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.
On the afternoon of January 3 we were skiing when I got a pain behind my right ear. It was a sensation similar to what happens to one's jaw when Novocain wears off after a session in the dentist's chair. My skull ached and the skin was sensitive. In the middle of this sensitive area my wife could see a tiny pinpoint of a scab.
I believe that the combination of the infected finger, the rectal pain, and the aching head were what finally brought my memories into focus. The confused swirl resolved into a specific series of recollections, and when I saw what they were, I just about exploded with terror and utter disbelief.
One of the memories would come into my head, linger there a moment, then leave me with my heart pounding, gasping, sweat pouring down my face.
I thought that I had lost my mind.
For half of my life I have been engaged in a rigorous and detailed search for a finer state of consciousness. Now I thought my mind was turning against me, that my years of eager study of everything from Zen to quantum physics had led me into some strange and tragic byway of the soul.
As soon as I had them in focus, my memories became perfectly vivid-as vivid, say, as childhood memories become when one chooses to draw them out of the mental file where they are hidden. I sat at my desk, trying to make sense of what could not make sense.
I thought, quietly and calmly, You may be going mad, or you may have o brain tumor.
You've gut to find um which it is and take whatever steps are necessary. And then I rested my head on the desk, and, quite frankly, cried.
For a couple of days I lived with it. Maybe the "symptoms" would subside.
Then, quite suddenly one afternoon, I recalled the smell. Their smell. It came back to me as clearly as if I had inhaled it not a moment before. More than anything except discovering that I was not alone with my experience, that totally real memory saved me from going stark raving mad.
In the first week of January, a local newspaper published accounts of an object or objects being sighted in our area. This story appeared m the January 3, 1986, issue of the Middletown. New York Record. The headline called the appearance a hoax but according to the story local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. One man, however claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local prison, and in the light he saw planes.
A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the prank hypothesis.
My wife showed me the article and told me. "You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week." I did not remember the conversation, but the article caused me to glance over a hook my brother had sent me for Christmas called Science and the UFOs by Jenny Randles and the astronomer Peter Warrington.
Warrington is a respected scientist, and the book seemed well written. As a matter of fact, it does not make any claims about the reality of the phenomenon, but simply calls for more study and appeals to the scientific community to begin to accept it as a legitimate area of inquiry.
I was surprised to find that Science and the UFOs frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first fire or six pages read.
Much later. after we had really begun to take this whole matter seriously. Anne and I did more research into UFO sightings in our area. We discovered that it is a hotbed of sightings, and has been for nearly half a century.
As it happens, the eighteen-year-old son of one of our neighbors saw something hovering near a road not five miles from our cabin ac approximately nine-thirty on a night in late December. He described it to me as "huge and covered with lights," a typical description. He watched it for some time. Being the son of a former state trooper and pilot, he did not claim that it was a "UFO," but simply told the truth: He did not know what it was, but it appeared to be a solid structure, and as it hovered for a substantial period, more than fifteen minutes, it could not have been a flight of planes. I telephoned the Goodyear Corporation and found that their blimp was not in the area at the time.