Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

It was like he always thought that he knew more about these things than anybody else. But he was curious enough to come with me when I went to the next Watchers meeting. It was here that Martha first explained the different beings located in ‘the astral’. She said that there were good and bad forces out in space. Knowing that she had the power to make contact with them, she had prayed very diligently that she might not fall into the wrong hands. I understood this at once, especially when she mentioned that Lucifer was actually a star being who, under his guise as the ‘bright one’, was intent on bringing chaos into the astral as well as here on earth. Lucifer is abroad in the world, leading our scientists to build ever greater weapons of destruction. In the past, Martha explained, there had been a great apocalypse when the two great lost civilisations — Atlantis in the West and its sister continent Mu in the Pacific — were destroyed with ancient atomic weapons.

Martha stated that two kinds of alien have been visiting earth: the ‘Space Brothers’, who seek to help us, are from Sirius and from the constellation of Pleiades; the bad aliens (who I know now are the Greys) are from the fourth planet of the star system Zeta Reticulum. She told us that she had been in contact with the Space Brothers and that they had some important information for us. When I asked her how she communicated with them, she told me that it was done psychically. This made sense to me as I remember clearly, when I saw the flying saucer over the Hollywood Hills, a distinct feeling of an unintelligible message being transmitted directly to my mind. Martha demonstrated that she could decipher these signals with automatic writing. She went into a sort of trance. Then, with a simple pencil and paper, she wrote down what the Space Brothers wanted to tell us. That night their announcement was: ‘We are coming soon to gather up the Chosen Ones. But take heed: those who instruct the people of earth in slaughter will soon meet a dark and awful justice.’

On the way home Larry didn’t say much. When I asked him what he thought about the Watchers, he said: ‘Well, they’re pretty good material for a story.’ He was working late that night. He often wrote through the hours of darkness and slept during the day. I had this strange dream that the whole city was in a panic about a great catastrophe that would occur any day now. I woke up and went to get a glass of water. The study door was open and I caught sight of Larry at his desk, pecking away at the typewriter. I crept up and stood in the doorway to watch him. He didn’t notice me there and in that moment I felt a grim knowledge creep over me. Larry’s face was blank, an empty mask of strange intent. I realised that what Larry did was automatic writing also. He claimed his work as his own but I knew then that he was being used to send messages just as Martha was. And I feared that it might not be the Space Brothers who had made contact with him. Maybe he was possessed by the star being Lucifer, or the Greys, or even the devil himself.

I went to the next meeting of the Watchers on my own. It was there that I met Dr Headley, another leading member of the group. He was a retired physician who had served as a medical missionary in Africa. He had studied theosophy and told us that all the world religions revealed sacred evidence of extraterrestrial life forms that had visited earth in ancient times. He led the meeting in a group meditation, imploring us to ‘tune in with each other’s frequencies of spirit’. Afterwards he passed around a letter that he had composed, addressed to President Eisenhower, calling upon him to make public the secret information that the air force had accumulated on flying saucers. We all signed it.

Then Martha announced that a special message was coming in from the Space Brothers. We all sat around her as she started writing. It took her over half an hour to finish the communication. She then handed it to Dr Headley and he read it out loud. The news was shocking. Los Angeles and the whole of the Western seaboard were going to be destroyed in a great flood and the lost continent of Mu would emerge from the Pacific once more. The Space Brothers were to send spaceships to save the ‘Chosen Ones’. I remembered the dream I had had about the commotion in LA and of a great disaster coming, and it all suddenly made sense. Martha told us that the Space Brothers would give us more information next week. The meeting broke up with everyone feeling shocked and a bit elated.

When I got home Larry asked me about my evening with the Watchers. At first I didn’t want to tell him about the prophecy. I was worried that he would think it was all nonsense. I also had this feeling that it was dangerous knowledge. I remembered the panic in my dream. But Larry was gently insistent and in the end I told him everything.

But I was right to be cautious. Soon there were complaints to the community church about the Watchers and it was decided that from then on we would meet at Martha’s house. All the group’s energy now went into preparing for our evacuation from the city in the flying saucers sent by the Space Brothers. At first there was a message that they would come on Christmas Day, but later Dr Headley amended that to 21 December. This was the date of the winter solstice, when the earth’s axis is tilted on its furthest point from the sun, creating the best conditions for spaceships to land. He also added that this was the day on which ‘the Essenes left their house and went looking for a new master and teacher. It was on the twenty-first, you know, not the twenty-fifth, that Jesus was born.’

This was only two weeks away! I didn’t know what to say to the studio. My shooting schedule had started to get hectic; there were big scenes coming up between Nancy and Adam Henderson. And Larry started to pester me about when we would visit his mother over Christmas. I told him: ‘How could any of this matter now?’ We had a row but after he had calmed down I told him that he could be one of the chosen ones too. You see, I really wanted to save him.

But he just got more and more angry with me. In the last few days I did everything I could to prepare us both for the coming of the Space Brothers, even though I was very busy recording A Family Practice . Dr Headley had told us to remove any metal from our clothing because he said that, while we were travelling in a flying saucer, contact with metal could produce severe burns. When Larry came home one night to find me cutting the zip fasteners out of all of his trousers, he went crazy. I tried to explain to him but this just made him worse. In the end I decided that I would stay at Martha’s until the solstice.

We all gathered together on the evening of that day. The final message had been sent through Martha, telling us that the flood would come on the twenty-second, and that we would all be picked up at the hour of midnight on its eve. There was a small crowd outside the house, some of them press reporters as there had been some reports of the Watchers’ prophecy in the newspapers and on the local radio stations. The phone kept ringing and Martha or Dr Headley had to answer all these questions from people about the coming flood.

Midnight came and nothing happened. We waited in silence for nearly an hour and then Martha stood up and said that another message was coming through. There had been a delay, it read. We must wait for a sign. As the hours passed some of the group got up and questioned Martha and Dr Headley. There were arguments and a few people left the house. Then, at six-thirty in the morning, Martha announced that something wonderful had happened.

She wrote out a communication from a supreme being called the Creator, of a higher power over the Space Brothers. He told us that the great cataclysm had been averted and earth had been spared by his intervention. The Creator and the Space Brothers thanked the Watchers for holding vigil and keeping faith. More information would follow but in the meantime the Creator and his astral brotherhood were sending a message of peace for all on planet earth. Martha went out to the few reporters that were left outside to give them this as a sort of press release. Everybody else started to get ready to go home. Some people were taking pictures. I didn’t want to be recognised so I put on a headscarf and dark glasses. Dr Headley gave me a ride back to my house.