Abducted by aliens

Melanie Harrison was abducted by aliens after her Zumba class on a Wednesday night. She drove home slowly, the windscreen wipers struggling to cope with a downpour of rain, and she had only gone a short way when her mobile phone rang. She pulled off the lane into a gateway, and a flash of lightening lit the car, and showed that the call was from Beth.

“Mum,” she said, “you’ll have to speak to Simon! Dad won’t – he’s got his head stuck in his telescope, and he says you’ll sort it out.”

Why can’t Phil look through his telescope and deal with things, Melanie thought. She sighed and switched off the engine.

“Sort what out?”

“It’s my turn to have the car on Saturday, me and Lara-Jane are going shopping – it’s all arranged. And now Simon says it’s his turn – and it’s not!”

“Where does Simon want to go?”

“He want to go to the Sports Centre with his friends – but it’s not his turn to have the car!”

Not for the first time, Melanie had the traitorous thought that it would have been much easier if the twins had failed their driving tests. Once they had been cute and winsome, until almost overnight they changed into quarrelsome teenagers who seemed to spend all their time arguing. Sometimes they felt like the Opposition, and she had to deploy guile and tactics to keep the peace and out-manoeuvre them.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Beth’s voice.

“Mum, are you listening to me? I want you to tell Simon he can’t have the car.”

“Why don’t you share? If Simon’s only going with a couple of friends you could give them a lift. It’s on the way.”

“Mum, I shouldn’t have to spend all my time driving him and his horrible friends all over the place!”

Melanie resisted the urge to tell her that she’d spent half her life doing just that.

“It doesn’t sound too unreasonable, Beth,”

“But…”

“And,” she went on, playing her trump card, “I did say you couldn’t borrow the car until you’d tidied your room.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone.

“Is it done yet?”

“Not yet,” replied Beth in her sulkiest voice. “I’m just going to do it.”

“Good,” Melanie said, “that’ll be nice,” and switched off her phone before Beth could complain that it wasn’t fair.

Really, she thought, I’m wasted working in the library, the UN should be using my skills as a mediator, and it would be a lot easier than dealing with difficult teenagers. The thought crossed her mind that it would be nice not to have to go home, and in almost that instant she got her wish.

There was a sudden flash of light, a white light that was so strong that even when she shut her eyes she could still see it. And then everything seemed to stop.

Gradually Melanie became aware that the light had gone, and instead there was a strong smell of something unpleasant. She was lying down, and she could hear crackly, discordant high-pitched noises. When she opened her eyes she saw what must be a hospital ceiling, and knew there had been some kind of accident – a car must have crashed into hers, or she had been struck by lightening. She looked round for a nurse.

It was lucky she was lying down because she’d have fallen over at what she saw. Melanie coped well in emergencies, even when Simon chopped the end off his finger and there was blood everywhere, she hadn’t screamed or fainted but wrapped his hand up hygienically, put the finger end in a packet of frozen peas and drove Simon and the finger to the hospital, all the time behaving calmly and capably. This time she didn’t feel calm; her heart pounded and she let out an involuntary squeal of terror. Watching her was not a doctor or a nurse but a … Thing. Melanie shut her eyes again, and tried to think reasonably, perhaps she’d had a bang on the head and was seeing things, or perhaps it was a very bad dream? She pinched herself hard but instead of everything being back to normal when she opened my eyes it was worse – now there were two of them.

They were looking at her with enormous round eyes in heads that were triangular in shape. There was only one explanation: they were Aliens, Extra-terrestrials, Beings From Another Planet. Melanie had seen enough films to know that if humans were abducted then there was a reason. Perhaps she was going to be used for gruesome experiments, done with shining implements? For the first time she wished she’d watched more on the Sci-Fi Channel, and knew how to react.

She sat up, so that she would feel less vulnerable. The two Things began to make noises at each other, the same horrible sounds she’d heard before. They were talking to each other. Melanie took a deep breath.

“Do. You. Speak. English?” she asked, very slowly and clearly, knowing how ridiculous she sounded.

The Things looked at each other, made more noises and began to move. Melanie shrank back but they ignored her, and went to the other side of the room taking tiny scuttling steps. They began to pick things up and turn them over. When nothing else happened Melanie began to look around.

She felt slightly better when she saw that the large room didn’t look like any laboratory or operating theatre that she had seen. One wall was covered with lights that flashed on and off, and screens that showed diagrams and patterns of shapes. Another wall was completely covered by what even she could tell was a representation of the stars. Phil would know what they were. She wondered if she’d ever see Phil or Beth and Simon again. She swallowed hard; she had to be calm in this crisis, so she concentrated on her surroundings.

She must be in a spaceship, but if she had thought about it, then she’d have thought a spaceship would be like a metallic version of a loft apartment, where the only thing on show would be a few silver cushions; this was very different. It was definitely not minimalist because every surface had something on it. When she looked down at the floor it was covered in piles of objects. Stuff. There were things everywhere: containers on their sides with the contents poured out; piles of what might have been clothes; upturned cylinders from which spilled grey or black shiny liquid.

Melanie heard scratchy steps and the Things returned, and the awful smell that had faded, came back with them. They carried what looked like large, shiny batons and she wondered if they were stun guns, until she realised one was being offered to her. She took hold of it quickly, before she changed her mind, and tried not to touch the creature’s fingers. It opened its mouth and made those squawking, discordant noises again, but this time she heard them differently.

“Can. You. Understand. Me.”

Melanie was so shocked she almost dropped the baton.

“Yes,” she breathed, “I can understand you.”

“These are translators.”

After that they all seemed to be at a loss as to what to say next, and just carried on staring at each other.

Melanie saw two aliens, one shorter than the other. They were small, vaguely humanoid, with two arms and two legs and had a definite green tinge to their skin, but these did not look as appealing as ET.

“Little green men,” she said aloud and without thinking.

“I’m not male!” said the shorter one.

“And I’m quite tall for my age!” returned the other.

Melanie narrowed her eyes. “Would that be considered adult in your species?”

The aliens looked at each other, and then the female said that soon they would be considered adults, and numbers were just numbers and some classifications needed changing.

Right, thought Melanie, I’ve heard that one before.

“Which planet have you come from?”

“We are from the star system Earthlings call The Magellanic Cloud.

“That would mean more to my husband, he’s interested in astronomy – you should have abducted him instead.”

“We didn’t abduct you,” said the female.

“Well, what would you call it?”

“We didn’t mean to. It was a mistake.”

“I don’t think you can abduct someone by mistake.”

“It was for research,” said the male, as if that settled the matter. “We’re doing primitive tribes on other planets, so we thought we’d come and have a look…”

“Hold on a minute, I’m not primitive!”

There was a silence that told Melanie that they disagreed.

“Anyway,” continued the male, “We wanted to get close to a real Earth human, so we came over, picked out an average specimen and ––”

“Abducted her!” Melanie didn’t know if she was more annoyed at being called average or a specimen.

“It wasn’t like that, we didn’t mean to. It wasn’t our fault. We said we should just have a look, but the others had set the coordinates and ––”

“And the next thing,” interrupted the female, “you appeared. It’s not our fault.”

“Whose fault is it then?”

“Theirs,” they said in unison, and pointed with spindly arms to a corner of the room. Melanie walked over to what looked like a pile of rubbish. She had to pick her way through heaps of objects lying about; none were were recognisable, yet somehow it all seemed familiar. In front of her were some alien bodies. Their eyes were shut, but their chests were moving so she knew they were alive.

“Are they all right?”

“They will be. Entering your atmosphere caused a bad reaction with …substances they had taken.”

Melanie was reminded of a party Simon had been to a few years ago when he and his friends took advantage of an empty house to drink large quantities of cider. She might be in an alien spaceship, but this was familiar territory.

“Do your parents know where you are, and what you are doing?”

The aliens looked at each other and said nothing.

“Well?”

“I see,” said Melanie. She folded her arms and addressed them. “So, am I right in thinking that your parents don’t know that you are visiting Earth, have abducted one of its inhabitants, and are experimenting with dangerous substances?”

Before they could reply another thought struck her.

“How did you get this spaceship to bring you here.”

“We programmed it,” said the male. “It was easy.”

“No, I meant, is it yours, or have you just ‘borrowed’ it?”

They shuffled what were their feet and dropped their gaze.

“I see. So as well as everything else, you’ve taken your parents’ spaceship without their permission?”

“They wouldn’t mind,” retorted the female, and tossed what would be her hair but looked like spirals of wire wool.

“I think they’d be shocked if they knew what you’d been up to, and very disappointed in you. I think you should go straight home before you get into any more trouble. And,” she added, “this looks as if it needs a good tidy up. It’s worse than my daughter’s bedroom!”

She was getting into the swing of it, and was about to give them the duties and responsibilities spiel, about how if you want to be treated as an adult then you had to behave like an adult, when all of a sudden there was the same blinding white light and everything stopped.

When the light faded she was back in her car, and her phone was ringing. She picked it up.

“Mum, Mum, you’ll have to tell Simon! Dad says he can’t possibly leave the telescope because he’s seen something really exciting, and Simon won’t listen to me. He says if I’ve got the car on Saturday then I have to take him to the cinema as well as the Sports Centre and I’m not going to. Me and Lara-Jane have been planning this for ages and we don’t want to be bothered with Simon and his friends and ––”

Melanie cut in. “I’m on my way now. I’ll deal with it.”

She put her phone in her bag and set off. She found she had a big grin on her face as she drove home; after thinking that she might never see them again it would be wonderful to see her family – and hers would be a doddle after coping with those difficult teenagers from The Magellanic Cloud!