Is this the first of the spiders from Mars?

Sep 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The earth-shaking spider has vanished, but does the future hold an even more terrifying surprise? David Charters weaves a story

IT WAS September 22, 2088, a date the future generations may care to remember – if there are any future generations, that is.

But let’s not rush ahead of ourselves. As is the case with all stories, we should start at the beginning, not knowing what the ending will bring . . .

Winter brooded in the early morning sky of September 3 – great sacks of rain in bruised shades of grey, blocking out the distant blue, into which romantics once stared, wonder-ing what could hang beyond.

“I’m too old for such idle fancies now,” I whispered to myself, raising my collar, as a raindrop spread darkly on the pavement.

“Hmm!” I added, before smiling at some words, which had been sucked up from deep in my memory.

“All good things come from Heaven, you know,” the old Sunday school spinster had told us, between hymns, in our days of short pants and sandals, when Dan Dare of The Eagle comic was the pilot of the future and his enemy was the green-skinned, frog-eyed Mighty Mekon of Mekonta.

We were in the Cold War then and that had provoked the Space Race. Who was going to get to the moon first? Children talked about invasions and aliens and monsters – between sucks on their gobstoppers.

And the spinster? Well, she had lived out her life in piety, fervently hoping for a later reward. We repeated her words and laughed whenever the birds opened their bowels. “All good things come from Heaven.”

It seems silly now, but we believed then that mysterious creatures, living deep in the oceans, or in the sky, or skulking in pods, or in the centre of the Earth, would appear among us one day. “We come in peace,” they would say, in perfect English, with ironic smiles.

But people don’t think like that any more. We are so rational these days, so unromantic.

My own thoughts were very much on terra firma that morning. A miserable summer was passing. The children were just back at school, starting the old routine of Hallowe’en, Bonfire Night, Christmas, New Year. I’d seen it all before.

Nothing much on Earth could surprise me now, or so I thought, as I stepped towards the cafe of marble, plasterwork and glass, where the percolators hiss and the heels of waitresses clop on the grand floor.

There, already, was my friend, known as the Philosopher to those with keen ears for wit and wisdom – sitting straight on a leather chair, drumming his fingers on its brass buttons.

I took my seat opposite and he passed me the morning paper, over our steaming pot of coffee.

Wars, football deals, a crash in the money markets, useless executives given massive compensation for leaving their jobs, useful people on the breadline, global warming, the dull antics of silly celebrities. “You couldn’t make it up,” he said.

“Yes, how can we tell where truth ends and fiction begins? It’s all a jumble,” I said.

But still the gulls bickered outside. Back in the suburbs, apples hung heavy in the snoozing orchards. The spiders of the night had been weaving their cities in the woods and dew sparkled on the webs. Silence held the meadows.

And down on the Liverpool waterfront, the woozy old tramp stirred on his bench. He had suffered another bad dream. It seemed so real. This huge . . . Ah well, it was probably just the fortified red wine and whisky. Sometimes it gave him hallucinations. But the ground had trembled, hadn’t it?

“It has become impossible to tell what is real and not real,” agreed the Philosopher, spooning sugar into his coffee in that grand old cafe.

By then, the business life of the city was beginning. People fanned in all directions from the mouths of the underground railway stations. Fruit was laid on the barrows. Secretaries pandered to their bosses in the corridors.

THE weary old priest bowed before his church’s mighty altar, before pausing at a table to light a candle, just a little candle, and then he gazed through the window, with its stained suffering, to the sullen sky and he wondered, again.

“Oh God, rid me of that doubt!”

“Father,” said the stooped cleaner, whose faith was greater than his. “Father, where have you put the mop?

“You know,” she continued, as he retrieved the mop from the sacristy. “You know, when I woke this morning, there were still stars in the sky. Father, I know this sounds daft, but how do they stay there? Why don’t they fall to Earth?”

“God love you, it is not for us to enquire into business of the Almighty,” said the priest, but tears clouded the pale blue of his eyes and he looked away, checking in his breast pocket for the photograph of his childhood friend, the little girl he had always loved. Now she was a grandmother, but to him she would be forever young.