Simon Green - The Dark Side of the Road

Since the Colonel wasn’t here to tell me what to do, I’d just have to work it out for myself. Question all the guests, and mine hosts, and see what they had to say for themselves. They weren’t exactly short on secrets and their own precious little intrigues. They all had connections that they didn’t want the others to know about. Alex Khan and Melanie Belcourt, for example. They both wanted Walter to retire from running his company, apparently for their own separate reasons … but did their relationship go deeper than that?

And I really wasn’t happy that two of the people in this small gathering had known me before, in different parts of my past. Khan at Black Heir, in the eighties. And Diana in Paris, in ’sixty-nine. It could be a coincidence. Stranger things have happened, in my life. Or, it could all have been carefully arranged, to lure me into a trap. There are always people looking for me. Wanting to get their hands on me …

I sat on the end of the bed, swinging my feet idly, sinking comfortably into the deep deep mattress. Listening to the wind howl and the locked shutters rattle outside my window. There was something very comforting about being safe and warm and cosy inside, while bad weather prowled around outside, unable to get at me. I stared into the leaping flames of the banked fire at the other end of the room, listened to them crackle … The air was deliciously warm, and the bed was almost indecently comfortable. I wanted so very much to be able to just lie down and rest, to stretch out and relax, let the aches of the day’s hard driving just slip away … but I didn’t dare. I was too tired. I had to stay awake and alert until I figured out where the Colonel was and what the hell was really going on here at Belcourt Manor.

And then; I had a dream that wasn’t a dream.

Another place, another time. Far and far away, and close as yesterday. A raging sea, with waves big as mountains. Heavy dark purple waters slamming against a massive overbearing cliff, made up of smooth and almost organic shapes. A huge structure stood on top of the cliff, strange and overpowering. All metal slabs and shining surfaces, with vicious spikes and unnatural protrusions, following no pattern or purpose I could make any sense of. Some parts of the structure weren’t there all of the time, fading or folding in and out, new parts replacing old in some terribly intricate endless cycle. The whole thing rose up and up, almost beyond bearing, on a scale beyond human acceptance. Towers blossomed like flowers as they stabbed the sky. Vivid piercing lights came and went, in explosions of colours.

And all of this under a bottle green sky, with a fierce white sun, and three small moons that went shooting across the cloudless heavens. There were sounds all around that I couldn’t identify or understand, but were still horribly familiar for all that. A series of images flashed before my unblinking eyes; strange shapes, hauntingly familiar scenes; freakish, nightmarish, disturbing. A great Voice spoke my name … and it wasn’t ‘Ishmael’.

Something made me scream. Something made me feel sick. Something made me feel horribly lonely, and sad, for people and places lost.

The dream that was not a dream changed abruptly. Became something more recent. I was inside a place I immediately recognized, but could no longer remember the name of. As though its true name and nature had been concealed from me; hovering forever just on the tip of my mental tongue.

The interior of an artificial place. Not a building, but still a constructed thing. A shimmering phosphorescent glow squirmed up and down great curving walls, ridged like bone or coral, while complex machineries with more than three spatial dimensions rose up around me, doing things I couldn’t understand or appreciate, but that I nevertheless knew were desperately important and significant. Things were happening all around me, with impossible speed. I was held in place, restrained, while terrible long needles plunged into me from every side, sinking in deep. Doing things to me. I felt no pain, but I could feel them working. And I couldn’t look down. I wasn’t allowed to look down, in this dream or memory. Because I wasn’t supposed to see what I looked like.

A machine voice spoke to me, giving me information and instructions, and I couldn’t understand any of it. I said something in return, and my voice didn’t sound at all human.

I came back to myself lying full length on the bed, twitching and trembling, my face covered in a cold sweat. Exhausted, physically and mentally. Sometimes I think these intrusions are memories, and sometimes I think they’re cover memories, to disguise something worse. They hit me out of nowhere, without warning, and they hit me hard. And I can’t escape the feeling that somewhere deep inside, the old me is trying to tell the new me something. Trying desperately to warn me, about something I need to remember …

So. Time to tell the truth, at last. Or what I have come to believe is the truth.

I am an alien, passing for human. My starship fell out of the sky over South West England, back in 1963. It hit hard, digging a great hole in the ground. I no longer remember why we crashed, but I think something bad happened, high above the clouds, but under the stars. The rest of my crew were killed in the crash. I was the only survivor. I remember that much, even if I can’t remember who or what the rest of my crew were. My ship’s mechanisms remade me, rewrote my physical form right down to the DNA, so that I could appear human. So I could pass as one of you, unnoticed, undetected, until my ship’s distress beacon could be answered by my own people. So they could come and find me, and pick me up, and take me home again.

The shape change is standard procedure, in an emergency. Because you must never know we walk among you.

But because my ship had crashed so very badly, the transformation mechanisms malfunctioned. They gave me a human body, but then they wiped most of my memories. I no longer know who or what I was, before the crash. I don’t know where I came from. I remember staggering away from the crash site, out into my new world, overcome by human thoughts and senses. By the time I was back in control of myself I was miles away, lost and disorientated. I have no idea now where my ship crashed. No point even looking for it, even if I could retrace my steps to roughly the right area. The ship would have followed its standard procedures and buried itself deep underground, hidden behind powerful shields and protections.

Because we aren’t supposed to be here. I remember that.

No rescue has ever come. After so many years, I doubt it ever will. Presumably the ship’s distress beacon was also damaged in the crash.

I have been making my way alone on this Earth, passing for human, for over fifty years now. Never ageing, always looking exactly the same. The transformation machines did good work. Always moving on, hiding in plain sight, staying one step ahead of the human authorities. But it’s become increasingly hard for me to stay under the radar, in this increasingly computerized world, with its ever-changing needs for confirmation of identity. So down the years I have had no choice but to work for many and various powerful subterranean agencies, in return for their protection. For the names and IDs they provide, backed up by all the necessary paperwork, to give me the appearance of a life, and a background.

I needed their protection because you can’t be the kind of person I am, and do the kind of things I can do, without being noticed. I have moved from place to place and from organization to organization, down the years; and there are a lot of people out there looking for me. Because they want to interrogate me, or vivisect me. One of the reasons I joined Black Heir was to search their files on alien visitations, for some information on who or what I might be, but I never found anything useful. And of course I did feel safer on the inside, looking out … I did good work, searching out the aliens hiding among us. Because it takes one to know one.