The Kid Who Came From Space. Ross Welford
the time it was light, which was about eight o’clock, a huge group of people had gathered in the car park of the Stargazer, and were being coordinated by a police inspector in uniform and a man from Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue, who had turned up with twelve volunteers. They had all come out to help on a Christmas Day morning.
There was a Mountain Rescue Land Rover full of equipment. The two Geoffs were there as well, and Sheba was snarling at three well-behaved Mountain Rescue collies in high-vis jackets.
At one point, the permanent hubbub of the bar room died down completely and there was a silence, eventually broken by the pealing of the little village church’s solitary bell summoning people to celebrate Christmas morning. I thought about the vicar, Father Nick, looking out over the empty pews and wondering why nobody had turned up. (In fact, I saw him later. He had taken his vicar gear off and cancelled services in three other churches that he goes to just so he could join the search.)
The morning and the afternoon passed in a confused mash-up that combined periods of hope and activity. In the mid-morning we all spread out on the top moor and trudged through the snow with whistles and torches. Iggy joined us, and Gran in her winter running gear, and Cora; in fact, I think almost everyone in the village was involved in one way or another. They were kind: they didn’t intrude when Mam was crying, and told me, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll find her.’ The TV in the bar was turned off because virtually every channel was showing jolly Christmas stuff and nobody felt like it.
The weather up on the moors had worsened overnight. It had started to snow again, and everybody knew that that was not a good thing. If Tammy had somehow wandered off then she was not well equipped for a freezing night in the Northumbrian hills, even with her new puffer jacket.
That, however, was not the worst of our fears. There were worse options that nobody wanted to say out loud in case saying them out loud would somehow make them come true.
That afternoon, when we would normally be watching a funny film and eating sweets, I sat with Mam in the bar with its Christmas decorations and switched-off tree lights which suddenly looked like the saddest, most pointless things the world. We looked out of the pub window, which Tammy and I had sprayed with fake snow a couple of weeks earlier, and we watched as the people who run the sailing school on the other side of the reservoir pulled into the driveway with a small boat on a trailer with an outboard engine.
We knew what that meant. We knew it meant there was a possibility that Tammy had entered the water and not come out again. Drowned, in other words. Nobody needed to say anything, but when Mam collapsed in sobs, I did too, while Gran sat beside us and stared straight ahead, shaking her head sadly.
‘There’s shepherds’ huts up on the moors, you know,’ said Gran eventually. ‘They’re a bit further from where we searched. Perhaps Tammy …’
‘The Natrass boys have been up there already on their quad bikes,’ said Mam, flatly.
I thought the most likely thing – but I could hardly bear to imagine it – was that Tammy had been kidnapped. But why? I could not work it out, and I don’t think Mam could either.
Hours passed …
The Mountain Rescue teams returned …
The police continued to make enquiries and more police cars arrived, and a police Land Rover …
An ambulance turned up in case they found Tammy and she needed treatment …
Christmas Day stretched into a long evening. Dad came back with some of the people from Mountain Rescue and poured them all whiskies at the bar to warm them up. He had one himself, and then another, and another. When it got late, some people drifted back to their houses and their elderly relatives, and their ruined Christmas dinners, and their little children who had not been told what had happened so as not to spoil their day.
And that day sort of stumbled into the next day, and I found myself playing a part in a drama that I had seen enacted before on TV, only this time it was real.
The pub was turned into an HQ. There were Come Back, Tammy posters printed and put up everywhere from Carlisle to Newcastle. Ted from the B & B, whose brother was a printer in Hexham, got a load of T-shirts made, amazingly fast, with Tammy’s face on them, and people wore them over their thick fleeces when we held a vigil outside the church.
Tea lights spelled out TAMMY on the ground, and people brought flowers and cuddly toys. The older kids from the school taxi-bus started singing Tammy’s favourite Christmas song, an oldie by a singer called Felina who died years ago. It’s supposed to be a funny song that goes like this:
‘Do-do-do-do-do the Chicken Hop!
Da-da-da-da-dance like you can’t stop!
Do-do-do the Chicken Hop this Christmas!’
Father Nick joined in, but it sounded completely wrong, even without the silly actions that go with it. I couldn’t sing along with them because I was too sad to sing a happy song, so I just stood and watched, massively aware that everyone was looking at me but trying to look as though they weren’t.
Soon (soon? It felt like a decade), four agonising days had gone past, and Tammy was still missing.
And still I felt, deep inside me, so deep inside me that I couldn’t even know if the feeling was real, that Tammy was alive. Somewhere.
Then, four days into our ordeal, Iggy Fox-Templeton came to the door with his fishing rod, trying to be normal, and everything got even less normal, if that was even possible. For that was when we met Hellyann: the strange, smelly creature who said she knew where Tammy was, and that we had to tell no one.
I wasn’t at all sure what to do, and I’m not sure you would have been either.
All right, do you want the long story of how I came to Earth, or the short story?
I shall give you the short story. The long story you will have to pick up along the way. Assuming we get there – at present there are no guarantees.
Anyway, here is the short story.
I, Hellyann, am eleven years old, and from another planet to yours. (I know, I know: it will all become clearer later. This is the short version, remember?)
I live in a world where human beings like you (but not like me, for I am not a ‘human being’) are exhibited in zoos. I think this is wrong for so many reasons and I must do what I can to put it right.
And that is how I ended up crossing the universe with two boys and a chicken.
A Note on the Translation
I wrote my part of this story in my native language and it was translated into English by Philip.
I now know that Anthallan does not sound much like a human language. To you, it sounds more like a series of grunts and squeaks and sniffs. My Earth friend Ignatius Fox-Templeton (Iggy) told me I sound like ‘a pug being strangled’ and he and Ethan Tait did not stop laughing for forty-two seconds.
Where the exact word does not exist, Philip, a robot, has tried to choose the nearest equivalent word so as not to interrupt the flow of the story.
(By the way, he is not a metal robot that walks around with a face and flashing lights. He is more … Well, you will find out.)