Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations

by By Brian Stableford

  I was very conscious, as I made my escape, of having bare legs and no shoes; the hospital gown I’d been wearing on the operating table, and was still wearing, seemed extremely flimsy. Staggering wasn’t easy, because we hadn’t come down on dry land. The water I was wading through was ankle- to knee-deep, but it was clogged with all kinds of thick weed. I looked around right away for something that could pass for an island, but the first one I saw didn’t look very inviting at all, because there were half a dozen of the silver-skinned aliens taking cover there. They all had guns and they were all shooting into the mist, at something I couldn’t see.

  I was glad that they were shooting in the opposite direction to me, but I figured that towards them definitely wasn’t the direction to go. I started to make my way around the body of the stricken saucer, looking to get even further away from the guys with the guns. That was when the first dinosaur stuck its head out of the water and tried to sink its teeth into me.

  When I say it was a dinosaur, I’m speaking approximately. I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t been transported to some alien world, so it could have been some entirely alien life-form, but the moment I saw it I thought: dinosaur. It might not have been a dinosaur in the pedantic sense. Maybe it was some fairly distant and modestly-sized relative of a plesiosaur, but I don’t really care much more now than I cared then.

  Looking back now, I’m just grateful that it only had a head the size of a football, and fangs no worse than the average rottweiler. Its neck was flexible, but not so clever that I couldn’t dodge its lunge. If I’d run into one of the ones that looked like a souped-up crocodile at that particular moment I wouldn’t have lived to see all the rest, but as things were, I managed to duck under the head’s thrust, and managed to get far enough out of range thereafter that its second attempt missed by a yard. Its body was under the water, and must have been impeded by the weed, because it didn’t come after me.

  I managed to get into the open before the thing with wings tried to take my head off—some kind of pterosaur, I guess it was—and I managed to shin up one of the things that looked more like a tree than most of its neighbors before the snaky thing came writhing over the giant-sized lily-pads. I didn’t even see the crocodile-thing until I was six feet up the spiny trunk and comfortably out of reach of its snapping teeth. It waited at the bottom of the tree, though, just in case.

  I took a moment to relax once I was clear of the things in the water, but I soon found out that I wasn’t safe. What passed for the plant’s trunk was like a vast fir-cone, maybe ten or twelve feet in diameter. There was no shortage of footholds, but I wasn’t the only one that found them convenient. I don’t know what to call the thing that swarmed around it and tried to bite through my leg, but I was profoundly glad when it took a bullet in the belly and fell into the crocodile’s waiting jaws. At least, I was profoundly glad until I figured out that the bullet had actually been meant for me.

  When the second bullet thudded into the woody stuff next to my head I tried to move around the plant, to get the thickness of the bole between me and the invisible shooter. I managed that, and then thought about going up into the crown—but when I saw the eyes and teeth that were waiting for me up there I calculated that I’d be better off on the ground, trying to put as many tree-trunks between me and the crashed saucer as possible. That meant that I had to avoid the crocodile, but it was busy with its meal, and obviously didn’t want to leave meat that was safely dead in order to chase meat that might escape.

  I managed to steer a course that avoided much of the water, and covered at least twenty yards without anything horrid getting within a foot of taking a bite out of me. My feet were stabbed by thorns and bruised by stones, but I never paused—until I ran straight into another bunch of shooters, who seemed very anxious to get to the party while there was still some sport to be had. If they hadn’t been wearing clothes—uniforms, it seemed to me—and carrying guns they might have passed for native wildlife, because they looked like bipedal lizards, not so very different from those velociraptor things in Jurassic Park, but the guns they had were ray guns straight out of some other sci-fi movie, and one of them took a pot-shot at me as soon as he caught sight of me. I was lucky that it missed by at least a yard, because if I’d been as close to the trunk it hit as I’d been to the one that the bullet had splintered a couple of minutes earlier I’d have been knocked flat by the blast and scorched by the gout of flame it emitted. As it was, I was able to keep running, in yet another new direction,

  I think they could have shot me in the back if they’d really wanted to, so I guess, in retrospect, that the screaming-match they started might have been the rest of the gang telling the one that had fired at me that I wasn’t an approved target. I didn’t have a thought to spare for such niceties at the time, though; I just wanted to find some place—any place—where I’d be safe enough for a minute or so to try to get my breath back. Hauling that humid atmosphere in and out of my lungs was like trying to breathe soup, and the fact that I was so high by then that I was half-convinced that I could fly really wasn’t helping.

  Another crocodile tried to grab my foot as I splashed through the shallows, and I had to duck under another diving pterosaur, but the crocodile only had short legs and the pterosaur was a glider rather than a true flier, so neither of them came back for a second bite. I reached another spur of dry land, where there was just about enough space to move about under the giant fern-fronds, and the only things trying to bite me, for the moment, were mosquitoes. I had already begun to look around for something that might qualify as a better refuge when the mortar-shell fell and exploded, and there was suddenly flying debris everywhere. This time I was knocked flat, and more than a little scorched.

  In what passed for normal circumstances in that awful place, I wouldn’t have been able to lie helpless for as much as a minute without six different local scavengers gathering to bicker about which bit of me each of them was going to get to eat, but a bomb had just gone off. Now, I’m free to wonder whether it was the first bomb that had ever gone off on the surface of the Earth, but I wasn’t sure at that moment whether I was on Earth or not. In any case, things were definitely not normal.

  It took a full five minutes for the scavengers to arrive, and when they arrived they certainly weren’t local. I could have believed that there were things like massive upright-walking locusts living along side dinosaurs, but not upright-walking locusts carrying bazookas and machine-guns. There were ten of them. They seemed to be arguing just as much as the locals would have, but I had no idea why. They might have been arguing about which of them would get to eat me, shoot me or rape me, for all I knew; I didn’t have a clue. All that I did know—and there was no doubt about it whatsoever—was that they were hopping, blazing, foot-stamping, tantrum-throwing mad.

  I kept my head down long after I was capable of sitting up, hoping that when they finally started blasting they’d blast one another instead of me. They probably would have, if it had come to that. Instead, it was the lizards in uniform that started blasting them, and when the locusts opened fire themselves, it was the lizards they aimed at.

  It was quite some firefight, while it lasted, although it didn’t involve any more mortar rounds. Five of the ten insect-people went down, various bits of their upper bodies and heads having been boiled, seared or fried by the lizards’ ray guns. I’ve no idea how many casualties the lizards took, nor have I any idea what had happened to the silver-skinned dwarfs, or which side they might have been on if they’d still been within shooting-range. If the lizards weren’t wiped out, though, they must have beaten a hasty retreat, because I was alone with five of the locusts when silence finally fell.

  It was authentic silence. When I’d first emerged from the crashed saucer, before the shooting had started, there had been a sonic background of buzzings, whistlings, and squawkings, but there was no buzzing, whistling or squawking now. The firefight had sent every animal and insect for half a mile
around stampeding away from us.

  The silence didn’t last, though. The locusts started arguing again—not quite as vociferously as before, but nastily enough. Their voices were high-pitched and full of whistling sounds, and they made my eardrums ache. I was convinced by then, though, that they weren’t about to shoot, eat or rape me. Whatever sort of bone of contention I’d become, it evidently wasn’t one that required them to rend me limb from limb right away.

  For the first time, I had a moment to think—or would have had, if it hadn’t been for the dope I’d breathed in and the whistling in my cars, either one of which would have made it difficult to string two thoughts together to make a train. Somehow, though, I managed to think that what was happening was all wrong. Whoever these various sets of monsters were, and whatever beef they had with one another, they shouldn’t have been shooting up the neighborhood. Like everyone else, I’d heard the story about what might happen to future history if a time-traveler accidentally stood on a Jurassic butterfly— and here were these guys crashing spaceships and lobbing bombs at one another.

  I guess I wasn’t the only one to think that. I’d just got around to wondering whether the history-changing potential of their recklessness might be what the big argument was about when the shadows came, and the locusts really freaked out.

  I call them shadows, because they were black and didn’t seem to be made of anything. They weren’t so much there as conspicuously not there, if that makes any sense at all: just weird flickering patches of absence moving through the interstices of the material world.

  If each individual shadow was a separate entity, there were probably a dozen or so converging on the locusts, but they might all have been different aspects of the same entity—perhaps two-dimensional cross-sections of the multitudinous limbs of some ten-dimensional creature cutting through our three-dimensional space. Maybe the locusts knew what the shadows were, and maybe they didn’t—but they knew enough to know that their guns and bazookas were useless now. They never fired a shot—just ran like hell.

  They were very fast, but running was just as futile as shooting would have been. The shadows chased them down, and...well, I don’t exactly know what they did. Maybe they devoured the locusts, maybe they just pulled them out of our space and into some other dimension. Either way, whenever a shadow caught a locust, it flowed all around it, and the locust was gone—utterly annihilated, it seemed.

  One, two, three, four, five—all gone, in less time than it took me to count.

  Then they came for me.

  Actually, they came for the dead bodies first. They cleaned up the patch of ground like the charwomen from hell—one quick flick of the shadow-duster, and everything was gone: body-parts, ichor-stains, shell-cases. Broken ferns became whole again; burned leaves were healed. It was like time winding back, but only for a second or two. Once the bodies were gone and everything else was on its way back to the condition it had been in before, the shadows settled on me—more than one of them, I think.

  * * * *

  I thought that I was dead. I thought, in fact, that I had been annihilated as utterly as the locusts.

  Strangely enough, I continued thinking that I was dead for quite some time. I actually continued to think that I was experiencing nonexistence, and if Descartes himself had come along to tell me that it was a contradiction in terms, I’d have told him that unless and until he’d actually been there and done it, he ought to keep his meditations to himself.

  It wasn’t just that I thought I wasn’t; it was that I actually thought that because I thought I wasn’t, I wasn’t. I know that doesn’t make sense—not now—but it did at the time...except, I suspect, that I wasn’t at the time at all, and that was what the trouble was. I was out of time, or beyond time, or in a special sort of darkness where nothing was possible but things still were.

  I had been high on that dope-laden atmosphere, but I wasn’t high any more. I had been in pain, from half a hundred bruises and several superficial burns, but I wasn’t any more. I wasn’t ...anything, and yet, after what might have been a split second or a billion years, I came back into the light, back into space, and back into time.

  I was back on the operating table—the same operating table I’d been on before, so far as I could tell—but I wasn’t strapped down. The straps were still there, loosened or unfastened as they had been when I’d wriggled out of them, but I wasn’t in them. There was no sign of the little silver-skinned guys with the almond-shaped eyes, or any of their scary equipment. There was no one there but the shadows—who were still very conspicuous by their apparent absence, like holes in reality.

  When I first sat up there seemed to be at least forty of them, but by the time I’d dangled my legs over the side of the table—which was the right way up now—there was only one.

  Then there were none—except that something had stepped out of the final shadow, which certainly wasn’t the entity that had cast it. It was a human woman. She looked like me—enough like me, in fact, to suggest that I’d served as a model, though not so nearly identical as to seem unduly creepy. She was wearing a traffic-warden’s uniform just like mine—except, of course, that I wasn’t wearing mine. I wished that I was, instead of the hospital gown. It was a very clean hospital gown, though—there wasn’t a trace of blood or ichor on it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Assuming, that is, that you just rescued me from Jurassic Hell, and don’t have any plans to eat, shoot or rape me.”

  “Technically,” she said, “it was late Triassic Hell, about two hundred and seventeen million years upstream of your pick-up point. Thank you for not losing your mind.”

  “At a guess,” I said, “that’s down to you too. You seem to have cleaned me up so well, inside and out, that I’m a good deal better now than I ever was before.”

  “That’ll be temporary, I’m afraid,” my approximate doppelgänger told me. “You might be able to hold on to some of it, if you’re lucky, but time and the flesh will take their toll. You do deserve congratulation, though—you really could have come apart completely.”

  “I’ve been to Alton Towers more than once,” I told her. “Rides terrify me, but it’s the kind of terror I can tolerate. Are you taking me home?”

  “Yes. We’ll put you back as close as possible to your point of abduction. You might lose thirty minutes, maybe an hour, but no one will have noticed that you were gone.”

  I nearly said that they could have put me back a whole week later without anyone noticing or caring that I was gone, but I managed to stop myself. “What about the others?” I asked. “The lizards, the locusts and the midgets with the creepy eyes? Do they get to go home, or have they been sent to the naughty chair?”

  She frowned slightly at that. “They won’t be going home,” she said. Rightly or wrongly, I took that to mean that appearances hadn’t been deceptive, and that they really had been annihilated.

  “So what are you?” I asked. “The time police? Every time someone stamps on a butterfly back at the dawn of time, you arrive to tidy up?”

  “Yes,” she said. I got the impression that she wasn’t being entirely straight with me—but I also had a sneaking suspicion that she’d somehow put the question into my mind, purely in order that she could say “yes” when I asked it.

  “But I get to go home because I’m innocent? I was just unlucky to be aboard the alien spaceship, getting probed without my consent, when whatever happened, happened?”

  “Yes,” she said, again.

  “This is silly,” I told her.

  “Yes,” she said, again—and then, just to break the pattern, she added: “It is silly—but it’s not pointless. There’s a reason for doing it this way.”

  I think I was supposed to ask what the reason was, or make another lucky guess at it, but time and the flesh were beginning to take their toll, and I was feeling more like myself—my real self, alas.

  “What do those little idiots think they’re playing at?” I asked, instead. “Why are they always s
natching people out of their cozy beds and mucking about with them? If they’ve come all the way from Alpha bloody Centauri, why don’t they just make contact and engage us in a mature dialogue like sensible unhuman beings?”

  “If they really had come from Alpha Centauri they probably would,” she said, with a slight sigh. “As things are, they daren’t. Even minimal contact is a risk—if your species weren’t on the very brink of extinction, they wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Because it’s not just Triassic butterflies you’re worried about, is it?” I guessed. “Discreet as they are, in their own inefficient fashion, they’re still risking the shadows by interfering with the twenty-first century.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t start that again. They’re all risking the shadows—the locusts, the lizards, and any number of others. They’re all being as discreet as possible...but even so, they’re all getting in one another’s way. Why?”

  “Some times attract more travelers than others. Your time is the hottest spot of all.”

  “Are humans really that interesting?”

  “Not in themselves—but you were the first to reach that level of self-conscious intelligence and technical expertise, and you killed yourselves off with such amazing alacrity. That narrows the window of opportunity to researchers, you see, and generates unusual traffic density.”