Make Belief and Other Stories

Fixes (Part One)​

At first everything was a little blurry. He rubbed his eyes and blinked, which helped a little. Once he’d got out of bed, Captain Hyatt’s mind quickly began sorting things into two simple categories: important and not important. The small but growing pile of unwashed clothes in the corner was classified as not important, as was the ringing alarm clock, the to-do list that sat patiently on his bedside table, and just about everything else. The one thing the captain’s mind currently categorised as important was coffee.

Sadly, the captain reflected, it was a problem he’d have to take care of himself. Then he imagined a world in which the human body could create its own caffeine. There would be countless working hours saved and grumpiness would be a thing of the past. It would change the world overnight. The captain tried to make a mental note of the idea, but since he hadn’t had his coffee yet, it slipped from his cerebral grasp leaving behind a hollow, ironic ringing sound as it faded.

Funnily enough, this begs the question as to how the very first coffee drinker managed to pick, properly roast, and grind the appropriate beans at 8am without having had their early-morning caffeine fix. A group of the first Jesuits set out to find the ancestors of this man with the hope of discovering how his monumental achievement came about, but discovered firstly that it was a woman, and secondly that she’d died of a stress-induced heart attack in her early thirties without having told the story. Some you win, some you lose.

With the revolutionary idea fading quickly in his mind, the captain turned himself towards the door and hoped his legs would continue his quest on their own. They did. The door opened and an unmistakable smell that his mind immediately classified as important wafted up through his nostrils and into his brain, where it set off all sorts of pleasant chemical reactions.


Out of habit, he turned right, and the smell quickly became stronger. Then, he walked towards the door at the end of the corridor, and planned to continue walking regardless of whether or not the door opened for him. It did. He turned to the right again. There was something blocking his path, but his mind assured him that it was not important.


Project Officer Aled Lowe was stood by the dining table proof-reading a report when the captain entered the room and turned towards him. Without taking his eyes off the report he said hello to the captain. There was no response, and he looked up. When he saw the look on the captain's face, he wisely got out of the way. The man walked straight over the spot where he had been standing and ignored the greeting. He stopped in front of the coffee machine. Suddenly there was a new item on the important list: mug. He got one from the cupboard, poured, took a few sips, and sighed a contented sigh.

Lowe watched the captain sit at the table with his coffee, as did Biologist James Clayton, who was sat on the other side.

‘Good morning, captain, how are you?’ said Clayton tentatively, and there was a noticeable tension that hung in the air with the words.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘How’s the work going?’

Clayton looked at Lowe, who looked at his report.

‘It appears as though this civilisation has begun its industrial revolution, but it’s stagnated very quickly.’

‘You mean to say we’ve been sent over a million light-years to study and contact a society that’s unable to get coal out of the ground?’

‘Yes sir, pretty much,’ said Lowe with a shrug. Although Captain Hyatt was technically in charge, he often took the advice of his project officer, who was in his early forties with greying blonde hair. His main field of knowledge was classical physics, but he also had practical knowledge of astro-navigation, mechanical engineering, and time panelling.

‘What now, then? Something must have caused this,’ the captain said.

‘Yes sir, that’s usually the case. I have a feeling I know what the cause is on this occasion,’ Lowe said, sitting next to Clayton.

The other two looked at him silently.

He pointed at the captain’s coffee mug, the captain looked down, then back up, then back at the mug again.

‘No porcelain?’ he ventured.

Lowe shook his head.

‘Uuh... they got distracted making saucers like Dresden?’

‘Nice guess, but no,’ said Lowe. He sat back a little in his chair and crossed his arms in front of him, then continued. ‘It’s actually coffee. Or the complete lack of it; no coffee plants, no caffeine, no coffee. It might seem like an inconsequential difference, but it’s believed that there wouldn’t have been an industrial revolution on Earth if it hadn’t been for coffee. Before it was introduced to the western world, most people drank mainly alcoholic drinks. They were filling, they kept the peasants from thinking too much and getting de-spirited, and the fermentation made it less risky than drinking water, since alcohol kills the majority of microbes in the liquid. Of course, they didn’t know that at the time, they just knew that alcohol drinkers were less likely to die of mystery ailments.

‘Coffee afforded the safety, along with improvements in energy and concentration, that allowed the rise of skilled workers that were vital for industrialisation to happen. I’ve never seen someone drunk operating a cotton mill, but I imagine it’s pretty funny. It would also be an absolute disaster.

‘It’s too late to introduce them to coffee now, but perhaps if we take a time panel, go back 400 years or so, and introduce a wealthy landowner to it, I’m sure that’ll sort things out.’

The captain mulled this over for a moment. Time panels were always a last resort, but it appeared they were needed for this civilisation.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but before you go, I want a report on the options of—’

To the relief of the other two, the captain’s tedium was cut off by a soft vibration accompanied by a low-pitched humming. Two men had appeared at the far end of the room holding a large black bar between them and looking slightly sheepish. The captain looked at Lowe and Clayton, and then back at the new arrivals.

‘Um,’ began one of them, ‘we're Lowe and Clayton from a little bit in the future. About 31 hours ship time. Can I suggest you try something else.’

‘Something else to what,’ asked the captain, a little disoriented.

‘The plan you’ve just agreed on’.

‘You weren't even here for that’.

‘Yes we were, we’re sitting right over there,’ Clayton from the future pointed out in a mildly exasperated tone.

The captain looked back at Lowe and Clayton, eager for someone to come to his defence, then glared at Present Clayton for a moment.

Present Lowe, still sat with his arms crossed, cleared his throat and addressed himself. ‘What do you suggest we do instead, then?’ he asked.

‘How the hell should we know,’ Future Lowe replied with a shrug, ‘we’re the ones who messed it up in the first place.’

Lowe considered this. ‘Good point,’ he conceded, and there was a general murmuring of voices.

‘Okay, okay,’ started the captain. When he had quiet, he looked down at the table for a moment, then turned to address his temporal guests. ‘Instead of arguing amongst yourselves, why don’t you tell us how exactly you “messed it up”? Maybe then we can come up with a better idea and avoid this mess all together.’

Future Clayton frowned and looked to one side, then looked back at the man stood next to him. ‘He’s got a point, if they sort the problem out, then we won’t exist. Existing is one of my favourite things to do,’ he protested.

‘No, it’s okay. You’ll still exist, things will just be a bit different is all,’ the other man explained.

‘Aah,’ Clayton said agreeably.

‘Couldn’t you have just found another way of fixing the problem?’ the captain asked.

‘Well we thought about that, sir,’ said Lowe, ‘but it would have been quite elaborate, and it would have risked changing quite a lot. We think our original plan was decent, we just need to use a little diplomacy.’

‘It was Lowe’s fault, he—’

‘Quiet,’ said the captain.

‘Can he order me about?’ Clayton said as he turned to look at the man next to him again.

‘Yes,’ said the two Lowes and the captain in chorus.

‘Why don’t you tell us what happened, Lowe?’ enquired the captain. Both Lowes looked silently at the captain. After a moment, he continued. ‘Uuh, him,’ he said, pointing at Future Lowe, who looked down at the floor for a moment, drew breath, then looked back up and towards the captain...
 

Fixes (Part Two)​


‘At first I thought it all went fairly well, sir. We were careful to approach them discreetly and disguise ourselves as traders from another land. The sample of coffee and the coffee plants were designed as a gift of trust; if they liked them, perhaps they’d consider an alliance with our fictitious nation in the future.

‘They were skeptical of the idea of a boiled drink, and of its ability to help people wake up in the morning, give them more energy, and help them concentrate on their jobs better. So I told them it was safer than drinking alcoholic drinks, and much, much safer than drinking water. They wanted to know why, which is where it all gets a bit awkward, sir.

‘I told them there were tiny creatures all around them that were so small they couldn’t see them. At first they thought we were mad, but I went into a bit of detail and told them we’d seen them using curved lenses, and they... got a bit funny with us.’

‘A bit funny? They freaked out, sir, you should have seen them! One of the King’s consort was drinking something from a wooden flask and he—’

‘Okay they freaked out. Can I carry on with my story now please, Clayton?’

There was a disagreement among the room here; Future Clayton wanted to tell his story, Present Clayton wanted to know what had happened, and everyone else wanted them both to be quiet so Lowe could finish the story. As is customary in these situations, the group called “everyone else” won by a comfortable margin, and the opposing group took the loss with the grace of a tropical urinary parasite.

‘Once things had calmed down a bit,’ continued Lowe, ‘they thanked us for the gifts and asked for some time to confer, so we left them to it and came back here. Well, not exactly here, back to the time we’d come from.

‘We left it a little while so that the changes to history could straighten themselves out, and then went to see what had happened.’

Lowe looked back down at the ground for a moment.

‘And?’ prompted the captain.

‘There was nobody there, sir,’ admitted Lowe. ‘Nobody at all. In fact, no living things of any kind; no animals, plants, even microbes. They were all dead.’

‘Did you go back in time to see what had happened?’

‘Well we were going to, then we realised that we didn’t need to. They’d recorded a significant amount of it on electronic devices not dissimilar to the early Tandy workstations. We went back anyway to check it out, but everything happened more or less as their records said it had.

‘It seems as though if you want to speed up technological advancement in a society, just give them coffee and something to be legitimately frightened of. The King immediately made the study of microbes a huge priority, and the coffee helped the early scientists work. Within 400 years, they’d harnessed electricity, invented microscopes and computers, and were setting about destroying all the viruses, bacteria, and parasites on the planet.

Clearly they didn’t work out that all of them are vital to life. Without bacteria, the nutrients in dead plants and animals are never returned to the earth, and the other two help the creatures they infect to develop an equilibrium with their ecosystems. Once the microbes were gone, there were several waves of growth and shrinkage of various populations, and in the end, there was no food left for any of them to eat. It happened time and time again all around the planet, and pretty soon the humans had no food either.

They were looking at artificial food substitutes, but they didn’t solve the problem in time.’

‘Well that’s fair enough’ said present Lowe, ‘all we need to do is go back to the King and sell him the idea of coffee without mentioning microbes.’

There was a general murmur of approval across the table as the group agreed upon the rough outline of a plan, but nobody did anything. Instead, they looked around the room, waited, and listened.

In the background there was a soft vibration and a low-pitched humming noise, but that might have been the ship’s engines...
 

Star Games (Part One)​


During the initial age of the explorers, humankind was divided. The races to conquer the poles, the unexplored lands, to circumnavigate the globe, and to reach its highest points had been fierce, and had claimed the lives of many. The first age passed, and there were many generations who lived without such races. Time did nothing to heal the divisions. When we first travelled interstellar distances it was not as a collection of small competing privateer groups, but as two multi-nation alliances. The Peoples’ Liberation Force (PLF) was formed of China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, many of whom had harboured interstellar ambitions since the early days of aeronautics. The International Space Agency (ISA) consisted primarily of The United States, Europe, Japan, and Australasia.

The PLF would not discuss its intelligence or its aims—either publicly or privately—with anyone. Each side sent probes to the closest Earth-like planet, to the first solar system with two Earth-like planets, and to the first multiple star system, all of which were heavily coveted by both sides. All of which also returned with promising results, but with no signs of sentient life. The opportunity for the two to share the cosmically vast resources fairly among themselves never existed, and the inevitable war was devastating.

Owing to the vast scale of the new-found territory it quickly became difficult to source recruits for both sides. This, combined with two separate disasters suffered by the PLF, each resulting in huge casualties, led to a ceasefire being agreed. Negotiations began in good spirits. The pair, however, were entirely unable to come to agreements as to who should get which resource, and, with their appetites for war diminished, they eventually decided to leave the entire thing to chance.

They chose a low-level clerk. He was a simple man with no family, content with the little things, and harbouring little ambition, and they gave him everything. As the trustee of the galaxy, it would be his life’s work to ration its riches as fairly and equally as possible among the powers so that they may live in peace side by side. The system would become known as the Star Games, and it would be watched by all. Although the trustee’s power and riches were entirely figurative, they made him the subject of much jealousy, hatred, and conspiracy. Every effort was made to make the game as transparent as possible, but it was always conducted so as to keep the man at the centre of it out of harm’s way.

The stars glittered through the window. He turned his eyes upward briefly and looked at them, wondering how many times he’d looked at each one before, then stared back at the polished white tiles on the floor. He sat with his feet tucked underneath him and tried not to think about what was going on in the auditorium. The corridor was pleasing to the eye. It had a stark minimalism that implied function over form. It certainly didn’t seem to imply the grandeur that was waiting behind the door next to the bench. There would be a huge, gaping cavern of a room, filled with people, flashing lights, cameras of several kinds, ostentatious flags that always appeared to be stood with their chests out preening themselves, and the buzz and crackle that came with the weight of the world watching from near and far.

With his mind on other things, he pulled absent-mindedly at a panel on the bench. Only when the panel he gripped came away in his hand did he notice what he was doing. Embracing the welcome distraction, he peered down at the spot he’d removed it from. Inside was a book. Not a normal one, but the old-fashioned kind made from pulped trees. There was a musty smell that seemed oddly ephemeral, as though he were breathing in knowledge from the strange object. He ran his fingers over the cover. It felt a little rough and a little soft. He turned the book so he held the spine against the palm of his hand, opened his fingers, and the book opened as though a groove had been worn into the spine. The words on the page seemed to call out to him. There was no activity at the door by the bench, and nobody in the corridor that stretched away to his left. At the end of the corridor was a door, and there was a turning left into another corridor just before it. The man, still seated on the bench, shrugged and began to take in the words:

Author’s notes, interview with Powell Sycamore, June 1991.

The idea of using a psychic to tell a story isn’t a new one at all, but I love the poetry of it. The vagueness, the suggestibility, the way their comments can be interpreted; moulded. It almost seems as though the psychic is manipulating the listener. I have several brief story outlines, but what I really want to know is this: how do these people know what they profess to know about the future, or about things they couldn’t possibly know from the past? What does it all mean? Where is it all coming from? I get the feeling that’s the key to the story.

He didn’t seem susceptible to the usual sort of incentives; a free meal (that’s a terrible idea anyway, you just end up spending the whole session spitting food at one another ), an expenses-paid trip to a city centre etc. All he wanted was a cup of coffee in the park at the south side of town. I found the bench at the spot he suggested on top of the hill. There were trees lower down the slope, and the upper part of the town, as well as some of the larger buildings from the lower part, peered out from above them and through the gaps. It was a clear night, the whole area was bathed in starlight, the effect was quite beautiful.

When he appeared, he was gazing up at the stars idly while he walked. I got the impression he was just captivated, rather than looking for anything in particular in the manner of an astronomer. He took a seat on the bench and said hello to me by name.

“I was wondering what the etiquette might be for introducing yourself to a psychic,” I said.

He chuckled to himself. “Depends on the psychic, I suppose. Next question.”

I handed him his coffee. “Do you consider it a gift?” I asked. “The powers, I mean.”

He paused and mulled it over. “In my time, I’ve brought people to justice, saved lives, and experienced some amazing things. But I also know humanity at its worst. Sometimes I find it unpleasant to be around people. It’s difficult to come back from that.”

“What’s it like having a vision?”

“You know, I’m really not sure. Have you ever been somewhere in the morning, and something happens that reminds you of a dream you had the night before? It’s similar to that.”

“How do you know the difference between a dream and a vision?”

“Visions are more—” he gestured with his free hand as he thought of the word. “—vivid. I get so much detail, it’s like being there. That's why I don't like the term "vision"; I don't just see, I feel. I get lots of little details, but rarely the important things. What use it is for me to know what it’s like to be attacked with an axe or stabbed in the stomach, for example?”

He’d clearly thought about these things before, but they still affected him a little. “Do you know my PIN number?” I asked, semi-seriously.

“I’d rather be a hoax than a showman.”

“You’re probably most well known for your involvement in the Peter Lindsay case, it certainly seems like they treated you as a showman. Have I got that wrong?”

He thought about that for a moment as well. “It was more of a test in that case. They told me they get a lot of imposters, people just wanting to be shown around a crime scene. Instead of taking me directly to the missing boy’s house, they were going to take me to three different properties, and they’d be interested to know if anything occurred to me...
 

Star Games (Part Two)​


“I tried to keep everything I knew as fresh as possible in my mind. At the first one, nothing. At the second one, they showed me around the living room and kitchen, let me look around downstairs for a moment, then suggested we try the third house. I recognised the wallpaper in the kitchen and asked if I could see the bedroom. When we got there, I realised I’d seen that before, too. I described a man who had strangled a woman to death in the bed. A few months later I discovered that a woman had been strangled in that bed, but the police had assumed it was a sex act that had gone wrong. After my description they arrested the guy and he confessed. It turned out they’d been casual lovers and had had an argument out of the blue. Anyway.

“They took me to another house. This was effectively my final opportunity to convince them I had anything interesting for them on the Lindsay case. Back then, of course, it wasn’t the minor phenomenon it became, just a simple missing persons case. Once again, I tried to keep what I knew as fresh in my mind as possible; the boy’s face, the handcuffs, the roof space above the fixed caravan. The way the knife tore into his back and twisted. Nothing in the house triggered anything. There were several policemen escorting me, and they were beginning to get annoyed at this point. Why had I not been able to help? I wondered whether I was on the wrong case. But then it happened. I was stood looking out of a second-storey window when I saw the dead boy walking down the street. I stopped what I was doing and followed. When we got to a bus stop, he vanished. It was clear to me that this was him on the day he went missing. I told the policemen where he had been going, but they had no way of verifying it. I can’t tell you how, but I followed the trail in the other direction. We went back passed the house they’d brought me to, along several other streets, and the trail stopped outside a block of apartments. I looked up at it and shuddered.

“I asked them if this was where the boy had lived. They repeated what I said, but said it in present tense; there was no evidence that the boy was dead yet. By that point I must have proven myself, because they took me inside and introduced me to the boy’s parents. His name was Jamie, and he’d been missing for around a week by that point. His parents were warm and welcoming. They showed me around their home, told me as much as they could about the boy. His mother was restless, constantly fussing over one thing or another as though she was trying to take her mind off things. Then, when we sat at the dinner table, she sat still, looked at me, and asked if her son was dead.

“How do you respond to something like that? I said I thought he was, but I hoped I was wrong. She seemed to accept it immediately, then she asked if I knew how he’d died. I lied and said I didn’t. The policemen and I offered what little comfort we could, and left her sobbing in her husband’s arms. What else could we do?

“I told them all I knew, including Peter Lindsay’s initials and a very brief description of him. It was over 20 years and nearly 40 murders later that they caught him. Could I have done more? I don’t know. If I’d known of any other way I could have helped, I certainly would have.”

There were all sorts of ideas going through my head at that point. “How did you get involved in the case to begin with?” I asked.

“I’m in contact with fringe areas of law enforcement departments all around the world. Sometimes they send me photographs, sometimes I send them descriptions of people I’ve seen. I don’t contact individual police departments because I never know where the events I know about are happening or have happened. They sent me the picture, I told them the name, then they wanted to meet me.

“You know the worst thing about this whole thing? There’s no why. Am I supposed to stop the terrible things happening, or help bring the criminals to justice? Or maybe something else? That'd be good to know. It’s a bit embarrassing; a clairvoyant reaching out hopelessly in the dark for answers, no less clueless than everyone else.

“As unpleasant as all the cases I’m involved with are, there’s one that really makes my skin crawl.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Everything’s white and sterile. There’s this strange feeling of peace and tranquillity that seems to envelope everything it touches. When I look out of the window and see the stars I realise that they’re moving. I’m in a spaceship, and it takes my breath away. There’s no way I’ll ever experience anything like this in my lifetime. I put my hand against the window and look outside, wondering if Earth is around any of the stars I’m looking at. As usual, I have no idea of the specifics. At least most of the time I know what solar system I’m in.

“I turn and look down the corridor. There’s a simple spiral pattern on the wall painted in cream and blue, the effect achieved with opacity. At the middle of the whole thing is an airlock. I walk up to the first door and it opens for me, I step inside. The stars and the nebula outside are so beautiful that I forget what’s going on around me, then there’s a hand on my back, and I’m tumbling end over end, gasping for breath. I search my mind for what happened. The door closed automatically behind me, then a while later, it opened and closed again. There were the sounds of someone playing with a keypad, and suddenly the nebula was right there before me in brilliant blue and red.

“I’ve turned so I’m looking where I came now. A figure in a space suit waves at me gently. The visor isn’t tinted or reflective, but I can’t see the face. It’s just too dark. Then the spaceship gets low in my vision, and everything fades away slowly.

“Can you imagine what that’s like?” He looked up at the stars again. “If there was any meaning behind this, you’d think it’d be planned a little better, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe interstellar travel will be here tomorrow, or you'll be frozen or something?” I suggested.

“Maybe. Or maybe none of this means anything.” He looked at me with a frankness in his eyes, shrugged, and smiled apologetically. “Over to you, I suppose,” he said. “It was nice to meet you. Thanks for the coffee.” He walked with slowness along the path and his eyes were drawn to the stars again. And that was it.

I’ve examined the story ideas from so many different angles, and there isn’t an ending that jumps out at me. For now I’ve decided to focus on other areas. Perhaps something will occur to me at a later date.

He stared at the last words on the page, reading them over and over. Where had this book come from? Who had put it here? With his heart racing and cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, he looked down the corridor, seeing the airlock at the end. He didn’t know when—or if—it would happen, but it’d be nice to know.
 
Make Belief

Some people get the most beautiful music from them. In others, chaotic events gather and clash in ways that we struggle to make sense of. Some get wisdom passed up from great cogs that grind away unseen in the depths. A significant number get terror beyond their wildest imaginings, and most of us get one of the numerous combinations of these things. Try as we might, we cannot escape or avoid them. They take us under their spell, and we are powerless to resist. It can be argued that they have the biggest impact upon us when we’re to young to appreciate their significance.

Gary Horston had been eight years old when his mind began mulling over the possibilities, having soaked up fact, fiction, and hearsay like a sponge. From inside the car, he attempted to pick out chunks of the night-time scenery through the veil of thick fog that had formed over the outside world. In the darkness of the cabin, there was the merest suggestion of road noise as the large vehicle wafted quietly towards home, and a light rocking lulled its occupants from underneath. In the front seats were his mother and father, and, from the perfect safety of his seat, Gary looked out of the window and into the half obscured void beyond. The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up, and he leant his head towards the window, looking at the road in front of them with curiosity. Suddenly, it appeared by the side of the road. A green sweater, black trousers, and white training shoes. Whatever was wearing them was invisible except for some mousy fuzz at the top that might have been hair, and an ominous red glow around the outer edges. As the car passed by it in a flash, Gary saw the shoulders turn towards him, felt its gaze, and then gasped as a burning sensation swept through him. It reached out its hand for him, and then, as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished backwards into the fog. Neither of the others in the car seemed to have noticed anything unusual. Gary opened his mouth, but no voice would come out. He took several deep breaths, and the near silent rocking of the car calmed him. What he’d seen could hardly have been real. He wanted to tell his parents about the whole thing, to be consoled by the comfort they offered him, and to be reassured by the immense safety their attention provided. But what would he say? How could he possibly get across the strangeness, the sense of evil, and the burning sensation he felt? The car continued to calm him. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

By the time they reached home it was late, and the miles of normality that the car had rolled through after the encounter had soothed Gary’s mind. He was tired now, and thinking of bed. He stepped out onto the pavement, closed the car door, and turned towards the house. As he looked up, the thing that he’d seen on the road was right there before him, barely an inch from his face. He drew breath to scream, the thing reached out for him, and he knew it would turn him to ash. Then, when he closed his eyes and expected to feel the burning, the terrifying ordeal was over.

On waking, with the nightmare fresh in his mind, it was a terror that he would not have thought possible before he’d experienced it. The way the feeling grabbed him, chilled him, and filled him to the brim with mortal dread would never leave him. What could do this to someone? Had he made it up, or was this—somehow—a sense of something that was more than just make-believe?

Just as some dreams are dispelled by the morning sun, or are forgotten in sleep altogether, others continue to grow in the mind. Whenever he passed the area he had dreamt about, he felt the presence of the dream again. Although the landscape wasn’t twisted and petrified as it had been in his mind that night, the association from one to the other stayed with him.

When he was old enough, Gary began seeking out others with experiences similar to his own. Some of the tales he was told had been remarkably close to his dream in certain aspects, but nobody else had seen or felt the thing in the same manner as he had while he slept that night.

By his early twenties, he’d had the fruits of his labour published: “The Folklore and Hauntings of Swanford Vale”. He was also fast gaining a reputation as someone who was prepared to investigate other people’s experiences with an open mind. It was this same open mind that had stopped him from wanting to be a doctor, musician, or one of countless other professions. After all, he had no idea what the lives of such professionals were like. He didn’t like to look to the future; one never knew what lay there. The job of paranormal investigator chose him as much as the other way around.

Headlights emerged from the trees and then disappeared again over the crest of the hill, then the red tail-lights followed them and faded to black in their wake. The hilly moorland was cold and foggy, and Gary Horston found himself looking back on the choices he’d made as he scanned the landscape.

There were two categories of people who had engaged his services. There were those who had seen something strange, but where perfectly prepared to accept that they’d seen what they’d seen because they were tired or stressed. They generally accepted Horston’s inconclusive findings. The second category was made up of people who were certain of what they’d experienced, and if anyone else failed to experience it too, they were doing something wrong.

‘You have to believe in it’, they’d say. ‘I mean really believe in it; it won’t show itself to you if you don’t believe in it.’ They were blind to the possibility that they were only seeing what they wanted to see.

Vanessa Craig was going to fall firmly into the second category. It wasn’t always easy to remain objective in such circumstances, but Gary always did his best to deliver his findings and not take any responses personally. As long as they paid him, of course.

As the years had passed him by, he began to feel more and more as though his childhood nightmare had been just that and nothing more; he hadn’t found a thing to show that there might be anything more to it. Would that be enough? He’d never even had the dream again.

I came, I didn’t see, but I didn’t really disprove anything either.

That would probably have been preferable to witnessing—and, thus, publishing his account of witnessing—Vanessa’s devil-like apparition. But he hadn’t witnessed it. And now he stood and watched the people go by as if from the outside of the world. As a boy, he’d been excited to embark upon what he saw to be an eternal journey of adventure and discovery, but the more he travelled, the more he found himself looking back on his time.

The trees rustled gently in the cool autumn breeze. Above them, the quarter moon shone dimly, and Venus pulsed with brilliant white, blue, and purple light beside it. The life of a lawyer or a doctor were ones that he’d never know; the warm, comfortable office, the meals that weren’t from a plastic container, going home to his own bed every night. Perhaps they weren’t at all as he imagined, but he’d never find out.

He looked down and saw the wide grooves that led, pirouetting as they went, deeper into the cold moorland. The flora had grown to reclaim the markings with time. He would not have seen them if he hadn’t known they were there. The buckled tent peg was disappearing as well, slowly being hidden amongst a patch of growing weeds. When he looked back to the road, he saw the blue canvas of his tent as it lit up with white light, then red, then white again.

His next memory had been seeing the truck removing a car that rested at the end of the grooves. They’d removed the blue tent, along with the blood and the bone, too. But they didn’t remove everything from the crash. How could they?

There was another car coming. From the outside, he watched it. He felt the same prickle on his skin as in the dream, and a pair of eyes met his with incredulity. Just like him, it seemed as though the irony would never get old.
 
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