Descent (8 page)

‘Well, he probably did,’ I pointed out, ‘my father might have told him.’

Calum scratched his head. ‘He didnae mention you. Didn’t even ask if I’d spoken tae yi. Went through other things and aw, stuff you hadnae said anything about. High temperature, rashes and that. Sair glands. Stuck his thumb under the side of my jaw, wiggled it about, asked if it hurt. That didnae come from your da.’

‘That’s odd,’ I admitted, ‘but—’

‘Aye, aye,’ said Calum. ‘He couldae just hae been guessing about radiation or something. But that’s no the really weird thing he said.’

‘What’s that?’

We were in the crush through the main door.

‘Tell you later,’ Calum said, over the heads of a mob of first years surging about us at elbow level. ‘Meanwhile, when you get a minute, take a wee look on your phone.’

In maths class, of course, looking at our phones was legit. I took the opportunity of being a little ahead in working out a problem to surreptitiously shrink my page of algebra scribbles and open the latest message from Calum. It was a picture – or rather, it was a picture of a picture, a photo of what appeared to be part of a page from an old book, though the background looked too white to be old paper. I unfolded my phone to see it life-size. Around the borders were what looked like incomplete sentences of print – or of precise handwriting – in two columns cut off by the edges of the photo. The script was unfamiliar to me, the language unknown, and would in any case have been made almost impenetrable by the uncial font, its elegant parallel uprights and stately curves entangled with curlicues and serifs. What grabbed my attention, though, was the woodcut in the centre, around which the columns flowed, narrowing to half their usual width on each side.

The picture was captioned by Roman numerals: IX VII. It was, in outline, unmistakably the head and shoulders and raised right hand of a Grey. The oval head, the almond eyes, the dotted nostrils, the slit mouth, the pencil neck, the four-fingered hand. In detail it was something else. The top and back of the head, and what might be called the cheeks, were shielded by a mask-like helmet encircled by a jagged tiara. Antennae sprouted from the forehead. The eyes were faceted and convex. The chin was a closed pair of laterally aligned mandibles. The neck was segmented. Behind the neck, wavy vertical lines suggested something like coils of wire hanging from under the back of the helmet. The fingers had barbs along the inner surface, like the distal portion of a locust’s leg, and the hands had no palms.

I felt my own palms sweat.

At lunchtime I tracked Calum by his phone location to behind the bicycle shed, where he and a dozen other fourth and fifth years were sucking on (to all appearances) the hollow tips of retractable ballpoint pens and meditatively puffing out vapour. At the sight of me he stuck his fake pen in an inside pocket and joined me in a mooch around the playing field. The sky was overcast, the odd spit of drizzle enough to keep most people away from that particular stroll – apart from young-love couples, which no one (I hoped) would suspect we were. We exchanged a few jokes about the previous night’s episode of
Anachron
, a cult programme to the high school cognoscenti of the day, then I asked, ‘Where the fuck did that picture come from?’

Calum cast me a smug glance.

‘Gave you a fright, did it?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘But it’s fucking weird.’

‘Not what you saw, though? In your dream, like.’

‘Nope.’ I shook my head, with an uneasy effort at a dismissive laugh. ‘I saw the standard model Grey. Reptilian, I guess – I remember scales on its neck. That thing in the picture looks like some kind of insect.’

‘Fucking hell!’ said Calum, smacking fist to palm.

‘What?’

‘Just had a thought.’

‘I can see how that would be a surprise.’

‘Insects, right.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They’re like … good at mimicry, right? Remember that mole cricket we saw in the museum up at Glasgow Uni.’

‘Vaguely,’ I said.

‘And the leaf grasshoppers and that?’

‘Aye, sure, I’ve watched the odd David Attenborough in improving childhood moments.’

‘Well, there you go,’ said Calum, ‘there could be insects that mimic Greys.’

‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

‘Oh, aye. Well. Like I was telling yi. After my da gave me the third degree and the medical, so tae speak, he hoiks me out of the house and down to the garage. I swear if I’d been a wean he’d have dragged me by the lug, that’s what it felt like. Raging, he was, but scared wi it, know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although if I’d been more honest or less tactful I’d have said I had no experience of my own father in such a mood. I’d seen him angry with me, but never raging, and certainly never scared. In fact, I couldn’t easily imagine it of Calum’s father. Although a bit of big lunk – like his son was fast growing towards – with alarming beetle brows and a broken-looking nose, and hair on his swarthy face from chin to cheekbones whenever he forgot to shave, in my few dealings with the man from childhood onward he’d struck me as fair-minded and even-tempered, albeit with the sort of right-wing views one might (if one was as incurably snobbish as my sixteen-year-old self) expect from and make allowances for in a self-made small businessman who still got his own hands oily and fingernails broken in the repair pits.

‘The garage is closed on Sundays, unless there’s a special job on, which there wasn’t yesterday. Old man has the codes, of course, so in we go. Naebody’s around. He takes me to the office around the side of the main garage. On a shelf above the desk there’s stacks ae they file boxes, you know, the ones that haud the papers wi a spring clip? Old and greasy and dusty, doubt they’ve been looked at for years. Labels turning yellow and that. He hauls one down and blows the dust off it. He opens it and it’s bulging wi papers, dockets and tax forms and the like, fucking ancient. The spring can only just hold them in. He clicks it back and under a wadge ae papers there’s this big thick heavy book. Leather binding, kindae frayed around the edges. Tiny flecks ae gold at the top of the spine, but nae title left tae read.

‘So he opens it and the pages are aw white-looking, and its full ae tiny writing or printing and wee drawings, swords and battles and kindae Gandalf-looking geezers wi robes and beards. And he flicks through tae near the back and there’s dragons and burning cities and then there’s this picture.

‘“Whit’s this,” I says, looking down at it, “some kindae Grey alien?” And the old man gies me a smack upside the head – no hard like, it’s his way ae showing affection – and tells me that’s what the gadgies call them, but we should show more respect, so we call them the Fine.’

‘The Fine?’ I pronounced it ‘feenih’, suddenly feeling clever. ‘Meaning “the people”, like in the Gaelic?’

‘No,’ said Calum. ‘Like in the English. Fine, as in fine folk.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘If he said “the gadgies” then …’

I didn’t quite want to say it.

‘Oh, aye,’ said Calum. ‘There’s a bit ae the travelling folk in us Williamsons, nae doubt about it, though it’s generations since we settled down. That’s no a secret, though my ma tries to keep quiet about it.’

He looked at me curiously. We’d done almost a circuit of the field, and the bell would soon ring. ‘You never knew?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘if I ever thought about it I sort of vaguely assumed there was a touch of the Pure Race in your family, maybe a Black American soldier or African sailor or something, like Sophie’s great-grand-dad or whatever.’

Calum clapped my shoulder. ‘That’s touching,’ he said. ‘Nah, we’re tinks, way back. Anyhow, like I say, no secret. What my da told me might be, though. In fact it is. He damn near swore me to secrecy, though maybe not quite, so I’m going to fucking swear you before I say any mair.’

I laughed. ‘What do you want me to swear on? The Bible?
The Origin of Species
?’

Calum looked as if he were considering this carefully. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’ll do.’

‘OK. I swear by God and Darwin I won’t repeat what you’re going to tell me.’

(I’m now of course breaking this oath, but I expect God and Darwin will forgive me. As Roy Batty might have put it, it’s nothing that the god of evolution would keep me out of heaven for.)

‘He telt me the book was handed down through the family from way, way back, hundreds ae years like, from when the Romanies were in Romania, or wherever the fuck they came fae. He’s no saying
we’re
Roma, by the way. Our branch ae the Williamsons are unquestionably tinks fae Ireland, surviving camp-followers ae Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army according tae family legend, but beyond that there’s some Spanish connection, via a shipwrecked Armada sailor as the story goes, back tae where some Romany rover had his way. So there’s just a wee drap ae authentic Gypsy blood in our ancestry, which I can believe well enough. And the book, handed down in secret.’

‘Why secret?’

‘He said in the old days folks could get burned if they got caught wi it. Naebody kens any more what the book is. Naebody kens what language it’s in, or how tae read the funny lettering, or even what the lettering is. Couldnae make head nor tail of it myself. Maybe in the old days they could read it, or somebody they kent could, the family itself having aw been fucking illiterate until some time after the 1872 Education Act. They must hae hung on tae the book wi’ nae clue as tae what it said. Some ancient work ae magic or lore or whitever, that’s what he reckons it is.’

‘And he keeps it on a shelf in the garage?’

‘Safest place for it. Who’s going to steal old receipts?’

‘Point,’ I admitted.

Calum shook his head impatiently. ‘Anyway, that’s no the important thing. No the big secret. The big secret is why they kept it aw these years, aw these centuries. It was because ae that picture. The thing is, they kept it because they
recognised
it. They’ve known about the Fine for a long time, for a long, long time even before that picture was made. And, my da told me, they – we – see them for whit they are. The gadgies see angels or devils or aliens out ae science fiction, but we see them as they are, they scary fucking insect things.’

‘Who’s “we”?’ I asked. ‘Roma? Travellers?’

‘No exactly,’ said Calum. He hesitated, glancing around. ‘Our people. A people who kindae travel alang wi the travelling folk, that was how he put it.’

‘You’re having me on,’ I said.

‘I am no!’ Calum snapped. ‘Christ, man, I’m taking a risk just telling yi. I’m damn near betraying my family. I wouldnae make this up.’

‘So where did these mysterious people of yours come from?’ I asked, still sceptical of what he was saying. ‘Egypt? Asia? Atlantis? Outer space?’

Calum licked his lips, and looked around again.

‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘We’ve always been here. We were here before … the other people. Before the ice.’

‘I always suspected your old man was a Neanderthal,’ I said.

Calum laughed. ‘Many a true word, an’ that.’

‘And these Neanderthals know what the Fine are up to?’

‘Oh aye,’ said Calum, suddenly confident again. ‘They watch. They’ve been watching us all alang, my da said. Probably aw the way back tae Africa, he said, though he admitted that was speculation. Since before the ice, he said, that we know for sure. Now and again, the Fine snatch someone, examine them, mark them and let them go. It’s like ecologists daein capture and release. Putting rings on birds, and that.’ He laughed. ‘I must say, that part ae it does make sense.’

I recalled the item about ecologists microchipping dormice that had been on television at dinnertime on Saturday, and wondered if Calum had seen it too.

‘I still don’t believe you,’ I said.

‘Explain the picture, then.’

‘Explain how you got it,’ I said.

‘Pretended tae get a call fae Sophie, pulled out my phone, took a snap while my da was politely looking away.’

‘Oh, aye,’ I said. ‘Pull the other one.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Calum.

He didn’t sound hurt. He sounded as if he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.

The bell rang. We ran.

That evening, after I’d done my homework, I sat at the desk in my bedroom and set about taking Calum’s strange picture apart. I began by zooming in to the highest resolution my phone was capable of. Peering closely at lines and letters, I could just make out a spidery tracery of ink in the fibres around them. So far, so good: unless Calum had used some specialised and expensive rendering software, this was a genuine photograph of part of a page. Of course, he could have written and drawn the page himself: as I recalled, his primary-school exercise-book cover doodles had always shown a disturbingly precocious grasp of perspective and anatomy, though these days he seemed to hide any artistic or graphic talent he might have under the bushel of O-level technical drawing, at which he excelled.

I zoomed back out and isolated images of individual letters and pasted them to a side column. There were sixteen distinct symbols, plus the Roman numerals. I ran searches on every one of them, and found no matches. Relaxing the criteria and looking for resemblances to every known script returned nothing, though it did tell me more than I needed to know about alphabets. An image search on the apparent woodcut predictably brought up Greys and insects, but nothing close to the original.

The only comprehensible marks on the picture were the Roman numerals. I searched on them, and predictably found lots of stuff about Roman numerals.

IX VII meant nine and seven, so I searched on that.

‘9 7’

Again, lots of nothing to the point.

I sat back and let my eyes go a little out of focus as I gazed at the picture. What did it most look like?

‘9 7 Grey’

‘9 7 alien’

‘9 7 insect’

Narrow the search, I thought. What
kind
of insect? The one that had come to mind at first glance was a locust, and some of the results of the image search had been locusts.

‘9 7 locust’

Bingo.

I called Calum.

‘I know what your old book is,’ I told him.