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Lights Out, Nobody’s Home, and the Absinthe Green Schnapps Keep Calling

If you had the opportunity to meet an entity from another world, would you take it?

By Amethyst QuPublished about a year ago 6 min read
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Art by the author from a photo by the author

It was 1999, maybe early 2000. Under the influence of multiple green apple martinis, I had wandered alone into a mostly empty theater showing The Blair Witch Project. Drunk when I stumbled in, drunk when I stumbled out, I found myself walking lost and long through dark, strangely empty streets.

For years after — blame it on the martinis — I had a vague impression this movie was set in upstate New York. It wasn’t.

I had the impression because of the sticks. I’d heard of these sticks before in Karl Edward Wagner’s bluntly titled story, “Sticks.”

Some of us believed this story wasn’t quite a story. We thought it was a fictionalization of what Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye supposedly told Wagner or, at least, supposedly told someone who told Wagner about a bizarre 1938 encounter he’d had with these sticks in upstate New York.

Entities, hauntings, ghosts must come from somewhere. The popular theory is that they are the remnants of the dead.

I have long doubted this theory.

My relatively few encounters with invisibles have left me with a powerful sensation of otherness. They are alien, not merely the fading traces of us.

Well.

Wander in the dark long enough, and you emerge into the light. Even in 1999. Or was it 2000?

This light glowed soft green in a square window. The rest of the street was dark. It had rained, but when had it rained? I wasn’t wet. I pushed in on a glass door to the song of wind chimes.

There was no one behind the bar, much less on my side of it.

Where was everyone? It must be later than I thought. The bar was closed, but they’d forgotten to lock up. Whoever worked here was in the back office or maybe in a basement. Cleaning, counting money.

It was the lingering influence of the apple martinis that persuaded me to walk around the counter and pour myself a shot of sour apple schnapps. The drink takes a drink, as they say. I tossed it over my taste buds and swallowed. Slapped a ten on the counter. Walked out again, restless, restless.

I had it in my mind that I could find one of these alien stick-cairns for myself. Not tonight and not in this town or any town, but surely on some night and in some stranger place.

They were temporary structures, these haystacks made of twigs into tripods, tents, and dolls. Someone must keep them maintained.

The ones Coye and/or Wagner described were upstate. Therefore, the “someone” who kept them maintained must be aligned with the regular UFO flaps seen in the Hudson Valley area. This seemed logical to me, a Southerner whose limited grip on New York geography came from reading Joyce Carol Oates and sensationalist 1980s-era UFO encounter reports.

Even now, my apple-martini-fueled hypothesis seems to make a certain sort of sense. To me, anyway.

Perhaps you would require way better drugs than apple schnapps.

Anyway, the theory: There were no ghosts of dead people building outsider art in the middle of nowhere. Rather, there were advanced visitors from another world camping out. For whatever reason, they couldn’t return to their own world. Refugees? Escaped criminals? Hell if I know, the hypothesis didn’t dig that deep into it.

I was thinking more about the sticks.

They’re no evidence of high technology. They’re maybe art or a little bit religion. Magic objects built with bare hands instead of tools. Placed with a prayer to bring the people closer to that day when their lost colony might be found again.

When the people might be restored to their proper place among the stars.

Walking, thinking, I burned with an intense desire to see these mysterious visitors in the process of creating their mysterious art. However, I had zero desire to wander around the tick-infested forests of the Northeast, where Lyme Disease had been endemic for years and disabled at least three birders I knew.

Besides, the structures in New York were washed away in a flood. Or so said somebody who said they heard it back in the day from Lee Brown Coye himself.

It was late. I looked at my watch. It had stopped. I shook it. Like that was going to make it start ticking again?

I returned to my walking meditation.

Where else could you expect to see any number of free-flying UFOs? Hot Springs, Arkansas. The great crystals growing under the earth pulled the space beings to those forests. Lots of my friends had seen UFOs in the area. They’d been telling me for years they could show me where.

The green light had gone out, or else I had walked too far away to see it anymore. It was very dark. The streetlights seemed to be out.

Come to think of it, I couldn’t see any lights on anywhere.

A power outage. Must be.

A pang of unease thrilled through me. Was it wise for me to be wandering alone at such an hour? My senses were keen, and I was good at not letting people follow me, and, anyway, there was no one around, I hadn’t seen a soul for hours, but…

You shouldn’t think I lacked all sense of caution.

For all my wandering — which included hikes on a decent number of trails around Hot Springs — I always avoided the ones where my friends told me they’d seen UFOs.

Ridiculous to be afraid. Ridiculous to be avoidant.

I wouldn’t have had to hike those trails alone. My friends would take me, they’d offered. Several claimed to know the spots where you were pretty much guaranteed a sighting.

One of them even had a side hustle of taking people to see the UFOs, and I never heard of anyone demanding their money back in a huff.

So I could go.

And I could see those mysterious visitors.

If I wanted to.

If I went.

And yet, for years, I didn’t go. What lit the fire in my blood that night?

Well.

It was not too late. Not yet.

The side hustle friend still needed money. He always did and always would.

And if he wasn’t around, other people would be.

So I could do this. I really could. No different than you’d call around and order up a sighting of a rare bird.

There. It was decided.

When I got home, I would call around the Arkansas crew. Ask who’d seen any structures made of sticks. Ask who wanted to join me in a search.

Why couldn’t we find some of these sticks there instead of New York? In 1999 or 2000 instead of 1938? Yes, we could. Of course, we could. It would even be easy.

But the martinis were beginning to wear off. A spot of pink had appeared low in the sky between two buildings.

That must be the east, that must be the dawn.

Time to head home and sleep it off.

.

Author's Note

This short weird fiction was originally published elsewhere behind a paywall but is now available here for your Halloween entertainment. It was originally sparked by the same Vocal Media prompt that inspired this very different story:

Horror
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About the Creator

Amethyst Qu

Seeker, traveler, birder, crystal collector, photographer. I sometimes visit the mysterious side of life. Author of "The Moldavite Message" and "Crystal Magick, Meditation, and Manifestation."

https://linktr.ee/amethystqu

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