The Lost Grey – A Tale of Interspecies Redemption #1

PART 1. Adrien Kelsey lives a remote existence. But then one night, something made him not alone.

PART 1

Kelsey

The sound of beating helicopter rotors stirred Dr. Adrien Kelsey from his ruminations. A search light illuminated the land around his remote cottage and shone briefly into his living room.

He swore to himself, brushing the cigarette ash from his lap.

His two dogs, which had been sleeping quietly beside him, sprang into life. Bobby, a black mongrel-collie, bounded onto the sofa to get a better view out of the window. His bark made him sound larger than he was. Maggie, a much older female, lifted her head from the carpet and let out a long growl punctuated by little barks.

Kelsey managed to stand and move unsteadily toward the window next to Bobby. They peered out together, but the helicopter was already moving off, its search light sweeping out arcs across the moorland.

Dr. Adrien Kelsey, one time Associate Professor in Astrophysics, sank back into his chair and reached for the bottle. He emptied the contents into his glass and returned to where he had left off… how the wheels had come off his former life.

Academia was a world he no longer recognised. It was a world which no longer wanted him either.

In the final years, the idea of remoteness had seemed so enticing. Somewhere far away, he recalled with dark amusement, from useless meetings, bureaucracy, and the ideologies of people. A distant asteroid for which the sun would be no more than a bright star. An icy world of glorious solitude far removed from all that was the madness of the inner solar system.

That’s where he had wanted to be. It had been the thing he had sought.

The west coast of Scotland was where he had existed for the past three years or so. It had seemed like the next best thing, but a little more realistic.

There were big plans, of course. There were a few books he was going to write, research he was going to continue in some remote capacity and various rustic projects. But all that had fallen away or amounted to nothing. He had drifted into a way of being for which time held no meaning. It was one in which days could pass without distinction between light and dark.

His dogs stared intently at him, their chins resting on the carpet.

They had got Maggie as a pup when his children were young. That was fifteen years ago now. He had always been the one to look after her, he remembered. His mind drifted back to the divorce, bitter rows and the false allegations made in court. His children had, he belatedly realised, grown up despising him while he had been oblivious.

He had discovered Bobby sleeping in the shed when he had moved into the property. He was a stray who had run away from travellers in the area at the time.

First Night

The cigarette burned in the ashtray, dropping its unsmoked ash, as Kelsey drifted into unconsciousness.

Hours passed.

How many, he could not be sure, when he stirred once more into a dream in which he was awake. He was aware of a presence before him while being pinned in his chair. He fought to move, but could not.

He heard a moan from somewhere – a long low moan gave out, not by him, but by his body.

Fear coursed through every fibre of his being, every atom, every synapse. His whole body screamed, entombed in a state of paralysis. His eyelids seemed weighted, and he realised he was seeing without them. Cortical vision. This was a strange kind of awareness. This was a terrifying kind of awareness. Adrenaline pricked every nerve. Fear.

His eyelids obeyed him and were open. Breath now. His eyes were open!

In the gloom, illuminated only by the dim lamp in the far corner, was a silhouetted form. It was perhaps six feet away, and stood a little over four feet tall. Two large eyes, with the quality of black ink, peered into him.

It stood, looking. Observing.

With a mind still remote and sluggish, Kelsey managed to respond. He pushed his voice out through gritted teeth, “What the fuck are you?”

He passed out.

The autumn sun was streaming in through the curtains when he awoke next. He began to move and clumsily knocked the empty bottle off the table next to him. He looked with disgust as it rolled several feet across the floor.

His head pounded and his mouth felt like he had swallowed the contents of the ashtray on the table. He made himself stand up. The memory of the night had not yet returned, but would shortly.

The dogs would need letting out, he thought. They were not here with him, he also realised.

He called them: “Maggie! Bobby!”

There would normally be the clatter of paws on hard surfaces from other rooms in the house. There was only silence.

Room after room he searched, his panic washing away the remnants of sleep. He found them in the kitchen which, being an extension to the original dwelling, was the furthest room away.

Maggie, an old Labrador, lay on her side in a puddle of urine.

“Oh no!” he groaned, falling to his knees beside her.

He placed his hands on her. She was cold, but her eyes were still open. He stroked her softly for a few moments. As he did so, events from the night came back – the helicopter, the thing with the inky-black eyes.

“Bobby!” Where’s Bobby?

He looked up and around.

Bobby had backed himself into the far corner, under the kitchen table.

Shuffling over toward him on his knees, Kelsey took hold of his fur, pulled him in and instinctively wrapped him in his arms. The dog was shaking violently, but growled quietly at the door to the hallway, as if to let Kelsey know that which was here is here still.

“Brave dog,” he said to him over and over, stroking his head.

It was some minutes, perhaps longer, before he felt ready to leave Bobby.

He trod silently down the hallway in a state of dissociation. There was no fear this time. Reality had receded into the distance for him.

The room at the end of the hall had once been a parlour. It was a room Kelsey did not use, except as a dumping ground for the possessions of his former life he had abandoned unpacked. Boxes lay untouched from the day he had moved in. It was dark in there. Old heavy curtains had never been opened.

The door, once closed, lay slightly ajar now.

Kelsey coldly pushed it wide.

There, in the shadows, it stood.

It gave a slight tilt of its head, as if to acknowledge his presence, as the door struck back against the wall. Again, it observed him with large black eyes, but Kelsey looked right back.

Minutes passed, neither of them moving.

“You killed my dog,” he said eventually in the distant tone of unprocessed loss.

There was a reply, but one without words. Kelsey neither understood nor cared.

“I’m going to take care of my dog now,” he said without using words either, but not realising it. “You do whatever it is you came to do.”

Interlude From Reality

Manhandling the body of a large dog is not easy even for a young man, which Kelsey was not. Nevertheless, dislocated from reality, he walked out into the daylight with Maggie in his arms and his other dog clinging to his heels. His cottage was remote and, with his nearest neighbours being more than five miles away, it remained one of few places free of eyes and surveillance. After all, it had been why he had chosen it.

Now, under the control of some primaeval autopilot still possessed by human beings, he began to dig a grave for his dog. He gave no thought to that which remained inside. Every muscle his body possessed ached, but Kelsey simply did not care. He used a pick to get through the stony ground and, in the end, reached a depth of only three and a half feet. It had taken him the entire afternoon. It was enough.

As the sun began to set below the coastal cliffs several miles distant, Maggie was finally covered over with stone and earth.

He stayed with Bobby into the evening, before returning indoors.

Over the next few days, life continued surreally on but kept its distance from reality. Kelsey had pulled the door to the room shut at some point. He did not look in. The creature was simply left there.

The hours passed as he sat in his chair, unmoving, with his mind switched off or asleep. The wall, it seemed, held a special quality that eased the passage of time. The hours turned into a day, then two and then three.

There was no sound or movement from the room.

He rose from the chair only to do the most basic tasks. He didn’t eat, but took food out to his dog. At night, Bobby slept in the shed, but lay beside Maggie in the day.

It was on the fourth day that there was a change in things. It was if there had been a power cut, but now with the sudden restoration of electricity, Kelsey’s mind powered up and started a reboot sequence.

His property was fed by mains electricity, but had oil fired heating and a septic tank. One would need filling and other emptying, he thought absent-mindedly. He should place orders for them before winter. There was a repair to the guttering that needed doing. And the window frames – where they weathered from the west – needed repainting.

Then he wondered why it had not occurred to him to contact anyone about the thing in the room. The authorities perhaps? At first, the question seemed like a trivial one, like he was asking himself why he hadn’t been out to the supermarket or refilled his car.

But then enormity began to yawn.

The creature had been familiar to Kelsey in the sense of popular science fiction. The stereotype of “little green men” had been supplanted by that of the “Grey” over recent decades.

What am I meant to do?, he asked himself, bitterly. Upload a fucking video to Youtube?

The web was awash with fake CGI content anyway.

Who would believe it?

Even if the police, or whoever came, then what? He had long since lost all trust in the establishment.

Would he be made to simply disappear?

That would be easy for them, he figured, given how cut off he was now.

Without Words

He found the creature sitting on an unpacked cardboard box, one of many he had abandoned. It had been sitting there all this time, with its head down, not moving. It lifted it now to look silently up as the door swung slowly open a second time.

He took several steps into the room, and simply stood for a time.

It peered at him from behind those eyes. He thought he saw it blink once, but wasn’t sure.

He took two more steps and stopped again. It’s been here for several days, he rationalised.

The skin was smooth, and it didn’t seem to be wearing clothing. He noticed small things – it had no apparent genitalia. Three fingers and a thumb on each hand, with only two toes on the feet. It didn’t appear to be carrying any devices.

Kelsey closed the final gap.

He didn’t say it, but thought it out loud: “Can I touch you?”

Strange, how he had just known to do that – how he had known that he didn’t have to actually speak to it.

There was an answer of some kind, but one which cannot easily be explained, for it was an answer of a different kind. It’s reply hadn’t been “yes” or “no”, but something else. Indifference? Rather, the answer lay on a line in an orthogonal direction unknown.

Again, there had been no words.

It wasn’t a “no”, Kelsey concluded after a few moments.

In the gloom, with the light from the doorway, he bent down and reached forward. A first fingertip made contact with the face below the eye. He ran his hand across its skin.

Its nose was flat – there was no nose – but there were nostrils. He made out that there was a discharge of what appeared to be mucus from each.

That was enough, and he pulled back. He retraced his steps in a backward motion to the door.

Out in the open air, he sat with his dog while he processed the nature of things. The sky was overcast, but there were occasional patches of blue. Strong winds caused the clouds to break, casting fast moving shadows across the land. His dog had been a stray and was used to the outdoors. Kelsey hugged himself to keep warm.

Academia had not been the place in which entertain unconventional thinking. Theories concerning exo-biospheres, microbes and abstract possibilities of life were safe so long as they did not descend into fantasies of actual aliens in flying saucers.

All that was part of another life and another time. Irrelevant in the here and now, he thought.

Here it was now. And why was it here?

It surely hadn’t come simply to kill his dog and then hole itself up in his storeroom for no reason. Maggie had been old, he knew. It was likely that she had literally been scared to death.

“I didn’t know what else,” he vocalised as he entered the room again, sometime later. He moved slowly and placed a glass of water in the vicinity of the Grey. His words, however, continued dryly on in his mind – Cornflakes perhaps? What about a bacon butty?

The realisation struck immediately that it had read that too. There was no reply, except one which simply let him know that it had understood.

Just how much did it know from him?

The Grey did indeed consume the water. He never saw it drink, but noted the level as it went down in small quantities between visits. He refilled it.

Kelsey had questions now which quickly turned into a flood. The alien understood them, but gave little in a way he could make sense of. It did, however, get better at replying in the affirmative or negative, but only to certain queries.

Water was OK. It didn’t want food. The dark was better.

There was nothing about why it was here but, "no,” it did not wish to leave the room.

It was as if, Kelsey wondered, its thoughts were highly compressed, comprising multiple concepts simultaneously expressed as tightly wound packages that could not be fathomed. In communicating with him, it had to unpack things and lay them out linearly for him.

When not engaging him, the Grey remained motionless with its head down. Kelsey wondered whether it was sleeping or just conserving energy.

Communication seemed to exhaust it.

It had no visible orifices, except in the head. It had no anus or urinary tract. It produced no waste.

Kelsey’s attention was drawn frequently to its mouth. It lacked teeth or a tongue, but there was a mandible. The lips were thin, and the mouth had an almost human quality to it. Too human, perhaps, for a creature which had presumably evolved entirely independently from us.

The mucus discharge seemed to get worse. The Grey allowed him to wipe it, but didn’t have any inclination to do it itself. He wondered whether the substance should be analysed somehow. Biology wasn’t his field, and he realised that he didn’t care about it anyway. He dropped the idea.

In an early experiment, he tried taking his laptop into the room. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting – perhaps the alien might point to a star system, or they’d communicate using mathematics or something. It showed no willingness to engage, and simply ignored him. The idea suddenly seemed ridiculous and he retreated, leaving it alone for a time.

Later, it told him that it did not wish for technology. With effort, it laid things out in human digestible form, or one could say that it explained.

It didn’t think human technology was primitive. It simply disliked all technology. He sensed a qualia resembling that of disgust.

He wanted to know whether more Greys would come to the house.

“No more Greys will come.”

It would not elaborate more on this, but told him: No, it would not harm Bobby. Maggie was regretted. Not intentional.

In the meantime, Kelsey spent more time with his remaining dog. He cleaned the house and poured his stock of alcohol down the drain which he no longer felt any inclination to touch. He cut his hair with trimmers, and shaved off the beard that had grown over the past year or so.

He found he could grieve over Maggie now.

Bobby still would not enter the house. In response, Kelsey took him on frequent walks to the coast. He tried reaching the alien when outdoors, but could not. The effect seemed to attenuate with distance.

Communication was becoming easier, but it was clear that it was holding some things back. He wasn’t certain whether this was deliberate, or whether it simply took too much effort. Nevertheless, it would answer some questions freely. Answers weren’t in words, but in thoughts which could now be understood as words.

He had been wondering just how much of his mind the Grey could actually read. This was when he discovered that it had a sense of humour.

“My head is crawling with broken glass, and I’m not sure I want you in there,” he had told it.

It let him know that what was in his head was OK, but it was amused by the metaphor – especially how he had mixed it. It liked how humans used metaphors.

“How do Grey’s use metaphors?”

“With more precision.”

It never asked questions of him. It seemed that there was nothing it needed to ask or wanted of him, save a place just to be.

First Disclosure

By the end of the second week, things had developed into question and answer sessions on a range of topics. Many questions yielded nothing, with others receiving only partial responses.

“Travel is not done how you think.”

“You fold space-time?”

“Not as you would imagine.”

“How so?”

The line went dead.

The following day, Kelsey came back to a subject which troubled him. Beside the small quantities of water, it consumed nothing.

“Do you eat?”

The Grey did not reply.

“Is there anything here that you need? Anything I could get you?”

It was a question asked previously, but with no answer. There was a long pause, but then it gave one this time.

“Not necessary. Time here is limited.”

There was a moment of telepathic silence. Before Kelsey could respond, the moment was interrupted.

Bobby had entered the house. He was standing now in the hallway, at the door, with the fur on his back upright. He snarled viciously with fangs drawn to their full extent.

The Grey drooped.

Taking hold of him by the fur of his neck, Kelsey dragged the dog down the hallway. Bobby became frenzied, and twisted and turned violently in his grip. He had no collar but, being a young dog, still had loose skin around his neck to which Kelsey held. The dog pushed himself upright on his back legs against the direction he was being pulled and almost escaped the grip.

There was a precarious moment when Kelsey had to release a hand in order to open the door.

Finally, with Bobby on the outside, he stood resting his forehead against it from the inside. The dog continued to bark and scratch frantically. Eventually things subsided.

The Grey did not lift its head as when Kelsey returned to the room.

“I’m sorry,” he said to it, but non-vocally.

It responded. There were a number of things he now just knew from it.

The Grey was one of a team deposited in the vicinity on the first night. The nature of their mission was not fully expressed, but it indicated that it wasn’t something Kelsey would regard as being good. The helicopter was military, and their activity had been interrupted. This, however, was not a problem. Evasion of human technology was trivial. Others had left.

“But won’t they come back for you?”

The information dump had exhausted it, but it answered again after a few moments.

“No. Greys will not come back for me.”

“But why would your people allow you to fall into human hands?”

“Not important,” it replied. “Human governments have many Greys in possession.”

The alien remained motionless as Kelsey took all that in. He could hear Bobby barking outside.

“What did you mean when you said time here is limited?”

Then suddenly he understood that too. Suddenly he knew – this Grey had intentionally marooned itself and was expecting to go nowhere.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2

Andy Thomas is a programmer, software author and writer in the north of England. He is interested in the philosophical implications of science, the nature of nature, and the things in life which hold ‘value’.

© Andrew Thomas, 2024