The Grey Ones (The John Lymington Scifi-Horror Library #3)

By John Lymington

The shadows gave the impression that one moment the people were there, and the next, that they were nothing but shade pools.

They were trapped, in the one oasis of peace in a world gone mad. Surrounding them were people who thought and acted like savages. But at least they were human, more or less.

It was the other thing that brought horror - the non-human, inexorable thing, slowly creeping...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Jul 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215762936

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

Book preview

Chapter One

THE DAY WAS thundery, cloudy and still. You could hear small sounds from a long way off. As he walked up towards the headland, he heard the little train chuffing six miles away. The noise stood out against a background of silence, and he hesitated and turned on the grassy slope to look back across the fields to the little white plume in the distance.

It was queer to be attracted like that on one’s way to commit suicide.

He watched the train running in the bosom of the green land, and felt a sense of extravagant regret, then drove his hands into his pockets and went on his way again. That small act alone showed it was drama and not determination which hauled him to the peak of the cliff.

The drop there was three hundred feet on to rocks, and had a history of deaths before this. There had been rain in the night, and the turf near the edge was slightly slippery. It was there that he slipped.

He was not such a fool as to mistake that sudden terror at the awful sight of the inevitable drop opening under him, not to realise the danger of the drama which gripped him.

He caught tufts of grass with his claws as he fell, and scrabbled madly to drag himself up and away from Death that pulled at him from below.

When he reached safety, the moment of truth was on him and he lay there and sobbed until all passion was exhausted. After a while he sat up, and for the first time in his life thanked God.

He got to his feet and started back towards the village at the foot of the hill, purged of his death wish.

After all, Maggy would come back. You cannot share a life with a man for ten years and just walk out like that. Of course she would come back. If he had not been in the grip of a hysterical despair, he would have realised that. It was a question of patience and suffering until she came back.

As he walked his head became clearer. He began to feel surprised at remembering the intention which had taken him up to the headland. It became unreal, like the miasma of a dream. But it was terrifying that he could have let a hysterical nightmare carry him so far away from life as that. The sweat came on his face, and the world seemed suddenly larger with the greatness of his relief.

Madness. Of course it had been madness. Unbelievable madness.

He could not understand how despair had got such a grip; as if it had been some maggot inside him, growing out until it was so big it gripped his mortal soul.

These last days had been times of growing nightmare, of seeing Maggy as some stranger, malignant almost. His feelings had grown against his normal will, as if some devil outside whispered and painted foul pictures for him to see ...

He stopped and pressed his hands to his head. It felt cool and solid again, as if the last days had been wiped out of his life. And that devil had driven her away. He knew that now. It had been his madness, his malice, his unreasoned jealousy lashing at her like some ghastly flamethrower.

He looked down upon the village, the little cluster of roofs nestling in amongst the trees round the church tower. The grey stone and the red tile were beginning to brighten, and a shaft of gold from a break in the cloud struck down so the gold wind cock on the church tower beamed a sudden brilliant diamond.

He went on down again, following the path through the farm lands. As he came into the big yard, the silence struck him. When he had come up he had skulked round the back of the barns, for the men had been at work and the hay baler had been whining over the smell of paraffin from the thunderous tractor.

Now they had gone. He stopped suddenly, as if warned by the silence. A shimmer of heat rose from the tractor radiator. There was still the smell of hot oil mixing with the musky hay. Bales were poised half-way up the chute. The whole scene gave him the odd impression that everybody had got tired of their work and had gone home, leaving everything as it was.

He walked on through the silence to the pond, where the six ducks always were, either floating on the mirror or sitting in solemn committee on the green bank. But they were gone now, flown away as if they too had got scared of the silence.

He went through the yard gate into the footpath past the cottages. The silence seemed to grow the nearer he came to the village.

Suddenly he noticed the Barnes’s dog wasn’t there. Rufus was lying on the wall outside the cottage all the time when he was not eating, and there was a fat cat that usually sat by him. Neither of the animals was there.

Again he stopped, frightened by a growing sense of dread. He stood there listening, but there was nothing to hear in the still, hot afternoon. No sound of traffic on the road, no dog’s bark, no radio even, no birds.

He shook his head, the odd feeling that he had gone deaf striking him, but he could still hear the faint movements of the air, occasionally touching a leaf enough to make it seem like a clatter in the great stillness.

At the inn he could see into the garden and the open back doors. There was Sam’s car standing in the cobbled yard, the bucket still by it, the leather hanging over the lip. The front of the car still gleamed with diamond drops where Sam had not leathered it off.

He hurried past the inn to the village street, winding off in either direction with its cosy little cottages and the two shops smiling gnome-like in the afternoon light.

But there was no one there. Pagson’s van was outside the shop, and the vicar’s car, and Mrs. Vander’s bubble job all stood parked around, but there was no one to be seen at all.

A sudden panic seized him, and once again the finger of madness prodded his brain.

Perhaps he had died on the cliff after all. Perhaps this was the hell to come; the old familiar place, but with no one in it save himself. No one but himself for eternity, staring bewildered at the grey afternoon.

The momentary spasm passed, but he felt weak from it as he touched his face and felt it wet.

For God’s sake, what’s happening? he said.

The silence was like a solid thing.

What’s happening? he shouted. What’s happening?

His voice echoed from either side, repeating as if the little houses were laughing at him in his madness.

He walked into the middle of the street, and shouted again.

I say, I say!

He could shout no louder. The houses, the church and the trees answered him, sending his voice away to the sky until the last whisper had gone in the great hush.

His heart began to beat like the thudding of an engine.

For god’s sake! he said again.

Suddenly he was determined not to panic. He had the idea that if he did, he would be lost.

He strode along the road to the little grocer’s shop, where the van stood. He threw open the door and the warning bell clanged once more in the emptiness, then was silent.

He turned in desperation and went out in to the street again.

The policeman. Wills. The policeman would be there whatever happened.

He hurried across to the cottage where the legend, County Constabulary, graced the door. The door was open. He went into the room which was Wills’s office. It was as empty as the shop had been. A ledger was open on the desk and a fountain pen, uncapped, lay in the ‘V’ of the pages.

At 3.40 James Burton, Ask Villas, reported bicycle ...

Bicycle what?

He looked round. Wills had got up and gone in the middle of the report, just as the farmers had gone in the middle of baling.

He went out into the street again. The main door of the inn yawned under heavy straw eaves. He crossed and went into the stone bar. The glasses were all ranged on the counter, lined up for washing after the morning customers.

Sam! Sam! he shouted, knowing there would be no answer.

He went behind the bar and took a strong whisky. As he felt its soft fire in him he knew he was not dead; he knew it was no dream.

Somehow every soul in the village had gone. Man, woman, and child—

No, not child. Idiotically he remembered The Outing; the Annual Outing for all the children, even those in arms with their mothers. He remembered the coaches going that morning, hearing the shrill squeaks of the happy, expectant departees ...

How many people, then, had walked out now? A hundred? Two? He had no idea how many lived here, though he had been here three years.

But they had gone.

He went to the doorway suddenly, an idea striking him. He looked out at the cottages, and as far as he could see, every door stood open.

Just as if the people had rushed out, leaving the doors wide, as if they had been pursued.

The heat of panic came over him again and he felt his knees go weak. He blasphemed again, but there was more of the urgency of prayer in it than the bitterness of a curse.

He turned back into the inn, for he knew that place, and went through the rooms on the ground floor. Everything left where it had been thrown down, a newspaper half-open, making a ragged tent on the floor, a pot of tea with a half-empty cup by it, the tea still very warm in the pot.

They had gone, right in the middle of things, during the hour that he had talked with Death up on the headland.

But what panic had taken them away like this? He had heard nothing, no warning, no alarm, no explosion, nothing, yet in the stillness he had clearly heard the little train from six miles away. Surely he would have heard a commotion in the village? The sound of panic, of shouting, of calling to others, the chaos of alarm, the running feet, the barking dogs—he must have heard it.

But he had heard nothing, nothing at all after the little train had chuffed away into silence.

Then what, for Heaven’s sake, had happened?

He went out into the street, walking quickly, up and down, zigzagging, peering into cottages, into barns and sheds, and seeing only the stillness of a photograph. The growing eeriness made his skin cold.

He almost ran to his own cottage; for there would be nothing strange in its emptiness; there should be no one there.

He pushed the door open, remembering it had been the one village door that had been closed, and went in.

The grandfather clock was ticking against the lounge wall. The sound melted his heart. He could have kissed this one mechanical friend still moving in the silence. But as the moments passed he began to hate it, as if its sonorous clack was cheating him of some faint sound that might be made in the empty village. He strained to hear outside until he could stand it no more, and he opened the clock door and stopped the pendulum. Then he felt relieved, and the silence came down again like the cloak of night on his senses.

When he moved it was stealthily, on tiptoe, lest someone should hear him, someone that he could not see. And with the sudden realisation of what he was doing, came the suspicion, the odd, insidious feeling that someone was watching, that in all that stillness, he was not alone.

The feeling dammed his throat with fear, but he fought against it.

If I can fight it—get used to it, I might do something, he whispered, staring round the so familiar shadows of the old place.

Suddenly he darted to the kitchen door and flung it open, as if in some mad attempt to catch someone there. Only the stillness was caught suspended in the moment that he stopped.