Janus the Arrival (The Janus Trilogy Book 1), page 2
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.
CHAPTER 2 – Young Love
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.
‘Well I’ve been watching you for ages now, and I reckon you’re nothing but a virgin who just enjoys messing with bloke’s minds.’
Amanda was a little stunned at first but before she could answer, Janus reached out, grabbed a handful of long hair and pulled her towards him. The guy had the upper hand but as she came face to face with him, his mouth suddenly met hers. Although she struggled at first, she realised that he was far too strong, so she bit into his lip which only excited him further and seemed to send him into a bit of a frenzy. Amanda became very scared at that point and tensed up completely as he reached underneath her skirt and ripped her pants off in one go. She stood staring in shock as he reached down and released his trousers with his other hand. He wore nothing underneath and his manhood was already standing to attention as he moved closer and then forced himself on her. After it was over, Amanda lay next to him crying.
