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On October 4. 1985, my wife, son, and I drove up to our cabin in the company
of two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.
We have known Jacques and Annie for about five years. The thing about them
most immediately apparent is that he is as enormous as she is tiny. He weighs
nearly 300 pounds, is a black belt in karate, d does a hundred push-ups at a
session. She is also a black belt, but weighs perhaps 120 pounds. She is
intellectual, he is physical. Both are writers. He came to the United States
as a refugee from slave labor in the Soviet Union in the late forties. A
Rumanian national, he had been forcibly transferred to the Donbas region to be
worked to
death in the mines there. His book, Donbas
, tells of his long Journey of escape, and paints an accurate picture of him
as a profoundly physical man. He would make a good witness, I
thought, because of his steadfast sense of reality.
Annie Gottlieb is more an intellectual, the author of the recent
Do You Believe fn Magic:
The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation
(Times Books, 1987).
The night of October 4 was foggy in Ulster County. We had dinner at a local
restaurant and arrived at the cabin at about nine in the evening. I turned on
the pool heater so that the pool would be comfortable for use the next day
(Saturday). Then I lit a fire in the wood stove:
We were all sleepy, so sleepy that we went off to bed almost immediately.
Anne and I retired to our upstairs bedroom, Jacques and Annie went to the
guest room and closed the door, and our son went to his corner bedroom beside
theirs. He left his door open. From my bed, with the bedroom doors open, I
could see out across the cathedral ceiling of the living room to a hexagonal
window set in the peak of the roof.
Over the next hour, the fog grew thicker and thicker. When I turned out my
reading fight
I was enveloped in absolute blackness and total silence. The harvest moon had
been full on
September 29, and was now at about half. It rose at approximately ten-thirty,
but was entirely invisible because of the cloud cover.
I do not remember what I had been reading that night, but it wasn't
frightening, nor was dinner the sort of meal that would give rise to later
unrest. We had not drunk more than one glass of wine and a drink each at the
restaurant.
I slept dreamlessly for some period of time, perhaps as much as two or three
hours. Then
I was startled awake and saw, to my horror, that there was a distinct blue
light being cast on the living-room ceiling.
I was frightened, because it wasn't possible for there to be any light there.
Car lights from the road could not be cast on that ceiling. In early October
our neighbor was away in Japan, and his house was not only dark but invisible
through the forest between our places, which was still thickly leafed. The
automatic porch light that had been persistently troublesome was now without
bulbs. It could not have been a flashlight, because it was so uniform and so
broad, and so distinctly blue. We have tried duplicating the light with a
fluorescent camp lantern both on a clear night and on a similarly foggy one,
but even an extremely powerful fluorescent light could not achieve the effect,
let alone a small portable unit.
My mind inventoried the possibilities as I watched this blue light slowly
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creep up the ceiling, as if whatever was causing it were slowly moving down
into the front yard from above. Finally I hit on what seemed to me a sensible
solution: The chimney must be on fire and dropping sparks into the front yard.
I had to do something about it at once.
Then I fell into a deep sleep! The last thought I remember before dropping off
with my heart still hammering was that the roof was on fire. This was the
first such wildly inappropriate reaction on that night, but it was not to be
the last.
I do not know what time this all took place, but it was well after midnight.
Sometime after I fell back to sleep I was again awakened, this time by a loud [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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