The Uninvited by Clive Harold

Author:Clive Harold
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: WordMean Publishing
Published: 2015-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

November 12th, 1977 Pauline turned the old car slowly off the minor road and on to the dusty track that led up to the farm, and sighed to herself. It had already been a busy morning but she had an even busier day ahead. Earlier that morning she'd had to drive the 8 miles into Milford Haven to collect Tina and her parents. After that there had been a mammoth load of shopping to do, and now there was lunch for nine people to be cooked. She always looked forward to having the whole family over for the day, but cooking for them all at one sitting was a bit of an ordeal.

'What's for lunch, Mum?' Tina - sitting next to her in the passenger seat - must have been reading her thoughts and was grinning, ear to ear. Trust her to be thinking of her stomach again. She reached over and gave her eldest daughter a playful poke in the ribs: 'Whatever you get, my girl, whatever you get!'

She could hear her parents chuckling in the back of the car. They knew, all too well, about Tina's appetite, having had to cater to it for the 3 years that Tina had lived with them. Still, she thought, it was nice to have them all together again as a family it seemed to happen all too rarely these days, particularly since all the strange things had been happening at the farm. It was only now - after a few weeks of comparative calm both at the farm and in the whole area - that Tina, and her parents, had felt relaxed enough to come visiting again. The atmosphere around the farm had, in fact, lost much of its tenseness recently, thank God, due mainly to the fact that nobody had been much to what had gone before; even Billy was noticeably less moody than he had been, though she could tell he was still deeply disturbed over the inexplicable disappearances of the herd and their strange behaviour. She glanced at her mum in the rear view mirror and studied her nervous expression for a moment. Poor mum. She was normally such an extrovert, bumptious character, who always got the upper hand until now. It had taken father all his powers of persuasion to get her to venture to the farm again and he must have found it difficult, particularly as he was a far more nervous, introverted character than she, and wasn't even sure he wanted to come in the first place.

'All right, Mum?' she asked.

No answer. Pauline glanced at the rear view mirror for second time, but her mother wasn't in view. 'Mum?' She glanced over her shoulder. Her mum - sitting in the back of the car on the passenger side to her left, clearly hadn't heard her. Her face pressed up close against the window, she was straining her neck to look something.

'Mum, you all right?' 'Yes, love, I'm fine,' she eventually heard her mother reply, her voice soft, hesitant and lacking in conviction.

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