Aliens and Dinosaurs (old unfinished story; abandoned)
I might be the only human being to have ever seen a living, breathing dinosaur. Unfortunately, I have no proof of this; but that isn’t my fault, it’s the fault of the aliens.
Perhaps tonight they’ll finally put the evidence in my hands. God knows I’ve pleaded for it a dozen or more times.
Their visits began when I was a teenager; who knows how long they were watching before that. They seemed to know things about me right from the start, mainly my fascination with dinosaurs. I have loved them ever since I was a little boy. I spent hours at the local library reading about them, displayed toys and models all over my bedroom, drew them, was hypnotized by the Charles R. Knight paintings at the Field Museum in Chicago (where they also have the bones of Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex) when we visited from the suburbs, and hushed my parents and younger brother whenever the prehistoric beasts appeared on TV in all their animated glory. Not only were dinosaurs my number one obsession, they were a gateway drug to Godzilla and Rodan, to Ray Harryhausen films, to Weird Tales magazine and the writing of H.P. Lovecraft and all things beautifully frightening and awesome. That I’d never see a true dinosaur, or spy one of Lovecraft’s indescribable cosmic beasts in a subterranean ruin, weighed heavily on my curious soul.
All that changed one sultry summer day at thirteen years old. I’d just finished sketching a battle between a Triceratops and Cthulhu when all of a sudden, through the open window, came a foggy, hissing white light. The curtains billowed and a warm wind blew my sketch to the floor. I sat up in bed and watched, trancelike, as a skinny, thin apparatus snaked through the air in my direction. It never occurred to me to run or scream. My temperament at the time—as it still is today, to an extent—was one of naive curiosity, like that of a lumbering dog who investigates, for the first time—and usually the last—the raised tail of prowling skunk. Only when the cold, spider-like terminus of the arm latched onto my chest did my instinct to escape kick in. But by then it was too late. I was snatched from my bed like a fly on the tongue of a mechanical toad.
My awareness resides in timelessness between blackout and blur from the moment I’m abducted to the point where I wake up naked on the ship. The first concrete experience is always the cold metal slab they somehow—I can’t see how—adhere me to; the thing seems void of latent heat, like dry ice maybe, yet it doesn’t burn. Anyway, believe what you read, it’s all true: they poke and prod and stick things up your ass; they run lights and machines up and down the length of your body and implant tiny glasslike fragments beneath your skin; and they do all sorts of other unexplainable and disgusting things. To what end, I don’t know; they don’t tell me. On occasion I’ve heard the screams of others, but I can’t speak of their experiences; I can only tell about my own, which have now been occurring, annually, for twenty years. In fact, I’m expecting a visit this very night. I can barely contain my excitement at the wonders of what I’ll be shown.
It’s customary in America for a child to be given candy or a balloon upon leaving the doctor’s office. The same applies, at least in my case, after each of my abductions. Only it isn’t candy or a balloon they reward me with for “being a good sport.” No-no, it’s much better than that. It’s a million times better than that—and horrible, and sublime. I can’t put it into words. How does one explain the elation of mind when presented all your hopes and dreams?
I’ll never forget that first abduction. Like I said before, I was thirteen at the time. Nothing had ever gone up my ass before, and I was writhing and screaming like a madman. Apparently the sedative they gave me didn’t work so well; I was an unusually feisty teen to begin with. They seemed displeased at first, at least that’s what I read in their subdued expressions, expressions that gave the impression of impersonations of over-dramatic actors in old black-and-white sci-fi movies. Perhaps they watched those films for fun, or as one of their myriad means of studying our species. Anyway, it was hard smooth skin and oval black eyes trying their best to convey their thoughts, and although, to me, it was a pathetic attempt at human impersonation, I was able to glean one thing: they were pondering what to do with me, my thrashing about was an obvious hassle which had to be dealt with.
Finally, the one with the most bulbous head and the oiliest eyes scrunched his cliff of a forehead ever-so-slightly—in the manner of a “bright idea”—and turned to each of his or her (the fuckers all looked the same) team and seemed just then to communicate something telepathically to the three of them. Then it pointed with one of its long, knobby fingers to a space on the far wall, in which the others shook their heads “no.” A moment later it pointed at a space on the wall nearby, and this idea was approved by the other three elongated creatures. The interior of this room, I might add, is round and dark (it’s always the same), not so unlike an H.R. Giger painting, only the walls here emanate an amber phosphorescence of which I do not look upon, mainly for the fact that it seems there are always many sets of eyes in them, as if the walls were some kind of one way mirror, with aliens on the other side taking notes or something for a class. The moment I first sensed them there, during that initial abduction, I stopped looking, for there was, and continues to be, something evil and grotesque in their manner of voyeurism that only my subconscious seems fully aware of. It’s one of those observations you make in a split second, and in that same instant, know that if you linger a split second longer, you’ll have interminable nightmares for the rest of your life.
Luckily my attention was quickly turned to another visual. And what a visual! It changed my life; a dream come true. I could go on and on in describing this indescribable experience. For after they unhooked plugs and wires from my naked body, they helped me to my feet and walked me “through” the second area of wall the one alien had pointed to, that the other three had agreed upon. And by “through” I mean we literally went through, as if it were a doorway of mist or illusion. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter at the time, because I was both scared shitless and half convinced I was in a dream triggered by the many movies I’d watched. Only after sitting me on a warm, stump-like chair and walking toward a control panel did I start to catch my breath and calm down; I was still, after all, under the influence of some kind of sedative. There was no clarity on my part; the whole experience being so surreal that there were times I felt foolish for screaming in the first place (although that anal probe did feel quite real) or being afraid. If it had only been a dream, I was the dreamer, so what was there to be afraid of?
But that thought didn’t last, for what happened next I could never have dreamed of on my own. All my impressions of dinosaurs had been molded by what I’d seen and read in books and saw on documentaries; in my mind, they even had the herky-jerky movements of Harryhausen’s puppets.
This is not what I was shown.
The aliens’ long, skinny bodies began to wobble-float up and down the length and height of the wall, their slowly rising fingers pushing strange colored lights and flipping myriad levers. I could only sit and wonder what it all meant, wonder still if this could possibly be some kind of evolution in my dream state. That was short lived, for in a matter of moments the wall gave way to what resembled a movie screen. It must have all been an illusion, because suddenly it seemed as if it truly were the size and shape of a movie screen, the dimensions somehow existing within the confined space of the room I had entered. Whether trick of mind or alteration of reality I soon didn’t care, for after a brief period of silent static came a foreign landscape. I rubbed my eyes, standing up even as my mind seemed magnetically drawn to the visual. I took a step forward and instantly became immersed in the design. Gone was the room; the aliens had even disappeared, although I could faintly detect their observing eyes. At any rate, the landscape seemed familiar: palms and ferns and a lush jungle in all directions. A volcano streaming lava in three molten rivers down its side. I reached for the hanging frond of a large fern. I didn’t fear. My fingers went through it. I pondered all the possibilities of what was occurring, and when I came to the theory that I was witnessing a video recording made millions of years ago by the aliens themselves, I looked to the four sets of faintly visible eyes in the green of the illusion at my right, and they seemed to move up and down in unison in the affirmative. So you can read my thoughts, I thought. Again, they nodded. Then I thought, You fuckers. The eyes turned and looked at each other, perhaps in shock, or maybe some form of strange laughter. It was all beyond me at that point. I took a step further into the recording, wondering what would happen next. A rain cloud drifted into the sky and began to drizzle rain. I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t feel it, that my senses weren’t locked in or that I was actually there. Such thoughts were dashed as the first dinosaur appeared from the thick tangles of lush growth at the jungle edge. I recognized it immediately: it was a Stegosaurus. My god! Only it didn’t move herky-jerky. And it wasn’t a dull brown either. How can I explain the reality of a real live dinosaur? I cannot. I can only compare it, and the others I saw that day—including Triceratops, Allosaurus, etc.—to a crocodile. Only, the colors and textures and mannerisms were like a hyper-crocodile. These were alien in themselves, truly grand and beautiful; the kings and queens of an older Earth. No bird, no butterfly, no orchid can compare in sheer awe and beauty. I was outside myself, cradled by mystery and dream all at once. There are no words profound enough. I was seeing dinosaurs in the flesh!
And I was thankful when they finally shut the “projector” down, for my excitement seemed like a loosed animal, never to be reigned in. That I was able to form a word at all in the moments after is a miracle in itself. “Thank you,” I told my abductors. And then I collapsed in a swoon of tears so heartbreaking to behold I think I may have presented my captors with an example of emotion beyond the boundary of what they might have imagined a human capable of.
The next thing I know I was back in bed, a model of T-Rex at my side. I grabbed it and flung it hard against the wall; how could it ever compare? The sun was just coming up and my mother burst into the room. What’s going on, Matthew?” she said, her face worried. And before I could think otherwise, I opened my mouth to tell all, only to suddenly forget every detail of my abduction and even of the abduction myself. “I don’t know,” I replied to my mother, shaking my head in that state confusion and frustration one feels when a memory falls from the tip of the tongue. “I guess I had a nightmare.”
That happened three more times over the next three years. By the fourth time I had learned my lesson: Don’t bother trying to tell anyone about the abductions. Each and every time I tried, someone, somewhere, pushed a button or something and temporarily erased my memory. Perhaps it was an implant in my brain. Who knows. At any rate, I would get my memory back at the onset of my next abduction, the full of it. Never again did I risk going an entire year without those memories of the dinosaurs, and by the fourth abduction I’d been shown hundreds of them. Not only that, but I’d been shown the age of the giant mammals, too, and the rise of Man.
I dropped out of school and began working menial jobs that required the least amount of time and effort, just to be able to pay rent. After all, what good was high school and college? So much of what I was being shown conflicted with what we’re taught. We speculate and conjecture so much and get so much wrong! Better to be educated by those that have witnessed, and documented on video, Earth’s entire history up close and personal!
It got to a point were I could think of nothing else, and having to wait an entire year for the next abduction was grueling at best. I became increasingly paranoid of dying. It got to the point where I would barely go out anymore. I thought, Why risk death with so much yet to discover?
That the aliens continue to poke and prod me is no longer of any concern to me, that the vile eyes that stare from behind the strange walls is of no matter. These are but a means to an end, that I might glory in the new revelations set forth in front of me—my candy, my balloons!
Perhaps tonight they’ll finally put the evidence in my hands. God knows I’ve pleaded for it a dozen or more times.
Their visits began when I was a teenager; who knows how long they were watching before that. They seemed to know things about me right from the start, mainly my fascination with dinosaurs. I have loved them ever since I was a little boy. I spent hours at the local library reading about them, displayed toys and models all over my bedroom, drew them, was hypnotized by the Charles R. Knight paintings at the Field Museum in Chicago (where they also have the bones of Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex) when we visited from the suburbs, and hushed my parents and younger brother whenever the prehistoric beasts appeared on TV in all their animated glory. Not only were dinosaurs my number one obsession, they were a gateway drug to Godzilla and Rodan, to Ray Harryhausen films, to Weird Tales magazine and the writing of H.P. Lovecraft and all things beautifully frightening and awesome. That I’d never see a true dinosaur, or spy one of Lovecraft’s indescribable cosmic beasts in a subterranean ruin, weighed heavily on my curious soul.
All that changed one sultry summer day at thirteen years old. I’d just finished sketching a battle between a Triceratops and Cthulhu when all of a sudden, through the open window, came a foggy, hissing white light. The curtains billowed and a warm wind blew my sketch to the floor. I sat up in bed and watched, trancelike, as a skinny, thin apparatus snaked through the air in my direction. It never occurred to me to run or scream. My temperament at the time—as it still is today, to an extent—was one of naive curiosity, like that of a lumbering dog who investigates, for the first time—and usually the last—the raised tail of prowling skunk. Only when the cold, spider-like terminus of the arm latched onto my chest did my instinct to escape kick in. But by then it was too late. I was snatched from my bed like a fly on the tongue of a mechanical toad.
My awareness resides in timelessness between blackout and blur from the moment I’m abducted to the point where I wake up naked on the ship. The first concrete experience is always the cold metal slab they somehow—I can’t see how—adhere me to; the thing seems void of latent heat, like dry ice maybe, yet it doesn’t burn. Anyway, believe what you read, it’s all true: they poke and prod and stick things up your ass; they run lights and machines up and down the length of your body and implant tiny glasslike fragments beneath your skin; and they do all sorts of other unexplainable and disgusting things. To what end, I don’t know; they don’t tell me. On occasion I’ve heard the screams of others, but I can’t speak of their experiences; I can only tell about my own, which have now been occurring, annually, for twenty years. In fact, I’m expecting a visit this very night. I can barely contain my excitement at the wonders of what I’ll be shown.
It’s customary in America for a child to be given candy or a balloon upon leaving the doctor’s office. The same applies, at least in my case, after each of my abductions. Only it isn’t candy or a balloon they reward me with for “being a good sport.” No-no, it’s much better than that. It’s a million times better than that—and horrible, and sublime. I can’t put it into words. How does one explain the elation of mind when presented all your hopes and dreams?
I’ll never forget that first abduction. Like I said before, I was thirteen at the time. Nothing had ever gone up my ass before, and I was writhing and screaming like a madman. Apparently the sedative they gave me didn’t work so well; I was an unusually feisty teen to begin with. They seemed displeased at first, at least that’s what I read in their subdued expressions, expressions that gave the impression of impersonations of over-dramatic actors in old black-and-white sci-fi movies. Perhaps they watched those films for fun, or as one of their myriad means of studying our species. Anyway, it was hard smooth skin and oval black eyes trying their best to convey their thoughts, and although, to me, it was a pathetic attempt at human impersonation, I was able to glean one thing: they were pondering what to do with me, my thrashing about was an obvious hassle which had to be dealt with.
Finally, the one with the most bulbous head and the oiliest eyes scrunched his cliff of a forehead ever-so-slightly—in the manner of a “bright idea”—and turned to each of his or her (the fuckers all looked the same) team and seemed just then to communicate something telepathically to the three of them. Then it pointed with one of its long, knobby fingers to a space on the far wall, in which the others shook their heads “no.” A moment later it pointed at a space on the wall nearby, and this idea was approved by the other three elongated creatures. The interior of this room, I might add, is round and dark (it’s always the same), not so unlike an H.R. Giger painting, only the walls here emanate an amber phosphorescence of which I do not look upon, mainly for the fact that it seems there are always many sets of eyes in them, as if the walls were some kind of one way mirror, with aliens on the other side taking notes or something for a class. The moment I first sensed them there, during that initial abduction, I stopped looking, for there was, and continues to be, something evil and grotesque in their manner of voyeurism that only my subconscious seems fully aware of. It’s one of those observations you make in a split second, and in that same instant, know that if you linger a split second longer, you’ll have interminable nightmares for the rest of your life.
Luckily my attention was quickly turned to another visual. And what a visual! It changed my life; a dream come true. I could go on and on in describing this indescribable experience. For after they unhooked plugs and wires from my naked body, they helped me to my feet and walked me “through” the second area of wall the one alien had pointed to, that the other three had agreed upon. And by “through” I mean we literally went through, as if it were a doorway of mist or illusion. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter at the time, because I was both scared shitless and half convinced I was in a dream triggered by the many movies I’d watched. Only after sitting me on a warm, stump-like chair and walking toward a control panel did I start to catch my breath and calm down; I was still, after all, under the influence of some kind of sedative. There was no clarity on my part; the whole experience being so surreal that there were times I felt foolish for screaming in the first place (although that anal probe did feel quite real) or being afraid. If it had only been a dream, I was the dreamer, so what was there to be afraid of?
But that thought didn’t last, for what happened next I could never have dreamed of on my own. All my impressions of dinosaurs had been molded by what I’d seen and read in books and saw on documentaries; in my mind, they even had the herky-jerky movements of Harryhausen’s puppets.
This is not what I was shown.
The aliens’ long, skinny bodies began to wobble-float up and down the length and height of the wall, their slowly rising fingers pushing strange colored lights and flipping myriad levers. I could only sit and wonder what it all meant, wonder still if this could possibly be some kind of evolution in my dream state. That was short lived, for in a matter of moments the wall gave way to what resembled a movie screen. It must have all been an illusion, because suddenly it seemed as if it truly were the size and shape of a movie screen, the dimensions somehow existing within the confined space of the room I had entered. Whether trick of mind or alteration of reality I soon didn’t care, for after a brief period of silent static came a foreign landscape. I rubbed my eyes, standing up even as my mind seemed magnetically drawn to the visual. I took a step forward and instantly became immersed in the design. Gone was the room; the aliens had even disappeared, although I could faintly detect their observing eyes. At any rate, the landscape seemed familiar: palms and ferns and a lush jungle in all directions. A volcano streaming lava in three molten rivers down its side. I reached for the hanging frond of a large fern. I didn’t fear. My fingers went through it. I pondered all the possibilities of what was occurring, and when I came to the theory that I was witnessing a video recording made millions of years ago by the aliens themselves, I looked to the four sets of faintly visible eyes in the green of the illusion at my right, and they seemed to move up and down in unison in the affirmative. So you can read my thoughts, I thought. Again, they nodded. Then I thought, You fuckers. The eyes turned and looked at each other, perhaps in shock, or maybe some form of strange laughter. It was all beyond me at that point. I took a step further into the recording, wondering what would happen next. A rain cloud drifted into the sky and began to drizzle rain. I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t feel it, that my senses weren’t locked in or that I was actually there. Such thoughts were dashed as the first dinosaur appeared from the thick tangles of lush growth at the jungle edge. I recognized it immediately: it was a Stegosaurus. My god! Only it didn’t move herky-jerky. And it wasn’t a dull brown either. How can I explain the reality of a real live dinosaur? I cannot. I can only compare it, and the others I saw that day—including Triceratops, Allosaurus, etc.—to a crocodile. Only, the colors and textures and mannerisms were like a hyper-crocodile. These were alien in themselves, truly grand and beautiful; the kings and queens of an older Earth. No bird, no butterfly, no orchid can compare in sheer awe and beauty. I was outside myself, cradled by mystery and dream all at once. There are no words profound enough. I was seeing dinosaurs in the flesh!
And I was thankful when they finally shut the “projector” down, for my excitement seemed like a loosed animal, never to be reigned in. That I was able to form a word at all in the moments after is a miracle in itself. “Thank you,” I told my abductors. And then I collapsed in a swoon of tears so heartbreaking to behold I think I may have presented my captors with an example of emotion beyond the boundary of what they might have imagined a human capable of.
The next thing I know I was back in bed, a model of T-Rex at my side. I grabbed it and flung it hard against the wall; how could it ever compare? The sun was just coming up and my mother burst into the room. What’s going on, Matthew?” she said, her face worried. And before I could think otherwise, I opened my mouth to tell all, only to suddenly forget every detail of my abduction and even of the abduction myself. “I don’t know,” I replied to my mother, shaking my head in that state confusion and frustration one feels when a memory falls from the tip of the tongue. “I guess I had a nightmare.”
That happened three more times over the next three years. By the fourth time I had learned my lesson: Don’t bother trying to tell anyone about the abductions. Each and every time I tried, someone, somewhere, pushed a button or something and temporarily erased my memory. Perhaps it was an implant in my brain. Who knows. At any rate, I would get my memory back at the onset of my next abduction, the full of it. Never again did I risk going an entire year without those memories of the dinosaurs, and by the fourth abduction I’d been shown hundreds of them. Not only that, but I’d been shown the age of the giant mammals, too, and the rise of Man.
I dropped out of school and began working menial jobs that required the least amount of time and effort, just to be able to pay rent. After all, what good was high school and college? So much of what I was being shown conflicted with what we’re taught. We speculate and conjecture so much and get so much wrong! Better to be educated by those that have witnessed, and documented on video, Earth’s entire history up close and personal!
It got to a point were I could think of nothing else, and having to wait an entire year for the next abduction was grueling at best. I became increasingly paranoid of dying. It got to the point where I would barely go out anymore. I thought, Why risk death with so much yet to discover?
That the aliens continue to poke and prod me is no longer of any concern to me, that the vile eyes that stare from behind the strange walls is of no matter. These are but a means to an end, that I might glory in the new revelations set forth in front of me—my candy, my balloons!
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