The Flying Saucer Read online

  The Flying Saucer

  Part 10 of the

  Sleep Writer Journal

  © 2019 Keith Robinson

  Published by Unearthly Tales

  on June 7, 2019

  Cover by Keith Robinson

  No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  COMING NEXT

  Author's Website

  Chapter 1

  Ant Carmichael crept through the dark, silent lobby into the guest wing. This was where things always got tricky. He peered down the hall, looking for a sliver of light under the third of six doorways on the left-hand side. Seeing nothing, he tiptoed as fast as he dared.

  He passed the first and second doors and willed himself to float past the third. Since that was impossible, he held his breath, gritted his teeth, and took long, stiff paces as though he were a ballet dancer. He suddenly realized why he’d been suffering mysterious aches and pains in his toes lately. Not the early onset of arthritis after all, just his crazy way of sneaking out of the house.

  Please come back, Barton, he thought.

  His old chauffeur had given notice a few weeks ago and vanished with his son, Caleb. It was for the best. The eight-year-old boy, with his astonishing magical powers, was a danger to all. Barton had a responsibility to keep him and everyone else safe, and driving a limousine just wasn’t important anymore.

  The trouble was, his replacement was a stone-cold, nosy, heartless witch. Where Barton had turned a blind eye to Ant’s midnight excursions, the new chauffeur was way too inquisitive, a woman whose ears pricked up at the slightest distant scuffle, and whose pale eyes pierced the darkness like a cat’s. Instead of driving him to ‘event’ locations at all hours with no questions asked, she would more than likely grab him by the ear and go wake his parents.

  Ant made it past her quarters and picked up the pace. When he reached the end of the hall, he unlatched the door, slipped outside, closed it softly behind him, and locked it again. He tucked the key into his pocket and headed off to fetch his bicycle.

  “Going somewhere?” a voice murmured from the shadows.

  His heart jumped, then sank. He saw his chauffeur’s distinctive silhouette peeling out of the blackness under an archway. Her footsteps crunched on the gravel, and suddenly she was bathed in a glow as an overhead light sensed her movement and came on. Lilith Malvolia halted before him and stood there with her bony hands on her skinny hips.

  Ant swallowed and tried to calm his nerves. It wasn’t that she scared him, just that she held power over him. One word to his parents about slipping out of the house at midnight, and he’d be grounded. “Can’t sleep,” he said. “Going for a walk.”

  He was pretty sure her eyes glowed from under her shadowed brow. Her straight black hair was tied up in a severe bun. This was her off-duty look. While driving him around in the daytime and sometimes evenings, she wore a chauffeur’s cap and let her hair hang to her shoulders. The woman was thin, like a collection of sticks.

  “Do you usually lock the door behind you when you go for a walk?” she demanded.

  “Of course I do!” Ant said, feigning shock. “You never know who might wander in otherwise.” He narrowed his eyes. “What about you? Do you usually lock the door behind you when you lurk in the shadows at midnight?”

  She stared at him in silence. Then: “Return to your bed, Master Carmichael. You know you’re not allowed out at this hour.”

  “We own sixty acres all around,” Ant said, growing angry. “I think it’s okay to take a walk. You can stand here and watch, if you like. I won’t leave your sight. I’ll just walk down the driveway and back. Look, I have a flashlight. You can see me in the darkness.” He scowled. “You can’t stop me, you know.”

  She gave a curt nod. “Fine. Off you go. I’ll be watching. Do not try to exit the grounds.”

  “How can I? The gate is like fifty feet high.”

  It wasn’t really, but it might as well have been. He couldn’t climb it if he tried, nor the fence.

  A little surprised that she’d allowed him his walk, he headed off under the archway and around the corner, feeling her steely glare on his back. He had no choice but to ignore the bicycle shed and keep up the pretense of a brisk midnight stroll.

  But that was okay. He had a backup plan.

  The long, sweeping driveway led down the hill, and neatly cropped shrubs lined both sides, all barely visible in the wan moonlight. He figured he would soon be well out of sight behind those shrubs, and there’d be a good few minutes where his bobbing flashlight would be no more than a faint flicker. Then he’d dart off to the side, across the grass to the woods. Even if she jumped into the limo and came speeding down the hill, he’d be long gone.

  He glanced back and was rather gratified to see her meandering toward the bicycle shed. He grinned to himself. Yeah, keep a good watch on my wheels. You think you have me all figured out. You think that even if I escaped this fortress, there’s no way I’d run off anywhere without a means of transport. Right?

  Wrong.

  This was the first time he’d put the backup plan into action. It went beyond sneaking out. It was an act of open defiance, and he guessed she would march straight up to his parents’ room and wake them. Or maybe not. She might just wait until morning and report him then. He wasn’t sure what she’d do when he vanished into the night, but there was an old saying he swore by: It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  When he was halfway down the long, long driveway, he glanced back toward the house. Now was as good a time as any. He put down his flashlight, then dashed off the driveway into the shrubs. Running at full speed across the grass, he knew for sure he was like a ghost to her, completely invisible in the darkness. She’d be focused on his unmoving flashlight for a while, wondering why he’d stopped and what he was so intent on looking at in the middle of the driveway . . .

  She’d catch on eventually.

  He felt a thrill as he tore across the field towards the trees. Having a plan made all the difference. He dug his phone out of his pocket and thumbed his way to the settings. When the brow of the hill behind him blocked the pinpricks of light from the mansion, he switched on his phone’s flashlight and weaved through the trees.

  He made it to the fence in record time, spurred on by the thought that Lilith might be mounting a massive search party. He doubted it—but then again, she detested being made a fool of. Slipping away like this could send her into a rage.

  The fence was indeed way too high to climb. But it wasn’t like the groundsmen patrolled the sixty acres looking for weaknesses in the perimeter. Ant and his friends had spent an afternoon digging a modest hole under the iron railings just out of sight of the nearest road.

  He slipped through, brushed himself off, and whistled a happy tune as he pulled back a camouflaged sheet and unchained his emergency bicycle. Yeah, Lilith, I have two sets of wheels. Have you seen how rich my parents are? You seriously think I can’t afford to buy another with a bit of pocket change?

  For him, money was the easy part. He knew most twelve-year-olds were lucky to get ten dollars a week if they did all their chores. Ant’s parents seemed to throw money at him—wads of twenties for school excursions, a hundred or so on his birthday . . . It would be embarrassing if anyone found out, so he stashed it away for emergencies. But getting to the stores and buying things without Barton chauffeuring him about was more of a challenge. Not insurmountable, just awkward. It took cunning—and a lot of pedaling.

  He wondered what Lilith was doing right now. It didn’t matter, though. As long as he kept to the forest paths and narrow lanes, he could find his way across town to the secret meeting place about four and a half miles away. He’d never been there before, and nor had his friends, but if Madison said to meet in the middle of Rowhill Copse at 1:02 AM to witness an alien visitation, then who was he to question her?

  It was 12:34 AM. The event would start in just under thirty minutes. Plenty of time.

  ****

  Worry gnawed at him. He should have been there by now, but Google Maps kept announcing he’d lost signal and was busy “Re-routing . . .”

  He could see the stupid patch of woods on his screen. It clearly said Rowhill Copse. But he couldn’t determine his own location. Staying off the main roads had been his downfall. A lot of these cross-country paths and fields looked the same.

  He sought out the nearest street sign, well aware that it was already 12:49 AM. He had a sinking feeling he was going to be late.

  “Arbor Lane,” he said to his phone as though Google were smart enough to understand him. Actually, it would have been if he’d had it on “Listen” mode. Instead, he typed it in and waited. Still no signal, so he spent a moment studying the street names on the map hoping to spot Arbor Lane.

  He sucked in a breath when he found it, then cursed his useless navigation skills. He took off down the street and around the bend, looking for the first right. Thanks to Google’s lack of GPS signal, he’d been a block out of his way and cycled straight past Rowhill Copse, and now he had to double back.

  It was 12:55 AM when he found the nearest trail into the woods
. His bicycle lamp lit the way, but he couldn’t help feeling a little jittery at being so far from home and so alone, and at such a late hour. At least Liam and Madison had each other for company.

  “I’m gonna miss it,” he moaned as he rattled along the trail. “I don’t even know exactly where I’m supposed to go. How about a little more specificity, Madison?”

  Talking to himself didn’t help.

  Occasionally, he glimpsed a starry sky through the trees. But he saw nothing else, not even a pinprick of light within the blackness of the woods. He pedaled slowly. He was beginning to think this was a bad idea. Then again, he thought the same thing every time he left the house at night and met his friends at some random place in the middle of nowhere, and he was always left breathless at the spectacle of visiting aliens.

  Ant stopped and switched off his bicycle lamp. Checking his phone, he was surprised to see he had good cell service again, and Google Maps pinpointed him over halfway through the woods. But it was 1:03 AM. The event would have started already, and he was missing it.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and took a breath to yell as loudly as he could—but he froze at the sight of a glow off to his left.

  His heart leapt. Whatever that glow was, it had to be Madison’s predicted event. It had started a minute ago, and the aliens were probably here already.

  Ant crept through the dark, silent woods, pointing his phone’s flashlight downward and feeling that at any moment a hideous alien would see the beam and leap out at him. He disabled it for a moment and stood still in the darkness, then switched the light back on and resumed his stealthy advance toward the mysterious glow.

  Most of Madison’s events involved a wormhole to another point in space. The wormhole was usually circular, hovering a few feet off the ground and looking rather like a rippling pool of water turned sideways. The center of the wormhole always swirled away into the distance, a weird tunnel stretching for many light years through outer space. The glow he saw ahead had to be the wormhole. They always gave off an ethereal illumination.

  Twigs cracked underfoot as he threaded his way through the woods. It struck him how complete the silence was; no crickets, no bullfrogs, not even the scampering of small furry rodents in the undergrowth. The wildlife probably sensed something was up, felt the presence of an alien in their midst. Animals and bugs had heightened senses when it came to stuff like that.

  So his ears pricked up when he heard a distant chittering sound. Ant stopped again, listening hard. It came from almost directly ahead, perhaps a little to his right. He stared into the woods, seeing nothing but the weird glow beyond a tangle of prickly bushes.

  Ant tiptoed on, wishing he was as light as a feather so twigs wouldn’t keep cracking underfoot.

  As he drew closer to a softly illuminated clearing, Ant held his breath and switched off his flashlight. In near darkness, he placed one foot in front of the other with the greatest of care, his gaze fixed on the white haze just through the trees ahead. The chittering sound came again, much louder this time—and then another, this one slightly lower in pitch.

  Alien voices.

  Ant was certain his hammering heart could be heard throughout the woods, as well as the deafening crunch of dry leaves, twigs, and pine cones underfoot. The white glow was no more than twenty feet away now, just past a clump of silhouetted bushes. He’d never seen such a bright wormhole before. It had to be huge. Ant circled the bushes, trying to find an opening. At least the mysterious light made it a little easier to see where he was putting his feet. He found a gap in the thicket and ducked low to avoid getting tangled up in thorns. On hands and knees, he crawled through and poked his head out into the clearing, dimly aware of a strong smell of sulfur.

  Barely able to believe his eyes, he stared in astonishment.

  It wasn’t a wormhole at all. A silver-colored circular spacecraft had parked neatly in the middle of the woods. It was smaller than a house but bigger than a two-car garage, shaped like a cereal bowl upside down on top of another. A wide rim jutted out where the bowls joined, and the ground immediately below was bathed in a dazzling white light. The brightly illuminated metallic hull of the craft was seamless and smooth, with a dull sheen that reflected little of its surroundings.

  An alien UFO, he thought in amazement and awe. A genuine flying saucer.

  Chapter 2

  Ant knew that the perfectly circular glade, with the woods pressing in so closely all around, hadn’t formed naturally. The aliens must have cleared their own parking space on their descent. A dry, powder-like dust covered the entire area and gleamed white in the glare. Around the perimeter were several scorched shrubs and tree stumps. Even where Ant hid was blackened and charred. That explained the strong smell of sulfur, as if someone had lit a whole truckload of matches in one go.

  So the UFO had come straight down and burned a path to the ground. Where had all the trees gone, exactly? It seemed impossible that so much foliage—all those thick tree trunks and branches, all those leaves and bushes—could have been incinerated so easily and quickly to the point where nothing was left but a fine layer of ash.

  Ant heard a chittering sound from the far side of the craft. The aliens must be there somewhere, he thought with a sudden thrill. The chittering sounded impatient and irritable, at least to his untrained ear. A lower-pitched, quieter voice responded, and Ant imagined this one as bored, perhaps tired. Not that he would know, of course. They were aliens from another planet. It was impossible to tell what kind of mood they were in just from the sound of their unusual, totally alien voices.

  If only they would come into view, perhaps step around to this side of the ship so he could see them.

  He wondered where Liam and Madison were. They could be hiding anywhere, but Ant didn’t feel it would be sensible to shout their names.

  Text them, he thought.

  He winced at the brightness of his phone’s screen and immediately dimmed it. Pulling up his texting app, he wrote I’m here to Liam.

  Liam texted back within seconds. So are we.

  Pinpointing his friends would be difficult. It wasn’t easy to describe an exact location in the woods. Ant squinted from left to right across the nearest side of the clearing. The light from the saucer lit up the bushes well, but he couldn’t see anybody lurking there.

  Ant suddenly realized the craft was not physically touching the ground. It hovered in the air, the lowest point of the bowl-like hull a few inches above the ash.

  Movement caught his attention. A pair of feet momentarily came into view toward the right-hand side of the craft where the upward-curving hull was knee high. Childlike silver boots, matching silver pants . . . Ant stared, holding his breath.

  But the feet shuffled out of sight again. Whatever these aliens were doing to the craft, they were doing it on the exact opposite side where Ant couldn’t hope to see anything. If only the craft hovered two or three feet higher in the air instead of mere inches . . .

  Just then, his cell phone rang.

  It was loud and startling, hammering out the first few bars of his favorite song at full volume. He almost threw it away in a panic before swiping wildly at the green phone icon to make it stop. Liam’s face grinned at him from the screen. Of all the stupid—!

  Ant glanced up, breathing hard, as alien feet came into view on the other side of the craft’s hull—not one pair but two, moving rapidly, kicking up a fine cloud of ash as they came around the ship to investigate the noise.

  His nerve broke, and he scooted backwards on hands and knees, panting like an animal. He staggered to his feet, turned, and ran—and promptly tripped on something unseen, a dead branch or a clump of roots. He sprawled on the ground, got back on his feet, darted blindly off to the side, crashed through what felt like ferns, and tripped once more.

  Flashlight! he thought wildly, remembering his cell phone. I need my flashlight!

  But the voice of reason stopped him. Don’t be stupid—they’ll see you. Just lie still. Maybe they’ll pass you by.

  He froze, immediately liking the idea. He held his breath.

  His cell phone screen was lit up, and he clutched it to his chest to smother the light. He was still connected to Liam’s incoming call, but this wasn’t a good time to chat.