Aileen the Alien: An encounter with another world

By Andrew MacLaren-Scott

A light-hearted novella about alien abduction that will make you smile and will make you think. A middle-aged man heads off for a break on the wild west coast of Scotland but gets a much greater change of routine than he expected. This fast-paced tale is surprising, entertaining and thought-provoking. It reveals another world rather close to home that is strangely similar to our own world, but also very different.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782342342

Book preview

1988.

Introduction

I can’t be bothered with people not believing me, so I will pretend that this is just a silly story

1

It was meant to be a quiet week away with an old friend. It was meant to be some time out to recharge the batteries, chill a bit, kick off the shoes and feel the sand between my toes and relax.

All that kind of calm and lazy sort of thing, is all that it was meant to be.

With Lizzy. A week away on the wild west coast of Scotland with lively Lizzy. That is how I thought of her. She was 57 years old, three years older than me, and as mad a singing, poetry-writing, wine-drinking and brown bread-making old hippy as you could hope to find.

Just me and Lizzy relaxing for a week in her lonely cottage at the end of a winding potholed track that left the main road a few miles inland and took you down to her place beside the sea.

Heaven in the sunshine. Hell in the wet, cold and wind. Often a mixture of heaven and hell each day. The west coast of Scotland, in other words.

A walk was suggested on the first afternoon, along the thin track that led to the top of the cliffs. That brought the first indications of the weird stuff.

She took me up to the cliff-top then we turned in towards the hills, until a thick mist descended, and we got lost.

So there I was, a couple of miles from the cottage, near the top of a hill, enclosed in an impenetrable mist with a rather odd woman who I considered to be at least half mad, and with dangerous cliffs between us and the safety of her home, which was down there, somewhere, I reassured myself.

So we just had to sit and wait for things to clear, and after a while sitting in silence, surrounded by clinging wet mist, she said, ‘You know, there is supposed to be a ghost on this hill.’

I frowned, and responded, ‘Aren’t you thinking of Ben Macdui? The Old Grey Man of Ben Macdui, way over in the Cairngorms?’

But she insisted, ‘No. On this one too. They call it the Bochun. Don’t know what that means, but it’s supposed to be a grey shapeless thing that emerges from the mist and terrifies people off the ridge, sometimes to their death.’

‘Oh great!’ I said, laughing, ‘That’s just what we need. A big grey shapeless thing that comes out of the mist and chases us over the cliffs!’

And she was laughing too, but she insisted there had been many stories about it, down through the years. None that I had ever heard of though. Look up the Bochun on the internet and there is nothing there about ghosts on Scottish west coast hills.

So... the Bochun. It was nonsense, I was sure. But sitting in the clinging mist I almost wanted to believe in it. Almost wanted to think that it might wander out of the void and convince me that this world is more complex and wondrous than I think, or I should now say than I thought, it probably is. That’s how badly I wanted there to be something else to this world, until I found out there really is.

But the Bochun didn’t come to scare us, although disaster nearly arrived in a simpler and more stupid way when, after an hour or so of waiting, she suddenly shouted, ‘What’s that?’ and jumped up, startled.

She was moving away from me. Must have heard some noise, maybe just the wind.

But she backed off, sideways, into the gloom. Slipped, fell, cried out.

But when I edged towards her carefully, crouched down and peering through the gloom, I found her hands and hauled her back up off a ledge. Quite a wide ledge. I don’t think there was ever any risk that she would actually have fallen far. But still, it was a ledge. Silly lady.

So after that alarm we were afraid to move any more and were up there for another hour or so, huddled together against the cold.

Then the mist cleared just as we were worrying about darkness descending, and we found the track again and trudged back down for some food, some drink and some sleep.

But during the next morning she got a phone call, and told me she had to go. Not much detail, just some stuff about a troubled friend, and so off she went in her rusty old car, leaving me to enjoy the solitude on my own.

And that is why I ended up climbing the cliff track again late at night, when I had been unable to sleep.

It was a clear night, and I also had a torch with me. I had already had a fair bit of whisky, and was feeling rather sorry for myself, trying to avoid the demon depression that can strike at times and wondering if going up there all alone was really such a good plan. And rather stupidly I took