"He was constantly smoking."

There was this person in the woods up there who I saw who used to-he was like a child. I mentioned him in "Breakthrough." I saw him sitting under a tree, and I went up to him, and he made a growling sound. It scared me so bad that I ran all the way back to the house. And I've found places where I've found weird things in the woods. Like a little basket-type thing that had been made of twigs. It was so skillfully woven together, it looked like a woven basket, even though it was made of windfalls and twigs. It was just amazing. It had old, sort of discarded children's toys in it, and there were also lots of cigarette butts in it. This little creature or person used to smoke all the time. He was constantly smoking.

Now you would think that that was all sort of strangely dreamlike. And it had a very dreamlike quality to it, but then we moved down to San Antonio. The neighbors began to complain that there was this strange, like eleven-year-old child who smoked constantly and was climbing up the walls of the condo and stuff. There were very strange complaints coming in about this kid, to where people called the Social Services in San Antonio to say that there was this child who was being left to run wild.

Then we noticed there was someone standing in a little corner beside our condo. They would be standing about three feet from the head of my bed, but outside. We could see that they'd been standing there all night because we could see all these cigarette butts lying there. So we put in a motion sensitive light to drive them away from that corner, and everyone said it was this kid who used to stand out there and smoke. They used to see him standing there in the night. Then the condo behind us, it turned out, was being lived in by squatters who didn't belong there.

So the lady who owned it got the sheriff to clean the squatters out. This kid apparently was involved with them, because the day the squatters left, I was working in my little garden there, and suddenly this person-I had never laid eyes on this kid before-comes bursting around the corner of the building and goes starting off down the street. It was the same person who had been in my woods. The same blonde kid. I mean the same exact person. Even walked the same. And he goes off down the street and has never been seen again. Then they went in to clean that condo out, and they found that the place was dirty and filthy and full of M & Ms and pennies. Now you put that in your pipe and smoke it. I'm telling you, that is a weird story.

Q. It is.

Strieber: But do you see how it turns out that something that I would have kept questioning because it was just so weird turned out to have a totally physical reference? In other words, there was really somebody there. And in this case, the person the kids used to see in the woods is sort of the reverse. I mean they just took it as a person. The thing I'm trying to get at here is that I keep these things in question because I think it's the responsible thing to do. But in this particular case, I would be very surprised if that man wasn't as real as you and me.

There are things about this experience that imply that we don't see the complete world. That there are parts of the world that we're blind to, and that there are people living in those parts of the world that are not like us. They know more than we do. They live on a bigger scale than we do.

But there's something about some of them that's completely sinister and terrible, like that supposed eleven-year-old kid. When I saw him up close in my woods, you know what he looked like? Not like a child, but like someone whose body had quit maturing when they were about eleven, but who was now fifty. In other words, it looked like a weathered child. It was real weird. That kid in those woods looked at up close was real weird.

And what happened in San Antonio, although I never saw him that closely, so many other people saw him that it was weird, too. Very weird. The whole situation. He was kind of like an interloper. And the two men who lived in the condo with him, I talked to them. They chatted with me a couple of times. They must have known incredible secrets. They were living with someone from another dimension or something. That really creeps me out to think they were right behind me.

You know, Sean, I wonder who the hell I am. I wonder who I am. If I went back across my life, I could spend hours telling you stories like this. There's many things that have happened that I've never even put into books. Just incredible. It's like I live with my two feet in two different worlds. And they're both equally real.

Q. I know what you're saying. If a voice were to ask me who I am, I think my answer would be "I don't know."

Strieber: Well, exactly. We're all in that position here, aren't we?

"The essence of reality is not fact but question.
Fate is life lived. Accident is life let pass." - Whitley Strieber - The Key

Rollo