John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos

Such a dismissal turned out for a time to be surprisingly easy, for it is doubtful whether the affair – even had it not lain beneath the intimidating muzzles of the Official Secrets Act – could at this stage have made a really useful newspaper sensation. As a dish, it had a number of promising aromas, but it proved short on substance. There were, in all, eleven casualties, and something might have been made of them, but even they lacked the details to excite a blas readership, and the stories of the survivors were woefully undramatic, for they had nothing to tell but their recollections of a cold awakening.

We were able, therefore, to assess our losses, dress our wounds, and generally readjust ourselves from the experience which afterwards became known as the Dayout, with a quite unexpected degree of privacy.

Of our eleven fatalities: Mr William Trunk, a farm-hand, his wife, and their small son, had perished when their cottage burnt down. An elderly couple called Stagfield had been lost in the other house that caught fire. Another farm-hand, Herbert Flagg, had been discovered dead from exposure in close, and not easily explained, proximity to the cottage occupied by Mrs Harriman, whose husband was at work in his bakery at the time. Harry Crankhart, one of the two men whom the Oppley church-tower observers had been able to see lying in front of the Scythe and Stone had also been found dead from exposure. The other four were all elderly persons in whom neither the sulfas nor the mycetes had been able to check the progress of pneumonia.

Mr Leebody preached a thanksgiving sermon on behalf of the rest of us at an unusually well-attended service the following Sunday, and with that, and his conduct of the last of the funerals, the dream-like quality of the whole affair became established.

It is true that for a week or so there were a few soldiers about, and there was quite a deal of coming and going in official cars, but the centre of this interest did not lie within the village itself, and so disturbed it little. The visible focus of attention was close to the Abbey ruins where a guard was posted to protect a large dent in the ground which certainly looked as if something massive had rested there for a while. Engineers had measured this phenomenon, made sketches, and taken photographs of it. Technicians of various kinds had then tramped back and forth across it, carrying mine-detectors, geiger-counters, and other subtle gear. Then, abruptly, the military lost all interest in it, and withdrew.

Investigations at The Grange went on a little longer, and among those occupied with them was Bernard Westcott. He dropped in to see us several times, but he told us nothing of what was going on, and we asked no details. We knew no more than the rest of the village did – that there was a security check in progress. Not until the evening of the day it was finished, and after he had announced his departure for London the following day, did he speak much of the Dayout and its consequences. Then, following a lull in conversation, he said:

'I've got a proposition to make to you two. If you'd care to hear it.'

'Let's hear it and see,' I told him.

'Essentially it is this: we feel that it is rather important for us to keep an eye on this village for a time, and know what goes on here. We could introduce one of our own men to help keep us posted, but there are points against that. For one thing, he would have to start from scratch; and it takes time for any stranger to work into the life of any village, and, for another, it is doubtful whether we could justify the detachment of a good man to full-time work here at present – and if he were not full-time it is equally doubtful whether he could be of much use. If, on the other hand, we could get someone reliable who already knows the place and the people to keep us posted on possible developments it would be more satisfactory all round. What do you think?'

I considered for a moment.

'Not, at first hearing, very much,' I told him. 'It rather depends, I suppose, what is involved.' I glanced across at Janet. She said, somewhat coldly:

'It rather sounds as if we are being invited to spy on our friends, and neighbours. I think perhaps a professional spy might suit you better.'

'This,' I backed her up, 'is our home.'

He nodded, rather as if that were what he had expected.

'You consider yourselves a part of this community?' he said.

'We are trying to be, and, I think, beginning to be,' I told him.

He nodded again. 'Good – At least, good if you feel that you have begun to have an obligation towards it. That's what's needed. It can well do with someone who has its welfare at heart to keep an eye on it.'

'I don't see quite why. It seems to have got along very well without for a number of centuries... or, at least, should I say that the attentions of its own inhabitants have served it well enough.'

'Yes,' he admitted. 'True enough – until now. Now, however, it needs, and is getting, some outside protection. It seems to me that the best chance of giving it that protection depends quite largely on our having adequate information on what goes on inside it.'

'What sort of protection? – and from what?'

'Chiefly, at present, from busybodies,' he said. 'My dear fellow, surely you don't think it was an accident that the Midwich Dayout wasn't splashed across the papers on the Dayout? Or that there wasn't a rush of journalists of all kinds pestering the life out of everyone here the moment it lifted?'

'Of course not,' I said. 'Naturally I knew there was the security angle – you told me as much yourself – and I was not surprised at that. I don't know what goes on at The Grange, but I do know it is very hush.'

'It wasn't simply The Grange that was put to sleep,' he pointed out. 'It was everything for a mile around.'

'But it included The Grange. That must have been the focal point. Quite possibly the influence, whatever it is, doesn't have less than that range – or perhaps the people, whoever they were, thought it safer to have that much elbow room for safety.'

'That's what the village thinks?' he asked.

'Most of it – with a few variations.'

'That's the sort of thing I want to know. They all pin it on The Grange, do they?'

'Naturally. What other reason could there be – in Midwich?'

'Well then, suppose I tell you I have reason to believe that The Grange had nothing whatever to do with it. And that our very careful investigations do no more than confirm that?'

'But that would make nonsense of the whole thing,' I protested.

'Surely not – not, that is, any more than any accident can be regarded as a form of nonsense.'

'Accident? You mean a forced landing?'

Bernard shrugged. 'That I can't tell you. It's possible that the accident lay more in the fact that The Grange happened to be located where the landing was made. But my point is this: almost everyone in this village has been exposed to a curious and quite unfamiliar phenomenon. And now you, and all the rest of the place, are assuming it is over and finished with. Why?'

Both Janet and I stared at him.

'Well,' she said, 'it's come, and it's gone, so why not?'

'And it simply came, and did nothing, and went away again, and had no effect on anything?'

'I don't know. No visible effect – beyond the casualties, of course, and they mercifully can't have known anything about it,' Janet replied.

'No visible effect,' he repeated. 'That means rather little nowadays, doesn't it? You can, for instance, have quite a serious dose of X-rays, gamma-rays, and others, without immediate visible effect. You needn't be alarmed, it is just an instance. If any of them had been present we should have detected them. They were not. But something that we were unable to detect was present. Something quite unknown to us that is capable of inducing – let's call it artificial sleep. Now, that is a very remarkable phenomenon – quite inexplicable to us, and not a little alarming. Do you really think one is justified in airily assuming that such a peculiar incident can just happen and then cease to happen, and have no effect? It may be so, of course, it may have no more effect than an aspirin tablet; but surely one should keep an eye on things to see whether that is so or not?'