When Milly introduced Janine and Steve to the chairperson, Walter Wainwright—who was even older than Mrs. Rockham— Steve felt vindicated in his anticipations, because the old man seemed every inch a slick salesman, of the type who could easily transfer skills learned flogging second-hand cars or dodgy stocks and shares to the context of a church, a cult or a support group. Walter hardly glanced at him, though, before greeting Janine much more warmly, claiming to know her parents quite well. Steve immediately added “old lech” to the list of pre-prepared insults he had organized, but the conversation was brief because the old man had other people clamoring for his attention and there were other newcomers to be introduced to him.
Milly obviously had a seat reserved for her by the other regulars—an old armchair that had seen better days, and she only paused briefly before taking it, making an apologetic gesture to Janine because the folding seats to either side of it were already occupied. Janine nodded to indicate her appreciation of the situation, and drew Steve across the room so that they could sit together, almost directly opposite Milly’s position, on a settee that was even older than the armchair. It was upholstered in a synthetic fabric whose brief fashionability had evaporated before Steve was out of short pants. “It’s called Naugahyde,” he whispered to Janine. “My parents had one once. So sad.”
He looked around then, and tried to gauge the composition of the audience. He, Janine and Milly were probably the youngest people in the room, although there was one other man and one other woman who were probably under thirty, There were half a dozen people apparently in their thirties and half a dozen apparently in their forties, but the remainder were over fifty, and at least ten must have been senior citizens. There were more men than women, although not so many more as to form an overpowering majority. Steve noted, though, that apart from himself and Janine there were only two obvious couples in the assembly; he suspected that the proportion of widows, widowers and divorced people in the group might be substantially higher than was manifest in the population of Wiltshire as a whole.
There was no round of general introductions when the meeting got under way, and no minutes to be read. Walter Wainwright’s welcome seemed to Steve to be more like a warm-up man’s patter than a preamble to the kind of meeting that he had to attend at school once a week or thereabouts, but he wasn’t displeased by that. The chairman ran briskly through the rules that Milly had already summarized, but didn’t labor the key points; when he asked whether anyone wanted to speak, Steve dutifully stared at his shoes, but the precaution was unnecessary. One of the non-debutant members seemed only too eager to introduce himself—as “Jim”—and to volunteer to tell his tale.
Jim, it seemed, had come all the way from Ringwood to attend the last few meetings, because Dorset apparently didn’t yet have its own branch of AlAbAn. He gave the impression that he wouldn’t be back once he’d got his story off his chest, although that obviously wasn’t typical, given the size of his audience and the attentiveness of its members.
Steve tensed himself for a painful experience. Within a very few minutes, though, he had to admit to himself that Jim’s story wasn’t at all what he’d expected or feared. It wasn’t an account of alien abduction at all, although Steve could see why the guy had brought the story to AlAbAn in search of a sympathetic hearing rather than broadcasting it to the regulars in his local.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER TWO
Creationism
I work in Southampton so my normal way home is the motorway and then the A31, but I’d had to visit a client that day whose offices were on the north side of Romsey. I’m in corporate insurance. We finished late—after seven—and instead of driving back to the motorway junction I let the SatNav guide me home by a more direct route. It took me through Awbridge, Sherfield English, and Plaitford, and then to a place that’s actually called Nomansland. It was south of there, aimed vaguely in the direction of Fritham, that it happened.
This was late November, so it was pretty dark and the road was empty. Because it was a B-road, I wasn’t doing much more than thirty—fifty at the most—and I was keeping my eyes peeled for headlights coming in the opposite direction. I didn’t see the deer until I was almost on top of it. It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I guess, and not fully grown at that—but it was plenty big enough to put some hefty dents in the radiator and the bonnet if I hit it head on. I braked hard, but I didn’t think it would be hard enough, because the damn thing stood stock still until the last possible moment, when it suddenly leapt sideways.
I will gladly swear on every Holy Book there is that there was nothing else on the road before that moment—but when the deer bounded from my side of the road to the other, it was suddenly in front of another vehicle, which appeared out of nowhere, coming in the opposite direction without its headlights on. Even if he’d braked, the other guy would have been certain to hit the stupid creature, but it didn’t seem to me that he braked at all. Instead, he swerved— which, as you know, is entirely the wrong thing to do. If he’d swerved my way, he’d only have clipped my back end, because I was still moving forward even though I’d slammed the brakes on. In fact, he went the other way, straight into a tree.
I didn’t actually see him hit the tree, because he didn’t have his headlights on and mine were pointed in the wrong direction, but there was an almighty bang. I came to a halt shortly afterwards, and jumped out immediately—well, almost immediately—to see if there was anything I could do. I left the door open in the hope that the car’s internal lights would give me enough light to see what was what.
I took my mobile with me, and began thumbing 999 before I noticed that there was no signal—which was peculiar in itself, given that I wasn’t exactly a million miles from civilization, even if they have just made half of Dorset into a National Park.
I’d only got the vaguest impression of the other vehicle as it went past. It had seemed bulky, so I’d assumed it was some kind of four-by-four, but as I first set off towards the wreck it seemed even bigger than that—minibus-sized at least. The thought crossed my mind that it might have been carrying a whole bunch of kids—but as I ran towards it, it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. One moment it was there, a mass of shadow suggestive of the kind of mangled metal mess you’d expect to find, given that it had just run into a tree doing fifty-five or sixty; the next, it was gone. The vehicle, that is; it had left its driver, or one of its passengers, behind.
The guy was lying on the roadside, apparently having been thrown clear on impact—or maybe having jumped just before the impact. For a moment, I thought he was dressed in something like a big plastic bag, but that must have been a trick of the poor light. When I knelt down and put out a hand I found that he was wearing a dark suit just like mine—made of identical cloth, it seemed. He started when I touched him, and tried to sit up.
“Don’t do that, mate,” I said. “You’re supposed to stay still until the ambulance gets here, so they can put one of those collars on your neck.”
He didn’t take any notice. First he tried to look at his wrist-watch, and then he started fiddling with his belt.
“Honest, mate,” I said, “You really need to take it easy.” I was so caught up in the moment that I’d mentally shunted aside the fact that no ambulance was coming, because I hadn’t been able to call one, and the fact that the guy had jumped or been thrown out of a disappearing car.
There was a noise behind me then. I turned around, expecting to see some farmer or householder who’d heard the bang and come running. It was the deer. It had taken a few steps forward, as if to see what havoc it had wrought. Its eyes caught what little light there was, glowing in the eeriest way. I had the impression that it was staring at the chap on the ground, in fascination or in terror. Then it turned aside and bounded off the road, disappearing into a thicket.
The accident victim managed to sit up. His face was badly scratched, presumably where he’d hit the road. He wasn’t bleeding much
, though. He was still trying to squint at his wristwatch, while his other hand was groping at his waist. He was staring at me in the much the same way the deer had stared at him, in what seemed to be fascination and terror.
“Well, okay,” I said. “If you can move you can move. I can’t get a signal on my mobile anyway—we must be in a freak blank spot. You’d better get into my car, so I can drive you to A-and-E in Ringwood. You’re going to need X-rays, probably some stitches.”
I put out a hand to help him up, but he wouldn’t take it. He got to his feet by himself and looked as if he was about to bolt, following the deer into the bushes. Then he changed his mind. He looked at me, and at the car behind me, and then he turned around to look at the place where his own car should have been but wasn’t. He cursed. I didn’t recognize the language, but it was definitely a curse.
“Odd, that,” I said, trying to inject a note of humor into the situation. “I didn’t know they’d started making four-by-fours that vanish into thin air when they hit trees.”
He cursed again, in that unknown language, and fiddled some more with his wristwatch and his belt. Now that he was standing up I could see that his suit really was identical to mine—not to mention his shirt and tie. I’d just begun to wonder exactly what his face had looked like before the road bashed it up so badly when he suddenly said: “What year is this?”
“2006, mate,” I said. “You got amnesia? Do you remember your name?”
If he did remember his name, he didn’t tell me what it was. His face was in no condition to go white, but I never saw a man look so scared. He looked at me in sheer panic, and then he looked at my car again. I never saw anyone look at a Volkswagen Polo like that.
“Okay,” I said, “it’s a couple of years old, and it doesn’t vanish on impact—but it goes, and the brakes still work. I’m not the one who came off worst in this little business. Get in, and I’ll take you to A-and-E.”
He started fiddling with his belt again. It looked like an ordinary belt, just like mine, but I’d begun to cotton on to the fact that appearances were deceptive, and that it might be something more like Batman’s utility belt. It didn’t have a holster attached to it, but all of a sudden there was something in his hand that looked uncomfortably like a gun, and he pointed it at me.
“Come on!” I said. “I could have just driven off. I stayed to help you. I’m trying to get you to hospital. Believe me, you’re not fit to drive. You don’t even know what year it is.”
He seemed to have second thoughts, and lowered the gun, which now looked like something you might see in a cowboy film. Then he brought it up again, and said: “You drive.”
It was my turn to curse, but I got back into the car, and didn’t even try to drive off while he was going round to the passenger side. He couldn’t get the door open. I had to do it for him. I got my first clear sight of him as he got in. He was my height and build, and his shoes were brown suede, just like mine. If his face hadn’t been so badly cut and bruised, he might well have looked exactly like me. The gun was, indeed, an antique Colt revolver.
“Well,” I said, all the more desperate to make light of things, “either you’re some alternative version of me displaced from a parallel world, or you’re some kind of alien chameleon who’s automatically taken on my appearance and is plundering my fondness for old movies in deciding what a gun ought to look like.”
He still looked terrified, but now he looked amazed too. “You know that?” he said. “You understand?”
“Sure,” I said, although I felt anything but sure. “I even know how to put a seat belt on—which apparently you don’t.”
If he really had been me he wouldn’t have been able to look any more frightened than he already did, but alien chameleons obviously have an advantage in that regard. He did put his seat-belt on, though.
“Drive,” he said.
“Where to?” I wanted to know.
“Turn around,” he said. “Go back the other way.”
I made a three-point turn, and headed back towards Nomansland.
“You really do need X-rays,” I told him. “It’s a miracle that you survived, and I’m really grateful that the cuts on your head aren’t bleeding nearly as much as I’d have expected, but you could have broken something. You really should have had your headlights on, you know, even if that thing you were driving was only pretending to be a car. It’s way too late for making crop circles, you know—the harvest came in three months ago.”
He didn’t say anything, but the hand that was pointing the gun at me was trembling. I should have been terrified myself, but I wasn’t. However absurd it might be, I thought that I was in control of the situation.
We should have reached Nomansland—the village called Nomansland, that is—within three minutes, or five at the most. We didn’t. The road just kept on, silent, dark and deserted. It didn’t take a genius to work out that we weren’t in Wiltshire or Dorset any more—and I don’t mean that we’d somehow skipped into Hampshire.
I was shaken up, I guess. At any rate, I wasn’t myself. In any normal frame of mind I’d never have done what I did, which was to slam on the brakes without warning and grab the gun out of his shaking hand when he lurched forward. I turned it on him. It felt strangely comfortable in my hand.
“Ordinarily,” I said, “I’d just tell you to get the hell out, and then drive off. Unfortunately, I realize that it might just be a bit too late for that, and that I might not be able to find my way back to any place my SatNav can recognize. So tell me—where are we?”
He cursed softly in his alien language. “Not 2006,” he said, eventually. “Too dangerous.”
“2006 is too dangerous for you?” I said. “What year do you come from, then?”
“Too dangerous for everyone,” the alien chameleon said, resentfully. “We no longer keep count with clocks and calendars. We know when it is, internally.” He was watching me very carefully as he said it. I’d already managed to give him the impression that I knew and understood far more than I did, and I wanted to hold on to the intellectual high ground
“Do time travelers often crash into trees while avoiding stray twenty-first-century deer,” I asked him, “or are you feeling like a bit of a chump just now?”
He muttered something that might have included the words “your fault” and “stupid asshole”, but he’d obviously inherited my habit of strangling undiplomatic remarks as well as my physical appearance. He pulled himself together and said: “What now? Do you want me to drive?”
I looked out at the bare patch of road illuminated by the headlights. It didn’t seem unreal, but I knew that it was only pretending to be a bit of English B-road. It was actually a very different highway.
“Where or when were we driving to?” I asked him. “Surely not all the way home? Converting second-hand Volkswagen Polos into time machines can’t be that easy.”
“A...lay-by,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Presumably, you could get a signal on your unwristwatch, even though I couldn’t get one on my mobile, so you were able to call the temporal AA. One up to future technology. Are you thirty-first century or forty-first? If you were still counting by means of calendars, that is.”
His eyes were fixed on the barrel of the gun, and he was literally quaking with fear, but he forced himself to reply, seemingly trying to humor me and make sure that I didn’t do anything violent. “It’s not a matter of centuries,” he said. “My era is a billion years from yours.”
“A billion years,” I repeated. “You just crashed a time machine from a billion years in the future into a twenty-first-century oak tree?”
“It wasn’t an oak,” the time-traveler said. “It was an ash.”
“You picked up the language very cleverly,” I observed. “Almost as cleverly as you picked up my appearance. What do you really look like, inside your plastic bag?”
“Would you like me to drive?” he asked, again—in a manner suggestive of some urgency.
&
nbsp; “All you had to do was say,” I told him. “All you had to do was say: Please don’t take me to A-and-E in Ringwood, because I need medical help from my own kind. All you had to do was say: There’s this little inter dimensional lay-by not a million miles from Nomansland, and if you could drop me there I’d be ever so grateful. And I’d have said: Sure—always assuming that I can get back again. Can I get back again? I mean, you wouldn’t want to rip me out of the time-stream permanently, would you? That would be tantamount to changing history, and I know how sensitive you time-travelers are about that sort of thing. Even if we humans are no more to you than a Mesozoic butterfly might be to us, you never know what changes might unfold over a billion years if you were to take me out...not to mention my poor little Volkswagen.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 4
