SUE HARPER

brambles and nettles made my legs bleed. Cursing and half-weeping with frustration, I recalled that a friend’s dog had plunged down a rabbit hole never to be seen again, and another had flown over a cliff with a seagull in his mouth.I came to a clearing and found the naughty creature.  He was digging something up. As he dug, a most frightful smell exuded from the ground. It was like no corpse I had ever smelled: not rancid, not sweet, but alluvial almost. I thought he might have unearthed a body. As indeed he had: but this was no normal murder.

 

I am curious by nature,  even a little forensic, and so I encouraged Jack  to dig away. In my bag I had a little trowel, which I had brought to steal wild flowers with. And so, dog and girl, we pummelled away at the ground. Jack gloried in the smell: I gagged, and covered my nose with a handkerchief. Gradually the ladderwork of a rib-cage emerged. But this was no human form: too big to be a gorilla, even. I decided to shift our attention to the head. After some scraping, I sat back on my heels with shock. The skull was colossal. But more than  that, it had a huge beaky form. A massive bony proboscis, solid as a rock, lay like a helmet atop the neck. The eyelets were small. I fancied I saw something glint in them, and hoped I was wrong. 

 

In those days,  there were no mobile phones. I hauled Jack away from his prize, made my way back to the car, and drove to the police station. They were suspicious of my tale, of course, since aliens are an unusual find in a  thicket. But four bobbies accompanied me back to my trophy. They too began to dig. As dusk fell, we saw that the  thing was twelve feet long, and had claws instead of hands and feet. 

 

The police, realising that this was beyond their remit, called the security services. And here my troubles began. I never knew if it was M15 or M16, or what M it was. But concealment was their game. They covered the corpse with a tent and took me to an office (after dropping Jack off at my house) and interrogated me about my intentions. Did I want to sell my story? Was I aware how dangerous my find was? Did I want panic to run amok in the streets? I was young and brave then, and refused to give any undertakings, or to sign their secrecy form. And so after several hours, they let me go. 

 

I did not realise then that  the exhumation of the alien produced a sort of hinge in my life. Everything before that was easy: everything after it was hard. I tried to sell my story to the papers, reasoning that proof of life beyond our solar system must be interesting to someone. But it was not. No-one would see the image or smell the aroma, not they. They had been tipped off. And  then the smooth running of my life became impeded. I did not get the jobs I applied for, even though I was qualified for them. I began to hear a “click” when I  picked up my phone. And it was as though, in some strange way, people had been warned off  me. It was easy to become paranoid in such a situation, and indeed for some years I became suspicious and unbalanced, mistrusting the evidence of my own eyes and the smell on my fingers, which I fancied could never be scrubbed away. 

 

In the end, twenty years later, I thought I would go back to the wood and look again. I took another dog this time - Jack’s alien corpse had been his last triumph, and I  fancied that he knew he would never find anything as remarkable as that again. So my new terrier Jill and I approached the spot once more. It was overgrown, of course. I did scrabble around on the old site, and found what I thought was a long nail. But then I decided to draw a large circle around the grave with a ball of string, and extended the radius bit by bit. 

 

Jill gave a soft bark. She had found something. Together we dug and scraped, but what we unearthed was much, much smaller than the previous find. It was the size of a baby: but no human  baby ever looked like this. The carapace of the skull had the same sharp beak that I had found before, but this one was agape as if it had tried, and failed, to breathe the strange air. The little claws were gnarled as though they had attempted to tear something. 

 

I wrapped it up and took it home. People glimpsing me from a distance might have seen a mother carrying her child. But this child was a proof of the unimaginable.  I was now too wise to persuade anyone to give it credence. I locked it in my bottom drawer. For years and years I would get it out and look at it, knowing that it was a  proof of a cosmic catastrophe. And that I was its only witness.