Work Text:
“Oh come on, it’s hardly deepest midwinter.”
Jenny snorted and pulled the scarf a little tighter around her neck. “I’m blaming you if I come down with something,” she replied. “How much further?”
Sarah squinted down at the map she was carrying. “Couple hundred metres, maybe? Should be just over the hill.”
Traipsing through a muddy field in twilight wasn’t how Jenny Lewis had ever spent her Boxing Days before. Then again, corralling mad scientists and prehistoric creatures wasn’t how she had ever spent any of her time before this year. And yet, here she was.
Sometimes she found herself enjoying the madness.
“Here we go.” Sarah tucked the map away and climbed easily over the stile in the wooden fence. Jenny followed, a little less gracefully but just as easily.
They walked for a couple of minutes into the field. Ahead of them Jenny could just about see the short wheat stalks.
“Is this definitely the right place?” Jenny asked. She didn’t want to spend the whole evening playing hunt the hypothetical anomaly site, even though she had a torch, a compass, satellite phone and GPS unit with her, not to mention a hotline to the ADD and its better satellite equipment.
Sarah nodded. “Map says yes. I did orienteering in Guides,” she added. “Not quite like riding a bike, but, y’know.”
Jenny grinned. “I can just imagine you running around in a blue jumper.”
“I promise that I will do my best,” Sarah grinned back. She held up three fingers quickly. “See anything?”
“Not yet.” Jenny took out her phone and pulled up one of the aerial photos on it. As with most things, the crop circle looked more impressive from above. Someone – probably Sarah – had marked on the original picture which way was north, and Jenny turned the phone around a little, trying to figure out where the pattern would be closest to them.
“There.” Sarah was pointing over her shoulder now, glancing between the phone screen and the wheat in front of them.
Jenny followed her arm, and nodded. There was a gap in the wheat just inside the first boundary. “Let’s go.”
They trod carefully through the crops. The farmer had been reluctant enough to allow the ‘agricultural consultants’ onto his land to begin with, and Jenny saw no point antagonising the man any further by damaging any more of his crops.
Something – Sarah was firmly convinced there was an anomaly involved despite Connor’s increasingly loud insistences that the ADD “would have picked something up, guys, I ironed out most of the wrinkles, honest!” – had caused some of the wheat crops in this field to wither and die in bizarrely neat patterns, spreading out from a centre like a lopsided spiral with some isolated circles dotted between the spokes.
In other words there was a crop circle in rural East Sussex. The transcript of that call the farmer had made had been passed onto the ARC. Sarah had seized upon the idea that this circle, and potentially others, had been caused not by bored, drunken teenagers in search of internet fame, or equally bored conspiracy theorists who just liked to cause chaos, but that they were caused by an anomaly.
Whatever case Sarah had pleaded to Lester, he had seen fit to authorise a (very) small fact-finding mission to the coast to gather any intelligence that satellite imagery and internet forums alone couldn’t provide.
Sarah had also managed to persuade Lester that the mission required supervision from someone in a relevant position of authority.
This was where Jenny came in, via a call that had interrupted her traditional Boxing Day spent with her mum, step-father, two step-siblings and their three children as they tried to annihilate each other through the medium of board games.
She still hadn’t quite decided whether Sarah was a genius for getting her out of there or not. It would probably depend on a myriad of factors, including how scathing her step-sister’s text message reports would be once Jenny’s signal returned and she was reconnected to the outside world.
“Definitely not a person,” Sarah said, bringing Jenny back to the here and now. She was on her knees a few feet ahead of Jenny, in the middle of a small, roughly formed pathway maybe half a metre wide formed by flattened wheat and using a small torch to examine her surroundings.
Except… “They don’t look trampled,” Jenny said slowly.
Sarah shook her head slowly. “They look dead, just like Mr Avery said.” She offered Jenny a stalk, which she held up close to peer at. She was not the expert Lester had touted her as, but she knew enough to agree that it looked like it had withered and shrivelled.
“Edges aren’t neat, either,” Sarah continued. She shone her torch ahead of them.
“When did the farmer say this had happened?”
Sarah’s face flickered in the dying daylight. “Not sure, but he found them a couple of nights ago. He reported them the day before Christmas Eve.”
“Could it have been a creature?” Jenny wondered.
“Not enough carnage for that.”
Jenny pulled up the photo on her phone again, then coughed. And coughed again.
“Are you all right?”
Jenny nodded. “Something in the air, maybe. Does smell a bit funny out here.”
Sarah snorted. “That’s called fresh air, city girl.”
“Says the woman who grew up in Brighton.”
“Doesn’t count, it wasn’t made a city until after I left.”
“Come on,” Jenny said, “let’s find the centre.”
It wasn’t too difficult switching from navigating via the Ordinance Survey to the grainy scanned satellite photo, but they slowly made their way through the uneven, accidental maze until they found themselves just outside what Jenny determined to be the centre of the circle. The very centre was a small circle, maybe a metre across but just as rough and uneven as all the other edges, completely separated from the rest of the pattern by a good half a metre of living, intact wheat. In the near complete darkness it would be impossible to get to the centre without trampling on more wheat.
“Hold your torch up?” Sarah asked. Jenny did so and Sarah began filming the circumference of the centre circle with a small camcorder. “We should come back tomorrow, when it’s light, see if anything changes between now and then.”
Jenny shivered slightly, and swallowed another cough. She coughed anyway.
“Are you all right?” Sarah asked again.
“Yes.” Jenny sniffed a few times to try and clear her nose. There was still something funny in the air. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, just that it was odd. “Still on you if I catch something,” she added lightly.
“Noted,” Sarah replied fondly. She turned around and pointed the camcorder at something Jenny couldn’t make out. After a few seconds she snapped the camcorder closed. “Okay, I think I’m done.”
Brilliant. Jenny took a step backwards and half-turned so she could get her bearings back. At the same time, her left foot hit something hard, and slipped.
Jenny fell face first into the mud.
“Mmmph!” A split second too late she realised there was mud on her face and scrunched her eyes and mouth closed. She dug her hands – thank God she’d grabbed gloves before getting out of the car earlier – into the ground and tried to push herself up. She felt an arm on her shoulder that moved down to her waist and Sarah helped her get to her feet.
“Are you hurt?” Sarah’s voice was low, and her hands were prodding Jenny’s jacket.
Jenny shook her head. She fumbled for her scarf and used it to wipe the worst of the mud off her face and mouth. “I’m fine, I think.” She couldn’t say the same for her scarf. It had been a present from Millie; she dreaded having to explain to her step-sister how she’d managed to wreck it in 24 hours.
“Come on,” Sarah said with a small smile, “let’s get back to the hotel.”
Jenny nodded. She let Sarah take her by the hand and slowly lead her out of the crop circle and back towards the fence and the lane they’d parked in. The hotel was only a few minutes’ drive away, on the outskirts of a small, grey industrial estate that connected the farm land to the nearest town.
They made it through reception with only minimal reaction from the night shift, a sincere but improbably young receptionist, and as soon as the room door closed behind them Jenny stripped off her boots and clothes and made straight for the shower.
“Kettle’s just boiled,” Sarah told her once she had emerged, feeling much more human. She pointed to the bed. “Get comfy.”
Jenny harrumphed and did as she was told. She yanked the duvet until she could climb underneath it and wrap it around her as tightly as possible, and closed her eyes. A few seconds later she felt the bed dip and a warm weight press up against her. Sarah’s arm snaked around her waist.
It wasn’t so much that she was cold, or in shock, or even tired from the weird day, going from mildly hungover in bed with Sarah that morning to playing high-stakes card games with her family to being back in a bed with Sarah again via a potential anomaly site and a face full of mud.
It was probably a combination of all of those things, but all of a sudden Jenny wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep for a thousand years.
She opened her eyes and looked around the hotel room again. Sarah’s research was strewn everywhere, photocopies of manuscripts, internet forum print-outs and backdated American tabloids as well as many, many illegible scrawls accompanying questionable pencil drawings and blurry photographs blown up to look even worse than they were.
On the counter-top opposite sat two steaming mugs. Sarah groaned, pulled herself away from Jenny and went to dump the teabags.
Jenny loosened her grip on the duvet and sat up a little straighter. “So what do we have so far?” she asked, because despite being cold she was still a professional, and knowing the aforementioned pain that was her boss, there would most likely be an extensive debrief in order to justify their expenses. She was also supposed to be the professional here, at least if Sarah’s conversation with Lester in Jenny’s mum’s kitchen that afternoon had been anything to go by.
“Well,” Sarah began, rejoining Jenny on the bed and passing her one of the mugs, “honestly, not much. I have plenty of ideas but without the ADD to corroborate any of them, and until I can get a better look at the site tomorrow then it’s just that – ideas.”
Jenny rolled the mug between her fingers. “Such as?”
“It’s possible an underground anomaly somehow affected the crops,” Sarah said. “The ARC’s recorded other anomalies transferring weather conditions from one side to the other, so why not a more toxic atmosphere seeping through and causing the effects we saw on the surface.”
“That assumes there’s space for the anomaly to form,” Jenny said.
She felt Sarah’s shrug against her own shoulder. “Could be a really small anomaly? Do we even know how they’re affected by solid objects, other than the sun cage? And soil’s not exactly a solid object, it’s hundreds of thousands of small particles, I -”
“Okay, okay,” Jenny laughed. “I get it, we could spend a year here and you’d still have theories to examine.”
“Maybe not here, though,” Sarah mused. “The carpets look like puke.”
“Take it up with Lester.”
“Might have to.” Sarah yawned. “Okay, less tea, more bed.”
It was a good idea. A very good idea. Jenny quickly downed the rest of her tea, because she could, and gave the mug to Sarah. She buried herself back underneath the duvet and propped herself on one arm to watch her girlfriend get herself ready for bed.
“Oh, where’s my phone?” Jenny asked.
Sarah pointed to a small pile of electronics. “Plugged it in while you were in the shower. Want it now? Millie’s probably texted back.”
“It can wait.” If it was really important Millie – or anyone else – would have rung and she’d have heard that, even in the shower.
“There is one other theory,” Sarah said. “About the circle.” She climbed under the duvet next to Jenny, who jerked back at Sarah’s cold legs before relaxing again.
Jenny wrapped her arm around Sarah’s chest. “What’s that?”
“Dumb kids with nothing better to do.”
Jenny laughed.
“We’ll figure it out,” Sarah said sleepily. “One way or another.”
Of that, Jenny had little doubt. Sarah was unconventional, but brilliant.
And tomorrow was another day.