“She’s been my best friend for years,” Janine said. “This is the one thing we haven’t shared, until now. She’s never told me what happened to her, though.”
“It often takes time,” Walter said. “We all had to wait until we were ready, and we understand perfectly why it takes some people longer to reach that point than others. You must both take all the time you need. Excuse me, please.” Walter allowed himself to be drawn away by Amelia Rockham.
Janine was still smiling, and Steve could see that she had no intention of explaining to Walter that she was only here to keep Steve company.
“You want your parents to worry about you, don’t you?” he said.
“You’re the one who thinks that a little mystery spices up a relationship,” she retorted. “Let’s sit down—we’re about to start.”
They took their places on the Naugahyde settee, which was already beginning to feel like “their” seat. When the preliminaries were over and newcomers had been duly advised of the rules, Walter invited “Mary”—a middle-aged and very well-furnished woman, who gave the impression that she had certainly never suffered from an eating disorder of the sort that had once afflicted poor Milly—to tell the story of an encounter she had had some twenty-five years before, in 1981. The prospect did not seem overly exciting, at first—but Steve found out soon enough that appearances could be quite deceptive.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CATALYST AND THE CHRYSALIS
This is something I’ve always remembered but always kept quiet about. I didn’t need psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy to dredge the memory up, but it wasn’t something I wanted to tell anyone at the time, or at any time since. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being laughed at, or being called a liar or a fantasist. It was just something I needed to keep to myself for a while. Now, though, it seems that the time is right. I’ve been coming here for a couple of years now, listening to everyone else’s stories, and I feel that I’m ready to let it go.
Some of the younger members won’t have any memory of 1981, and it’s not a year that has gone down in history for any particular reason. It’s probably enough to say that it was two years into Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror, with the economic recession getting ever deeper and unemployment rising fast. I was married then, and my husband, Mike, was one of the people who lost his job.
We had been doing reasonably well until then, and weren’t exactly plunged into instant destitution. I was working at the local hospital as a nurse, but my pay wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage and sustain any kind of decent standard of living. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t react well to unemployment, or to my becoming the breadwinner. The vague plans we’d made to start a family went right out of the window, and although the prospect of having children had never seemed a particularly big deal before, the fact that we were no longer able to consider the possibility suddenly seemed to become one. At any rate, it became another thing for Mike to get bitter about—another thing to fuel his disappointment and his drinking.
We were soon struggling, getting gradually deeper in misery and debt. Being in debt doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays, when everybody under thirty seems to live on credit, but in those days we didn’t think about owing money as something normal and natural. It was bad, and it preyed on our minds—which only served to increase Mike’s disappointment, and drinking, even further. You can imagine how the spiral worked.
I did my best to increase our income, working extra shifts and studying hard for the exams I needed to pass in order to get promotion, but that only made the fact that I was supporting him increasingly conspicuous, burdensome and annoying. The state of the marriage went downhill rapidly once the slide began, and I think we both knew that it was only a matter of time before something broke under the strain.
The abduction itself was like a dozen others I’ve heard described here. I’d worked sixteen hours on the trot, from six o’clock in the morning to ten at night, and I came home exhausted. Mike was already asleep when I came into the bedroom, so dead drunk that an earthquake wouldn’t have woken him up. I should have been equally oblivious once I’d dropped off, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table, which said that it was twenty past three. I got out of bed and went to the bedroom window.
The window was open—it was August, and we were three days into what passed for a heat wave in those days. There was a huge disk floating over the house, silent and unilluminated. I was paralyzed, and then grabbed by some kind of tractor beam. Its manipulators maneuvered me out of the window easily enough. I was a lot thinner in those days. I lost consciousness when the thing swallowed me up.
When I woke up, I was in the kind of laboratory space that we’ve heard described so often. I was lying on my back on an operating table, with a white sheet draped over me. My limbs were immobilized, although I couldn’t see any solid restraints.
There was a bright light directly above me, bright enough to hurt my eyes. There were various items of equipment massed on the left-hand side of the bed, all seemingly idle. I had lines in each arm, and one in each leg. The one in my left arm seemed to be an intravenous drip, and the one in my left leg also seemed to be carrying a clear fluid—probably bodily wastes. The ones that caught my attention, though, were those in my right arm and leg, which were full of colored fluid. The tube connected to the leg appeared to be carrying red fluid out, while the tube connected to the arm seemed to be carrying a blue fluid back again.
It didn’t take a genius to guess that the leg-tube was carrying oxygenated arterial blood while the arm-tube was returning deoxygenated venous blood. The flow was slow but steady. I didn’t appear to be breathing any more deeply or rapidly than usual, but the air I was sucking in had a slightly strange taste, which suggested that it was richer in oxygen than Earthly air.
It wasn’t easy to see where the blood was going, because it was below the level of the operating table, but I could crane my neck just far enough to see that there was something in a kind of cradle resting on the floor. The cradle must have been about four feet long and two wide, and the thing fitted into it fairly snugly. It was dark brown in color, with a shiny surface. It put me in mind of a big balloon, or a giant rugby ball, or some sort of monstrous egg. My blood was being slowly pumped into the ovoid at one end, and pumped out again at the other, then returned to the vein in my arm.
My first thought was that I had fallen victim to alien vampires, but that didn’t make sense, because the blood—or something very like it—was being returned. Then I wondered whether the ovoid might be some kind of dialysis machine, but that didn’t seem very plausible either.
I must have been lying there for an hour or so before anyone—or anything—came in. I felt quite calm, perhaps because I was being fed tranquilizers through the incoming drip as well as nutrients. I didn’t scream when the door finally opened, or experience any dreadful sensation of shock. I’d already prepared myself mentally to see something that wasn’t human, and was, in the event, slightly relieved to see something that wasn’t quite as horrid as it might have been.
It was a bug of sorts—a six-limbed thing that used its four hind feet for walking while its two front feet were modified into something more like arms. Its wing-cases curved around its upper body like some sort of fancy jacket, colored dark red with black spots like a ladybird. The body would have suited a head like a praying mantis, but that’s not the sort of head it had. Its skull was big and rounded, and its face was like some kind of Halloween mask, with big round eyes positioned in front and a big smiling mouth with nice white teeth. It didn’t have a nose or ears, but the eyes and the mouth were just enough to provide a hint of apparent humanity even before it spoke.
“Hello Mary,” it said, in a strange fluty accent. “I’m Imhotep. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. I hope you’re quite comfortable.”
“Wasn’t Imhotep the guy who built the Great Pyramid?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me, I hope, that the pyramids really were constructed as landing-pads for alien spaceships?”