The Alien In The Living Room

I love Halloween, no matter what it is called. When I was a kid it was the best day (night) of the year and when I got married, it was on Halloween.

Some years ago son number 4, the only one still living at home, decided to do a small Halloween decoration and hung a man from the oak tree in the front yard. I thought that was neat, so did a scarecrow sitting in a chair holding a pumpkin. As he inherited my insane gene....I mean since he inherited my Halloween decorating gene, he had made the hanging man look a little too real.

The next year I bought dozens of yards of gauze to make a platoon of ghosts in the yard, including a huge, ten foot tall ghost which I had draped over a PVC pipe armature and clamped between some pieces of wood. Since the ghost was darned heavy and had a tendency to topple over, I ended up putting one fork from a forklift, on top of the wood. (We had a spare fork hanging around, not sure how or why.) Suitably secured, the ghost would still move back and forth in the wind, often looking as if it was trying to grab the viewer. Sweeeeeeet.

The same year I remembered the school desk we had used when I homeschooled number four son. We made another ghost and plunked it in the desk, titling it "Ghoul Skool." But that wasn't enough. My insanity, er....creative juices were flowing.

A quick trip to the fabric store and I came home (lighter by a bit of cash) with foam to make bodies, red satin to make the Devil, a cute cauldron they had at Wal Mart, a devilish mask and some glow sticks, poster board and other stuff. The Devil display was put in the side yard with a tombstone saying "This space reserved for..." Insert your favorite baddie here, I refrain from doing so at this time for fear of reprisal. Posterboard flames were quickly cut and painted and on Halloween we put glow sticks in the cauldron and candles all over the yard.

Tombstones were made with polystyrene insulation, cut into tombstone shapes and inscribed with amusing epitaphs. (I'll do them in another post.) The husband person was kept busy cutting long pieces of wire from coat hangers since my hands were too wimpy to do it. Each tombstone had a candle in a candle holder in front of it for Halloween and the trees were filled with ghosts. It was great! Son number four thought it was enough, so did his father.

Ha, what would they know? I was caught in the throes of inspiration. As soon as Halloween was over I went crazy with making Halloween displays. Since I have always liked using papier mache, most of the things I made over that year were in that medium. My hands were rarely out of the stuff and the poor husband person was run ragged by going here and there for people's newspapers. Thankfully the boss of bosses (aka He Who Is To Be Obeyed) took the Wallstreet Babbler, or whatever it is called and since it is a big paper, it was great because I finally had enough paper to papier mache the yard. All 2 acres of it.

I made a UFO to hang from the tree and little aliens to go with it. I made a monster (pink, about 4' tall), sitting on its haunches on top of the test well, a fishing pole hanging from his claws and a human skeleton hanging from the end. I made a troll (also 4' tall, but green and purple this time) and talked the husband person into making a troll booth.

Then I had The Idea to make a huge dinosaur (the Bitemyrumpasarus) in two parts. The first part would be the head, going out the right side of the driveway (or left, whichever perspective you were looking from). The tail end would come out of the other side. I made the armature out of chicken wire and the legs from number 10 cans. It wasn't too long before I discovered the armature was much too puny so had to stuff it with a lot of paper, cloth scraps and whatever else was at hand. The Bitemyrumpasarus weighed a lot by the time I put a couple dozen layers of papier mache and a few coats of polyurethane on it. It was kind of cutsie, I'm afraid, with her (yes, her), purple eyelashes cut out of aluminum cans, big eyeballs and purple skin with tasteful green and pink splotches.

But it wasn't Halloween yet, just August when I finished the Biteme's scales and paint job and I still had a bunch of my favorite papier mache paste made of wallpaper paste and glue. I decided a haunted tree would be perfect and out came the chicken wire and a quarter sheet of heavy plywood for the base. After putting on several layers of papier mache, I realized the haunted tree looked more like a tube of chicken wire covered in paper and less like the menacing haunted tree I wanted. So I cut out a large space for the mouth, already knowing how I wanted it. Unfortunately I had not calculated on the weight of the papier mache and the tree started leaning forward, the mouth collapsing. So I had to add interior supports and propped it up in the living room (that's where the TV and DVD player were) with the broom and mop. (Clever me, I had an excuse to not mop OR sweep.) It turned out well, though really rather heavy. The limb arms were just the touch, as was the Spanish moss and fake spider web. My friend Shelly had the clever idea of putting her then 4 year old daughter inside on Halloween, with the little sprite saying "Saaaaaaaaaaaave meeeeeeeeeeee" when people came by.

Anyway, back to the other stuff I made. After the tree I had The Idea. What would be scarier than a 5 foot tall alien, gray and with huge bulgey eyes, spooky hands reaching out to grab you? Well, it would scare the crap out of me, I can assure you of that. It was the easiest to make of all the things. A large balloon was the perfect armature for the head, the eyes were large plastic Easter eggish things (about 5 inches across), seperated in two, the body armature of PVC plumbing pipe and fittings with foam rubber over the body and a robe of cheap silver lame covering the body. He was great!

But it still wasn't Halloween, so the tree and alien stood in the living room. The cats decided the tree was a great place for sleeping and climbing. Some discovered how to sleep on the top of the tree, which was open. Don't ask me how they did it, they're cats, they can do what they want.

Son number 4, his wife and baby hadn't been over since I started the dinosaur (which was in the storage building after having proven to be a little large for the living room), so he didn't know about the spooky tree and frightening gray alien.

He has the occasional bad headache and had left his migraine medicine here, so at the first throb of one, about 2:00 AM in the middle of the night, he drove over here to get his medicine. Now everyone (ok, everyone who's honest) is afraid of something and Stephen REALLY does not like aliens. He won't even watch UFO shows. So he walked into the front door without turning the lights on so he wouldn't wake us us and several things happened at once. The light of the full moon shone through the window, throwing the haunted tree and alien into frankly ominous shadows, a couple thousand cats came pouring out of the tree and into the hallway and Stephen saw The Alien.

We were woken as he slammed into our bedroom, the doorknob impaling itself into the wall. "What the HELL DID YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING? THAT'S NOT FUNNY, DAMNIT!"

His dad actually woke, "Huh? What? Stephen?"

I was already getting out of bed, trying really very hard to not pee my jammies or laugh at our kid. Since I was obviously handling it, the husband went back to sleep. So did the cats once they were sure the screaming human who was foaming at the mouth wasn't a threat.

Stephen was livid. "What the bleep did you think you were doing, Mother?" Oh shat, I was in deep fertilizer. He never, ever calls me mother unless he's really perturbed or pissed. Perturbation was obviously not the problem, so the problem was pissedness.

I tried to defuse the bomb - I mean situation. "Did you like the tree?"

He wasn't defused or amused. "No, I don't mean the blanking tree!"

Dumb blond mommy mode wasn't working, "Ah, you saw the alien?"

He had gone from definitely not defused or amused to really pissed off. "Yes I saw the blanking blanking bleeping blanking blanked, will be blanked, was blanked, will always be blinking bleeping blaping blanking blanked alien. What the............did you, how, what....." About then he was sputtering and black with rage. (His Welsh heritage, I guess, though it could be our AmInd, either way he was too far gone for me to be considering our genealogy.)

Since I didn't have any horse tranquilizer or a cattle prod handy it took a while to get him settled down with a slug of his brother's booze in some hot cocoa. I had to throw a sheet over the alien while he was there but it didn't help since it then just looked like an alien ghost.

The good news was that the scare cured his migraine and showed me that I didn't need to tweek the scariness of either display. They were just right.

Thinking of it - and I'm not certain there is enough time left to make it for this Halloween - a 7 foot tall werewolf with claws extended would be a neat thing to make. Stephen doesn't mind werewolves.

At least I don't think so.

Sometimes in the Night They Come a short nightmare by Jean Buckhalter (1980-1990, about)

Sometimes in the Night They Come
a short nightmare by Jean Buckhalter (1980-1990, about)

Sometimes in the night they come and carry me to that place I fear. Sometimes in the day, my old memories, my old fears come back to haunt me and I run crying to my mother. She dries my tears and comforts me, and it is better then.

My old memories, which they try to tell me are just bad dreams; I have learned to keep to myself. Some know, for others who have shared my memories and given me theirs to keep have been taken in the night as well. My old fears which the old one tries to take away with the touch of his long, cold fingers on my forehead, I have learned to hide in my other self, my true self.

I am writing this to tell others, even those who have never been taken in the night, or whose own memories are so deeply hidden that they will not fill them with fear in the day, what I and others have learned. For we have learned the secret. We have learned the secret of how to let them take our bodies and do what they will to them without fear, for we have learned how to pour our true selves into our other bodies, bodies which they cannot touch or even sense. Others must know of this. Everyone must be ready.

They came for me in the night again many months ago. The one who was doing things to my body did not care about my fear or the pain he was causing me and the old one who takes pain and fear away was not there. I was held fast to the table and the pain was so great that I wished there was a way I could leave the body and suddenly I was floating free over the table, over the body and the one who was doing things to it with strange instruments. At first I was afraid that he would see me and force me back, but even when I passed my other "hand" in front of the creature's eyes, he did not react.

I explored this strange place where they had taken me and saw others of my own kind on other tables with other creatures doing strange, hurtful things to them. My little brother was in another room; crying and asking for mommy to make the bad men go away. I found that I could enter his thoughts and showed him the way to step out of his body. He clung to me, which was strange at first, as our other bodies had no substance, but his presence brought me a sense of calm and I comforted him as well.

Together we joined with the others in that place. All but one, that is, for when I entered the room where another was being experimented on, the old gray who takes pain and fear away sensed me. I do not understand clearly exactly how I knew this, I just did, so I immediately withdrew and watched from where he could not sense me.

The others and I and my brother spoke together and compared what we had learned. My teacher was one of the first I taught, and she has helped me write this. Before the awakening, some may have found my writing strange for a child of my years, but one of the others who are taken in the night explained it by saying something about a group mind. You will understand soon. You will be changed as the rest of us have been.

Over the past sixteen months or so, ever since the night I learned how to leave my body and taught the others, we have done some experiments of our own. The first thing we learned was how to hide our other selves from the old grays. We discovered how to enter the thoughts of the others, those creatures which come for us in the night. We have learned their secrets and have brought them back to the day. Others are learning how to use those secrets and some day we will go to the place those creatures came from, and we'll show them what we have learned and we'll use the knowledge they gave us without knowing. Then they will know fear; they will know pain.

We do not enter just the minds and memories of those others, we enter the minds of our own kind as well, waking them and teaching them. Everyone is responsible for waking as many of our own people as they can every night as our bodies sleep. We are united, asleep and awake and everyone stands ready. Soon the entire world will have been awakened. One of our people has used the computer he works with at NASA to estimate that we will have wakened everyone within three months.

Sometime they will come for one of us in the night, but this time we'll be ready. Oh, yes, we'll be ready.