Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,66
creating mirror images of herself, an infinite hall of mirrors…
A psychic sees what is really there.
“No!” she said.
“What? What is it?” cried Gray, looking terrified at her. But she didn’t have time to answer, she had to focus her attention, bend her mind around this corner. She stared through the moving net of her fingers, trying to understand what was hidden.
A pattern. Like the ripples from a stone dropped into still water.
She lifted her head, looking out over the gently rolling hills, the shape beneath them becoming clearer. A hidden layer, the one she’d seen when she’d stood with Gray in the rocky bed of a dried-up stream. She hadn’t given it much thought then, but now…
She breathed out a sigh.
Ship.
Its curves blended perfectly to the contours of the hills. It was covered by layers of soil and earth, grown over with trees and grass. She peered through her fingers, trying to catch the truth of it. Not just a ship, this was something more alive than that. Merlin was right! There were nerves in the land; thoughts made of colours, mapping the shape of a something huge, blended into the hills. It was miles across, this ship-creature, far too big and strange to be anything human. Understanding leaped from the part of her brain that had no words, fixing onto one word that explained it all.
Alien.
Every cell in her body instinctively knew it. This couldn’t possibly be from Earth.
And now she understood the standing stone too. A piece of this enormous ship, raised up by prehistoric farmers. Their memories made sense at last – the clouds smashing apart and everyone looking up in open-mouthed wonder – they’d witnessed an alien spaceship landing. No, it had seemed more chaotic than that. The craft had crashed from the sky, falling like a wounded bird, huddling itself into the safety of the earth’s crust, safe from harm…
And now people were digging it up…
The quarry was where this had started for Gray. The shapes he’d seen must have been the alien, trying to send a message through the stones and earth it had slipped underneath. A creature trying to speak in a language learned through thousands of years of listening to the people who came and wished at the standing stone.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered. It was a cry for help.
As if in relief at being understood, colours poured in through her fingers. She had a dizzying sense of time stretching and expanding to take all of her life into a single heartbeat. For the alien creature, the crash had happened very recently, and the diggers had arrived there a moment later, scraping and churning, causing a pain the creature couldn’t fathom.
“It hurts?” Isis asked.
An answer came in words learned so laboriously. I scared.
It feared the roar of explosions, rocks flying up, of being disintegrated in a future it could foresee but couldn’t understand.
It’s a mining company, she wanted to explain, blasting its way into your body, taking away the valuable metals that make up your skeleton. But she didn’t, because the alien couldn’t understand these things. She imagined its answers: What is mining? What is a company? What is valuable?
Instead it pressed on her, overwhelming in its fear, confusion and desperation.
Helphelphelphelphelphelphelphelp.
“Isis!” Gray screamed, but she couldn’t answer, couldn’t stop either of them from falling.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Gray
Silence and blackness. No sound, no air. On and on. I thought it would never end.
And then… the slow-moving shift of stars. A distant gleam ahead of me, getting brighter and brighter. A yellow star, with its circling dance of planets. One of them, so beautiful. Glowing like silver, even from so far away. Except that’s wrong. It was… like a beautiful tune. No, that’s wrong too!
Take your time. Don’t rush. You’ve seen things I need to understand, just try to explain them clearly.
It was… like coming back from a long journey and getting somewhere you recognise, knowing that soon you’ll be back home. That was what Neptune was like for them, they could smell-touch-taste-hear-see-feel-love it.
Earth was a kind of shortcut, I think. Like, when you have to cross the road, and you can’t be bothered to go all up the way to the traffic lights so you risk crossing over where you are.
The risk went wrong for one of them.
Them?
My dad always says the movies haven’t done us any favours, because we think we know what aliens and spaceships look like, when in fact that’s just Hollywood. He says we think life is only like ourselves. But