Woodland

30 Years Ago Somewhere in small town America, 30 years ago. A young girl, Brenda, is playing in the long back garden of her parents' home, a picture of the American Dream. Suddenly she's disturbed by something unseen. Shadows loom over her. "No! I won't!" She cries firmly. Later, her distraught mother rushes the girl to the town doctor. The girl has blood streaming down her face and chest from her nose. 15 Years Later 15 years later. Brenda's idly cruising the back roads around town with 3 girlfriends after a night hanging out with the local teen crowd. Suddenly something like a large truck, seen through its blazing lights, approaches from ahead, racing at them for a head-on collision. Today Today, Brenda Newman, young mother and marketing manager for a local timber and paper mill has a peaceful and content life. She's lived in the same town all her life, amongst the spectacular mountains off which the town earns its living. Her hobby is compiling a photographic journal of the whole of "Innes County". She even works with one of her old childhood friends, and their families often get together to share a dinner, a gossip, togetherness. Brenda spends many lunchtimes driving up into the mountains from the mill's nearby offices, leaving her 4x4 truck in untouched areas to continue her hobby. One afternoon, having passed a workcrew who are keeping a firebreak track clear, she fails to return, and no one can raise her on the radio. After a few hours fearing she may be lost a search party is assembled to look before sunset. They're halfway into the mountains when she reappears, driving along innocently. She had a little trouble starting the car but hopes she's not late for work. What!? She's three hours overdue!! She returns to the office in a daze. It's also the time for a 4th July barbecue she and her husband hold each year for friends and workmates, only this year she's feeling adrift, no appetite, disoriented, causing her to throw up most of what little she ate. That night, weak and still a little sick, she even suffers the delusion that she has a baby somewhere in the house, if only she can find it, searching, opening cupboards, she knows it's somewhere safe, she just put it somewhere safe, if she can just find it everything will be all right - yet their youngest child is several years old. Next day she's off work sick and visits the doctors where her odd medical history is revealed in her unusually thick report. Most of her ailments seem to have cleared up since she moved out to town. The doc. takes samples and says he'll let her know. Yet she's already feeling better, refreshed and healthy. She decides on a little shopping, maybe something to read for all the family. In the bookstore she catches sight of a book about extraterrestrials and abductions, it shocks her, sending her fleeing the shop to the safety of her car. It's a while before she calms enough to wonder "What happened!?". The only way to find out is to buy the book. This begins a steady decline in the stability of the family. The reading has triggered memories, fears and tension. Her work and family suffer in her terrified over-protectiveness towards the children. Snapping at them one morning she's taken aside by her husband who suggests she see the doctor. The doctor refers her to a psychiatrist as he sees nothing medically wrong with her. It's through him that she begins to develop an understanding of what may be happening to her, and through this understanding she begins to gain a new control over her life. It's not all due to him directly but the techniques of calling up her memories without fear and exploring what happened. The psychiatrist's own conversion to the idea that she's telling the truth has two sources: the workcrew Brenda saw on the day she lost an afternoon have also suffered psycho-problems of a similarly unusual nature; and when collecting new books on psychiatry at the local store to research Brenda's problem he's confronted with his own disturbing and convincing "Close Encounter". Brenda's story progresses. As she learns more her fears increase, but when nothing truly bad happens her sense of control strengthens. Through her memories we learns that not only she but her 3 girlfriends have been involved; that for years the so-called phantom pregnancies she'd suffered from weren't so phantom - she'd been used for breeding by these alien creatures, her disgust eventually turning to fatalistic acceptance; that these creatures have their own motives, mission, message, which they show her in an "encounter" even during her months of therapy. All this has hooked the psychiatrist's own curiosity as he tries to fathom out what the true story is, researching the area, interviewing Brenda's neighbours, but discovering little. Though she's been living under this cloud all her life and now realised it for months, Brenda's confidence and strength have increased. She can't do anything to stop "them" but will not let them control all of her life. Now she returns gradually to the mountains, and acknowledging that it's real as far as she's concerned, she decides the psychiatrist's wasting his time, she's not paranoid, "they" really do exist. Conclusive proof for her is an eerie photo she took the previous winter and a blow-up of one part, thought to be just a pattern of leaves, shows an "alien" face. There can be no true conclusion. Brenda restores her life to some kind of normality, she bumps into the psychiatrist one spring day the following year when he's en route to explore the forest for clues now that this research has become his hobby. Soon? Soon. Some years later an alien promise to Brenda is fulfilled, she gets to meet one of the babies they'd forced on her, now grown. Perhaps this is the beginning of the interchange promised by the aliens - "understanding will come through the children". The End.