The Book Didn't Mention Aliens: Time and Time Again Part I

By Cher Palmer

Lauren finds herself up a tree dressed only in her undies (not the way she usually dresses to go out). A millennium in the future Elisias newest and youngest perfect finds an anomaly: a fifteenth century monk describes a most improbable holy relic which sounds suspiciously like a bra and pair of pants. Katya, her unusually aggressive guard, an even less appealing alien and sundry other handicaps set out to rescue Lauren. Times a funny thing. It doesnt just pass. Sometimes it turns back and bites you on the bum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499087949

Cher Palmer

A coal miner’s daughter with an enormously supportive mother, I was born in South Wales and studied philosophy at Bristol University. Although several poems and songs were published and recorded when I was a student, the royalties wouldn’t have kept an anorexic budgie in seed so, after graduating, I moved to London. My first boss turned out to be Mr Right and, to prove it we have our beautiful, brilliant daughter, Kate: the Katya of these stories. The recent publication of a play inspired us to publish the first of these stories about Katya and her team.

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Copyright © 2014 by Cher Palmer.

ISBN:          Softcover          978-1-4990-8758-1

                    eBook             978-1-4990-8794-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/20/2014

Xlibris LLC

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

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CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ONE

1

A s if from nowhere a colourful array of expletives rent the air. The girl experienced sensations of falling and rising and breaking through and being scratched all over. But most of all Lauren just wanted to throw up.

Some things are all too believable – like she’d snogged the love of her best friend’s life after downing half a bottle of vodka (especially when the offended article was later seen patrolling the school perimeter with a well-honed vegetable parer).

Then there are things which are totally unbelievable – like she’d clambered forty feet up a rather large oak tree (even to escape a knife-wielding girl with a grievance).

She’d given up climbing altogether after an earlier best-friend had remarked how big her bum looked from below in a voice which megaphoned this information to the rest of the playground. Obviously Lauren had shown her former best-friend the error of her ways… and drummed the message in every time they’d subsequently met until they didn’t meet anymore. You won’t be surprised to learn Lauren had run through rather a lot of best-friends over the years.

But if forced to tell the truth she might have admitted her erstwhile chum had a point about the size of her bum. Not that Lauren believed in honesty, you understand. The truth just slipped out occasionally when she wasn’t looking.

The tree she’d unexpectedly found herself hanging onto for dear life was undeniably tall but otherwise quite unremarkable as trees went. What was remarkable was that only a moment earlier she hadn’t been there.

So she hadn’t climbed the tree and hadn’t fallen out of an aircraft either, (an unfortunate incident involving a boy, a shower and a flooded hotel lobby last year had led to a blanket ban on holidays). And she most certainly hadn’t been shot through the air like an overweight and under-dressed human cannon ball. She wasn’t terribly observant as a rule but even Lauren would have noticed if that had happened.

Almost as remarkable as being up a tree, however, was the slowly dawning realisation she was only wearing a few grubby scraps of underwear.

Lauren might have been prepared to dress a bit on the provocative side if the occasion called for it (and more often if it didn’t) but never in her wildest nightmare would she have gone out in just a push-up bra and knickers, both of which had seen better days.

Let me give you a thumb nail sketch of Lauren at this point in the hope you’ll want to continue reading her story. (On the other hand you might want to avoid her like the plague once you get to know her better. It’s a risk you take with the Laurens of this world.) Anyway, picture if you can a gorilla… without the hairy suit but sporting an incongruous blond top-knot instead, and a possibly excessive amount of decorative metal, depending on taste.

Next – place your gorilla up a tree. Of course gorillas don’t usually hang about up trees (any more than Laurens do) but, if you could picture one bald but for a few peroxide tufts and a lot of earrings, you clearly have sophisticated imaginative skills so should be able to manage the tree bit as well.

When you’ve got the picture, add a black nylon bra and pants; a touch too thrusting or frilly perhaps but nothing very special either – what you might wear when you’re vaguely on the pull but would be just as happy staying home to wash your hair and watch the telly.

If you’ve got all that then you’ve got Lauren Wilson. And no, I don’t want her back.

She was too old to believe in magic and too cold to believe in God so could think of only one other explanation covering all the permutations of her present predicament.

ALIENS! her brain screamed.

That she’d been abducted by aliens might seem the obvious solution to some sadly deluded individual when finding herself in an improbable situation but quite why they’d then abandoned her half-way up an unnecessarily large oak tree was anybody’s guess. It was presumably an alien thing they couldn’t have explained themselves.

Vertigo kicked in at that moment so to be on the safe side Lauren crossed her fingers and put her hands together in silent prayer, although her position, vis-à-vis the tree, made convoluted praying postures maybe not the cleverest thing she might have been concentrating on.

Having satisfied herself as to how she’d got up the tree the girl was just starting to tackle the next teensy-weensy little problem – how to get down – when gravity and a dodgy grip supplied a solution. It wasn’t the one she’d have been looking for if given a choice.

AAARGH! rang out a piercing yell from on high, abruptly terminating in a splayed splat at the bottom of the tree. (I’m still assuming you’re of an imaginative bent and can conjure up what a scream would sound like splayed and splattered.)

Her fall was partly broken by a distinctly crocked looking cow she struck a glancing blow in free fall.

I wish I could reassure you Lauren and the cow suffered no lasting damage but I can’t so won’t.

2

Rachel was tired, almost indescribably tired, but exhaustion was the norm rather than exception in her tiny part of the world. She still hurtled across the field as fast as weariness and bandy legs would allow anyone so wholly unsuited to the task of hurtling to hurtle. She had to if she wanted to keep up with the rest of the human race.

The master must have been wrong.

He was certainly drunk.

However, drunkenness was so integral to his persona you’d get suspicious if he sounded sober. He said he’d seen something big fall out of that tree. Big as in person-sized.

Rachel couldn’t imagine how anything big could have managed to climb up the cows’ favourite tree for scratching an itchy bottom to able to subsequently fall down it. But Rachel was the sort of individual who found it difficult enough to think, let alone imagine things, so she’d given up trying to do either at a fairly early stage in her less than awesome intellectual development. She was at least smart enough not to voice any doubts she might have entertained in front of the master. He didn’t take kindly to doubters.

A breeze was starting to whip across the grass, clearing her tired and befuddled head and blowing the thin fabric of her dress to chafe against goose-pimpled legs. The others had reached the tree long before she got anywhere near it and were calling for the cart to be brought up. Shielding her eyes against the rising dust she could see the master had been right, though.

This was something BIG BIG BIG.

Because all the lower branches were missing, the oak made a distinctive silhouette on its small mound and the bundle on the ground had been discernable from a considerable distance away. Rachel scurried the last few yards to see what it was the lads were struggling to pile on the cart. But when she reached the object of everyone’s interest she stopped dead in her tracks.

Tears sprung to Rachel’s eyes and she sobbed aloud at the sight of such torture and mutilation having been inflicted on a poor young woman.

Oh, mercy me!

Metal nails or rings had been driven right through the girl’s face and body.

3

Waking to the taste of chewy beer being sloshed over you isn’t the kindest way someone could say ‘hello’.

Lauren gasped for breath and that was her first mistake. The air was smokier than the school loos and the smell even worse. She tried to open her eyes again, more cautiously this time, but the smoke just made them fill with tears. Well, it was either smoke or pain.

She jumped as something tickled her foot. There was an animal snuffling and truffling at her toes. What with the smoke, the smell and the beer she was starting to retch although all these might have been considered superfluous since sheer terror was already doing enough to make her want to throw up without anything else being added to the heady concoction.

Lauren swallowed back her bile and tried to reason (not a very rapid process, admittedly). The book didn’t mention how much aliens stank being a typical example of the sort of thinking Lauren came up with on the odd occasion she kick-started her brain. She hadn’t noticed the field guide she’d been presented with on arrival at Todd’s Farm mentioning aliens at all, actually, stinking or otherwise, but since she hadn’t bothered to read the booklet she shouldn’t really have advanced an opinion about its contents. Not that ignorance normally inhibited her unduly.

She then decided to try out her other senses. Instead of sniffing and looking she tried listening. Listening wasn’t something she tended to go in for as a rule though and the effort proved rather more arduous than first anticipated. The only sound to assail her expectant ear was an eerie silence, punctuated by the occasional grunt of an animal and the ominous crackling of a nearby fire.

OK, time for a quick fumble (she was good at groping.) However, what she felt around her wasn’t much more encouraging than anything else she’d experienced since her fall from the tree.

Her almost naked body was being viciously pricked from below with what could only be needles and something draped over the top of her itched and bit like she imagined fleas would itch and bite. (Lauren had never had fleas so it was a remarkably accurate guess for a novice.)

She tentatively felt to her side again, expecting to be on a bed of nails at the very least considering the discomfort. Instead she discovered her bed was made of straw. Not particularly fresh straw and certainly not the nice sweet-smelling stuff they used to put down for their rabbit before it ODed on mouldy lettuce. No, this was thoroughly-nasty-dirty straw with thoroughly-nasty-dirty things crawling in it. And there was something she presumed was a blanket draped over her, filled with holes and knots and more thoroughly-nasty-dirty things she didn’t doubt and certainly couldn’t have identified even if she’d been fast enough to catch one, which she wasn’t.

To make a bad situation worse, if that was possible, something was now snuffling at her other leg; the one causing her so much pain.

AAARGH! she screamed for only the second time that day, which in view of all she’d already suffered, showed a remarkable measure of restraint in my opinion.

She finally plucked up the courage to open her eyes wide and keep them open. She saw a baby pig.

It was about then she also noticed what she took to be an ugly little crone hovering over her (presumably responding to her scream). She hadn’t spotted Rachel at first because the pig had been getting what little attention she could spare from her agony.

How could such a fine lady have been so cruelly injured? Rachel asked herself. The intruder looked distinctly peculiar to the servant’s untrained eye and not just because of the absence of clothing (though near-nudity doesn’t usually help create an impression of normality, even in rural Britain). She took up so much more space in the barn than her master or any of his sons would have done in a similar position. In fact she was even taller than Peter, who was a giant in Rachel’s misty eyes. And she is so fat as well.

Now, Lauren didn’t particularly mind being slightly taller than average but would have been positively mortified to hear herself thought of as fat, however accurate the description. So mortified she’d probably have hospitalised anyone brave enough to think it.

Rachel’s master finally managed to find where his feet were and staggered over to examine what the cow had dragged in. He was a competent enough farmer even when tipsy, which was fortunate for his livestock because tipsy was the nearest to sobriety he ever got.

Having whipped off the blanket to examine the girl, he proceeded to set her broken leg quite skilfully for someone so clearly sozzled, although adopting the same bedside manner he’d have used on the pig… a few grunts. Two planks of wood and a bit of rope created a reasonable approximation to a splint and Lauren had to be satisfied with that, since it was all she was getting. She didn’t feel her soul exactly flooding with heart-warming gratitude for the man’s indifferent ministrations because she thought of herself as rather hard done by. Nevertheless, had she looked at the situation objectively she might have realised she had sufficient cause to thank the farmer for his efforts. Objectivity wasn’t her highest priority just then, though: agony was.

He unceremoniously forced open her mouth to examine her teeth next, which was what he always did to anything new around the farm. To his patient it seemed a most unwelcoming gesture and she would have told him so if there hadn’t been a pair of grubby great hands poking round her molars making speech difficult, if not totally impossible. However, since the setting of the bone had left her barely conscious, let alone articulate, for once Lauren let a brilliant opportunity to vent her spleen pass by unvented.

The farmer proclaimed her to be healthy enough except for a broken leg, well fed (Very! thought Rachel) and probably still in her teens.

Besht teesh I’s ever sheen, was his considered opinion of her orthodontistry, adding that on the basis of her teeth she wasn’t likely to be any older than Rachel, who believed she was ten. However, this belief of Rachel’s that she was ten was based solely on the fact she could only count that high.

Ten fingers, see?

She was actually seventeen and if she’d thought of using toes as well as fingers she might have arrived at a slightly more accurate estimate of her age. No one tried to correct her faulty maths, though, since no one on the planet conceivably had that much patience.

The farmer readily admitted he’d never seen anything like the marks of torture inflicted on the girl but slyly noted the nails puncturing her in some highly improbable places looked to be made of silver, interspersed here and there with the odd precious stone.

Rachel hovered at his elbow throughout the examination, admiring Lauren’s cleanliness as much as anything else. Clean isn’t she! she observed to no one in particular. No one in particular ignored the observation, just like they ignored everything else about Rachel. Must have washed at some time, she continued, before whimsically adding, I wonder why? No one in particular continued to pay Rachel no attention whatsoever. How comes it she’s so brown when she smells so clean? mused the girl, not expecting an answer since she hadn’t got one after her first three observations and was therefore rather surprised when she got one this time.

The farmer could see what she meant, although he’d have said the colour was more orange than brown. (I think the blurb on the bottle described it as St. Tropez Shimmer, but I may be wrong so don’t quote me.) He gave an acknowledging grunt to the maid for just about the first time she could remember. In his experience people only got a bit weathered on their faces and hands. This all over paint job was something outside of the man’s experience and gave rise to an uneasy suspicion rather than the envious admiration Lauren had fondly imagined her fake tan would inspire. Has our visitor been wandering about naked for some time? If so, it’s funny no one’s noticed her. Nudity really, really wasn’t the norm in those parts.

Lauren, almost surfacing for a moment or two, couldn’t altogether make out what the man above her was drivelling on about, what with the farmer’s inebriation and rather arcane speech. But she still managed to glean she wasn’t being showered with the praise and admiration she thought she deserved to bathe in, nevertheless. Arguing was just too difficult in her present condition, however, so instead of pointing out HE was no Hollywood heart-throb she passed out again instead.

What bewildered the farmer most about the girl wasn’t actually her suntan or her near-nudity so much as the fact that her feet were still so soft and clean. At his age the state of his feet was of paramount importance so Farmer Todd naturally assumed everyone else accorded them the same priority.

If she’d arrived at his tree by walking there bare-footed her feet would have shown signs of damage. If she’d been wearing shoes (and preferably a few more items of attire) where were they now? It made no sense at all. This girl had fallen from a tree no one could remember anyone being able to climb in living memory and yet there was nothing to suggest she’d had a helping hand getting up there so how had she done it?

Only one explanation occurred to the farmer and it certainly wasn’t alien abduction. He stored all the information in his alcohol-fuelled brain, drawing it to the attention of the others for good measure. You never know when you might need a witness in these troubled times.

But Rachel wasn’t the slightest bit interested in how someone had balanced up their tree without visible means of support. What fascinated her now, besides Lauren’s cleanliness, was the fine fabric of her underwear, edged with what Rachel could only describe as the most exquisite ‘embroidery on air’. She was to remember that ‘embroidery’ for the rest of her relatively short life, often to repeat the tragic story of the girl who’d fallen from heaven and describing the lace she’d worn. Rachel was glad she was wearing her Sunday best that day since she was meeting someone of such obvious quality (she’d slipped on a leather belt which was the closest to best her wardrobe got on any day). This had to be a very fine lady indeed to wear such gorgeous garments in a place it’s to be hoped they’d normally never be seen.

Presumably she hadn’t planned on landing in a tree (or falling out again) Rachel mused, or she’d have dressed a little more appropriately for the occasion. The lady felt anything but fine at that moment however. She tried to sit up and was embarrassingly sick all over the much admired underwear.

Lie still, M’lady, thou art safe, I swear. Sup some more of the ale. It’ll soothe thy pain.

Now, this wasn’t quite the reassuring sort of words Lauren had expected to hear on waking. In her limited experience nurses tended to speak their soothing platitudes in contemporary English and force-fed their groaning patients paracetemol not rancid beer. Where am I? the girl asked weakly. (Something of a clichéd opening gambit but probably the best she could rise to in view of her suffering.)

Master Todd’s Farm, was the singularly unedifying reply.

Oh great! Thanks a bunch, I don’t think! She was perfectly well aware she was at Todd’s Farm. So where’s ‘First Aid’ Fanny when you need her? When it came to smelling blood that woman had the fine-tuning of a particularly peckish piranha on the trawl for late-night munchies. And although Lauren would have had to admit the fall hadn’t left her bloodied so much as broken, the PE teacher would still have sniffed out any opportunity to inflict the full brutal force of her nursing ‘skills’ on a helpless student. Where are all the others? This definitely wasn’t the Todd’s Farm they’d come to know and HATE!

Her attendants didn’t seem to understand any of her consternation by the look of things however, so after a few anguished gasps had failed to elicit a particularly comforting response Lauren let her mind drift back to examining her immediate surroundings. She seemed to be in a derelict barn she didn’t recognise from the familiarisation exercise. It housed an assortment of grubby and smelly little animals, one of which had already introduced itself via her feet.

Electric lighting was non-existent and central heating also conspicuous by its absence unless you counted that brazier flaming dangerously close to the straw she was lying on. She wouldn’t have been terribly impressed to know the brazier burnt dung rather than charcoal but might have been reassured to know the awful smell wasn’t coming from her. The lack of glass over what she assumed was meant to be the window might even be counted as air conditioning in more primitive circles. It certainly provided plenty of well-needed ventilation.

Lauren reluctantly turned her attention to the crone again since she could think of nothing better to do with it.

She’s admiring my belt, I knew she would. Thinking this, Rachel smoothed out the creases of her homespun dress as best she could and wiped a licked hand over her slicked-down, lank hair. She smiled – an action she thought would reassure her patient. Unfortunately, showing the full set of stumps was anything but reassuring.

What IS the creature wearing? (Rich coming from someone dressed in just her underwear.) Looks like a brown sack with a bit of red leather holding it together. Whilst this quite accurately described the look Rachel had achieved it sadly neglected the spirit of her sartorial efforts. And how could a dentist have left anyone’s teeth in that state? Lauren continued to herself. Rachel hardly had a tooth in her head which wasn’t crooked or blackened.

The girl, for Lauren now recognised her ‘nurse’ was only a child not the old hag she’d assumed her to be at first glance, was very small, thin and dirty. After sniffing she added smelly to the description though I’ve already explained Rachel mightn’t be quite as guilty of this last offence as Lauren’s nose led her to believe. How could people live this way in a civilised country like England!

The piglet gave the foot on her broken leg another nudge and pain finally put an end to pointless musing. Lauren blacked out again and this time stayed blacked out.

CHAPTER TWO

1

I ’ve got one! Katya exclaimed proudly. It was something of a cross between a squeal and a screech rather than the more conventional kind of exclamation you might have expected from a refined young lady, but pride had presumably