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I know this will sound paranoid, but I think I’m being watched. It’s been a few days since my last entry, and there’ve been more strange episodes I need to write about.
I’m getting ready to leave the hospice in Bridgeton with my mom, and before we even leave the building, my heart is pounding. I’m shaking and scared, but I have no idea what it’s about.
As soon as we walk outside, I see a guy in a pickup truck parked at the corner staring at me and grinning. He has long, greasy hair and a scraggly beard, and his stare feels like a physical attack.
This is hard to even write about, but he has really bad sexual intentions toward me, and I can sense what he wants to do to me—it’s almost like he is doing it to me, and it’s horrible, like someone stabbing me in an alley. But that’s more like a comparison, and what I saw . . . I don’t even want to put it into words.
Once we’re in my mom’s car, I feel a little safer, but my heart is still pounding like crazy, and I have cold sweat all over.
My mom looks at me and says, “Tommy, what’s wrong? You’re so pale. Are you ill?”
I have no idea what to say, but I have to say something.
“I think I might be having an allergic reaction.”
She puts her hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel hot,” she says. “Did you eat something at the hospice?”
“Yeah, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
“Tommy, I told you not to eat there. It’s as bad as hospital food.”
As we pull out, she tells me everything that would be wrong with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by the hospice, but I’m only half listening. I see the truck pulling out just after we do. It has Maine plates.
“Tommy, from now on, I want you to make your own lunch and bring it with you, OK?”
“You’re right, Mom. I will. I promise.”
I look in the rearview mirror and see the truck following us for a while, but then it turns off right before we leave town. I have a feeling I’ve seen that truck somewhere before.
And then, two days later, I see it again.
I’m back in Bridgeton with Dorothy, picking up supplies. She needs me to load stuff into our community car because her knees are really bad.
The same truck with Maine plates pulls up. The sun glints off the windows, so I can’t see inside. But I feel that man staring at me, and my heart races. I feel like prey, like a mouse skittering beneath the eye of a hawk.
I don’t want to show it, so I haul everything into our car without looking toward the truck.
And then, as we’re pulling out—a terrifying vision. I see the truck, the store, and the surroundings with my regular eyes, but with some other kind of vision, I see something else, a creature that radiates evil.
It looks something like a giant translucent spider, but with a weird head like an upside-down pear with large black eyes watching me in a cold, scientific way. I can tell it’s not of this world because it isn’t reflecting the sun’s light, and it has no color, only a pale glow. It’s peering in at me from another dimension underneath or above this one.
Lines of energy, like nearly invisible electric guitar cords, run down from the spider into the man in the truck. The spider is operating him like a puppet set on my track.
I keep my face turned away from Dorothy so she won’t see the spasms of sickness overtaking me, contorting my body, almost doubling me up. Dorothy is a super careful driver, so I know she’ll keep her eyes on the road, and if I don’t squirm too much, she might not notice, but then she does.
“Tommy, are you—”
“Can you pull over, please? I might need to throw up.”
She pulls over, and I walk into the woods, crouch down, and do a couple of dry heaves. The spasms pass, but I still feel sick.
While I walk back to the car, I decide to tell Dorothy the story I told my mom about eating something at the hospice that disagreed with me. I hate lying to her, but I feel like I’ve got to, and I know it would fit with what The Friends believe—and I believe as much as anyone—that food from the outside world is suspect and to be avoided.
When we’re back home, Dorothy offers to make me her tea for nausea with ginger, chamomile, honey-lemon, fennel, peppermint, and licorice. She’s our master herbalist. I thank her and tell her it’s exactly what I need, and she lets it rest. Dorothy is really great that way—she can sense when it’s better not to talk and just lets me be in my own space when I need that.
The tea helps, not just the herbs, but I can feel the love Dorothy put into it, and it calms me. As I sit on the porch of her cabin drinking the tea, I force myself to think back to the vision.
It had a really odd twist. I know people throughout time believed in evil entities like the devil, but that’s just like a distant fact in my mind, like knowing that the Egyptians built pyramids a long time ago. To actually encounter such a being was a horrifying shock. But the strangest part was the sense it was revealing itself purposefully and not to frighten me, but almost for my benefit, like it wanted me to know things.
If that wasn’t weird enough, yesterday, another strange thing happened—another watcher appeared. Matthew drove us to Burlington to drop off furniture at the store that sells our stuff, something we do about once every six weeks or so. There was a young guy who stopped to let us carry a heavy chest into the store, and I sensed him staring at me. I had a moment of slowtime, just a moment, which is not how slowtime usually works, and I turned to look at him, and . . . it was strange, not scary but not comfortable either . . . it was like we were reading each other’s minds.
It felt like he was a spy sent to find me or something like that. I’m not sure what I read from him, but he seemed highly intelligent and intensely interested in me, observing me, almost like his eyes were high-res camera lenses recording every detail.
He was another watcher, but I don’t think he had any connection to the scraggly guy in the pickup truck. He was almost the opposite of that guy in the way he looked. Not a hair was out of place, and he was weirdly perfect, like a European model you’d see in a glossy magazine ad. He didn’t seem like someone from Vermont, but like someone you’d see in Paris or New York, someone from a super-rich family. But he didn’t seem like a spoiled rich kid—it felt like he was on a serious mission. He was so alert, and his whole mind focused on me like we were in an espionage movie, and I was the person he had been sent to find.
When we came out of the store to get the next item, he was gone. I sensed him still thinking about me, like he was watching from a distance, but he didn’t seem like a threat. It felt like I was in a movie with him, and he was going to bring me a secret message or something.
I realize anyone reading this probably thinks I’m a kid with an overactive imagination, but I’ve learned to trust my strange perceptions, and I’m sure there’s something to the intense feeling I picked up from him.
There’s got to be a deeper pattern playing out—all these strange encounters in just a few days—Andrew, the man in the truck, the entity, and now this young spy or whatever he is. The weirdness just keeps piling on, and I’m struggling not to be so overwhelmed that others will see I’m freaking out. I’ve got to keep myself together because I’m needed for something, something connected to all of this.
Part of me wishes I could just be a kid again. Normal, like the other Friends. But to be honest, when I look back on my life, I was never normal. There was always another level of things going on. Things I haven’t shared with anyone. But maybe now I have shared, by writing this journal. Having this place to talk about what’s really happening to me . . . it’s helping me not feel so crazy.
But I’m not sure how much more of this I can take, how much longer I can keep living two lives, the one I let The Friends see and this other life of strangeness that keeps pulling me further away from The Friends every day. It’s like my life doesn’t belong to me anymore, and I can’t control what’s happening or what’s coming. I’m caught up in something bigger than I am. It’s racing me along its path, and there’s no way off—I just have to let it take me.
I know that all of this is not just my imagination. I am being watched, but not everything watching me is evil.
