Roger Gramston's house stood at the end of a quiet avenue, on the outskirts of south London. Unlike its neighbours it was detached, and it was old, a relic from the time before the railway came and brought the suburbs with it. The house had a large garden that sloped gently down to a lake, surrounded by woods. Roger was the only human occupant and, it being late on a Thursday night, he was asleep.
His cat, Keats, sat by the lake's edge. Although the sky was cloudless and flecked with stars, the July night was warm. Keats remained motionless, hoping for a movement, somewhere down in the darkness. But, as always, the koi lurked in the deeper realms, safely out of his reach.
Having remained as still as an Egyptian statue for a considerable length of time, the cat stirred at last and turned towards the house. As he moved, Keats's voluminous tail brushed a pebble that lay on the water's edge, and caused it to drop down into the blackness. The cat ran swiftly up the lawn and slipped silently into the house via a flap in the kitchen door.
The stone continued its descent into the lake, which was far deeper than Keats could ever have imagined. Indeed Roger Gramston, into whose bedroom Keats was now silently padding, also thought the waters to only be a few feet deep. He believed that the lake had been dug by the ancestor who had built the rambling old house and its grounds. The truth, however, was that the lake had been in existence long before the Gramstons had built their ancestral home. The lake was there when the ancient woods had covered this part of Kent. And it was very deep.
The pebble continued to fall slowly, past the sluggish carp, and down into the darkest waters where the sunlight never penetrated. It hit something at the bottom of the lake, and then came to rest in the mud. The thing which had been struck by the pebble shuddered. It had been asleep for a long time. Now, slowly, it began to awaken. An hour before dawn, the thing in the lake became fully conscious. It lay on the mud, deep under water, remembering.
It recalled a millennia long flight through the darkness of space, and the sudden searing flame as it had struck the Earth's atmosphere. It remembered the people who had found it long ago - simple folk, dressed in fur and skins, with minds that were easy to control. They had worshipped it as a god. Then slowly the world had turned cold, and snow had covered the ground. The thing had crawled into the lake to shelter, deep down in the water, under a thick crust of ice. It had fallen asleep there, and remained in a coma for ten thousand years.
The thing in the lake began to scan its surroundings. It found that the water of the lake was no longer cold. It scanned upwards, its thoughts brushing past the drifting fish and up into the night sky. Its mind locked on to a satellite communication signal. Tracking this up to its orbiting source, the thing tuned in to the internet, and began to absorb the information flowing around the world. Within an hour, it had caught up with the changes that had occurred during its long sleep. It shuddered with excitement. The conquest of this scientifically advanced planet would be most enjoyable. Rather than being worshipped by a few dozen isolated tribes-people, it could now become the god of an entire civilisation. From its fanged mouth, mucous-like saliva dripped into the water of the lake, in anticipation of the pleasures that were to come.
The creature knew that it would need slaves to help with its plans of conquest, and it began to explore the immediate surroundings of the lake, looking for signs of life. Its thought waves moved slowly up the garden, and then entered the house. They scanned the downstairs rooms, and found nothing of interest. Slowly they moved up the stairs, and drifted into Roger Gramston's bedroom.
Keats, who was now asleep at the end of the bed, was scanned first. The thing recognised his brain patterns, they were similar to those of the great sabre-toothed beasts that had stalked the world before the ice came. The thing decided that a cat slave would be of little use. It proceeded to scan the sleeping brain of Roger Gramston, and found him to be an ideal subject. He was bright enough to be useful, but not so intelligent that he posed a risk to its plans of world domination.
