A Sword Above the Night (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #5)

By John Lymington

The missiles came from a long way out in space. Maybe there were people in them. Things from somewhere else. Man always thought he was the Only Man in all the million worlds in a Universe that might itself be one of a million. Now men from one of those other worlds had come to Earth. That was all that had happened. But who were they, the night-comers? And what horror had they brought with them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Aug 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215923696

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.

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The missiles came from a long way out in space. They weren’t explosive. Maybe there were people in them. Things from somewhere else. Man always thought he was the Only Man in all the million worlds in a Universe that might itself be one of a million. But now men from one of those other worlds had come to Earth. That was all that had happened.

But who were they, the night-comers? And what horror had they brought with them?

A SWORD ABOVE THE NIGHT

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1962

©1962, 2023 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: August 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Chapter One

1

AT EIGHT-THIRTY on the fifteenth of August it was hot and overcast, making the day darker than it should have been. The police van rattled and thundered like a dustbin rolling down a hill, and Sergeant John Adams was beginning to feel exasperated at its hard slowness. There was in him a hardly suppressed excitement, a kind of tense dread at knowing that somewhere, under this same sky, strange things were happening.

Strange things indeed, as he knew, and officials knew, but nobody else. Even great things, changing the course and history of the world, maybe, and here was he, Sergeant Adams, driving down to Crosslane to check up on a car number. Serious, maybe, for Charles Devine, if it turned out to be his number, as records said, and if he had been in the car at that time. Serious, it could be, for a man; maybe break him and everything he had, but a pinpoint in the world’s affairs now that these things were happening ...

The hiss of the radio broke suddenly and a tin voice gave a brief command to some cruising car miles away to look at a break-in somewhere. It snapped off into a hiss again. Sergeant Adams bumped along down the winding road towards the Crosslane house, a one-time farmhouse facing the broad junction of the roads and the river bubbling by, where later in the year the trout fishers would come in their big thigh boots ...

If there was a later time of year for them.

The idea startled John Adams, but it was not so strange as all that. He realised the thought must have been in the back of his mind since the first news of the Things had started to come in during the afternoon.

The tense emptiness of excitement increased in him. He wanted to shout suddenly, but gripped the wheel harder to get rid of the feeling.

He felt his tie and wished it could be loosened. August was no-jacket time for coppers, and he wished now it was no-tie time too. His helmet sat on the floor, rocking with the motion like a decapitated head.

He stiffened again as the radio clicked and another order was barked. A child had got his head stuck in the railings of the bridge back in town.

Good heavens, John thought, at a time like this!

But you couldn’t leave the kid there, stuck in the railings while the world started to crumble up all round it. No, that was just the point, he realised. That was just it. No matter what happened, or what was going to happen, you had to carry on living, right to the very end. That was the whole meaning of things; to go on living, right to the very end. For after all, who could be sure it would be the end?

He swerved suddenly to avoid a sharp stone in the road, but he hit it with a crack he was sure would be followed by a rhythmic bumping of a cut open tyre. But the van rolled on, hard and noisy as ever. He looked back over his shoulder at the big space and the leather benches either side and the bars on the windows.

A lot of the people who had been in here might have had the feeling that everything was lost, that life had come to an end, but they had gone off again afterwards—sometimes a long time afterwards, and—

What in hell was he thinking about? Morbid, that was it. Like the story he was going to write, when he got time. Realism, that was. The Sweat Bead. There was a fat man sitting in a chair almost naked, watching a bead of sweat crawl slowly down between his breasts, and down to his belly, watching it because it would be the last thing he would ever see; he had taken poison, and was watching the sweat bead while he waited for death. But the reader wouldn’t know this till the end. It would be just as if he was watching the bead run down his own belly, and then get the shock at the end as to why it was there at all …

Morbid, perhaps, but all the same, an idea.

He looked at the sky again. Somewhere under this very sky the things were happening. The fact that it was quiet and motionless here among the hills seemed to make horror out of what should have felt like security.

Fifty thousand miles out. Maybe the sky was full of them.

He eased his tie.

And maybe he was letting his imagination run right away like a wild horse.

At the top of the hill he passed a girl pushing a bicycle back towards the town. She was pretty and smiled, a bit breathless from pushing up the hill, and she had nice breasts he suddenly wanted to touch. He wanted a girl. Part of the natural urge for comfort and recreation when disaster threatened all.

Hell, he was on it again.

He looked at the loudspeaker hissing like a boiler about to blow.

Think of Charles Devine. He had to make talk with Charles Devine. Find out things. Get around what happened to that car last night, and where it was and who had it.

Last night, when things like that had been important. Not now. Only one thing was important now, and he couldn’t mention it to anybody. That made the pressure worse.

He looked at the sky again, then into the mirror to see the girl with the exciting bosom pushing her bike up to the crest. It was hot in the van though he had the door open at his side. Well, he had given himself the job of coming out, just for the ride. At least it was away from the paper and the bumph and the damned, eternal phone, the idiot’s trumpet. But he was away from the news, too; the strange, exciting news that filled him with this ecstatic apprehension ...

Down the hill he could see the greystone farmhouse which always reminded him of Wuthering Heights and the Doones and the rest of the colourful ghosts he liked. Around the house there was the old yard and the stone barns and the engine house where the generator was. He could even see the lazy puffs of the exhaust from the iron pipe that stuck up over the roof, floating uncertainly in the still air.

A small car came buzzing up the hill, a lone girl at the wheel, a blonde popsie with a long bob. He ought to get married; he had too much sex. Yet Bob said it was worse then, for you felt like it more, but women didn’t feel like it that often; at least, so Bob said about his wife, and he talked about her too much, trying to find out what was the matter with him, or her, or both of them together. He even went to a lecture about it at the hospital and when he tried to tell her about it she locked herself in the room for a fortnight while Bob slept down on the bed-sofa.

He looked at the sky again, and Bob and everybody shrank, like things flying away down a vast corridor and became specks, and then nothing.

They picked them up fifty thousand miles out, one after the other, like the black German planes he had seen that morning when they came rushing out of school to see, and the planes had come over low down, scattered, ragged as a pack of hounds, and you could see the Men from Mars inside the glass, and everybody shouted and squealed and ran, except John. John had stood there staring, perhaps too scared to run like the others. But the planes had gone by and paper in the playground scurried about in the wind they had made behind them. Then, in desperate wishfulness he had shouted that the Spitfires would come and smash all the Germans. But the Spitfires didn’t come, and into his young mind that had seemed rather dreadful, a negation of all the promises of God on that fine, golden morning.

He remembered it again going down the hill, and shifting into third as it steepened. A truck came smoking slowly up towards him; Holmes the carrier, very late, though Holmes worked when he felt like it, in the middle of the night sometimes. It depended on whether his wife could get him out of bed or not.

The van brushed aside the smoke cloud from Holmes’s exhaust and went on down towards the silver river. He would like to take up fly fishing; people looked so relaxed standing in the water, slowly hauling back, then casting, then hauling back, like stroking yourself to sleep.

The radio snapped out again; fire in a backyard. He whistled impatiently between his teeth, and changed up again as the road levelled out. Ahead the farmhouse stood by the clump of trees, and what lay inside might be small, in the light of events, but it could be unpleasant.

He pulled up outside the open front door of the house and got out. The radio went on hissing as he pulled the bell, and behind the house came the steady thump-thump of the big old Diesel engine that made the light for the place.

2

CHARLES DEVINE STARED at the window, a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. His wife’s blue eyes opened in sudden alarm as she saw the police van stop outside the old farmhouse.

It’s the police! she said, as if afraid to be overheard. My God, Charles!

He turned to her.

For heaven’s sake!