“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I didn’t want to talk. I just said, “I saw Drake. He was on the table.”
I took another pill. And finally collapsed.
****
“It was Drake again. In my room.” It was the next day. I was talking to Sue.
“You said he was on your table. What did that mean?”
“He was there. I mean in person. Until he disappeared. But he left a picture in a book on the table. It was a picture of a mandrake plant. To show he’d been there. So I had to believe it.”
“There was a picture in a book on the table…of a mandrake? And that reminded you of Drake?”
“No, he was there. He was actually there.”
“And then he disappeared?”
“Yes, he disappeared and left the book with the picture.”
“Honey, does that sound right to you? You know that Drake can’t just appear and disappear.”
“Everybody appears and disappears. It happens all the time. Everybody.”
“Who else are you seeing? Appear and disappear?”
“I can’t explain it. It’ll be in my book.”
“Now I know that some strange things have happened, including Drake himself. But you seem to be believing the stuff you are putting in that book. You said you were writing some fiction…that it was relaxing…therapeutic for you. But this sounds like it’s getting out of control. Out of your control. I think maybe you need to go see Dr. Harding. Maybe he can recommend a counselor up this way.”
“I can’t go back to counselors again. Shrinks. They lock me up. Take all my time. They won’t believe me. They’re no help.”
“They can change your medicine at least. Get you feeling better again. I thought it was great for you to attend those lectures. I thought that would be very positive and give you something to do since you don’t seem very interested in the farm anymore. But you think you’re seeing Drake in your hotel room…and he’s scaring you to death. It was very unsafe the way you came back home.”
“I know it was. I don’t know what to do about it. Drake needs to stay away.”
“Honey…Drake is only in your mind. I don’t know if he ever was a real person or not. Nobody can find out. But he’s gone. You are dreaming him. Or hallucinating him. And if that’s the case, you need help.”
“OK, I’ll make an appointment with Harding. Maybe just get some different meds. I know there used to be a Drake. I was okay until the trip.”
“You were okay until you disappeared that night. You’ve been…different ever since. And since the cruise. I wish we’d never gone on that cruise. What in the world did it do to you?”
“It was the trip. The big trip.”
“What do you mean, big trip? Have you been using drugs? Tripping?”
“No, no…not that. Not that. It was my corn. The hole in the corn.”
“Holes in the corn?”
“The whole corn. I mean the field. Drake was right.”
“Drake was a quack. Oh why did you believe him?”
I suddenly laughed. But I sounded like a madman. “Yeah, he quacked like a duck. Like a drake…duck…mandrake….”
“Go call for you an appointment. Or do you want me to make it for you?”
To the phone: “Hello, this is Don Henson. I need to see Dr. Harding. Do you think he can work me in?”
Chapter 17 - THE LIGHT
There were glaciers on the mountains, in my dream. Giant white and blue masses of ice, eons forming, creeping ever so slowly toward the valleys they would never reach. The valleys were filled with flowers, wild and abandoned, twisting, reaching like tallest trees far above my head. Fairies twirled and skimmed. Fairies. Beings that proclaimed that life was fair in this perfect world, and fair was the life, all beautiful, all bountiful, none attacking any other.
Of course there were unicorns. How could there not be? It was perfect after all.
A glowing being of comely form brushed my newly copious strands of hair from my forehead, setting free my eyes, eyes of clearest vision, gazing past the mighty towers above to a sky both blue and brilliant, where the sun shone brightly, and so did the stars. And comets, oh how the comets streamed!
How could I write this? I thought. This is not my writing.
Butterfly wings flapped swiftly, and I could feel their breeze. The Being spoke quietly, but my ears could hear everything.
“We are sorry that the one Drake now frightens you. It was not our intention. He was so like you, in the beginning. Or what you imagined him to be.”
I spoke not, but I was understood.
The Being continued, “If not for him, you never would have known. We would never have found…each other. For in every pixel, every scene, every root and every branch and on and on forever, there must be One Who Knows. If not for that, there is nothing.
“We know you are bewildered by all this. Your brains, your thoughts, your consciousness, your awareness, never evolved to such a level of comprehension. We have tried to make it as easy as we can. Truth may bring terrors beyond your imaginings. We must temper this with comfort, with help for pain.”
It was just a dream I had. But I did not want to leave it. When I awoke, the world seemed dark, and yet, I felt the light.
****
I kept my appointment with Dr. Harding. I told him I was feeling better though. In fact, I really did feel better ever since the dream. That dream was powerful. I still couldn’t believe the words, the scenery, the feeling of it. It was a goodness that lasted. It didn’t hurt that I wasn’t hearing anymore from Drake.
Harding didn’t change my meds very much. Increased one a little. Decreased another. Always striving for balance, I guess, just like all of us. But I surely thought a lot about the dream saying that there has to be one. One Who Knows. One for each pixel. So I’m the one in this pixel? I don’t know what I know that makes such an important difference. Maybe someone has to see the Quantum Gate and talk to the angels there. At least that’s how I thought of them. It was a much better thought than about Grays and Pinks…and Hunters!
I tried calling Driscoll again. I wanted to find out more about the glass he had, the piece of glass from Drake’s place. It was the one tangible piece of evidence out of all this. Everything else had vanished.
Driscoll said the glass had gone to an agency somewhere. They were continuing to study it. But it was all classified now. It had qualities that made it valuable.
Yeah, it was something no one else had. Always scarcity. Always the fear of scarcity even where it does not exist.
Then one day, on the news, they admitted there actually was an Area 51 after all! Well, Drake, whoever or what he was, was right about that. I wanted to go see it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get close.
“You are not going to Area 51!” I seldom saw Sue that excited.
“Why not? How could that be harmful? They won’t let me get too close anyway.”
“Then you can look at the pictures. It looks like any other government complex in the desert. All they did was test planes there. There are no UFOs, and if there were, you are not going to go hunting for them. I’m glad enough to be rid of Drake in my life.”
She did have a point. I decided I didn’t want to take a chance that Drake, real, fake, or ghost, could be hanging out in the desert just waiting for me.
But I knew that deserts were good places to look for UFOs. That is, when they weren’t in my cornfield. I remembered some old black and white sci-fi shows I used to watch as a kid. The flying saucers were always in the desert back then. How could I be nostalgic about something that now brought me such nightmares?
Chapter 18 - RAPTURE
I decided not to grow corn the next season and instead planted my field with pasture grass. It had grown up nicely, and I was thinking about adding some beef cattle. But now I kept thinking about “meat product”. I didn’t want to turn into a hunter, even though I still ate what I was given to eat and didn’t think much about meals otherw
ise.
So I held off on the cattle. I thought white-faced Herefords were pretty though. Maybe I could have one for a pet.
But then a group came by. They wanted to have a festival on my land. They said a spot there was sacred. I asked them how they knew that, and they just assured me that they could tell. I thought of the irony. If only they knew the whole story.
But they were very nice people. They danced and drummed and kept their clothes on most of the time. They burned a straw man and cleaned up after themselves and took care of their portapotties. So they were no trouble and the rent they paid helped a little.
I gave them strict orders not to venture into the woods though. The woods here are bad, I told them. There are poisonous plants…really deadly…not like mushrooms or weed. The plants would suck their lifeforce right out through their fingertips. I showed them my left hand. That impressed them. They didn’t want any lifeforce sucking that they weren’t doing themselves.
But on the last night of their festival, I was watching them through the kitchen window. They were burning the straw man. It was dramatic, and I went outside to watch it. They’d assured me that they could do this safely, but I was a little nervous anyway. The fire was brilliant orange and its column tapered into the darkness. Sparks swirled there like fireflies. It was mesmerizing, even from a distance. I found myself walking, ambling you could say, some distance toward it. I could smell the burning vegetation, the limbs and twigs, clods of slightly damp dirt and grass. And a peculiar smell. An oil, or essence, something added that I couldn’t identify.
Was I the only one affected by it? I felt dizzy, a little at first. Then my head began to spin, or was it the ground? The sparks rising into the sky seemed to swirl rapidly. They trailed into and beyond the darkness of the smoke. But then I could see it. From my vantage point it wasn’t hidden by the smoke. It rose high above it, but it also seemed to join the mad rush of incendiary brilliance. It was an oval. A conduit. But this time, a tall, thin vertical eye, like a cat, watching, ready to pounce, ready to lick the crowd with its alien tongue that darted straight out of the eye. I was busy running, trying to run, toward the crowd. I needed to warn them. I felt the resistance. I couldn’t move forward. I twisted and fell, hard, my head against a rock.
I was hurt. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t move, and no one seemed to notice. I was lost in the darkness. The crowd that danced around the flames slowed. The fire was dying and so were their movements. Soon, they too were still. Then the tendrils shot forth, from the eye, it lifted them, and their faintly glowing straw man, into itself.
I tried to look about. I could move but ever so slowly, so weakly. My head pounded. I could feel the trickle of blood down my cheek and chin.
I rose to one shoulder, trying to sit upright. And they were gone. The whole festival was gone. No people, no straw man, no portapotties, no tents, no cars. A wide circle lay flat in my field, a circle of soil, swept clean. I could see it in the full moon light. A barren circle in a field of grass. So quiet the night sounds. So shattering my scream.
Sue came running out when she heard me scream. She helped me get back to the house…and once again called 911.
“This has got to stop, Don. You can’t keep exploring in the dark, or whatever it is you do.”
“The whole festival is gone. They were just taken away.”
“Of course they’re gone. They got finished and left. They did a good job of cleaning up, just like they said they would.”
“But now they’re missing….”
“They’re not missing. They all went home. Gave us an extra $100 for use of the land.” Turning to the paramedic, “Does he need to go to the hospital?”
“He really should go get checked out….”
“I am not going to the hospital. I fell, and I’m fine now. The smoke made me dizzy.”
“He won’t go. He’s stubborn like that.”
I felt exasperated. I kept thinking about all those nice young people being snapped up by alien tongues. And this after The Enlightened Ones said it wouldn’t happen anymore.
“We need to call the cops. They need to find those kids.”
“Those kids are young adults who have gone home after their festival. How would you locate them anyway? You don’t even know their names. And they paid in cash.”
“Somebody must know….”
“Somebody never knows. If they’re missing, they’ll turn up. They always do. Like Krupp. And you.”
I gave up. It was true that I didn’t know who those kids were. I should have gotten all their names.
****
After the rapture of the kids and their straw man, I kept watching the news for any missing persons reports. There was nothing of course. I figured the men-in-black were busy covering it up, just like the people missing from the plane that landed in Jacksonville. But what about the EOs, The Enlightened Ones who promised no more abductions? Well, they promised no more hunting too, but my fingertips went the way of the rapture. I didn’t trust anybody.
I recalled that someone, one of the EO fairies I suppose, had told me that for every pixel there has to be One Who Knows. This made me wonder if I were a particular chosen one or if there were other chosen ones out there. I thought, well, I can’t extend over too many pixels, just myself, can I? If pixels overlap, then chosen ones must overlap too. And then, there is religion. I had not come close to figuring out how religion, or religions, fit into all this. I reasoned that I did not have the wisdom or the knowledge for that, and so I wasn’t going to try. But I did wonder how many pixels any particular religion could cover. Are there pixels with no religion at all? There are pixels with no humans at all. Do religions belong only to humans, or do Grays and Pinks and EOs have their own religions too? And what are their religions like? Who are their chosen ones? They must have some that overlap with me. And what do hunters have? I thought of hunters as being evil, but are they any worse than human hunters? That always took me back to the idea that we all should be plants.
My speculations had become endless, and I was putting some of them in my book. But I always got lost. I never could put it all together in my mind. For being the “one who knows” I felt like I wasn’t doing a very good job. I just knew that my favorite beings, in my favorite place, were the EO fairies. And their unicorn.
These were the odd and mostly useless thoughts I occupied myself with. There wasn’t a lot else to do. I didn’t go out much. People in Grover mostly avoided me by now. They thought that I made up Drake, that he wasn’t even real. They figured, I suppose, that if they couldn’t trust me on that, they couldn’t trust me on anything else. I stopped going to lectures too.
Even the crank wasn’t there anymore. He’d disappeared, and no one ever knew who he was. If a crank disappears in the forest, and no one remembers him, did he ever exist? I guess there has to be one who knows…and for every single pixel.
Chapter 19 - GROVER GLASS
One day Driscoll reappeared on my doorstep. He seemed…annoyed.
“The glass is gone.”
“What glass?”
“You know…the glass from the alleged Drake’s place. The glass with all the special properties.”
“It’s gone from where? I thought it was in a lab somewhere.”
“Once we figured out how to cut it, pieces were sent to several places, all of them for study. And all of them with top security. Well, the glass is gone from all of them. It disappeared from all of them at roughly the same time.”
“That’s amazing.” I tried to sound surprised. I wasn’t.
“I need to look for some more. We’re going back to Drake’s, uh, alleged place.”
“We are not. I don’t go there anymore. Sue won’t let me. And nobody believes in Drake anymore, so I figured I might as well join them.”
“You’re the only one who has ever seen Drake’s place before it burned, as far as we can determine. Your memory of it is important.”
“My memory of anything is overrated. But if
you want to look for glass, why don’t you get some geologists to use radar on my field. That way you won’t have to dig up my whole field looking.”
“There’s glass in your field? There’s no record of that.”
“Nobody looks deep enough. That’s why you need radar.”
“OK, wait now. What makes you think there’s glass? Have you seen any there?”
“Yeah…I’ve seen tons of it. There are caves made of that glass.”
I didn’t expect to be believed. I thought, what the hell….
“I’ll start making arrangements.”
“You actually believe me?”
“I believe anything. The glass is missing…all of it. We have got to find some more.”
He sounded awfully determined. I thought, me and my big mouth. What if they actually find the stuff? But I also wondered what happened to the samples they had already. Grays? EOs? The MIB?
Well, all I could do now was wait for the radar to show up. I doubted it would happen. I shouldn’t have.
****
“You want to massively and deeply dig up my field?”
“Something’s there. OK, we’ll try to compensate you in some way. We have enough missing person investigations that we could just confiscate it as a possible crime scene.”
“A crime scene? What kind of crime are you talking about? I just told you that you might find some glass there.”
“What makes you think there is glass there?”
“I can’t explain why. But you asked where some more might be, and I suggested that you use radar….”
“And suggested your field. Why did you do that, Mr. Henson?”
Driscoll had become very cold. He was standing on my porch with some kind of report, that he wouldn’t let me see, in his hand.
“This beats all. After all this, now I need to get a lawyer? I don’t want you destroying my field. I just suggested you look there.”
“OK, I’ll level with you this much…there’s something under there…something big, and very deep. We can map the structure, but we can’t penetrate it. It’s walled off from us. It could be an archeological site. But there are lots of people missing.”
Angels of the Quantum Gate Page 9
