Prologue
The house was silent.
The wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind me. I couldn’t wait to tell Marie my news. She was the one who encouraged me to break out of the rut I’d been in. I was twenty-seven and my career was going nowhere until Marie came along and shook me up, told me to stop staring at the pavement and start looking at the stars. The bottle of champagne in my bag was still cold from the overpriced supermarket on our street. I was going to pop it open, raise a toast, take her to bed. Celebrate.
‘Marie?’ I called.
No response.
I stuck my head into the living room. No sign of her. In the kitchen I put the champagne in the fridge. I heard movement and turned, a smile ready on my face, but it was only our ancient cat thumping down the stairs.
Maybe Marie was having a bath. She spent a lot of time in there, lying back with her pale red hair stretching like tendrils around her, or sitting up with the laptop balanced on the toilet, watching one of her UFO documentaries. I ran up the stairs, past the damp patch I’d been ignoring for months. The house was Victorian, a ‘fixer-upper’ that I hadn’t got round to fixing up.
Maybe soon I’d have the money to turn this place into the home it could be. Somewhere to be proud of, and Marie and I would live here for years and years, and . . . and I’d ask her to marry me. I grinned as I took the stairs two at a time. I could just imagine her face if I proposed. We’d only been together four months. She’d tell me not to be an idiot. But in that moment, I felt like anything was possible, that happiness – a future filled with the stuff – was hanging like ripe fruit, saying, ‘Take me, have me, here – it’s easy.’ Optimism propelled me into the bathroom where I expected to find her, naked and smiling up at me from beneath the water.
She wasn’t there.
She wasn’t anywhere.
I went from room to room, my phone in my hand, trying to call her. It went straight to voicemail.
It was getting dark outside, the shadows from the trees drawing inwards, a half moon sharpening into focus. The house felt too quiet, too cold, making me rub my arms where goose bumps appeared. The cat was running back and forth across the kitchen, making strange noises. I ended up back in the hallway, staring at the front door, waiting for it to open, for her to come home, tell me she’d popped out to see one of her friends from college, why was I so worried? Why did I look so scared?
But the door didn’t open.
I was not superstitious. I didn’t believe . . . well, Marie complained that I didn’t believe in anything. Not ghosts or horoscopes or aliens or even destiny. But standing there then, I felt a terrible, ominous sense that by being so optimistic I had tempted fate. I could feel it, the emptiness around me, the damp patch on the wall mocking me, its shape – now I really looked at – like a face with a twisted, mocking grin. Something had happened here. I could sense it. It wasn’t rational, it didn’t make sense to feel this afraid.
But I knew, even before I knew, that she was gone. And life was never going to be the same.
PART ONE
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
1
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
From The 1066 Herald, June 7th:
COUNTRY RANGERS SPOT LIGHTS IN SKY
Two local men spoke this week of their fear when they witnessed strange lights in the sky over the East Hill.
Barry Dane and Fraser Howard told The Herald that they had seen a cluster of red and blue lights ‘dancing over the country park’ where the men work as rangers.
‘We were on the night patrol in the Land Rover,’ said Dane, 38. ‘Fraser suddenly gripped my arm and pointed upwards. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’
The two men describe the lights as being in two triangular formations that circled each other repeatedly.
‘The red triangle of lights was larger and moved more quickly,’ said Dane. ‘It was eerie. I felt all the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’
Howard, 57, who is currently on sick leave, declined to comment.
There were no other reported sightings that evening. Experts say that the men could merely have been seeing the lights of aeroplanes, or lights from the attractions on the seafront reflected in the night sky.
I never wanted to be a photographer for a local newspaper. It just kind of happened. When I left college, I foresaw a future in which I would win prizes for my photo-journalism. I imagined myself dodging bullets in far-off war zones, not snapping pet hamsters at the primary school down the road from my house, the same school I went to. I hadn’t travelled a great distance in my life, professionally or geographically.
I remembered the day I had been carrying my camera home from the repair shop. It was loaded and I had planned to take a few arty shots of trees and suchlike on the way home, just to test it out, when a man came running round the corner pursued by half a dozen policemen.
As the man ran past me, I did what any self-respecting, law-abiding citizen would do – I took a photo. My advantage was that I had a DSLR rather than an iPhone.
The next day, when I was conducting my weekly hunt through the job pages, I spotted a competition in the Herald for amateur photographers. They wanted a dramatic action shot, with the theme of crime. I sent them my picture of the panicked thief and the puffed coppers, and the editor, Bob Milner, liked it so much he gave me a job.
Now, here I was, three years later, twenty-seven years old, on my way to take a photo of a bunch of deluded hippies who had camped out on the East Hill in Hastings, where I lived, hoping to spot a UFO. I wanted to be photographing blazing buildings, heroic deeds, distressed victims of circumstance. I wanted excitement.
UFO watchers, I thought. Give me strength.
‘About time,’ said Simon when I reached the lift.
‘So nice to see your happy face,’ I responded.
We paid our fare and stepped into the lift, which was in fact a funicular railway that took tourists up onto the hill during the season. Nobody who lived in the town ever used it, except for overweight journalists like Simon. I looked out at the sea as the cable car ascended the hill, a journey that took less than two minutes.
Stepping out of the lift, I was reminded why I liked my hometown, why I had never put much effort into getting out.
Old Hastings nestles between two hills. We stood on the East Hill and looked across to where its western sister rose up, the ruined castle perched atop the cliffs. Between the two hills stand the crooked Tudor houses of the Old Town, where artists and fishermen share the narrow streets. The main road cut a path of modernity between the aged, pretty dwellings, with their dark sloping roofs and oak doors and window frames. Seagulls made nests in cracked chimneys; their high-pitched cries provided an omnipresent soundtrack to the days and nights; they swooped over the houses toward the beach and the fishermen’s boats and huts.