Tthere was a time when I was growing up in Indiana when we were renovating part of an aged house. We had stripped the wallpaper off the walls around the stairs leading to my bedroom and had just put down a fresh coat of joint compound to even out and polished out the aged plaster, in preparation for gluing cork and mirror tiles to the walls the next day. (Yes, it was the 70s.)
In the middle of the night I got up to go downstairs and pee. (It's nice to be reminded that even as a kid I had to do this from time to time.)
In my room there was a rocking chair where my cat Rascal liked to sleep at night.
Without my glasses everything was blurry and all I could see through the two windows at opposite ends of the room was the moonlight and the streetlight. One window was at the top of the stairs. I thought I saw the blurry white silhouette of Rascal in that aged wooden rocking chair, so I leaned down to pet him as I walked toward the stairs.
But when I reached down, my hand went through a fluffy, furry white blob that I thought was a cat, and my fingertips touched the coarse material of the pillow he was sleeping on. I felt a sudden cool tingle, like an electric charge, except it was really, really cool. It chilled my hand almost immediately above my wrist. This sounds weird, but the outermost edges of it were “pooling blue” as I looked at them. My mind was still in shock from my hand passing through my cat, and I know it doesn’t make sense now, but it felt like it was “pulling the blue” out of the room, and the tingling intensified until my elbow hurt. Then whatever it was, it burst out of the back of the chair, moving quickly, like I was scared of it.
It streaked across the room and reached the stairs, an elliptical patch of bluish-white delicate that did not touch the floor but rolled in the air, swirling slightly with each movement.
As stupid as it sounds, I ran after it. It flew toward the stairwell, then down, keeping above the steps and sort of leaning against the wall, until it finally went through the wall and out of the house somewhere just beyond the other side of the landing.
I was still at the top of the stairs and looked out the window and down, trying to see if I could find him coming out of the house. I saw him briefly, just a glimpse as he flew over the hedges and tomato bushes in the side yard, and then suddenly he shot up, out of sight. As he rose, he seemed to move away, as if turning inside out, just before he disappeared. By the time I could see him no longer, he was about ten feet above my head and almost halfway across the neighbor's yard. That thing was moving speedy! and strangely…
I watched the sky for a few minutes to see if there was anything else up there until I really had to pee. So I went downstairs and into the bathroom to pee… and then went back to bed. It was awfully slow at night and I didn't think anyone would want to be woken up only to hear about something that was already over, so I went back to bed.
When I woke up the next day and went downstairs, the putty was desiccated and ready to be tiled — except now it was all scratched up. But these weren't claw marks, the kind you'd expect to follow a straight path or make curving arcs, lifting the mass if it really was a stupid cat and I'd just imagined everything else in the moonlight… no, these marks were more like a series of poorly drawn lightning bolts. They looked like they'd been “screwed” into the mass. They were all jagged, in compact — almost methodical — bursts. Like someone had been writing something but had forgotten how to exploit the alphabet.
But the really weird thing is this: the putty wasn't dragged… I don't know how to explain it, but bear with me for a moment. Imagine dragging your finger across the cake frosting (it's about the consistency of putty) to form the letter Z, like Zorro would do. Notice how the icing is moved outward by the movement of your finger. Notice how most of the icing ends up in a little pile, pushed down at the end where you lifted your finger from the cake to lick the icing off… notice how the icing rose with you to follow your finger as far as it could before it split and fell slightly. And here's the really weird thing: with these markings on the wall, there was NO HARDEST EDGE OR END, anywhere! Period. All along these little jagged letter-like shapes, the displacement was even, like you started at the center (each axis) and pushed out evenly to move the mud (that's what they call putty). Even. Smooth. Uniform displacement. Everywhere. Also, when I said these things were “letter-like,” I meant they were pretty uniform in height and width, kind of like you were scribbling something really quickly. (Yeah, I know, alien graffiti, then again. But it really could have been some kind of writing, it looked intentional. You know what I mean?)
Believe me, my brother and I studied these markings for a long time, twisting to look at them from every angle and even holding up a mirror to look at them from the back before we had to cover them with glue and tile.
