“I don't know what to make of my story,” Mario Moro, also known as Captain Magenta, admitted, staring around the room. “Up until two years ago, I'd have said ghosts at worse, and some form of hallucinations at best. But recently, I keep thinking about what the Mysterons said to you, Paul.” His eyes stayed fixed on Captain Scarlet, as he imitated the hollow booming voice of the Mysterons: “‘We have watched you for centuries. Your violence disgusts us.’ I wonder if some of them did more than watch.
“It was in 2058, when things were just starting to turn in the Terrorism wars. Not that we'd realise that until later. I was serving with the UN Security Forces at the Columbia base near Leeds in England. Officially, Columbia was a rest base, a place for guys to have some downtime. Unofficially, it was the primary base for regrouping after Baza.
“That created its own atmosphere, a mixture of incredible highs and lows. Yes, the Berklin had being defeated and (as events would later prove) were on the run, but the cost had being high. The brutality of the battle of Schlink, in particular, was hard to forget.
“People were desperate and did stupid things. That was what we thought had happened.
“We were being asked to track down two service personnel, Private Fiona Samson and Corporal Bernard Harris who had deserted.”
He paused and added, “They actually said that too. None of the usual absent without leave stuff, though it was clear there were special circumstances. Not only had they left their barracks after dark, without permission, they had removed, with threats of violence, their fellow soldier corporal Neil Tey, from the base hospital and stolen an ambulance.” He paused again. “That was what everyone was upset about. Samson and Harris were recognised as being physically and emotionally exhausted. If they had taken off on their own or even with Tey in a car or a jeep, then we would have never got involved. Their CO would have sent a couple of guys to persuade them to return, maybe written them up for being AWOL, and that would have been the end of it. But the theft of the ambulance created… what did the chief medic say… ‘Represented a direct attack on their fellow soldiers’. That had their commanding officer up in arms.”
*******
“For God sake, I already told you,” Captain Manchester snapped. “Give it a couple of days and they’ll be back, ready to face whatever you put them through. They’ve got some bee in their bonnet about Tey, and as soon as they’ve dealt with that –”
Mario interrupted before the chief medic could start again about the danger that the two soldiers had put their comrades in. “Dealt with it how? They can’t hope that Tey will survive.”
The medics had being brutal about that. Tey had being caught almost directly in an explosion, created when a shell hit an ammunitions store. He should have being killed outright. That he had not was a miracle, but as even the medics admitted, not necessarily a lucky one. Half his right lung was missing. The left was gone completely as was his right arm. Just about every bone in his body was broken, and he had full thickness burns over seventy percent of his body. His chart listed treatment as a level of morphine that was certainly borderline for an overdose and the letters TLC. There was nothing else they could do for him.
Captain Manchester rubbed his forehead. “I’m not sure on that one,” he said softly. ‘Tey and Samson come from Samehine. It’s a tiny village in the Lake District, but there’s a story, a belief, really, that they’ve never lost a man to war since 18 something or other. That no matter what happens, no matter how brutal their injuries, they’ll survive.” He shook himself sharply. “It’s a story, of course, but the locals believe it and they’ve certainly got the luck of the devil about them. James O’Neil revealed that.” He glanced at the chief medic. “Your guys were willing to write him off as trapped in a chair for life, if he lived through the winter. They got him back home to Samehine. And rumour is he’s walking around now, bold as brass.”
“This has happened before, then?” Mario asked, cautiously.
Captain Manchester paused. “Let’s just say I’ve backdated some leave.” He sighed. “Look, go, get the ambulance back. That’s all they’re –” He jerked his head at the chief medical officer, including all of commanding officers with him. “… really worried about. Either Tey will have died, in which case they’ll see that it is just a story, or he’ll rally, even if only temporary, and they come back ready to fight like tigers because they believe they’re unbeatable.”
Mario sighed at him. “Doesn’t work like that.”
Captain Manchester sighed too. “Yeah.” He sounded both sorry and like he really understood.
*******
Magenta paused and looked at his audience. “The next bit I should have paid more attention to, I admit. Captain Manchester said: ‘Didn’t think Samson was even speaking to Tey these days. Much less that she’d help him’. I should have listened, but my mind was on the mission. On assessing where the agents were likely to go.
“Everyone was clear on that. Samehine. Even those who came from the villages in the area were firm on that one. The inhabitants apparently were ‘a bit odd’, ‘All got three fingers up there,’ ‘Kept themselves to themselves.’
“No one was aware of any friends or family that Tey or Samson might have outside of the village and everyone was firm had no one but Tey.
“One teammate summed it up: They were either in Samehine or at the bottom of the Humber.”
Magenta paused and added: “With the benefit of hindsight, there’s a lot I should have noticed, really. I should have paid more attention to the CO’s remarks, I should have paid more attention that Harris had no-one but Tey, I should have picked up on what everyone wasn’t saying. And I definitively should have realised something was up when I got to Samehine.
“Saying Samehine was in the middle of nowhere is insulting to nowhere. My sat nav wouldn’t acknowledge it existed. The ordnance survey had it down as a micro dot where two squares intercepted. The directions I eventually managed to pry out of a harassed local policeman, who was more interested in whether he had enough sandbags or not (it was just before the Storm of ‘58) took me down roads that were basically a farmers tracks.
“No place looks it’s best just before a storm, but Samehine actually looked welcoming. It was bigger than I expected, with lots of white washed houses and lights in every window. There was a massive church, sort of a miniature cathedral in the middle. It was there I headed for and it was there I definitely should have realised something was wrong.”
Magenta looked around the room at the assembled officers. “What’s the one thing you always see at the front of English churches?”
“A cross?” Blue muttered. His face was distracted and he kept moving his lips without words coming out, like he was trying the sound of something.
“A communion table?” suggested Scarlet.
“Flags.” It was Destiny who spoke up. “For the different organisations the church supports.”
Magenta smiled at her. “That’s right. Brownies, Guides, Scouts, Beavers, Air Force Cadets, Army Cadets, Navy Cadets, Boys Brigade, Girls Brigade, sometimes even a couple of Red Cross or St.John’s Ambulance snuck in there. But the back of Samehine was bare, not even an Union Jack. Which was very unusual for a parish church at that time.” He paused. “That wasn’t the only unusual thing, but it was the only thing that couldn’t be put down to me. The atmosphere changed as soon as I entered. Before, they spotted me, the church had being busy and full of people, all chattering. As soon as they saw me, it fell silent.
“I showed my warrant card, explained who I was, about Tey, Samson and Harris and that I had a warrant to search the village in an attempt to locate them. The vicar stepped forward. He was a tall man, with black mutton chops, you know that hair where it comes down, but it’s really a beard? He looked, not Byronic, but with a sort of suggestion about of that era about him. There was no accent in his voice, but his English was careful, like he wasn’t used to speaking it. He denied seeing any of the fugitives, but invited me to begin my search here in the church. I asked him about Samson and Tey and he was polite, but vague about them.”
Magenta held up his hand. “What happened next was stupid, I freely admit that.”
“Green, make a note of the date!” Captain Ochre said, breaking the slight tension in the room.
Everyone laughed and Magenta grinned at his partner before continuing: “I was suspicious, but only of sheltering a fugitive, which, let’s face it, many clergymen didn’t actually view as a sin as such. I insisted on stepping first through a door and someone hit me.”
He grimaced at the memory.
“The next clear thing I can remember is a voice, a voice with a Lakes accent repeating over and over again: ‘Thank God. Thank God.’ I opened my eyes and saw a young woman, still in her army uniform staring down at me. I recognised her from the photos in the file. It was Private Fiona Samson…”
*******
“I thought they’d killed you,” she said. “And I’d have that on my conscience as well.”
“Security officers have to have a thick skull,” Mario muttered, trying to get to his feet. He felt something tug on his ankle and looking down, realised that he was tied to the bed on which he had being lying. Looking at the knot, he also had his first real chance to look at Private Samson. She was pale as ghost and shivering. There was a bruise across her right cheek and there were similar bruises around her wrists and what looked like the beginning of some around her mouth.
There was a single candle in the middle of the room, and looking around, other than the bed on which Mario had being lying and the one where he presumed Private Samson had been bound, and there was no other furniture. There were no windows and only a single door, which he concluded was probably locked.
“Where are we?” He decided to start with basics.
Samson shrugged. “Samehine, the old Sunday school room. They’ll leave us here until they decide what to do with us.”
“Where’s Harris?”
She shrugged. “With them. The rest of the village.”
“And Tey?”
She blinked suddenly, tears shining on her eyes. “Tey died just outside of Hawkshead.”
Mario sighed. It wasn’t unexpected, but still, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, turning her face away. “Be sorry for what’s going to happen next.” The last part was spoken so quietly Mario almost didn’t hear her. he wondered what she meant, but he had to press on.
“Where’s the ambulance?”
For a moment, she looked confused, as though she had forgotten about the ambulance, but she answered honestly enough. “I don’t know. Probably in the river. It’s too obvious, too easy to track.”
Mario glanced at her. “What’s going on?” he asked gently.
The story spilled out of her willingly enough. When they had joined up, Tey, Samson and O’Neil had sworn an oath that whatever happened, they would bring each other back to the village. When Tey had met Harris, he had brought him in on the pact as well, only, after O’Neil, Samson had told Tey she wanted no more to do with it.
“I couldn’t, not after I saw what happened to James, I couldn’t.” She swallowed. “I’d known James O’Neil since we were kids and…” She swallowed again. “I don’t know what comes afterwards, after death, but I can’t believe its any worse than –”
“Than what?” Mario asked, but she froze as footsteps were heard on the stairs.
The door opened and the Vicar walked in.
Mario glared up at him. “Are you aware of the penalties for kidnapping of a World Police officer?”
The vicar ignored him and focused his attention on Samson. “You have being very foolish Fiona,” he said, his voice soft. “But it is not too late.”
Fiona shook her head. “I can’t,” she repeated with more courage. “I won’t be a part of it. Just let us both go. We’ll say nothing; no one would believe us anyway.”
The vicar shook his head. “You know we can’t do that. You have disobeyed. You must be punished.” His voice had changed while he was talking. It had being deeper, more booming.
Fiona backed up, sobbing. For a moment, the vicar looked confused and at the same time, expressionless.
“You will obey.” He turned and walked out of the room. At the door, he turned his head back. “When it is over, you will be thankful.”
As the door closed, Fiona managed to yell after him. “That’s about the only thing we agree on!”
A second later, Mario heard the key turn in the lock.
Samson was sobbing, great gulping sobs, but slowly they died down and she seemed to get control of herself.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Whatever’s happened, you at least don’t deserve to be caught up in this.”
“Caught up in what?” Mario demanded, confused. Kidnapping of a security police officer is hardly a small thing, but he sensed there was more to it than this. The scene with the vicar had proved that.
Samson swallowed and started talking, almost calmly.
It took a long time. How long exactly, Mario couldn’t be sure, but it must have been at least a couple of hours, as she kept almost breaking down and she had to give a lot of history, which wasn’t strictly speaking relative.
According to Samson’s story, in 1815, the village had sent an infantry regiment with Wellington to the Battle of Waterloo She didn’t remember which regiment or where they fought, but they were wiped out. Not a single man between 16 and 40 was left in the village, including the then vicar’s son, who had actually led the campaign.
The vicar was dispatched to Belgium to try and retrieve the bodies. He came back with a cart full of bones and his faith in God destroyed. In the weeks following the funerals, he took to vanishing, to going on long walks across the fields. It was somewhere out there, in early October, that he found them.
No one knew what had happened, just that there was a bright green light in the sky one night, so bright it was almost blinding and the next day, the vicar came back, walking like a man who’d aged 50 years in a night. Beside him was walking his son.
The villagers were terrified, to put it mildly. They were convinced that the vicar had sold his soul to the devil to get his boy back. Others were angry, demanding to know why his son had come back when their men were still in the ground.
The vicar told them that they would come back. That the Mists had promised that there would never be another death from violence in the village. In the evening, he led the village out to the fields behind them. A green light engulfed the field and the men rose out of the earth. They were unharmed; exactly as they had been the day they marched away.
Or at least most of them. Some were missing.
The Mists had explained to the vicar that in order to bring them back, they had to have the remains. And some of the men’s bodies had being too badly damaged for the vicar to identify, let alone bring back with him. So going forward, they would send a unit to the war, but the men, and later women, swore that if they fell, they would bring the body back, so that the Mists could bring them back to life.
*******
“Wait a minute,” Scarlet interupted. “Green glow? People coming back from death? And that name, ‘the Mists’… Mario, are you saying…”
Magenta held up a hand. “I’m telling the story as I was told,” he explained.
“I don’t believe it,” Blue said in turn. “Also, the same vicar? From 1815?”
Magenta sighed. “That was part of the history that I didn’t rank as particularly relevant. The old vicar apparently died in 1816 and his son took over.” He looked around. “Well, if that all sounds far-fetched, don’t worry, at the time I didn’t believe her either. Oh,” he swiftly added, “I didn’t think she was lying, but we’ve all encountered survivors of cults who believe the most improbably stories. Think about Excalibur. The ones who believed that the air outside of the compound was toxic and would kill them the instant they stepped outside. Some of the survivors actually suffocated that first night, they were so convinced of it. I thought that this vicar was bad news, and that there was something odd going on, but nothing more than a cult thriving in an isolated village. This guy had had control over her life since she was a child; it was natural that Samson would believe him, and all those who believed in him.
“My job was to get us all out of there. I kept it quiet, coaxing, using every bit of charm I had to reach her. And slowly, it worked. I won’t say Samson calmed down, but she slowly seemed to understand the situation… And she was willing to help…”
*******
Slowly, Samson got to her feet and edged towards Mario . Her fingers were trembling, but they underdid the knots without any problems. She stood by as Mario used an old card to open the lock, and she showed me how to get out of the church.
Mario’s car was still where he had left it and whilst the communication had being ripped from it, the rest of the car seemed to have being left alone.
“Where’s Harris?” he asked. Samson blinked.
“With the rest of the village, in the field behind the church.” She shivered. “They’ll be waiting for the Mists.”
“O.K.” Mario had decided that he needed to get Harris back. No one could bring back the dead back and when Harris realised that… he’d need help. Both of them would. This one would be for the shrinks rather than the court martial.
“You stay here, alright? I’ll be back soon.”
“Where are you going?”
Mario smiled at her in what he hoped was a sympathetic and reassuring manner. “I need to go and speak to Harris.”
“He won’t come. He wants Trey back, that’s all he cares about.” She glanced around. “We should go now. They’ll come looking for us soon.”
Mario shook his head. Saying that Samson wasn’t happy about that was putting it mildly. She argued, begged and pleaded with him not to go. To get in the car with her and both of them get the hell away from here. It was nearly ten minutes before he could finally persuade her to stay with the car while he went to find Harris.
The storm was brewing as Mario walked towards the fields at the back of the church, the wind whipping at his face. It was hard to see, which he guessed was the reason why he didn’t immediately pick up something was wrong.
The field was glowing green. At first, he thought it was from torches or some form of lantern. But then he saw that the glow was centred in two circles, hovering above the ground, reflecting off the water which seem to run off the hills surrounding the village. He couldn’t see much, even with the glow; it was still dark and the weather was appalling. He could only perceive dark figures – the villagers, he presumed – hovering around the edges, and a dark shape lying in the centre. There were two figures standing on either side of the dark shape.
From what Samson had told him, Mario was pretty sure he knew what, or rather who, they were.
The Vicar, Harris and that lump in the middle probably was Tey’s body.
Mario took a deep breath and yelled as loud as he could: “Corporal Harris!”
Everyone spun around to look at him. Even the wind seemed to have dropped. Mario thought they must be passing into the eye of the storm. The thought didn’t reassure him as much as it should.
“You are absent without leave. I must demand that you accompany me back to base.”
No-one made any move to interrupt or attack him. They didn’t even seem especially bothered by his presence. He thought that was the worst thing, until Harris shook his head.
“No.”
Mario had being expecting that.
“You’re in trouble, Harris, I can’t deny that. But you’ll be in a lot less trouble if you surrender and return with me.”
“No.”
Mario sighed and decided to admit exactly what he knew. “Samson’s told me why you came out here, but it’s nonsense. No-one can bring the dead back to life.”
Harris shook his head and the vicar laughed. “Are you sure of that?”
Mario swallowed. It was an unnerving voice, cold and hollow, not booming like it had done in the church hall, but still seeming to echo around them.
“I know it,” he replied.
“Did Fiona tell you that?”
Suddenly, Mario was angry. “I know what she said. But I also know about you!”
“Do you?”
“I’ve met your type before. I’m not impressed.”
The vicar laughed again. It was different to his previous laugh, a deep booming sound that seemed to echo even above the storm.
“Earthman, you have never encountered anything like me.”
His eyes were glowing green.
*******
Magenta shook his head, as his colleagues had their eyes riveted on him, listening to his every word.
“I mean, you’ve all seen it, you know. So imagine how it looks in the middle of night in a field in Yorkshire with the wind and rain ripping at your face.
“Truthfully, I’m now grateful for how little I could actually see, just those circles passing over the body and it rising up. I think, if I’d being able to properly see it happen, the body just appearing out of thin air, I’d have gone mad. Certainly I froze on the spot. At the same time, I didn’t believe it. My rational brain simply refused to accept it. Given Samson’s state when I left her, at least half way to hysteria, I decided that she must have made a mistake. That Tey must simply have been unconscious.
“I clung to that, even as I remembered that the extent of his injuries would have made it impossible for Tey to sit up, let alone stand without assistance.”
*******
“Impressive trick,” Mario managed, swallowing hard. “What’s next, walking on water?”
The vicar didn’t properly look at him; he just waved a hand in his direction, as if to say to his followers to dispose of that.
The thing that had being Corporal Tey turned to face Mario and the latter froze. The eyes glowed a vivid horrifying green – it was nothing natural on the planet. He was standing tall, and Mario could see he had both his arms, and that his body was whole.
Mario was so surprised that he didn’t even react when Tey swiftly crossed the distance separating them and picked him up like he was a nothing.
*******
“I felt like a child’s doll, as he was holding me by the neck and as those eyes fell on me, I felt like something was reaching inside me, trying to struck me out of my body.” Magenta glanced around the room and grinned. “O.K. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. I was clawing, fighting like a mad man, but knowing it was hopeless, that I would loss consciousness in a few seconds, when a bullet whisked between us. Both the creature and I turned in unison to see who was shooting. It was Samson.”
Magenta paused, as though considering how much he should now say. “I never found out where she got the gun from. It wasn’t a military one, and anyway, she hadn’t had one with her when I’d seen her. I know a lot of people, particularly that far out and that late in the war, had firearms illegally, so I presumed it was one of those cases, but whose it was and how she came by it, I don’t know. I didn’t ask either. It never showed up in the official police reports of what happened afterwards, but I think both the inspector and I decided that some things were best left a mystery. He said something about there being ten good men in Sodom and Gomorra, to spare the city. I could believe that what I saw and wrestled with that night was a demon, or at least I couldn’t. I couldn’t accept it was supernatural, not even when I saw Samson’s second bullet hit it.”
*******
The first shot injured Harris, and sent him sprawling to the ground. The second caught the minister. Samson was shouting, while she fired, but it took a while for the wind to carry what she was exactly saying.
“Go away! We don’t want you here anymore. Is the pain of death worse than the pain you’ve brought us? They only wanted their men back, what was evil about that? They didn’t want this. Get behind me, Satan!”
The vicar frowned and gestured towards her. The creature dropped Mario, for which he was grateful; he didn’t think he could have held out much longer. While he lay on the ground, trying desperately to get his breath back, it grabbed Samson in the same manner he had previously done with him.
She emptied at least another two bullets into the creature’s stomach… It could have been more, Mario was too groggy to be exactly sure. Her noticed her eyes though; they were ablaze at it as if to say, “Kill me, I don’t want to live anymore.”
*******
Magenta took a deep breath. “What happens next moves my story from a fantastic story into an unexplainable. I’ve mentioned the weather, that it was worsening all the time. The rain was soaking us all to the skin and the wind was cutting through us. Thunder roared overhead, lightning flashed and suddenly one of those flashes hit the earth. Or more accurately it hit the vicar.”
“From where I was lying on the ground, I saw it pass straight through him. There was a scream, like a man being burnt alive and suddenly the green light was gone and the whole place was in darkness. I got to my feet, looking around. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that there were dark shapes lying all around me. A torch from one of them rolled over and I managed to grab it and turn it on. The dark shapes were bodies, just lying there. It was the dead bodies of the villagers.
“Samson lay trapped under the thing which had being Tey. It was dead too, and it took a few minutes to pull it off her. She just stared right through me. Harris was kneeling in the mud, sobbing. I managed to get field dressing on his shoulder, where Samson’s bullet had hit him. I think I read him his Miranda rights, but if I did, I doubt he even heard me. Samson slipped an arm under his good shoulder and helped me get him to the car.”
He frowned. “Just how we survived that journey back down the hill and into Windermere, which was the nearest large town, is the real mystery of the thing.”
He glanced around and noticed the doubtful expressions upon his colleagues’ faces.
“I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. It took us two days, in winds of 200 miles per hour, driving along roads which were becoming rivers because of the pouring rain. We should have ended up in a ditch or buried in a mudslide or any number of a dozen scenarios that the chief inspector at Windermere was good enough to spell out. He initially took my story of cult in Samehine with a pinch of salt, but he did agree to send someone out, once the storm was over.
“Three days later, myself, an inspector and a full forensic team drove up the barely cleared roads to the village. What they found seemed to confirm at least most of my story. They saw the blackened corpse of the vicar, the dead bodies, the Sunday school room with its two beds and the ropes. The ambulance was eventually found, washed up with some other debris from the storm.
“The official explanation was that a powerfully cult had managed to take hold in a village and that they had committed suicide after the death of their leader. “The medics couldn’t explain what had killed them all. They eventually settled on some undetectable poison, which the villagers must have taken as part of whatever ritual I interrupted.
“There were plenty of things that couldn’t be explained, including what I’d seen in the field, but as the inspector said, lest said, soonest mended.” Magenta shrugged. “Possibly, but sometimes, I wonder if what they saw, what they learnt there turned them against humanity.”
Scarlet cleared his throat. By ‘they’, you mean… the Mysterons?”
Magenta nodded slowly. “There is no doubt in my mind today. Whatever I met then… the Mists… I could only have been related to the Mysterons. Some manifestation of them, anyway.”
There was a moment of silence before Destiny asked: “What happened to Samson and Harris?”
Magenta shrugged. “Harris had suffered a breakdown. The official view was that he’d been on the verge of one for a while, and last I heard, he was still confined to a mental hospital in the UK.”
“For Samson, it was a bit different. Whether because that thing had been warmed up from me or because she was part of Samehine and thus easier for him to get, I don’t know, but she wasn’t the same woman who’d left the base, or even the same woman who’d helped me escape. You can take that in whatever way you want. The official explanation was that she suffered post traumatic stress and they tried to discharge her. Samson responded by reenlisting with the Australians. She died at the battle of Azbak.”
Blue’s hand suddenly hit his knee. “Of course, she was a sergeant when I knew her, that’s why I didn’t make the connection. Got the VC, didn’t she?”
“You knew her.”
Blue grinned. “I was one of the soldiers she saved. We were held down by the Berklin with an electric fence preventing us from either advancing or retreating. Samson grabbed the coil of wire and flung it around the fence, creating loop for the charge to run out of. There was no way she couldn’t have known it would kill her too, but she still did it.”
Magenta nodded thoughtfully. “The last thing she told me before we parted way was ‘Electricity kills them, that’s worth knowing’. I wonder if she’d tried other methods before finding that one.”
“Are you trying to say she might have been… indestructible?” Scarlet asked with a dubious expression. “Like me?”
“I don’t know,” Magenta replied, “but she sure as hell seemed to have lived a charmed life after the events in Samehine. Jawabi, Waga Waga, Porter, she came through them all without a scratch. That is… until Azbak.”
“And what about the village?” Green asked. “What happened to it?”
Magenta lowered his eyes. “Samehine’s still there, but it’s just a couple of farm houses now. People pass and never give it a glance. I went back a few years back, just before joining Spectrum, mostly to try and figure out what the hell happened there. Didn’t manage, but I did find something in the fields around the hills, something no one could explain how was there to begin with.”
“And was that?” Blue asked in a low voice.
“A huge chunk of sandstone, which isn’t native to the area. In fact, according to a geologist I showed it to, it’s not even native from Earth. It could have been brought there by a meteorite, or something, that’s the only logical explanation…” Magenta looked up and looked at his colleague with a grave expression. “But apparently… It’s very abundant on Mars.”
*******
Authors Notes:
Thankful Villages are the term used to describe the villages that lost no servicemen in World War I. There are between twenty-eight and fifty-three credited in the UK and fourteen of these are “Doubly Thankful” as they also lost no men in World War II. The town of Thierville in France is the nearest of all the Thankful Villages to come to Samehine, as they managed to avoid losing any residents in The Franco Prussian War, World War I, World II, First Indochina War, nor the Algerian War. Whether its luck has continued to today (or any legends as to why it was so lucky) neither Wikipedia nor the BBC have divulged.
This story came about because of a complaint by a Beta Reader two years ago that the story I had submitted didn’t mention Skybase or the Mysterons. I’d just heard about the Thankful Villages and so decided to get my own back with a historical Mysterons’ story. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
I don’t own anything and I am extremely grateful to the beta-readers always (and
not just for the fun ideas they give me.
)
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