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    Out of the Blue
    Out of the Blue
    Out of the Blue
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Out of the Blue

    By Michael Panckridge and Pam Harvey

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The unexplained brings new adventure to a small town and its resourceful kids
    One autumn night, when most people in the small town of teasdale are sleeping, the sky fills with strange blue flashing lights. Is it just a meteor shower? the town is buzzing with questions, and ED, Angus, Hannah, Gabby, Ling and Sean set out to find the answers. Why do those two unfriendly scientists have 'UFOSItE' written on their caravan? Was Byron Watts - the local unofficial UFO expert - really abducted by aliens, as he claims? then Sean discovers a mysterious canister on the old rifle range ... Is this what the UFOSItE people are looking for? And why is Gabby so moody and unhappy? What on Earth is going on?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9780730401421
    Out of the Blue
    Author

    Michael Panckridge

    Michael Panckridge has published over 20 books, including the bestselling Toby Jones cricket series and the new Legends of League series with Laurie Daley.  

    Read more from Michael Panckridge

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      Book preview

      Out of the Blue - Michael Panckridge

      CHAPTER 1

      Thursday night

      Sean Williams woke with a start. He sat up quickly and looked around his dark bedroom. There was nothing. The house was quiet. His clock read 1.35 a.m. It was too early for the garbage men or a milk truck or any sort of delivery van, so what had woken him up?

      Sean slid out of his bed and padded over to his window, pushing the curtain aside so he could see out. Suddenly, he saw what had made him wake up like that. The sky was lit with blue flashes as if a whole heap of meteors were cascading to Earth. The bright light must have come through a crack in the curtains and hit him in the face. As Sean watched, half a dozen more flashes shot through the dark and disappeared. The sky returned to normal.

      Sean waited for another minute but nothing more happened, so he left his room and ran into his sister’s. It wasn’t until he touched her empty bed that he remembered that Hannah was on school camp. He swore under his breath. It was times like this that he really needed his level-headed, scientific sister. Instead, he went to his parents’ room and shook his father’s shoulder. ‘Dad! Wake up! The sky’s full of lights!’

      ‘Wha…?’ Mr Williams sat up and then slowly started to get out of bed. Sean pulled him over to the window and wrenched the curtains open.

      ‘What am I meant to be looking at?’ his father asked sleepily.

      ‘Lights, Dad. The sky was full of lights!’

      ‘Aeroplanes? Satellites?’

      Sean shook his head impatiently. ‘No, brighter and more of them.’ He looked outside but the sky was dark except for the faint light of some stars blinking through a haze of clouds. ‘They’ve gone.’

      Mr Williams yawned. ‘I can’t see anything, mate. Maybe it was one of those aurora things. You know, like the Southern Lights.’

      ‘No, Dad. I’ve seen photos of that. It wasn’t anything like it. These were like bright sparks, flashes. I thought it might be meteors.’

      ‘Could have been.’ Mr Williams gave another gigantic yawn. ‘They’d be burnt up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Get back to bed, son. I’m really tired.’

      Sean watched as his father crawled back into bed. He pulled the doona over his head and Sean could hear him start to snore almost immediately. Well, he thought, that’s good. And his mother was so hidden in the bedclothes that he knew she didn’t want to wake up. He went back to his room.

      Hannah would have stayed up with me all night, Sean thought, as he watched the window from the warmth of his bed.

      King had seen the lights. As they flashed across the sky, the horse raced out of his tin shed and galloped around the paddock. The younger racehorses in the next yard reared and stormed around their paddocks as well. A light went on in the house, but by the time Mr MacDonald had pulled on his coat and run outside, the sky was dark again and the horses were calm. He shone a torch around the yards. Everything was fine. He gave King a pat on his warm chestnut-coloured neck and then went back inside, making a mental note to tell Angus about the disturbance when he returned from school camp.

      Mr Mac missed his son. Even though Angus had only been away for a few days, the house felt empty without him. He had been taking extra time with the horses to make up for Angus’ absence, but it wasn’t enough. King was bored without his owner there to ride him. We’ll both be glad when Angus is home again, thought Mr Mac. He went back to bed, unaware of the strange lights that had woken his horses.

      No one in the De Lugio household had seen any lights. The family were sleeping the deep sleep of people who worked hard during the day and were exhausted at night-time.

      No one at the Hunters’ saw any lights, either. Gabby was asleep, her mind dark with her secret. It was giving her nightmares. She kept dreaming that she was on a ship by herself pulling out from the shore and leaving behind all her friends on the beach, waving at her. It was a rotten dream. She mumbled in her sleep, and even sobbed once or twice, but didn’t wake up.

      Byron Watts was awake. He was standing on the roof of his house at the edge of town, his arms stretched out towards the sky.

      He’d been there for half an hour, ever since the brilliant lights had flashed into his telescope and nearly blinded him. It wasn’t unusual for Byron to be on his roof at this time: he’d built a platform for his telescope up there and every night spent hours gazing at the sky. He wasn’t very good at it. It was hard to keep a telescope on track and things often wobbled out of his view. And his telescope wasn’t very large. He’d bought it second-hand on the Internet and it wasn’t really the one he wanted but it was the only one he could afford.

      The flashes had caught him by surprise. He’d been trying to locate Venus but the clouds had kept floating across his vision. Suddenly, the sky had lit up and he’d almost fallen off the roof in shock. At first he thought he’d seen a supernova—well, he wished he’d seen a supernova—but instead of one big blast the flashes came in a series. They were over almost as soon as they started. He lay on his back for a while to get a full view of the sky. Then he stood up. ‘Come on, lights,’ he said, waving his arms at the sky. ‘Do it again. Show me more.’

      But the sky was dark. It had finished its show for the night. Byron Watts would just have to make a guess at what those lights were.

      CHAPTER 2

      Friday

      Sean rode his bike to the dry brown oval next to the high school and then stopped. He got off, leaned his bike against the old wire fence and then walked towards the cricket pitch. There was no one around. The entire high school had gone on camp for the last week of term—including Hannah and their friends Angus and E.D. Apart from last night, it had been a pretty dull week once school was over each day—not that he’d ever tell Hannah that. The house was too quiet, and at dinner time there was only him to answer all his parents’ questions about school.

      Sean stopped and looked around. In the distance, he could just see the blackened bush that had been burnt in the summer bushfires. Under his feet, the grass was dry. It had been a hot summer and even though the weather was cooler, the ovals had stayed hard. He stamped his foot on the ground. It was as solid as a rock.

      It was obvious that no one was back from camp yet. Sean went back to his bike, climbed on it, and turned around. School was over for the term and so officially he was on holidays. I’m already bored! he thought.

      The roads were quiet. All the other primary-school kids were already at home, watching TV or playing backyard cricket. Sean pedalled around the corner, spotted the milk bar and smiled. On the last day of every term, his mother gave him some money to spend at the canteen. She’d given him extra today because Hannah was away, and he hadn’t spent it all. The thought of hot chips made him speed up, and he hurtled onto the footpath and braked hard in front of the milk bar, leaving a black skid mark on the concrete.

      He leaned his bike against a metal stand that was displaying the local news headlines and was about to walk into the shop when some words caught his eye.

      UFO Sighting in Night Sky

      UFOs in Teasdale? Sean shook his head. Did they mean the lights in the sky last night? They were UFOs?

      He pushed the shop door open and the bell tinkled loudly but it didn’t interrupt the conversation going on at the counter.

      ‘So I said,’ a man dressed in running shorts was saying to the shopkeeper, ‘it was probably just a shooting star but Julie got really mad at me, and she said, Shooting stars don’t flash as they go across the sky.’

      The shopkeeper shrugged. ‘Had a bloke in this morning who said he saw lights but they weren’t flashing, they were blinking. I wonder if they were the same thing.’

      An older woman stood in line, holding a newspaper. When Sean moved closer he realised it was Mrs Evans. ‘According to the paper, the lights were mostly seen by Teasdale residents but there have been reports as far south as Brant Valley,’ she said.

      ‘That’s a long way from here,’ said running-shorts man. ‘Julie reckons that after the lights stopped flashing, she saw a cigar-shaped object coming towards her. That’s when she ran

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