They Came From SW19 (22 page)

‘Yes,’ said Quigley, looking at me. ‘Grant that what he has seen may not be a thing sent to tempt him!’

Pike made a kind of snuffling noise, and Mrs Quigley tried once again. She took the hands of those on either side of her, lowered her head and gave a constipated grunt. She grunted until sweat stood out on her brow. She grunted so hard there seemed a very strong chance she might drop a turd right there and then. But, after a minute or so, she shook her hands free, waggled her head furiously and said, ‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’

They were in a meeting, guys! Mozart was talking to Rose Fox. Rose Fox was talking to Vivaldi. My dad was tied up with Dickens or waiting for General Franco to turn up.

‘Damn!’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’

‘Precious . . .’ said Quigley.

‘Fuck!’ said Mrs Quigley. ‘Fuck! Fucking arseholes!’

Everyone looked at her oddly. It was OK for her to do this kind of thing when in a mediumistic trance, but this wasn’t quite that, was it? She was, allegedly anyway, compos mentis. If this kind of thing was allowed to continue, she might well start swaggering into Sunday service and shouting things like ‘Bugger!’ or ‘Piss off!’ if she found someone in her seat.

‘My darling . . .’

It was then that it happened.

Leo Pike, in forty years of attending Spiritualist seances, had never made much impact on the spirit world. He had an aunt in Leicester who had died of double pneumonia in 1964, but she had never wanted to speak to him. In fact, none of the dead, famous or unfamous, had ever shown any interest in Pike. And, as far as I had been able to judge, the feeling was pretty mutual. In all the years I had been watching him, he had, as far as I could tell, absolutely fuck-all interest in them. You could wheel in Julius Caesar and Pike would just sit there, peering at him through his gold-rimmed glasses.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Pikey, without prior warning, started to hum like a top. At first I think most of us thought it was some electrical appliance. Then we noticed that the Pike head was sort of pulsing backwards and forwards like a mechanical toy.

Nothing unusual in that. Pike’s head quite often pulses backwards and forwards like a mechanical toy. In fact, he has an extraordinary repertoire of mannerisms, all of which could be reasonably mistaken for possession of one kind or another. There isn’t a moment when the lad isn’t twitching or jerking or going into spasm. So, at first, we saw nothing unusual in his bonce doing the rhumba on top of his neck.

Then his toupee started to slip.

Pike’s rug was a topic of endless fascination in the First Spiritualist Church. I can still remember the day when it walked into all our lives. I must have been about nine, but I still remember my dad putting his back to the door, after Pikey had gone home from a seance.

‘Did
you see
it?’ he said in hushed tones. ‘Did you
see
it?’

‘Sssh, Norman,’ said my mum. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

But it was impossible not to talk about it. One minute, there he was with a few scraps of grey hair plastered across his scalp – the next he looks like a prizewinner at Cruft’s Dog Show. This wasn’t just any old wig, you know? It looked like it had been grown in a tropical rainforest.

For weeks we had talked of little else. How was it held on? Was it stitched? Was it pure will power? Was it, perhaps, Blu-Tack? One woman was prepared to swear she had seen Sellotape on the back of Pike’s neck.

And now it was moving. The more his head jolted backwards and forwards, the further down his scalp it crept. By the time he had finished rocking, his fringe hung over his eyes. When he finally spoke, it was as if his voice was coming out of a large, brunette bush.

‘O Lord,’ he said, in a high-pitched voice. ‘O Lord!’

We all just goggled at him. I mean, no one had ever seen Pike do this before. Right? Then he slewed round hard in his chair. His wig was now at a slight angle. He looked as if someone had just hung a mop on his nose.

From behind the toupee came a deep, deep voice. ‘How y’all doin’? it said, in a strong American accent. ‘An’ how’s little Nelly?’

No one had an answer to this.

For a moment I thought Quigley was going to tell him to snap out of it. But then my mum said, in a timorous voice, ‘Do you mean Nelly Woodhouse that was with the Guardian Building Society?’

There was a silence. Then Pike said, in the same Texan drawl, ‘Don’t rightly know, ma’am. Don’t rightly know.’

Mrs Danby was looking at Pike with a new respect. This all went to show just how far Quigley had slipped since I Testified. Time was when no one would dare open their trap in front of Mrs Quigley.

‘The spirits wander,’ said Mrs Danby, ‘and find their homes in new bodies.’

Everyone nodded with fantastic respect.
‘The spirits wander,’ right? You heard Mrs Danby. She said the spirits wander, and she has a Rolls-Royce, guys! I
thought to myself that, however far they had wandered, if they ended up in the body of Leonard Arthur Pike they must be really desperate.

Pike started to sing ‘Home on the Range’ in quite a loud voice. I had never heard Pike sing in real life, so I couldn’t tell how this spirit voice matched up to the real one. Whoever was talking to us from Over Yonder, however, knew
all
the words.

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam

And the deer and the antelope play . . .

I thought there was a strong chance that some of the lads might join in, but this proved not to be the case. Pike gave us all four verses, including the one about the wagon train being painted green, which I had never heard before. When he had stopped, there was silence. Nobody could follow that. We all looked at Pike. What was he going to do next? Would it be with or without music?

‘I’ll mosey on down now,’ he said, now sounding as if he came from Alabama rather than Texas. ‘I’ll mosey, ah guess.’

‘Stay, spirit!’ said Mrs Danby. ‘Who are you?’

Pike gave a deep chuckle. ‘Tex,’ he said. ‘Tex is my name.’ Then he started to sing ‘Home On the Range’ again.

I don’t think we would have worn all four verses again (especially the one about the wagon being painted green) but, when he got to the line about the deer and the antelope playing, he burst into tears.

‘What’s the matter, Tex?’ asked my mum.

‘Little Nelly!’ said Pike, now sounding vaguely Australian. ‘Little Nelly Woodhouse died on the prairie!’

That was all we could get out of Tex. Mrs Danby tried. My mum tried. Even Quigley abandoned his dignity and had a go. But Tex had nothing more to say to us. I still wake up at night and think about Nelly Woodhouse. It was haunting, somehow.

There followed the longest silence I can ever recall at a seance. Pike just sat there with a toupee and tears all over his face, and we sat there staring at him.

After three or four minutes Quigley said, ‘He’s in deep, deep trance.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘he is very, very far away.’

Mrs Danby nodded.

‘I have been where he is,’ La Quigley continued, ‘and it is a bleak and lonely place.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby.

Mrs Q was finding her way back into the action.

‘It is a place,’ she went on, ‘where the soul is buffeted by winds and violent storms and feelings from the old, old time.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby.

Before Mrs Quigley could start drawing us maps of the terrain on the far side of the Veil, Pike gave an absolutely agonized scream. It really was scary – I kid you not. What was even weirder was, it sounded like his own voice.

‘Mr Marr!’ he yelled. ‘Mr Marr!’

I leaned forward. ‘What about Mr Marr?’

But Pike went on screaming. It was a horrible sound. As if someone was being hurt, badly. The sort of noise you imagine coming from a torture chamber. ‘
Mr Marr! Mr Marr! Mr Marr!
’

‘What about him?’

Then a new voice came out of him. It was a mechanical, grating sound from deep in his throat. I’m not easily spooked, but I didn’t like this voice. It reminded me of the voice that had started all this, the night my dad died. ‘I serve a different master,’ said the voice. ‘I serve other gods!’

It was well weird. No one was holding hands any more. We were all staring at Pike. As we watched, his wig fell forward over his nose and landed on the table in front of him. No one tried to pick it up. Pike continued to stare ahead of him, but his eyes weren’t focused on anything.

‘Where are you from?’

Pike gave a glassy smile. His head turned to me, just the way Mrs Quigley’s had done when she passed on that first message from my dad. And, when he spoke, I’ll swear it was my father’s voice coming out of him. It sounded just like him.

‘I’m a long way away, Simon,’ said my dad. ‘I really am a long, long way away.’

‘Dad . . .’

Then the mechanical voice cut in on him, like a radio changing channels. ‘Our planet is dying,’ said the mechanical voice. ‘We have no food or water. Help us, please! We have no food or water.’

Quigley’s eyebrows drew in tight. He wasn’t sure about this at
all.

‘Our sun is weak,’ said the mechanical voice. ‘Our canals are dying. The moon is in its last quarter. Help us, please!’

‘How can we help?’

That’s my mum. If she met an alien in Wandsworth High Street, she’d be telling it the way to the supermarket and offering it free babysitting before you could say ‘flying saucer’.

I wasn’t sure what Mrs Danby thought of all this. She was gazing at Pike in bewilderment.

Before Quigley could interrupt, I leaned forward and said, ‘From which planet are you?’

I practically spelt this out. I wanted this thing to hear me loud and clear. It didn’t, however, answer me directly. Which, if you think about it, isn’t surprising. Anyone – even an advanced being from the other side of the universe – who is forced to use Leo Pike as a channel of communication is bound to experience transmission difficulties.

‘From which
planet
?’

Pike’s head was still facing me. At my last question there was movement behind the eyes. You could see a thought stirring, but you couldn’t say if it was Pike’s or not.

Then the voice started again, cracked and dry. ‘Our planet is old and tired. The craters are dying. There is no night now. We need food and water.’

Whinge, whinge, whinge, eh? When we finally meet beings from another galaxy, all they do is moan! As I was thinking this, Pike started to laugh and the voice took on more colour. It didn’t sound mechanical now. It sounded sneaky and mean, like a kid that thinks it’s got away with something.

‘We got Marr,’ it said. ‘We fixed Marr good!’

‘Which
planet
?’ I said again.

I was getting annoyed, as well as frightened. But before I could say any more, my dad’s voice came back.

‘Don’t look any further, Simon, please,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous. Please don’t look for me any further. We all have to die, my darling. I didn’t want to go! I didn’t want to leave you! But I’m dead. You must stop looking for me . . .’

‘Dad . . .’ I almost shouted.

But, as I did, the mechanical voice came back, loud and clear. ‘I am Argol, from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear. And I bring death with me. I am the bringer of death to your world!’

Pike clambered to his feet and tried to walk forward. The table was in the way, but he was still trying to move. Emily Quigley started to scream. Pike’s legs went up and down like someone walking the wrong way along a travelator. He still stared straight ahead as he ploughed into the heavy dining-table.

Then, suddenly, he picked it up and flung it across the room. Pike isn’t a big guy, but he did this like he had been in secret weight-training. As the table fell against Mrs Quigley and my mum (who started to cry), Pike just kept on walking, like a robot responding to an invisible signal. When he got to the wall, he didn’t stop. He just kept trying to walk through it.

‘Leonard . . .’ whimpered Hannah Dooley. ‘Oh Leonard . . .’

‘I am not Leonard,’ said a sneering, robotic voice. ‘I am not
Pike.
I am Argol from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear. And I bring death with me. I am the bringer of death to your world!’

We knew this. But we were still interested. No one had ever seen Pike express an opinion about anything. His job was to open car doors for Quigley. Now here he was, walking into walls! Mrs Quigley could roll. She could froth. Although she seemed not to be doing a lot of that these days. But did she walk into walls? We were looking at a very serious contender indeed.

Mrs Q was looking rather critically at Pike’s performance. And he was certainly not getting the kind of back-up she got from her old man. He was just quietly walking into the wall, while the rest of us stood around in an awkward half-circle.

From a room somewhere else in the house came a loud gurgling sound, followed by a scream. It was hard to hear what was being said, but someone had put a nail through a pipe. None of us paid this any attention. I looked at Pike, my mouth open. How had he got hold of that name? Why ‘Argol’?

I’ll be frank. In a way, I thought he was putting it on. I mean, I thought there
were
aliens, or something like aliens, out there. But I wasn’t sure they were the kind of entities that come from other planets. They could have been the kind you find here. It is easy to make up someone to look like someone, isn’t it? And to play on someone’s fears and hopes. Could they have got an actor to pretend to be my dad? It was possible. Somebody was trying to freak me out, and, from what I could gather, it might well have something to do with the Quigleys, with Veronica and this Mrs Danby.

But what I thought and what I believed had been moving further and further apart in the weeks since my father had died. What I was prepared to believe now, although it changed from day to day, was something frightening and surprising and new. Belief is spooky. It’s something you use to get you from A to B, I guess, and right now that seemed a long way to me. Besides, for reasons I will come to shortly, the name Argol was familiar to me.