Janus the Arrival (The Janus Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

   
Later, having recovered full control
of their senses, they gradually regained the ability to speak to each other.
This was where it became apparent that although they’d both been subjected to
separate ordeals, their
abductors had somehow
managed to implant some form of information into their memories during that
time. Everything they needed to know seemed to be right there for them to pick
and choose as they wished.

    They talked long
into the middle of the next day, completely ignoring the phone whenever it rang
in the distance. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that they’d obviously
been selected by these creatures due to their history of infertility problems.
This whole thing had been carried out in order for them to become parents to a
being from another planet. As they spoke more openly about things, further
details started coming through to them, and it was more than clear that Emma
would soon be about to confirm she was pregnant. She and John would bring
him
up as a normal human baby. This would be managed without a word to anyone and
further instructions implanted into their brains would appear in their
thoughts, as and when required. They knew they both faced periods of good and
bad times in the not too distant future, but Emma and John agreed that it would
be well worth the sacrifice. Their need for a child had been so great, that
they’d have gladly sold their souls to the devil to get what they’d wanted,
regardless of what anyone else would have thought.

The usual comings and goings of the
maternity ward continued, but Emma was far too busy gazing into the cot beside
her to even notice. It was the baby’s eyes. She just couldn’t get over how
fascinating they were. Although they looked all loving and innocent, there were
definitely many instances when they appeared to dismiss her totally. This
essentially left the new mother with a hurtful feeling of rejection.

    The nurses, as
with so many other hospitals, were completely rushed off their feet. Yet Emma
was still on a high from it all, apart from having terrible trouble sleeping at
night. This, combined with her hatred of hospital food, was causing her to
become rather restless at times. Therefore, she was completely overjoyed, when
the staff nurse appeared and informed her, that she’d been given the all clear
to return home the next day, following a couple of minor checks that needed to
be carried out as a precautionary measure.

    The next morning
John arrived at the door to the ward carrying a brand new baby seat for the
car. Once the last bits of paperwork had been done and the ward sister was
wholly satisfied, the family bid farewell to the nurses who’d gathered round to
take one last look at baby Janus. Twenty five minutes later, and
completely unable to take in the existence of the sleeping youngster, who
graced the passenger seat during the journey, they eventually entered their
Wimbledon home before passing a kiss to each other. 

   ‘At long last we’re
finally the complete family we’d always hoped we’d be.’ Emma sighed with
relief.

As requested, Harley Street doctors
had been notified of the outcome by the hospital. On further investigation of
the Storm’s scans and historical records however, they were more than amazed at
the final results that appeared to be showing up. Any previous traces of the
tubal damage had miraculously disappeared, and it was almost as if the original
problem had never existed in the first place. The whole thing was deemed rather
odd and held no rational explanation from a medical point of view. It was a total
mystery to all concerned, and very soon this became what could only be
prescribed as headline news in the papers, along with the latest editions of
medical journals.

As anticipated, the Storms had been
contacted, and once the required arrangements had been put in place, the
doctors carried out a whole series of further checks. These seemed to drag on
forever, but after a while, the media attention thankfully began to calm down.
This made a lot of difference, and essentially allowed John and Emma to carry
on leading what they hoped would turn out to be a fairly normal life with their
newborn
baby.                                                                          

    The expected
stream of visitors ensued, just as they’d been warned, and the majority
commented on how advanced Janus seemed to be for his age.
  

   
Another thing they never failed to mention
was how captivating his eyes appeared to be. The deep blue gaze was
extraordinarily mesmerising in all honesty, yet most of these people felt very
unsettled, having felt as though the child somehow knew what they were
thinking. It was almost as if he could read their minds at times. As time
progressed however, this was exactly the sort of thing that would separate him
from others throughout his life. His parents tried their hardest to treat Janus
as a normal child as much as possible. Yet they looked to keep the truth to
themselves, rarely discussing the events of that bizarre night earlier in the
year.

The first few
years simply flew by, and before they even knew it, Janus had already reached
his fifth year at the local primary school.

   
Gill Moxon absolutely adored the pupils she’d taken on that year, and they
seemed to love her in return. However, it wasn’t too far into the first term
that she started to worry about one of the boys called Janus Storm. He’d proved
to be extremely receptive to her teachings, which was great news, but his level
of intelligence appeared to be well above that of the other children in the
class.
 

   
Therefore, she automatically assumed that
he’d inherited this brains from his mother and father, or at least that was the
case up until the time she first met them face to face at a parents evening.
This was where her suspicions were initially aroused. Emma and John seemed to
be very polite, caring parents. However, there was something very unusual in
the way they talked about their son, which didn’t quite add up to her way of
thinking. Gill had always been a fairly good judge of character during such
situations, and she’d therefore started to wonder if Janus could possibly have
been adopted by the two of them. Therefore, in order to gain the answer,
without trying to offend them in any way, she’d casually asked the couple some
rather personal questions, whilst being very careful about not over stepping
the mark. From the answers she’d received, and having fully analysed the
questions she’d asked in the first place, Gill Moxon firmly concluded that the
boy was certainly not their natural child.

During the next
day few days, Gill studied Janus even closer than would usually be necessary
and she even watched him out of the window as he played outside during break
times. The teacher realised that this could easily be deemed as unprofessional
conduct for a person in such a trusted position, so in the end, she decided
she’d be much better off talking to Janus in private.

The following
Wednesday morning, as the class stepped out into the playground, Gill called the
young lad aside and sat him down at her table before asking,

   
‘Janus, do you remember anything from around about the time when you were
born?’

   
The youngster simply lifted his head and
looked all innocently into her eyes. She’d always been amazed at how blue his
eyes had been, but this was the first time that she’d been so close, and been
able to study them in any great depth.

A weird
sensation came over the woman all of a sudden. The deeper she looked, the more
they seemed to be able to hold her in their heavy, hypnotic yet wondrous gaze.
Something very much out of the ordinary was somehow occurring, and Gill began
to feel quite scared, as she realised there was something extremely unnatural
and threatening about them. Strange flame-like flecks appeared to be floating
around in the background. These seemed to reach out towards her, almost as if
they were searching for her soul. But as hard as she tried, the teacher found
it totally impossible to turn away, as Janus looked on and probed around inside
her mind.

   
Gill sat absolutely paralysed. She’d never experienced anything like it before,
and she fought very hard to keep her wits about her. In an extreme moment of
panic, she let out a loud scream that echoed around the whole classroom. She felt
as though she was losing complete control of her senses, and became very giddy
as the room started to swim around her. Pressure then began to build up inside
her. It pushed against her lungs causing her to find it very difficult to
breathe normally, with the lack of oxygen starting to cause her mind to play,
what she would have classed as silly little games. She imagined herself being
gradually crushed to death in the menacing grip of a giant Boa-constrictor. Its
body slowly coiled around her, cloying at her body in the process. The whole
thing was completely gross, but this soon turned to reality, as in her attempt
to head for the door, a sharp pain suddenly shot across her chest. This emitted
a strange popping noise just before she fell quite heavily to the floor. The
cries of a young child caught the attention of another teacher working fairly
close by. He immediately knew that something was wrong, stopped what he was
doing, and ran as fast as he could in the direction the noise had come from.

   
Eric Jacobs was unequivocally shocked to
discover Gill’s body lying sprawled across the floor. At first he just stood
staring from the doorway and couldn’t quite take in what he was seeing. He
noticed one of the five year olds from her class crouched in the far corner
with tears streaming down the sides of his face. Eric spotted the caretaker
just about to turn into the corridor and immediately shouted for him to call
for an ambulance. He also realised that it would probably be a little late for
Gill, as there didn’t seem to be any sign of her breathing at all. Eric walked
across to her body and quickly checked for a pulse. There was nothing, much as
he’d expected. He then adjusted her skirt in order to cover her modesty as best
he could, before approaching Janus.
 

   
That was the episode that his parents
blamed for setting off the bad dreams their son happened to suffer from that
day on.

Over the coming
years, the death of Gill Moxon became a distant memory, although the school
still maintained a bench within its grounds in her honour. Janus had grown much
stronger over that period of time and he’d settled in pretty well during the
transition from primary to secondary school.
 

   
Due to his agility and his keenness on
sport, he’d automatically been drafted into the school football team, which was
a no-brainer for the coach. Sadly, it was when he excelled beyond the normal
expectations of a child of his age that his parents suddenly stepped in. After
putting quite a bit of pressure on the school, and using what had happened in
the past, they soon put a stop to any progress in that direction, much to the
frustration of the school’s sports master and his football coach. Yet, however
hard Janus tried to understand why his parents were constantly so protective about
him; he always felt they didn’t want him to grow up. It was almost to the
extent that he felt they were trying to hold him back for some obscure reason,
best known to themselves.
 

   
Consequently, a huge divide soon started to
appear. The tension in the house was gradually becoming unbearable until it all
came to a head one evening, when at nine years old, Janus innocently invited a
girlfriend to come home for tea. Emma immediately exploded into a frightful
rage and frog marched the poor girl up the hallway and straight out of the
house. Janus was fuming and he never really forgave his mother from that day
on. The atmosphere became pretty intense whenever they clashed, although both
tried their best to avoid any such unpleasantness. Any further escapades he
wished to hide from his parents were much more carefully planned from that
moment on. However, the one incident that did come to his mother’s attention
happened during a lunch break at school, when the head of year reported that
one of the older pupils had been rushed to hospital following a violent
incident with her son. On further investigation, it transpired that Janus had
been caught in a storeroom with the hospitalised boy’s girlfriend, who’d
evidently challenged him to a fight. Some of the story still remained a little
vague, as witnesses to the event had seemed to have provided such outrageous
details when asked. Yet the outcome was still deemed to be extremely serious as
the head teacher now had a pupil in hospital whose spine was possibly damaged,
so much so, to the extent that he may never be able to walk again.
 

   
Luckily, on this occasion, the boy appeared
to be making a miraculous recovery, and after the school finally relented,
Janus was eventually allowed back, following a six week period of suspension.

Janus was ten
years old when the dreams started appearing on a much more regular basis. They
consisted of a large mountain range with a faint inscription that looked like
BNS
etched on the front of them, while a series of huge wheel type contraptions
gyrated around somewhere in the background. Someone at school had once
mentioned how meditation could aid sleep, and so Janus, who’s reading ability,
was already well above average, visited the local library, and after a short
search, soon found what he was after. The boy practised meditating religiously
every day from then on, and after much hard work he’d gradually mastered the
art, until his sense of being had improved dramatically.
 

   
Not long after that, he began to realise
that he could easily direct his mind to a single point of focus, as and when
required. This was initially discovered completely by accident whilst gazing at
a great big bluebottle buzzing around the window sill in his bedroom. He’d been
following the fly’s flight path as it sped back and forth, smashing against the
window every now and again, getting nowhere fast, when it suddenly glowed,
bright yellow and then seemed to shrivel up, right before his very eyes.

   
Following that incident he consequently
suffered a fairly nasty migraine and within a few days the whole episode was
completely forgotten as he continued to practise relaxing his mind. His parents
appeared far happier with him as of late, and it surprised him that they seemed
to approve of his meditation studies.

As the years
passed by, Janus displayed no further signs of violence and at the tender age
of seventeen, which was a real turning point for many youngsters, it was
officially noted that he possessed a very high IQ.

   
His thirst for knowledge could only best be
described as ravenous, and exam after exam passed by with Janus gaining top
grades in every single subject he sat. This was much to the expectation of the
teachers who’d closely monitored his amazing transformation over the past five
years. Not unexpectedly, these were the very same people who then awarded him
for his achievement as the schools most outstanding pupil, the likes of which,
none of them had ever come across in all their years of teaching.
However, it was during those same years of hard work
and study, that Janus somehow adopted a strange obsession with eastern
cultures. These centred mainly on the Chinese and Tibetan people, along with
their unique tribal instincts and beliefs. This was something he really took
seriously, not that his mannerism’s ever showed otherwise.

As before, the
dreams continued to appear on a regular basis, and although instinct told him
that these were linked to his future in some way or another, he was still
unsure of exactly how. The meditation helped ease his worries and it was
through this that he’d learnt to understand so much more, both physically and
mentally. It had helped to improve his visualisation to such a degree that he
could now invoke a mental picture at any time of his choosing, although this
was something that he’d already decided to keep to himself.

  
Emma and John hardly saw him these days. He was either shut away in his room
knee deep in his studies, or out at the local youth club, which did concern
them quite a bit. This meant that they no longer had any control over his
movements, and yet from his point of view, Janus felt they were still
interfering with his life far too much, especially when they threw the odd
sarcastic remark into a conversation.
He was
essentially pondering whether to
carry on with
his education or travel the world when the clubhouse door opened and a young
woman by the name of Amanda Redgrave sauntered casually into the room. The eyes
of just about every single hot blooded male in the place turned to watch her as
she strolled across to the pool table and started speaking to a group of
girlfriends. As they talked amongst themselves, Janus kept looking across at
the so-called “
local prick-teaser”
who
usually dressed-to-kill and looked absolutely stunning in her long black boots,
short mini-skirt and long red hair that flowed wildly. The hair only added to
her sexiness, providing her with the appearance of an untamed animal.

   
When the club eventually closed, Janus lingered outside for a while until he
noticed Amanda and one of her friends appear from the shelter of the doorway.
He looked on, but kept out of view as they turned back and shouted goodnight to
the caretaker. He was busy locking up, fiddling around with a dodgy padlock and
shouted out a muffled reply just before they finally disappeared around the
corner. Janus followed at what he judged to be a safe distance for a while.
Before long, Amanda’s companion bade her farewell and gave her a tight hug
before walking to her front gate and entering the house at the end of the path.
Once she’d heard the door close, Amanda crossed the road and took a short cut
she usually used through the Common. The young woman was completely startled
when Janus suddenly appeared from behind a tree that loomed just ahead, but as
soon as she recognised him and saw the smile on his face, she relaxed.

   
‘Hey! Janus!' You nearly scared me to death!’ she exclaimed. Janus simply
grinned and replied.