The Blue Light

I have always been of the opinion that any good love story has to start at the very beginning.  That for the reader to really believe in the love story, they must also fall in love with object of the main character’s affection, and this is only plausible if that character is portrayed from the very start; that first glance, the first kiss, and so on and so forth.  This personally held opinion has made it nearly impossible for me to write short stories because of my obsession with cataloguing the romantic progression of my characters.

However, this is not a love story, and it is not about two invented characters.  This is a true story, a personal story, that I can only categorize as a horror tale, because for me it has become a story of pure horror.  This is a story of my husband’s dissolution into madness, and the ultimate discovery that it was not madness at all, but a truth far more terrifying.

I will refrain from my propensity for unnecessary backstory; you don’t need to know about how I met my husband in college, or about our drunken first kiss in the back seat of a minivan, or about our wedding on a hot July afternoon.  What you do need to know about is our home, because this is the setting of the tale I am about to tell.

After finishing graduate school we were lucky to happen upon a year round cottage available for rent in the woodland settings of Westport, Massachusetts.  Unlike most of Mass, which is often comprised of suburban homes compressed upon each other, Westport has retained a certain bucolic charm; acres upon acres of farmlands rolling along gentle hills and melting into a briney river that leads out to the Atlantic.  It was a score to find a two bedroom cottage built at the turn of the century (20th, not 21st) that we could actually afford on the piss poor salaries of recent grads who had just built up a mountain of college debt.  

Upon moving in we furnished our beloved rental with second hand furniture bought from antique emporiums in nearby New Bedford, became diligent with developing vegetable gardens during the warm seasons, and learned to live with frigid floor boards in the cold months.  For five years this little cottage was our home, and it was here that we cooked many good meals in our impossibly small kitchen, watched sunsets transpire with ice cold beers in hand, and made love with the shades wide open at nights, only the stars as witness.  For five years everything was lovely aside from the occasional blizzard or other such natural conflicts that arise when one lives in fairly close proximity with that bitch Mother Nature.

Actually that is not entirely true.  For five years everything seemed normal, or at least some close proximity to normal.  On the weekdays we were your typical pleasant married couple; we woke up and brewed coffee and packed lunches and kissed goodbye before parting our separate ways down the dirt road in route to work.  On weekends there were smokey charcoal BBQs, and occasional parties, and many whiskey laden conversations, and when the mood struck, perhaps there was the occasional dabble into psychotropic drugs.  I only mention the drugs because as this story progresses you are going to wonder what sort of chemicals might have influenced our minds to lead to the events that transpire.  So in the interest of honesty I mention the drugs, but I must underscore the very rare circumstances under which such things were imbibed.

Anyhow, as I said, most things in our life were quite normal, but there were certain aspects of living in the woods that brought a slight tension at times.  At first I thought of this as quite natural; we were both city born and raised, so our foray into a home that had no neighbors and was surrounded only by trees and all manner of wildlife had the likely outcome of inflaming certain nerves at times.  Perhaps it was the outcome of too many horror movies, or perhaps there it is just the very real fear of knowing that if you scream nobody would hear you, but the nights were hard for us to adjust to at first.  It was just a bit too quiet, and then there were the night terrors that started, but we never thought much of this.  We had both been restless sleepers since childhood, and so what was there to do but laugh off those screams that woke us from dreams we could never quite remember afterwards.

Shortly after moving into the house my husband developed a bit of passion for UFOlogy, which is to say the study of Unidentified Flying Objects.  There was nothing unusual about this in and of itself.  We both loved X Files, and given that he had majored in Physics, all things space related were of great interest to him.  It began with YouTube videos which he would often show me at the dinner table, and then it evolved into the reading of certain more prominent theories.  I got a bit wrapped up in it myself.

We would lay in the dark, willing sleep to come join us in our marijuana induced haze.  Tomorrow would be another long work day and so sleep we must, but that made these stolen moments all the more golden.  The room would be pitch dark and silent except for the soft tones of George Noory interviewing some exuberant man about his alien abductions, and occasionally the sound of one of us savoring the final sips from a tallboy of Guinness.

I wondered what it was like to so fully believe in the paranormal, the supernatural, and the extraterrestrial.  I wondered what it was like to fully know there to be more to life than the stagnant repetition of the day-to-day; more than the observable prison of survival.  “I want to believe” I spoke to the darkness one night, grinning at the nostalgic joy brought to me by the X Files quote.

“I do believe” he responded from his side of the bed.  “I have to believe.  I’m a scientist, so I know of infinity”.

These musings about there being more to the universe were nothing of concern to me at the time.  In fact, it elated me at times.  Nobody wants to be alone, nobody wants to believe the universe is an icy and vast nothingness and we are here alone by mistake, without meaning or purpose.  But then there came a conversation one morning that tilted the trajectory of things in such an unperceivable way that while I could not have possibly known it at that time, I would later wish I had fled that cottage right in that very moment.

We were fishing on the river that morning, at that grey hour just before the sun rises when the fish are more apt to bite.  We stood at the edge of the river with our poles cast out into the dark water and he spoke suddenly of a strange memory.  “When I was a kid we were driving back from vacation in Canada and we lost time.”

“Lost time?” I yawned, imagining this was some expression I was still too dull to suss out.

“It’s like what they talk about often in UFOlogy.  People describe suddenly losing time… like one minute they’re doing something super ordinary and it’s, say noon, and then time seems to skip and it’s suddenly 4:00 in the afternoon and they have no memory of where the past four hours went.”

“I drank a whole bottle of Jameson once and lost eight hours” I jested, but he barely cracked a smile and I realized this was rather serious to him.

“We were driving back from Canada and it was a little past midnight and I was like 12 years old… my Dad was at the wheel, my mom was in the passenger seat and I was wide awake trying to beat Pokemon Red.  I remember my Dad saying ‘we need to get gas’ in this tired voice, and I realized it was just after midnight.  And then, suddenly it was 3:02 in the morning and I still had my game in my hand, and we were still in the road but we weren’t moving.  My Dad kinda eased on the gas, like he wasn’t sure why we stopped.  Maybe he thought we’d run dry, but the tank was at the exact same spot it had been.  He said, ‘what’s wrong with the clock?’ and my Mom looked at her watch and said ‘mine also says 3:02’.  And then we just kept driving, but I could see something in his eyes in the rearview mirror; like a sort of panic.  We all knew something was wrong but somehow we just couldn’t be sure.”

Those words would go on to haunt me for a long time; We all knew something was wrong but somehow we just couldn’t be sure.

“My mom finally mentioned it years later, after my old man passed away” he continued.  “She said they talked about it many times after the fact and just couldn’t fathom where those three hours disappeared to.”

“So, do you think… do you think your family was abducted?”  I didn’t ask it in a patronizing way; I’ve already told you part of me always wanted to believe, I just lacked the quantifiable research to make it real to me.  I’m pragmatic like that.

“I don’t know, but there have been a lot of weird things with me and all my family members over the years, things I sort of shrugged off but when I started learning more about UFOlogy a lot of it matched up.  Lost time, weird markings that appear on the body overnight, waking up in odd locations with no memory of moving.  It’s all so easy to explain away.  With my brother we’d say, ‘oh, he sleep walks’, or when that unusual mark appeared on my mom’s neck we worried about cancer but it was nothing the doctor could explain. But now I wonder… I just… wonder.”

I bit my lip and had no response but to reel my rod in and try a recast while my mind mulled over what he had just said to me.  He was certainly right; it was all very easy to explain away.  And the fact that his story matched up to those he read about online didn’t mean jack shit.  It’s natural to seek paranormal explanations for the perfectly reasonable; it makes us feel special or important somehow.  Still, his story sent a chill down my spine that I couldn’t shake off.  We all knew something was wrong but somehow we just couldn’t be sure.

It was shortly after that when I started noticing the blue light.  Actually, I think I may have been noticing them for a long time before that, but never really remembering them. I lose many nights of sleep now wondering just WHEN I started seeing the blue lights, and why I didn’t remember them until after that damned story he told me.

The first night I saw the blue lights was during one of my many evenings of restless insomnia.  Insomnia has always been an on and off struggle for me, but unlike some insomniacs I long gave up wandering the house or any of that nonsense.  I will force myself to lay in bed and work through the plot details of whatever I am writing until I fall asleep.  This is the only tactic I’ve ever found to combat insomnia, and it only works 10% of the time, but any insomniac will tell you that those are odds worth taking.  Anyways, I laid there wide awake and I recalled my husband’s story and wondered if I could wrap that into my latest attempt at fiction as he snored blissfully beside me.

Then it happened; a blue light flashed into the room so bright that I thought a lightening bolt must have struck in extreme proximity.  The last thing I recall thinking is “What the hell…” and then I woke up the next morning.  I had not dreamt, which for me is very peculiar.  Aside from the night terrors, I can typically recall every dream I have in vivid detail; much to the annoyance of friends and family (who ever really wants to hear you recall your stupid dreams?).

While this certainly struck me as odd is wasn’t anything to “write home about” as they say.  But then the same thing happened the next night, and so on the third night I was inspired to stay the fuck awake.  I would observe this strange blue light and then I would look out the damned window and see what was causing it.  After my husband fell asleep that night I sat up against the headboard and fixed my eyes on the window across from the bed with fierce determination.  I felt fairly certain I wouldn’t actually see the stupid light, but then, just as before, the flash occurred and I told myself “Stay awake… get up… go to the window…”  but everything faded from me, and then it was morning again.

I didn’t say anything about this to my husband.  Not because I was particularly scared; after all, what was there to be scared about?  I saw a blue light, and then I fell into a deep sleep.  Unsettling perhaps, but not exactly horror show shit.  Besides, I didn’t see the blue light anymore after a couple weeks passed.  The reason I didn’t tell him because his interest in UFOlogy had grown a full blown obsession and it was becoming concerningly unhealthy.  In my pragmatism, I imagined that his dissatisfaction with his current occupation was causing him to seek further meaning and purpose, not from the bible, but from the cosmic.  I figured that he wanted, no needed, to believe that the strange occurrence with his parents on their trip from Canada, etc., meant that his family was special in some way.  That they had been selected to be studied by extraterrestrials because they were unique in some way.  While such a bizarre belief was concerning to me, it wasn’t the worst thing I could conceive.  His discontentment could have lead to an affair, or worse yet, Born Again Christendom.  Still, I didn’t want to feed his delusions with my weird blue light story.

However, as with all poorly kept secrets, things intensified over time.  I began to notice that in the middle night he would no longer be in the bed with me, and when I would look for him I’d find him standing in some corner of the house, naked expect the boxers he’d fallen asleep in.  I convinced myself that work related stress had lead to him sleepwalking, but part of me knew by this point that I was the one being foolish.  I felt like Scully from X Files; I had seen the evidence but I still refused to believe.

He said nothing more to me about aliens or UFOlogy, but he would retreat into our small study whenever possible to feed his obsession by the pale glow of the computer monitor.  And then, finally one day he appeared before me in such a sudden and startling way that I nearly dropped the stack of papers I had brought home to grade.

“What do you make of this?” he asked me, presenting to me his forearm.  At first I thought he had just lost it, and I was beginning to consider what resources were available to 30 year old men who had cracked under work stress.  But then I saw what he was referring to; five dots in a perfect line along the soft flesh of his forearm.  They were tiny but perfectly shaped and a shade of black so inky that I thought he had might have made them himself with a pen.  But as I wiped at them, I could feel something under his skin, like tiny braille bumps.  I retracted my hand with the same intense speed with which he had appeared.  After over ten years together I can honestly admit that I was quite familiar with that man’s body down to the very freckle, but I had never seen these markings before.

“You should go to a doctor” I suggested in a shaky voice.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right” he said in a dull tone, and right in that moment I just knew there was no possibility of that happening.  I wish I had told him right then about the blue lights, but what good would it have done?

That night when we went to sleep I made every effort to stay awake and see what might be happening to my husband in the dark hours, in these woods.  But that ended up being the last time I ever saw the blue light, and when I awoke he was gone.

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