If he hadn’t been so
damned ugly, I would’a thought he was an angel.
One moment I was
lying in my bed, sinking deep into its feather-soft mattress. The next I was
flying low across a dark and strange landscape. At first I thought it was the
surface of the moon as I had seen it pictured a thousand times in books,
photographs and the live videos from the Apollo landings. But that couldn’t be, could it? This landscape
was similar with its grey and dusty plains littered with coarse residue of
stones, boulders, troughs and peaks.
This
land was illuminated by a soft, grayish-silver glow that must be from the moon
or a moon of somewhere else. I must be
in some foreign place, I thought, somewhere new and unknown. I flew along, sometimes inches from the
ground, sometimes high in a cloudless, softly muted sky of a strangely
luminescent grey.
I
followed the lay of the land, over small rounded hills and down into deep
ravines that resembled the ragged, water torn gorges of the American west. Scattered in meager patches across the low,
rocky hills were small tree-like plants in groups of two or three. Each plant was a sickly yellowish green stalk
with thick, fleshy leaves that reminded me of the fat, heavy stems of the
succulents my mother grew in her flower garden.
The leaves, like bloody purple blisters, were sparse, dotting the limbs
in random patterns. They were unlike any
tree or plant I had ever seen.
I
felt him before I saw him, a slight tugging at my mind. Like a high flying kite that had come to the
end of its string, I slowed, then stopped my flight and drifted to the
ground. My feet touched the course,
sandy soil. I turned to face back in the
direction I had come and saw that I had company. Standing near me was a creature. A person?
A man? I see him/it clearly even
today and still don’t know.
He
wore no clothes. I am sure it was a he
although I could see no obvious sex organs.
His skin was the gray of ash. He
stood there, looking at me, wordless. I
am not sure he could speak. I saw no
ears and the mouth was just a thin, straight line with small, almost
nonexistent, lips. He was tall and very
thin with arms and legs that seemed too long for his body.
Just
above his head I could see the rounded edges of what must be wings, slightly
taller and slightly wider than his slender body. The wings were the same dark gray as the
ground at my feet, covered with fine, peach-fuzz fur. They were like, yet unlike, those a bat might
have. His eyes were small, extremely pale
gray and set deep into his bald skull.
He
stretched his long, thin arms towards me, bent slightly at the elbow, his palms
up and I did not see but felt him
smile. I felt him welcome me to his
place. There were no words, just
emotion. He was saying hello in his way
and welcoming me to this new place I had discovered. I smiled in return and wondered what message
he might have for me. But there was only
warmth and welcome. We stood face to
face maybe ten feet apart until I felt myself being called back to where my
body lay, suspended in a dreamlike trance.
Secret Warriors, Psychic Spies -
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