The Dossier

The woman drove me out to a secluded shack in the woods.  I had been involved with this group for a while now, a little over a year probably.  It had started out as simple casual friendships, playing cards in the kitchen or sitting around watching TV with dopey boredom waiting for someone to show up and drive somebody somewhere.  In other words, it all seemed perfectly normal and innocent enough.  But gradually it became clear after a while that there were ideas and perhaps even beliefs that bonded these people together, something a little off the beaten path.  They were a "Group" with a capital "G."  Sideways glances and conspiratorial whispers in back bedrooms hinted at these things.  Finally it became clear that I was picking up on these secrets, and a decision was made to initiate me to the next level.  That's when this woman with the dark hair took me for a ride out to the woods.

The shack was made up like a roadside motel room.  There was a queen-sized bed in the main room when you came in the door.  There was a little kitchenette in the back with a louvered window that looked out onto the woods.  The dark-haired woman pulled a large white envelope from her coat and tossed it down on the bed.  "These are the pictures of the people who run our group.", she said.  "We only show this to people when we're completely sure they're ready to see it."  She paused, perhaps wondering if she really was sure.  "The last pictures are of our leader, an extraordinary man.  He has lived for 60,000 years and he has a hard time maintaining human form, so I have to warn you that you may be disturbed and confused by what you see.  But we have decided that you're ready."

She directed me to the kitchenette in the back, because she said that I had to view the photographs privately.  She went back to the front room and left me there as I sat down and undid the clasp on the envelope.  It contained a stack of large glossy photographs.  The first couple looked normal enough, like smiling photos from a senior yearbook.  Then I came to the end.  These were smaller, loose pictures, taken with a common home camera.  They were pictures of a small baby who showed clear signs of some kind of congenital birth defects.  I'm not sure exactly how I could tell that.  There was something wrong with the eyes, something wrong with the face, something dull and slack and wandering that suggested brain damage.  I stared in horror at the pictures, not because of their subject, but because of what they told me about these people.  I had to get out of there immediately.    

Portable Radio

I woke up thirsty from my nap, so I went downstairs to get something to drink.  As I stood there with the refrigerator door open, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something seemed wrong about the light coming up from the basement.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  I couldn't tell if the light was flickering or whether that was just a manifestation of my rattled nerves.  I tried to go back upstairs to sleep, but I never got farther than the first step.  I kept going back to the kitchen to stare at the ambient, flickering, light coming up from the basement stairs.  I couldn't shake the feeling.

Finally, I realized that I was hearing very faint music coming from the basement.  The flickering was keeping beat with the music, and then I realized that the light wasn't actually flickering at all.  It was just an auditory suggestion caused by the fact that I wasn't aware that I was hearing the music.  I went down to check it out.  There was a little portable radio sitting on the top of a cabinet.  It was one of those cheap old radios with a handle on the top and a single speaker and an analog dial which spanned the length of it, the kind of radio someone would bring to a work site.  It was playing a harmless, familiar, song, but yet it made me feel uneasy all the same.  I knew that someone had left this radio on, and I knew that if I didn't change the station, they would be lured back here by the music.  And I knew that was bad.

So I started to tune the dial, but instead of it changing the radio station, it changed everything else.  I found myself in the backyard of one of my childhood neighbors.  My wife and my daughter were there too, sleeping on the patchy grass, still wrapped up in their blankets.  They stirred, wondering how we had gotten outside.  My memory was a little foggy, and just as things were starting to come back to me, the screen door at the back of the house came banging open and my bearded old neighbor came rushing out yelling something in a toothless, drunken garble.  Yeah, this wasn't good.  My wife and daughter gathered up their blankets and we started away, waving my neighbor off with our hands and assuring him that we were leaving.

As we were crossing the road, I noticed that I still had the radio.  I tuned the dial again.  Now we found ourselves in a long, narrow upstairs room in a strange house somewhere.  The room seemed to be an antechamber of some sort that opened onto other rooms on either side.  It spanned the width of the house with high, ornate, windows at either end.  In the evening the sunlight would fall through the window at the west end, and at night the streetlight outside would follow suit.  But the morning light would come through the window at the east end of the room, and everything would look different then.  I was anxious to see it.  I was comfortable here.  We stretched the blankets out on the floor below the west window.  Then I clicked off the radio and went back to sleep.