How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Chris Green

The sign ought to have been enough to trigger alarm bells. Zitt – Twinned with Area 51, it said. But at the time, it didn’t make an impression. Area 51 was just a remote place in the US that I had heard referenced in random conversations. I knew little about the clandestine goings-on there. Ignoring the yellow and black notices, I drove on into the centre of the town. I was not planning to spend much time in Zitt. I was just using it as a stop-off so what could possibly go wrong?

Zitt seemed quiet for a town of its size but I put the lack of people down to the heavy rain we had had earlier in the day. On the plus side, it meant I had no trouble parking the car close to Dreamland, a cool-looking café I had spotted. My phone had no signal but this did not surprise me greatly. Coverage was a bit hit-and-miss back then and my network had been having problems. As I ate my mid-morning breakfast, some soft jazz music played, Thelonious Monk or Bill Evans perhaps. A middle-aged couple at a nearby table discussed the previous night’s episode of The X-Files and across from me, a geeky man with blue glasses was doing the Guardian cryptic crossword. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was not until I got outside and found my car was missing that I began to feel edgy.

……………………………………….

The bizarre conversation going on in Zitt police station did nothing to ease my concerns.

‘Where was it again that you said the craft landed, Mr Spayne?’ Sergeant Sargent was saying.

‘Up by the reservoir,’ the man in the cream windcheater raincoat in front of me at the desk told him. ‘I was out walking Trevor.’

‘And Trevor is your dog, I take it.’

‘No,’ Mr Spayne said ‘Trevor is my ferret. My dog is called Fenton. He’s a terrier. Fenton is a good name for a terrier, don’t you think? Much better than Fido or Rover. I used to have two dogs, Sergeant but sadly now I only have the one, Fenton.’

‘To save time, Mr Spayne, I won’t ask what your other dog was called,’ the Sergeant said.

‘Oh, that’s all right, Sergeant. I’m not in a hurry. My other dog was called Flynn. Flynn was a retriever. He died last ……. ‘

‘So let me get this right, Mr Spayne, you were out walking …. Trevor when you saw the little green men emerge from the landing craft.’

‘That’s right, Sergeant, except they weren’t little, they weren’t green and they weren’t men. More like big black blobs.’

‘Mr Spayne. I appreciate you may feel that you have witnessed something strange but I’m wondering if the police are the right people to deal with this particular matter,’ Sergeant Sargent said. ‘Is it your belief that these …… aliens have committed a crime?’

‘I was coming to that, Sergeant but you keep interrupting me,’ Mr Spayne said. ‘These black blobs tried to abduct Trevor. They were after my ferret. Abducting a ferret is a crime, is it not?’

I had been waiting a few minutes now and was anxious to talk to someone. ‘I have a real crime to report,’ I said.

Mr Spayne seemed equally keen to continue with his science fiction story. Landing craft. Big black blobs indeed. What a load of twaddle!

Eventually, Sergeant Sargent managed to placate Mr Spayne with the promise that he would look into the attempted ferret abduction and he left. I joked that perhaps Mr Spayne’s elevator didn’t go right to the top, but he just shrugged. Maybe there were a lot of crazy people around those parts. I began to tell the Sergeant about my stolen car.

‘We don’t do any of that stuff here, he said. ‘Car theft is with a ……. private contractor. You could phone the details through to them.’

‘No phone signal,’ I told him.

‘Ah yes. A problem around here. You may have noticed there are no phone shops. They don’t seem to do well in Zitt. Look! As you’ve been kept waiting, I’ll log your information into the CarCrime page for you.’

I gave him the details and he keyed these in. Chat was minimal, but I did not feel particularly chatty anyhow.

‘CarCrime will be in touch,’ he said.

‘When do you think that might be?’ I asked.

‘Difficult to say,’ he said. ‘If you don’t hear from them by ……….’

Should I stay or should I go? I wondered. I didn’t think I wanted to be there. I couldn’t imagine for the life of me why the directions I was given had sent me this way in the first place. There must have been a more convenient place to break the journey. I could have hired a car and been out of here, but I would have still had to return to Zitt when they found my car. It was best to hang around until I heard something. I asked Sergeant Sargent about hotels. He said he was not a travel agent but directed me to a place down the road.

……………………………………….

The lobby of the Paradise Ranch Hotel was like a 1920s black-and-white film set. A lugubrious man in a long-tailed coat and a dress shirt greeted me. He was long and lean and moved slowly. He had a dome-shaped forehead which emphasised both his age and his baldness. His deep voice echoed around the dark space. He stopped short of saying, we’ve been expecting you, but his presence felt menacing. He handed me the key to Room 101 which he said was on the third floor. I had a sense of foreboding. I hesitated a little before getting in the lift. I couldn’t help but wonder why Room 101 was on the third floor.

Room 101 felt claustrophobic. It was the only hotel room I’d been in with no window. An unpleasant smell pervaded. There was a background hum, a low-pitched whine that appeared to come from all directions. I tried to get online but no luck. Nor was there a phone signal. How would I know when they had found my car? I made my way down to the lobby to ask about changing rooms, but Christopher Lee had disappeared, I rang the desk bell and waited. but no one appeared.

My head was doing cartwheels. Why was all this happening? I needed to take stock. I needed to get online to find out more about Zitt. What was it that went on at the place with the barbed wire fence that I had passed on the approach road? The one that I foolishly had taken no notice of. Was it a surveillance centre? Was it a research establishment? How could I get information? There must be a library in town.

……………………………………….

The library was boarded up. Closed Until Further Notice. Cutbacks were happening everywhere. But why were the post boxes on the main street all sealed up? Why were there no public phone booths? Everything about the town was wrong. I made my way back to Dreamland café. There were signs of normality when I had dropped in earlier, although now I thought of it, the coffee did taste bitter. Maybe I was now looking for further anomalies and shouldn’t get too carried away. The proprietor would be able to tell me what was going on.

Dreamland had closed for the day. The shutters were down. Strange, it was only 1:30. Perhaps it was siesta time in Zitt. Everything else here was weird. There was no one I could ask. I had only seen three people on the street and each of these was creepy. One or two shops had sign-writing in a strange alphabet but these too seemed to be closed. No Conspiracy Theorists Here read a notice in the window of a Cancer Research charity shop. At least it was open. I was about to go in to look around when I was accosted by two police in urban camouflage gear. They had guns.

‘Get your ass over there!’ ordered the one with the gallery of face tattoos.

There was no need as the one with the shaved head and the funky badge on his tunic, brandishing the handcuffs was already dragging me by the collar in the direction of the armoured vehicle parked on the corner. I was terrified but also baffled. If they had wanted to pick me up so badly, why hadn’t they done so when I arrived in Zitt or at the police station when I had reported my stolen car? If they wanted me out of the way, why had they taken my car? I would have been long gone by now.

The one with the face tattoos tied my hands behind my back and blindfolded me. They threatened me a bit more and threw me into the vehicle. In the short journey that followed, I tried to retrace my steps to see if anything fell into place. I had noticed very little as I was driving in. I had no reason to. I was not aiming to be here long. The first thing remembered was the Twinned with Area 51 sign. I had seen a programme about it on Discovery. The Moon landings were supposedly filmed in Area 51. Hadn’t an alien spacecraft landed nearby? Weren’t they reported to have captured the aliens? I remembered excited geeks in woolly hats banging on about all the things that were kept hidden from them. But this was all I could dredge up from the depths. My short attention span meant I was never good with fifty-minute documentaries.

……………………………………….

We arrived at our destination and I was roughly bundled up some steps and into a stop-start lift. Because of the blindfold, I could see nothing. I was pushed into a room with the same rank aroma as earlier.

‘Why don’t you tell me who you are?’ I yelled.

No response.

‘What am I supposed to have done?’

No response. These paramilitary cops seemed to eschew conversation.

There was a lot of shuffling around as if they were moving furniture. Then with the slamming of the door, they were gone.

‘Just tell me what it is you want from me,’ I shouted after them.

‘You might as well save your breath,’ said a voice from behind me. A soft female voice.

‘What? …… Who?’

‘I kicked off a bit when they first left me here,’ she continued. ‘No one came.’

‘How are we going to get out of this?’ I said

‘There’ll be a way,’ she said. ‘There is a crack in everything.’

‘What!’ I said.’

‘That’s how the light gets in,’ she said. She was fond of quoting Leonard Cohen.

We worked out that although we were both being held captive, with a little wriggling about, we might be able to free one another. The binds were not tight. These guys were not professionals.

‘I’m Tina,’ she said, meeting my gaze.

Realisation took hold. This was all part of the plan.

‘I’m Des, Tina,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think that’s appropriate?’

‘Any suspicion about why you might have ended up here then, Des?’ she said.

‘Same reason as you, I’m hoping,’ I said.

Des and Tina. What about that? Who could have come up with that? We were meant to be. There was no other explanation. Circumstances may have played their part, but a surge of electricity had passed between us.

I was smitten. She was stunning. A bit of a hippy perhaps, but nevertheless, stunning. I was surprised that you could buy floral dungarees like the ones she was wearing, let alone look good in them, but remarkably she managed to. She looked a million dollars, and it turned out she had a fun personality to go with it and a thoughtful nature. And other attributes besides. She was perfection.

……………………………………….

‘So that’s how the two of you met,’ Levi says. ‘Cool.’

‘That’s right, Son. Magical Mystery Match Weekend. Although neither of us expected the gig would be so madly elaborate or surreal. But that’s media creatives for you, I guess. Desperately striving to push the envelope. We knew it would be a surprise, that was the point, but we expected a little something more mainstream, orienteering or white water rafting. Something along those lines. A hot air balloon ride maybe. A Murder Mystery Weekend. Challenging but, at the same time, pleasurable. We didn’t expect to be holed up in a nightmare place like Zitt. I still don’t know how they did that. It’s not on the map, you know?’

‘You can’t have everything, Dad. But you know what? I have the feeling Mum’s still got those floral dungarees.’

Copyright © Chris Green, 2023: All rights reserved