The valley was ten miles and several worlds away.

---

I hailed a taxi at the station and we drove out of town as the late autumn afternoon began its characteristic hush. The road soon began to drop towards a broad wooded valley with patches of mist here and there. I asked the driver to pull over at a lay-by, climbed out, and stood for a while looking into the depths. A few lights, earth-stars, gleamed down on the valley floor, making it easy to pick out the main village. I would be staying in that village, staying there for however long it took.

Gravelly footfalls sounded alongside me. ‘Funny lot,’ said the driver, ‘down there in the valley. Perfectly friendly, nice folks, but they don’t really like modern life.’

I knew this. That’s why we had chosen the valley for the test.

‘Do they mix much with people outside?’ I asked him.

‘Not really. They’re happy where they are, but they’re welcoming enough. I’ve been down to the pub you’re staying at myself, once or twice, with the wife. Nice little break, peace and quiet. That what you’re after?’

‘Yes. I had a bad fall at work. They thought if they sent me to a place where I couldn’t do anything, I’d get better quicker.’ As a cover story it wasn’t bad, because there was some truth in it. In the general panic after the incident, when we were rushing to our stations, I had collided with someone, fallen over and torn my knee to the extent that I still walked with a slight limp.

We climbed back into the taxi and descended through dark woods of oak and hazel. When the gradient eased, the woodland cover dropped away and we travelled between small fields separated by wooden palings and broken up by patchy broadleaved plantations like game coverts.

After a while, houses began to appear; just now and again, not cheek-to-cheek as in a proper street. Some were picturesque, others were plain and unattractive, but no two were alike. Gradually they began to congregate together; one or two shops appeared and what looked like a village hall. Near a square church with neither spire nor tower, the lights of an inn finally emerged.

I paid the taxi driver and took my suitcase to the door of the pub whose sign read Prince in the Valley. I pushed open a much-weathered door of wood and frosted glass which swung to behind me. It opened on a traditional taproom, worn but comfortable. Settles, upholstered in an oft-patched red fabric, lined the walls and bay windows and there were some wooden tables and chairs in the middle of the floor. Opposite the door was a small bar behind which gleamed chrome and copper and glass. A pair of shabby men in drab jackets and trousers supped pints quietly as they leaned on the bar. A broad man of about fifty, red-faced and topped by a mop of hair the colour of raked ashes, stood behind the bar; seeing me come in, he roared in a deep bass, ‘Now you’ll be Mr McDonald.’

The two men at the bar looked at me without animation or interest. I confessed I was Mr McDonald.

‘You just sit yourself down and I’ll get the boy to take up your case shortly. You’ll be half-starved. We got steak pie and taters tonight – that do you?’

I nodded gratefully and was soon shown upstairs to my room by a thin, mop-haired son of the house. The room was small and dark but pleasant; a little coal fire tinkled and glittered, throwing cold flickers on to the wooden furnishings. There was a creaky brass single bed. ‘The lav and bath are just down the corridor a bit,’ said the boy, ‘I’ll keep the fire going while you have your dinner.’

Back in the taproom I sprawled on a settle and tried to look convalescent. Jed and Albert were still there, perhaps half an inch further down each of their pints. Suddenly, with what seemed like an explosion of sound and activity, one of them said, ‘Quiet in here tonight.’

A full minute by the clock on the wall above the faded hunting prints elapsed before the other man replied, ‘Always quiet in here.’

Another three or four minutes passed, during which the first man took a brief pull at his drink, before he replied, ‘Aye.’ Then the landlord burst in from the swing doors by the bar, bearing a plate piled with steaming new potatoes, a huge wedge of pie and a fair-sized copse of greens.

‘Hope Albert and Jed aren’t putting you off with their non-stop chatter, Mr McDonald!’

I laughed and ordered a pint to go with the meal. When the landlord returned with the drink, he introduced himself as Bartholomew Prince. ‘Sometimes known as Prince in the Valley. We have our own ways here, sir, but strangers is always welcome. Lots of people come and stay here just to get away from all that fuss and worry you have outside.’

I replied, ‘Yes, I was sent here because my employers thought I needed to go where nothing ever happened.’

Prince laughed, ‘Can’t say as nothing ever happens, eh, boys?’ He looked at Albert and Jed, who turned and looked back at him; really quite an acrobatic feat by their standards. I thought there might be a hint here that I could start investigating, so I asked, ‘Oh? What’s been happening, then?’

‘It’s a funny thing, sir, we had this thing a week or two back, very strange it was, people are still talking about it…’

Just then, the outside doors burst open and a group of local people, in the same colourless agriculturalwear as Albert and Jed, crowded in, moving over to surround a table near a window.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Prince, ‘the Brook Farm lot will be wanting their steak pie. I’ll speak to you later.’

While this was a disappointment, those words ‘people are still talking about it’ suggested that I would be able to hear about the incident. Assuming it was, in fact, the test that Prince was referring to.

While I remained in the bar, I affected to read a vapid paperback thriller, all the while listening to Jed and Albert’s slow-burning talk.

‘That’s a nice new lass that’s started serving in the shop.’

‘Bit old to notice lasses, ain’t you?’

‘I’s not even forty. I’s younger’n you.’ That exchange took a couple of minutes.

I slept well in the noisy bed – it was quiet if you lay still – and opened curtains on a morning of green and gold. The sun, filtered through trees, hit a crumbling tarmac road. I could see the squat little church, a small patch of village green and some cottages on the periphery. One of them was a general store; even at this early hour iron buckets and brooms and tin trays and bags of firewood were piled chaotically either side of the door. Perhaps they never took them in. Perhaps they never needed to.

Prince served me with a sizzling-hot breakfast in the cold empty taproom, and while I was relaxing over coffee asked, ‘Any plans for today, sir?’

‘I thought I’d go for a walk. Nothing too strenuous, but the doc did say I had to exercise my leg.’

‘You could try the public footpath that runs along the riverbank, sir. You just follow the track between here and the church and that leads you to the path. Just turn left and go upstream. After a couple of miles there’s a place where you can sit, overlooking the waterfalls. I’ll make up some sandwiches for you.’

An hour later I stood outside the inn. A warm breeze skittered a few early Autumn leaves about on the roadway. A couple of ancient, mud-spattered cars chugged past, their occupants waving to me as they went.

I turned right, following a rough, stony track that ran through the wasteground between the church and the inn. After a hundred yards the track swung left into a farm entrance – Brook Farm – but a narrow footpath continued through light woodland until it reached the riverside path.

The river was broad and bright and slow, chattering over a light chalky bed, and trout darted for cover as I approached. I didn’t go upstream as Prince had suggested, but downstream, towards the location of the test. I limped slowly downriver and disturbed a heron and some dippers and at one point there was a plop that might have been an otter. I began to enjoy myself. The clean autumn sunshine broke through my mood.

Where the path swung left, following a meander of the river, I broke off right through dying woodland undergrowth. The trees began to thin out into a kind of rough heathland. I was suddenly grasped from behind. A second figure leaped out in front of me, a soldier wearing camouflage and a balaclava.

‘Who are you and why are you here?’ barked the one behind me.

‘Help is on the way,’ I said slowly and clearly.

‘McDonald, eh?’ the voice said again, releasing me, ‘wondered when we would see you.’

‘Anything of interest?’ I asked the two men, as they pulled off their balaclavas.

‘Nobody’s really come near. A few kids playing in the river, the odd adult on the footpath. If they saw anything, they’re not rushing to go and investigate. How about you?’

‘I think I was about to get a local view last night but I was interrupted. How’s the site looking?’

‘D’you think we’re going to go and look at that thing? We’ll leave that to the science boys.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll come back when I know anything.’

I returned to the river and ate my sandwiches – made with thick, smoky cooked ham – in a much gloomier mood. By mid-afternoon I was back at the path junction; I turned away from the river and walked past the entrance to Brook Farm. There was a lot of activity in the farmyard; earlier, I had seen them making square bales of hay with equipment hauled by vintage tractors. Now, the vehicles and machinery were being checked and oiled and tuned. One or two of the farmworkers waved at me, but another man, older and stout and craggy-faced and whom I recognised from the party in the inn the previous night, stopped what he was doing and began to walk towards me. I tensed, but his expression and manner were not unfriendly.

‘Afternoon, sir. Hope you don’t mind my asking, but was you just walking down by the river?’

‘Yes, I’ve been following the path alongside it.’

‘Downriver?’

‘Yes, downriver.’

‘If you do go down that way again, sir, make sure you stick to the path. There was something odd going on there a week or two back. Funny lights, kind of low rumbling like thunder, deep in the woods. Best keep away.’

‘I’ll do that. I wonder what it was? Has anyone been to look?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. We’re all too busy to be bothered with what sort of thing. It must’ve been something to do with people outside. Begging your pardon, sir, nothing to do with us. I’m Simon Brook, by the way.’

‘Andrew McDonald.’ We shook hands.

‘Tell you what, though,’ said Brook, turning back to me after he had begun heading back to the farm, ‘Jed and Albert will know what’s going on down there. Favourite place of theirs for setting traps, it is.’

I sat on a weathered wooden bench outside the church. Jed and Albert, the saturnine characters of the night before. Had they stumbled on the test site yet? And if so, had they seen enough – understood enough – to condemn their valley?

My walks grew longer as the days wore on. My injured leg was the perfect cover; it was injured and it was getting slowly better, so I must have made a convincing convalescent. I regularly met up with the soldiers guarding the test site, and reported what I was picking up from the valley folk that I’d spoken to; something funny had happened, bright lights, explosive thundering. Some felt that it had been some kind of freak electrical storm, others (rightly) viewed it as some intrusion by people from ‘outside’. Either way, their general contentedness limited their curiosity. They just got on with things. My mood began to lighten. I had not yet, though, managed to engage Jed or Albert in conversation.

I had been in the valley about two weeks when I was in the taproom after another huge evening meal; my daytime walks were, of course, carried out to pursue the grim New Cold War business we had brought to the valley, but without them I would already have put on a stone. The Brooks Farm lot had not been in that night and I had the room to myself. I was thinking about heading to bed when the outer door opened and in came Jed and Albert. Both were dressed as usual; Albert had a fishing rod and Jed carried a squirming sack over his shoulder.

‘Evening gents!’ boomed Prince, ‘Can I get you anything? And anything for the ferrets?’

Each man mumbled quietly in turn, and I could just about make out the word ‘pint’ from both. Prince served them and continued valiantly trying to draw the men into conversation.

‘Be checking on your traps, boys?’

‘Yer.’ Albert said.

‘Rabbits in for a hard time tonight, then?’ Prince persisted, nodding at the squirming bag Jed carried.

There was something that might have been a nod from Jed.

After a while, Prince asked, in a much lower voice, ‘You heading downriver?’ The men again nodded faintly. ‘Well, you take care, then,’ said Prince, ‘Lord knows what that thing down there was.’

‘We’ll be all right,’ said Albert. By the time Jed had added, ‘Yer, we’ll be fine,’ Prince had turned and gone.

As unobtrusively as I could, I slipped on my coat and sidled out into the hush-quiet night. It was already dark, the mouldy autumn smells drifted over from the woods and I hurried towards the river path. The gloom meant that there was no need to assume my usual exaggerated limp. When I came to the waterside path I half-ran, half-stumbled downriver; I did have a small pocket torch, but I had to go so quickly that I stumbled often over bumps and tree roots anyway.

I came off the path and a couple of soldiers melted out of the background in the gloom. ‘Help is on the way,’ I said.

‘What’s up, McDonald?’

‘Listen – we don’t have much time. There are two village men – poachers – heading this way. This is their patch. I don’t know how close they’ll go to the site. Albert and Jed are their names.’

‘Albert and Jed?’ said one of the soldiers, ‘Surname isn’t Archer by any chance?’

‘The scientific boys are at the site,’ said the other soldier. ‘They arrived last night. We can’t let your bumpkins get anywhere near it.’

‘Watch out for them, then. I’ll go back and keep an eye on them. Might try and divert them.’

‘All the best, McDonald – but don’t blow your cover.’

I scouted back along the river path until I heard low, muffled voices by the water. Albert and Jed hardly had great booming voices, but the sounds bounced along the smooth river surface as if it were a tight drumskin. I couldn’t make out what was being said and the voices seemed not to be getting any nearer.

I slid off the path and hid behind a stout bole. Out of the darkness came the long, whispering kiss of a fishing line meeting the water. If they had paused for a spell of fishing, I could creep closer and keep an eye on them. I stalked noiselessly along the path until I could just see the men’s figures by the water, and then tried to melt into the undergrowth. I could now hear the sporadic talk.

‘Fish will never bite this time o’ night.’

‘Not with you gabbin’ away like an old washerwoman.’

‘We gonner go and see the place where it happened?’

‘Might if we got time.’ This was Albert, in charge of the fishing rod.

‘I think we got to. Find out what’s happened, what they done, and let folks know.’

This dialogue looks quite normal on the page but there’s no way I can convey the slow, drawling delivery, or the minutes-long pauses between. Yet Albert and Jed were insightful enough to work out that the test had been a human act.

‘No one gonner listen to us. So what if folks outside have come and blown up some bomb? Nowt we can do about it.’

We had taken the future to this peaceful, forgotten valley. Its people hadn’t asked for it, yet I feared that Jed and Albert, at least, would be paying the price. And then Jed spoke again.

‘One of them newspapers outside would pay a lot of money for a story like this.’

I sped stealthily and silently away, back towards the soldiers. I fed the password and they glided into sight again.

‘Albert and Jed; they’re fishing at the moment and I eavesdropped on them. They’re a lot sharper than they look. They’re going to look at the site. They may not keep quiet about it.’

Instantly the atmosphere became thick and tense.

‘So…’ one soldier began. I interrupted him and just said ‘Yes.’

‘How many more?’ asked the other soldier.

‘Not sure. Depends how they react if Jed and Albert don’t…’ I struggled to finish, but the men knew what I meant.

I returned to the path, followed it for a bit, and then hid once more in the trees off the path.

It wasn’t long before the slow, steady rhythm of Jed and Albert walking came to me. Their footfalls became louder until they thudded past me, Albert’s shouldered fishing rod scraping the lower branches.

I let them go, and when all was silence, I returned to the path and hurried back to the inn. I had to leave this valley quickly, and then try hard to forget it.

---

Featured Download: CLICK HERE to unlock the methods for preparing your life for creative inspiration and visionary change.