by forewarning himself of this fact he might forearm himself against any similar effect, although he didn’t think that it would do him any great harm to start dreaming about other people’s supposed alien abductions, or even projecting himself into such dreams, provided that he remained fully conscious of the fact that dreams were what they were. He was confident, as a man of science—even the second-rate kind who taught science to school kids rather than actually doing it—that he could resist the temptation to start believing in nonsense simply because it was sometimes spouted by people who had the gift of the gab, capable of sweetening the tempers of road hogs and selling ice to Eskimos.
Before picking Milly up, Steve had vaguely assumed that the AlAbAn group would meet in East Grimstead’s village hall, but by the time they had passed through West Grimstead Milly had disabused him of that notion and had given him fair warning that the front room of Amelia Rockham’s so-called cottage could get a little crowded.
Steve was surprised to find, when he, Janine and Milly arrived, that there were already twenty-five people gathered, most of them perched on folding chairs with no space to stretch their legs. There were more than enough tea-cups to go round, though; Mrs. Rockham was obviously used to catering for such numbers. She greeted the newcomers warmly, and told them not to be shy about grabbing their fair share of the biscuits, because no one else would be.
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
