During my Freshman year of high school, I began arguing with this one girl at lunch over various controversial topics. You name it, we argued over it. We enjoyed butting heads so much we decided to start writing letters to each other about it. All was well until we came to the topic of the paranormal, specifically UFO sightings and abduction cases, at which point I became incredibly obsessed with the subject matter.
I had been given a variety of books on the paranormal from my grandmother, who was quite intrigued with that sort of thing, and when I began reading one book in particular -- Budd Hopkins Missing Time -- something terrible began happening to me. At a few points I had to put the book down, but no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I kept coming back to it.
First it just aroused alarming emotions in me. Later, along with the emotions there came memories. The initial memory was something that had been pushed to the side of my mind for the previous few years but had always been conscious. Since the time it had occurred it had elicited a particular curiosity and confusion in me. It happened back when my family had been living in our previous house in a small, suburban town where we would remain until I was almost eleven years of age.
Although I know it was Christmas Eve, I cannot be certain of the exact year. I know it happened after I had my own room, however, which means after my youngest sister was about two years old. It must have been about 1984, then, which would place me at six years of age.
At that time I had a room to myself at the end of the hallway. I remember my room very clearly, and most of all my canopy bed. Beneath the lower half of the top bunk was a built-in dresser, and beneath the head of the bunk was a small cubicle with a bookshelf. I'd moved the desk that was meant to be in there to the opposite wall of the room and put a bean bag there instead.
No matter how hard I had tried that night, I simply could not get to sleep. This bothered me a great deal, because for some reason I'd latched onto the belief that if I wasn't asleep Santa would pass our house by and leave us with nothing. As I m a compulsive worrier, thoughts of a Christmas morning without gifts filled my paranoid little mind, which only made it that much more difficult to get to sleep.
Hours had gone by until I finally gave into the growing sense of futility. I'd been thirsty as hell for the past hour or two, and there was, below the window to the side my mattress, a single shelf that held my digital clock and a glass of water with a sippy-top. So I sat up in bed, leaned over the safety bar and reached out my hand to grab a hold of it. As I did so, however, I happened to look out the window, and this resulted in an immediate termination of my plans. I moved away from the edge of my bed and quickly crawled into the corner, drawing my knees up to my chin. It was in the safety of that corner that I tried to fathom how on earth that horrid face at the window could be real.
Since it was Christmas, of course, the default assumption was that it must be Santa Claus, and for years that was the ridiculous, half-humorous assumption I would make in relating the story. Which was ridiculous for obvious reasons, but also for the fact that this was certainly no jolly old elf that I had seen. On the contrary, the face I had seen at my window had looked very angry, not to mention totally inhuman with its wrinkly skin, bulging eyes and its long, unearthly frown.
As I remained in that corner, motionless, doing my very best to convince myself that I had somehow just imagined the whole thing, I suddenly heard a loud, deliberate, persistent tap-tap-tapping on my window pane. Adrenaline shot through my system. Paralyzed by fear, I wouldn't have been able to do so much as look back at the window, not that I had the insane inclination to do so. From where I was cowering, the thing couldn't see me and I had no desire to get back into its line of sight. The thought crossed my mind, as it so often does in such circumstances, that if I just pretend that I didn't see it, that none of this was really happening, that it would all go away. That I could somehow will away reality.
For a awhile, it seemed to work, too. Then, from my corner, my eyes caught some movement down below my bunk bed. As I watched, a dark silhouette walked through my closed bedroom door like an apparition. This silhouette walked through slowly as little ''elves'', a good degree shorter than him, walked right through my door in a similar fashion, only at a much higher rate of speed. They walked along the walls, mostly, casting shadows on the walls and heading right towards the ladder that led up to my bed. I curled myself into a ball, pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes tight.
The next thing I remembered was waking up the following morning with all of it still very clear in my mind, but with the distinct impression that there was much more to the event that I was unable to recall. I told my parents about it as we gathered around the tree to open our presents, hoping that, being the omniscient adults I still hoped they were, they might be able to provide some sort of explanation. All I remember is dad assuring me that it had most likely been a hallucination, perhaps brought on by dehydration or sleep deprivation. Those explanations did little to satisfy. In the attempt to prove the reality of what I'd encountered, the very next Christmas Eve I kept myself awake for as long as I could, my camera in hand, just waiting to hear that tap on the window. Just waiting for them to walk through my bedroom door again. The evil Santa and his little team of elves, needless to say, never arrived, and I felt ridiculous and frustrated in the wake.
Not that a good part of me had not expected such a failure. I had, even at the time of the experience that Christmas, heard through the grapevine that Santa wasn't real. Figuring this to be true, I had still kept my mouth shut about it for fear that if my parent's knew I would no longer get any gifts. When that incident happened, however, I had no other way to explain it and so latched onto the Santa myth. I really wanted to believe what my parents had been telling me over the years, though, if only because it seemed to provide some limited explanation for what had occurred.
The doublethink my parents expected of me in general had led to a mass of confusion for me. On the one hand, my parents insisted that there was no such thing as magic, that there were no monsters, that there was no such thing as ghosts. At the same time, however, they expected me to believe in a Heaven and a Hell, a god and devil complete with their respective legions of angels and demons.
They insisted some fairy came around, stole exorcised teeth and left quarters in exchange. They insisted some bunny hopped around to every house on Easter and left chocolate eggs and other candies.
They insisted that some obese man from the North Pole dressed in red and white visited every house in one night, riding his sleigh full of flying reindeer and somehow squeezing his fat ass down the narrowest of chimneys to fill our tacked socks with goodies and leave presents beneath the tree.
I would have entirely accepted these myths as lies, perhaps, if not for that one Christmas. Yet I needed an explanation, so I hung on to the only available context.
As an inevitable result, it killed me a year or two later when my parents called me into their room with those alway-ominous words, "we have something to tell you." When they went on to tell me that Santa wasn't real at all, and that it had been dad who had been eating the cookies and drinking the coffee all those years. I was awash with horror. By the end of their revelations, I was bawling, and for very good reason. After all, if not some evil Santa that had tapped on my window and walked through my bedroom door with his elves that Christmas evening so long ago, what in the hell had I seen?
Now, years later, in reading this book at age sixteen, my mind seemed to be wanting to link that bizarre experience with the contents of Hopkin's book. I found it absurd. When looking back on this memory within the context of alien abduction, I could only laugh to myself. Sure, it was a strange memory, but throughout all I had read I had never come across something even remotely sounding like the face I saw outside my window. This book spoke about little gray men with big, slanted, liquid-black eyes, not wrinkly tan creatures with huge frowns and bulging eyes. I didn't understand how my mind, against all common sense and conscious will, would strive to indicate a correlation here.
So I tried to push it out of my mind. As the weeks wore on, however, pushing aside the memory seemed to be as futile as putting down the book. Even when the book was away, as a matter of fact, the memory continued to come back to haunt me, and it wasn't long until it began to bring along some company. Over a period of many months, fragments of memories began surfacing in my mind.
Once I decided not to fight these memories, I'd often go into meditation to open myself up to my unconscious and let it display to me what it was willing to, void of any conscious resistance or editing. These recollections came of their own accord; I couldn't seem to drag out of memory anything that happened before or after these particular moments. Since I wanted to capture the feelings these images gave me and words seemed to fail them, I began trying to capture them in my artwork, using charcoal and pencil to illustrate them.
It felt good capturing them on paper, too; it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Still, I couldn't be certain if these were pieces of real childhood memories I was capturing or just remnant from a childhood of vivid, overactive imagination and wacky dreams. I continued to find it confusing that I so strongly associated these memories with the subject mater of Hopkin's book, too, as few of these memories involved UFOs and none involved short, gray being with big, black slanted eyes. Nonetheless, the relentless rush of them forced me to consider that perhaps I actually had been abducted by aliens; still, the idea seemed rather silly to me. I certainly believe in that sort of thing beyond a doubt, but I had adopted the attitude of my grandmother: if I ever had seen them, why on earth would I want to forget?
As I continued to sketch these images, I began having disturbing dreams. I got the sense that more seemed to be coming, too. There was this uneasy, tip-of-the-tongue kind of feeling arising in me that I was unable to shake off. It was a lot like hanging on the edge of a sneeze that just won't happen.
Then it happened.
It was late one evening and I had been trying to quiet my mind and catch some sleep. I propped my chin up on my pillow and gazed awhile at my new lava lamp, thinking that the motion of the red lava floating in the yellow oil might help me relax. It didn't. What it did do was make these weird ripples wave across my field of vision. A similar perception can be produce, I would later learn, by staring into a turning circular plate on which is drawn a spiral that begins at the edges of the plate and spirals in towards the center. As for my state of consciousness, I can say from my standpoint now that it was somewhat akin to being high, though I wouldn't try any such drug until almost half a decade later. This night, as a matter of fact, was one reason why I kept clear of drugs for so long.
Awed and intoxicated by this strange state of consciousness, I took my eyes off the lava and let them glide across the row of books on the shelf attached to the head of my bed. When my eyes came to rest upon the novel War of the Worlds, by HG Wells, the strange feeling that had been slowly building up it's rhythm in me since I'd began reading up on the paranormal roughly a year before finally reached a climax. It was as if water had been building up behind a locked door and the pressure had finally caused it to give away, swinging it open violently and without the slightest hint of warning. I was lost in a flood of rushing thoughts, emotions, images, associations and memories, seemingly catapulted back into my past. It was less of a recollection; it was more along the lines of a re-experience.
The first flashback was of an event that I would later learn had to have occurred within a ten-month period bridging when I was five and six, between the years 1983 and 84. It may have been when I still shared a room with the eldest of my two younger sisters and we had bunk beds; either that, or I was hiding beneath the bed in the room they shared for some reason. During that period, I had been diagnosed with Leggs-Calves-Perthes Disease, a condition that result in an irregular growth of the hip bone. As treatment, I had to wear these experimental leg braces; a device that wrapped around my waist and legs, separating my legs in an arch.
I found myself beside a large box my mother had given each of us kids to place all our artwork in. I was beneath a bed, wearing my leg braces, watching as these strange creatures burst through the bedroom door. From my perspective, I could see only their feet, legs and their long arms. Their hands had long, wiry fingers and I think at least some of them had only three toes. As they ran about at high speed, their feet made a pitter-pattering sound on the carpet. They seemed to be looking for something, as they were going through drawers and picking objects up and putting them down again.
At first I thought I was fairly concealed by the sheets and blankets that draped over the bed, which hung fairly close to the floor. They seemed to be going through everything in the room, however, and it didn't take long for me to realize that this was likely to eventually include peering beneath the bed. Fear struck me when I noticed my leg, held in place by my braces, was sticking out into potential view. Frantically, though as quietly as I could manage, I tried to squirm farther under the bed. This required me moving my entire body, obviously, not just my leg, since it was held in an arch due to the braces -- and that's where I ran into a problem.
In the process of moving, my leg hit the box, causing my squirming beneath the bed to do precisely opposite of what I had intended. It not only pushed my leg farther out into view, it caused quite a noise in the process. Damage already done, I stopped moving, too frightened to look. I didn't have to. Though it seems to be a contradiction in terms, the silence took on a deafening volume.
Finally, I managed to look behind me, watching in absolute terror as I saw the feet of one of them approach It's hand reached down, the long fingers touching my braced leg. In my mind, in that moment, I immediately saw a still-image flash from the closing scene of the move War of the Worlds, which had been my favorite movie at the time. In the scene, people were huddled around the downed Martian spacecraft. Its hatch had opened and a brown hand with wiry, snakelike fingers had slowly slithered it's way out. Though the hand that touched my leg certainly looked different from the hand I saw in that movie, they were similar enough for one to remind me of the other.
I just stared at that hand a moment, then at its feet. I don't know if I crawled towards it or was dragged out from beneath the bed, but I would have to imagine, under the circumstances, that I must have been dragged. All I know is that my eyes made a slow, measured journey up to meet the face of the creature, trying to memorize every feature, detail and wrinkle from foot to face. I wanted to burn the reality of this moment in my mind and preserve it. I somehow knew they would try to make me forget, but I decided to try desperately to remember and made a promise to myself that I'd draw that face one day when my talents were good enough.
He had a brown or darkly-tanned complexion and deep wrinkles. His eyes had whites, a yellowish-brown iris, and a black pupil and he stared down at me with a very displeased, penetrating flare. The frown this being wore was unreal, and it's this feature that I remember most vividly. With his bottom lip pressed up against his pug nose, the depth of his frown seemed to extend further downward as he looked ever-more-deeply into me. I was drawn towards those eyes, and I mean this in the most literally sense -- and once I met them, I was drawn into them.
Upon eye contact, I was flooded with flashes of high-speed imagery. I got the impression that he was "the Doctor" and that they were scientists; that he was "very old" and "very wise." Words that rose in my mind in association with him, strangely enough, also included "old one" and "grandfather." All this was communicated to me through his eyes, but not, it seems, in words. He simply made me know by giving me flashes of imagery and what I can only describe as wordless impressions.
Somehow, his face seems to get closer. I don't know if he leans close or pulls me up, I don't know how it happens, but shortly thereafter, my mind is entirely divorced from my body. His eyes draw me in entirely, it seems, or perhaps its more appropriate to say that his eyes invade me, or, better yet, that our minds somehow ''fused.'' Regardless, I am suddenly encapsulated within a vivid, cleverly-concocted dream setting. It's like a three-dimensional, full-sensory movie. Though nearly real and life-like, there is that nagging, underlying sense within this ''dream'' that something is inherently wrong. Something hints at its artificiality.
In the scene, I am generally where I had been previously, which is beside the bed with the Doctor before me. This was not, however, a true reflection of the Doctor I had just encountered. Here he appeared as a little brown, elderly creature with kindly round eyes which were rimmed and magnified by a pair of glasses. In place of his long, unearthly frown was this equally wide and surreal smile. It stretched from one end of his face to the other; from ear to ear, if he had had ears. He wore a long white lab coat, held a clipboard and had a stethoscopes wrapped around his head.
Looking dead at me, unwaveringly and unblinking, he told me that he was just hear to give me a check-up, to run me through some tests. There was some conversation, I think, but I cannot remember the particulars. As we spoke, however, it seemed as though he was trying his damnest to absorb my attention, which was focused less on him and more on the action going on behind him. Though I couldn't make out anything specific, I could catch that there were a lot of lights and action going on, but I couldn't make out anything specific. I only knew that he was eclipsing things that were occurring which he did not want me to see -- and which, for that very reason among others, I dreadfully did want to see.
The flashback ended and I opened my eyes. I was sixteen again. I sat up in bed with my head ringing and my body drenched in a cold sweat. I felt as if I'd just woken up from a dream I'd been trapped in for roughly sixteen years,. I was refreshed in one sense and absolutely terrified in another. I had no idea what to think. Was it safe to sleep? Was I somehow in trouble now for remembering this? Was all this some fucked up hallucination, some false memory?
A few moments later, I felt another flashback creeping up. I let it take, and I remembered the Goblin Man I'd seen around the same time in my youth.
It was some time after that night that I came to realize that the face of the Doctor in the flashback was the same face I had seen at the window that Christmas Eve. I also noticed one evening, to my absolute amazement, a cartoon character I had drawn some time ago and scotch-taped to my wall. It was drawn far before I started remembering all these weird things and I had hardly ever spent time looking at it. It was of a strange creature with large eyes, directed downward. And it had a deep, deep frown.
I had been given a variety of books on the paranormal from my grandmother, who was quite intrigued with that sort of thing, and when I began reading one book in particular -- Budd Hopkins Missing Time -- something terrible began happening to me. At a few points I had to put the book down, but no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I kept coming back to it.
First it just aroused alarming emotions in me. Later, along with the emotions there came memories. The initial memory was something that had been pushed to the side of my mind for the previous few years but had always been conscious. Since the time it had occurred it had elicited a particular curiosity and confusion in me. It happened back when my family had been living in our previous house in a small, suburban town where we would remain until I was almost eleven years of age.
Although I know it was Christmas Eve, I cannot be certain of the exact year. I know it happened after I had my own room, however, which means after my youngest sister was about two years old. It must have been about 1984, then, which would place me at six years of age.
At that time I had a room to myself at the end of the hallway. I remember my room very clearly, and most of all my canopy bed. Beneath the lower half of the top bunk was a built-in dresser, and beneath the head of the bunk was a small cubicle with a bookshelf. I'd moved the desk that was meant to be in there to the opposite wall of the room and put a bean bag there instead.
No matter how hard I had tried that night, I simply could not get to sleep. This bothered me a great deal, because for some reason I'd latched onto the belief that if I wasn't asleep Santa would pass our house by and leave us with nothing. As I m a compulsive worrier, thoughts of a Christmas morning without gifts filled my paranoid little mind, which only made it that much more difficult to get to sleep.
Hours had gone by until I finally gave into the growing sense of futility. I'd been thirsty as hell for the past hour or two, and there was, below the window to the side my mattress, a single shelf that held my digital clock and a glass of water with a sippy-top. So I sat up in bed, leaned over the safety bar and reached out my hand to grab a hold of it. As I did so, however, I happened to look out the window, and this resulted in an immediate termination of my plans. I moved away from the edge of my bed and quickly crawled into the corner, drawing my knees up to my chin. It was in the safety of that corner that I tried to fathom how on earth that horrid face at the window could be real.
Since it was Christmas, of course, the default assumption was that it must be Santa Claus, and for years that was the ridiculous, half-humorous assumption I would make in relating the story. Which was ridiculous for obvious reasons, but also for the fact that this was certainly no jolly old elf that I had seen. On the contrary, the face I had seen at my window had looked very angry, not to mention totally inhuman with its wrinkly skin, bulging eyes and its long, unearthly frown.
As I remained in that corner, motionless, doing my very best to convince myself that I had somehow just imagined the whole thing, I suddenly heard a loud, deliberate, persistent tap-tap-tapping on my window pane. Adrenaline shot through my system. Paralyzed by fear, I wouldn't have been able to do so much as look back at the window, not that I had the insane inclination to do so. From where I was cowering, the thing couldn't see me and I had no desire to get back into its line of sight. The thought crossed my mind, as it so often does in such circumstances, that if I just pretend that I didn't see it, that none of this was really happening, that it would all go away. That I could somehow will away reality.
For a awhile, it seemed to work, too. Then, from my corner, my eyes caught some movement down below my bunk bed. As I watched, a dark silhouette walked through my closed bedroom door like an apparition. This silhouette walked through slowly as little ''elves'', a good degree shorter than him, walked right through my door in a similar fashion, only at a much higher rate of speed. They walked along the walls, mostly, casting shadows on the walls and heading right towards the ladder that led up to my bed. I curled myself into a ball, pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes tight.
The next thing I remembered was waking up the following morning with all of it still very clear in my mind, but with the distinct impression that there was much more to the event that I was unable to recall. I told my parents about it as we gathered around the tree to open our presents, hoping that, being the omniscient adults I still hoped they were, they might be able to provide some sort of explanation. All I remember is dad assuring me that it had most likely been a hallucination, perhaps brought on by dehydration or sleep deprivation. Those explanations did little to satisfy. In the attempt to prove the reality of what I'd encountered, the very next Christmas Eve I kept myself awake for as long as I could, my camera in hand, just waiting to hear that tap on the window. Just waiting for them to walk through my bedroom door again. The evil Santa and his little team of elves, needless to say, never arrived, and I felt ridiculous and frustrated in the wake.
Not that a good part of me had not expected such a failure. I had, even at the time of the experience that Christmas, heard through the grapevine that Santa wasn't real. Figuring this to be true, I had still kept my mouth shut about it for fear that if my parent's knew I would no longer get any gifts. When that incident happened, however, I had no other way to explain it and so latched onto the Santa myth. I really wanted to believe what my parents had been telling me over the years, though, if only because it seemed to provide some limited explanation for what had occurred.
The doublethink my parents expected of me in general had led to a mass of confusion for me. On the one hand, my parents insisted that there was no such thing as magic, that there were no monsters, that there was no such thing as ghosts. At the same time, however, they expected me to believe in a Heaven and a Hell, a god and devil complete with their respective legions of angels and demons.
They insisted some fairy came around, stole exorcised teeth and left quarters in exchange. They insisted some bunny hopped around to every house on Easter and left chocolate eggs and other candies.
They insisted that some obese man from the North Pole dressed in red and white visited every house in one night, riding his sleigh full of flying reindeer and somehow squeezing his fat ass down the narrowest of chimneys to fill our tacked socks with goodies and leave presents beneath the tree.
I would have entirely accepted these myths as lies, perhaps, if not for that one Christmas. Yet I needed an explanation, so I hung on to the only available context.
As an inevitable result, it killed me a year or two later when my parents called me into their room with those alway-ominous words, "we have something to tell you." When they went on to tell me that Santa wasn't real at all, and that it had been dad who had been eating the cookies and drinking the coffee all those years. I was awash with horror. By the end of their revelations, I was bawling, and for very good reason. After all, if not some evil Santa that had tapped on my window and walked through my bedroom door with his elves that Christmas evening so long ago, what in the hell had I seen?
Now, years later, in reading this book at age sixteen, my mind seemed to be wanting to link that bizarre experience with the contents of Hopkin's book. I found it absurd. When looking back on this memory within the context of alien abduction, I could only laugh to myself. Sure, it was a strange memory, but throughout all I had read I had never come across something even remotely sounding like the face I saw outside my window. This book spoke about little gray men with big, slanted, liquid-black eyes, not wrinkly tan creatures with huge frowns and bulging eyes. I didn't understand how my mind, against all common sense and conscious will, would strive to indicate a correlation here.
So I tried to push it out of my mind. As the weeks wore on, however, pushing aside the memory seemed to be as futile as putting down the book. Even when the book was away, as a matter of fact, the memory continued to come back to haunt me, and it wasn't long until it began to bring along some company. Over a period of many months, fragments of memories began surfacing in my mind.
Once I decided not to fight these memories, I'd often go into meditation to open myself up to my unconscious and let it display to me what it was willing to, void of any conscious resistance or editing. These recollections came of their own accord; I couldn't seem to drag out of memory anything that happened before or after these particular moments. Since I wanted to capture the feelings these images gave me and words seemed to fail them, I began trying to capture them in my artwork, using charcoal and pencil to illustrate them.
It felt good capturing them on paper, too; it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Still, I couldn't be certain if these were pieces of real childhood memories I was capturing or just remnant from a childhood of vivid, overactive imagination and wacky dreams. I continued to find it confusing that I so strongly associated these memories with the subject mater of Hopkin's book, too, as few of these memories involved UFOs and none involved short, gray being with big, black slanted eyes. Nonetheless, the relentless rush of them forced me to consider that perhaps I actually had been abducted by aliens; still, the idea seemed rather silly to me. I certainly believe in that sort of thing beyond a doubt, but I had adopted the attitude of my grandmother: if I ever had seen them, why on earth would I want to forget?
As I continued to sketch these images, I began having disturbing dreams. I got the sense that more seemed to be coming, too. There was this uneasy, tip-of-the-tongue kind of feeling arising in me that I was unable to shake off. It was a lot like hanging on the edge of a sneeze that just won't happen.
Then it happened.
It was late one evening and I had been trying to quiet my mind and catch some sleep. I propped my chin up on my pillow and gazed awhile at my new lava lamp, thinking that the motion of the red lava floating in the yellow oil might help me relax. It didn't. What it did do was make these weird ripples wave across my field of vision. A similar perception can be produce, I would later learn, by staring into a turning circular plate on which is drawn a spiral that begins at the edges of the plate and spirals in towards the center. As for my state of consciousness, I can say from my standpoint now that it was somewhat akin to being high, though I wouldn't try any such drug until almost half a decade later. This night, as a matter of fact, was one reason why I kept clear of drugs for so long.
Awed and intoxicated by this strange state of consciousness, I took my eyes off the lava and let them glide across the row of books on the shelf attached to the head of my bed. When my eyes came to rest upon the novel War of the Worlds, by HG Wells, the strange feeling that had been slowly building up it's rhythm in me since I'd began reading up on the paranormal roughly a year before finally reached a climax. It was as if water had been building up behind a locked door and the pressure had finally caused it to give away, swinging it open violently and without the slightest hint of warning. I was lost in a flood of rushing thoughts, emotions, images, associations and memories, seemingly catapulted back into my past. It was less of a recollection; it was more along the lines of a re-experience.
The first flashback was of an event that I would later learn had to have occurred within a ten-month period bridging when I was five and six, between the years 1983 and 84. It may have been when I still shared a room with the eldest of my two younger sisters and we had bunk beds; either that, or I was hiding beneath the bed in the room they shared for some reason. During that period, I had been diagnosed with Leggs-Calves-Perthes Disease, a condition that result in an irregular growth of the hip bone. As treatment, I had to wear these experimental leg braces; a device that wrapped around my waist and legs, separating my legs in an arch.
I found myself beside a large box my mother had given each of us kids to place all our artwork in. I was beneath a bed, wearing my leg braces, watching as these strange creatures burst through the bedroom door. From my perspective, I could see only their feet, legs and their long arms. Their hands had long, wiry fingers and I think at least some of them had only three toes. As they ran about at high speed, their feet made a pitter-pattering sound on the carpet. They seemed to be looking for something, as they were going through drawers and picking objects up and putting them down again.
At first I thought I was fairly concealed by the sheets and blankets that draped over the bed, which hung fairly close to the floor. They seemed to be going through everything in the room, however, and it didn't take long for me to realize that this was likely to eventually include peering beneath the bed. Fear struck me when I noticed my leg, held in place by my braces, was sticking out into potential view. Frantically, though as quietly as I could manage, I tried to squirm farther under the bed. This required me moving my entire body, obviously, not just my leg, since it was held in an arch due to the braces -- and that's where I ran into a problem.
In the process of moving, my leg hit the box, causing my squirming beneath the bed to do precisely opposite of what I had intended. It not only pushed my leg farther out into view, it caused quite a noise in the process. Damage already done, I stopped moving, too frightened to look. I didn't have to. Though it seems to be a contradiction in terms, the silence took on a deafening volume.
Finally, I managed to look behind me, watching in absolute terror as I saw the feet of one of them approach It's hand reached down, the long fingers touching my braced leg. In my mind, in that moment, I immediately saw a still-image flash from the closing scene of the move War of the Worlds, which had been my favorite movie at the time. In the scene, people were huddled around the downed Martian spacecraft. Its hatch had opened and a brown hand with wiry, snakelike fingers had slowly slithered it's way out. Though the hand that touched my leg certainly looked different from the hand I saw in that movie, they were similar enough for one to remind me of the other.
I just stared at that hand a moment, then at its feet. I don't know if I crawled towards it or was dragged out from beneath the bed, but I would have to imagine, under the circumstances, that I must have been dragged. All I know is that my eyes made a slow, measured journey up to meet the face of the creature, trying to memorize every feature, detail and wrinkle from foot to face. I wanted to burn the reality of this moment in my mind and preserve it. I somehow knew they would try to make me forget, but I decided to try desperately to remember and made a promise to myself that I'd draw that face one day when my talents were good enough.
He had a brown or darkly-tanned complexion and deep wrinkles. His eyes had whites, a yellowish-brown iris, and a black pupil and he stared down at me with a very displeased, penetrating flare. The frown this being wore was unreal, and it's this feature that I remember most vividly. With his bottom lip pressed up against his pug nose, the depth of his frown seemed to extend further downward as he looked ever-more-deeply into me. I was drawn towards those eyes, and I mean this in the most literally sense -- and once I met them, I was drawn into them.
Upon eye contact, I was flooded with flashes of high-speed imagery. I got the impression that he was "the Doctor" and that they were scientists; that he was "very old" and "very wise." Words that rose in my mind in association with him, strangely enough, also included "old one" and "grandfather." All this was communicated to me through his eyes, but not, it seems, in words. He simply made me know by giving me flashes of imagery and what I can only describe as wordless impressions.
Somehow, his face seems to get closer. I don't know if he leans close or pulls me up, I don't know how it happens, but shortly thereafter, my mind is entirely divorced from my body. His eyes draw me in entirely, it seems, or perhaps its more appropriate to say that his eyes invade me, or, better yet, that our minds somehow ''fused.'' Regardless, I am suddenly encapsulated within a vivid, cleverly-concocted dream setting. It's like a three-dimensional, full-sensory movie. Though nearly real and life-like, there is that nagging, underlying sense within this ''dream'' that something is inherently wrong. Something hints at its artificiality.
In the scene, I am generally where I had been previously, which is beside the bed with the Doctor before me. This was not, however, a true reflection of the Doctor I had just encountered. Here he appeared as a little brown, elderly creature with kindly round eyes which were rimmed and magnified by a pair of glasses. In place of his long, unearthly frown was this equally wide and surreal smile. It stretched from one end of his face to the other; from ear to ear, if he had had ears. He wore a long white lab coat, held a clipboard and had a stethoscopes wrapped around his head.
Looking dead at me, unwaveringly and unblinking, he told me that he was just hear to give me a check-up, to run me through some tests. There was some conversation, I think, but I cannot remember the particulars. As we spoke, however, it seemed as though he was trying his damnest to absorb my attention, which was focused less on him and more on the action going on behind him. Though I couldn't make out anything specific, I could catch that there were a lot of lights and action going on, but I couldn't make out anything specific. I only knew that he was eclipsing things that were occurring which he did not want me to see -- and which, for that very reason among others, I dreadfully did want to see.
The flashback ended and I opened my eyes. I was sixteen again. I sat up in bed with my head ringing and my body drenched in a cold sweat. I felt as if I'd just woken up from a dream I'd been trapped in for roughly sixteen years,. I was refreshed in one sense and absolutely terrified in another. I had no idea what to think. Was it safe to sleep? Was I somehow in trouble now for remembering this? Was all this some fucked up hallucination, some false memory?
A few moments later, I felt another flashback creeping up. I let it take, and I remembered the Goblin Man I'd seen around the same time in my youth.
It was some time after that night that I came to realize that the face of the Doctor in the flashback was the same face I had seen at the window that Christmas Eve. I also noticed one evening, to my absolute amazement, a cartoon character I had drawn some time ago and scotch-taped to my wall. It was drawn far before I started remembering all these weird things and I had hardly ever spent time looking at it. It was of a strange creature with large eyes, directed downward. And it had a deep, deep frown.
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