The Ufonauts (Part Two)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

At the other side of the Connor house, which was a sprawling five bedroomed bungalow with a central courtyard that Alan had built more or less single-handedly in the late seventies on the site of the old two up, two down cottage that had stood there before it, he sat in the cane chair beside his bed. The light was off and the curtains were open, and he was constantly peering into the darkness beyond the two windows, a loaded shotgun in his lap and a flask of coffee on the bedside table.

He didn't know why he bothered with the shotgun because the intruders were wise to it, and they had a number of novel ways of disarming him. Even if he could use it it was no damned good to him – he had shot one of the creatures through a closed window one night a few months back when Brett and Sophie were on holiday in Spain, and to his horror it snickered at the outrage and scampered off unharmed into the darkness.

“Maybe the little bastards won't come tonight,” Alan said. “They haven't been for the last four nights and I'm overdue for a visit, but maybe it's safe to go to bed now – I'm desperate for a decent night's sleep.....”

It was a few minutes after midnight, and his eyes desperately wanted to close; he hadn't slept properly for weeks, but the early part of the night was by far the most dangerous, he had found, and it was best to stay awake. Come three thirty, four am it would be reasonably safe to take one of the fat yellow sleeping pills that doctor Amis had prescribed and get his head down, by then the bastards were unlikely to bother him. Just lately Brett saw to all the jobs on the farm that needed doing at the crack of dawn, and though Alan had been up before five for most of his adult life, since his troubles started he was rarely out of bed before eight.

“I wish I could tell Brett what's going on, June,” he said to the large framed portrait of his dear, departed wife on the wall, though he could barely see it in the dark, “but I can't, he'll think I'm going crazy. And who could blame him? I told you what was going on because I couldn't help myself, I couldn't handle the weirdness alone. But then you started seeing the fuckers too, something I hadn't counted on, and it made your last few months even more miserable than God in His infinite wisdom, for reasons known only to Himself, intended them to be.”

One of the halogen security lights dotted around the perimeter of the building came on, and Alan was startled though the comings and goings of the visitors never tripped the infra red sensors. An old, fat boar badger was standing in the middle of the yard in front of the barn, and the bemused creature wandered off casually into the night.

“It's an infection, that's what it is, June,” Alan continued. “It's the devil's work, and as far as I can see even God can't stop it – or He doesn't bloody well want to. Maybe I'm being punished for my sins..... Hopefully if I can keep Brett and Sophie safe until they take me they'll leave him alone. Or he'll agree to move away, or he'll develop some immunity, perhaps. Maybe he's already immune, maybe he's stronger than me. Who knows? Or maybe the bastards will just waltz out of here and fuck off back to wherever they came from as quickly as they waltzed in.....”

Just then Alan heard a familiar sound in the distance. The approach of the visitors always reminded him of the first washing machine that he and June had bought not long after they moved into the bungalow, an overenthusiastic Servis twin-tub that used to dance all over the kitchen floor when it was spinning, even with two people sitting on top, and you could hear the damned thing from anywhere in a forty yard radius of the house even when all the doors and windows were closed. Brett never complained of hearing any odd nocturnal noised, though, nor had he seen anything out of the ordinary, which made Alan think maybe it was all in his head, maybe the whole terrifying caboodle was an unusual side-effect of his bereavement.

The Ufonauts were on their way, and they were a little earlier than usual - or at least that was what they called themselves. They weren't really visitors from another planet, Alan believed, and they weren't from a parallel dimension either as a lot of so-called Ufologists believed. Oh no, the nauseating bastards were from the darkest suburbs of Hell, or from a place every bit as vile and wicked. Whatever they were, they wouldn't be interfering with him any more because, he reckoned, he was beginning to grow wise to their tricks, and he knew their limitations. He had defeated his demonic enemies after a fashion, he often thought, though in reality they were slowly gnawing at his swiftly erected, poorly considered and utterly desperate fortifications.