by L D Strawser
“I will listen but I can’t promise that I will want to help you.” That was the best I could do and still pretend that I was my own person. “How long have I been here, how long since I found you in the forest?”
“The sun has not yet set on your home,” he said in a whisper. “We can leave now if you wish.”
“Please.” That was all I could manage to say at that moment, his eyes had caught mine again and I was drowning in a scent so powerful that I couldn’t think straight. He gave me another of those strange looks. He reached into his shirt and took something small from an inside pocket.
“I would like to give you a small gift to make up for what I have done to you this day against your will,” he said formally. His hand was still on my chin but slowly traced down the side of my neck. My heart pounded against my chest in response. Now his hand caressed my shoulder and slid down my arm to my hand leaving behind a tingling sensation. He seemed to be slightly out of breath as he opened my hand and deposited the item into my palm. How could I find out what it was without looking away from his eyes?
“What is it?” My words made me sound frail and pathetic. If this was all it took for him to befuddle my mind I didn’t have a chance against him when he asked for help. I would look into his blazing gaze and fall all over myself to do whatever he asked of me.
“It is a ring, it has sentimental value to me,” he continued in a quiet whisper, “since I value it in that manner it is appropriate to give it to you as a gift of apology. I am truly sorry that I found you.”
If he had thrown cold water on me it couldn’t have brought me out of my trance quicker than those last words.
“What do you mean, ‘I am truly sorry that I found you’?” I demanded in an angry voice.
His reaction shocked me. I expected arrogance or superiority but not the deep look of desolation that filled his eyes. It only lasted for a moment but I was no longer angry, I just wanted to hold him to me and tell him that everything would be alright. This time I reached for his face with both hands and at the same time he reached out for my waist. As I stepped into his arms he pulled me to him as if we had known each other forever. He laid his head on top of mine as my arms tightened around his neck. I have never felt so completely content in my life. This is where I belonged and yet I couldn’t understand why I felt that way.
Chapter Three
Present… Earth, Chillicothe, Ohio
The heat woke me up. I was drenched in sweat and my sheets were clinging to my body uncomfortably. That was the first time in years that my dreams were that vivid. It had been a while since I had dreamt of the beautiful blue skinned man. I had never given him a name before though. I struggled to remember what it was but it wouldn’t come to me. I was in a good mood until the realization hit me that it was just a dream—again. My easy acceptance of aliens and all of the impossible feelings for the blue skinned alien should have clued me in during the dream. Usually when I know I’m dreaming I can control the dream and deliver the outcome I want instead of the one my subconscious originally planned. This time it had been so realistic that I didn’t even consider that I was dreaming.
Sometimes I wished that these vivid dreams of mine were real then at least I would have someone in my life even if it was an alien. I must be more upset about my most recent break-up than I’d thought. After having been married for fifteen years to one man it had been hard to go back to the dating realm. I didn’t exactly dive in either. I’m a little strange and it was hard to be myself with just about anyone. I thought I had found someone but unfortunately he wasn’t looking for the same things I was looking for in a relationship.
I should have known better than to trust a guy who insisted on meeting me in town and didn’t want to take me home or come to my home. At the time he had made it sound like he wanted to take things slow and I didn’t have a problem with that. Then he started suggesting hotel visits for a few hours instead of a day or several days. I simply asked him point blank if he was married and he got angry and left. I got stuck with the restaurant bill and another lesson in ‘don’t trust anyone; if they are too good to be true then there is something definitely wrong.’ That was one of my sisters’ mantras. She keeps telling me that I am too trusting. Maybe someday I’ll pay attention to her.
As I got out of bed I grabbed the sheets and blanket, stripped the pillow case off the pillow and took them to the wash room. I had overslept and it was already late in the afternoon. I took a quick shower, got dressed, strapped on my Colt 45 and went outside to see if I could salvage something from the wasted day. I still had mushrooms on my mind and decided that it couldn’t hurt to take a quick walk in the woods to see if I could find some morels.
I reached the edge of the woods and I had the strangest sense of déjà vu. There was the wind-blown trash that needed to be picked up. I laughed at myself and headed deeper into the woods. Suddenly I was curious to see if I could find the spot where in my dream he was next to the tree that had morels growing at its base. The tree was distinctive because it was the largest and tallest in that section of the woods next to my farmhouse.
I approached the tree in question and when I looked at the ground around it I was surprised to find the area where the mushrooms had been in my dream covered with undisturbed dead leaves. I don’t know why that should have surprised me, it’s not like the dream was real, it’s not like the mushrooms were really there. Still, the impulse to check under the leaves was too strong. I pushed the leaves out of the way and a cold icy feeling traveled from the back of my neck down my spine as I looked at the ground. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Under the leaves were five pinched off mushroom stubs, I stared at them trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The fact that they were there and that I wasn’t dreaming was undeniable.
It had to be a coincidence. Perhaps someone had come onto my property without permission to hunt mushrooms. I continued looking at the ground around the tree but there were no other disturbances in the leaf litter, no footprints, no impressions, nothing what-so-ever to suggest that anything had happened under this tree except the very real pinched off morels. Obviously my imagination was getting away from me. I laughed at myself and resumed my hunt for mushrooms. I crossed the small creek and found three morels that were the perfect size. I pinched them off and swept my eyes further out from where the small grouping had stood.
Something glinted in the sunlight off to my left at about a foot above my eye level. Curious I walked towards the object that was reflecting the sunlight. On a small branch, slid past some of the new leaves was a ring. It was the ring from my dream. I was quickly running out of explanations that sounded plausible even to my own self. I reached out to touch the ring. I was worried that as soon as I touched it either it would disappear or I would wake up from another dream. My Grandmother had called it dream-walking, a state of mind where you can be conscious and dreaming at the same time.
Is that what was happening to me or was I just going slowly insane? Grandma had told me when I was little that I had certain gifts but now I was just wishing I could distinguish between dreams and reality. Someone who can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality would eventually end up in a little padded room with no way out. I would rather avoid that option if possible.
My fingers touched the branch first and then followed the slightly rough bark of the slim wooden finger to the ring shining on it. The ring was cold, smooth, and felt very real as these things go so I was willing to make a leap here and postulate that it was possible that someone for unknown reasons put this ring here. I slid it off the branch and held it in the palm of my hand. His words echoed in my mind ‘I am truly sorry that I found you.’ I looked closely at the ring but it appeared to be unremarkable other than the circumstances under which I found it.
It was heavy for such a small ring but it looked like silver rather than gold. Perhaps it was platinum. No, no one would leave a platinum ring lying about with the price it was going for on the market these days.
I would have said that for silver as well if I weren’t holding the evidence to the contrary in my hand. I looked at the interior of the ring to see if there was an inscription but no such luck. It was just a plain, heavy, silver band without any markings what-so-ever.
I pocketed the ring for the moment and continued my search for mushrooms. If I were being honest with myself I was also looking for more evidence of my encounter that I had thought was a dream. I found no more mushrooms and no other signs that my dream was other than that, a dream. I made my way back to the house and picked up the bits of trash that had made its way onto my land. I was determined to figure out the differences between my dreams and reality one way or the other.
When I got back to the house my dogs were clamoring for attention. I laid the ring down on my nightstand by my bed. I grabbed the leashes and took the dogs out for a short walk. When a person could do the things that I could do and see the things that I have seen it wasn’t too much of a leap to assume insanity before assuming that anything was real. That’s why I stopped talking about my dreams to my family. My parents were too sick and getting older—I didn’t want to burden them with the things I saw. My sisters had their own problems to deal with, and my brothers tried to pretend that they were normal—no one wants to be considered a freak of nature.
The few friends that I had had no idea what I was hiding, they just thought of me as a little kooky, and a little strange, maybe just eccentric. That was of course when they were trying to put a pleasant light on me. Usually they just assumed that dementia ran in the family, hadn’t my Grandmother gone insane and got herself killed? Most of the time people just had a weird feeling about me and instantly took a disliking to me without understanding why.
Of course, it’s not as if I went out of my way to make friends with the people I have met. Most people are sickeningly selfish and so self absorbed that they don’t even notice the death, misery, and destruction going on around them. The strange thing is that most people think that I’m self absorbed and only concerned with my life, my troubles, myself. If they could see what I have seen and wield the power that I unwillingly possess I wonder what they would think then. Do I use my gifts to help individual people? Do I attempt to make life better for myself or my family or even certain other people? The answer is no.
There is a very good reason that I reign in my gifts as much as possible, once unleashed they tend to have a life of their own. Imagine that someone has made you angry—they have hurt you in a personal way. A normal person might decide to get back at them the first time the opportunity presented itself. Maybe if they were hurt enough they would go so far as to physically hurt or even kill that person. Most likely they would get caught, but what if they could think of what they wanted to happen and then make it a reality without ever doing anything else except imagine the outcome a few times until it was a reality in their mind.
Imagine what could happen if that power were used for selfish ends, for personal gain. Now imagine the restraint necessary to never use that power against those who have hurt you. Isolation is not a choice for me it is a necessity. I was born with the burden of these gifts and then The Divine, whatever you call God, with that infinite sense of humor gave me a temper with my gifts. I am easily provoked and have the power to exact retribution beyond what anyone could possibly imagine.
In my youth I was inadvertently responsible for the deaths of two girls. One had made me angry and I wished for her death. The other was my friend—she was also friends with the girl who was my enemy—they were together when the events I thoughtlessly set into motion ended in both of their deaths. I didn’t know my power at the time and didn’t understand it but that doesn’t bring back the lives I took away in a moment of anger. There are worse examples that I attribute to my ignorance of how my gifts work—and yes, I constantly question my sanity.
The only reason I have not tried to kill myself are the words of my Grandmother, “Your gifts are for a higher purpose and you should never use them for anything less than the benefit of the world.” I hope to someday live up to her great expectations. She told me many things when I was little, some of them sounded like interesting historical stories, others were obviously fantasies about the future. I realized that she could see what was coming and what had already passed as if she had been there herself and experienced it firsthand. Up until she died I had believed most everything she had said as if it were real. When people started talking about her after her death—how she was insane and should have been committed to a mental hospital—only then did I truly doubt myself and doubt what she had told me.
Even now, when I can see the evidence for myself, I still have doubts and question my sanity. Who would willingly believe that they could do the things I can do—influence events to unfold as I want them to—see future events as if I have lived them? The dreams of the blue skinned man were the only ones I’d ever had that felt real and seemed prophetic but never resulted in anything in the real world. Did the blue man really exist? If he did, then why would he be interested in me—aside from the obvious control of someone with my gifts—in a romantic way?
These dreams had never made sense even when I was a small child and they made even less sense now. When I told my Grandmother about the blue man she told me to trust my heart and always do what was right for all the people of Earth and I would never go wrong. The problem with that was what the blue man wanted in my dreams didn’t seem to be in the best interests of the people of Earth, so trust my heart or do what was right for the people? What was right for the people—did I really have the knowledge needed to make those kinds of judgments? She also told me to never tell anyone else about the blue man, not even mom and dad.
My dogs could tell I was distracted—they tried to engage me in one of their games but I was hardly paying attention to what they were doing. My mind was on the mystery of the mushrooms and the ring. What if the dream was real, did that mean what I was doing now was a dream? If what I was doing now was a dream then that would mean most of my life was a dream and that didn’t make sense unless I was completely insane. I would rather go from the assumption that I was sane for the moment so what would be another possible explanation? If the blue man was real as my Grandmother had suggested—if what I thought was a dream was something that actually happened—then why would I not remember how I got back home or what his name was?
What happened when I ‘woke up’ in my dream and went into the woods? Do I remember waking up this morning before I was in the woods looking for mushrooms? The harder I thought about it the more confused I got—what was the last thing I could clearly remember before that walk in the woods? I couldn’t remember waking up and I couldn’t remember going to bed last night. The last thing I remember for certain was eating dinner last night with the now ex-boyfriend and flat out asking him if he was married. He stormed out of the restaurant, I paid the bill, I drove home, I walked the dogs, and then—nothing. I don’t know what happened after I walked the dogs last night—I don’t remember getting back to the house with them—I have no memory of anything until the dream and even parts of that were fading.
I wish the dogs could talk, maybe they know what happened and they could tell me—if I spoke their language. I laughed at myself again, how pathetic could I be—wishing I could talk to my dogs in order to figure out what I was doing last night. Perhaps after eating something and taking another look at that ring something would suggest itself as to why my memories were so fuzzy.
The sun would be setting soon which surprised me. I had been out walking longer than I thought. When I walked into the house, there was a strange smell. It was as if I had walked into a house that didn’t belong to me. The familiar smell of my own house was replaced with a scent I recognized but could hardly credit as real. It was the blue man’s smell, that combination of the most delicious food and the most sensual erotic musk.
My senses went on immediate alert. I stopped dead in the doorway as soon as the scent hit me in the face. I carefully
pulled my Colt 45 out of the holster and took off the safety. The dogs did something that made me certain that having the Colt out was a good idea. They both bolted out the door with their tails between their legs. I followed the scent through the house and back towards my bedroom. As I checked my room I could tell that the scent was stronger in here—as if he had lingered for a while—but when I finished checking the rest of the house it was obvious that no one was in the house but me. I went back to my bedroom to see if anything had been disturbed. A tiny glint of light shone off of the ring I had placed on the nightstand in my room. The ring had been moved—it was sitting on my pillow. Nothing else in the room had been bothered so why was the ring moved?
I picked up the ring, it still appeared to be an ordinary silver ring with no markings and nothing to suggest it was anything other than what it appeared to be. Some impulse made me want to put the ring on, I knew I shouldn’t but the feeling was growing—I needed to put on the ring and I needed to do it now. My heart was racing as if I was running full out and yet it seemed as though I was holding my breath at the same time. I put the ring on my index finger, there was no way I was putting a ring on my ‘ring’ finger. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen but putting the ring on was rather anti-climatic after the overwhelming impulse that seemed to want me to put it on in the first place.
In my left ear I heard a very quiet buzzing sound.
~WE can speak to you now, WE had to remain inactive until you put on the tracer, with the tracer on you WE can be active and the tracer will hide the signal source with its own signature~