Friends at Waters-edge and Fremont House , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Margaret Margereson

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103 pages

English

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Matthew Weldon has been ill, locked in a coma with visions so intensely real, he wakes up feeling as if he's lived them. There's no reason why - at least no earthly reason. The truth is out there, indeed, and it's that the vulnerable are always the first to be experimented on. However, what our galactic researchers don't count on when they try to implant what are called 'life patterns' to observe how we fare, is just how strong our minds can be... something Matthew discovers when he sits down to write down the adventures he's experienced in the scope of his own mind.The life pattern involved four characters from the animal world, together with an AI robot.All find themselves homeless for different reasons.A rabbit is dumped, unwanted, by the roadside one dark night by the elders of her commune and eventually finds shelter in an empty garden house in the village. She is later joined by the robot, a badger who was a financial adviser with a city bank and who had been made redundant, and a spaniel who escaped one night from a gang he had got involved with. Finally a penguin, who arrived by boat, whose background was never discovered. Together they form a strong friendship, but when they meet a cat who was a city broker, all their lives changed dramatically.But what does it mean for our galactic visitors that Matthew recalls these stories so vividly? More - what does it mean for Matthew himself?

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	05 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781803134055
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Margaret Margereson

Cover design by Dave Hill

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781803134055

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

It gives me great pleasure to write the dedication to my dear late wife’s book. This is the fulfilment of Margaret’s ambition to have her book published and tell you her story. I hope it brings you, the reader, as much joy reading her story as I know Margaret had writing it.

I should like to thank friends and the publishing team for their help in enabling me to realise Margaret’s wish.

Contents
An Introduction: Bizarre Events with Mysterious Results
A Brief Background
Rilganna’s Premonition and Her Unenviable Situation at the Ultor Commune
Rilganna, Zig-Zag Pontoon and Bardwell
Peckleton
Daxham Arrives
An Unexpected Magical Phenomenon
Deptus Dickens, Burgatus Bulldog and Belltring Bulldog
Albert Alsatian
The Day Trip
New Transport
Lainstonbury-on-Sea and Windy Barn
Zig-Zag Pontoon’s Robotic AI Boost
Rilganna’s New Tooth and Albert’s Opportunity
The Annual Celebrations
More Activity at the Dental Clinic, Birthday Dates and Challenging Behaviour
Mr Jeremiah Swan
Psychotherapy, More Bad Behaviour and Comfortable Paws
Those Teeth Again, and a Fresh Challenge
An Unexpected Inheritance and Peckleton Gets to the Bottom of Things
Robotic Investigations
Rilganna’s Much-Needed Vacation at Fremont House, and Daxham Helping Out
Challenging Actions, and Returning Home Again
The Inheritance, Catherton Badger and Trouble With Finances
Cousin Catherton’s Arrival at Glenland
Cousin Catherton’s Holiday, and Too Much Lavender
Serious Trouble Afoot
Plans Are Made
What a Relief
The Temporary Farewell

An Introduction: Bizarre Events with Mysterious Results
After the sudden onset of the mysterious illness that had attacked his immune system and devastated his body, Matthew Weldon had been flown home by air ambulance from Revalian and immediately admitted to Mountfield Hospital. Now, after ten long tedious months, he was being discharged. It had not been possible for the medical scientists to exactly identify the pernicious virus responsible, but the cocktail of antibiotics and carefully orchestrated medical attention had gradually sorted him out, at least partially, although he still suffered periods of extreme exhaustion, a condition which he had been told was not likely to vanish any time soon.
The conference trip had certainly left its mark. He was particularly aggrieved as he had only volunteered to stand in for a colleague who had been unable to attend due to a persistent personal problem, and now looking back he rather wished he hadn’t been so helpful.
Taking account of all the negative predictions and probabilities concerning his illness, it was surprising that he was still alive!
Having been resident at the hospital for such a prolonged period he had become something of a permanent occupant which had led medical staff to wave him off with fond farewells as he walked towards the privately hired car that had been sent, courtesy of his company, to take him home. It had stopped conveniently at the bottom of the wide stone steps to pick him up, but he soon realised just how weak and inflexible his limbs had become as he slowly stooped forward to get into the vehicle, which was not designed to cater for the transportation of the less mobile.
Once Matthew had regained consciousness, he had been transferred from intensive care onto a hospital ward. His mind, though, was still full of the characters who had been his constant companions throughout his devastating illness. He had been an enthusiastic onlooker into their world and each day, as he watched the events of their life unfold in his mind’s eye, he had been given the will to live; without that connection he felt he would have given up and expired. The doctors explained that when patients were in a coma and as ill as he had been the strong concoction of prescribed drugs that have to be administered play bizarre tricks on the mind, often leading to vivid and realistic dreams, sometimes psychedelic episodes.
Matt knew that this must be true. There was, though, no doubt in his mind that he had experienced something uniquely different. The daily sequence of events that he had witnessed when he had been unconscious were no less vivid to him now than they were before, when he had been at death’s door. The memories were crystal clear; they never faded with time nor became less important to him in the way that dreams or psychological meanderings invariably do in the end, however profound.
An explanation existed, but how could Matthew have been aware that experimental motion threads of free animated organisms had been set free by researchers functioning in a sphere in an alien environment, millions of light years away from Earth? Travelling far beyond their terrain in the most northerly extremities of the isolated galactic outreaches and the inner sections of the Milky Way (which leads to the vast hazy nebulae on the other side) these moving organisms, containing the genetic material of fictional characters capable of independent dynamic activity and free will, were instructed by their perceptive masters, Kettlebaston, Meynell and Jasper, to seek out and program the brain of a ripe and helpless earthling in order to try out the first of their novel experiments and to implant this initial dynamic activity. All they needed for the trial to allow the experimenters to chart and record the outcome of the experiment was the psyche of the host target. A donor such as Matt in a weakened psychological and physiological medical state was ideal. And so the experiment was well and truly underway.
Kettlebaston, Meynell and Jasper had studied life on Earth in great detail and their plan, however long it took, was to manipulate earthly existence and to steal its resources. Their vision of building up a bank of vulnerable earthlings to control, manipulate and use as strategic stepping stones now seemed to be within their grasp, or so they hoped.
The experimenters had assumed that the memory of this first experiment would deteriorate once the earthling had regained consciousness, but this part of their plan had not gone quite to book. It turned out that the experimental activity could not be neutralised and destroyed as predicted and could perhaps even take on a hitherto unexpected and distorted dimension.
The scary truth is that we never know who or what is watching and using us, nor are we aware of how complicated a mesh we could each unwittingly become a part of.
After Matt arrived home from the hospital, it had taken him a week or so to settle back into some kind of basic routine. One morning he felt determined that he must try harder to achieve a daily achievement of some kind, and so he decided to start up his laptop and to begin typing out his first batch of reminiscences, starting from the time when he had been so near to death in the intensive care unit. It was not like creating a story: he had no plot or characters to invent as it was all there for him as a documentary in his mind.
He had no intention of doing anything in particular with his draft: his reminiscences only resulted from a need to put down a clear record of events for his own peace of mind and to give himself something to concentrate on during the long recuperation process which he still had to endure. He had been told that it would be very many weeks or perhaps months before he could return to work.
Flowing from his fingertips and onto the keyboard his reflections took their shape and so this is how the peculiar story went.

A Brief Background
The rabbits that inhabited the Ultor Commune were called Ultorians: they were also referred to as Ultorian Scoodles, a derogatory nickname given to them by members of the Challion Community (a rival rabbit settlement that existed nearby).
Senior Ultorians were called Ultorian Elderians and the Chief Elderian went by the name of Mould.
Rilganna was a Beveranian, a large Blue Beveren rabbit with thick lavender-coloured fur who lived at the Ultor Commune; treated indifferently and dismissed as an outsider, she was the only one of her kind within the local communities.

1
Rilganna’s Premonition and Her Unenviable Situation at the Ultor Commune
R ilganna could tell that big trouble was brewing in the commune: the atmosphere had changed, and life felt more unpredictable than usual. Her ears developed an involuntary twitch and inst