The Last Night

The Last Night

By

Curtis Ray Jones

Page One

Chapter One

The Seer

     Wyatt Faraday could remember having no words in his mind, of being unable to free himself from the blanket that bound his little infant body. He also clearly remembered his first emotion, frustration.

     Even now, twenty- three years later. The image of his bedroom ceiling rushing down at him shined as clear and bright in his mind as it did the golden sunlit morning he left his body, looked down and saw not his crib, not his helpless tiny body tightly swaddled in his blue baby blanket, no.

    What he saw was nasty pure filth, squeezing and squirming through every crack and crevice of his sunlight flooded room. The terrifying image of charcoal tendrils spun from sewage twisting and writhing across the floor toward his crib, dropped him from the ceiling washed him in white light and changed his life forever.

   If this had been his first and last brush with the impossible, what many coined the paranormal, then maybe he could have forgotten, and simply grew away from it. However, that was not to be. In fact, about the only high strangeness stuff, he had not seen was bigfoot werewolves and vampires.

  The black windows that surrounded him on this predawn morning reminded him of another early morning nineteen years ago. The morning, he awoke, ran into his parents living room saw black windows, became overwhelmed with intoxicating relief and thought in his innocent four-year-old mind ‘…we’re going home…’ For an all too brief moment he was certain they were in their starship headed back to their home world.

   Of course he was mistaken, but his ignorance could not explain how a four-year-old child could make such a wild mistake, much less feel such profound relief. Nor could it explain how just a few months later, on a hot summer afternoon, he stood before his parents TV

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and watched an old newsreel of a nuclear blast fill the sky with a giant mushroom cloud as the words, ‘they think that’s a bomb’ run through his little mind.

     The question, ‘What am I?’ was a concrete block he had carried since his infancy. A weight that had only grew heavier with every passing year of his life. That question had pushed him toward several paranormal posting sites and chat rooms. Just a year ago, on one of those sites he had ‘met’ Ariel Pace, a young woman whose own strange childhood rivaled his.

      She was a self -described abductee. But not so much a true believer as a woman haunted and driven. So driven in fact she had given him her cell phone number.  At first he assumed she was merely intrigued by his experiences and desperate for answers, from anyone including him. He was certainly moved by hers. But after hours of interaction, their conversations grew more personal, emotional and eventually intimate. Weeks of long talks that started at dusk and lasted until sunrise the next day, finally led to a face-to-face meeting at a local McDonalds.

     Early on they discovered they lived only twenty miles apart, which only made it that much easier to start a relationship. It certainly didn’t hurt that she was pretty, and he was nice looking himself.

    Her petite five foot three body, pale lovely face and long naturally white hair and pale blue eyes, only reinforced the old adage, ‘love at first sight’. They seemed made for each other, him being just a few inches taller than her, with long jet black hair, flat stomach taut wiry body and dark brown eyes.

   She was wearing a long white empire dress that could have easily been a gown, with white sandals, when he first laid eyes on her. After hearing her harrowing abduction stories, he was actually expecting an alien, not an angel. But an angel is what he got. He could not have ben more pleased.

    She on the other hand got a nerd. He thought it might be cute to wear his black and white favorite X-Files T shirt with jeans and tan running shoes. But the minute she passed through the glass doors of the restaurant and settled her eyes on him, a smile brightened her face like sunshine. In that moment of perfect connection, they knew that they were meant to be together for the rest of their lives. A few months later they wed.