Alien Island

Names and locations have been changed in the following account where necessary.

My friend Francis was rich, or at least his parents were rich. His father was some kind of high-flying businessman. We were at university together, which is where we met. He always had a plan that, after university, he would sail around the world. He had been sailing boats with his parents since he was a child.

Originally he planned to go with Emma. Emma was his girlfriend. But after university she had to go and work somewhere, and they quickly drifted apart. That’s when he invited me to go with him instead. I was his best friend.

I didn’t know anything about sailing and still don’t, really. I had never been on any kind of boat other than a ferry, and even that made me a bit sick. I had already started a PhD. I was studying atmospheric physics. His proposal seemed like a great opportunity. To sail around the world: how often does a chance like that come along? For sure I could learn a lot about the Earth’s climate by sailing around the world. So I talked to my supervisor and he agreed that I could take a year out and resume when I got back.

That’s how it happened that in May of 2016, Francis and I sailed out of Portsmouth on a yacht.

We sailed south to the Canary Islands, and arrived there two weeks later. I got seasick; horribly, horribly seasick, and I was so happy when we were finally on dry land again. The Canary Islands were beautiful and I told Francis I’d had enough and he should go on without me, but he employed every device possible to persuade me to continue. He told me I couldn’t just abandon him, and so early on as well. He said I’d already faced the worst of the sickness and it would soon get better. He said I was throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime. He was right, of course, probably about all of it. So a few days later, we got back on the boat together.

We made it to the Caribbean in under three weeks, and I only stopped vomiting in the third week of this second leg, even though I took every kind of travel sickness pill known to humanity, at least that I’d been able to obtain in Lanzarote.

We stayed two days in St. Lucia, stocking up on supplies. Again the island was beautiful, and I could happily have passed a year right there, but Francis insisted we had to go on, and anyway, I had promised my supervisor that I’d collect data for my thesis.

I’ll admit that, by then, I was beginning to get used to life on the yacht. Maybe I was even starting to enjoy myself, now that I was getting the nausea under control. There was a certain charm to the simplicity of our life. We had only to think about lines and sails and charts and weather patterns; there were no distractions and the problems of everyday life back at home in Britain had receded into a dim and distant background.

From Lanzarote, we were at the Panama Canal in a week. We had to wait two days in a small town called Colón before we could pass through the Canal. The yacht had to pass some kind of inspection, and Francis had some minor repairs done, extending our stay to four days. There wasn’t much there and Colón was nothing special—actually it was kind of run-down and industrial—but we enjoyed drinking in the bars and eating in the cafés.

Actually transiting the Canal took a day and a half, and then we were in the Pacific, heading for the Marquesas Islands.

Then I really did begin to enjoy myself. Francis was teaching me some rudiments of sailing so I could help out a bit. His yacht had all possible modern bells and whistles, but even so Francis became exhausted and we staggered our sleeping patterns so we could keep watch. I wished I’d taken a pile of books, instead of the three books I actually had taken, which I quickly finished. On the other hand, the Pacific was endlessly beautiful, and with all the stuff that had to be done every day, the time passed fairly quickly. I recorded measurements of wind speed and water temperature, and took photographs, which began to look at little monotonous since they were mostly all of sky and water.

Francis had some kind of satellite phone on the Iridium network, which allowed us even to send emails, but the connection was extremely patchy. The boat was equipped with a radio too, which generally worked, although Francis was nervous of actually transmitting, saying he wasn’t properly licensed.

The Marquesas Islands are a bunch of volcanic islands in the South Pacific, and we were supposed to reach them about a month after leaving the Canal. We were making good progress until about twenty days into that part of the journey, when we were hit by a massive storm.

The storm quickly became terrifying. The yacht was being lifted easily seven metres up onto the crests of the waves, before plummeting down on the other side. We hadn’t received any warning of the storm via the satellite phone, nor via any of Francis’s other devices. I’ve since wondered if he knew about the incoming storm but kept it from me. Francis kept assuring me the yacht could cope with waves of that size, and I’ve since learned that to be a flat-out lie. The storm was exceptional, and we were in danger of capsizing.

As darkness fell we were lashed with rain like I’ve never seen, and winds that by themselves would have swept us off the deck had we not been tied to safety lines. Great torrents of water smashed into us as we tried to manoeuvre the boat to face the waves. Keeping it straight was a nearly impossible task.

Around midnight, Francis finally began to radio for help, but without success. He activated some kind of emergency radio beacon, but we knew that, if the boat capsized, we would spend a great deal of time in the water, or at best, in the inflatable lifeboat, before anyone would be able to rescue us. In the emergency lifeboat we would be even more at the mercy of the waves, tossed about like a literal cork.

The boat began to fill with water, and our two electric pumps malfunctioned and couldn’t be restarted. One of the horizontal beams, or booms as Francis called them, which usually kept the sails in the right place, got flung uncontrollably to the side and became detached at its base, remaining only in place due to ropes, and several times it nearly killed us with its wild thrashing about.

By the time the storm subsided and the first reddish rays of sunlight glittered across the sea, we were both utterly exhausted, but the boat was full of water and, with the electric pumps not working, we had to pump the water out by hand. As the day started to warm up we began to get very thirsty, and then we discovered our largest container of drinking water had got cracked and contaminated, and was unpleasantly salty.

At that point we were down to hoping our distress signals had got out and someone would come to rescue us.

As a matter of fact, no-one ever came to rescue us, so I can only think the emergency beacon didn’t work at all.

For nearly a week we drifted at less than a knot, unable to raise the mainsail, becoming increasingly nauseated by the brackish water. The GPS gave us crazy readings that made no sense and the satphone had taken a bad knock in the storm and refused to work properly.

Then I spotted the top of a curious tower in the far distance.

“Must be a mast.” said Francis.

“Doesn’t look like a mast.” I said. “It looks like the top of a lighthouse.”

He took the binoculars.

“Impossible.” he said, but I could see from the expression on his face that he thought I was right.

As we drifted closer to it we began to see birds wheeling around above it, and the lower part came into view. It was unmistakably a lighthouse.

“There’s nothing out here.” said Francis, perplexed. “We can’t have got as far as the Marquesas.”

“Maybe the GPS is right after all.” I said.

“Even if it is, there’s still nothing in this region.” he replied.

I must admit, I had for some time been entertaining doubts about the actual level of Francis’s yachting abilities. Just because your parents take you on boats when you’re knee-high to a grasshopper doesn’t mean you actually know much about them as an adult. Francis had navigated us this far, but his management of the yacht during the storm and his subsequent utter confusion had made me wonder how much he’d actually taken in during his previous yachting adventures with his father.

The lighthouse, as indeed it was, turned out to be standing on a rocky island perhaps 200 metres in diameter. We could barely steer the yacht at all, and ended up crashing on some rocks. If the storm had still been raging we would have died, but all was calm and we were able to swim and wade to shore.

And that’s where things began to get really strange.

We were met by a bespectacled man in his early thirties, with longish sandy-coloured hair.

Francis hailed him. “Do you speak English?”

“I am English.” he replied. “This is private property. You need to leave immediately.”

“We can’t.” I said. “That’s what’s left of our ship.”

I waved towards the wreck on the rocks.

“We won’t be here long.” said Francis. “We just need to use your radio to get help.”

“I don’t have a radio.” he said.

“You don’t have any way of contacting the outside world?” I asked him.

“No.” he said. “You have to leave.”

“We can’t leave.” said Francis. “We don’t have any way to leave. We’ll gladly leave if you’ll lend us a boat.”

“I haven’t got a boat either.” he replied. “Look, you can stay in the outhouse. Some people will come in two months.”

He began to walk back to the lighthouse.

“We need water and food.” I shouted.

“I’ll bring you some later.” he said.

We were too exhausted to argue. We went over to the outhouse he’d mentioned; the only other structure on the island. There were some fish drying in there, suspended from lines, and not much else.

“We’ll have to fetch stuff from the boat.” said Francis.

The man soon turned up with some flour, a two-gallon drum of water, a few blankets, and a rusty old portable oil stove and some oil, all of which he transported to the outhouse in a wheelbarrow.

“Best I can do.” he said.

He was going to walk off again, but Francis, tired though he was, insisted the man tell us his name and explain where we were.

He told us his name was Kieran, but he seemed to hesitate, as though he had just made the name up on the spot. He clearly wasn’t happy to see us. He told us we couldn’t go in the lighthouse because he was conducting experiments in there.

The island was apparently named Stannage Island, after its discoverer, and was British territory. It wasn’t large enough to appear on our charts, and Kieran hinted vaguely at dark secrets that had inspired the British government to hide its very existence.

For the most part he was terse and monosyllabic. He told us a boat would definitely be along in two months, then he insisted that he had to get back to his work in the lighthouse.

“I must be dreaming.” said Francis. “Did we die in the storm? Is this Hell?”

“If so it’s relatively nice for Hell.” I said. “There’s only one demon, and he seems more irritable than evil.”

Fetching supplies from the wrecked boat was rather urgent, but we were so spent that we slept for the rest of the day and all of the night.

It was wonderful to be on dry land again after nearly dying in the storm, even if the place we’d washed up was incredibly strange.

The following day we began to transport whatever supplies from the boat that were still intact. We had enough food for some weeks. The water from the boat was really useless except for washing but we were glad of the additional blankets and bedding. We also salvaged cooking equipment, clothes, and best of all, the radio and some batteries.

“Once we get this working I’ll radio my parents and they’ll arrange a rescue immediately.” Francis said. “I’m not spending two months on this godforsaken rock with that weirdo.”

Over the following days we endlessly fiddled with the radio but we received only static. We tried to broadcast distress calls regularly but we had no idea if the thing was transmitting.

Francis also had a little portable radio for listening to radio stations when available, and he suggested we break it open, try to unwind some wire from it, and string that out as an aerial for the transmitter. He thought there’d be an electrical transformer in it that we could unwind. When we broke it open we indeed found such a thing, but it was wound with wire that was so fine we couldn’t unwind it without it snapping. After several attempts we did managed to rig up a kind of aerial of very fine wire, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

“Worst case is we’re here for two months.” I told him. “We should ask Kieran about catching fish. With some fish we’d have enough food.”

Francis looked apprehensively at the lighthouse.

“He hasn’t been outside since we arrived. What are we supposed to do, knock on the door?”

“We can definitely try.” I said. “Otherwise we’ll have to go in and find him.”

“I get the feeling he wouldn’t like that. What do you suppose he’s doing in there anyway?”

“Experiments, he said.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with the atmosphere. That’s your area.”

“Or maybe it isn’t.”

We spent the whole rest of that day trying to get something other than static out of the radio, to no avail.

After the sun went down, plunging us into an inky blackness broken only by the stars, the faint luminescence of the waves breaking on the rocks, and some dim lights from near the top of the lighthouse, I stood for a while watching the lighthouse, trying to detect signs of movement, and seeing none.

“I feel like we’re in prison and that’s the guard tower.” said Francis.

The following morning, we awoke to find the transmitter was on fire. We threw some of the dry gravelly soil on it that sparsely covered the island and put it out.

“How did this happen?” I said. “It wasn’t even switched on.”

Francis was looking at it suspiciously.

“There’s oil on it.” he said.

We looked at each other, each of us knowing full well what that meant.

“Why would he set our radio on fire?” I said.

“It makes no sense.” said Francis. “He must be insane.”

“We’re going to have to tackle him about this.”

“All right. Let’s do it.”

We went to the lighthouse and banged on the door. There was no reply, and the door was locked. We tried again several times that day, with the same results.

“He must come out eventually.” I said. “He obviously fishes. We’ll just have to wait.”

“He might stay in there for weeks.” said Francis.

But it didn’t take weeks. A couple of days later, Kieran emerged from his tower of solitude and went to fish at the far end of the island, which was all of a hundred and fifty metres away from the outhouse.

“Hey!” Francis said to him, “Did you set fire to our radio?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” he replied, over his shoulder.

“It looks like you poured oil on it and set fire to it.”

He turned and fixed Francis with a steely gaze.

“If you expect me to keep you supplied with water, you’d better be civil. I don’t have enough water as it is. I’m having to go without washing because of you.”

Then he turned and strode off.

“Is someone still coming in two months?” Francis shouted. “Should be seven weeks now.”

“Sure.” said Kieran.

We weren’t exactly reassured.

“This is ridiculous.” said Francis. “We ought to give him a beating and get some proper answers out of him.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” I said. “Let’s see if he’s left the lighthouse unlocked. I want to know what’s in there.”

“Good idea.” said Francis.

Kieran seemed well-settled on the rocks with a fishing rod, and the door of the lighthouse turned out to be unlocked. Probably he didn’t want to risk the possibility of losing the key and dying of thirst on his own island. We crept in and began making our way up the stairs.

“What if he comes back while we’re in here?” I said.

“Don’t care if he does.” said Francis. “There’s two of us and one of him. I’ve a mind to revert to Plan A and give him a damn good thrashing. There’s no way he didn’t set fire to our radio.”

About halfway up we emerged into a storage room, and above that we discovered what was evidently Kieran’s bedroom. But not only his bedroom; also his kitchen and living room. As we were shortly to discover, all the other rooms were dedicated to his work, and everything he needed to prepare food, sleep and relax was crammed into that one room.

At the time I knew nothing of lighthouses, but I’ve since learned that a modern lighthouse of that size will often have a storage room, then above that a bedroom, then a living room and a kitchen. The order may vary but the principle remains the same. Kieran’s lighthouse was of an older design but it still had room for all those things; it’s just that all the space was taken up with equipment and apparatus.

Above the bedroom we found two rooms entirely filled with batteries, radio equipment and scientific apparatus, the purpose of which we could not divine.

At the very top we found no beacon, but instead only a series of upward-pointing aerials connected to radios and computers in weather-proof cases.

“What on Earth do you suppose he’s doing up here?” Francis asked me.

“Maybe he’s a spy.” I suggested.

“What’s he spying on?”

“I don’t know. Radio communications?”

“Look, there’s a log book.”

“Maybe we should leave it alone.” I said.

After all, Kieran was giving us water from his limited supply and I wasn’t absolutely 100% certain that he had set fire to our radio. I felt indebted to him, even if he was extremely unfriendly. I didn’t want to invade his privacy any further than we already had done, but Francis was having none of it.

“I want to know what he’s up to.” he said, and he began leafing through the book.

Presently his face took on a perplexed expression.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“Come and see.” he said.

The book contained a log of messages apparently sent and received over the past month, written entirely in tiny spidery uneven capital letters. They were both cryptic and ominous.

I will try to reproduce a selection of the received messages as best I can from memory. I saw the book only briefly, but some of them stuck in my mind.

ZAGTORUS WILL CRIPPLE THOSE WHO DISOBEY

OUR MACHINES WILL REQUIRE MOST OF THE OXYGEN

PAIN SHALL WALK THE EARTH

And so on, filling up the entire book.

The messages that Kieran had apparently broadcast were mostly pleas to come quickly, and questions over when they would arrive, which were never answered directly, but only with cryptic replies, such as: WE WILL ARRIVE WHEN THE THIRD MOON OF TSEFLOX ILLUMINATES THE SEA OF DJEBLOFUR.

Towards the end we found some messages concerning us. Kieran had asked these people, whoever they were, what to do about us. WAIT, was the ominous reply.

“What is this?” I said.

At that moment, a voice said, “So now you know.”

It was Kieran, standing there at the top of the stairs that led up to the lantern room. We hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs. He must have padded up silently with the utmost care.

We stared at him, not knowing what to say, and half-expecting him to physically attack us.

Instead, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m not angry. Actually it’s a relief. They forbade me to tell anyone else about them, you see, but I couldn’t stop you finding out, so it’s not my fault, is it?”

“Who are they?” Francis asked him.

Kieran sighed heavily, and sat down, putting his head in his hands and running his fingers through his hair.

“It’s best if I start at the beginning.” he said.

“We’re all ears.” I said.

“You see, I’m from a very wealthy family. My father is the CEO of Brickhurst Group.”

“Your father is the CEO of Brickhurst?” said Francis.

“That’s what I said.”

“I think he’s been to our house. My father owns 22% of Sandringham Corporate Global.”

“It’s a small world.” said Kieran. “Well then, if you’re father’s into that stuff too, you can imagine that my parents, probably like yours, wanted me to study business.”

“You can say that again.” said Francis.

“I had other ideas.” Kieran continued. “I’ve always been interested in strange phenomena and the unexplained. So I bought a small radio telescope and I began to study cosmic radiation. At first my father opposed me, but when my book on the search for extraterrestrial life became a bestseller, his opposition largely ceased.

“Four years ago I detected a signal, coming from the direction of Alpha Centauri. I thought I could discern signs of intelligence in the signal, but the signal was too faint to be sure. The problem was, there was too much interference from radio signals originating on Earth.

“It just so happens that my family are descended from the man who discovered this island, and this lighthouse has been in our possession for two hundred years. I persuaded my father to let me come here to analyse the signals further. This far from civilisation, there is much less interference from transmitters on Earth.

“I have new supplies brought to me every three months. I’ve been here nearly three years now.”

“Three years?” I said, astonished.

“Yes.” he said. “And in that time, I’ve made enormous progress. That’s why I’ve stayed here so long. I’ve been able to decode the signals, and even reply to them. I’m literally in a dialogue with alien beings.”

He was beginning to get quite excited, in a startling departure from his former dour demeanour.

“Hang on a minute.” said Francis. “Alpha Centauri is light years away. How can you get a reply so quickly?”

“I was puzzled too, at first.” he replied. “The aliens explained to me that they have a relay station inside our solar system. They use technologies beyond our understanding to send the signals instantly across space to their relay station, and from there the signals are transmitted to the Earth. The relay station is manned, so to speak, and they are planning to visit our planet. Soon I will meet with them in person. I will be the first human being ever to meet an extraterrestrial lifeform. They are coming here, to this very island.”

He noticed the sceptical expressions on our faces.

“Now that you know my secret anyway, I’m prepared to explain the process to you in detail. I can show you my algorithms for decoding the signals. Believe me, it sounds unbelievable but it’s all absolutely real.”

“Fascinating though this is,” I said, “we’re anxious to contact our relatives. We need to arrange to be rescued. We’re going to need to use your radio to get in touch with them.”

He shook his head, pursing his lips.

“Can’t be done, I’m afraid. You see, I only have radio equipment for communicating with the aliens. I built it myself. It works on entirely different frequencies to human radio communication and sends heavily-encoded signals.”

“Can’t you change it to contact human beings?” Francis asked him.

“No, I don’t have the equipment I’d need. But don’t worry. I’m expecting another delivery in less than two months now. They’ll be able to take you to New Zealand.”

“When are the aliens coming?” I asked.

“Not for another three or four months, I think.”

When we went back to the outhouse, I asked Francis what he made of it all.

“I suppose it’s not impossible that he’s contacted aliens.” he said.

“It’s not impossible that he’s off his rocker either.” I replied.

“We can get him to show us how it all works, in detail.”

“I don’t know anything about radio communication or encoding algorithms. Do you?”

“I know a little. Maybe we can get him to break it right down for us. If we’re stuck here for two months anyway, we may as well use the time to try to understand what may be the greatest discovery ever made.”

“And what if he turns out to be a lunatic?”

“Then we’ll humour him.”

---

For several weeks things went quite well. Kieran gradually explained to us how the radio apparatus worked, and he began to explain how he decoded the signals he received into messages written in English.

It was a complicated process and neither of us had the kind of background we needed to properly understand every step. It involved complex frequency analysis, calculus, and information theory, with much of the process handled by computer programs and some of it carried out by hand.

There were certain steps in the process that Francis wasn’t quite convinced by, and for some reason he felt we were getting on well enough with Kieran by then that he could tackle him about it. I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

We were standing in a room in the lighthouse at the time; a storage room just below the lantern room.

“What bothers me about the process,” said Francis, “is at the third step, you’re choosing which words best match the decoded signal.”

“What about it?” said Kieran.

“How can you be sure there’s any meaning in the original signal at all? It works like an inkblot test. You could just be seeing what you want to see.”

Kieran’s face immediately darkened, and I could see he was wrestling with strong emotions.

“After all the time I’ve spent patiently teaching you how the aliens communicate, you throw that in my face?” he said.

“I’m not throwing anything in your face. It’s a perfectly valid question. You’re a scientist, aren’t you? You have to be open to questions.”

“I’m a scientist, yes.” said Kieran. “And you, with zero expertise, zero relevant knowledge, think you can pick holes in my work?”

His face had flushed red, his whole body was trembling, and he looked like he could barely restrain himself from attacking us.

“Steady on.” said Kieran. “I didn’t mean to —”

“Get out.” said Francis, with controlled fury. “You’re not fit to be in my laboratory!”

Francis looked at me and I sort of shrugged.

“Get the Hell out!” shouted Kieran, pointing at the stairs that descended out of the room.

We mutely followed his directions.

When we got out at the bottom I said to Francis, “I don’t think that was a good idea.”

“What?”

“Challenging him. I don’t think he’s playing with a full deck. Do you think he’s really receiving messages from aliens, or is he just making them up?”

“Hard to say.” said Francis.

He seemed preoccupied.

“One thing I do know, as long as we’re depending on him for water, we’d better keep him sweet.”

“Yeah, fair point. I suppose we’d better try to butter him up a bit.”

---

For several days, Kieran remained holed up in his lighthouse. It was quite obvious he was sulking. We began to run low on fresh water.

“We’ll have to go and bang on the door till he comes out.” said Francis.

We went to the door of the lighthouse and banged on it, and shouted, but to no avail. Kieran didn’t appear. It was getting dark, and darkness falls quickly in those parts, so I suggested we try again the next day.

The next day we banged on the door and shouted all over again, with the same result.

“We’ll have to break the door down.” said Francis. “There’s an axe in the outhouse.”

We went and got the axe, but upon our return, Kieran opened the door.

“I was sleeping.” he said. “Come in.”

We followed him up to his living quarters. He seemed to have reverted, in large part, to his earlier surliness.

“We just need some more water.” I said.

“No problem.” he replied. “You can fill up your containers. Come and have a drink with me first.”

Never before had he suggested a drink. The only thing he talked about was aliens, and he seemed happier doing that around his equipment. Still, we needed to be on good terms with him so we were ready to roll with whatever he suggested.

“I have whisky, gin and tonic, or a middling Vernaccia di San Gimignano.” he said.

“What is that, wine?” said Francis.

“Exactly.” he said.

“Let’s have a glass of that then, shall we?” I said.

It was only around ten in the morning and the whole thing seemed weird, but we weren’t about to annoy him any further. Kieran seemed like he understood aliens better than human beings, and we appreciated that he was at least making an effort, although his speech was strangely stilted and he was throwing odd, darting sideways glances at us.

He poured the wine into three glasses—actual real wine glasses—continuing to look distinctly shifty while he did it, and handed two of them to us.

I was quite sure something was off, and I could see Francis shared my feelings.

Even so, Francis brought the glass to his lips. I wanted to dash the glass out of his hand but I couldn’t collect my thoughts together fast enough to take decisive action. He sipped a bit, then, to my relief, spat it out.

“What the devil is this?” he half-shouted.

“What do you mean?” said Kieran.

“You’re trying to poison us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s fine. You’re just not used to decent wines.”

Kieran drank a deep draught from his glass.

“Drink this.” said Francis, thrusting his own glass into Kieran’s face.

“You’ve already drunk from it.” he said.

“You can have mine, then.” I said.

He quickly finished the rest of his glass and said, “I’ve finished mine now. I don’t want more.”

“Enough of this.” I said to Francis. “Let’s just get our water and go.”

“OK,” said Francis. “but I want to fill our containers personally. I don’t trust him.”

The fact is that neither of us were familiar with Kieran’s obscure wines. Francis, in spite of having a wealthy family, wasn’t a big wine drinker, and I personally have never had a taste for the stuff.

I did start to wonder if we hadn’t become a little paranoid.

We filled our containers and left.

During the night I thought I heard Kieran prowling around, but it’s possible the noise was just seabirds pecking at things.

“Why would he try to poison us just because you suggested his aliens might not be real?” I said to Francis the next day, as we sat brewing coffee over the oil stove.

“He’s unhinged.” said Francis.

“We don’t really know what that wine’s supposed to taste like.”

“We should have held him down and poured it down his throat.”

“Aren’t we getting a bit carried away?”

Francis stared into the coffee, stirring it thoughtfully. We made coffee by boiling water with coffee grounds and then pouring it through a filter into mugs. It worked pretty well but it was strong and we’d got so used to it that neither of us was good for much before our first coffee in the morning.

“Maybe.” he said. “Maybe not.”

He filled up my mug and I blew on the dark brew and sipped it.

“I thought I heard someone prowling around in the night.”

Francis had raised his own mug to his lips. He stopped.

“How do we know he hasn’t poisoned our water?” he said. “Or our coffee?”

“It tastes all right.” I said.

He sniffed it suspiciously, then continued to drink.

“Seriously, we’re getting paranoid.” I said. “He’s an oddball but he’s not dangerous.”

It turned out I was wrong.

That night we ate noodles from our supplies and went to sleep still discussing Kieran and his odd behaviour.

I awoke around four in the morning to find myself surrounded by flames. Francis jumped up, screaming. His leg was on fire. I wrapped a blanket around his leg, which put the flames out, and dragged him outside.

There was a half-moon, and we were just in time to see the dim form of Kieran retreating into the lighthouse. Behind us, fire engulfed the shed where we had been sleeping.

“He tried to burn us to death!” Francis gasped.

“How’s your leg? Is it burned?”

He felt his shin.

“Not badly.” he said.

We turned to look at the flames. There was nothing to be done for the outhouse. It was made of wood, and flames were licking up to the ceiling.

“We haven’t even got an axe now.” I said, thinking of the lighthouse door.

“Yes we damn well have.” said Francis, and he darted into the burning outhouse before I could stop him.

“Don’t be an idiot!” I shouted. “It’s too dangerous!”

But he emerged seconds later wielding the axe.

“Now we have the tools we need for a proper discussion.” he said.

We trudged wearily in the dark to the lighthouse door. By then the half-moon was mostly hidden by clouds, and a brisk breeze signalled the beginning of a storm. A few spots of warm rain fell against our faces.

At the door we began shouting and hammering on the old wood. Of course he stayed silent, trying to pretend he was asleep, not knowing we’d seen him running away.

“Kieran!” Francis shouted. “This is your last warning! Come down or we’ll smash the door in.”

Still no sound.

Francis began chopping at the door. In the darkness I could see only occasional flashes of his eyes and teeth, and the dim outline of his form.

Soon we were pulling long broken strips of wood out of the door, and not long after that Francis stepped through it.

“Be careful!” I hissed at him. “He might be waiting for us in there.”

Inside, the lighthouse was completely dark. We could find our way only by feeling for the stairs. Gradually we made our way upwards.

We emerged into the lowest of the store rooms, halfway up the lighthouse, to find a brisk wind now battering the glass of the little window there with rain. We paused to catch our breath, and when a flash of lightning momentarily illuminated the inside of the room, we saw Kieran standing there pointing a shotgun at us.

We scrambled for the stairs, almost falling down them, just as a loud bang went off behind us and bullets ricocheted off the stone wall.

“He’s bloody well shooting at us!” shouted Francis, sounding as though he was barely able to believe his own words even as they emerged from his mouth.

We ran down the steps in the dark, a difficult and precarious businesses, with Kieran firing the gun at us. He got off two more shots before we stumbled through the broken remains of the door.

Outside a fierce gale was blowing, and bolts of yellow lightning streaked the horizon. We ran towards the still-blazing remains of the outhouse and got behind it.

“We can’t wait here for him to come and blow our heads off.” I said. “We’ll have to go down to the rocks and get into the sea.”

“We can’t do that.” said Francis. “The sea’ll pulverise us, if we don’t drown.”

We stepped slowly from behind around the blazing wreckage and another bolt of lightning illuminated Kieran progressing towards us, shotgun in hand. He spotted us, and fired off another round.

“Get some rocks.” I said.

“What?” said Francis.

“If we gather up some rocks we can throw them at him.”

“That’s not going to do us any good!” said Francis wildly. “He’s got a bloody shotgun!”

“We need to distract him till he runs out of bullets.” I said.

When Kieran reached the outhouse, he turned on a flashlight and began to creep round the fire towards us. We threw a volley of rocks at him and he switched the flashlight off, and fired another round.

Then for a moment, all was silent, aside from the storm raging around us.

“Listen!” said Francis.

Before I could ask him what I was supposed to be listening for, Francis had run around the fire and thrown himself on Kieran. He’d managed to catch him in the act of reloading. The two of them commenced wrestling on the ground, Francis distinctly gaining the upper hand.

I took a piece of wood and gave Kieran a huge whack on the head. He stopped struggling and his body went limp. It’s possible he was faking, but in any case, he offered us no further resistance.

We dragged him back into the lighthouse. He was conscious by the time we got there, but groggy from the blow. We made him walk up to his bedroom, keeping him covered with the gun, and there we found some rope and tied him to a chair.

“You don’t know what you’re messing with.” he said. “They will annihilate you.”

“Who?” said Francis. “Your aliens? They’re not real, my friend.”

“They’re real, and you just made them very angry. You’d better untie me so I can try to calm them down.”

“You’re staying there till we decide what to do with you.” I told him.

Then his demeanour changed and he suddenly seemed almost on the verge of tears.

“I didn’t want to hurt you.” he said. “They made me do it. They told me either I kill you or they’ll kill me. They don’t want anyone but me to know about them.”

“What absolute nonsense.” said Francis.

“Let’s go and have a look at his logbook.” I said. “I’m curious.”

We began to make our way further up the stairs.

“You don’t know what they’re like.” he shouted desperately. “They can do terrible things to you. They can get inside your mind. Unspeakable things!”

We left him there, crying softly to himself.

The storm was still raging, but we were well-insulated from it in the lighthouse. We switched on all the lights and it seemed quite pleasant in there aside from Kieran’s periodic ranting, crying and shouting.

When we opened the logbook, it told a grim and disturbing story.

The messages from the alleged aliens indicated an increasingly murderous intent, which in the past couple of days had escalated to a series of outright orders to kill us. Mixed up with that were monstrous threats concerning what would happen if Kieran failed to kill us.

“Who do you think’s sending him these messages?” I said, flicking through the book and gazing in horror at dozens of these homicidal alien instructions, mixed up with messages from Kieran pleading that we should be allowed to live.

“I don’t know.” said Francis. “Not aliens, that’s for sure.”

Eventually we decided to tie Kieran to his bed, feeling it would be inhumane to leave him on a chair all night, and we ourselves took some spare bedding and made beds for ourselves on the floor of the topmost storage room.

We awoke the following morning to find the storm had passed and the sky outside was clear blue.

“Let’s go down and see if we can make coffee.” said Francis.

We descended the steps to Kieran’s bedroom and found, to our dismay, that he had somehow got loose during the night. There was no sign of him.

“We’ll have to search all the rooms carefully.” I said. “He can’t have gone far. Good job we kept the gun up with us.”

We retrieved the gun and cautiously searched every floor, but Kieran clearly wasn’t in the lighthouse.

Then we went outside. There was no sign of him out there either.

“He must be hiding on the other side of what’s left of the outhouse.” said Francis. “Let’s go and have a look.”

“Where did you leave the axe?” I asked him.

We looked back at the door.

“I think I left it inside the doorway.” he said.

“It’s not there now. He must have taken it.”

“Not a problem. We’ve got this.”

He pulled back the safety catch on the shotgun.

“Is it loaded?”

“You bet it is.”

We walked slowly over to the wreckage of the outhouse, Francis aiming the gun, ready to finish Kieran off at a moment’s notice. The outhouse was nothing but a smouldering black ruin. Doubtless it would have been mere ashes had it not been for the storm, but instead its charred shell remained standing, barely.

Kieran had to be hiding behind it. There was nowhere else for him to go, unless he was crouching by the rocks at the far end of the island.

Accordingly we slowed our pace and rounded it at a wide angle.

When he leapt out wielding the axe above his head, it wasn’t entirely a surprise, but it still made me jump.

He ran at Francis, screaming, and Francis pulled the trigger, but the gun only made a dull clicking sound and nothing else happened. He tried to jump out of the way, but the axe skimmed his shoulder, taking a chunk of clothing and flesh with it.

He shouted in pain and dropped the gun. Kieran raised the axe again. I picked up the gun and aimed it at him, and pulled the trigger frantically, but it was absolutely useless. Something had jammed or gone wrong inside it, and I had no idea what. I put the safety catch back on and swung the stock at Kieran, holding it by the barrel. It contacted his face, giving Francis enough time to scramble backwards, and then Kieran came at me with the axe. I jumped back as it skimmed the air in front of me. Francis shouted “Run!” and we both turned and fled.

Francis seemed to be absolutely covered in blood and he wasn’t too fast on his feet, and at first Kieran went for him, but I hurled some rocks at him and managed to get him to come after me instead. At least I wasn’t wounded.

For about an hour we ran around the island with Kieran tirelessly trying to kill us, locked in a kind of stalemate. At times we all sat, resting, while Kieran taunted us from a distance. We threw rocks at him and we tried to get the rifle to work, without success. Francis and I tried to get to the lighthouse but we couldn’t manage it. He always cut us off. All the while Francis was growing paler and weaker, and it was getting harder and harder to keep Kieran from getting at him with the axe. I could see that if things continued as they were, it was only a matter of time before he stuck the axe in Francis’s head.

I was out of ideas and almost out of hope, exhausted, Francis bravely telling me to save myself and get to the lighthouse, when the sound of boat engines drew my attention and I spotted a boat approaching in the distance; quite a large boat.

When it got within a few hundred meters, three men rowed over to us in an inflatable dinghy.

One of the men appeared very serious and somewhat sombre, with grey hair, and the other two were younger and looked like they meant business.

“Kieran!” shouted the older man, as they clambered towards us over the rocks. “Drop the axe! Drop it, son!”

Instead of dropping it, Kieran ran at them with an inhuman cry.

Yet Kieran proved no match for the two younger men, even with an axe, and they wrestled him to the ground with surprising ease.

The older man looked at Francis and I with a grave expression.

“I’m so sorry.” he said to me, as Francis sunk to the ground clutching his shoulder. “I’ll see to it that your friend gets medical attention immediately.”

“Who are you?” I asked him, bewildered.

“Alastair Wyndham.” he replied, extending his hand. “I’m Kieran’s father.”

---

On the voyage to New Zealand, Wyndham explained everything to us. Kieran had suffered some sort of breakdown four years previously while on holiday with his family in Namibia, and had attacked and killed a local man there. Wyndham had decided to smuggle Kieran out of Namibia, afraid that, in spite of Kieran’s obviously psychotic mental condition and need for psychiatric treatment, the Namibian justice system would inflict a heavy penalty.

They took him to a boat off the coast, and they arranged a consultation with a top psychiatrist in Egypt, who felt that Kieran’s derangement had been only temporary, since by then Kieran was again more or less in his right mind, except that he was understandably distraught about the fact that he had killed someone. The psychiatrist also felt that a recurrence of the psychosis was quite likely.

For a year they had kept Kieran out of the hands of the authorities, afraid to return to Britain in case Namibia had him extradited. Kieran had evinced a growing interest in scanning the airwaves for alien communications: a hobby which, while not altogether beyond the pale, did not seem to bode well for his future mental stability.

In the end they had hit upon the solution of marooning Kieran on Stannage Island; a solution with which Kieran had expressed a surprising degree of contentment. Kieran was in fact able to communicate with his family via his radio, a fact which he had kept from us, but a month earlier he had begun to drop his daily sessions on the radio with them, inventing all kinds of excuses.

Then, a week before setting fire to the outhouse, he had ceased contact altogether, until finally they had sent out a boat, fearing the worst, and prepared for all eventualities.

---

Fortunately they were able to patch Francis up well enough to keep him going till we arrived in New Zealand, where he was given a skin graft, and he’s since fully recovered.

I don’t believe Kieran ever received any messages from aliens. He left enough space in his methodology for his subconscious desires to determine the end results; a common tactic of pseudoscientists and dubious researchers of all kinds. Like so many others before him, he had deceived himself first and foremost. The messages he received were from nowhere other than his own subconscious.

I hope he is now receiving proper treatment, but since his father paid us well to keep our mouth’s shut, I will decline to speculate further on his current whereabouts.