Tomy and the Planet of Lies (3 page)

I felt like a microbe stranded on a crumb of bread, and although I was free to hop around the place as much as I liked, I would never make it out of the bakery. I had heard plenty of UFO stories, but I had never seen a UFO myself. However, tonight, this was what my heart was yearning for. I stared at Vega, with its blue rays, and really began to wish that some being from out there in space would come and visit me. “Come down here! I want to talk to you!” I thought, “Show yourselves, if you're out there!”

Suddenly I recalled the Volga Song from the operetta
The Czarevich
, and began quietly humming to myself:

A soldier stands on the Volga's banks
Standing guarding his fatherland

… and then the refrain:

Have You up there forgotten me too?
My heart is yearning for love so true.
So many angels in heaven abide by Thee,
Send just one of them down here to me.

All kinds of crazy thoughts occurred to me then. “Halloooo, you strangers!” I giggled to myself, “Show yourselves, if you're really there!”

At some stage, I must have nodded off to sleep again for I was suddenly awakened by a flash like lightning.

I started as if a bomb had gone off under me. All around, as far as the eye could see there was no sign of a storm. Then I suddenly had a feeling as if heat was spreading out under the surface of my skull and the moisture between the folds of my grey matter was beginning to bubble and boil. I pressed my hands desperately to my temples and began to shake my head frantically. It seemed to help: the pressure slowly eased. With dawning horror, I recalled reading something about strokes. Had I just had a stroke? Was I going to be partially paralyzed, never be able to speak again? I opened my eyes and saw a dark red band across the horizon—the morning twilight. A second later I heard a shot ring out under me. It sounded like a dry “plop” and Marc started to cry out. The Range Rover started to vibrate violently. I leapt down from the roof and yanked open the driver's door. Had Marc somehow gotten hold of the gun and fired it under his blanket? Was he suffering some kind of delirium, no longer knowing what he was doing? If only I had taken the pistol with me up onto the roof!

“Marc! What are you doing! Wake up! Give me the gun!” I screamed at him, realizing at the same time that my fears about walking and talking were unfounded.

As I had opened the door, the light had automatically come on. Marc stared out at me wide-eyed and said, in a shaky voice:

“I didn't shoot, Erich. The banging is coming from somewhere here in the car.”

I went to the rear of the car and fumbled nervously with the lock to the rear door. I swung it upwards and immediately noticed that the window was shattered. I didn't even have time to come up with a theory as to how it could have broken as there was another loud bang, and then a torrent of water, almost like from out of a shower head, hit me right in the face. God damn! I shook my head and went to dry my face on my right sleeve, but my face was completely dry! Not a drop of water, simply nothing.

“Erich!” Marc was clearly having trouble speaking. “Look over there!”

He was pointing at something on the ground, about three meters away from the left-hand side of the car.

There was another bang and I watched as one of the 2-liter water bottles exploded inside the car. The water didn't flood out; didn't create a puddle, but instead, before my very eyes, formed itself into a water funnel, swirling around itself above the exact same spot that Marc was anxiously staring at. It was as if some hidden underground vacuum cleaner was trying to suck it up.

“Marc! Get out of the car!” I screamed, without even really realizing why I said it.

Marc grabbed onto the steering wheel, swung his legs and made his way toward the front of the vehicle. It struck me that he had bare feet and I was thinking to myself, “I hope he doesn't tread on a scorpion,” when the next bang cracked through the night, immediately followed by another.

I ran away from the car to what seemed a safe distance, about five meters. Marc ran over to me and we stared goggle- eyed at the events that were playing out before our very eyes above the desert sand. The water from the exploded bottles was swirling through the air to that eerie spot where it coalesced into a floating water funnel. Suddenly there were three more explosions and the water that was released formed another funnel, which then combined with the first floating funnel. A fine mist of water vapor formed and the sand started to move. I thought of one of the larger scorpions digging itself out of the sand, and then some kind of worm. Then it looked more like a small, constantly twitching snake, growing rapidly. The ‘snake' seemed to split into several then laced themselves together, a fourth of them forming a kind of translucent head with two large eyes.

We heard another bang—by now around ten of the two-liter bottles must have exploded—and a bent body grew out of the head in front of us.

“It looks like an embryo,” said Marc in awe, and I could see that he was right, although my common sense was telling me that I shouldn't believe the evidence of my own eyes. One explosion followed the next inside the car until every single one of the water bottles—it must have been 54 liters of water in all—had burst and the embryo in the desert sand had slowly began to bubble and steam, part of the paint on the car's bodywork started to melt and for a moment I thought I could smell magnesium. (I knew the smell from my schooldays, because we had always rubbed magnesium powder on our hands before doing gymnastics on the horizontal bars). Then there was suddenly a smell of gasoline in the air.

The next thing we heard was some kind of sucking noise, which became a roaring and then a bubbling sound. As if thrown by a ghostly hand, one of our spanners flew through the shattered rear window. Not floating slowly, but at a speed that would have done serious damage to our skulls if we had had the misfortune to be in the way. The water funnel over the sand had disappeared. Where it had been a moment before, the spanner now floated and, I don't how else I could describe it, seemed to be melting in certain places.

Marc and I were horrified. This was definitely no kind of earthly phenomenon—we were witnesses to something uncanny.

Coincidentally, I had written a book some years before about unexplained apparitions and so I was aware of various different types and forms of appearances from the literature.

Now, as I stared dumbfounded at that spot in the sand where the body was forming, I was struck by the similarities to the statements of the Lourdes and Fátima children. Their visions were always heralded by lightning and then followed by electrical discharges, which in turn were associated with rushing, crackling sounds. One of the Fátima children, little Lucia, had stated that before every single appearance she had noticed a noise like a firework rocket exploding in the distance.

All this occurred to me while I—incapable of uttering a single sound—was staring at the apparition slowly taking shape in front of me.

Marc wheezed next to me, “In the name of God, what is it?”

“It must be some kind of vision,” I said. “You know, like those ones in Fátima in Portugal. Some kind of strange energy form is materializing here. I remember the statements made by the Fátima children in the transcripts. They said that at first they had seen something that looked like a sack of flour shrouded in a floating veil. I don't think we have too much to fear. That thing will disappear into thin air in a second.”

I sounded a lot braver than I actually felt, but I wanted to reassure Marc. My insides, however, were in complete chaos. I was really scared; my heart was pounding so loud I was sure Marc could hear it; and the veins on my temples felt as though they were about to burst. Then I unexpectedly had the feeling that I wasn't alone in my skull. As if I was suddenly schizophrenic, as if all my higher functions were being switched off against my will. Incomprehensibly and quickly, I was overcome by a feeling of leaden tiredness, my knees sagged, and I fell to the ground. The whole thing must have lasted only a few seconds, since Marc grabbed me and cried: “Come on! We've gotta get out of here!”

While I was pulling myself together, a young boy was growing at an alarming pace out of the desert sand in front of us. The boy became a youth with hair on his head and in the pubic regions.

Then there was silence.

Marc and I watched as his chest began to rise and then sink. He breathed deeply and, as it seemed to me, very slowly. His eyes were closed, his hair and body covered in sand. Then the unfathomable creature balled his hands into fists, moved his fingers, his toes, pulled his knees in, stretched his arms out in front of his chest and opened his eyes.

Now I really was thinking about hallucinations. The shock of the last few minutes was not something I could shake off too quickly; the inexplicable exploding water bottles and the flying spanner must have addled my senses. Obviously, I was seeing things that couldn't possibly have happened, like some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion. A suggestion just to clear up the matter is something that influences process of thought, feeling or will, leading to an unconsidered assumption of values. This was what flew through my mind, but it quickly became clear to me that this was no kind of suggestion.

“Marc, what do you see?” I pressed.

I could hear Marc's breathing. He breathed in deeply through his nose and puffed out all of the used up air through his mouth, the way we did when we were hung over and were trying to get as much oxygen as possible into our bodies. Then he gathered his senses together and spoke with almost exaggerated clarity.

“It's a man,” he said. “A
naked
man.”

That's what I saw, too. The rising sun was now throwing out enough light that we could clearly recognize the young, male body. The face of the stranger seemed to be wearing a smile. All around was utter silence. We stared at each other: Marc and I on the one side, the stranger standing just a few meters away from us.

Alongside us the Range Rover with its shattered rear window and lying in front of us on the floor, directly in front of the stranger's right hand, a spanner, which looked to me to be strangely porous and bent. And there was still the smell of gasoline in the air.

“A monster,” said Marc in a calm voice and then ran the few steps to the car and pulled the gun out from its hiding place. Before he could cock the trigger, I shouted, “No Marc! Don't shoot! Give me the gun!”

I took the safety off and made sure the first round was loaded into the chamber. I had done it so many times during my national service I could do it in my sleep now. No need to look at the gun at all.

Even during the strange process of “creation,” I had already noticed that the stranger in the sand looked a hell of a lot like me. However, it was how I had looked thirty years ago, not now. Marc wasn't even born then and he couldn't possibly know how I would have looked as a 22-year-old—after all, I was now 52. Now, as the impossible being squatted in front of us on the floor and stared up at us, it was clear to me: this was a rejuvenated copy of me!

Then the stranger began to smile and my breath almost caught in my throat. In my youth, I had had two prominent, white teeth on my upper jaw, which I had later lost in a car accident. The being on the desert floor had my old teeth! He continued smiling, looked me up and down, and then noticed the gun in my hand.

“You don't really want to shoot yourself, do you?” he said in the voice of my younger days, and what's more in Swiss German! “Yourself” he had said, not “me.” Those were his first words, which Marc and I would always both remember exactly.

“Shoot, for God's sake!” shouted Marc, “This monster isn't real!”

The stranger sat down in a crouch, propping himself up on his arms.

“I'm cold,” he said, and leaned his head a little to one side, a typical gesture of mine.

“Who are you?” I asked fearlessly, ready at any second to squeeze the trigger.

“I haven't got any name yet. And as to who I am… you should be able to see that. For goodness sake, it's damn cold here. Erich, help me—please!”

He knew my name! Marc stood next to me and said, flabbergasted:

“It's unbelievable. He speaks Swiss German and knows your name! Have you got an explanation
for this
?”

I didn't. I wandered over to the Range Rover, grabbed Marc's woolen blanket from the front seat and threw it over to the stranger. He stood up, shook himself, wiped the sand from his naked body, and wrapped himself gratefully in it.

“Thanks,” he said, dryly.

Suddenly the similarity between the stranger and me struck Marc, too. He pointed at the stranger's face and then at me.

“Is that you?” Then a few seconds later: “Is this some kind of projection?”

“I'm real enough,” answered the stranger before I could. “Projections don't freeze and don't wrap themselves in blankets.” He checked out Marc, “And who are you? Actually it wasn't such a bad guess.”

“Me…?” Marc looked helplessly over to me: “What the…? Shouldn't he be introducing himself to us and explaining this … um … performance?” And while speaking, he returned to my side. He didn't trust anything that was going on here and squinted constantly down at the pistol.

“Who I am,” mocked the stranger, “Wouldn't help you much right now. And as for a name… As I said, I don't have one yet.” Then he looked directly at me and said: “Erich, give me a name. Please.”

He said, “please,” and I remembered how I used to always do the same. The situation was grotesque. A human being materializes in the desert sand, growing in slow-motion into a man before our eyes, a man who just happens to be a copy of my own body as a young man. Our entire supply of water had exploded and now the stranger stood there, wrapped in a woolen blanket, and demanded a name. The whole thing was just unreal.