now is a good time.’

‘Good for what?’ I wiped both hands down my jeans and left smears of bacon fat on both thighs.

‘You said you had something you wanted to ask me?’ There was something arresting in the way he tipped his head to one side and looked out at me from under the resulting flap of hair. ‘Or was that a false pretence to get into my house? Because, you know, bacon on its own would have been enough.’

‘I wanted … last night … the lights …’

It was as far as I got. Phinn’s face went very still as though he was inwardly processing information, then his eyes flickered and went to my face, scanning it slowly.

‘You saw them?’ He almost exhaled the words.

‘Yes, I was looking over …’ But I got no further before Phinn dragged me against him and hugged me so close that I could tell he wasn’t wearing underwear beneath those joggers and that his arms were surprisingly strong.

‘Thank you.’ He spoke almost into my ear. ‘Thank you, Molly, you amazing woman.’

My nose was squashed into his chest bone and there was an almost obscene amount of bobbing about going on around my navel but I stood still and let myself be hugged. It was rather nice, even given that he smelled of dusty damp linen and I could see from the wrists that protruded from his sleeves that his arms were covered in goose pimples, not at all like being hugged by Tim had been. Phinn was taller, skinnier, it was like being embraced by a plank of wood covered in knotted ropes. But still oddly pleasant.

‘Does this mean you did see them?’ I managed to get enough air between us to ask. ‘Or am I just generally amazing?’

‘Oh, I think yes to both.’ He raised his head so that he no longer spoke directly into my skin and the tiny, impatient little hairs that had spiked along the back of my neck relaxed. ‘Above the moor over there, yes?’ One arm let me go and pointed towards the high peak. ‘Although, if there were two incidents, I might have to go for a lie down.’

Trying not to make an issue out of it, I slid a slow step back. ‘About midnight. A load of tiny lights, moving through the sky. Like … like they were checking us out and then heading over to the coast.’

‘And the coast is …?’ He let me go, unresisting.

‘East of here. That way.’ I pointed now.

He nodded slowly, pushing both hands up to snatch his hair out of his eyes. ‘That’s what I saw too, but Link couldn’t see anything.’ His expression was distracted. ‘And you said “again”. The lights came again. When did they come before?’

‘A couple of days ago … the night before I found you up on the moor.’

‘Yesssss!’ He jumped and punched the air and the front of his jogging bottoms bounced around as though he’d got a couple of water-filled balloons down there. ‘Oh, Molly, this is fantastic!’

‘But why couldn’t Link see them? They were – well, not clear as day, but pretty clear. And you couldn’t mistake them for stars or anything, they were moving.’

‘I don’t know.’ He was back to pushing his hair around again, rubbing the back of one hand over his cheek as though gauging the stubble depth. ‘I don’t know, Molly, but I sure as hell want to find out.’

A sudden crackle from the direction of the primus made us both leap across the kitchen to rescue the charring bacon. While Phinn piled it onto plates, I fried four of the bantam eggs, tipping the lot on top of the bacon. Two rather tinny looking forks came from a drawer and we perched ourselves on the worktop to eat.

‘Where’s Link? Isn’t he going to want some of this?’ I spoke with my mouth full and gestured with my fork.

Phinn gave a one-shouldered shrug and carried on shovelling egg and bacon down like a starving waif, saying nothing. His hair fell over his face and hid his expression.

‘You’ve not killed him and buried him out in the paddock, have you?’ That got me a half-smile.

‘Apparently he’s hiding out here from some woman. Silly sod’s probably got himself engaged to another reality TV star and he’s trying to lie low until it all blows over. He’s done that before.’ Phinn looked around at the bleak kitchen. ‘Although this is lying so low that it’s practically subterranean. But we had a bit of an argument last night. When he couldn’t see the lights, he accused me of … I dunno … doing drugs, I guess, simplest explanation.’

I thought back to our first meeting, his shaky grasp of reality, his near transparency. ‘I’m assuming you’re not.’

He raised his head and looked at me, a stern, direct look. ‘Reality got a bit harsh for me and my doctor prescribed me antidepressants. I stopped those, and started drinking more than was good, but that does not make me some kind of substance abuser, Molly. All I’m doing is blunting the edges, making it easier to sleep. Definitely not shooting junk or smoking crack, all right?’

‘You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Phinn.’

Another direct look, which was quickly dropped back to the rapidly clearing plate of bacon. ‘I know.’ He scraped the last of the egg onto his fork, licked it, and dropped the plate into the sink. ‘Okay, so. Lights. Tell me what you know.’

I gave him a brief rundown of my experience so far with the lights in the sky. ‘I asked Caro and she just muttered something about Alice Lights, which sounds like some folk story. I did try asking the people in the shop but … well, they’re a bit odd and they tried to sell me a packet of cream crackers. So no one else in the village seems to have noticed anything. Except you?’

I let the question hang in the air between us for a second. Phinn was staring over my head out of the kitchen window. Marks against the walls showed where blinds had once hung but, like the furniture, they were now nothing but shapes of brighter paintwork and scraped woodwork. Eventually he dragged his eyes from wherever they were focused and back into the room to meet mine.

‘That day you found me …’

‘I was riding up there because I wanted to see if there was any trace or in case they’d left anything behind. Nearly wet myself when I found you, I thought you might have been …’ I let my words trail off – he could tell what I meant. I could see it in his face.

‘You thought I might have been some alien invader that they’d left behind?’ A hollow kind of laugh. ‘That’s quite funny, y’know, Molly. Because that’s why I went up there. I mean, okay, I was blasted out of my skull, but I knew what I was doing. I wanted …’ Now it was his turn to tail off, a gentle blush creeping up his pale skin, tinting his cheekbones with the first signs of healthy colour I’d seen on his face.

‘You wanted them to take you.’ The sudden realisation made my heart hurt. He’d wanted to be abducted. ‘So why did you take off your clothes?’

A sudden spreading of long, curled fingers along the granite top, a digital shrug. ‘Thought they might … that it might persuade them to pick me up. I was very drunk, after all.’

My insides squeezed and I touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened to you to make you like this, it must have been dreadful for you to want to leave the planet.’

A slow headshake which made his hair brush against the collar of his fleece with a soft sweeping sound. ‘A usual story. Wife left me, I didn’t handle it well.’

Now I could see the faint tracery around his finger where a wedding ring had once seated itself against his flesh. ‘I’m sorry.’

His fingers slid out from under mine and clenched back into pockets. ‘Yeah, well. It happens. I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.’

I slid myself a little further away along the stone worktop and pursed my lips. ‘Would it have been any better if you had?’

A sigh. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ His voice was quiet. Almost dangerous. A light year from the man who’d hugged me in relief. ‘Suddenly another planet looked like a good bet.’

‘Wow. Little green men, all that probing?’

A flash of smile, not aimed at me. More as though he was smiling at the memory of a memory. ‘If there is anything out there, it’s more likely to be a super advanced kind of pure intelligence than some bipedal life form with a fascination for shoving bits of metal up unguarded orifices.’

‘So you don’t believe in UFOs.’ I felt suddenly betrayed. All his effusiveness when he knew I’d seen the lights too, and it turned out that he didn’t believe in them any more than, say, Link.

‘Molly, I don’t even believe in humans right now.’ Phinn glanced at me and seemed to see something in my face, my disappointment perhaps. ‘Hey, UFOs aren’t called that any more either, it’s UAP now. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which, for the record, definitely exist. The term covers everything from earthlights to meteorological abnormalities – anything in the sky that can’t be easily recognised.’

Ah. It hadn’t been a comment on my gentleness the other night, then. He’d been saying ‘UAP’, not ‘you ape’.

‘Is that what our lights are? UAPs?’

He chewed the side of a finger. ‘Do you know what they were?’

‘No.’

‘Neither do I. Think that makes them UAPs and brings them right up under my area of interest.’

A sudden smatter of rain struck the window and made us both jump. ‘I suppose I ought to get back,’ I said, surprised at my own reluctance. Howe End was cold and draughty, and we were sitting on a freezing granite slab because of the lack of furniture. Phinn wasn’t exactly Mister Chatty, and yet I was dragging my feet over leaving. I must have been more relieved than I thought to finally be able to discuss those mysterious lights.

‘Okay.’ Phinn hopped off the worktop. ‘Thanks for the bacon and eggs.’

‘If I see the lights again, should I …?’

‘Get pictures. An ordinary camera will do, but try and get something in the foreground so we can make an assessment of scale.’ He was moving around the kitchen, distracted, looking for something. ‘Or a video recording, if you’ve got the technology, but put a timer on-screen, just a clock would be fine.’

‘Why?’ I slithered rather gracelessly onto the flagstones of the floor and the cold immediately bit through my boots to my toes.

‘Because we’re going to be accused of faking it,’ his tone was matter-of-fact. ‘Harder to fake if the pictures are sequential. Ah, there they are.’ He hooked his glasses out of the dark corner and pushed them on, instantly gaining a layer of insulation against the world. His eyes still had a slightly haunted expression but it was milder and more quizzical than it had been when they’d been darkly naked.

‘But I wouldn’t fake pictures, that would be stupid. Why say I saw lights if I didn’t?’

Phinn leaned against the hideous iron range and looked me up and down. ‘Innocence. I so rarely see it, sometimes I don’t recognise it when I do.’ Then his gaze travelled down to his own feet. ‘Bugger, this floor is cold. I need some clothes on.’ And without another word he walked out of the room and I heard his bare feet stepping slowly up the wooden staircase that led from the hallway to the first floor.

I stood awkwardly for a few seconds, then slipped out through the still partially open front door and breathed deeply of the rainy air outside.

* * *

Phinn watched her go. From his room above the porch he had a pretty good view all along the side of the house, so he saw her stop and turn and frown up at the gable end, almost as though she could see him poised there in the dusty darkness. But then she shrugged and her slight figure was swallowed by the shadows behind the overgrowth of elder. He blew out a breath that made the cobwebs swing and shoved his hands into his pockets.

There was an emotion moving around in the back of his brain, he didn’t know what it was, didn’t even know if it had a name, but it was burning its way through enough synapses to make him suspect that his eyes might be glowing. She’s seen the lights.

The untidy woman with the reckless hair had shared something he thought was his own madness. When she’d described her experience, he’d had the unnerving feeling that they were the only two people in the world who had understood some fundamental truth; that magic had happened, the world had changed just a little, and they were the only ones who’d seen.

He blew out again and an irritated spider rotated in its web, spinning its way up and down a single thread like a machine running on liquid silver. She saw them too. He found his mouth pulling itself into a grin, an expression so unaccustomed on his face that his cheeks literally ached with the effort. Whatever else you might be, Baxter, you aren’t a nutjob. Or, if you are, then she’s one too and at least you’ll have company in that padded room.

‘What are you smirking about to yourself in the dark, Bax?’ Link’s voice made him jump. The grin fell away, leaving what he feared to be a surprised grimace. ‘Your psychiatric ward called, they want their straitjacket back. Did Molly come by? I noticed two plates in the sink down there, so either you had a visitor or you are beginning to externalise your inner geek to a dangerous degree.’

‘Thought you’d gone back to your collection of Pot Noodles and alphabeticised joints-through-the-ages.’

‘Bax, you underestimate my capacity for self-punishment.’ Link came over to the window and leaned against the wall next to him. ‘I got the bus into Pickering. Well, I say a bus, it’s more like a trolley powered by a large dog and run by Hobbits, but, hey, it got me into the town.’

There was a moment’s silence which contained the ghost of a conversation in which Link apologised for calling Phinn a junkie and Phinn, in his turn, apologised for getting so shitty about it. ‘Why the bus? You’ve got a perfectly good, if rather ostentatiously over-priced car, haven’t you?’

Link gave a sideways nod, acknowledging the overt fact, as well as the unspoken apology. ‘Yeah, with a petrol tank the size of a fifty pence piece. She’s sitting in the red, and I didn’t want to get out there and find that the nearest petrol station is in Doncaster. Thought I’d suss things out on the ridiculously expensive public transport first – hell’s teeth, Bax, you could run a Bugatti for the price of those bus tickets!’

‘I remember Pickering. Nice little place, got a castle, yes?’

‘Oh yeah, I was forgetting you used to hang here when you were … I was going to say “a kid” but you were never really a kid, were you? Just smaller then. Yep, still got the castle, I guess eight hundred years of history doesn’t go down easy. I bought some food. Oh, and there was this camping shop, so I bought some torches, proper sleeping bags, stuff like that. They didn’t have any solution to the shower problem though.’ Link wrinkled his nose. ‘And, I hate to say this my friend, but you are beginning to smell a bit ripe.’

‘Molly saw the lights.’

‘Sorry?’

Phinn turned to face his friend. ‘Last night. Molly saw them too.’

Link put his hands up. ‘Oh, hey, man, you didn’t … you know, persuade her, did you? Don’t forget that I’ve seen you in action. One flutter of those eyelashes and the girls will say they saw Bigfoot and ET getting down and heavy.’

Phinn simply raised an eyebrow and waited.

‘Okay, so there were lights. Invisible lights that mysteriously only you and the hot chick down the road could see. I don’t know how you did it, and I hope she’s not a serious screw-up, but …’ and Link slapped Phinn on the shoulder, ‘… gotta hand it to you, man. Way to get the girls.’

Phinn opened his mouth to reply but Link was already walking out of the room, heading for the staircase. ‘If you’re determined to keep playing the Hermit of Nowheresville, then at least we can do it in a bit of style.’ Link continued talking, Phinn suspected so as not to give him a conversational opportunity. ‘I got some very funny looks bringing this lot back, but then there was a guy on the bus holding two chickens, so I guess they kind of do funny looks by default around here.’

Phinn gave up. Even stretching his memory back as far as it would go he couldn’t remember a time when he and Link hadn’t been friends and it looked as though it was going to take more than a nervous breakdown and a lack of mod cons to shake him off. ‘Yeah, all right,’ he said wearily. ‘How the hell did he get two chickens on the bus anyway?’

‘One under each arm.’ Link passed him a box. ‘Dynamo torches. Get winding.’