Free Lost on Mars by Paul Magrs

shoulders as he told me this. He was acting like he was disclosing some great adult truth to me. Something he felt I’d grown up enough to hear.
    I nodded, and tried to seem as if I was absorbing everything he was saying. Acting like Grandma was some amazing and noble woman who had sacrificed herself for the good of the rest of us. Inside, though, I was seething. I wanted to yell at him: so, how come she left behind her faulty leg? And what about all the other Disappeared townsfolk? The babies and tramps and husbands and healthy young people? Did they all crawl off into the wilderness to die?
    I could feel the objections piling up in my head. My brain was throbbing with angry logic. For the first time I felt like my Da – my Da who I worshipped – had made himself into a fool. And all for the sake of an easier life.
    He led me back indoors, out of the cold and the whistling dune winds. In the kitchen everyone was singing Adeste Fideles . That was an old song written especially for that time of year, in a language that none of us could understand.

12
    At the end of the year the Disappearances increased. The town’s leaders simply couldn’t ignore them any more. As Da said, they had all turned a blind eye for far too long. Doctor Eaves Disappeared and that was really serious. He left behind a surgery stuffed with books and potions and mechanical parts, but they were of no use to us now. There was no one in Our Town with any knowledge of how to use them.
    Only when the wife of Sheriff F.E. Baxter went missing did they call a town meeting. Everyone knew that Sheriff Baxter didn’t give two hoots about his wife in her gaudy dresses, always looking elsewhere for male company. But now the Sheriff had to be seen to care, after she’d been carried off into the night. Also, he had given chase, onto Main Street, alerted by his wife’s unholy screaming. Others were woken and looked out of their windows. That night several townsfolk had caught glimpses of the Martian Ghosts, just as I had months previously. Skinny, dried-up things with lamp-like eyes. Mostly nude, but some were wearing stripy garments that flapped behind them as they danced along the lane through pools of shadow.
    As we ate a frugal supper of winter greens and corn bread Da was telling the tales he had heard that day at the Storehouse. About the skinny, giggling men and how they had been seen by Sheriff Baxter and others, carrying away the Sheriff’s screaming wife, Eliza. How she had gurgled and howled. The men in the Storehouse had laughed uneasily as the tale was related. But their laughter was fooling no one. Everyone was frightened.
    â€˜You saw the kidnappers, didn’t you?’ Da said to me. ‘You tried to tell me you’d seen them, when we stayed at Aunt Ruby’s. I didn’t listen to you.’
    I nodded and stared down at my plate, flushing. He wouldn’t listen to me. He’d told me to keep it quiet, in case I scared the others. I could feel all their eyes on me – Ma, Ruby and even Hannah – shocked that I’d been carrying such an important secret. Al and Toaster were looking at me too, and I don’t think I’d ever felt more important.
    I nodded again. ‘I saw them. They creep into town and they take folk away, one at a time. Sometimes screaming, sometimes silent-like.’
    Ma’s face was white. The dinner she had so carefully prepared was going stone cold on the plates in front of us. She was rigid, with her hands like claws on her knife and spoon. ‘What do they do with us? When they take us away?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I admitted. I’d wondered about it a lot and I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
    â€˜Oh, poor Margaret,’ said Ruby softly. At first I didn’t know who she meant, but then I remembered that Margaret was Grandma’s actual name that no one had called her for many years. To Ruby she had always been the same