Chapter Text
Prologue
1974, and the village was only beginning to make concessions to the modern age. Tucked high along England’s north coast, none of the settlement’s brick and thatch cottages were under a century old. The only road in was a dirt track, which, until the past few decades, had only seen carts, horses, feet, and sheep.
But things were changing — faster now. Tractors had supplanted the proud draft horses of the old days, trucks were replacing carts, and televisions (colour!) and telephones were stacked in a satisfied display at the front of the general store.
It was to this village, which is not important to this story, except as a beginning, that a darkened star fell.
It made its landing (crash) on New Year’s Eve, four minutes after midnight, blazing through the newborn year’s sky, cutting the atmosphere with a thin whistle that competed with the wind and the crash of waves against the nearby coast. A long borealis line of colour marked its path against the night.
Most of the villagers were afraid, thinking the world was coming to an end: More than one member of a group exiting a late church service dropped to their knees in prayer. A group of teens celebrating in the bush thought it was an atom bomb sent by the Russians and ran to their homes to duck and cover. One old man, a veteran and the village doctor (he should have retired decades past, but who would take his place?), had no fear left in him, but shed a tear at the beauty of the shimmering heavens and was supremely grateful that he had lived to see such a sight.
*
Three days later the world had not ended. The group of teens who had run in fear tried to save face by claiming that the falling star had been a bomb, but it had failed to explode due to a faulty detonator. Other theories abounded. In the small community any new event was always mulled over, chewed, and gossiped into a thousand fragments.
Some thought it was a good omen for the coming year, others still insisted it was a sign of impending doom. None of them took their theories seriously, and life went on with its steady rhythm of work and sleep. A search for the remains of the strange object was called off because of a severe snowstorm.
A week later, a government man came from London to explain that the phenomena had been caused by the deteriorating orbit of a Russian spy satellite. The group of teens was delighted with the explanation and told the man that they had known it was the Russians all along. The man sarcastically congratulated them.
The man, who was dressed completely in black and had a grey-touched goatee, staged a search to find the ‘satellite’ using an impressive looking tool that vaguely resembled a metal detector. He found nothing — Perhaps because of the deep snow, or perhaps because there was nothing to find. He left in a fuming bad temper.
A few days after the government man left, another, quite different, stranger came to the village.
The stranger appeared on the village outskirts looking like a mouse which had been toyed with by a particularly sadistic cat and left to rot. The schoolteacher who found him threw up once she realised she was looking at a living man and not a pile of ground meat. The stranger was brought to the old doctor, who fought valiantly to save him, but the injuries and burns were too intense. The stranger’s body roared with infection. Mutilated limbs were stretched tight with pus, so that the cracking black burned skin above ripped under the pressure. The stranger had no face; it had been burned off with the rest of his body.
Not since his war days had the doctor seen such devastation. At that time the body had belong to a friend, and it was perhaps that memory which caused the doctor to fight so hard to save the stranger. Perhaps it was the strange air which surrounded the dying man; duty, remorse, and… somehow… peace, which touched the doctor and made him feel that he was safe, that his village — his whole world now — and the universe beyond it, even to the furthest star, were safe, and all of his hard fought battles and losses of the past had been worth it. When the doctor touched the man’s scarred and rotting chest he felt two distinct heartbeats thudding in a steady, desperate bid for life.
The doctor, though he told no one, believed his patient to be an angel who had rode the falling star from the heavens to save the world from further war and destruction.
The group of teens were convinced he was a Russian survivor from the crashed satellite.
Whoever he was, the stranger died just under fourteen hours after being found.