This is an attempt for National Novel Writing Month. It is not perfect. It's probably not even especially good yet. Xen is not going back to revise anything until he is completely done. So, deal with it.
"You don't?" Chrys asked.
"It is a long story. I live on Church Street, just a minute away. Why not come with me after to clear this all up?" He looked imploringly at Chrys, ignoring the cynic Jasmine.
Jasmine, however, was not keen to be ignored. "You are a stranger… you, in fact, might be a strangest. So, no, we won't be going with you. Dylan, could you pay so we could leave?"
Dylan looked, for the first time, a little flustered, as though uncertain of what to do now.
"Or," said Sterling in the moment of confusion, to seize it to his advantage, "I could pay the bill and you could come to my apartment and listen to what I have to say. Not a lot of people are going to put this much effort in trying to help you, you realize."
"I'm sure you are very nice, but we don't need your help," Jasmine said, offering her debit card to end the argument.
Chrys palmed the card on the table. "Jazz, maybe we do need help? Maybe not his, but he is here."
Jasmine looked into Chrys's huge eyes and tried to hold her resolve firm but found it wavering. "Fine, why don't you tell us a little of your story. I am not promising you that we will be convinced or will come with you. Actually, I pretty nearly can guarantee that I won't go with you and I sure as hell won't let my little sister go if I don't. Dylan can do what he wants. Fair enough?"
Sterling patted his stomach. "No, but the best I'm likely to get from you. I have been working with a local doctor concerning the presence of what people believe to be alien vehicles in the sky over the last few decades. I monitor the meetings for evidence of people becoming aware of the truth. I also, as you so clearly noticed, spread disinformation to keep the idle believers from clinging to anything too powerful."
Jasmine clucked her tongue. "So, you willingly lie to the credulous? Why?"
Sterling laughed in an air was as he sucked the meat from his last shrimp tail. "Have you ever believed in something so powerfully that is seemed real?"
Jasmine blushed at having revealed her Easter Bunny story. "Everyone has, as a kid. So?"
"So, if you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist."
"No," Jasmine said. "If you are suggesting that believing something makes it real, then why isn't Jesus roaming around granting miracles?"
"Because enough people disagree with what Jesus is to prevent him from… from manifesting, as such. And billions don't believe he existed at all. He is a legend, a myth. Something people ignore why committing acts in His name, even as they call themselves believers. But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized that they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter. The more people who believe, the stronger their presence can become."
"But I don't believe in them!" Jasmine shouted, too loudly. The small girl at the register looked up from her homework and again made a sour expression.
"And they are going to great efforts to convince you, it seems."
Dylan interrupted. "What do you mean?"
"The Grays, or whatever you want to call them, have a particular interest in Jasmine, since she is the apparent focus of these events. I can call the doctor up and, hopefully, we can hypnotize you all-separately, of course-and try to discover what occurred during your missing time. If we can uncover why they are interested, we can stop them."
"But we know why they are interested, because I took a picture of them," Chrys replied.
"No, you could take the picture because they were already interested in you. Whether you remember it or not, they've been interested in you for a while, probably."
"I'm really not comfortable with some stranger hypnotizing me--" Jasmine began.
"It's perfectly safe, I'll assure you of that. She is a consummate professional and very sympathetic to genuine abductees," Sterling interrupted.
"--But," Jasmine continued, "I don't know what happened today. And I know that I will feel violated and cheated if I don't. So I am willing to try it. Call your friend."
Sterling could barely contain his delight at this, tossing a handful of bills on the table, then running outside to call.
"Are we really going to do this?" Chrys asked.
"Do you want to?"
"No. Yes, but no," Chrys said. "I'm a little scared, you know?"
Jasmine put her hand on Chrys's knee. "Listen to me, I will never, never let something hurt you if I can stop it. You know that, right?"
Chrys hesitated, but then nodded. "I know."
"So, since it will only be one of us at a time hypnotized, we should be safe. And if I think we aren't, we'll leave that moment. Sterling is a nutbar, but he is sincere about all this lying… ironically."
"Disinformation," Dylan said. "It's a thing in the paranormal world, people spreading false information for the specific purpose of making sure people don't know what to believe. Mostly, it is to mock the community. Or, sometimes, to keep people to get to close to the truth."
Sterling returned to the table and said "the doctor" would be to his apartment within twenty minutes and was "very excited" to meet them. This, if anything, made Jasmine more reluctant. Had his doctor friend felt put out or even aggravated by meeting them on a moment's notice, Jasmine would have felt confident that this woman might be sensible. Now, she felt the uneasiness that the doctor might make Sterling look sane by comparison.
Sterling's apartment was on the top floor of an old building that had been divvied up into units, making them feel, to Jasmine, like shoddy dorms.
He offered them tea while they waited for the doctor. Jasmine demurred, not wanting anything to keep them here a moment longer than was necessary. Chrys accepted the hospitality, but even she was a little disappointed by the stale, grocery store tea offered to her.
"I'm sorry," Sterling said. "I am not used to having company."
Sterling said little more than this, leaving his guests to talk amongst themselves.
Jasmine jumped when she heard a knock on the door. Sterling answered and hugged a nearly skeletal, blonde woman. She traipsed in, nearly hovering above the floor on black high heels. Her eyes were set back in drawn face, as though sleep was something foreign to her. Her eyes darted to each of them, as though noticing with surprise that she was not alone with Sterling for the first time.
She glided up to Chrys and extended her hand. "You must be Jasmine, I look forward to hearing all about your experiences."
Jasmine stood in front of her sister. "I'm Jasmine, actually." She could tell that this upset the woman in an undisguised way, as she didn't care to hide how she felt. "So, what kind of a doctor are you?"
"I beg your pardon?" the woman said.
Chrys raised her eyebrows. "You are a doctor, right?"
"Oh, yes, I suppose. I have my doctorate."
"In what?"
The woman sucked her bottom lip into her mouth like an errant child. "Mm, New Age Music." The sisters' shoulders dropped in unison. "Oh, don't be like that. I am a professional."
"In what way?" Jasmine asked.
"I wrote a book all about the Pine Bush phenomena," the doctor answered, obvious pride puffing out her chest.
Jasmine realized then why the woman seemed familiar. "You wrote Quiet Infiltration. You are Eileen Diamond."
"Yes, you've read it?"
"Skimmed, mostly," Jasmine admitted. "You said that there are underground tungsten mines under the Jewish Cemetery, right?"
Sterling and Eileen burst into laughter. "Honey," Eileen said, "Don't tell me that you took that seriously?"
"No. No, absolutely not," Jasmine answered, feeling as though she had walked into a practical joke. "But why would you right it if you know it isn't true."
"Sit down," Eileen said, "And I'll explain."
The three complied, sitting on the ratty blue sofa. Sterling sat in an easy chair in the corner of the room, paying more attention to Dylan and the sisters than he did to his confederate. Dr. Diamond did not sit, maintaining her stance as a lecturer.
"It is important that people believe that the Grays are ridiculous. When people are laughing at those who go to the UFOS meetings, when people think that through sky watching in Pine Bush are nothing more than lunatics, then they do not give their believe to impossible interstellar beings with superior technology."
"But why?" asked Chrys.
"I don't know how much Sterling told you. To put it as poetically as possible, aliens are the children of the gods of modernity, the gods of science."
Dylan scoffed despite himself. "Like, literally?"
"Figuratively, but in a very solid way, yes. If you read through the literature, you will find innumerable mentions of people misconstruing visits with fairies and elves when they were really stolen away by aliens. The symptoms are identical: missing time or time flowing differently, a sense of unreality, everything getting eerily quiet, sexual abuse, children being taken or replaced, and so on. But they are just repurposing the evidence to suit our current mythology. In truth, people are experiencing the same things since time immemorial. But whatever it is comes from the mind and wears the trappings of what we expect it to be."
Jasmine nodded. "So, it's just something in our heads doing this?"
Eileen Diamond perked up. "Sort of, yes. But that doesn't mean it isn't still 'real', whatever that means to you."
"Because I absolutely didn't have interest in or believe in UFOs or aliens or anything like that, up to this. I still really don't. I mean, I once was told that I saw a ghost, but I think a coworker was just screwing with me."
Eileen Diamond clapped her hands together once. "Excellent. Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal. They want you to believe in them, to give them power. You," she said, approaching Chrys. "You took the picture of them that they want destroyed, right?"
"Sterling told you about that?"
The two exchanged a look. "Yes, he did. They do not like evidence like that, anything too definite because humanity's first instinct is to find flaws and debunk. They want to be discussed and portrayed, but never proven. They want to be credited as the true makers of the pyramids and lifters of Stonehenge when it had much more to do with the gods who were then extant. Do you understand?"
"I… I think so," Chrys said, though this was all a bit much for her to take in given that she casually allowed that UFOs and aliens might actually exist in her town to having them be a force worthy of conspiracy theories and meetings with strange doctors in attic apartments.
"I know what you must think of me if you read my book. It is insanity and I'm a clown, right?"
Jasmine looked away.
"That is the point. If I need to sully my reputation to get to them, I will do it." Dr. Diamond looked into the middle distance. "I have done that. I could have gotten a doctorate in psychology. I have a Master's in that. But then I might be seen as legitimate and people might actually believe what I wrote about. I can't let that happen."
"Why are you so dedicated to this?" Jasmine asked.
Dr. Diamond breathed in sharply. "They've been following me since I was a little girl. I would see the UFOs - I prefer to call them TLP for Transient Luminescent Phenomena because they are not unidentified - on my street as a kid, just hovering. I lost a lot of time, had unexplained bruises and injuries. Even when Child Protective Services placed me in a foster home for a few months, I would see them in the sky. I knew they were watching me. When I got old enough, I began to study them, tried to figure out why they chose me. I was barely out of diapers when it started, what aptitude or predilection could I have shown? Why did they want me and, if they did, why didn't they just take me? No one believed me and no one could have stopped them even if they did. Or did they take me, only to return me absent of memories and a few hours? How would I know? The more I learned, the more I realized that there were untold generations that had been stalked since birth by something they could neither understand nor control. They captured us like fish and implanted these beliefs in us. But I dedicated myself to stopping them the only way I could, by undermining their source of power." She looked intensely out the window, as though all her childhood fears waited on the other side of the glass and were about to slowly rise into her line of vision. Then, she clapped her hands again, snapping them all to attention. "So, who would like to be hypnotized first?"
Jasmine volunteered to be put under because she gathered that she was the least suggestible to all of this. It was not important to her for this to be true. She would, in fact, have rather lost half the day to a gas leak. Plus, she had to admit, she would rather experience Dr. Diamond's hypnosis first to protect Chrys from it if it turned out to be harmful.
Chrys and Dylan joined Sterling in another room so their hypnosis would not be tainted by Jasmine's recollections.
"Now, you should just relax," Diamond said in a humming, low voice. "This isn't going to be scary or uncomfortable. I am not going to ask you to do anything more than talk to me. I will be recording our session for you to listen to in private later. You don't have to share your recording, it is just for you to know what happened. If you become distressed, we will end our session. Do you understand?"
Jasmine nodded, folding her hands in her lap and closing her eyes.
"You can keep your eyes open for now. Are you ready to begin?"
Jasmine nodded again. She thought it would involve swinging pocket watches. Instead, Dr. Diamond simply asked Jasmine to follow her finger with her eyes and spoke in soothing tones. Soon, Jasmine was under.
Jasmine roused to the machine clicking off.
"It's over?" she asked.
"Mmm," Dr. Diamond replied.
"How did I do?"
Dr. Diamond looked past her while saying, "You did great. I can't say anymore until after I speak with your friends so as to not skew the results." Diamond handed Jasmine a disk. "Listen to this later in a place where you feel safe."
"She's my sister."
"Excuse me?"
Jasmine put the disk in her purse, nestling it safely in a paperback. "Chrysanthemum--Chrys. She's my sister, not my friend."
Dr. Diamond eyed Jasmine. "Biologically?"
"Yes. Same parents. Recessive alleles," Jasmine summarized. "So don't do anything to her that is going to hurt her. She believes in all this weirdness. I think she is just looking for her place, you know? She's still basically a kid."
Dr. Diamond smoothed her skirt over her painfully thin legs. "Okay, yeah. I'll be gentle, I promise... She's lucky to have you."
"She doesn't think so."
Dylan went in next. Jasmine huddled next to Chrys on the edge of Sterling's bed, her muscles tense. She had not thought to imagine where Chrys had been during her hypnosis, but would not have acceded to be away from her had she known.
Chrys wore large, green, noise-cancelling headphones and bopped her head along with an animated musical on the television. Another pair lay unused on the bed, whispering out songs. Sterling, typing rapidly on his computer, explained that the headphones were to assure privacy and the authenticity of the hypnosis. Jasmine refused the headphones and, as she had finished her session, Sterling thought better of arguing the point.
She heard occasional murmurs and, once, Dylan shouting. Sterling held up a finger, warning Jasmine not to leave the room. "It is best not to disturb a session in progress. Your friend is reliving something traumatic and being brought back here all at once could damage his psyche. I swear, Eileen will keep him safe."
She returned to the edge of the bed. Chrys looked up and asked, "What?" Jasmine mouthed back that everything was fine, preventing her sister from removing the headphones and hearing Dylan scream.
"Did I scream like that?" she ask Sterling when Chrys had settled again.
Sterling glanced up from his computer at her for a moment. "I would prefer not to say. Listen to your disk."
"Fine," she replied, unhooking the vacant set of headphones. "Lend me your computer."
"No. It would be unethical to let you do that here. You need some space, both physically and emotionally."
Jasmine glared but, seeing Sterling refusing to relent, gave up and sorted the contents of her purse until Dylan returned and it was her sister's turn in the chair.
"How was it?" Chrys asked him as they passed.
"Really chill," he said with a lethargic grin. "You'll be fine." He patted her on the shoulder and she was out the door.
Dylan dropped onto the bed next to Jasmine, who asked him, "How was it really?"
"I don't remember. I feel relaxed, but the sort of way you do after you cry a lot. You?"
"Yeah, I can see that." She bit her lip, finally deciding to say it. "You screamed a bit at one point."
He looked at her as though waiting for the punch line, but she had none to give. "I did? that's... jarring."
"Did I?" Jasmine asked.
He shrugged. "I don't know. Headphones."
The two of them silently eschewed the headphones and strained to listen to what was happening to Chrys. They heard the two female murmurs, Dr. Diamond's low hum versus Chrys's high song. No screams came, nor did Chrys raise her voice once.
Forty-five minutes later, Chrys skipped in, disk in hand. They both briefly queried her as to her experience, but she only smiled and said she knew nothing.
The three, followed by Sterling, exited the room to see Dr. Diamond, fixing her hair and looking flustered. She stood to greet them again. "You've all been through something a little trying today. I encourage you to listen to your sessions as soon as is possible. And please," she said, eyes flaring for emphasis, "keep these private. It does no one any good for this information to get out." She grabbed for her jacket and bag quickly. "Now, I really have to be going."
"Wait, are we going to be left alone now?" Jasmine asked, standing in front of the door.
"You'll know when you listen to your disks, I assure you--" Dr. Diamond began.
"Just tell us," Jasmine begged.
"No. They will never leave you two alone," she said to the sisters. "You," she pointed to Dylan, "are collateral damage, I think. You have nothing they want."
"And we do?" Chrys asked. "What?"
"Listen to the disks," she reiterated, her voice shaking. "Separately. But don't give into them. And don't let them guess what you know. They can be cruel."
"How do you know?" Dylan asked.
Dr. Diamond shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Then she grabbed at her scalp and pulled off her hair. Underneath, her head was completely bald. She looked like a clay version of a person, half finished. The three jumped back and Dylan pushed Jasmine behind him, who pushed Chrys behind her.
"You're an alien?!" Chrys shouted.
Jasmine moved from behind them and took a step toward Dr. Diamond. "No, you doof, she's doing chemo. She has cancer."
Dylan came closer. "That part in your book, where you found something so radioactive that it broke a Geiger counter... that wasn't fiction."
"No. A brain tumor," she explained, reiterating, "They can be cruel."
Pine Bush is a serialized novel being written by Xen. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is syndicated throughout the internet and will write for you if you pay him.
