The Archfornicator of Canterbury

29 The alien spaceship

The aliens aboard the spaceship hovering over Lake Waycanbayck observed the Archbishop and his boat with detached curiosity. Soon, a beam emerging from the alien vessel bathed both in radiant light. The beam, being a tractor beam, had the effect that the boat carrying the Archbishop started to float towards the spaceship.

For the Archbishop, this was a bit too much. The events of the past few days had taken their toll on his physique, which wasn't much to write home about to begin with. He felt a searing pain in his chest and collapsed in a heap on the bottom of the boat. The pain made it impossible for him to breathe. By the time the boat reached the spaceship, the Archbishop was already dead.

On contact with the spaceship, the boat carrying the Archbishop's remains disappeared in a brilliant flash of light. An infinitesimal instant of time later it reappeared inside the spaceship in a large hall. The hall was brightly lit, although there were no light sources in sight. With its concave ceiling it looked a lot like an aircraft hangar.

It would not have been entirely accurate to say that the aliens were caught unawares by the Archbishop's death. Being the intellectually superiour and technologically advanced master race that they were, they had already solved many of the questions that Man would not be in a position to even start to contemplate for millennia to come.

The Archbishop's inanimate corpse was lifted out of the boat by a tractor beam similar to the one that had grabbed both and carried them to the spaceship, although a far less intense one. The corpse was placed on a tablelike structure floating nearby. Once the corpse hit the table, a faint glow covered both. The Archbishop's body started to shiver and tremble on the table. Sparks flew as flamelike arches of light seemed to devour what was left of the Archbishop. Slowly, his body began to reappear as the flames died off. After a few seconds, the Archbishop opened his eyes.

It took the Archbishop a few moments to realise what had happened. In fact, he didn't have a single clue as to what had happened, except that his ears were no longer ringing and that his clothes felt quite loose for some reason. He sat up and looked around him. There was nothing else in the hall except his boat and the floating table he sat on. The walls, the floor and the ceiling were a matt gray colour that made the hall look like it was just a void inside a storm cloud. It occurred to him that this was what a gigantic hollow metallic doughnut might look like from the inside.

"Hello."

The Archbishop's voice echoed around the hall, but there was no response. The table started to lose altitude and his feet touched the floor. He stood up. When he did this, the table disappeared.

The Archfornicator of Canterbury by Olli-Pekka Rinta-Koski
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.