Then he was back on the time-ship again, watching the world end, from a situation so very, very high above the dark and dismal planet that it was literally unbearable....
* * * *
When Steve went round to Milly’s flat that night so that she could demonstrate another of her talents by cooking for them both, she was eager to learn the outcome of his session. He had confessed the nature of his phobias to her, and the ways in which they tended to manifest themselves, in order to raise her to another kind of equality with Janine, even before he had told her that he had made an appointment with the hypnotherapist. She was avid to know what progress he had made; it was as if she hoped that the difficulties he and she were experiencing in their relationship might be cleared away with all the rest of his troubles, leaving the two of them secure in serene harmony, utterly content with one another for ever more.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Steve told her. “I didn’t actually turn grey, apparently. Because my carotid arteries didn’t tighten up, I didn’t faint—it’s very difficult to faint when you’re lying down, because gravity doesn’t hinder the blood-supply to the brain. I did the cold sweat, mind, and the rapid breathing. Sylvia had to make me breathe into a paper bag until the carbon dioxide build-up activated the reflex that sucks more air into the lungs. I felt sick, but I didn’t throw up. All in all, pretty average.”
“But you did get back aboard the spaceship? You saw whatever terrible thing it was that kicked off the phobic response?”
“Oh yes. I imagined myself back aboard the time-ship, and I looked out of the window. I saw the vertiginous drop. More importantly, I saw what was going on at the other end of it. I also picked up something substantial from a preliminary phase, before the window opened up, so I now have a pretty good idea what happened before the moment of abject terror as well as afterwards. I think I can start to piece it all together now, and I think I can convince myself that the panic wasn’t warranted—or was at least excusable as a melodramatic device—because the story has a happy ending. Given time, I think I can get the whole story together for telling at AlAbAn. Not next Thursday, mind...maybe in December. January at the latest. Do you think you might be ready to tell your story by then?”
“Yes,” she said. “When you’re ready to tell yours, I’ll be ready to tell mine. That goes without saying. There’s a bond between us— I always knew that. Even before the first time I met you, when Jan told me that she had a boy-friend who wanted to see what an AlAbAn meeting was like and could give me a lift in his car, I knew we’d get on. I know it sounds silly, but I knew that we were fated to be together.”
Steve couldn’t help remembering the way Sylvia Joyce had taunted him with the quote from Hamlet. Milly was trying too hard, as if to convince herself—and when she did that, it was often a prelude to a complete change of mood.
“Is that when you decided to steal me?” Steve asked, keeping his voice neutral. “Before you’d even met me?”
Milly shook her head. “No,” she said. “You know I didn’t decide any such thing. You know I was just borrowing you, when I got the chance—when Janine gave us the chance. She did give us the chance, you know, when she told you to take me to the meeting while she was in Brighton. I think she knew what would happen. Subconsciously, I think she knew that she had to bring us together, because she knew we had a bond. She knew we were right for one another.”
“You may be partly right about her giving us the chance,” Steve said, soberly. “But she didn’t tell me to go to the meeting with you while she was away on her training course because she wanted to see whether I’d cheat on her, and she certainly didn’t want me to. She never expected us to sleep with one another, because she trusted both of us—you as well as, and as much as, me. What she did expect, I think—and what she wanted—was for us to talk to one another, and maybe tell one another our stories. She thought it might help us both, if we could help one another to get our abduction experiences out into the open. She was trying to help us both—you and me—because she was our friend. She wanted to help us both move on. She’s the kind of person who’s very keen on people moving on. Why else would she have become a travel agent?”
“There’s no point in continuing to take her side, Steve,” Milly told him, petulantly. “You’re supposed to be on my side. I’m your girl-friend now. We have to make this work, or we’ll both lose everything.”
“We’ll do what we have to,” Steve said. “We’ll tell our stories when we can, and see where it goes from there.”
“I suppose I ought to be grateful that you don’t want to leap up next Thursday and get it all off your chest,” Milly said. “At least we’ll be together while you’re taking your time—and we’ll have that time, too, to make things better. With any luck, Janine will get bored waiting and stop coming to meetings.”
Steve wasn’t entirely sure, in his own mind, why he needed more time to sort his story out. He couldn’t quite see why he couldn’t just stand up at the next AlAbAn meeting and tell the assembled crowd what his mind had dredged up, with the aid of Sylvia’s prompting, even if they might think that it was a load of unripe bullshit. He was, after all, no stranger to that situation. He was a science teacher in the second best comprehensive in Salisbury, ninety per cent of whose pupils took it for granted that everything teachers said was bullshit, even if they needed to memorize it to get them through their exams. Even so, he really did want to get his story straight. He really did want to get it right, so that he, at least, would know that it wasn’t entirely bullshit.
He hoped, although he certainly wasn’t going to say so to Milly, that Janine would have the patience to stick around until then. He knew that his story wouldn’t help her to understand his betrayal of her trust, let alone encourage her to forgive it, but he still wanted her to hear it, when it was complete. He wanted her to have that unique insight into his dreams, anxieties and hopes, and into the mythical future to which they were both party, even though they were apart.
For all these tangled reasons, when Walter Wainwright called for volunteers at the following Thursday’s AlAbAn meeting, Steve and Milly stayed glued to the seat of the antique Naugahyde settee, feeling the pressure of Janine’ gaze even though she was conspicuously ignoring them, while some doddering old man Steve had never seen before—who introduced himself as “Neville”—got up to tell a tale that he had obviously told before, maybe a dozen times over.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Passion for Print
I haven’t been to group in quite some time and I don’t see any familiar faces—except, of course, for Amelia and Walter. That’s reassuring, in a way, because it gives me reason to hope that I won’t be boring anyone too much—except, of course, for poor Amelia and Walter. I suspect that I’ve been a bit of a bore all my life—my late wife, Jenny, told me often enough that I wasn’t the brightest spark in the fire—but I don’t mean to be and I don’t relish the reputation, so I hope that the younger people here will be able to find something in my story that’s a little bit interesting, even though it isn’t nearly as melodramatic as some of the tales you’ll have heard.
There was nothing unusual about the way I was taken, except that I was taken from my car rather than my bedroom. This was way back in the early 1960s, so I was still in my early twenties—it was seven years before I met Jenny—and I’d only just got my driving license after finishing teacher training and getting my first proper job teaching general science at a grammar school in Warminster. I didn’t really have any need to be out so late, but I liked driving in the dark, when the roads were quiet, so I was doing it for its own sake rather than having any pressing need to get from A to B. I don’t remember parking, but the car was safely parked when the aliens put me back into it, so I suppose they must have had some way of hypnotizing me into pulling over, putting the handbrake on and switching the engine off before I got out of the car and stepped into the tractor beam.
I don
’t know how long I was on the ship, and I only have brief flashbacks to tell me what they did to me there. I remember them lifting my eyeballs out of their sockets, one by one, and placing them on my cheeks while they ran needles into my optic nerves and my cerebral cortex, but I suppose that’s the sort of thing that’s bound to stick in one’s memory, even when lesser events dissolve into forgetfulness. It sounds horrible, I know, but even though I wasn’t under a general anesthetic I couldn’t feel any pain or any horror; it’s only in retrospect that the thought of it makes me wince.
I doubt that I was on the operating table for much longer than a couple of hours, and I doubt that I spent more than twelve hours on the ship in total. When I woke up in my car I’d only been gone twenty minutes, so I naturally assumed, at first, that I’d fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed the whole thing—it wasn’t until I started attending AlAbAn meetings that I realized how easy it is for the aliens to play tricks with time.
I drove home, at least half-convinced that I’d had a dream, perfectly prepared to forget the whole thing. Lots of people do, according to Walter—but they’re the ones who can just get on with their lives as if nothing at all had happened. I wasn’t able to do that. My life had changed completely, although it took a few days for me to realize that fact, and much longer than that for me to figure out why.
The next day, as soon as school was over, I drove to the central library in Salisbury. I went into the reference section, pulled half a dozen books off the shelves, sat down and began to read.
When I say “read”, though, I don’t actually mean read. What I actually did was turn the pages and look at each one in turn. I took time to do it—I actually scanned the pages rather than merely glancing at them, maybe for three or four seconds each—but I didn’t actually register anything consciously. I was just about aware of what it was that I was reading, in the sense that I knew whether it was algebra, poetry or some sportsman’s biography, but I only got the vaguest impression of the content. I was turning the pages too quickly; my brain couldn’t take in the information at that sort of pace. I couldn’t slow down, though, any more than I could stop. I didn’t leave the library until it closed at eight-thirty, by which time I was tired and starving.
I had to catch up with my marking the next day, but that only took an hour or so. Back in those days we didn’t have anything like the kind of paperwork to cope with that teachers have nowadays, so there were no lesson-plans to prepare or any nonsense of that sort. By five-thirty I was back in the library, and I didn’t leave until it closed. On Saturday I was in there all day, and I spent Sunday being very grateful that the library didn’t open on Sundays.
I knew something was wrong with me, of course, but I jumped to the conclusion that I had suddenly developed an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. I tried to book an appointment with a psychiatrist, but with school and my library work there wasn’t a suitable gap in my calendar, so I had to try to tackle it myself. I tried to stop myself going to the library. I tried to stop myself turning the pages at that hideously metronomic pace. I tried to pick out books that I wanted to read instead of the ones to which I was drawn. In every instance, I felt sick—not nauseous in the strict sense that I wanted to vomit, but just plain horrid. After a week or so of fighting it, I gave in. I was distressed and depressed, and my work at school was beginning to suffer, but I couldn’t let up. I was trapped.
And that’s when I met Amelia for the first time.
She wasn’t Amelia Rockham in those days; she was still Amelia Jennings. She was a little younger than me, but she’d qualified as a librarian at exactly the same time as I’d qualified as a teacher, and the junior position at the central library was her first job. I’d noticed her, of course, on my way in and out, and sometimes from the corner of my eye while I was working, and I’d seen the puzzled way she’d looked at me—which was understandable, given that I must have seemed a total madman. When she came over and sat down in the chair at seven forty-five on a quiet Monday evening I nearly broke out into a cold sweat for dread of what she might say.
“You seem to have quite a passion for print,” she observed.
I think I managed to mutter “Yes.” I was in the grip of a passion all right, but I wasn’t sure that print was the target of it, or that the passion was really mine in the strictest sense of the word.
“I won’t disturb you, then,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you.”
I couldn’t look up, but I managed to say “Why’s that?” without stammering.
“You always put the books back in the right places,” she said. “No matter how many you pile up when you come in, you always put them back exactly where they came from.”
“It’s no trouble,” I assured her.
“I thought at first you were studying to go on some TV quiz show,” she said, “or maybe that you were some kind of performer, like the Memory Man in that old Hitchcock film—The Thirty-Nine Steps, I think it was—but you’re a teacher, aren’t you, over at Warminster Grammar?”
“How did you know that?” I asked, still not looking up.
“Pupils get around,” she said. “Some of them even come into libraries occasionally. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but it occurred to me that you might find this helpful, if your passion for print will allow it.”
She got up and went away then, but she left a little piece of paper on the table with an address, a day and a time written on it. I suppose I should have spoken to her again as I left but I was too embarrassed to do anything but nod. She smiled, but didn’t say anything.
There was no AlAbAn in those days, but there were meetings of self-styled UFO investigators—including, luckily for me, meetings that took place after eight o’clock in the evening. The piece of paper Amelia had given me was the time and place of such a meeting, hosted by someone named Walter Wainwright.
My first impulse was to feel insulted, and to avoid it like the plague—but in the end, I went to the meeting. Amelia was there, of course—and to tell you the truth, that was the only reason I stayed, and certainly the only reason I went back the following week. That was odd, in a way, because she didn’t say much more to me than hello on either occasion, and certainly didn’t give any outward sign that she was attracted to me. I suppose I was just being optimistic, or just appreciating the fact that I was somewhere other than the library or school. However paradoxical it might sound, I felt safe, simply because I was among strangers, with nothing at stake if they found out about my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I didn’t feel safe at school. I’d begun to take my lunch-breaks in the school library, eating sandwiches while scanning pages, and rumors had begun to circulate there about my unnatural passion for print.
All the talk at the UFO investigation meetings was about sightings and newspaper reports—there was nothing about abductions in those days. I thought the people in the group were just exotic train-spotters. I didn’t really have an opinion on the stuff they were talking about, even though I was working in Warminster, not far from Cley Hill, where a lot of the sightings had been made. I didn’t really care one way or the other. All the speculation about what the riders of the alien spaceships might want with us, and why they didn’t just land their flying saucers outside the Houses of Parliament and ask to see Harold Macmillan, seemed like so much hot air—but it was comfortable hot air, and I was content to drink it in while hoping to catch Amelia’s eye, hoping that she might smile at me again, hoping that she might make the move that would take our relationship to some further stage.
I couldn’t make any sort of move myself, of course, because I was too embarrassed about being crazy. I was probably a fool to think that she might, given that every time she was on shift while I was in the library it must have seemed to her that I was deliberately ignoring her, putting her in second place behind my absurd passion for print
It was at the fifth investigators’ group meeting I attended that Amelia made a move of sorts, but it wasn’t at all what I
’d expected. It was during a run-of-the-mill discussion about what the UFO people might want, when she suddenly piped up. She didn’t even glance in my direction, but I knew that she was really talking to me and not to the others.
“They’re studying us,” she said. “They’ve come here to find out what we’re all about. Maybe they’ll make contact eventually, and maybe they won’t, but they want to find out everything they can before they even think about doing that. They’re not going to be able to do it just by watching us, of course, or by monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts. They need more detail and more depth. They need to study our books, our libraries. They can’t just turn up in a library themselves, of course—-but what they could do, if they were clever enough, would be to recruit humans so serve as their eyes, to do their reading for them.
“They’d need more than eyes, mind; they’d also need brains to interpret what the eyes see, though not necessarily consciously. They’d need to plant their bugs in the cerebral cortex as well as the optic nerves—but they wouldn’t need all that many surrogate observers, provided that they were willing to take their time with the project: two or three in Britain, maybe, the same in France and Germany, half a dozen in America, Russia and China. There are a lot of books in the world, but they wouldn’t have to read them all, and the more they read the more they’d be able to refine their search. A few dozen people working for a couple of years—five at the most— would enable them to learn pretty much all that they’d need to know about the human race.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 23
