"God appears, and God is light
to those poor souls who dwell in night,
but does a human form display
to those who dwell in realms of day."
These lines were penned by William Blake,
but others have a different take:
Stare long into the deepest black;
the human mind is winking back.
Whose perceptions can be trusted?
Those whose eyesight has adjusted.
Regular readers will know that I just recently read Whitley Strieber's 2007 novel 2012: The War for Souls. While it has a certain Strieberian charm that kept me reading to the end, it is basically a very poorly written book, and I can't recommend it. The story has to do with three versions of earth that exist in parallel universes. One of these is the earth we know. Another is a world in which the dinosaurs never went extinct but rather evolved into a race of (mostly) evil humanoid reptiles. The third is very close to our world but has several differences; they have McDonald's, for example, but it has "emerald arches" rather than golden ones, that sort of thing. (They also had no World Wars and no Communism -- but inexplicably somehow still had a Manhattan Project and have the hydrogen bomb! As I said, it's poorly written.) The most obvious difference, though, is that this parallel earth has two moons -- and "two-moon earth" and "one-moon earth" are used throughout the novel to refer to these two similar worlds.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it just so happens that NASA has recently discovered a tiny asteroid that has been orbiting the earth for a few years, and the press is hyping it a "second moon" despite its diminutive size (just a few meters wide). I discovered this a few days after finishing 2012 when Vox Day linked to a news story about it, titling his post (qv) "We're living in 1Q84."
I knew that 1Q84 was a novel by Haruki Murakami, and that the title is equivalent to 1984 (the Japanese word for "nine" sounds like the English name of the letter Q) but had not read it and knew nothing else about it. (I read A Wild Sheep Chase years ago and enjoyed it, but not enough to try anything else by the author.) A bit of Googling revealed that, just like Strieber's 2012, it is about a parallel earth that has two moons.
Reading the Vox Day post so shortly after finishing 2012 was a coincidence, but it's also a coincidence that two novels were written within a few years of each other -- by very different authors in different countries -- but each with a year as the title, and each featuring a parallel two-moon earth. Strieber's novel was published in 2007; Murakami's in 2009 and 2010 in Japanese, with the English version following in 2011. Therefore, any direct influence would have to have been from Strieber to Murakami rather than vice versa, which seems highly unlikely.
It occurs to me that the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact -- released in 1984, just as the final volume of Murakami's 1Q84 was released in 2010 -- also has a plot that revolves around two moons, in this case two of the moons of Jupiter, not those of a parallel earth. Coincidence, or deliberate homage?
Much of Whitley Strieber's non-fiction book The Secret School has to do with mental time travel. He recounts a vision of Rome around 50 BC, one of the world around 10,000 BC, and one of the near future (when he himself is an old man -- i.e., around now).
In an appendix, he writes, "I have assembled a short list of prophecies and predictions for the near future. I intend it to be used as a validating tool for my work, and trust that I have been sufficiently exact for this to be possible." There is no indication at all of where these prophecies came from; they do not overlap at all with the vision of the future reported in the body of the book. This vision would, I think, make a better validating tool, since it includes some very specific events (such as Air Force One being grounded in a sandstorm in Los Angeles) and also has a very specific deadline (the death of Whitley Strieber). At any rate, here are the prophecies from the appendix, with my comments. I have added numbers to what is in the original a bulleted list but have made no other changes. It's been 23 years since the publication of The Secret School, so at least some of these "near future" prophecies should have been fulfilled by now.
1. Our present system of government, made unstable by debt, public disaffection, and the vast chasm between its secret and public sectors, will change radically in the context of economic disruptions brought on by serious environmental difficulties of various kinds.
I guess the global birdemic coup of early 2020 sort of fulfills this, though "environmental difficulties of various kinds" weren't really a factor.
2. Specifically, I see problems with a food supply disrupted by violent weather: great storms in some places, horrendous drought in others.
Uselessly vague. There are always storms, droughts, and food-supply issues somewhere in the world.
3. I see huge clouds of smoke over a great city -- Mexico City. Popocatépetl is erupting.
This is one of the most specific predictions on the list, but unfortunately turns out to be worthless. According to the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program (click on "Eruptive History" here), every year since 1994 has seen at least one eruption of Popocatépetl. If we count only "catastrophic" eruptions (VEI of 3 or higher), the most recent was in 1996, and the last before that was in 1663. The Secret School was published in 1997.
4. In the United States, there will be a struggle for control, fierce but not very bloody. The power of the military/industrial complex will end, and with it official secrecy. What will take the place of the old system will be freedom in the form of a republic that is real.
Just how wrong is it possible to be? (To be fair, some Trump supporters still hold out hope that this is just about to happen.)
5. Despite all the chaos, science continues to move from success to success. We begin to understand our deepest selves. As we unlock the meaning of our genes, we will discover that human beings and human lives are constructed in such extraordinary detail that the presence of a level of super-conscious planning prior to and hidden within our lives, as suggested by the secret school, must be seriously considered.
Trivially, science is cumulative and thus "moves from success to success"; barring total societal collapse, it never actually moves backward. However, no spectacular scientific discoveries about "the meaning of our genes" or anything else have been made since the publication of The Secret School, and in fact science seems to have been treading water for several decades now. (The Human Genome Project was in progress when The Secret School was written, and perhaps Strieber believed the hype surrounding that.)
6. Fusion is perfected as an energy source and we will want to mine the moon for fuel, but there will be an obstacle to this that will be overcome only through profound personal and social evolution.
Fusion power is about 50 years away -- always has been, always will be. Mining the moon for helium-3 for use in fusion was first proposed by Gerald Kulcinski in 1986.
7. Antimatter will be successfully created, contained, and studied. It will offer us the ability to devise weapons of appalling destructive capacity and small size, but also the chance to use it for the greater good in mega-engineering projects that will need power on an undreamed-of scale. Given the explosive power of antimatter weapons, we will also become able to deploy a meaningful system of defense against asteroids and large comets. In understanding how to contain antimatter, we will also discover how to gain access to parallel universes and eventually to traverse the universe at speeds bordering on the instantaneous.
Antimatter was first created in 1955 and first successfully stored in 2010. Only tiny quantities (nanograms) have been created. No military or engineering applications so far.
8. A man presently working inside a classified program will reveal knowledge of how psychic power works. Many research programs now secret will become public, whereupon the work will proceed with explosive energy. Average people will gain access to their own enormous psychic abilities as they realize that we all possess them and can learn techniques to make them work. Effective methods of teaching them will come into general use.
The Stargate Project was declassified in 1995, just before The Secret School was published. Effective methods of teaching psychic powers have not come into general use.
9. Memory and prophecy will be understood to be tools of the hyperconscious level of mind, and people will begin to use them as such.
Too vague.
10. Time will also come to be a tool, and travel in time will become practical. As mind frees itself from time and thus approaches singularity of consciousness, nations as we know them -- directed by power, politics, greed, and lies -- will end. They will be replaced by the only valid form of government that has any meaning to the truly free: one that is founded in love and organized around compassion.
Time travel has not become practical. Nations are still directed by power, politics, greed -- and, above all, lies.
11. We will meet people from other worlds, the barrier between the living and the dead will collapse, and it will become possible for the individual to store and process huge amounts of knowledge.
This has apparently been going on for a long time, as Strieber knows from his own experience. No special developments in this area since the publication of The Secret School.
12. We will throw off the bondage of assumptions that we are small, weak, and frail, and discover ourselves a rare and precious creation, immensely talented and bearing upon this tiny scrap of stone called Earth a powerful responsibility to survive, to grow, and to partake of all knowledge in full consciousness. As we do this, we will also find that others on the same quest reveal themselves to us, and we will join hands with them.
Rather than discovering "a powerful responsibility to survive," the human race is more suicidal now than it has even been before.
13. As science becomes increasingly honest, open, and powerful, it will begin to detect the presence of deity in an incontrovertibly factual manner. At that point, a Niagara of joy will flood the world as the species consciously joins the companionship for which it was created.
Or consider the polar opposite: "As science becomes increasingly dishonest and collapses, atheism and nihilism will be taken for granted, and a Niagara of despair, anomie, and alienation will flood the world." Which better describes the world you see around you?
Verdict: Epic fail.
Late last night I was sitting in a McDonald's drinking coffee and reading The Secret School, Whitley Strieber's 1997 book about his childhood memories of attending -- as you may have guessed -- a nocturnal "secret school" with other children. These lessons took place in the Olmos Basin in San Antonio and were presided over by the "Sister of Mercy," a strange nun who did not appear to be entirely human. (For parallels in Strieber's fiction, see the secret school in The Night Church and the Sisters of Mercy in Cat Magic.)
Here is some of what I had just read, from pp. 157-160.
The result [of struggling to recall some suppressed childhood memories] was a total blank, and a return of the feeling that had worried me from the beginning, that this was nothing more than an act of the imagination, an interesting but essentially worthless exercise. [. . .]
I sat listening to the sighing leaves of the old live oak and trying to evoke memory without also bringing my imagination to bear.
I closed my eyes, thinking of the Sister of Mercy. Immediately, I remembered [. . .]
I remembered that I saw inside her wimple once, and it looked as if a giant moth was staring out at me. My whole being rocked with terror.
We would get up and go round and round, dancing. The sister danced with us, her habit whooshing in the dark. We danced the backward dance, going past the ages, deep into time. And as we danced in 1954, we joined to our dance in Rome, and to another dance, longer past.
Everything is dance, she would say -- dance of time; dance of life; dance of fate; dance of air, water, and light; dance of fire and future; history dance. Evil, love, good, hate, holy, cruel -- all the dances are the dance.
As I read that last paragraph -- dance dance dance -- I suddenly became aware of the background music that was playing in the restaurant. The line "Will I dance for you, Jesus?" caught my attention, both because of its incongruity (since when does McDonald's play religious music?) and because it synched with what I was reading. The song was soon over, but I looked up the lyrics on my phone to see what it had been, and it was "I Can Only Imagine" (2001) by a Christian pop band called MercyMe -- apparently a cover, since the vocalist had been female but MercyMe is an all-male group.
The synchronicity goes beyond the reference to dancing. A female cover of MercyMe syncs with the Sister of Mercy; and the name of the song, "I Can Only Imagine," reflects the concern repeatedly expressed by Strieber that his apparent memories may in fact be "nothing more than an act of the imagination." The song also contains the lines "I can only imagine / What my eyes would see / When your face is before me" -- which reminds me of Strieber's looking inside the Sister's wimple and seeing something very unexpected!
 |
| Derbyshire, England -- not the planet Abaddon |
In his non-fiction book Breakthrough (1995), Whitley Strieber recounts an experience in which he and one other person took a wrong turn off Route 17 in New Jersey and for several minutes found themselves in what seemed to be another world, before eventually finding their way back onto the highway. Strieber describes the scene:
The houses were set back from the street, in lawns heavily planted with shrubs and emerald-green grass. The house I could see most clearly was one story and had no visible roof, which made it look like a huge box. It appeared to be made of tan stone deeply etched with carvings of large serpents. [. . .] I observed another one just the same, then took a turn. The place was sinister, to be frank, and I really did not want to attract the attention of whatever it was that thought images of giant snakes were attractive decorations for a home.
In Strieber's novel 2012: The War for Souls (2007), Whitley Strieber stand-in Wiley or Wylie Dale (both spellings are used indiscriminately throughout this poorly edited novel) visits the Union, a little corner of the evil reptilian planet Abaddon where the reptilians are good -- or are environmentalists, anyway, which for Strieber amounts to the same thing. (In most parts of Abaddon, "mentioning global warming drew a death sentence," but in the Union, I kid you not, "it was illegal not to mention global warming"! Sound familiar?) Here Wylie describes one of the houses there. (I won't say whose house, lest I spoil what passes for a plot, but they're good guys.)
Wylie [. . .] watched the rich green Union land speed below them. [. . .] They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls.
This is obviously the same sort of house described in Breakthrough, but now the carved serpents symbolize "luck and joy." Much like Tolkien, Strieber seems to work with memorable images which can be interpreted in more than one way. (Tolkien's Black Riders evolved out of a scene that originally featured Gandalf rather than a Nazgul.)
One had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.They watched him with their brilliant, dead eyes, their heads moving with the clipped jerks of lizards. As he walked, he saw that the street was made of wood -- in fact, of cut tree trunks fitted together with an Inca's skill.
 |
| Well, fuckaroo! |
My God, Rollo, Rollie boy, hey, you are one sinister sonembitch.
-- a story anthologized in Murder in the Family, 2002Bats. In your belfry, squeaking like sonembitches
-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007Tough sonembitches.
I've never liked executions. Some poor dumb sonembitch, every damn time.
-- Hybrids, 2011He's a smart sonembitch.
-- The Wild, 2015
"It'd ruin somebody's day, for sure."
"The God-for-damned enemy's day"
-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007
Hideous stuff [absinthe], but it did pack a pop. He got it out now, unscrewed the bottle, and chug-a-lugged.
Fuckaroo.
He went down to dinner, and ate in silence.
"This man isn't dead! This man is breathing!". . . "Fuckaroo, he's right."
Later that day [December 29, 1986] we were driving through a nearby town when a voice told me to stop at the house of a friend, glass artist Gilda Strutz. Another car, driven by a tall and imposing bearded man of about thirty, pulled up at the same time. We all went in to see Gilda together. The man turned out to be another friend of hers, Barry Maddock. Communion hadn't been published and neither of them knew anything at all about it.We chatted for a while and I soon found myself talking about the owls we had been seeing.Barry was surprised to hear this because he had had a very unusual dream the night before about an owl. He proceeded to describe what sounded to me like a screen memory for a visitor experience. He had been asleep in a house where he was house-sitting until the new owners moved in. Suddenly he was awakened by what sounded like somebody kicking a baseboard heater. He got up because the house was new and he'd helped build it. He knew that the heating system shouldn't be doing that.He walked into the living room. The first thing he saw was a pair of huge, dark eyes. When he later saw the cover of Communion he was amazed by the similarity. At the time, he had the bizarre impression that an enormous gray owl with big, black eyes was in the room. The owl took him into a large, vaulted chamber that reminded him of the Sydney Opera House. There it turned into a bird of paradise.
He remembered sitting beside a small man who seemed to him like a gnome or a gremlin. His impression was that this man was good-natured. He didn't remember anything about the man's appearance, except that he was "dark."The next morning Barry had what he said was an extremely strange feeling. He seemed "loose" in his body. He was also suffering from "missing time" in that he could remember getting up and going into the living room, then having the vivid dream. The trouble was, he could not recall going back to bed before he had the dream. The sort of confusion that Barry described fitted very well with my own initial conscious reactions to the visitors. He also noticed a small raised mark on his neck. He didn't think to mention it at the time, and I didn't see it, but his description, given later, suggested that it was similar to the one I had found on my own neck on the morning of December 24.The dream had frightened him badly.I resolved to get to know him better to find out if anything more would emerge from his mind. On the morning of December 30 we went hiking together deep into the woods and we talked. He turned out to be one of the most fearless people I had ever met. [. . .] The more he spoke about his dream, however, the more he revealed deep fear. It seemed to me that he was aching to say he thought the dream was real, but dared not do so because of its content.I found that the house at which he was sitting was quite near my own place.
While I was writing Communion, I began questioning people in the immediate area regarding odd things they may have seen. As yet, I was not aware of all the strange sightings across the Hudson in Duchess County, which would become famous as the Hudson Valley UFO sightings. There were many stories, but one told by a carpenter in the process of finishing a house on our private road is particularly relevant to this part of my narrative.
This was the first of two incidents that, to me, added up to a sort of communication. I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For example, a consistent image that witnesses connect with them is that of the owl. It has played an enormous role in my own experience of them, in fact. If you study the habits and capabilities of the owl carefully, you find yourself studying the capabilities of the visitors. They are creatures of the night, they are stealthy, silent, and use surprise. Like owls, which can use their extraordinary ears to hear prey scrambling under snow, they have extraordinary means of detection. Like owls, they are predators. [. . .]
The incident involving the carpenter occurred during the fall of 1986. He had been hurrying to complete construction before winter arrived, and had ended up in a situation where he had no way to take his tools out at nightfall. He didn’t want to leave them in the unlocked house, so he decided to sleep there, on the floor.
Later, he found himself awake and looking straight at a short man who was standing a few feet away. It was too dark to determine any color, but he was short and squat. The carpenter experienced a wave of intense fear, whereupon the man changed before his eyes into a bird of paradise and then disappeared.
I climbed down off the roof and went into the room. [. . .] A moment later there was a terrific lot of noise on the roof, like a crowd jostling for position. I sat down and an instant later felt something come bursting into my mind -- also physically, bursting into me . . . hard to describe . . . like being touched on the inside.
Pictures began to flash in front of my eyes, of everybody I'd ever known, even people I'd met only briefly. [. . .] I shortly began to realize that what I was seeing here were the wrongs I had done these people. [. . .] I was getting frantic, but I couldn't make it stop. On we went, reviewing my life.
We came to a certain face -- one that I really hadn't wanted to see. With this person, I had done wrong.
The roof erupted in thuds, like they were stomping with rage. Then they came roaring down around me right through the beams, a crowd of racing shadows, shabby and stinking of sweat. I could see that they looked human, but they were crouching, they backed into corners, they acted like I was the wild wolf. [. . .] Then the visitors all trooped down the stairs, some of them jumping up and down on the runners, others leaping off the landing and dropping with soft thuds.
About two hours later I woke up to familiar, machinelike jabs to my shoulder. Once I probably would have leaped out of bed, but no more. This had happened too often, and too often there was nothing there. So I wasn't really expecting to see anybody when I opened my eyes.I was absolutely stunned.They were right there, and they were glaring at me. I reacted like I might have to a coiled snake, to see human faces staring at me from a position about three feet above the bed. There was light around them, and I could see that they were all men, small, wearing gray tunics except for one, whose tunic was white. [. . .] Behind them, where the raftered ceiling should have been, there was a black, starless maw. Something about that darkness really frightened me. [. . .] All I knew was that it was oppressive and lonely and big, and where was my familiar ceiling? Reality seemed plastic indeed.The faces of these people were terrible to see. Their eyes were normally shaped but as dark as lampblack, and their stares were amazingly ferocious. [. . .] It lasted for a moment, then another. [. . .] They left abruptly, rushing away in a crowd.
When I opened my eyes, I saw dark shapes against the beams of the ceiling, which seemed to be back to normal. I thought, now what? I turned on my bedside lamp and proceeded to receive the single worst shock of a life that has sustained some fairly severe shocks.Hanging from the ceiling were four tremendous spiders. Their bodies were gleaming black and striped in irregular bright yellow. Structurally, they were hourglass spiders. The only problem was that they were easily a foot long and their legs spanned perhaps two feet. [. . .]
The next thing I knew I was out of that bed and on my way as far as I could go barefoot in pajamas. But Anne was still back there and Anne was sound asleep.I was afraid that they things were going to fall on us. On her. [. . .] Above her, the spiders were working, weaving what I would describe as curved hutches made of silk.They were, in short, settling in."Honey," I whispered. "I think --"What did I think?I thought I was being punished is what I thought. Contrition? I begged them to forgive me. I would have howled contrition but I was afraid I'd upset the spiders.Then they were gone, just like that. I grabbed Anne, I started kissing her, and then I noticed that the cats were still panicked. What was I -- stupid? I'd seen things disappear before. What if they weren't gone?As far as I know, they're still waiting . . . for the day I die. [. . .]
I spent the rest of the night reading the Bible and trying to figure out how one might truly repair a sin. Dawn came, clear and pure, and Anne got up and we had breakfast. I didn't tell her what had happened. [. . .]I finally said to Anne, "I've seen demons."She responded, "Here?""A nightmare. Mother of all nightmares."
My relationship with my meditation partners continued to develop. [. . .] So I asked the question: What do I need to do to avoid the wheel of life. I want to ascend.
The answer was the most powerful moral lesson I have ever received. It began one night with a startling review of my life—the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at the moment of death, I suppose. Image after image from my life appeared before my eyes. I saw a good, honest life, flawed but pretty blameless. But then something appeared that was of interest. I was in a hotel room in Beverly Hills with a beautiful young woman. I wanted to make love to her, but I was hesitating, forcing myself not to, respecting my vow of marriage and my love for Anne.Still, every detail of the meetings I’d had with this woman came rushing past.I was left on that night devastated and, quite frankly, confused. I hadn’t violated my vow. I’d been tempted, yes, but no violation.When I got up to go to bed, I discovered that it was already three. I’d been meditating for four hours. Exhausted, I collapsed into the bed and threw my arms around my beloved wife. Silently, I cried tears of gratitude that I had not broken my vow.
Later, I woke up. The ceiling was gone, the roof was gone. Overhead was a blackness that I knew at once was the appalling face of infinity. Endless dark. Arrayed around the borders of this opening were seven faces peering down at me. Gentle faces. Angry faces.Then it ended. I was fully awake. I lay there thinking about it for a time, wondering where it lay on the spectrum of reality. A dream? I thought not. But what, then?
I went close to Anne and kissed her cheek. She cuddled against me, delighted.I had almost betrayed her, but I had not done so. I had wanted to, though, so very badly. And it wasn’t like the incident with the gray being. That I could not control. This, I could.
Some time later I woke up and there, hanging over our bed, were the two most terrible creatures I had ever seen. They were spiders, each at least three feet from stem to stern. They had gleaming black abdomens that were crossed by yellow stripes like tigers. Worse, they were not stable on the ceiling, especially the one over Anne.My impulse was to roll off that bed and run for my life. Then I thought, “Wake up, you fool, this is the mother and the father of the nightmares.”
Fully awake now, I leaped out of the bed. Surely they would evaporate, will-o’-the-wisps of dream.But no. I stood there at the foot of the bed staring at them. I was awake and they were as real as ever. I could even hear the slick clatter of their busy, complicated jaws.Anne lay perhaps three feet beneath one of them, sound asleep. Some of its legs had come off the wooden planks of the ceiling and were scrabbling for purchase. The sound filled the room.It looked as if it would fall on Anne, right now.My dear God, how I wanted to run. But if I did that, then what would happen? She had said early on, “You won’t let anything happen to me, will you?” I told her that I would protect her. But how did I know that? Now, it seemed as if I was lying.Another leg came loose and began jittering wildly. The abdomen was now tilted. I could see a stinger in it the size of a small knife. My body screamed at me to run, but I could not run, my love would not let me. On legs of lead, transfixed by terror, I approached the bed. The pulsating demon was inches from my face. I could not dare touch it, try to push it away. God only knew what would happen if it and its brother started running around the room. What was their venom like? Where were they from? Certainly not this world.
I did the only thing I could to protect my wife, which was to lie down on top of her so that my body was between her and the spider.She opened sleepy arms, welcoming her husband to her in the night, opening herself body and heart to the man she loved.I lay there, waiting for the spider to drop down on me. She lay there waiting for the act of love to commence.In that instant, there was a feeling like weight lifted. My body felt free, my soul like the soul of a child. Like that, the spiders had gone. The night—the beautiful, earthly night, filled with sensual promise—had returned.I wept and her comforting arms came around me. Joy filled me. We rode the small hours together in the boat of our love, crossing to morning.
There were in my life two instances in which I was shown something relating to an underworld. The first occurred after one of the meditations with the people from between lives. They used to page through my mind, causing me to relive past events in startling and uncanny detail. One night, paging through my memories, they came across a moment during which I had been tempted to cheat on Anne.
They hesitated. Lingered. I writhed in discomfort.After the meditation ended, I went as usual to bed.I hadn’t cheated. I’d only been tempted. So all was well— wasn’t it? [. . .]
A few hours later, I woke up to see something so horrific that for a moment I simply did not understand what I was looking at. But then the two presences hanging from the ceiling above our bed became clear. But they were impossible. Nothing like that exists.Except that they did.I was looking up at two bulging black spiders, each easily two or three feet long. Their gleaming abdomens were ringed with yellow tiger stripes. I could see the pointed stingers at the base of their tails. Worse, they were scrabbling against the ceiling, struggling not to fall on us.Dear god in heaven, it had to be a nightmare. I rolled out of bed, my initial impulse to run. But then I looked back and saw Anne lying there peacefully asleep. A few feet above her, the most unstable of the two looked ready to fall.Now that I was on my feet, their appearance seemed entirely physical. I could even hear the rhythmic scraping of their claws as they struggled to find purchase against the ceiling.
A few years before, there had been not a test but a warning, and I will never forget it in all of my days and beyond my days.In the years after Communion was published, Anne organized many groups to come up to our cabin. Often enough, as I have reported in previous books, they met the visitors.Once, we had a group up which included a young woman who took a shine to me. She was attractive and I was tempted. I did nothing, however. Later, in Los Angeles, we once again encountered her and I was again tempted. Once again, I did nothing.We spent that night in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and no sooner had I fallen asleep than I found myself being dragged downward through solid rock. I was in some sort of cage and I couldn’t get out. This was more lucid than any lucid dream I could imagine. It felt real. As I shot downward, I realized that I was inside the legs of a gigantic spider. Nothing I did would release me. Those legs were like iron.Finally, I managed to get out. I found myself back in my body, hammering my arm against the bedside table. The lamp was smashed, Anne was screaming —and I was shaking with terror.I connected what had happened to the temptation the young woman had offered me, and resolved never, ever to even entertain such a notion again.
He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!
He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature-a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.
Screaming now, he rolled.There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.
A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.Silence.Nothing there. Nothing at all.
Then I realized that something was happening, something quite new. My mind was sort of moving. I was seeing pictures from my own past. It wasn't as dramatic as I imagine the life review at the time of death might be, but these images kept appearing, one after the other.It was exactly as if I was looking at an illustrated book of my memories. But it wasn't me doing this. Somebody else seemed to be turning the pages of my memory.At first the imagery was trivial. [. . .] Then it became more complex, with images from related experiences superimposing themselves on one another. Looking back, I cannot even begin to describe them all. There were hundreds, thousands. [. . .] How lovely it was. How delicious my life had been, how beautiful -- and how much of it I had let pass by!
And the, suddenly, I was focused on something very specific. It was the face of a woman. I knew it well. It was a woman I had wanted. Badly. And she had wanted me. We'd come close to connecting in a way that would have violated my marriage vow. I had really sweated over this. I had wanted her so badly. But I had not quite let myself slip into a love affair. Not quite.But what was it that had stopped me, my loyalty to my vow or my love of my wife? A man might love his wife, but a temptation like this can be very powerful, and it certainly had been for me.Then the memories ended. I slumped to the floor, devastated. I was pouring with sweat. Shocked and confused and telling myself, You weren't disloyal. You resisted the temptation.I did not want to face what I had not resisted, which was the desire. I had been the instigator. My challenge to my vow and to the selfless love my wife has given me since the day we met was my doing. I had not been seduced, and that was very hard to face.
What I was looking at were two enormous spiders hanging on the ceiling. And I don't mean, for example, the size of tarantulas. These things were tremendous. Their abdomens were at least three feet long, gleaming black and banded by yellow tiger stripes. And what was worse, while the one over my side of the bed seemed stable, the one hanging over Anne was struggling and looked as if it was about to fall on her.Instinct caused me to leap out of the bed, and as I did so, I though that this was one hell of a nightmare.I stood there just absolutely agog because the things had not disappeared when I woke up. They still looked completely real. [. . .]The one handing over Anne was trembling now. [. . .]
As quietly as I could, I moved around the bed. I slid in beside her. She sighed and smiled, welcoming her husband. I slipped over her and held her to me, and lay like that, afraid to move. The core of my heart seemed to open, and I remembered why I loved this woman [. . .]I was left like that. At some point, the spiders of nightmare had gone.
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| The cover artist was not an entomologist. |
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| Mr. Peanut as he appeared in the 1950s, when Strieber was a child |
Mother Star of the Sea came forward, prancing, mincing, her arms akimbo, her head lolling from side to side, her jaw snapping.Perhaps she intended to be amusing, but she could hardly have chosen a more unwelcome appearance. Ever since she was three and she'd been chased by a man dressed up as Mr. Peanut, Amanda had loathed and despised all forms of puppets.
Many of my screen memories concern animals, but not all. I remember being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut, and yet I know that I never saw Mr. Peanut except on a Planter's can. I said that I was menaced by him at a Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, but I now understand perfectly well that it never happened.
[The smell of paint] reminded him of the six weeks of the summer of 1968 he had spent in Florence. There had been college students from all over the world there, art students, working on the restoration of the Uffizi masterpieces which had been damaged in the flood of the year before.He had met Irish magical Roisin, with whom he had cohabited for weeks, before he had found, jammed into her suitcase, the terrible rubble of a dead owl.He had run terrified from her. Roisin, lost in the dangerous clutter of time.
In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe.
I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.
I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 [. . .] I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random. I ended up in Strasbourg.
In 1968 I was living in London. During the summer I spent between two and six weeks on the Continent, and have been unable to account for most of that time. As I reported in Communion, I crossed to the continent on a ferry and took a train south to Italy. On the trip I met a young woman. I remember her name and her nationality but have not been able to trace her. We went first to Florence and then to Rome. In Rome something happened that terrified me. My screen memory is that I got lost in the catacombs under the Vatican.Whatever happened, I literally rushed back to my pensione and threw my things into my suitcase. Something I saw in the room horrified me. I have tried to recall what it was, but all I have been able to find out for certain is that I told a friend at the time that I had seen "a dried owl" somewhere in the room. If that is indeed what I saw, I am not surprised that I ran!I made an unsuccessful attempt to extract more of this memory via hypnosis, but my feeling is that the material that emerged is not correct.
Later, in 1968, I had a profoundly unsettling experience involving an owl. That year, I was living in London and attending the London School of Film Technique, now called the London Film School. During the summer break, I decided to travel on the Continent. On an overnight train to Florence, I fell in which a girl. We began traveling together. For a couple of weeks in Florence, we had a lovely time, living together in chaste intimacy. But then we went on to Rome, and when we toured St. Peter's, she became crazy, stalking through the church in raging silence. She scared me. I was living with her in a small pensione near the railroad station. I decided, "No more," and headed off to the pensione to collect my suitcase and get out of there.I went into our tiny room, threw my toothbrush into my suitcase, and started to leave. Then I stopped. Her suitcase was lying on the foot of the bed. I have always been a bit too curious, and I opened it. What I saw shocked me to my core. In it was a nun's habit and, lying beside it, a dry, flattened owl carcass. I didn't get off the train again until I was in Strasbourg.
