It was a dark and stormy night. The rain was heavy and relentless. Icky things from the mud were crawling around all over the place trying to find a way inside the tent. The grim swamp water was rising. That's when people are most often bitten by deadly pit viper moccasins, because the slithering obscenities are washed up from underneath the heaps of dead twigs, vine tangled undergrowth, and rotting logs where the vicious serpents slink and skulk and hide, waiting in stealthy treachery to sink their murderous curved-needle fangs into the naked flesh of an exposed human leg.

I heard a bizarre inexplicable racket, a noise not normal to the eerie sounds of the swamp. Amid the thrashing squalls of the violent thunderstorm, I couldn't be sure what I was hearing, yet I knew something wasn't right about that ominously foreboding sound. The disturbing noise was similar to someone breathing, only much louder and with enough raspy background to make the skin crawl. It was a hot night in summer, so I wasn't in my sleeping bag, I was lying on top of it listening to the torrential rain hammering down onto the roof of my flimsy tent. In wary contemplation, I watched the brilliant flashes of lightning. It was pink lightning that night. I remember wondering about how lightning could be pink.

That's when I saw the other light. It was a diabolical light. There was something otherworldly about that macabre light. It was not flashing lightning. This new light did not go off and on. It kept shining in a steady beam. I don't know how it was, perhaps deep in my subconscious the primal instinct had been triggered warning me of danger, but whatever the cause, I was suddenly alert. I was alarmed by a creeping sense of lurking fear and imminent danger.

The light was coming from just above the height of the gloomy moss-draped cypress trees. It was a short distance away and was shining down through the pouring rain as if it was a search light hunting for something on the ground. My tent was on the ground and I was in it.

At first the light was a chartreuse color, mostly pale yellow with a tinge of lime green. It remained that haunting chartreuse color as it moved closer to my tent. Closer and closer the sinister light moved.

My impulse, quite frankly, was to turn on my flashlight, unzip my tent flap, and step out with my loaded 22 rifle and demand to know what the hell was going on, but some irresistible overpowering emotion of curiosity caused me to remain perfectly still and watch, like a deer helplessly caught in the headlights of an automobile approaching at high speed.

When the light finally hit my tent, it instantly changed to a deep blood-red color. The heavy breathing sound I was hearing through the thunder, wind, and pouring rain altered into a rapid steady clicking racket, as if someone were crinkling stiff plastic wrapping paper, but the sound was much louder. This was the moment that the subtle hint of fear deep in the obscurity of my subconscious jumped to the surface. I was genuinely terrorized. I felt the looming threat of real lethal danger. I panicked.

For a moment my rational brain groped for ordinary explanations, like perhaps a helicopter from the military base forty miles away might be conducting some idiotic nocturnal reconnaissance exercise, but then the blunt realization that helicopters don't make sounds like what I was hearing forced itself upon my desperate attempt to deny what I was experiencing.

I was thirty years of age at the time, and of course I had been exposed to the idea of alien abduction, yet in spite of the fact that such a horror was overtly suggesting itself as the only plausible explanation, my spinning reeling brain was struggling and fighting, scratching and clawing against that morbid fact. I kept telling myself it just wasn't possible. "There's no such thing as aliens", I whispered to myself, "and even if there are, the vast distances between stars are far too great to be traversed. Even the most advanced technology cannot surpass the speed of light. It's a constant - an unbreakable universal law."

That's what I was stupidly babbling to myself while sitting bolt upright inside my tent during a howling thunderstorm at night with a blood-red beam of light shining directly down from just above the treetops while a nerve-grating clicking crackling sound hammered at my ears above the tumult of the storm.

Then two events took place simultaneously that caused my breathing to stop and my heart to pound as if a sledgehammer was beating inside my chest - the red light went suddenly dark and the raging thunderstorm vanished into thin air. Everything all around me, the whole entire swamp, the whole world, it seemed, was suddenly dead silent and pitch dark.

I held my breath, straining my ears into the creepy night. At the slightest sound I honestly believe I would have died of a burst heart valve or a cerebral bleed, but sound is not the stimulus that began transmitting sensory data to my central nervous system. There was something that felt like fingers crawling on the back of my neck.

There in the stillness of the dark silent night while alone in the middle of the grim ghoulish swamp, something was touching the back of my neck. Something was in my tent with me.

I had not heard the tent flap unzip. I had not felt any movement approaching me. I did not hear the sound of breathing or any indication whatsoever that a thing of unknown origin and intent was in my immediate proximity - crouching right behind me inside my tent.

I would have screamed and I would have lashed out with as brutal physical violence as I was capable of at the time, yet a stern voice spoke with threatening authority directly into my ear. It spoke using the English language and it said one word and one word only - "Don't!"

A warm sensation, as of a weird heat, started in my groin and moved up toward my tense shoulders. I couldn't believe I was obeying the command, because I had a premonition that I could have resisted - I could have fought back against the insidious attack of that unknown thing that crouched behind me with those cold molesting fingers creeping along the back of my neck.

The next thing I remember is a delirious feeling of weightlessness, as if I were floating up in the air. It reminded me of being in the back seat of my mom's Buick Skylark when I was little and she would go very fast over the railroad tracks on Everitt avenue. Weeeee!

I seemed to be rising right up through the top of my tent, then on up the huge trunks of the towering cypress, higher and higher through the grim moss-draped canopy into the unknown night above. Then I saw it. A bizarre object hovering over the trees was visible in the darkness before me with ghastly unearthly luminescence. The best way I know to describe it is an enormous clamshell with petite rainbow-colored lights flashing all around it. I thought I heard cows mooing and a woman accusing me of getting her pregnant. When I protested that I had never seen her before in my life so the pregnancy could not have been caused by me, she held up a test tube and said, "Then explain this!"

I looked at the test tube. There was a fetus in it. The face of the fetus looked exactly like my face.

I don't know where I was next. I would have thought myself in a grotto deep underground. Mucilaginous tendrils similar to pus-filled tree roots were writhing in a violet gelatinous goo on the sooty walls all around me. Somewhere water was dripping, I could hear it echoing through cavernous shadowy chambers and down the far distance of dismal empty corridors - drip, drip, drip. A female voice was shouting, "Ask him why he hasn't opened the door! He was supposed to have opened the door already!"

Another voice, also feminine, but softer in tone said, "Patience, he's not going to remember, so there's no need to shout. I'll show him. His priority has failed. It sometimes happens with them. It will do no good to shout. Some of them don't respond well to that technique. Turn on the persuader prod. I will re-motivate him. His priority has failed, that's all. We'll reset him."

I heard a sudden ear-piercing sound like a camera flash charge circuit getting hot, then it felt like all the air in my lungs was being sucked out. There was some type of heavy weight on my chest. I could not breathe. I could not draw in a breath of air. I was suffocating to death.

Then the softer female voice spoke, "Do you know where you are, Sean?"

I wondered how whatever these monstrous things were could possibly know my name. I was smothering, but I could not move a muscle.

"Where are you, Sean. Tell us where you are."

I wanted to scream that I couldn't breathe, that I needed air fast or I was going to die, but the thick honey-coated female voice commanded, "Tell us where you are. Hurry, Sean, you don't have much time remaining. Tell us. Where are you? Do you remember? Think very hard. You can do it. We know you can. Tell us where you are. Tell us now, or it will be too late."

I could not believe this was happening. It had to be a nightmare. I surely was still in my tent in the dark swamp, with icky things oozing around me in the rainy stormy night. I was having a bad dream, and something, probably a pit viper moccasin, had crawled in my tent with me and coiled itself around my throat and was choking the life out of me. Wake up! My mind was screaming for me to wake up before the deadly snake strangled me. But they have lethal sharp fangs full of assassin's poison. I must move slowly when I wake, or the disgusting slithering demonic beast will bite me, and out here all alone in the middle of the grim swamp at night, I won't have time to find medical aid, there won't be any anti-venom to save me. My lungs burned like red-hot fire coals. My chest was collapsing under the intense gravity of the heavy pressure.

"Tell us where you are, Sean. Don't let it end like this. You must tell us. We can't do anything to help you until we know for sure that you remember. Tell us where you are. Please, Sean, you have less than ten seconds remaining - nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two -"

"Georgian Cottages!" I was startled, utterly dismayed. Even though there was not a wisp of air in my bursting lungs, I had somehow managed to holler the name. Then cool soothing blasts of icy arctic air raced in to fill my quivering lungs with sensational relief. I was so glad to have air. I breathed deeply the calming sweet rushing air.

I could see the granite rock, the sparkling water, the windswept pines, the juniper, the maple, the white bark of the birch as those roundish leaves trembled in the prevailing west wind coming in off the bay.

Georgian Cottages in the thirty thousand islands - I hadn't been there since I was eleven years old. I knew the place had gone out of business; closed down years ago. All the cabins were gone, torn down. The fuel tank and pump had been dug up and hauled off. The rec-room, the camp store, the shower stalls by the RV hookups where the old hand-painted wooden sign read "Tenters Welcome!" - everything was gone. The eerie wilderness camp was long abandoned. All that remained was the main lodge house up on the hill, with it's log cabin exterior and green metal roof, and the marine garage, yes, the gray metal shop building out by the water's edge, up on a high rocky bluff overlooking the Magnetawan river. But how was this possible? It was surely all a bizarre dream.

"I told you there was no need to shout," I heard the soft female voice say. Then I saw her face. It was no female. It was an alien from outer space. UFOs, flying saucers, Roswell, Area 51, Hangar 18 - it was real! It was all real! I recognized the clammy gray skin, the grotesque oblate cranium, the large dark eyes - the ghoulish thing was blasphemous. It was sickening. They were tricking me. They weren't women, they were extraterrestrials. Where was I? What were they doing to me? What were they going to do to me?

"Ask him why he hasn't opened the door."

The loathsome gray alien moved its ugly head right into my face to look me directly in my terrorized eyes. That alien had no soul. There was nothing alive in those dark almond-shaped eyes. It was a dead thing.

"Why haven't you opened the door, Sean?"

I was calmer now that I could breathe again. I thought I might have known the answer to the question. I wanted to say it, but even though I was breathing easily, I couldn't speak a word. My mouth was numb. My lips were cold, they wouldn't respond.

"Use the persuader prod on him."

"I will if it becomes necessary. Let's not rush. His priority needs to be reset."

"You must apply the persuader prod to reset his priority."

"I know that, but shush, you talk too much. He's going to get the persuader prod, but we don't want him to know that's going to happen. Let's get him to talk first. If he knows I'm going to apply the persuader prod, he might be provoked. He may attempt resistance. We wouldn't want him to resist. We don't want to have to apply the tenderizer as well. I don't think he can hold out for that much special treatment, and remember, we need him to open the door."

"Then find out why he hasn't opened it!"

"I will, that's what I'm doing now, if you'll kindly let me get on with my work."

"All right then, Sean, please tell us why you haven't opened the door."

I wasn't sure what I was being asked, but I thought I knew the answer anyway, only, for some reason, I couldn't speak.

"It may help if we show him. I think his hormones are overreacting to the sound of our voices. Give me the libido suppressor. I'm going to bypass his arousal."

The warm heat started again in my groin and moved rapidly up past my shoulders to the back of my neck where the perverse cold clammy fingers were still crawling. I felt something break inside me. I whimpered.

"There now, that's better. Okay, Sean, I'm going to ask you one last time. I hope you'll tell me what I want to know, because if you don't, I'll be forced to apply the tenderizer. I don't want to have to do that, Sean. We need you to help us. Why haven't you opened the door?"

Then I saw it. It was a sequence of visions, actually. A disjointed herky-jerky chain of images haunting my mind's eye. Ghostly, like bits and pieces of memory being shown in an old 8mm film reel without sound. I was standing in front of the rustic marine shed at the wilderness camp. It was a balmy summer afternoon. The prevailing west wind was breezing in off the vast sapphire water of the deep bay. A Tom Thomson painting - a tourist was passing behind me with a print of a scene the famous Canadian colorist had painted at Canoe Lake in Algonquin park where he disappeared, only to be found eight days later, his lifeless corpse floating face-down in the murky chill water.

The garage door of the gray marine shop was open in front of me. I walked in. I saw a couple of small outboard motors on a stand. The cowlings were removed. They had parts missing, a carburetor, a spark plug, a pull-cord. I walked farther into the shop. I saw the workbench. A dented charger was connected to a 12-volt battery. Farther in I walked. There were some fishing rods with reels, one shiny and new, the other old and dusty. I was almost to the back corner of the shed. There was an immense northern pike, a truly big one, what's known as a 'lunker'. The huge teeth reminded me of a shark. Even though it had been mounted and was hanging on the wall, I feared it could leap at me with deadly lightning speed. Then I saw the chest - on the floor in the shadows of the far back corner of the old marine shop, a cedar chest. It reminded me of an heirloom that someone's grandmother would have at the foot of her bed with perhaps a homemade quilt lying on top.

I heard a gull squawk outside in the distant hopeful sunshine. Carefully, I moved the chest aside. I saw only bare concrete floor underneath.

"Give him the key."

"Here, Sean, take the key."

The repulsive alien handed me something that looked like a pendant, a witch pentacle, a pentagram, a five-point star circumscribed by a braided silver chain. The pentacle was glowing like gold, and across its familiar occult geometry I saw the heads of wilderness creatures passing like a kaleidoscope shifting patterns - a bear, a moose, a grouse, a goose, a walleye, a smallmouth bass, a groundhog, a muskrat, a beaver, an otter. When I took the amulet in my hand (the pendant that the aliens referred to as a key) an octagon-shaped shadow appeared on the floor in the corner of the shed.

At first, there was just a dark shape, then the octagon shadow lightened a bit. It looked like wax paper had been stretched over the place that was now growing even brighter. I saw a fog or mist swirling in the space that was gaining dimension like a door ready to be opened. Then slowly, the mist began to fade and I thought I was seeing glitter or sparks, but then I realized I was looking at faces with a human semblance. It was uncanny. I wanted to jump up and run away.

"Why haven't you opened the door, Sean?"

The angry faces staring at me through the octagon portal in the floor of the old marine shop at the wilderness camp sent chills down my tightening spine. There were hundreds of those menacing faces - thousands. They seemed to be lined up as if waiting to pass through the octagon portal. I don't know why, maybe because they looked so angry and maybe because there were so many of them, but I began to sink into nauseating paranoia. I was mortified at what those foul faces would do if I let them through.

"You must open the door, Sean. We are waiting for you to open the door."

When I was very young, I had seen a girl my own age choke to death on a piece of fat from a roast beef sandwich. I remember the gut-wrenching experience like it happened yesterday. It was in a tent in her parent's backyard. All the other children were playing in the swimming pool, but Shelby and I had gone into the tent to eat our lunch. We had been playing in the pool for hours without anything to eat. We were starving. Somehow swimming always seems to generate a ravenous appetite - like you haven't eaten for days. You feel like you're starving to death.

Shelby and I were alone in her tent gobbling our lunch. We were wolfing our sandwiches down way too fast. Her mother was always telling us not to eat too fast. She said we were liable to choke. Shelby had taken a huge bite of her roast beef sandwich. I remember she challenged me to see who could take the biggest bite. She dared me. She double-dared me. I reminded her of the warning her mother had so many times given us. Shelby said I worried too much. She said I was a fraidy-cat. She called me chicken, then she took a huge bite of her sandwich. She laughed a little bit, her young voice muffled by all the chewy beef and fluffy bread in her little mouth. Her face was so stuffed with that big bite of sandwich, she almost couldn't move her jaws to chew.

When the choking began, at first I thought she was playing a prank, but when she started turning blue around the mouth, I got scared. That's how I found out that when someone can't breathe, their lips start turning blue as the oxygen is being depleted from their blood.

I ran out of the tent screaming for Shelby's mom. Everybody was splashing and playing in the pool, plus the radio was on, so with the loud music and all the other noise it was almost impossible for me to be heard. By the time I got her mom's attention, I had a bad feeling in my stomach, because I knew Shelby had been alone in the tent choking on that chunky mouthful of fatty roast beef sandwich for a long time.

Shelby's mom and I ran as fast as we could, slip-sliding from the pool across the wet slick green grass of the backyard to the tent, but by the time we got there and looked in, Shelby was lying on the floor of the tent with her hands at her throat. She wasn't moving. Shelby's mom screamed "Oh my God!" but that icky trembling feeling in my stomach told me that God wasn't going to be able to help Shelby.

"Why haven't you opened the door, Sean?"

The cold cadaver blue lips of that dead little girl materialized like a ghoulish phantom before me. Too much blood flooded my heart in a mad rush. I stared helplessly at what was left of Shelby with imploring sympathy in my tearful eyes. She looked pitiful, like she had crawled out of her grave with wormy vermin oozing from her rotting flesh that was falling off her sad little skeleton.

I winced when I heard her scratchy voice speak to me, "Don't do it, Sean. Don't listen to them. Don't open the door. You know we don't want them to get through. Even though they look like people, they aren't. They are not human. They're evil. Don't let them come through the octagon. If you do, everybody in the world will choke to death on a fatty roast beef sandwich and look like me."

Shelby's words were muffled and difficult to understand. She had putrid grease-caked roast beef sandwich falling in gristly chunks from her cold dark blue lips.

When I woke up, I was in the hospital. My sister, who is a nurse, was standing over me crying. The doctors said it was a miracle I was alive. Apparently, a military jet had crashed down in Tate's Hell Swamp near where I was camped. My lungs had been seared by heat and toxic fumes erupting from the tragic cataclysmic explosion. There are ill-omened whispers that it was no accident that caused the military jet to crash. Rumors flying in the scandal-sheets and tabloids point to attempts to cover-up eerie controversial reports of garbled radio transmissions and blips that disappeared from radar screens. The military jet was in supersonic pursuit of some unidentified craft that blazed like a meteor across the stormy night sky. The unidentified thing shot the military jet down - blew it right out of the sky with a blinding beam of chartreuse light. The shocking accusations are being emphatically denied by military public relations officers.

I did my best to describe what I had seen and heard - the chartreuse light that turned blood red, the cold fingers on the back of my neck in my tent in the sudden inexplicable silent darkness, the strange heat that started in my groin and rose up to those creeping icy fingers. Yet, to this day, the medical people assure me it was all a psychotic episode brought on by the trauma of the jet crashing down so close to my tent. At first they kept repeating that I was lucky to be alive and that I should be thankful and forget about that other stuff, but when all I wanted to do was eat roast beef sandwiches and draw octagon shapes with color crayons, the staff physicians ordered me to be taken down the hall to the mental ward for a psychiatric evaluation.

I was also sent for X-rays, a PET scan, a CAT scan, and an MRI, but the fuses in the machines kept blowing out every time they started one on me. They say there's definitely a foreign object inside my abdomen, but they cannot determine what it is because the scan machine fuses keep blowing before a clear picture can be acquired. The surgeons don't want to attempt an invasive procedure until they know for sure what's inside me.

I've been in limbo now as per my health for almost a whole decade. Nothing has yet been decided about what to do for me. Other than the mysterious thing inside me, I seem to be okay except for my libido. I have no desire whatsoever for romantic or sexual love.