Creepy online stories? Yeah, I’ve got one of those. Well, kind of. My story isn’t so much creepy as it is unusual. Kind of. Probably 60% of the world’s population has the same story, but they don’t remember experiencing it. Is that sufficiently creepy or weird for you? I don't have much time to write this down, so I'd better stop working on my preamble.
It began a long time ago when I was a child of five. I was outside with my dog Red, and we were playing. Red would put up with a lot from me. I would pet him too hard and try to ride him like a pony, and Red would let me do it. Hell, he would encourage me to do it by coming and standing right next to me! Of all the dogs I’ve had over the years, Red remains my favorite. He was like a protector for me. He knew that I was outside unsupervised, and he took it as his duty to look after me.
One day, I was sitting next to Red on the ground at my childhood home. I had a metal spoon in my hand, and I was digging up dirt (much to the annoyance of my mother). I found a worm, and I picked it up and showed it to Red. “We can use this to go fishing!” I exclaimed, although I had no real plan to go fishing. Normally, a finding such as this would elicit a minor interest from the old dog, but instead, Red growled. He was looking up the hill toward the road. There was a little girl standing there.
“Stop growling, Red! It’s someone to play with. You stay!” I pointed at Red, doing my best dominant dog owner impersonation that I picked up from my mom. Red was not having it. He ran up the hill toward the little girl, and fearing that he was going to bite her, I chased right after him. Red stopped short of her and began to growl more intensely, transitioning into an all-out barking spree. I grabbed him from behind. Now Red was more than capable of throwing me off and attacking the girl, but I guess he decided he’d be in more trouble for doing that than exposing me to the perceived threat. He stopped growling and licked me.
“No, Red! That is a bad dog! We do not growl at people! You can’t act like that!” I look up at the little girl, still holding the dog. “Listen, I’m sorry. He’s not a bad dog. He’s just not used to seeing anyone on top of the hill.”
“He is afraid of my scent,” the girl announced. I took a moment to take in the features of this most welcome guest. She had jet black hair that was styled into a bun. She was wearing a white skirt with a pattern of lilies on it and a lavender belt, and she had a long-sleeve dark white shirt on. Her sneakers had no discernible branding on them, so I figured they came from PayLess or somewhere cheap. She continued, “He did not view me as part of his pack, but your attempt to protect me has made him wonder if I am your aunt’s daughter. You can let him go. He will not bite me.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never seen him act like this. Are you sure you want me to let him go? I’m not sure that’s a good idea!” I shouted, still clenching Red tightly.
“It is perfectly safe. Can’t you read his thoughts!?” she asked me with a perplexed look on her face as she put her hands on her hips. What kind of question was that? I was too young to have mastered sarcastic humor, so as far as I could tell, she was completely serious. Her demeanor made it seem as if reading someone’s thoughts was the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Um, no?” I responded as I mentally went through all of my five years of life experience for any vaguely similar experience. “Can you read his thoughts? Are you like Dr. Dolittle with that? You can hear animals talk in their secret language?”
She giggled, presumably at the thought of her being like Dr. Dolittle. “Not quite. Animals do not have internal monologues – or at least not in the way that most humans do. They have patterns of thoughts that you can pick up on. But with humans, it’s different. I can see your memory engrams and search through them, and from this, I see that you don’t know about telepathic communication at all. Weird!”
“Wait, telepathic? Do you mean like in Zelda where Zelda sends the telepathic message to Link at the beginning?” I let Red free of my grasp, and he walked up to her. Timidly, she stuck her hand forward and tried to pet his head. However, Red evaded the petting and opted to lick her hand several times.
“It is exactly like A Link to the Past, yes. And that game looks very fun, by the way. We have some games where I’m from, but nothing like that. You get sent to another universe in the game?”
“Yeah, the Dark World. I’ve got the game in the house if you want to play it.” I turned back toward the house to yell at my mom and see if she can come. “Wait, what’s your name?”
“I do not have a name yet.”
“How can you not have a name? Are you an orphan?”
“No. My mother is from Arkansas, and my father is from the Philippines. I see them both once or twice a month, but I like to think of the Magonia crew as my family. There are other humans on board who have raised me. We don’t need names to identify each other, although the concept of naming is very interesting. I can see how it would be useful.”
“Um, ok. So what’s a Magonia?” I asked.
“It is a Mantean vessel from the Intergalactic Federation. They are here on an important mission, and it’s this mission that led to my being born,” she explained, matter-of-factly.
“Oh. My God! Are you telling me you’re in Starfleet? No way. You’re pulling some sort of prank on me! Did Billy put you up to this?” Inside, I was just hoping she would offer to prove what she was saying.
“Starfleet. So people on the surface wonder what it’s like to be in space, and this results in the creation of fictional stories? Interesting,” she opined.
“Yeah, people wonder about that. So you’ve gotta show me what it’s like so that I can tell them.” I was so excited. With no proof, this little girl on the side of the road had sold me on the existence of Starfleet. Maybe First Contact was happening. Maybe First Contact already happened and the government covered it up. I couldn’t be sure. But either way, she was saying Star Trek was real, and she automatically became the coolest person I knew.
“Actually, that’s what we’re here for. You’ll get to see the Magonia today!”
“We?” Ruh roh.
“Yes, we.” She moved her eyes to my left and to my right, indicating there people were behind me. I turned around, and my heart skipped several beats. Two Greys, like the ones I’d seen from the several Fox specials. To say that I was terrified beyond measure would be an understatement. Red cowered down on the ground and put his head underneath his paws. And then he fell asleep. I’d seen enough UFO Fox specials with Jonathan Frakes to know that they had put him in a trance sleep.
“Remain calm,” one of the Greys communicated… telepathically as they both put a hand on my shoulder. The girl clearly wasn’t lying about that or anything she said. “No harm will come to you.”
“MOM! HELP! ALIENS ARE TRYING TO ABDUCT ME!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Oh right, you switched her off, too, didn’t you!? You’re not probing my mom, are you!?”
“No. She is asleep, and she will remain asleep until you return,” the Greys simultaneously responded with telepathy. When two beings say the same thing to you simultaneously, there’s no echo. It’s one voice that’s speaking, and you just know that it’s multiple people talking.
I was unable to escape the surprisingly gentle grasp of the Greys, but that didn’t stop me from completely freaking out. “Aliens! ALIENS! Listen, little girl! When you said you were part of Starfleet, I didn’t realize you would be working with those aliens! I don’t want to be experimented on, and I don’t want to be probed. Do NOT probe me!” I shouted.
“The reports of our probings have been greatly exaggerated,” the little girl said with a faux-British accent as she tugged on her shirt, imitating one of my personal heroes.
“That’s… a really good impersonation of Captain Picard.” Although I was being abducted against my will, something about what the way she said that relaxed me just a little. She was a human being who was aware of what is happening. That alone added the faintest bit of normalcy, and I have no doubt that it kept me from having a heart attack at five years old. “Have you… seen the movie?”
“No, but you have, and I’ve seen your mind.” Then, with sincere conviction in her eyes, she said, “That movie was really scary. The Borg are scary. Like, you’re afraid of us because you’ve never seen an android, but those Borg cubes are way more terrifying than the boring old Magonia. In that one episode, the Enterprise shot a photon torpedo spread at the cube and it automatically regenerated! How!? The Borg have better technology than anyone in the universe! They could assimilate the whole Intergalactic Fleet with no trouble at all!” During this whole Star Trek nerdout, she was moving her arms around for emphasis and it ended with her arms expanding outward to convey ships exploding. Had I found true love at five years old?
Now I was five, but not stupid. I knew that she was trying to calm me by talking about something that I liked. And I didn’t want to be calm; I wanted to escape. Nevertheless, my inability to escape was being coupled with a resurgent curiosity that this young girl had brought on. I had to keep this conversation going. “Really? So your level of technology is more like the original Star Trek with Kirk?”
“Don’t worry, there are no parallel Earths or amorphous energy blobs that make you fight to the death.” She looked closely at me afterwards, waiting for the response that she knew was coming. In the midst of being abducted by aliens, I laughed.
“That’s amazing. You know more about Star Trek than anyone I know. Even my uncle doesn’t talk about how they always fight energy blobs in the first one!”
“Hey. I learned it all from you, and maybe after they examine you, I could show you a few things that are like the show. Would you like that?” She knew that I would like that.
“Y-yeah. That sounds like the coolest thing ever.” And suddenly, she’d sold me on being abducted by Grey aliens.
“Nicolas and human 56392, you can both continue this discussion aboard the Magonia. There is an automobile within two kilometers of our current position, and we must dematerialize before we are spotted.”
The girl came close to me and whispered something into my ear. “Prime Directive,” before walking over to the side of the Grey on my left.
“56392. Demonstrate your competency with initiating dematerialization.”
Human 56392 closed her eyes, scrunched up her face, and clenched her hands into fists. She then jumped. At this point, what I can only describe as a thick rolling fog started generating at the bottom of the hill. It spread in all directions, including ours. The fog became thicker and thicker. When it covered my eyes, it was grey at first, but within seconds, it became so thick that the sunlight couldn’t penetrate it. The grey fog color was quickly replaced by a piercing black nothingness.
And so there was nothing, until there was something.
“You’ve still got all of your limbs, right?” 56392 looked me over. “Nice.”
This concludes Chapter 1. Read the rest of the story on Amazon Kindle.