Memories

My whole life I've felt like someone was following me.  Or something.

Growing up, my bedroom window looked down on a line of trees, the boundary of Sutcliffe Woods.  One night I couldn't sleep and looked out the window and saw a man beyond the treeline.  He was looking right back up at me.  I could barely make him out but he stood calmly and looked up at me.  I backed away from the window and froze for a moment.  When I looked back the man was gone.

Polaroid of me when I was 6

My mom says I started sleepwalking as soon as I learned how to walk.  She said I eventually stopped doing it but that when I was five there was a period of months where I did it almost nightly.  It seems that I didn't fully outgrow it.

It began as a series of strange dreams, or I thought they were dreams.  Turns out they were memories of me walking places, doing weird things.  Other times weird things happened to me.

When I was 14, Billy Murphy told me that the woods around Fairmount Park were satanic worshiping grounds.  He said if you walked straight into the thickest part of the woods and kept going you'd find people in robes sacrificing animals and babies and that sort of thing.  I figured he was trying to get my goat but I never forgot it.

A few years later, I was 17 and my dad had moved us to McGuire air force base.  I was supposed to meet some new friends I met at a party.  They wanted to meet in the woods at the edge of Fairmount.  I told them I used to live near there and that I'd meet them.  My phone died.  I didn't repeat what Billy told me.  They wanted to meet around 10:30, after the park was closed.  The moon made it easy to walk through the relatively tree-less park but as I entered the woods it became much darker.  I pulled out my cell phone, still dead.  Soon, I was deep in the woods and couldn't see or hear much of anything.  I decided to turn back assuming I'd been stood up.  Just as I turned around I heard something behind me.  Following me.  I stopped.  All was quiet.  I kept walking.  I could hear it again.  I slowed down.  Was it just an echo?  Was I hearing myself?  No, it was something else, moving closer.  My pace quickened.  I looked back and couldn't see what it was but it was keeping up with me.  I kept running.  I could see the moonlight.  I arrived at the clearing and kept running.  I looked back and there it was.  A tall, thin man, wearing a black bodysuit which covered his face, except for his eyes.  Holes were cut in the skintight mask.  He stood at the edge of the woods and didn't follow me into the clearing of the park.  I kept running and he just stood there.

I have thought a lot about the man in the woods.  Sure, it could've been one of my friends pulling a prank but when I think about it in the context of other events in my life it seems part of a larger pattern.  Billy Murphy may have been wrong about the satanic cult but he was right that something was going on in those woods.  Or at least I thought it was the woods.

I was always a forgetful kid but things were disappearing and reappearing in ways I couldn't explain.  One Thursday morning I woke up and my alarm clock was flipped upside down.  I know it was a Thursday because for months after that, my alarm clock would be flipped over every Thursday morning.

I spent large portions of middle and high school on the base.  Pop was always working and pretty short if you asked him what he was working on.  I always pretended he was a top secret agent and he couldn't tell me about his work or else he'd have to kill me.

That house was the first I'd lived in that had a basement.  I rarely was allowed down there.  It terrified me.  I remember once during a rainstorm my mom asked me to go out and fetch the mail in the rain.  I couldn't find my shoes.  I searched the entire house three times over.  Finally I looked down in the basement and they were tucked under a bunch of clothes in a closet.  It was the weirdest thing.  I put on my shoes and went out into the rain.

I used to wake up to the sound of jets taking off and go to sleep to the sound of them landing.  I could watch the end of the runway from my bedroom window.

I used to stare out that window at all hours, wondering if I'd ever see the man who follows me, out there, staring back at me.

One day there was a lot of commotion because an aircraft had been stolen and they spent half a day tracking it down.

Another time there was an evacuation because a batch of missiles had been armed accidentally.  No one knows who did it or how it happened.  Luckily it was shut off before the countdown completed.

It was sometime after those events at the base that I began having weird dreams.  I don't know how they compared to the ones when I was young because I don't remember those.  I remember these.  I dreamt of a tree.  Over and over.  First it was just a flower, I had a dream that showed me the whole history of this flower like it was a documentary.  Then of subsequent nights I saw the trunk and the roots and then the branches and finally I dreamt about the whole tree.  I had to find this tree.  I knew it was real.

When I was eight or nine my dad took us on a vacation in Hawaii.  Our hotel looked out at another hotel.  When I was on the balcony I noticed someone in the window across from ours. They remained motionless for over an hour.  So still I started thinking it must be a lamp of some kind but when I looked back later that night, it had moved.

I had more dreams about the tree.  I used to be the ultimate skeptic.  I thought anybody that believed this stuff was nuts.  I used to be a loud skeptic.  I remember everything.  By body freaked out and tried to forget it but I remember everything.

The tree wasn't just a dream.  It was real, I'd been there.  It wasn't anywhere near the base. 

The tree was in Utah  I had to go there.

I'd been searching for it for years and I saw it in a film tv and realized it was a lone Juniper somewhere in Moab.  It looked just like the tree from my dream.

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Stan Parks is a sci-fi author of many books including his latest 
publication titled "Visitors" which is autobiographical.