transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] SpectreVision Radio.

Speaker 2:
[00:07] Hi, this is Marcy.

Speaker 3:
[00:10] And this is Betsy.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] And we're from A Funny Feeling Podcast.

Speaker 3:
[00:15] We're comedians and paranormal enthusiasts who love getting scared.

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[00:21] Each week on our podcast, we read and listen to stories from you, the audience, and we have our funny friends come on and tell us their paranormal experiences.

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[00:30] Yeah, previous guests include Nicole Byer, Darcy Carden, Aubrey Plaza, Brian Saffey, Mike Mitchell, Jim Harrold, The Goat, and Ammon Christine from And That's Why We Drink, Dudes.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] So come on over and listen to us.

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[00:50] We're talking about ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, cryptids, Ouija boards falling from the sky, anything and everything. You gotta check it out.

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[01:02] Not to brag, but we have over 400 episodes. So come check us out over at A Funny Feeling. Don't...

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[01:10] F*** your pants!

Speaker 2:
[01:12] Coming to you from SpectreVision Radio.

Speaker 3:
[01:20] SpectreVision Radio.

Speaker 4:
[01:52] My name is John Vesco. When I was nine, something strange happened with my mother. She was a completely normal mom to me, and not in the least bit superstitious or religious or over imaginative. But on Halloween night, she suddenly wouldn't let me go trick or treating for some reason, just would not allow it. She had some kind of talk with my father behind closed doors and got upset. And in the end, she took me to a kids party at the community center, which was actually not bad at all. That night, a drunk guy in a van struck a power pole on the street where every homeowner agreed to go all out with their decorations every year, create a real carnival atmosphere. And the downed line conducted a fatal charge along a metal fence to a spot a man and woman were standing beside. They were dressed as creepy dolls. They were both killed. That street would have been the first stop on my rounds that night. I didn't learn till a year later that my mother believed she had dreamed of the accident the night before, seeing it only through fuzzy shapes and disconnected images that still left her convinced when she woke up that something terrible might happen to me if I went out that night. Growing up, that was the one and only time my mother ever exhibited anything even remotely like precognition. She only became more and more embarrassed by the whole episode and didn't like to talk about it. I only write of it now because of what happened with her decades later, at the very, very end of the timeline I want to describe to you here. Ten years after that outlier Halloween, I got the part of Peter Patrone in the University of Florida's production of The Heidi Chronicles. Not bad. I was on stage during a rehearsal when the episode struck. Feeling perfectly healthy up until that moment, I was seized by a sudden deep cough, not like anything I'd ever suffered. I tried to struggle through it, but I just couldn't go on. For almost five painful minutes, I was virtually doubled over, my throat and chest spasming brutally every 20 seconds or so. It was like my body desperately needed to expel something, but just couldn't do it. I stumbled off the set and collapsed in a chair backstage as dry, hacking heaves rendered me useless. Fellow cast members brought me water. They slapped my back. Nothing worked. And then the coughing simply ended. There was no fade out, just a hard stop. My throat hurt, my lungs hurt, my head was throbbing, but it was over. Rehearsal went on after I had more to drink and a candy bar to regain some energy. The cough struck me again five days later as I was walking across campus without any warning or any other symptoms. The force of it left me unable to even walk right, and I had to brace myself on a bench while the attack played out. People stopped and asked if I was okay. My whole body contorted with each eight or ten second spasm, between which I had about twenty seconds to take deep breaths and try to calm myself. My heart settled a little, and my eyes stopped watering, and then here came another inhale deep enough to make my back arch, followed by coughing that seemed to generate from a place below even my stomach. I could feel the force of it in my heels. Something wanted out, but what that might be was a complete mystery. The grotesque sounds I made, the feeling that I was tearing up my insides, and the fear of what might come up my throat, all properly traumatized me. And helpless on that bench, I was creating a frightening public spectacle. Someone wanted to call for an ambulance, and I was just about to agree when it all stopped cold once again. It was like the expelling mechanism had admitted defeat. As soon as I could stop shaking, I made my way to the walk-in clinic down the road. The less said about that first consultation, the better, because it was useless. It wasn't until a full three weeks, and another four coughing attacks later, the last one being so violent that my throat was hoarse for a whole day and a half, that I began to be taken seriously. I just had a fairly fruitless couple of tests run, including an upper endoscopy, and suffered through an unsatisfying exchange with a new doctor about what could be wrong with me. Leaving his office, I wondered if I'd gained anything at all there. As I waited for the bus a half block from the building, I felt my lungs filling up and my back arching, and I closed my eyes and waited for the hacking to start. I found myself in the middle of a full-fledged attack. I ran straight as I could back into the doctor's waiting room and to the front desk, needing him to witness this. They led me back, and he got to see almost half my agony that afternoon. I hadn't been able to perfectly describe my symptoms, and had vowed to video record myself on my phone the next time they came, but now here they were, live. They seemed to visibly alarm him. I was given a round of chest x-rays after that display, and a CT scan, and a full blood test. They all came back hinting I likely wouldn't be facing the most serious worries, which I'll spare you from mentioning here. The culprit this doctor wanted to target was allergies, so cue a lot of pesky little shots, and the beginning of a weeks-long elimination procedure, striking various foods and liquids and behaviors from my diet. The results were totally inconclusive. The mystery remained. The process of whittling down the possibilities, scared and worried me so much that my schoolwork began to suffer. My parents were stressed, too. My friends were just plain weirded out. I lay awake at night knowing something was very, very wrong, and just waiting for that next attack, plus the 36 hours of aches a bad one left behind. Muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatories prescribed to ease the pain made me sleepy and listless. One day in mid-November, I told the director of The Heidi Chronicles that I didn't feel comfortable taking the stage live in case an attack happened, something that could ruin the play, and that maybe the guy who had also been learning the part should take over. I was heartbroken when I told her that. Bless her heart, I still remember her shaking her head so forcefully and saying, We're going to take that chance. This is not the opening night of King Lear at the Globe Theatre. This is a learning experience. I almost collapsed in relief at the party held to celebrate the end of our sixth and final performance. I had very nervously gotten through my commitment. Everyone went out to a bar nearby and we had a good time. Though I knew deep down I hadn't been very good in my part. I'd become unfocused, constantly distracted, haunted is a word I might use, haunted by illness, haunted by paranoia about my health. When the worst attack so far hit me in the middle of that cheery hour, the usual gaggle of concerned faces and sympathetic words swarmed around me as I waved off a possible ambulance and asked for help getting outside, where the awkward silences between my coughing spasms were an awful contrast to the music and fun we had to leave behind. Once out the door, I forced my cell phone into the hand of a friend and said, record this. When she failed to respond fast enough, I was much sharper with her than I meant to be, yelling at her. It was for the doctor. I heard the word Heimlich spoken and had to physically ward off one of the play's stagehands as I tried to tell them this simply had to play out. The attack went on longer than normal. I wound up on my hands and knees on the crumbling sidewalk where someone had obviously spilled a beer just minutes before. They finally helped me to my feet and the girl who had recorded the meltdown handed my phone to me and took an involuntary step back as if she were afraid to catch what I might have. Dude, you need a specialist, she said somewhat coldly. And that was very true. What came next? Further tests for acid reflux, for nerve hypersensitivity. I underwent spirometry and a bronchoscopy to determine how badly I was hurting myself with the coughs. There was the danger of a collapsed lung to contend with, of bruising bad enough to make swallowing painful for days, and possibly even internal bleeding. I even tried cough reflex desensitization therapy. I was given something called a cough pillow to hold against my chest in key moments. That actually helped a little. Somewhere in there, the coughs were analyzed on audio, and I remember a nurse having a grim chuckle with me about the tacky colors on the waveforms that danced across a digital screen as the recording of my hacking entertained us. And I got two free massages because I'd been pulling something in my lower back during the spells. At some point, one specialist suggested environmental factors were most likely a cause of the attacks, and my dorm was thoroughly snooped around by a pair of graduate students finishing their degrees in environmental engineering. They didn't find a mold or asbestos or organic compound problem bad enough to delve into further. I was finally referred to a neurologist who suspected nerve dysfunction and faulty brain signals. Maybe my body was being fooled to believe there was an irritated present when there wasn't. Into the MRI tube I went. I wound up being prescribed two neuromodulators, which felt like desperation to me. These were the fourth and fifth medications I'd been put on since November. As all of this dragged on, I began to live daily in fear and confusion and ultimately doubt about my sanity, about whether the cause of my body's rebellion was housed somewhere unattainable inside my fevered mind. Finally I was convinced to enter the Caesar Creek Clinic for three days by the doctor I was most impressed by, Rashaun Corbett, an adjunct professor up at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He talked to me straighter than anyone had. He was most interested in studying the product of my coughing. The microscopic dust, pollen, moisture and cells brought up from my airways. It had all been collected in various sterile containers. The body has a lot of secrets, Dr. Corbett told me in an exam room at the clinic, where my three days would cost my parents enough money to make paying for the next year of my education a real hurdle. As a real medical nerd, this mystery interests me, he went on. I asked him flatly what the chances were that my brain was the problem here. He took the time to tell me a little anecdote from his two years studying in Lithuania almost 20 years before. A child of 13 had been brought in with unexplained tingling all over his body that had been going on for months, utterly baffling, no known cause. The boy's father had taken Dr. Corbett aside at one point and told him in hushed tones that the family had a ghost in the house. In the chimney. The boy's dead uncle. When the ghost had come, so had the tingling. Maybe if the ghost were run off? Corbett shrugged. He couldn't tell me much more about that case, but the point was that moment actually opened up other avenues of investigation. No one called in ghostbusters or an exorcist, but they had to entirely rethink the boy's history and the father's history and their entire environment. If you don't explore the nooks and crannies, Dr. Corbett said, you risk missing the important things. His words may not have soothed me, but his sense of calm did. We even bonded a little because he was a fellow actor. After having played Sam in a Morehouse production of Master Harold and the Boys back in the day. So I was in a slightly better state of mind until my second day at the clinic at about two o'clock. This was a couple of hours after some friends paid me a sympathy visit and even brought me a gag gift, a carton of cigarettes. They so badly wanted to make me feel better because this was my spring break. The clinic, which, nice and casual as the staff had made it, was still crushing to my soul. I'd be having a session with a talk therapist that afternoon, in addition to a new round of physical tests. I was in the community room, messing around with an old school electronic chessboard when the coughs came. The people at the clinic were all over it. I was guided into a prepped room by two attentive nurses, and Dr. Corbett was there in a heartbeat. One of the nurses held my wrist gently as I curled up on a half sofa and endured. My chest pillow was applied, squeezed in both my arms against my sternum. I had been asked to try to cough as much as I could into a special open tray treated with an invisible layer of some kind of reacting solution. I only did a so-so job. I was encouraged not to talk between coughs. Toward the end of the five-minute fit, the thing happened. I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, and one of the nurses was holding a cup of restorative medication for when I needed to drink it to ease the pain. Just a second before I reached out to it, a feeling came over me that I still can't describe persuasively. The nurse would later tell me my eyes became kind of wild suddenly, and she knew something was very wrong. It was like a profound and repressed physical hunger had built up over days and suddenly struck me all at once, an overpowering impulse to gorge. But for food itself, there was no desire. But it was more than that. I felt a blind primal compulsion to suddenly protect what was mine. Before anyone knew what was wrong with me, I had lunged back toward the tray, sitting on a rolling cart halfway across the room, striking away helping hands that instinctively reached out to settle me. I knocked the cup of meds out of the nurse's hand, as if it were a barrier to my frantic desire. Dr. Corbett put a restraining hand on my shoulder, and I bowled my way roughly past him, almost knocking over the rolling cart. I bent my head desperately over the tray that had collected the biological product of my coughs. I stuck out my tongue, and I began, almost panting, to lick its surface. Then more hands were on me. No longer quite a man, more of a desperate animal. I literally fought them off. I felt that if I did not keep licking, consume him, I would die. They forced me back onto the sofa. I cried out, clawing for the tray one more time. But in some dark way, I had been satisfied. And within seconds, I had no more capacity or compulsion for violence. Very soon after, did the shame and horror and embarrassment flow over me as Dr. Corbett did his best to soothe the madman before him. Then I put my head in my hands and asked for his forgiveness. That night, convinced I had gone insane, I harbored my first thoughts of suicide. I left the Caesar Creek Clinic two days later than expected. Dr. Corbett came to see me just before I was signed out for good. It had already been arranged that my talk therapy would continue while we awaited the results of a new leukocyte test. We had already tirelessly reviewed my bizarre episode, and I had done all I could to express what it had felt like. He wasn't there about that. He held a clipboard containing so many loose pages that they strained to bursting against its metal tooth. He had some news that may or may not comfort me. I was not alone, after all. Reports of others who shared my strange affliction were coming in. Not just locally. They were from everywhere. What about the last part? I asked. Surely not that too? Yes, he told me. That part too. And he sat down to share with me the notes he'd taken. And guess what? Not only did that scary freak urge, the trace memory of which lingered for years, never return, but neither did the coughing. Not one time in my life. Ever. Having apparently gotten exactly what it wanted, my traitorous body released me from bondage. It would be three and a half decades before I'd return to a doctor with symptoms concerning enough to schedule a special appointment. That's one hell of a run of health, as if the coughs had traumatized me right into a better immune system. Just after I turned 55, I nervously entered the office of a primary care physician, feeling a familiar trickle of fear. I'd felt it for days now and had put off my appointment mostly because I couldn't bring myself to plunge back into the terrible frantic state of mind that had engulfed me back in college and finally made me think briefly of killing myself. By then, of course, the history of what eventually came to be awkwardly called unprogrammed recursive tussus had mostly been written. In all, more than 18,000 cases of URT were documented, each involving a progressively intense series of deep hacking coughs that rendered the sufferer frightened and confused and bodily damaged. Ninety-one deaths had been caused by the sheer force of the coughing, though most of these poor souls had pre-existing conditions that rendered them unable to cope. There were 1,310 known cases of URT victims attempting to revoltingly lap up the product of their attacks. You could even watch a few of those episodes online if you were that kind of person. The URT phenomenon worldwide seemed to be contained entirely within a two-year period. It joined a large number of ephemeral disorder clusters that not many people remembered. It made a few headlines, just a few. Research money was spent, articles were written. Doctors seemed to agree that the most frustrating aspect over the phenomenon, which made URT's causes and solutions so difficult to penetrate, was the lack of sufficient unifying biological or geographical factors among the victims. They shared no common medical histories, no common lifestyle patterns, no common continents even. The ages of the victims ranged from 6 to 56. So at least it could be said that it was a younger person's affliction. But it had otherwise been so very random. True to Dr. Rashaan Corbett's thinking, a large number of scientists looked for answers in the properties of what had been found in the product of our coughs. Most strikingly, it seemed our bodies had needed to work to develop a cough deep enough to draw up inscrutable material it could not do in any other non-surgical way. There was something once referred to as junk DNA in the samples of many of the victims. This was a blanket term for DNA that didn't seem to have any true known function. The consensus back then was that it might carry the code of primeval viruses that predated humans becoming what we are, and might well represent the raw material that evolution needed to make its tireless shifts and adjustments across the eons. The sequencing it took to identify junk DNA, and where inside the body any particular sample of it came from, was so complex and expensive that it took about a decade for scientists to collect enough data to make their educated guesses about it. In URT sufferers, the cryptic material tended to be expelled only during the last and deepest rounds of the coffin. Several studies were conducted about that terrifying urge I'd experienced just once, and I know at least one book was written about it. I picked it up off the shelf once at the university library where I worked. In some URT cases, the urge happened a few times. A man in Osaka had actually stabbed his wife in the heart when she tried to stop him from the act. I don't know if she was grouped in statistically with the other URT deaths. Seems to me like she should have been. That particular symptom joined others that people made weird online video lists about, things with titles like, Eight Crazy Diseases You Hope You Don't Get, or Their Sickness Made Them Do What? The urge was ascribed mostly to a series of biochemical reactions so baffling they could barely be explained to a layperson like me. On the day I walked into the doctor's office in Vero Beach about the frightening thing that was now happening with my eyes, URT was old news. Medical history, another unsolved affliction that had not recurred, could not quite be replicated. It was something only to be studied from a great distance by a precious few who could afford to devote their time and resources to it. As for myself, I had long since moved on. All right, what can we do for your peepers today? My new primary care doc said to me with a smile as she reviewed the curious complaint I'd submitted online. Her name was Sarah Bunton, and she dyed her hair several different shades of red. I was with her that day for a full half hour. I began to quickly wonder why she wasn't more surprised by what I was telling her, why the weirdness of it didn't seem to faze her much. She nodded a lot and asked smart questions, and in the end seemed to have a very specific specialist referral at the ready. She waited until the end of the appointment to echo a sentence I hadn't heard in 35 years. She told me that I was not alone in my symptoms. Back when I had URT, that news came as something of a relief. But this time it struck a chord of faint but genuine terror in me. The way she said it intimated that I was maybe not even the first person who'd come into her office that day talking about a similar problem. Maybe someone in the waiting room was up next with their own version. I'd been surprised by how packed that waiting room had been, and by the fact that at least two people in it had been wearing sunglasses indoors. As we know now, my terror turned out to be completely justified. The condition I reported to Dr. Bunting was spreading rapidly. With URT, I'd at least had the distinction of being one of the first in America to claim the symptoms. Not so with rod shift photophobia. Not by a long shot. I went to see my mother at the nursing home that afternoon, wearing my sunglasses and lying to the staff that I just had my pupils dilated. I pushed her out into the solarium, and we said hello to the parrots there, Bitsy and Martini. Then it was off to news talk in the day room, where about a dozen of mom's fellow seniors had gathered for a weekly review of world events, led by a former semi-pro football player named Cody, who I'd come to know a little during the years of Mom's Twilight. Cody, friendly and gentle as an elf, was about six and a half feet tall, and looked like any Mack truck that ever tried to run him over would be spending a few nights having its front end replaced. Mom revered him. Funny thing about the lighting in the day room. It had been noticeably dimmed. A few of the seniors had apparently complained it had gotten too bright in there, and one gent in plaid sweatpants was wearing wraparound sunglasses. The top headline for discussion that afternoon was about a young celebrity's accidental demise on a cliff in the Alps about which several seniors tisk-tisked. Then it was right on to the collapse of Lilinandra. Cody had to tread carefully on the topic because dozens of seniors at Seaglass Senior Living had become quite afraid of Lilinandra. He tried to assuage their fears after the latest news and had a go at engaging them in the science of it all. Infrared outbursts from Lilinandra's outer envelope were the main source of concern for astronomers, as were the highly unusual neutrino emissions. Everyone in the room seemed quite lost by the concept of those, and mom's best friend, Tina, had to ask Cody to spell out the words. Neutrino what? She said. Mom remained silent through it all. She only absorbed about half of what anyone spoke. It was kind of simple, really, Cody told us all that day. Surprisingly misjudging the senior's capacity to grasp what was happening. But then a lot of people weren't thinking so clearly since Lillinandra had started to take up more and more TV airtime. The Lonely Star's fuel seemed to have run out, Cody explained, so its core couldn't fight against gravity anymore. That meant it might just collapse. Why is gravity bad now? someone asked. It's not, said Mr. Barker, age 88, who had once been a patent attorney. Gravity is only what something makes of it. What then? What does it mean if it collapses? Does it explode? someone asked, leaning precariously on a cane. A quiet panic in his voice. I think then it becomes what they call a supernova, Cody told us. A huge bang. Two or three people wanted to know if it could kill us all here on Earth. It's too far away to be a threat to us, Cody assured the room. But they were just a little too tuned into the media to be fooled by something that was now demonstrably untrue. Usually there were five or six headlines knocked around and debated over the course of news talks half hour. But that day I seemed to remember they barely ever got off the topic of Lillinandra. During that uneasy discussion, my eyes went constantly toward an old woman named Elsa. She was listening very avidly, head turning from person to person, and gazing at Cody as if he were a preacher whose visions of apocalypse had begun to hypnotize her. Her left hand shook a great deal. At one point after someone mentioned the ice age and the possibility of another one, her eyes became wet with tears. A nurse came over and knelt before her, whispering, trying to make her feel better. Cody, seeing this, ended all discussion and reminded everyone that it was time for a 15-minute break before board games. Why is it so bright in here? Mrs. Hunter asked me meekly, reaching up to touch my arm with cold fingers as I began to turn mom toward the exit. I told her I was sorry, but I didn't know. Are you scared, Mom? I asked my mother minutes later out on the back lawn, where she liked to sit in the sun for a time before lunch. She had waited patiently for Cody's explanations to end and saved her own questions for me, away from everyone else. No, she said softly. I know it's all just panic talk and we're far away. She still had a bit of egg below her chin from breakfast, and I wiped it away with the edge of my sleeve. Yeah, nothing's going to happen, I told her. If you're going to worry about something, worry about schnitzel night. She tried to smile. I was distracted then by the sight of a vaguely familiar face near the little white gazebo by the parking lot. An elderly man I could have sworn I'd seen somewhere before. He was sitting in a wheelchair and was nearing the end of a very thick hardcover novel. I couldn't investigate further just then. Mom was asking me why I kept rubbing my eyes. She didn't know that as I spoke, I was sometimes closing them behind my sunglasses for ten and fifteen seconds at a time for relief. Like young Bevy at the nurses station, I was becoming more and more unable to endure the ghastly brightness of the daytime sky. All over the world, it had begun to happen. Increased rod activity, dilated pupils, and reduced color processing within the eye, leading to photophobia and intolerance of bright light. To some, it all suggested a pattern of what was called dark adaptation. Millions of human brains were being led to believe that their surroundings were darker than they actually were. There were only two plausible reasons for this. One, it really was darker, which it was not. Two, we were being biologically prepared for such a state, a prolonged one, perhaps lasting thousands or millions of years. Evolutionary adaptations like these normally progressed at so slower rate as to be utterly unnoticeable from generation to generation, but not now. It would only be about two more years before 60% of the world was like me, wearing specially treated sunglasses any time we stepped outdoors, and using newly devised light bulbs in most rooms of the places we lived and worked. Virtually all scientists stressed the impossibility of such a rapid evolutionary arc. At this alarming rate of progression, babies being born with larger eyes and the development of a tapetum usidum over the eye like raccoons would occur within 50 years. But the protestations of these scientists got quieter and not covered so much in the media when the mirror verge happened and was partially visible over the Arctic Circle because of the silicon buildup around Lillinandra. It was beautiful to behold, even as it bruised and scarred the sky for weeks. The sound it made, audible on half the continent, was like a kind of wistful music. The mirror verge seemed to change things for good. Confusion and panic peaked but then retreated. And somehow a blanket of calm and acceptance swept over us all. Maybe it was terror fatigue. A profound sense of hopelessness dulling our panic, making us docile. So we bought sunglasses and took eye drops and wondered whether it was going to be five years or 5,000 before Lillinandra's neutrinos burst outward all at once, causing it to shine like a fiery coin before the shock wave, which was not physically able to strike earth directly, would instead merely plunge wide swaths of it into an eon of darkness. During my worst moments of existential fear, I sometimes thought about the intense late adolescent trepidation that preceded my audition for the part of Peter Patrone in the University of Florida's production of The Heidi Chronicles. It all seemed so absurd now, and that brought me some small measure of peace in the face of the unthinkable. Three days ago, after reading aloud to my mother for an hour, I left her room and finally approached the vaguely familiar face I'd now spotted a couple of times when visiting her. Sea Glass Senior Living is a very big place, so it wasn't surprising our paths had rarely crossed, especially as my mother felt up for visits less and less. I apologized for interrupting him just as he was opening up a history of Civil War prison camps, sitting in his wheelchair beside the window that looked out over the fish pond. He was wearing sunglasses, so was I. I asked if he was, in fact, Dr. Rashawn Corbett, now gone gray and sporting a big bandage on his neck from some medical procedure. He was indeed who I'd hoped he was. I told him I was a former URT patient, one of the first, allegedly, and that he had helped me a great deal. He shook my hand and smiled pleasantly. I think I remember, he said, removing his sunglasses. You were a student, correct? We chatted for a bit. He explained that he stayed at Seaglass only sporadically whenever his son had to leave town on business. He felt comforted to live occasionally among his fellow seniors, understanding more than most their struggles and small comforts. He might even offer to help out from time to time in the memory care wing, which was operating at terrible overcapacity. Since Lillinandra and Photophobia, the population of Seaglass Senior Living had been moving there at a heart-breaking rate. That's what depression and helplessness did. Since he still seemed very alert and mentally sharp, I asked Dr. Corbett about how far he wound up taking his own research into URT. He became contemplative then. A long way, he said. I definitely developed my own theories. I made an enemy here and there and embarrassed myself a little. Big mouth. Finally I got run out of the room. I told him, with total honesty, that I really, really wanted to hear anything he thought. He looked at me with gentleness. I'm remembering your episode now, he said, with the tray, the first one I ever saw. Yes, I said, and we both realized that I had begun to cry, gently and without sound. It was the first time for me since after the coughing attack that had left me on my hands and knees on a sidewalk outside Trimper's Pub in Gainesville when I was young. Yet quiet tears had become such a common sight, even in public, that we felt the need to mention them, not at all. He looked out at the pond as the autumn dusk settled over it. Do you believe in aliens? he asked me. UFOs? For a moment, I despaired at the thought that dementia had a firm grip on him after all. But he assured me he just wanted to draw a parallel. I told him no, I did not believe. He cleared his throat and organized his thoughts. I guess we've always assumed, he said, that if aliens needed to learn about us, they'd risk leaving home and head across the universe, take some samples and head back with them. To prepare for what? A defense against us? An invasion? Who knows? But what if, he went on, what if some sentience we weren't even aware was in our DNA, needed to know something in a hurry, needed information it couldn't wait on. Maybe it would need a mechanism to get knowledge of the outer world. Something inside us might be sent out to take a look, so to speak, get snapshots, imprints of what was going on in the atmosphere, so it could prepare us for... He trailed off there, and for a moment it seemed he forgot I was even beside him, sitting on the edge of an ottoman. Then he seemed to remember he had a true willing audience for his thoughts. Maybe our bodies were capable of sending out explorers of their own, he said, embedded somewhere in our biological murk. Dormant inside the genetic code. The material we have never fully understood the stuff with god-like power. It must have sensed quite an emergency coming to take a step that drastic. The explorers got a sense of the world they never had before. That information had to get back inside of the murk so it could be used to inform our evolution. Fast. Because the threat was on its way. Something unexpected and massive. Had to get back inside the murk, I repeated softly. Dr. Corbett nodded. He lifted his hands from their place resting atop his book and moved them slowly left to right to suggest a chain of events. Uncoded substances are expelled out. Acquire information. Uncoded substances are consumed back in. And here we are, changing, impossibly, day by day. Why was it only some of us sent out explorers, I asked him. Who really knows how information is spread through the hive, he said, scratching his beard. You might have used chemical signals below your own radar to inform riff-raff DNA like mine of what needed to happen. I looked out the window with him, squinting at the pretty gold light, and asked him the only question that seemed to really matter anymore. Do you think night is coming? I asked him, wiping my eyes one last time before fully regaining myself. I'd swear my hearing is already getting sharper, he replied, smiling sadly. Getting ready for self-defense, I guess. Getting ready to detect some very scary things. Like what? I asked. He was no longer smiling. Whatever gets bold in the dark, he said. Last night, I got a call from Seaglass that Mom had a bit of a fall as she was being helped into the shower. It upset her, and she had a rough night. Very little sleep. At dawn, she managed to figure out how to call me herself for the first time in a couple of years. I could barely make out what she was saying, so I immediately got in the car and drove the forty miles to her room. Her leg was wrapped tight and she was running a slight fever. She roused herself and after briefly mistaking me for her long dead brother, she told me there in her almost lifeless room that she'd had a terrible dream. She hadn't had a dream like that since I was a boy. Did I remember? Something was going to happen to us. She was sure of it. She'd seen black shapes coming out of the mountains and the swamps. They weren't real yet, but they would be. What were they, Mom? I asked her just before she drifted away again. There will be such monsters, she said. And I believe this to be true.

Speaker 1:
[50:29] Now receiving frequency transmission. One of the most interesting ideas about ghosts was proposed by Andrew Lang, who was a fascinating polymath and author. He was one of the co-founders of the Society for Psychical Research, who took one of the first sort of forensic and scientific approaches to gathering and cataloging accounts of ghosts. And in 1897, he collected them in an amazing volume called the Book of Dreams and Ghosts. And in the Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Lang proposed the unique idea that ghosts may be the effect or the emanation caused by a dead person dreaming. And in effect, projecting into the mind of those living. And that's a fascinating concept. That when you encounter what seems to be a ghost, you may actually be making contact with a dead person dreaming. Transmission complete.

Speaker 4:
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