Communion: A True Story (3 page)

My memory of the one that came before me next is of a tiny, squat person, crouching as if huddled over something. He had been given the box and now slid it open, revealing an extremely shiny, hair-thin needle mounted on a black surface. This needle glittered when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but was practically invisible straight on.

I became aware — I think I was told — that they proposed to insert this into my brain.

If I had been afraid before, I now became quite simply crazed with terror. I argued with them. "This place is filthy," I remember saying. Then, "You'll ruin a beautiful mind." I could imagine my family awakening in the morning and finding me a vegetable. A great sadness overtook me. I do not recall screaming, but evidently I was doing so, because I remember the next exchange quite clearly.

One of them, I think it was the one I had identified earlier as the woman, said, "What can we do to help you stop screaming?" This voice was remarkable. It was definitely aural, that is to say, I heard it rather than sensed it. It had a subtly electronic tone to it, the accents flat and startlingly Midwestern.

My reply was unexpected. I heard myself say, "You could let me smell you." I was embarrassed; that is not a normal request, and it bothered me. But it made a great deal of sense, as I have afterward realized.

The one to my right replied, "Oh, OK, I can do that," in a similar voice, speaking very rapidly, and held his hand against my face, cradling my head with his other hand. The odor was distinct, and gave me exactly what I needed, an anchor in reality. It remained the most convincing aspect of the whole memory, because that odor was completely indistinguishable from a real one. It did not seem in any way a dream experience or a hallucination. I remembered it as an actual smell.

There was a slight scent of cardboard to it, as if the sleeve of the coverall that was partly pressed against my face were made of some substance like paper. The hand itself had a faint but distinctly organic sourness in its odor. It was not a human smell, but it was unmistakably the smell of something alive. There was a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.

The next thing I knew, there was a bang and- a Hash, and I realized that they had performed the proposed operation on my head. I felt like weeping and I recall sinking down into a cradle of tiny arms.

At this point. I had some feeling, and enough muscle tone had returned to enable me to slide my feet along the floor in an effort to avoid falling the way. Then I was lifted up and seemed suddenly to be in another room, or perhaps I simply saw my present surroundings differently. It appeared to be a small operating theater. I was to the center of it on a table, and three tiers of benches were populated with a few huddled figures, some with round, as opposed to slanted, eyes.

I was aware that I had seen four different types of figures. The first was the small robotlike being that had led the way into my bedroom. He was followed by a large group of short, stocky ones in the dark-blue coveralls. These had wide faces, appearing either dark gray or dark blue in that light, with glittering deep-set eyes, pug noses, and broad, somewhat human mouths. Inside the room, I encountered two types of creature that did not look at all human. The most provocative of these was about five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes. This being had an almost vestigial mouth and nose. The huddled figures in the theater were somewhat smaller, with similarly shaped heads but round, black eyes like large buttons.

Throughout the whole experience, the stocky ones were always present. They were apparently responsible for moving and controlling me, and I had the distinct impression that they were a sort of "good army." Why good I do not know.

I do not remember what, if anything, happened in the operating theater. My memories of movement from place to place are the hardest to recall because it was then that I felt the most helpless. My fear would rise when they touched me. Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects. It was very distressing.

Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew l was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long narrow. and triangular in structure. They inserted this thin into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.

Only when the thing was withdrawn did I see that it was a mechanical device. The individual holding it pointed to the wire cafe on the tip and seemed to warn . me about something. But what? I never found out.

Events once again started moving very quickly.

One of them took my right hand and made an incision on my forefinger. There was no pain at all. Abruptly, my memories end. There isn't even blackness, just morning.

I had no further recollection of the incident.

I awoke the morning of the twenty-seventh very much as usual, but grappling with a distinct sense of unease and a very improbable but intense memory of seeing a barn owl staring at me through the window sometime during the night.

I remember how I felt in the gathering evening of the twenty-seventh, when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.

But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.

Later I discovered that memories of animals in strange places are a common block to this experience. One young woman arrived back at a picnic in the woods in France with a story of seeing a beautiful deer. But she had blood on her blouse, and a strange straight scar that could not be explained. Ten years passed before she remembered anything of the truth of her experience in those woods, and she would have died with that memory had not her memory of another encounter with the visitors caused her to question its real significance. Another man came away from his experience thinking only that he had seen a bunch of rabbits hopping around outside his car.

Like my barn owl, these stories must have seemed no more than whimsies, but they hid real experiences that were so impossible to accept, just keeping them hidden took a large toll-as it has with others, as it might be doing with anybody.

From that first day my wife noticed a dramatic personality change in me, which she thought was similar to a change that had taken place the previous October. We had gone through personal hell then because of my demands and accusatory behavior, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself.

But I was in decline again, and this time the symptoms were not all mental. That first evening I underwent the initial physical symptom of my ordeal. We had come in from an afternoon of light cross-country skiing, not at all strenuous. I was dead tired. Normally I am full of energy. Even a hard afternoon on the ski trails leaves me feeling pleasantly relaxed.

I got chills and went to bed. I lay huddled between the sheets and the quilt, with evening coming down, feeling just awful. I thought that I must have had a high fever. I was exhausted. The sounds of my wife and son downstairs filled me with a sense of foreboding.

Strange recollections of people running, of being pulled and shoved, swirled through my head.

Then our nearest neighbors suddenly arrived. They appeared without warning. We tend to be very private in our sparse community, and this was only their second spontaneous visit in the two years we have been neighbors.

Feeling somewhat better, I went downstairs to see them. No sooner had we started talking than I found myself complaining that I thought I had seen the light of a snowmobile m the woods between our houses at about three in the morning. I was horrified at myself. What was I saying? I couldn't remember any such thing, and I knew it even as I spoke. Our neighbors offered the thought that the woods were too thick for a snowmobile to maneuver, which is true. Then I said that it must have been the lights on his house. He has two floodlights that shine out over his backyard. He explained that these lights had been off, but promised to redirect them so they couldn't be seen from our house. I knew even then that his lights hadn't been bothering me so late at night (although !hey were sometimes bothersome early in the evening, now that winter had stripped the woods of their concealing leaves). My memory of the snowmobile was as hollow as my memory of the owl.

After some small talk, our neighbors went home. I was not pleased with my own behavior, and found it hard to understand because it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.

My wife reports that my personality deteriorated dramatically over the following weeks. I became hypersensitive, easily confused, and, worst of all, short with my son. We have always been a happy family, and there was no change in our life condition or relationship to account for this personality shift.

The realization that the owl memory was not true created troubling problems for me. I was aware that something had somehow gone wrong with me. The trouble was I could not understand what it was. There simply wasn't anything in my life to explain it. I started to worry about toxins in our food or water, but as nobody else in the family was affected, and we hadn't tried any food that might have caused some bizarre allergy, that seemed unlikely.

I did not know that the owl and the light were screen memories that concealed a traumatic experience. As described by Freud, the screen memory is a method that the mind uses to shield itself from things too upsetting to recall.

I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal. By December 28 I was so depressed and in such a state of inner conflict that I sat down and wrote a short story in an effort to explore my emotions. It reflected not only my emotional state but probably also some of the realities hidden behind it.

I called it "Pain." It was to be the last sustained writing I would do for seven weeks, and is the last thing I wrote before these enormous hidden truths began emerging from my unconscious.

At the time I had no idea that I was suffering from emotional trauma, or that dozens of other people had been through very similar ordeals after being taken by the visitors.

Previous to the twenty-sixth I had made good progress on a huge two-volume novel based on the relationship between Russia and America at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Now I could hardly read my own work, let alone continue working on this complicated project.

Since I wrote "Pain" as an expression of the emotional state that overlay the memories I was then suppressing, I will recount it briefly. It is about a man who encounters an enigmatic woman named Janet, who proves to be some sort of superhuman being, perhaps an angel or a demon. She draws this man into a strange experience of capture and incarceration in a tiny, magical cabinet. From the agony that ensues, he gains immense insight and new spiritual strength.

What is most interesting to me about this story is that it continues imagery that is present in my early horror novels. The visitors could be seen as the Wolfen, as Miriam Blaylock in
The Hunger
, and as the fairy queen Leannan and her soldiers in
Catmagic
. The theme is always the same: Mankind must face a harsh but enigmatically beautiful force that, as Miriam Blaylock describes herself, is "part of the justice of the world." This force is always hidden between the folds of experience.

As I worked on "Pain" my mental and physical states continued to get worse. An infection appeared on my right forefinger. It looked like a splinter injury, but I could not remember getting a splinter, unless it was from some log I carried in for the stove. The injury festered. Neither iodine nor antibiotic ointment seemed to help. I looked for a bit of splinter but could find nothing.

I noticed that I was uncomfortable sitting because of rectal pain, a weird and disturbing symptom. I had a vague feeling that something distressful had happened to me, but no clear memory.

In the ensuing days, I experienced more bouts of fatigue. I would be working and suddenly I would get cold and start to shake. Then I would feel so exhausted that I could not go on, and crawl into bed quivering and miserable, sure that I was coming down with the flu.

I took my temperature during one of these experiences and found that it was 96.6 at the outset and 98.8 at the height of the "fever." Afterward it dropped to 97.0

Nights I would sleep, but wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been tossing and turning the whole time. I ceased to dream, and sometimes had difficulty closing my eyes. I felt watched, and kept hearing noises m the night. Mornings I would wake up with the feeling that I had been somehow on guard.

My disposition got worse. I became mercurial, frantic with excitement about some idea one moment, in despair the next. I was suspicious of friends and family, often openly hostile.

I came to hate telephone calls. I could not concentrate even on light television programs.

After writing "Pain" I found that I could not sustain enough attention to work for more than five or ten minutes at a time. An attempt to read
Gerald's Party
by Robert Coover left me profoundly confused. I kept reading and rereading the same few pages. I switched to a less challenging novel, but it was also totally incomprehensible. I had been reading some sermons of the thirteenth-century mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart, but this study had to be abandoned. I could no longer follow my own thinking, let alone that of the authors who interested me. It was a fearful, haunting discovery.