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 wristwatch, 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