Thunderhead (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

It was a dark night and the moon was almost full, though the bulk of the time it hid its silvery face behind the dense, moisture rich clouds scudding across the sky. It had rained shortly before nightfall, a brief but heavy downpour released from a passing gunmetal grey thunder-head that played its face up for half an hour or so before riding on the wind towards the coast, its fury far from spent. It was the first rain for several murderously hot weeks for most of the British Isles, and the dry earth and wilting flora of Brennswyck and the surrounding Shropshire countryside breathed an exhausted sigh of relief. The air was tense with static, for an even mightier storm was rolling in from the hills to the west of the village.

As the new heavyweight champion casually trundled in on an ice cold air-stream some twenty thousand feet above the hills it commenced its first grumbling, or at least the first grumbling audible from Brennswyck if anyone was awake to hear it. A few minutes later, shortly after a lightning bolt struck the heap of rocks marking Wynnet tor, the highest spot in the area, the thunder-head began to discharge its heavy cargo. Mixed in with the fat raindrops were hundreds of thousands of lurid pink fish of an unidentifiable species, the bulk of them under an inch long but a few slightly larger.

Because of the unsettled weather the following day the only folk that would tread Wynnet tor were shepherds and a handful of die-hard hill walkers, most of whom would fail to spot the anomalous creatures because they would dry out into unrecognisable streaks of grey in the heat of the brief morning sunshine. In the puddles that formed during the downpour some of the fish survived their incredible journey, though they were covered in a thin film of ice when they fell from the sky.

A man named David Davidson, an avid rambler and amateur fish-keeper, would collect a few specimens in a plastic sandwich box and transport them alive to his home in Manchester. Over the next few days he would spend hours writing emails and making phone calls to get some biologist interested in his find, but the few members of the scientific community that bothered communicating with him would say more or less the same thing -

'You are mistaken, Sir, I know that for a fact because I'm a fucking expert and you're a crass amateur. The fish you found were are not of an unidentified species, and it's most unlikely that they fell out of the sky. The likeliest prognosis is that they are fry from one of dozens of possible native species, the eggs of which are sticky and get transported far and wide on the legs and bellies of waterfowl. If they did fall from the sky they were taken from the sea or a nearby lake by a passing waterspout – that does happen on occasion. Mystery solved, my dopey friend.....' David Davidson would keep his specimens alive for a couple of weeks, but one by one they would inexplicably die and eventually he would forget about the whole thing.

The increasingly angry thunder-head was heading straight for the village, but it was taking its sweet time. On the southerly slope of a hill known as Conniston's seat a couple of miles west of Brennswyck the cloud sent out a bolt which split a huge windblown oak asunder, and then it spilled a little more of its cargo – thousands of shiny inch long nails, all covered in a thin coating of ice, which fell on maybe an eighth of an acre, mostly in thick bracken. A few people would collect some of the nails from the path that wound around the hill over the following weeks, but as no one witnessed the fall the incident would go unreported, because the notion of nails falling from the sky during a thunderstorm was the last thing anyone would expect. If some clever dick had come up with the idea of sweeping the undergrowth with a large electromagnet they would have picked up nearly three tons of nails.....

The air-current took the thunder-head over the winding valley of the river Beeme, which had almost dried up during the heatwave, and that's when it started to unleash its full fury. The lightning bolts came thick and fast, shattering great chunks of weathered limestone at the top of the slope, incinerating trees and lengths of hedgerow and lighting up hundreds of yards of barbed wire fencing. The thunder was incredibly loud and the sheep, which were the only sizeable living things in the area, ran back and forth in terror with nowhere to hide. It wasn't the lightning that they should have been afraid of, though, because their chances of being struck were minimal – it was what was coming down with the pelting rain and what was yet to be spewed out by the furious cloud.

Millions of tiny unidentified white frogs with huge red eyes tumbled out of the belly of the cloud. Most of the amphibians were no bigger than a child's finger nail, and the bulk were dead long before they hit the ground. The remainder would die within the next couple of days because they would dry out in the sun or die of hypothermia in the river because the British climate wasn't to their liking. The frogs were extremely poisonous dead or alive, and during the following fortnight well over two thousand sheep would die agonising deaths, the only clue to what was ailing them an unidentified, extremely powerful neurotoxin in their stomachs and bloodstreams. A farmer called Billy Jones would also die two days later after touching one of the unusual frogs that he found alive in a sun-warmed puddle shortly before eating his lunch.

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The thunder-head hadn't finished dishing out surprises, far from it. Just over the edge of the Beeme valley a number of bright spheres spat out of the belly of the cloud like a string of gaudy pearls, crackling with malevolent energy as they broke formation and wandered off in different directions, the rushing wind proving no obstacle. The globes were examples of a well documented but little understood electrical phenomenon called ball lightning.

One of the glowing spheres tumbled almost purposely down the chimney of a farmhouse belonging to the Hamilton family at three thirty three am precisely. It sauntered leisurely from the fire grate in one of the back bedrooms, passing straight through a sleeping baby in a cot without waking him, then it travelled effortlessly through the wall into the master bedroom. It hovered over the heads of the sleeping farmer and his wife for a few minutes as if in silent revelation, and then it passed through the floorboards and exploded magnificently in the kitchen below, taking out an entire wall, tearing down the phone line and disintegrating the family's three collies.

Seconds later another exploded and killed a prize Hereford bull in the barn, ripping the unfortunate creature into great bloody chunks, the largest of which passed straight through the corrugated steel walls and landed some distance away. The animal's head landed on the concrete path just in front of the house, its still twitching eyes looking up expectantly at the front door. A third travelled around the farmyard several times, hugging the ground and avoiding or passing through obstacles until all of a sudden it earthed on the steel cover of the cesspit behind the house. The sphere exploded with a mighty bang, leaving a huge, ragged crater and showering a large area in lumps of concrete and stinking filth.

Some distance away from the farmhouse one of the spheres gently touched down. Its bright glow dimmed to an orangey red, it swelled rapidly like an inflating balloon until it was almost as big as an armchair, and then it popped, leaving a slimy something lying on the ground. The something slowly unfolded from its foetal position and dragged itself to its infeasibly large feet, feet that filled every inch of its whopping bright red shoes. It stretched out to its full height, which was nearly seven and a half feet, and grinned, revealing a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth.

The pasty white face and bald pate of the creature could easily have been mistaken for greasepaint, though it was actually the colour of his skin. He looked up at the tumbling rain with black-rimmed eyes, his huge red nose sniffing the air rabidly. A monster clap of thunder exploded overhead and the newborn laughed long and loud, his baggy blue and yellow checked trousers flapping in the wind, the plastic flower in the lapel of his oversized purple and black polka dot coat spinning rapidly anti-clockwise. The being picked up his wide brimmed hat from the mud, set it at a jaunty angle over his tufty, bright orange Ronald McDonald hair and started plodding purposely towards the farmhouse, pausing to watch as three more globes landed nearby, fermented with great speed and popped.

“It's sad when a traveller doesn't make it,” he croaked in a voice like rustling autumn leaves as he turned the pale stillborn over in the mud with the tip of his shoe. It was a long, lean segmented thing with twelve legs and huge crab like claws. “Come, my newly hatched friends,” he said to the two that had made it. “Tis playtime for the likes of us.....”

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“What the fuck's going on?” Jane Hamilton called to her husband, clutching her sobbing baby and her slightly less upset thirteen year old daughter tightly to her breast.

“The kitchen wall's blown out, it's just a shell!” Tony called up the stairs. “It must have been lightning, I can't think of owt else that could have caused this much damage. The dogs were all in here, so we've lost 'em.....”

“But there were at least two explosions, maybe three.”

“I dunno, love, I thought so too, but it's bloody loud thunder, it sounds like the storm's right overhead, and I think that caused the confusion. I've changed the fuse for the lights, the living room light is working but none of the other rooms - try the bedroom light again.”

“It's working, love”

“Lightning rarely strikes the same place twice,” Tony said as he came back upstairs. “Remember old Mrs. Highway telling us that at school? Oh, the land-line's down, I was gonna call the fire brigade to make the live wires in the kitchen safe. You'd better try your mobile, but call your sister first to make sure her family are OK.”

Jane tried her mobile, but she couldn't get any signal, just static. “It's no good, I've tried a few different numbers and I can't get through.”

“We're just gonna have to sit it out, then. If we can calm the kids down a bit we can go back to bed, but I doubt if we'll get much kip.”