Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens

The fresh air wasn’t doing any good. The events of the last couple of weeks had finally caught up with him and he needed to sleep. Because whatever it was up in the sky above Pemberley couldn’t possibly be real. The strange flying machine was decorated with coloured lights that twinkled as it twirled around and every now and then it emitted a mournful “Ooo – laa – laa” sound.

“Probably French,” thought Darcy. “Not that it exists anyway.”

Whether it was real or not, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. He sighed and headed back towards the house. There seemed to be a bit of a commotion in progress, which was the last thing he wanted to get involved in at the moment, so he eschewed the main entrance and went in by the side door instead.

Darcy plodded up the back staircase until he found his bedroom. He went in and was about to lie down when it struck him that the room wasn’t in anything like the state that he’d left it. There were unfamiliar clothes scattered everywhere, a curious trail of slime on the rug and a smell in the air that hinted at the presence of a long-dead animal.

“Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” he wondered. But his thought process didn’t get much further than this, because he decided to lie down anyway and within a few seconds he was asleep.

But he was rudely awoken only a few minutes later by voices shouting up and down the corridor outside his room. He recognised one of the voices as his wife’s. The other one was male. It was familiar as well, but not in a good way. Who on earth was it?

“He’s not here!” he heard it say.

“I’ll try the billiard room!” came his wife’s voice in reply.

“Take care! I’ll check out the bedrooms. He can’t have gone far.”

He heard running feet disappearing into the distance. What the deuce was going on? All of a sudden, there was a knock on the door. He was about to tell them to come in, but it occurred to him that this person might not be friendly. Who was the owner of that voice? Was it someone who owed him money? Did he owe him money? The best policy was to take no chances, so he leapt out of bed and hid himself in the closet.

“Anybody there?” said the man. “I know you’re in here somewhere. Come out and we can deal with this like gentlemen.”

Darcy could hear the person moving around the room, rustling through clothes and opening and shutting cupboards. Finally, he could hear the man’s breathing outside the closet.

“Aha! So that’s where you are,” he heard the man say. There was a triumphal tone to the voice. “If you don’t come out of the closet in the next ten seconds, I shall run you through with my weapon.”

Darcy burst open the closet, knocking the intruder over as he did so. He tried to make a break towards the bedroom door, but the man grabbed hold of his ankle as he went past and he crashed downwards. He was too tired to put up any more resistance as his opponent straddled him and pinned him to the floor.

“Wickham?” he said, finally recognising the face that was looking down at him.

“The same. Now no more of your slimy tentacle tricks – you’re coming back with me to the Department. Sir Humphrey’s in the mood for a little dissection, I think.” Wickham produced some rope and began to bind Darcy around the chest.

But he was interrupted by a loud thump and a crash on the roof above them, followed by a woman’s scream. There was a brief silence, broken only by the awful keening sound that Darcy thought he had imagined earlier: “Ooh – laa – laa”.