Episode 3: Encounters

TRUE STORY is not a true story. It is a work of fiction. Similarities to any person, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

PART 1: Awakening

Sunday, October 25, 2021, 8:36 a.m.

226 Gage Road, Pawtucketville

Lowell, Massachusetts

“Sometimes, something happens in your life that marks you. That changes you forever…”

Amma pauses and watches her father, Graham, as he enjoys his breakfast in the morning sunlight. It’s the same breakfast he always has. The same one he’s had for years. Two rashers of bacon, two eggs – over easy, a slice of toast and a generous dollop of baked beans. He’s enjoying it in the same wooden chair, at the same wooden table, in the same wooden house that he has for the last thirty-odd years.

Amma begins recording again.

“Graham Portland – my father – is a creature of habit, that way we all become as we age, as we begin to realize our days are numbered, our hours finite. Graham – Dad – doesn’t say much these days. Occasionally, he’ll get real lucid and talk to me as though it were perfectly normal for him to converse. So many times, I’ve thought ‘this is it – he’s back for good’, only for him to shut down again just as quickly as he opened up. Only for him to go completely silent for a week or two weeks or more, until something – usually something trivial like asking for food or pointing out a Boston landmark – will cause him to speak again.”

Amma watches as Graham clears his plate and mops up the remaining beans with his toast.

“It wasn’t always like this. At least, that’s what I’m told by people who know him before I arrived on the scene. Benji, down at the gym, who trained Dad when he was in town, will tell anyone who’ll listen that Graham Portland was witty and deeply intelligent. He was far from verbose, even back then, but when someone would ask him about flying jets for the US Air Force, his eyes would light up and he would talk about it for as long as anyone would listen. The thrill, the speed, the unbridled freedom.”

Graham places his cutlery neatly onto the empty plate, adjusting the fork to sit perfectly parallel with the knife. He pours himself a cup of tea from the old, metal teapot that’s been a fixture of the home for as long as Amma can remember. She watches as he stirs the tea, places the spoon onto the cloth napkin, and smiles at her with his eyes as he takes the first sip.

How I love watching these age-old routines.

“Last evening, during my fight with ‘Mad’ Max Mayers, I had a vision. I saw my father as a much younger man. I saw him in his jet plane, wearing his black-and-red-striped helmet with his callsign marked above the visor. ‘The Porter’, they called him. In the words of Benji Brights, ‘because he was so damn good, he could carry the whole squadron’.”

Graham puts down his teacup and Amma takes one of his big, leathery paws in her hand. He squeezes her hand tight and smiles the kindest smile a human being ever smiled.

“In his jet plane, his eyes weren’t filled with the love and kindness I see in them now. They were filled with a swirling golden energy. And they were filled with – not fear. Shock and consternation.

“I believe this was a vision of the day it happened; the day Dad had a brush with something otherworldly; something that could not be explained. I believe this was a vision of the day that Graham Portland stopped talking – just a few short months before I was born.”

Amma squeezes her father’s hand tight.

“What was it, Dad? What did you see that day?”

Graham and Amma hold hands and stay that way for a minute or two, her phone recording nothing but the distant hum of traffic hour along Pawtucket Street. Amma glances at the various mismatched picture frames that sit on doilies on the sideboard. There are several pictures of the two of them, with Amma at varying ages and various stages of dental development – no front teeth, braces, and – finally – the decent set of gnashers all the work, bullying, and money finally achieved. There are pictures of other family members. Aunt Birdie features prominently as she was around in the early years to help look after Amma when Graham stopped talking and Amma’s mother, well, was no longer present.

There is just one picture of Amma and both of her parents. She’s little more than a baby, held in her father’s arms, his expression vacant. Her mother sits to the side, a clear distance put between herself and her husband and child. Her jet-black hair brackets her attractive but stern-looking face. She wears a black dress that looks out of place and out of time, even in the old picture – like something from a Victorian funeral. Her hands sit stacked neatly on her lap. Amma stares at the picture, at her mother’s hazel eyes. Her mother, the great enigma. Alona Portland.

“Do you know what it means?”

He’s talking!

Amma checks to make sure her phone is still recording.

“What, what means, Dad?” she asks, squeezing his hand.

“‘Alona’,” he says.

Amma looks at the picture of her as a baby with her two mysterious parents, and back at her father.

How did he…? He must have seen me looking at the picture.

“I just kind of always assumed it meant, ‘alone’,” Amma says. “It seemed to fit her.”

“Oak tree,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, that fits, too,” Amma says.

“Sturdy. Majestic. Broad around the beam,” Graham chuckles.

I can’t believe it. He’s back. But for how long?

“It’s Native American, right?”

“Pennacook,” he says with a smile.

He takes a deep breath and examines the picture for a moment, before turning his attention to the window and jumping up out of his seat.

“Come on,” he says as he grabs his coat and hat from the hook on the wall by the front door. “We’re going for a walk.”

Amma stares at him in disbelief.

“Okay,” she beams, making her way over. She grabs up her coat and places her phone – still recording – in her pocket.

“Do you mind?” she asks, holding a wireless lapel mic in her hand.

“For your radio show?” he asks in reply.

“My podcast. Yeah.”

Amma is stunned. He knows about the podcast. How much has he been taking in this whole time?

“Of course,” he says, and she clips the mic to his lapel. “You’ll probably want to record this,” he says as he opens the door and looks back at her with those kind, loving eyes.

“I’m going to tell you about what I saw,” he pauses, looks out to the clear-blue fall sky. “Up there.”

Part 2: The Porter

Sunday, October 25, 2021, 9:22 a.m.

Lowell National Historic Site

Lowell, Massachusetts

“That day, Graham Porter – my father, a man who hasn’t spoken more than a sentence or two at a time in almost thirty years – talks. Like, really talks. I’m a little girl again, small in his presence, his words filled with wonder.

“We head out of the old house on Gage Street and east along Salem, then onto Merrimack – the street named for the river that runs parallel. Soon, we’re surrounded by the red brick buildings of Lowell National Historic Site and great old cotton mills converted into overpriced apartments. Colourful banners hang in front of the big, rectangular buildings – a shock of yellow, purple, and peach with words like ‘live’ and ‘play’ emblazoned on them in an attempt to capture the renovated modernity that lies beyond the aged brick walls.

“We walk among the old buildings and even older trees, making our way slowly towards water, towards the river that pulls us to its energy.

“We walk and we walk. And he talks.

“And I wonder. Will this be permanent or as fleeting as his brush with… with whatever it was he encountered thirty years ago in his jet plane, in the skies above Pacific waters, off the coast of California.”

“Thirty-seven seconds,” he says. “That’s how long they told me it lasted. Of course, thirty-seven seconds is a lifetime when you’re traveling at a thousand kilometres an hour.”

“A lifetime,” I say.

“Or the end of one,” he jokes. “I was testing an early version of the B1 Spirit.”

“The ‘Stealth Bomber’.”

“That’s right!” He seems impressed with my knowledge of military aircraft, and his approval warms my heart.

Of course I know about the Stealth Bomber. You’re my hero. I know you flew them. I would take out big, hardback books from the library as a child and read all about the planes you flew. I would build model aircraft and play for hours, whooshing them through the air, shooting down enemy aircraft, bombing their bunkers with my US Air Force jet plane, piloted by Officer Graham Portland. The man they called ‘The Porter’. Because he was so damn good, he could carry the whole squadron.

“What did you see?” I ask as we make our way across one of the numerous bridges that traverse the Merrimack River.

He pauses and I pause with him. We lean on the railing, looking out at the shimmering water.

“I saw,” he squints. “A fantastic golden light.”

The light. Exactly as I saw it in my vision.

“That’s how it started,” he says. “Just a fantastic golden light. And then time slowed. It… it sort of ceased to exist, at least as we understand it. Or, at least, time became irrelevant. Didn’t matter. That was the sense I got.”

“How did that feel? Were you afraid?”

“No,” he says, still looking off into the distance. “I never felt afraid. Not once. “I felt…” He looks at me, tears forming in those kind eyes. “I felt love. Pure, uninhibited love.” He smiles thinly and returns his gaze to the river.

“And what then?”

“Oh,” he says, searching the skies for the right words. “Then,” he says. “Things really started to get weird.”

I check my phone quickly while he stares away.

Still recording. Battery good. I do not want to miss this.

“What I’m about to tell you, they will forever deny.” He looks around as though checking for spies. “They never wanted me to talk.”

I place a hand on his shoulder.

“Dad. You can always talk to me.”

He smiles, patting my hand with one of his big bear paws.

“What I saw,” he says. “It made talking seem… insufficient.”

“Tell me.”

He takes a deep breath and begins to talk.

Tuesday, October 25, 1994, 11:31 a.m.

B2 Spirit ‘Stealth Bomber’ Prototype

32,000 feet above Pacific waters, California

“Spirit One, come in, over.”

The radio crackles with static.

“Spirit One, do you read me? Over.”

Graham ‘The Porter’ Portland hears no words. He hears nothing at all as the great ball of golden energy sweeps towards him. But ‘towards’ is wrong. Nothing here is linear. There is at the same time everything and there is nothing.

“Spirit One, do you copy? Do you read me? Over.”

The static crackles and all is golden energy. There is no point at which ‘Graham Porter’ ends and the cockpit begins, nor the glass, nor the skies, nor the world beyond.

“Jesus, Porter, talk to me…”

He hears that and responds, but not in words. No words are necessary. Belmont – his captain – is right there with him. Everyone is with him. All is energy.

32,000 feet below and 87 kilometres due north, at Edwards Airforce Base, Captain Stuart Belmont stops talking.

No words are necessary.

Porter is just fine. He can feel it.

High in the heavens, Porter is pure consciousness, bound with the magnificent force that has engulfed him, filled him, made his boundaries obsolete.

He is energy, as all things are energy, and visions are played out before him.

There are lifeforms, humanoid, but not human. Smaller, narrower, their heads and eyes larger. Their bodies appear to be, not dressed, infused? With biomechanical suits that pulsate narrow streams of blue light. They are kind. He can feel that.

Amma is there. Not yet born, but, like all things here, without beginning and without end. Graham hasn’t even conceived of her yet, hasn’t named her, but he knows her. Here, he knows her.

This is where galaxies and molecules are sized the same, where planets orbit suns as electrons orbit nuclei. Scale is senseless, infinity somehow comprehensible. This is where all things just are.

 The swirling strokes of golden energy begin to part like clouds to reveal a scene. Somewhere far from the Earth. Another place, alien, in purple hues. A great bird flies across the rugged landscape. From the clouds emerge towering, triangular mountains – at a scale the likes of which Graham has never seen, each a thousand Everests. Two of them at first, then four, then six. A half-dozen magnificent, purple mountains, lined up in almost perfect symmetry.

Graham is the bird and the breeze, the clouds and the rain.

Then all is golden again.

And he hears once more.

“Hey, Porter. Time to come back down to Earth. Over.”

Porter is a man again, contained within a body, contained within a cockpit. He breathes as though his lungs have never been used and goes to speak.

Roger, Ground One. Heading back to base. Over.

But no words come out.

All words seem… insufficient.

Part 3: Alona

Tuesday, October 25, 1994, 1:02 p.m.

Edwards Airforce Base

Edwards, California

Captain Stuart Belmont is at least five years younger than Graham Portland, but in terms of ranking is his senior officer. He’s a smart guy with sharp features and immaculately parted dark-brown hair whose uniform always appears freshly pressed.

“Come in, Lieutenant,” he says.

Graham stands at the door, wearing khakis, having changed and showered before heading, as instructed, to the captain’s office.

“Have a seat,” Belmont says.

Graham lowers himself into the chair, opposite Belmont, who sits on the other side of the desk, rolling his chair to the left a little so he can see Graham past the beige cube that is his computer monitor.

“You doing okay, Porter?” Belmont asks.

Graham doesn’t respond. His face is expressionless, calm.

“What the hell happened up there?”

Still nothing.

“Lieutenant, I asked you a question,” Belmont says, raising his voice.

Maybe pulling rank will help, though I don’t like to do it. This isn’t just any pilot. This is The Porter.

Belmont stands and wanders over to his window, watching for a moment as an F-16 Fighting Falcon roars along the runway and climbs steeply into the sky.

How do I handle this? The man is a legend. It’s unheard of for him to go off the rails.

“Thirty-seven seconds, Porter. At just shy of the speed of sound. That’s over ten kilometres traveled with no response, no reaction.” He turns to face Graham again, arms folded. “In a half-billion-dollar aircraft.”

For a moment, it looks as though Graham is about to speak, but he seems to shake away whatever thought he had, as though trying to explain would somehow be futile.

Belmont makes his way over, perching on the edge of his desk, and leans in.

“Porter, you gotta give me something here. I don’t want to have to report this, but, Jesus, a half-dozen officers in there saw what happened. The brass is going to want an explanation.”

It feels weird to talk to him this way, but what choice do I have?

Still, Graham stares blankly ahead, his expression giving away nothing.

“Last chance, Lieutenant Portland. Tell me what happened.”

Graham turns slowly to look at his senior officer and just for a moment, Belmont could swear he sees something in the man’s eyes. A swirling, golden energy, like a churning distant galaxy.

Then a flash.

A vision.

Some alien planet in purple hues. A range of six towering mountains – massive and near-symmetrical.

Belmont jumps up from the desk and, as quickly as it arrived, the vision passes.

“What the…?”

Graham looks at the man, calm and expressionless. But Belmont doesn’t want to make eye contact anymore. He takes a deep breath and tries to collect himself.

“Okay, that’s enough,” he says. “I need to think about this. Dismissed.”

Wednesday, October 26, 1994, 9:07 a.m.

226 Gage Road, Pawtucketville

Lowell, Massachusetts

“Uh-hu. I see. I understand. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Alona Portland places the phone carefully back on the hook and pauses for a moment, watching the morning traffic go by out on Gage Road.

She’s alone at the house, as she so often is these days. Graham, her husband, has been stationed at Edward’s Air Force Base in California for close to a year now, returning home on leave only twice in that time – most recently for the week of the Independence Day holiday.

For the last four months, she’s been alone in the house save for the occasional neighbour dropping by and the week that Birdie came up to visit form New York. She’s been alone in the peace and quiet of the house on Gage Road, devoid of conversation, lacking in the laughter of children.

She stands in the window, considering the words she just heard.

Your husband is coming home. There’s been an incident. He’s okay, but he seems to be shaken up.

He isn’t talking to anyone.

Alona stands alone at the window, as she has done every morning for the last four months. Usually, she would be sipping camomile tea – her favourite. But not this morning. This morning her stomach is unsettled. She’s nauseous and can’t face food or drink. Not yet.

She places a hand on her belly and rubs it lightly. The fabric of her long, black dress feels good against her palm, the motion settling her stomach just a little.

It happened on Tuesday. He hasn’t said a word since.

Tuesday.

That’s when it had started.

She had been out in the back yard working on her latest sculpture.

She heads there now, through the kitchen and out the back door with the metal dreamcatcher – another of her creations – hanging from it. Out into the back yard where her latest project sits beneath a large, green tarp.

She looks to the ominous grey skies and grimaces.

Looks like rain. I’ll have to check the forecast.

She pulls back the tarp to reveal the in-progress sculpture.

Dave O’Neil – a friend of Graham’s with his own construction business – had called round a couple of months back with some 304 stainless tube in various sizes – leftovers from a big commercial job.

“Thought ya might be able to make use’a these, Ms. Portland,” he’d said in his thick Boston accent. "Turn ‘em into somethin’ beautiful, y’know.”

Dave was a kind man. One of those genuinely joyful and cheerful types that Alona could never really understand but appreciated – in small doses.

“Thank you, David,” she had said, instantly seeing not 304 stainless tube but the swirling, curling bark and branches of a great tree swaying in the wind.

Dave hadn’t brought her a pile of metal tubes. He’d given her a project.

“You can put them in the yard.”

She had started with the base – a dense, circular metal slab she’d found at the scrap yard. She drilled 2-inch holes around the perimeter to hold the tubes that would form the trunk of the tree.

Then she saw it. As plain as day, right in front of her eyes.

The great tree, swaying in the wind, set against a backdrop of purple-hues and six towering, near-perfectly symmetrical mountains.

It was close now, two months later. But it had been hard to get right because in her visions, which had continued to recur on a daily basis, the wind was high and the tree was always moving, dancing. She had been trying to capture that. The movement.

She holds out her hand, palm to the sky.

No rain. And the sun seems to be trying to come out.

She covers the sculpture once more with the tarp and resolves to finish the sculpture before her husband returns home at the end of the week.

She places her hand on her belly as another wave of nausea sweeps over her.

She will finish the sculpture and continue to think about how to tell him what she has yet to confirm but knows to be true.

She is expecting their first child.

PART 4: The Room

Wednesday, October 26, 1994, 10:00 a.m.

“The Room” – Edwards Airforce Base

Edwards, California

Graham has never been in The Room before. Though he has heard about it, he has always assumed it to be a myth. But now, here he is, in The Room. No one has told him it is The Room and nor did its unassuming beige metal door give away its status as anything other than some storage closet or janitor’s office – except, perhaps, for the barely perceptible, thin slot around head height, covered on the inside by a slidable strip of metal. Allowing people to look out but not in. But this is The Room. There can be no mistaking it.

Graham has never been in The Room before and nor, before today, had he ever been in the basement of Edwards Air Force Base, though he had heard rumours that’s where The Room was housed. He isn’t sure if it is the cumulative effect of that tittle tattle over time that had led him to be unsurprised when they had taken him down to the base’s subterranean level, or if it was the fact he knew that’s where they would take him, the moment he landed the plane.

He'd seen it. The dark, narrow corridor with the confusion of pipes running alongside. The beige door with the slot you may not even see in the dull light.

If you didn’t already know it was there.

Graham had been unsurprised when he was led to the basement and along the dimly lit corridor because he’d had visions of that happening when he was in Beaumont’s office. He’d been perfectly able to hear everything his captain was saying, but his mind was simultaneously showing him events that were yet to unfold.

It had started as soon as he’d landed the plane.

He had known he would be met on the runway by a gaggle of armed soldiers.

He had known he would be told to shower and change while the soldiers stood guard right outside.

While he’d been showering, the whole encounter with Beaumont in his office had been playing through his mind. He’d heard every word the man was going to say, a good ten minutes before he’d said them.

“Come in, Lieutenant…”

“Have a seat…”

“You doing okay, Porter?”

“What the hell happened up there?”

“Lieutenant, I asked you a question…”

“Thirty-seven seconds, Porter. At just shy of the speed of sound. That’s over ten kilometres traveled with no response, no reaction…”

“In a half-billion-dollar aircraft…”

“The brass is going to want an explanation…”

“Last chance, Lieutenant Portland. Tell me what happened.”

To reply seemed… not pointless. It was more that he’d seen this already, so he knew he didn’t reply.

It was predetermined.

He would stay silent while Beaumont questioned him, then he would show Beaumont what he saw. The purple-hued world with the punishing winds and the dancing tree. The six towering, symmetrical mountains.

Then, they would take him to the basement and lead him to The Room.

He had known this because he’d seen it ten minutes before. Beaumont had dismissed him from his office, but he hadn’t left, because he’d known that he didn’t. He’d simply sat on a chair in the hallway and waited for them to come for him.

He hadn’t recognized them. Well, not in his premonition at least. By the time they had actually arrived in the corridor, they were familiar. A stern looking young woman and a kindly looking older man, both dressed impeccably in black, accompanied by a couple of the armed soldiers from earlier.

Without speaking, or needing to, they had led him to the basement, along the dark corridor, and to that innocuous beige door.

At the door, Graham had stopped, a wave of foreboding sweeping over him.

Here, at the door, is where his visions had stopped.

After this, there was nothing.

The man and woman in black had put on sunglasses, the woman reaching out to the handle-less door. The lock had released seemingly before her palm had made contact with its surface. The thick metal door had swung open with surprising ease and the bright white light emanating from The Room had caused Graham to squint as his eyes tried to adjust from the darkness of the corridor.

When his eyes did adjust, Graham had been surprised for the first time since the incident high in the skies over Pacific Waters.

He hadn’t been able to see this part, nor see past it.

The visions had stopped as soon as he entered The Room and they haven’t started again since.

As Graham sits in The Room, he chuckles to himself. He can’t believe how quickly he had become accustomed to seeing his future unfurl ten minutes ahead of time, and how unnerving it now feels to have lost this ability.

Now, there is nothing but now. Nothing but The Room.

It’s much larger than its unassuming beige door or location tucked in the bowels of the air force base had suggested. Large and brilliant white. White floors, white walls, white ceiling. White to the point that it’s hard to see the seams, giving the illusion, as he sits in what he’s somewhat sure is its centre, in the only piece of furniture in The Room – a lone white chair.

The people in black and the soldiers hadn’t entered The Room with him. They had simply ushered him inside, then closed the door behind him.

And so, Graham Portland now sits, floating in white space, waiting for something he can’t predict to happen.

It’s terribly quiet inside The Room. Muffled, almost, like he’s surrounded by foam soundproofing.

The silence goes on for a while, until it is disturbed by… something. A rhythmic sound. A tapping, or a dripping perhaps. It’s faint at first, barely audible. Graham closes his eyes, tries to focus only on the sound.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

He can just about hear it and it’s already aggravating him.

Is this some kind of torture? Are they trying to drive me mad?

Time has little meaning, but the sound grows very gradually louder.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It’s loud enough to determine a direction now. It’s coming from right in front of him, still distant but nearing.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

He strains to look for a source. Is there water getting in?

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It’s getting louder and he feels compelled to get up, to investigate. But something tells him not to stand. He feels heavy, as though with every drip, gravity is turned up just a notch.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It’s tormenting now. Nefarious in its unerring regularity. An ever-rising irritant, nearing but ever out of view.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It grows louder, gets nearer, and just as Graham feels like he can’t take it anymore, it occurs to him.

It isn’t drips at all.

It’s the sound of footsteps.

PART 5: Gravity

Wednesday, October 26, 1994, 10:21 a.m.

“The Room” – Edwards Airforce Base

Edwards, California

Click. Click. Click.

They are footsteps for certain. Not drips. Distant footsteps that grow louder, coming nearer.

Click. Click. Click.

The Room feels strange now. Graham can’t be certain if it’s just his mind playing tricks on him, the white walls, floor, and ceiling merging to form the perception of nothingness. He sits in his chair, suspended in the endless white. It is as though the space twists and contorts before him, as though a vortex is opening up, a rip in space and time through which the shrunken silhouette of a man emerges, walking slowly towards him.

Click. Click. Click.

A feeling of dizziness and nausea comes over Graham and he tries to focus on the only thing he can. The man drawing closer, the footsteps growing louder.

Click. Click. Click.

There’s texture now to the background from which the man emerges. The slightest hint of a corridor, of lights, maybe doors. The air seems to cool on Graham’s face as though the world from which the man emerges is colder than it is in here.

Click. Click. Click.

The man grows larger now, his features coming into focus. He’s of average height, maybe a little below, with immaculately groomed, wavy black hair. He wears an all-black, form-fitting outfit, including black gloves. His matt black boots step rhythmically on an unseen floor.

Click. Click. Click.

There’s noise now, too. A low electric hum and the vaguest of voices, muffled words in a language Graham cannot place.

Click. Click. Click.

The man is right there now, right there in The Room, which takes form again, the tear in space and time sealing itself behind him as he stands, adjusting a glove, just a couple of metres in front of Graham.

“Hello, Graham,” the man says. “Or, should I say, The Porter?”

Graham sits in silence, the twisting confusion of The Room having settled, the walls perceptible once again, just about, from the ceiling and the floor. He blinks away the last remnants of disorientation and focuses on the man’s face. He has sharp, handsome features, impeccably cleanshaven, his hair almost too perfect. The man brushes down his long-sleeved shirt with a gloved hand and looks at Graham with deep, dark eyes.

“Got yourself a little superpower there for a moment, huh?”

Those words get Graham’s attention.

“Catching a little sneaky-peek into the future, a glance at what’s to come, a glimpse of what is yet to be.” The man speaks quickly, his face full of expression.

There’s something off about this guy. Something weird.

“But then they drag you down to the basement, into this room, into this space, and the visions go away, am I right?”

Graham looks at the man, his lip twitching, words seemingly beginning to form on his there.

“You don’t have to say anything,” the man says, waving a hand in the air. “I mean, you don’t say anything – nothing of any substance anyway – not for another twenty-eight years. And even then, do you really speak? In the conventional sense, in the way you understand it, in the primitive, human sense, perhaps not.”

The man walks now as he speaks, his boots clicking once more on the white floor. He circles Graham, disappearing and reappearing into view like a planet orbiting a star.

The man settles back in front of Graham and sinks to his haunches, those deep, dark eyes staring right into his own.

“So, what happens now, Porter? There is so much I could tell you, but no, not now, not the time. The next forty-eight hours will be… painful. They know. That’s the most painful part. Your government – the real one, I mean, not the puppets in the White House – they have known all along but they couldn’t tell you, though they’ve tried, we wouldn’t let them. I say ‘we’ but who am I in all of this?”

Who are you?

Graham thinks it, but the man hears it and smiles a wide, Cheshire Cat smile.

“I, Porter, am just the messenger.” He rises to his feet and turns his back to Graham, walking away a little, into the white. He raises his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot me!” he yells, spinning and laughing to himself. He stops when he realizes that Graham isn’t laughing along.

“Don’t shoot the messenger?” he says. “No?” He shrugs before returning to the hunched position right in front of Graham, his face just inches away.

A coolness emanates from the man, and his skin, up this close, is flawless – almost appearing to house no pores. A look of genuine concern sweeps across his face.

“The next forty-eight hours will be a trial for you, Graham Portland. They don’t know what we do in here. They only know this is where close contacts such as yourself need to be brought right after an incident. They’re not allowed to know, but I know what they think is going on. They think we’re probing you, testing you, hurting you in some way. They think this in part because you will leave here drained and tired. You’ll barely be able to stand and they’ll think we unleashed on you, in this mysterious white room, some unspeakable, barbaric torture when in truth all we did was have a little chat. Just, you know, in a gravity far too heavy for your paltry human flesh and bones. An unfortunate side effect of the, uh,” he gestures behind him to where the vortex had appeared and makes a ripping sound.

“They think we hurt you in some way. And they think this because they see through human eyes. They think we hurt you simply because that’s what they do. That’s what humans always do.”

The man stands again, letting out an exasperated sigh.

“They will hurt you, Porter. But they will not break you. You will not speak to them. But you will speak to me. They will ask you many, many questions. Questions to which they shall receive no response. I will ask you but one and you will tell me.”

The man brings his face so close that their noses are almost touching, Graham feeling the coolness of his breath against his lips.

“What did you see, Porter?”

The man’s eyes are bottomless pools, dark and deep and swirling, like a black hole in the furthest reaches of space, sucking in all around them.

“What did you see?”

The visions come to Graham in flashes and so too do they come to the manic man.

The purple-hued planet.

The six triangular mountains and their near-perfect symmetry.

The huge, stately tree, windswept but standing firm against the gales.

And there, wrapped within its branches.

“A baby,” the man says, his words cold on Graham’s face, a smile creeping across his porcelain face. “And…” he pauses. “A name.”

The flashes cease, the visions falling away, and a thousand voices speak it in perfect unison.

“Amma.”

PART 6: Lightning Strike

Wednesday, October 26, 1994, 10:46 a.m.

226 Gage Road, Pawtucketville

Lowell, Massachusetts

The blow torch blasts a searing blue flame against the smooth surface of the metal tube. 1,430 degrees Celsius. 2,610 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot enough to melt many common metals and to vaporize organic matter. Such as a person’s skin and flesh.

Alona had been acutely aware of this since she was a seven-year-old child and had gone wandering into her father’s workshop back on the reservation. She’d been fascinated by that beautiful blue flame. That perfect little triangle of flickering blue that waved like a carnival flag and yet wielded such power.

“You stay out of there,” her father had said. “When you are old enough, I will show you.”

And he did. But not until later, and not before little Alona’s fascination with the little blue flame had gotten the better of her.

She’d planned it and she can’t help but chuckle to herself now as she remembers. She’d noticed that her parents’ mornings ran like clockwork. Once breakfast was made for Alona and her four older brothers, her father would appear in his Sherriff’s uniform, grab a bagel, kiss her mother on the cheek, and shepherd the boys out of the house for school. Once satisfied that Alona was occupied with a slice of toast covered thick with sweet jam, mother would tell her to “stay right there” and go collect up all the items of clothing that lay strewn around the house, to get the laundry going.

There were always clothes strewn around the house. With five children and a husband who worked all hours, each morning their humble home looked like a tornado had swept through the place. The peace when the boys left for the day was palpable, the post-storm cleanup a daily occurrence.

That’s when 7-year-old Alona had jumped down from her chair, dragging it across the kitchen and standing on it to reach the keys that dangled provocatively from a hook by the back door.

The shed was different with father not around. It was so quiet and seemed bigger somehow. More intimidating. Alona recalled that the atmosphere of the place had spooked her. It was as though the spirits were speaking to her, telling her she shouldn’t be here. She had paused at the door. She had almost turned back and run to the house. Almost.

But the temptation of the pure, blue flame had been far too great. The lure of that power had pulled her in. She had closed the door behind her and made her way past the splintered work benches and the blackened stove, all the way to the back of the shed where the big, red propane tank sat, the hose carefully coiled around a hook on the wall, and there, suspended in space and time, the torch.

Little Alona had taken a hold of the handle, reaching it high into the air and jumping up and down to release just enough hose from the hook. She had opened the release valve a quarter turn, just like she’d watched her father do so many times before. And she had pressed the little red button.

Click.

Nothing.

She’d pressed it again.

Click.

Nothing.

And a third time.

Click. Whoosh!

Back in the now, the memory sends a chill down Alona’s spine and she kills the perfect blue flame, moving quickly to bend the final branch of her windswept tree to just the right curvature.

Instinctively, she reaches a hand to her cheek, feeling the contours of burned skin against her fingertip.

She takes three strides back and looks at her work. The tree made of metal tubes bends over itself, a thick, gnarled bark rising to splintered branches, swaying even in stillness. It has the appearance of some giant Bonsai, though, even as it stands a good seven feet tall before her, she feels that it should be much bigger; that the tree in her mind – the tree that her sculpture is based on – is giant in a way not seen on the planet Earth.

This tree is from someplace else. It’s real. She can feel it.

The sky is getting moody now, the sun’s light fading behind rolling, black clouds, this midday cast in a strange and purple hue. A distant clap of thunder urges Alona to cover her creation once again with the tarp, to return to the safety of the house and begin preparing lunch, her earlier nausea now giving way to hunger.

But something isn’t quite right.

It’s the final branch. The curvature is a little off.

She opens the valve, steps forward and reaches high, the blowtorch held in her hand. She pushes the little red button to ignite the flame.

Click.

Nothing.

She presses it again.

Click.

Nothing.

And a third time.

Click. Whoosh!

But not the whoosh of the perfect, blue flame. Instead, a mighty gust of wind, like that which might buckle a giant tree on some alien planet. The whole world flashes bright, blinding white, a jagged bolt of fork lightning reaching down from the purple sky and imprinting itself on her retina.

And then the jolt.

She sees the tree, alight with electricity jumping from branch to metal branch.

She sees the gnarled, glowing fingers of white reaching out at her, taking her in their grasp.

She feels her hand squeeze the handle of the blowtorch impossibly tight, feels her teeth clench and her whole body stiffen.

And then Alona Portland falls to the floor, laying lifeless on her back in the yard beneath the towering alien tree.

As a little smoke begins to rise from her scorched frame, she feels a few light drops of rain falling onto her cheeks. She could even swear she hears them sizzle as they make contact with her skin.

“Alona?” The voice sounds familiar but distant. “Missus Portland? Jesus, Alona, are you okay?” It’s the voice of Graham’s buddy, Dave O’Neil.

She’s aware of him grabbing her wrist and the thought crosses her mind.

I can’t feel my heart beating.

And almost as though in anticipation of the question she doesn’t want to ask, she feels something, deep within her womb. She feels a heartbeat, but not her own. She feels the heartbeat of her unborn baby girl.

“Amma,” Alona mouths.

“What?” Dave asks. “Alona, did you say something? Alona!”

She smiles a smile that never makes it to her lips and feels her whole body relax as she allows the last remnants of consciousness to gently slide away.

PART 7: Flowers

Friday, October 28, 1994, 2:30 p.m.

Lowell General Hospital

Lowell, Massachusetts

Alona lies alone in the hospital bed, covered with impossibly smooth white sheets that remind her of snow, her feet forming two symmetrical mountains at the foot of these ersatz icy planes. She’s a little high and dislikes the feeling. She’s never been one for altered states whether delivered via smoke, teas, drink, or drugs, but she has a particular dislike for the latter. The manufactured nature of it, dialled up and down by doctors in white. The clinical control. She dislikes being controlled.

Her arms are rigid at her sides, those icy planes so very flat and undisturbed, running down from her chest and along to her feet. There is no snowy hill in between. There is no baby bump beneath the sheets.

She tries not to think about it. She tries to close her eyes and give in to the weight of the drugs. But there is no respite in there. Only flashes. Purple hues. The alien planet and those six perfectly symmetrical mountains. And that tree, blowing and whipping in a raging wind. And the spark. The fierce bolt of lightning that crossed worlds to strike her down.

She draws breath and opens her eyes. She watches the heart monitor draw its triangles of green. One mountain. Two. Three, four, five, six perfect triangular mountains on the screen.

“I don’t like flowers,” she says, without turning to face the man who’s entered her room.

“No,” says the man. “It’s the impermanence, right? The painful truth that as full of life and colour and sweet aroma as they may be right now, in no time at all they will shrivel and stink, tainting the very water that sustains them, turning it into a muddy cesspool of decay.”

“Who wants to watch something beautiful slowly die?” Alona asks, turning her head to look at him.

“Who indeed?” the man says. “Alas, convention suggests that bringing flowers in situations like this is the common practice. That, or fruits that the patient might consume. Both a treat and a form of sustenance, a source of vitamins and minerals. High in fibre and rich in health-boosting antioxidants, which is all well and good if the person likes fruit.”

“I don’t.”

“I know. So, flowers it is.”

“Oh, how beautiful,” the nurse says as she strides into the room and takes a sniff of the flowers on her way over to Alona’s bedside. “I think he’s a keeper,” she says as she fiddles with the bags hanging from the IV pole.

“He isn’t my husband,” Alona says.

The nurse looks over her shoulder at the man dressed in black.

“Well. It isn’t my place to judge,” she says. “Handsome, though.” She gives Alona a wink and turns to leave.

“You can put those on the table over there,” she says to the man on her way out. “And don’t keep Ms. Portland too long. She needs to rest.”

The man puts the flowers where he’s been told and arranges them a little.

“They grow, they blossom, they are beautiful for a time. They wrinkle, they decay…”

“They die,” Alona says.

The man turns and smiles an inappropriate smile, like he’s trying to find the right expression for the situation but he can’t quite figure it out. Like he’s driving his face for the first time and trying to find the right gear. He pulls up a plastic chair beside her and sits.

She knows him.

But not really him. That isn’t quite right. She’s never seen his pale, angular face before. She’s never seen his shock of curled black hair or observed his restless movements. But she has been in his presence. She has felt his energy. An energy much larger than him or her or any person. Or any being trying to pass themselves off as a person.

“That’s a suit,” Amma says with a roll of her eyes.

The man looks down self-consciously.

“It’s tailored,” he says.

“It’s black.”

“Well, like you I dislike colour.”

“It’s inappropriate.”

The man looks genuinely hurt; embarrassed that he didn’t get this right.

“Inappropriate?”

“Nobody died,” she says. “I’m alive. She’s alive.”

“Your baby.”

Alona scoffs. “That’s a stretch.”

There is silence for a minute or so.

“Anyway, I wasn’t talking about your clothes,” Alona says, sleepily.

The man looks down at himself again.

“I get it,” she says, her eyes now closed. “I understand how you feel. Trapped in this mortal coil. The claustrophobia of it. The horrifying mortality. Stuck in a meat sack, confined in time and space. A prisoner in your own body. Imagining what it would be like to be free, to be unbridled. Just energy as all things are energy. At one with the universe. But you know.” She opens her eyes again to look at him. “Don’t you?”

He frowns, then smiles, stretching his face like he’s trying it on for the first time.

“I don’t think my suit quite fits,” he says.

Alona laughs at that.

“I think perhaps that it is you that doesn’t fit,” she says.

More silence.

“Of course, you get to take your suit off. All the rest of us have to look forward to is the shriveling, the withering. The awful truth that we’ve bloomed already and been the prettiest we will be. Now, all that’s left is to shrink and fade and muddy the waters that sustain us.”

“Is that why you sculpt?” he asks. “To suspend the process. To capture life and freeze it in time.”

“No,” Alona barks, seeming quite offended. “I sculpt because I have to. Life can’t be suspended. Only lived and created anew, only to grow and to blossom and to wither and to fade and to repeat, the same mistakes. Over and over and over again.”

“Is that what you think she is? A mistake?”

“Amma?” Alona asks, causing the man’s eyes to widen, an entire universe swirling and expanding within their deep, dark forever. “I have no idea what she is.”

The man stands, fiddles with his cufflinks, and straightens out his blazer.

“What will you tell him?” he asks.

“What will I tell who?” Alona replies as she begins to drift off to sleep.

“Your husband. Graham.”

“About the flowers?”

“About the child.”

“You know what I’ll tell him. That we have a daughter now. And that I’ll be leaving.”

The man smiles a wretched, unpracticed smile.

“Goodbye, Alona,” he says. But she’s already asleep.

PART 8: No Words

Sunday, October 25, 2021, 11:11 a.m.

Lowell National Historic Site

Lowell, Massachusetts

“But how did you know all this?” Amma asks as she wipes a tear from her eye and gazes out at the red-bricked buildings across the Merrimack River. She glances at her father, a featureless silhouette now as the rising sun beams bright between the girders of the bridge. “I mean, did Alona – mother – did she tell you all this? About strange man at the hospital? About her conversation with him?”

Graham Portland, so chatty for the past couple of hours, is silent once again.

“Why would she feel the need to leave? Was a daughter such awful news?”

Perhaps she asked the question seeking reassurance, but none is forthcoming. The answer is obvious. She didn’t want Amma.

Amma decides to change tack.

“I met him,” she says to the wordless silhouette. “The man who visited mother in the hospital.”

She expects that to garner a response, but her father remains silent, unmoving.

“I saw him in New York. First, over at the Lovells’. He came striding over to my car and started talking in that same manic way. That’s what I call him. The Manic Man.

“He was there again at the top of One World Trade Center. When I saw the… whatever it was in the sky. The night Melvin Sams disappeared.”

Still she waits for her father to respond. Still he says nothing. After two hours of talking like he couldn’t get the words out fast enough, he’s suddenly as silent as he’s been for the last twenty-eight years.

Amma places a hand on his arm. Maybe it’s the emotion of it all. Finally getting this out after all this time can’t be easy.

Then a thought occurs to Amma.

“You said the man was in his late thirties or early forties. That was almost thirty years ago. But the man I saw just last month, he was around that age, too. He had the black, curly hair. And it wasn’t like he was an old guy who’d dyed it. He was young.”

“What can I say? The years have been kind to me.”

Amma recoils from the silhouetted figure as he speaks in a voice that is not her father’s. A voice knows.

The man turns to face her, his features coming into focus. That broad, Cheshire cat smile. Those deep, dark eyes. That shock of black, curly hair.

“It’s you,” Amma says.

“Of course, always. Who else could I be but me?” the man says.

“But…” Amma swings around, scanning the bridge, looking left and right. “Father?”

“Graham is safe.”

“What did you do to him?” Amma snarls, lurching towards the man.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy now, Miss Portland. I didn’t do anything to your father. He’s at home.”

“But…”

“You didn’t really think he was speaking, did you? I mean, not directly anyway, after all this time, after all these years, on this of all days.”

Amma takes out her phone and checks the date.

“October 25th,” she says. “The day that Dad has his encounter.”

“Bingo.”

“But, he was here,” she scans her surroundings once more, the streets, the buildings, the traffic swirling around her as she tries to get her bearings.

“No,” says the man. “Well, not in the conventional, physical sense anyway. But I greatly enjoyed our little walk.” The Manic Man turns and gazes out at the river. “It’s so nice to get some fresh air, isn’t it?”

Amma has already left. She’s running back across the bridge towards the red brick buildings of the historic site.

“Ah,” says the man to himself. “There she goes. Amma Portland. A leaf blowing in a cosmic breeze.”

Amma runs between the old buildings and the modern condos, retracing her steps – steps she believed to be taking in the company of her father, listening to the sweet sound of his voice.

His voice.

She pulls out her phone and opens up the recording of the last couple of hours. She plays it back from the start. She hears her own voice, but in place of her father’s there’s nothing more than the same static noise she had recorded the last time she’d encountered the Manic Man back in New York.

“Son of a…” Amma gasps, plunging the phone back into her pocket and quickening her pace.

I have to get back to Dad.

She backtracks along Merrimack, then Salem, and arrives at the old house on Gage Street, where she finds the front door ajar.

She bursts inside and searches frantically for her father.

“Dad? Graham? Dad, are you in here?”

She searches the living room and the kitchen, then bounds up the stairs to search the small bedrooms, but he’s nowhere to be found.

“Dad? Dad!”

She runs into the bathroom and pulls back the shower curtain. No sign of Graham Portland.

And then she hears a faint humming. She stops dead in her tracks and listens. It’s coming from outside, from beyond the bathroom window, which is open a crack, letting in the cool Lowell air.

Amma steps up on the side of the bathtub and peeps out of the window, looking to the small yard below.

There, to her great relief, she sees her father, standing in the shade of the metal tree sculpture, seemingly examining the intricacies of its curling, stainless steel branches.

Able to breathe again, Amma heads downstairs and out the back door to where her father is standing. She throws her arms around him and squeezes him tight.

“Dad,” is all she can say.

He casually puts an arm around her and pats her shoulder with a big bearpaw.

He doesn’t say a word.

* * *

Sunday, October 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m.

226 Gage Road

Lowell, Massachusetts

            “Thanks for coming, Birdie,” Amma says as she fixes tea and brings it over to her aunt.

            “Oh, it’s not a bother, my darling.”

            “I just didn’t want to leave him alone after…” Amma sits at the dining room table across from Birdie.

            “You encounter with the Manic Man. I understand, my dear. Really, it’s my pleasure to be here.” She blows on her tea and takes a sip.

            “It’s just so weird, y’know? He’s so weird. I went out around the block again after I got home, just to see if he was hanging around.”

            “You didn’t see hide nor hair of him?”

            Amma shakes her head.

            “Well, I’m sure he’s long gone and far away by now.”

            Amma just stares at her tea, watching the steam dance from the cup.

            “I really thought it was Dad, Birdie. I really thought he was talking again.” Amma fights back the tears.

            “There, there,” Birdie says, touching her hand. “Have you called the police?”

            “No,” Amma says. “This feels…”

            “Beyond them,” Birdie says, knowingly. She’s always so calm about this stuff.

            “Yeah.”

            Amma’s phone rings.

            “Excuse me,” she says.

            “Of course,” Birdie replies, and Amma scoops up the phone, inserting an earpiece and heading into the kitchen.

            “Hey, Ali.”

            “Amma Portland, intrepid investigator!” Alison says, excitedly.

            “Alison, have you been drinking coffee after noon again?”

            “What? No. Well, maybe. But this isn’t caffeine; this is genuine enthusiasm.”

            “What have you got.”

            “Something really weird.”

            “It would have to go some to beat my day.”

            “What? What happened?”

            “Nothing. Forget it. What ya got?”

            “Only a midwestern town cloaked in a mysterious fog.”

            “Okay…”

            “Throw in a couple of murders, some sudden short-term memory loss among the locals, and something creepy is going on.”

            “U-huh,” Amma says, distracted by her father who sits in the living room, engaged with a crossword puzzle.

            “Amma? Ams?”

            “Yeah, I’m still here.”

            “Trust me, you’re gonna want to check this one out. You do love a good horror story, right?”

End of TRUE STORY, Episode 3: ENCOUNTERS 

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