A couple of hours after dusk, the door opened and in walked the old man and the tall man.
‘Please sit,’ the tall man said. We both sat in our chairs. The two men stood in front of us.
‘First. We have not decided on a course of action with you yet,’ said the younger man.
‘We demand to be released,’ said Hazel, ‘I am a lawyer and I promise, if you don’t release us immediately, I will sue the pants off you.’
I wasn’t impressed with Hazel’s bravado and neither were they. Frankly they just ignored her outburst.
‘Your four-legged creature is safe,’ said the old man.
‘How do you mean, safe?’ I asked, not knowing if they realised the meaning of the word in the context of her need for food and water.
‘One of us handed it in to the police.’
That was interesting. Addy had a name and address tag on her collar and was also microchipped. The police would trace her back to us and investigate. It gave me hope, but it was short-lived.
‘We removed its label and electronic identifier,’ he continued, and my hopes were dashed of looking for rescue from that quarter.
‘What about us then?’ I asked.
Before they could answer, Hazel jumped in, ‘We will swear never to discuss what happened to us if you release us.’
‘We have not decided on a course of action regarding the two of you. Be patient,’ said the taller man.
‘Do you have any other needs?’ asked the old man.
My first impulse was to tell him to fuck off, but Hazel realised we needed to at least offer some semblance of cooperation.
‘We need lights in the corridor and the bathroom,’ she said.
‘And a bed,’ I answered, ‘and some magazines or books,’ I added as an afterthought.
‘We’ll attend to that,’ he said, ‘You can control the lights by sweeping your hand from bottom left to top right to increase light and the reverse to decrease light… thus,’ and he demonstrated.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘That is not your concern,’ said the taller man.
‘We are interested. Are you from another world? At least you can tell us that. We know your technology is more advanced than ours,’ I said.
‘The less you know, the better.’
‘Are you from the solar system?’ I couldn’t resist the question. I’d been trying to wrack my brains as to anywhere in the solar system where there could be a civilisation.
‘We are on this world, currently. The less you know, the better,’ he said, depositing another bag of groceries on the desk, before turning and leaving the room with the old man.
‘We have more questions,’ I shouted after them, but the door closed without further issue.
We looked at each other and once more Hazel had tears in her eyes.
8 Prisoner Transfer
For three more days, our imprisonment in the convent room continued.
The aliens continued to be uncommunicative whenever we saw them, but we found we were left alone almost all of the time. Our protests and demands came to nothing. We promised silence and pleaded for more information. All to no avail.
They replaced an inflatable mattress, brought in during the small hours of the first night, with two camp beds and sleeping bags the next morning. Food continued to be takeaway meals from the local Mace supermarket. We requested more toilet paper, soap, a kettle for hot water, and clean clothes.
The kettle was a revelation – a large mixing bowl which heated water on demand. It had no visible electrical connection and the temperature of the water was set by waving a hand over the bowl clockwise or anticlockwise. Cold water boiled in just fifteen seconds on full power, but I later discovered it could be frozen with continual anticlockwise waving motions. I wondered if I were witnessing an example of broadcast power. Imagine that. No annoying cables trailing around the home.
Hazel said, ‘I was due in court at one today. There’ll be consternation and an effort being made to contact me right now.’
‘But no one will know where to look,’ I said.
‘No, but there will be a hue and cry when neither of us can be found, especially given that I was acting for someone who was subject to a violent assault.’
‘Still don’t see how it helps.’
‘No,’ she said in despair.
We held hands and looked out at the rain falling in the convent compound. Nearby, we heard the spasmodic rush of a gutter overflowing.
‘Is there no way we can overpower them?’ Hazel asked.
‘Doesn’t seem to be. They appear to be able to read our minds. Have you noticed how the force field holds you back if you want to go and snoop in the hallway, but not if you are going to the loo? They have to be sensing our thoughts.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve not tried anything since the first day. I’ll try to think about something innocuous and then jump at the next one to come in.’
‘Don’t get yourself hurt.’
‘They don’t seem to want to harm us, so far.’
‘No… so far,’ she said.
I didn’t have to wait long to attempt my attack. Hazel was sitting on one of the beds, but I was standing near the table when the door opened.
The old man came into the room with more sandwiches and cold pies. I concentrated on imagining a delicious a hot meal and its flavours and aromas, hoping it would mask my intentions.
He placed the bag of groceries on the table and I leapt at him.
I managed to get a hand around his neck before every muscle in my body froze and I was thrown back across the room, falling hard against the wood panelling under the window and cracking my head painfully against the wall. Hazel was with me in a flash to make sure I wasn’t badly injured.
‘That was foolish, Mr. Mackay. You cannot harm us, only yourself,’ the old man said as he left the room.
‘You okay, Henry?’
‘Yes. Just a bang on the head.’ I felt my scalp. No blood.
‘This is scary. We’re totally helpless.’
Whether my action was the cause, I don’t know, but twenty minutes later one of the young men and the old man returned. I noticed the force field was immediately present as the door opened. We were no longer trustee prisoners. They weren’t taking any chances.
They stood, looking down at us as we sat on one of the beds.
The old man spoke, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mackay, you are becoming a liability. We are taking you somewhere more secure.’
‘Why not let us go? We’ll keep quiet,’ said Hazel.
‘We cannot take that risk. We do not intend you any harm, but we are in the middle of a project which cannot be interrupted and your presence is a nuisance. Come with us,’ he said and the younger man opened the door. Outside, the larger man I’d seen the first day was waiting.
The force field released us and we followed as he made his way along the corridor, turned the corner, and opened a door into the garden. He stepped through it and we walked behind him with the other two following us. One was holding one of the blue guns, so fleeing was out of the question.
For a moment, I thought the rain had stopped, but quickly realised that we were covered by the force field and the raindrops were sliding off to each side. Amazing.
The path forked. The right branch headed in the direction of the green door, but the one we took led towards the chapel which I could just see between the overgrown shrubs and orchard.
A fourth person, a woman dressed as a nun, stood by the chapel door, holding it open. Surely, they didn’t intend to imprison us in this tiny building. It could not have measured more than ten feet by twelve.
She held the door open and I noticed it had been painted the same green as the mysterious one in the wall. We entered and stood in the middle of the bare stone structure. The others followed us. The three in our escort stood with their backs to the wall of one of the longer sides. The nun stepped a couple of feet closer and stood still.
&n
bsp; She spoke in a guttural language which seemed almost bestial, then switched back to English and said, ‘I am going to accompany you to a new location where you will have relative freedom until we have completed our project. The journey might be disorientating. Do not become anxious. You will be safe.’
Hazel and I exchanged worried glances and the chapel vanished. We and the nun were surrounded by grey mist.
9 A Truly Alien Journey
The stone walls, floor, and plaster ceiling of the chapel dissolved into an amorphous, swirling grey. The nun stood before us but none of the other figures were present. I held Hazel’s hand.
The mist encircled us. Both Hazel and the nun were flicking in and out of focus. Not just focus, but the crispness and colour rose and fell simultaneously as if they were not in phase with the rest of this bizarre reality. I looked at my hand and I, too, was pulsing in and out of solidity. What on earth was happening to us? She’d said we’d not be harmed. She was here with us. I had to believe her as nothing else made any sense. None of it made any sense anyway.
Hazel and I looked fearfully at each other. The chapel was gone and we seemed to be moving quite rapidly but without any consistent direction. One moment we’d feel as if we were being pushed to the left, the next backwards, then forwards, upwards, down, as if in an invisible elevator combined with a gentle rollercoaster. It was quite disorientating and I was beginning to feel nauseous.
Only a few minutes had passed. I was about to ask what was happening when the phasing ceased and the swirling grey changed to oranges, reds, yellows, blues, and blacks. It was as if they were trying to form themselves into something before our eyes. It all morphed into an unbelievable otherworldly scene.
The three of us were standing in what seemed to be a glass bell jar structure. What we could see outside was almost impossible to comprehend. Hazel and I turned to take in our surroundings, gasping with surprise.
Skyscrapers stretched into the air. A huge red building of more than a hundred floors, stood solidly before us, but was only one of many in all the colours of the rainbow. They were clearly buildings and had windows. People were entering and leaving them at ground level and climbing into blob-shaped vehicles which then whizzed off in various directions.
Behind the skyscrapers, I could see what looked like a dome protecting the whole city. Beyond that were some scattered, wispy, thin clouds and blue sky. The sunshine was strangely reddened, adding to the alien impression. I could see a reflection of the sun in one of the skyscrapers, it seemed bigger and redder than ours.
The bell jar vanished and the nun morphed into different clothes, a tight-fitting tunic in rose and white material. She was now a middle-aged woman in clothes more suited to a teenage clubber. I looked at our apparel and it hadn’t changed.
We emerged from the glazed foyer of a building into the street. I looked up at the red skyscraper. It was taller than the London Shard. A lozenge-shaped vehicle arrived and the side faded into nothingness revealing several seats.
‘Enter,’ said the nun.
‘Not until you tell us what is happening. Where is this place?’
I’d barely finished the sentence before I felt the force field whisk me off my feet and deposit me into the rear seat of the vehicle. Hazel got over the shock of seeing me so manhandled and walked to the vehicle to join me. Our guard took the seat in front of us. Resistance was no longer delaying our captors. The side of the vehicle reappeared, the nun said a few unintelligible words, and we accelerated rapidly along a broad avenue between the alien buildings. We were soon exceeding seventy miles per hour yet other vehicles criss-crossed in front of us. They must have been communicating with each other for there was never a sign of a collision. This was autonomous driving taken to the extreme.
We held hands and peered around at the futuristic city.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, but there was no answer.
We appeared to be travelling out of the centre and into less crowded suburbs with smaller buildings more suited to the reducing height of the dome. Its boundary was closer now and we were approaching it rapidly.
As we reached the dome wall, the vehicle entered a hemispherical tube of glass, the size of a motorway tunnel, leading out into the countryside. The car neither hesitated nor slowed but shot along the transparent route. If anything, it was accelerating.
Outside, the scene was no longer futuristic, but almost dead and barren, reminiscent of the wild west, but with less structure to the hills and no greenery whatsoever. Could it be Mars?
Some of the red hills could be called mountains, but with old, crumbling features. There were no jagged peaks or sheer cliffs – everything was more rounded in the manner of older eroded mountain ranges. Rusty red and brown soil formed dunes which rolled off, Sahara-like, into the near distance. The tunnel continued before us and this soon became the longest part of our journey.
‘Are you not going to tell us where we are?’ I asked eventually.
‘No.’
Well, at least I’d got an answer that time. I looked over my shoulder at the rear window.
‘Hazel, look behind us,’ I said as I marvelled at the domed city which was now in the middle distance, looking magnificently alien. This is exactly as I’d pictured the domes of fanciful, futuristic, alien civilisations, in the days when I used to read science fiction.
‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘So, they are aliens.’
‘Never had any doubt.’
‘Surprised they look so much like us.’
‘Yes. That is odd,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe they’re making us see them this way and they’re not really humanoid at all.’
Our eyes met and the fear was shared.
Before us, the glass tunnel stretched onward, passing between two large, eroded hills and then across what could only be described as a desert, complete with red, brown, and yellow sand dunes.
‘Do you think it’s Mars?’ I asked.
‘Surely not. The orbiters would have seen these cities.’
‘Not if they were hidden by whatever concealed that green door. All we’d have seen is desert and hills.’
‘Mars has craters. Not seen any craters.’
‘No. The sunlight is a strange colour, too. Not like our sun.’
'There's a moon up there,' Hazel said, pointing at a small reddish-grey disc up to our left. It was less than half the size of our moon.
'I seem to remember that Phobos and Deimos were more asteroid shaped than that. That moon seems to be spherical.'
'Pinker than ours,' she said.
'But that might just be the sunlight.'
'Gravity. It’s similar to back home.'
'You're right. Can't be Mars, then,' I said.
‘Where on earth are we?’ she asked, but I knew it was rhetorical. The one thing we did seem to be certain of was that this was nowhere on Earth.
‘Can we get something to drink, please?’ I asked our guard.
‘We will arrive shortly and there will be food and drink,’ was the curt reply.
I scanned the horizon, but there was nothing but the dunes and the endless tunnel. Behind us, the city disappeared among the ancient hills, just the upper part of the dome and one or two taller buildings visible. The vehicle must be travelling at more than a hundred miles per hour. While the city traffic had been considerable, we had only seen one or two vehicles coming in the opposite direction since entering the tube. As they passed us the sensation of our true speed sank home. I’d never been in a ground vehicle moving so rapidly.
Minutes later, we saw a glass barrier on the horizon cutting straight across the front of us. The first feature we’d seen for more than an hour. As we got closer, we realised we were nearing a crossroads. The tunnel crossing ours was much wider with many lanes of fast-moving traffic flowing in both directions. Looking to the left, the top of another city dome was peeking over the horizon. Why was our road so sparsely populated, I wondered?
There was no change in our speed as we closed upon th
e intersection so we assumed we were going straight on, but our excessive speed seemed to indicate a rapid stop was imminent. Both of us gripped our seats as we careered towards the junction.
With impossible precision, our vehicle threaded straight through the crossing traffic. We were so close to a vehicle coming from our right that I could clearly see the passengers and, if they’d been reading, I might have been able to see the title of the book.
We were mightily relieved to be continuing forward and not dying in a high-speed wreck. The aliens certainly trusted their technology.
More desert stretched before us, but eventually a low dome came into view in the distance. Our vehicle began to lose velocity. Was this to be our destination?
10 Internment Camp
Our speed fell away as the vehicle approached the dome. It was nowhere near as large as the city domes we’d seen. I estimated it was perhaps a mile in diameter and no more than three or four hundred feet high at the apex. There were no skyscrapers here.
We halted at glass gates. Two security women with weapons peered inside our vehicle then one waved her hand towards the glass barrier and the lower part opened to allow us through. The weapons were the size of an AK47, but with a four-inch diameter cylinder beneath the barrel. They were blue, like the pistols, but with black stock and detail.
Inside, the differences between this place and the city were even more obvious. There were no futuristic buildings at all. In fact, they were very Earth-like in design, like a street of small detached houses. They had gardens, and hedges or picket fences separated them. People in the street and gardens watched our vehicle enter and I saw others coming to their windows and looking in our direction. Their attitude towards our arrival indicated our visit was out of the ordinary for them.
The one truly alien aspect to the houses was their bizarre colours. Blue, yellow, green, and orange bricks as if a child had used a random variety of Lego in their construction. Roofs were pink, black, or red. Window frames painted cyan, magenta, brown, grey, and some white added to the curious scene which brought ‘painting by numbers’ to mind, but where someone had jumbled the palette, causing the artist to paint everything incorrectly.
The Door Page 5