The Sleepers (The John Lymington Scifi/Horror Library #7)

By John Lymington

He was the first victim of the Sleep Eaters – a mental invasion force that attacked him as his mind travelled over the edges of sleep. Their plan was to clear Earth of Man so as to pave the way for a physical invasion. And the method they employed was a simple one: they persuaded Man to use his own genius for self-destruction ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Sep 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215951996

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

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The Home of Great

Science Fiction!

He was the first victim of the Sleep Eaters – a mental invasion force that attacked him as his mind travelled over the edges of sleep. Their plan was to clear Earth of Man so as to pave the way for a physical invasion. And the method they employed was a simple one: they persuaded Man to use his own genius for self-destruction …

THE SLEEP EATERS

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1963

©1963, 2023 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: September 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Chapter One

IT HAPPENED FOR the first time on the night of May the eighteenth. The date was set for me because of Strong’s letter that morning. It had occupied my mind all day, giving a mixture of excitement and a feeling of dissatisfaction for myself, even a little uneasiness.

For twenty-five years I have been writing stories for boys in comics, magazines and in book form. Even while I flew for four years in the RAF during the last war, I managed to keep up a certain flow of stories, and a cartoonist pilot had pictured me for the flight hut wall with an aeroplane in one hand and a typewriter in the other, with a scroll below bearing my supposed motto, ‘Nil desperandum—pass the Buck’. That day Strong had proposed in his letter that I should write my autobiography, saying, ‘I discussed it with my partners, and the reminiscences with which you regale us on your visits to London seem to us to have possibilities in a wider market, therefore ...’

At the outset of this story it is essential that I be honest. I know perfectly well that I shall be accused of lies and inventions as befits the ranging mind of one constantly touring mental space to find new, more exciting, more incredible adventures for my stories. One does get into the habit of living in fiction to a certain extent. While in the fictional world of his own creation, the writer is there, in it, with his characters. He does not stand outside a glass case and report the antics of dolls inside; he goes in and lives in it with his fantastic people.

There is also the point that the fiction writer, while living in a false world with his characters, is always conscious of the role of entertainment to an audience of readers. Now this role of entertainer is not easy to drop. I was well aware on that day that some of the reminiscences which I had told Strong might not have been true. Anything for a good story; almost anything for a laugh.

What happened to me extending over the period from May eighteenth to now is far beyond anything that I have invented, though in some ways it could be identified with my inventions. It is this that I am afraid of. Space adventure is a popular field in boys’ entertainment, but it just so happens that developments of recent years have brought fact from the fiction field. It is as well to remember that. The Martian landings of Wells in the 1880’s have become possible in the 1960’s. Verne has been verified in numerous fields and the dreams of da Vinci justified.

What I have learnt in this recent experience might at first sight seem to come from the baleful influence of nightmares, but from the start I could discern the difference between the dreams and what happened to me.

Now it is important for me to tell you the exact content of the dream which preceded the first experience, because it is a recurrent dream of mine, and one which shows very clearly that, though the colour of dream and experience might be alike, there is no resemblance in content.

My work that day was not concerned with space or extra-terrestrial things at all. I was doing a story about a schoolboy inventor for a magazine to which I contribute every month. I had been a bit stuck with this one, because it was the nineteenth in the series and ideas were getting rather strained and I am afraid of repetition. In the end I gave the boy a rest from inventing and wrote a pure cricket story in which my hero defeated the demon bowler from another school by psychological means; that is, by constantly staring at him in such a way as to make the fellow feel insecure and have the constant suspicion that his trousers were falling down as he took his run.

After tea, I walked with my wife Shirley and the dog up on the Warren, a high ridge of hill above the house, covered with golden gorse then. From the top you can see most of Hampshire and Dorset spread out like a relief map of gentle colours on the other side of the Solent. The sea was like a blue mirror that night. On the way back we called at the pub and had some beer, then came back to the house. Our two little boys had been to a birthday party, and were brought back by Joan Innocent in her car. Joan had a glass of sherry and said how good the boys had been and so on, and laughed about nothing and drove off again with—it seemed—both hands waving out of the windows in reply to our children’s screams of farewell.

Shirley put the boys to bed while I got a salad together. We had bought a lobster down at the pub—the potters sell a few in there for untaxable beer money—and I did a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes and cress with hot new potatoes in plenty of butter. It could have been nightmare stuff to anyone but me, and if it was even for me then I had the nightmare first, as I shall tell you.

At nine I watched a school play on BBC television, which they had shown about four times previously, and which I’d missed. I got no ideas from it. It was in fact about a rude form master’s affair with the headmaster’s wife, which, for boys’ literature, is way out. Imagine some of the dialogue:

I say, Smithers, there’s a blow going round old Snooty has bedded Laura Bilson, absolute fact, the rotter. I think we ought to call an emergency meeting ...

It was in that somewhat irreverent frame of mind that I went to bed. Shirley had got tired of the play and was there already. I read about twenty pages of a book about airline pilots, but they had temporarily left their aeroplanes and were dashing in and out of bars in Hong Kong, and I drifted into sleep as they drank.

I WAS CLIMBING up the outside of a building so high that the other buildings were clustered around the foot of it like mushrooms round a tree root. So high that the air was rare, and made me gasp as if it was too thin to sustain me in this awful ascent. The place was falling to pieces. As I climbed the iron ladder, pieces of brick and mortar fell away where the ladder was pinned to the wall. I got a hold on a piece of guttering, but it came away from the wall and fell, twisting and spinning down the well of space between the buildings below me. The ladder was beginning to shake under my hand, as more bricks fell away from its fixings.

I wondered why they never built stairs inside these buildings, nor doorways, either, but narrow, choking places that almost squeezed the breath out of you to get through.

I had to keep going up. Everybody had to keep going up. It was the only way to get to the gallery of this fantastic cinema.

The entrance was about six inches wide, and when I left the ladder and stepped into the crevice it seemed to close in on me. I fought my way through and came into a concrete landing, where there was a door. I went through the door into the railway station, shiny with steam from the engines, which were brilliant yellow, and lined out in red and black, with bright brass fittings. The platforms were empty. At the bookstall there was a bearded man holding tickets.

I know you, I said. You’re Jesus.

I’m not, he said. I’m wearing this sheet because I have just sold my uniform to a collector.

I thought you were the Son of God.

I am, he said. So are you. Here is your ticket, but you have a long time to wait. You’ll have time to fetch your luggage from the hotel.

He gave me a ticket and I went out of the station entrance into a cobbled alley and into the staff entrance of the hotel. I went through kitchens of steamy pipes and yellow lit rooms of laundry baskets, trailing split sheets, like shrouds. In the main hall there was a spiral staircase that flew up dizzily for several hundred feet, spinning as it went.

The manager came out of the door marked ‘Air Ministry’ and said, Number six. Then he went somewhere out of my sight and I went down a corridor, counting the doors. They were numbers one to five and seven to twelve. I counted my way back again. There was no six. I must have been mistaken about the floor.

I ran up the spiral staircase to the next floor, and counted down the doors to number six. But when I opened it, there was nothing behind but a long passage with yellow naked lights and no doors. I tried the next floor, and the next, but there was no number six on either. As I turned back to the staircase the manager came running by, arms going like pistons on a steam engine.

Two minutes for the train! he said as he went by. It’s the ground floor.

I flew down the spiral stairs to the ground floor and ran along, counting the doors. And there, sure enough, was number six. I opened it and there was my bedroom and my bag on the bed, but my car was parked by the side of the bed. I knew I should have to get that out of the room before the manager saw it, or he would punish me.

I shut the door in case the manager should see in, then got in the car and started up. But when I pressed the accelerator the engine just kept on idling, and the car wouldn’t move. I tried the choke and the throttle, but she wouldn’t bite. And then I heard the manager’s footfalls, thump-thump coming along the corridor ...

I AWOKE IN a bit of a sweat, because it is a guilt dream, a thing compounded of alarm, apprehension and frustration. You may wonder how I remember it so distinctly.

I do not claim that it is distinct, or complete; but the main outlines of it are familiar because they are recurrent. I am sure there must be logical connecting links between the top of that building and the station entrance; somewhere I must go down again, but that link I don’t remember. But it could show that not all of the dream comes back with me into consciousness.

In the Experiences that follow, every detail is clear and the sequence perfect. There are no gaps.

You will see also, from telling this dream, that I dream in colour, very vivid, rich colour, but however rare this might be, however garish the hues, they do not compare in any way with the type of colouring which I have seen through the eyes of The Sleep Eaters.

Another difference is this; that throughout the dream, and this goes for most dreams I can remember, I am fully conscious of physical effort and feeling.

In the Experiences, there is none of this. It is my mind alone that is moving, the body is fallen away, lying somewhere, dead.

When I awoke that night I was in a bit of a heat, but, beyond the feelings experienced in the dream, May the eighteenth was a hot night.

I got up. Shirley was sleeping there, cosily doubled into a Z. I got a drink of water at the lavatory basin, then went to the window and looked out down the valley to the sea sparkling in the arc of a great bay, the Portland light winking on the horizon. The moon was low, but against the velvet sky and the stars, quick-flying white clouds piled up in snow vistas, great Alps of the night.

Far off the lights of a liner lay like a golden string upon the sea, drifting to Nowhere. On my right the black mass of the Warren piled up towards the cloud galleons as they raced away towards the East. I could hear the bell buoy out in the Solent, tolling slowly, dismally, like a hopeless church call. On my left the hump of the Downs showed against the southern sky.

Often in the night I have stayed a minute or two to watch that scene and see some glittering ocean-going liner drifting away on its journey to another sky, taking my thoughts with it for a little while.

I saw the Thing for the first time at an angle of about forty-five degrees upwards, so that it must have been two or three miles off and at no very great height in the sky. It edged slowly out into my sight from beyond the pinnacle of a tower cumulus, glowing, and hung there against the stars, a great warm bowl of pinkish light.

There was no sound in the sky but the solemn tolling of the bell buoy in the distance. The strange ship moved very slowly, and as it did its glow was slowly cut off. I realised then that it had been lit up by the moon’s rays and not by itself at all. It went behind a cloud. I once saw the Graf Zeppelin gliding in silence between the clouds, very slowly. This was like that.

I watched, curious, fascinated, excited and a bit alarmed by its strangeness.

The clouds moved on their mighty way, and now and again I saw that strange bowl hanging in the sky, almost above the house. It seemed not to move at all then, and now and again, as the moon’s beams caught it, the shape glowed in pinkish splendour before the racing clouds cut it off again.

The cloud thickened, and though I watched for some minutes, I did not see it again.

At that time I was quite convinced that it was something of ours. There had been much going on in the world at that time of which the public knew nothing at all.

Now and again the clouds broke but I did not see the craft, and I thought it had moved on out of my range.

Still thinking about it, I got back into bed, and I lay there for some time wondering what it had been. Then my mind turned to the fact that I was still awake, and that there was a lot of work to do in the morning. I tried to get to sleep without success. I kept hearing that solemn bell clanging away in the night.

Now there are two things I can do to get myself asleep. They don’t always work, of course, but often they do. They are:

To run through the sequences of a film I have seen, and which has excited my mind in some way or the other.

The second is to imagine myself on some fantastic height, a mountain with a sheer fall below me so deep that the chasm seems to reach down into the centre of the world. Then, in the eyries of mental awe, I drift slowly in the breathless space and fade from wonder into sleep.

As one who fears heights, I suppose it is strange that the world of great heights should have the means to bring the peace of sleep, but it does.

That night, at three a.m. I tried that again. I saw myself on the side of a great mountain, with a sheer drop below that made me hold my breath. It was a place so high as to be out of the world, almost, and I felt, as I always do, that my brain was actually flying in that vast, frightening emptiness, as if I have actually sent it away from me.

And it was on that mental flight that the Experience happened for the first time.

I was waiting in the stillness, about six miles up. I could judge that roughly from the size of the land below and my flying days, but also I seemed to know it.

It was just as if I had left the ridge of my great mountain, and moved across to a platform in the air directly above my own house. I had no sense of wonder or of strangeness, but of waiting. I watched the chasms in the clouds below, deeper now than the dizzy drop from my own mountain. But the clouds were not white now, but varicoloured, like glass fibre, rainbow tinged, and brilliant by contrast with the darkness of the sea. The water itself was a rich, dark green and transparent, so that I saw fish shoals gleaming and darting like phosphorescent fleets drifting parallel with the island shore where the sea edge gleamed in thin white streaks. The liner I had seen from the bedroom came slowly, an ovoid of golden light heading chevrons of brilliant blue green across a darker sea. The startled dart and scuttle of fish running away from it were clear and distinct as if my eyes had a microscope’s intensity. I could see the lighter shade of the shallows, the bright ridge of the submerged shingle bank standing like a fender off the Needles. I could see the skeleton ribs of wrecks and hulks long forgotten in the submarine sands, and on a strip of shallow sand near the shore gleamed the bright silver cross of a lost war aircraft, long buried under the sea. I saw everything in detail, not because I searched but because my sight was panoramic, holding every detail at once.

My descent began without any sensation. Suddenly I was streaking vertically down the chasm of the clouds, their colours changing like the glowing of chemical fires as I passed. I was dropping to the sea at fantastic speed. The liner swelled in my vision so fast it seemed it must burst, then abruptly I was level with the hull, my direction changing from a fall to a direct rush at the liner’s side. The metal of the hull glowed like glass, as if its light within shone through the steel and paint. I felt no fear as I went directly at the side and the steel dissolved about me. I was through and in a cabin, motionless above a bed.

The man in it was asleep, and I knew him. As I waited I heard the stream of his speaking thoughts jerking like the ticking of a tape ...

... This wind of change is a gale of hate. You won’t understand me, but I tell you the whole thing’s boiling, boiling. It means blood, don’t mistake it. You can feel it everywhere you go, it doesn’t matter. It means war, but war on a scale we’ve never seen before, not just nations, but races. That’s where it is now. Races must exterminate each other, then nations, then tribes ... You won’t see it. You want to appease, to get with the other side. But you can’t. You see the bastards grinning, and they know you know, and they know you can’t do anything about it, because you’re trying to keep in with every side at once. You shiver and blow about the Russians, and put the public eye to Moscow and bombs and goddamned missiles, but you’re leading them the wrong way. This is going to be a war of races. It’s the coloured against the whites. Do you know what the odds are against us? Ring up your experts. They’ll tell you. And what’s the good of your bombs when they’re all on the same side? What mealy bloody lot like you would let them off against these primitives who haven’t got it? You send your bloody aeroplanes into the Congo for the swift decisive master stroke, but opinion makes you back out again. We’ve backed for the last time, I tell you. From what I’ve seen, you’re backed up against a wall and there are coloured faces watching you from all sides, like Rossum’s Universal Robots. So many, you can’t kill them. So many that fast as you mow them down, more and more come in their place. The Human Hydra. The more heads you cut off, the more will come. The day of the white is over, Mr Prime Minister. This is the last fight you’re coming to, and you can’t even see it’s begun. What do you care? You’re nearly dead. We’ve been in trouble before. We’ve got out of it. Some have died, of course. A few millions didn’t get out of the trouble, but in general everything’s all right. It’s all ideological now, and everybody can understand either you’re a red or you’re not. You send me round the world to find out what the situation is, and now I know, you won’t listen. I know you’re not going to listen. You’ll have a report and you’ll go on blasting the industrial dispute and the Unions for putting sand in the export bearings. Not that it really matters, of course. ‘The Lord Chancellor broke his finger, did you hear? Yes, trying to pull the flipping thing out ... Yes, well of course these blacks have a problem, but things’ll settle down. One mustn’t look too much on the dark side—I was going to say the Black side—not with the election in fourteen months. One doesn’t want to spread a lot of gloom ... How can they make war on us, anyway? Don’t be silly, old boy ...’ Oh God, how can I stick it into you, jump you out of your seat? I must get the others together. Somehow, somehow ...

I could see him tossing and turning in the tumbled bed, sleeping, the waves of his brain recording in mine.

At that time I had a strange mental excitement, as if the dreaming rigmarole pleased me, or perhaps even that I could be in part responsible for it.

The dreaming went on for some time, and of course I cannot give