Metallic Manifestations

It has been a while since I posted a story on YGS, and I've seriously considered not submitting this one. Oddly, I haven't finished typing up a different story because it sounds fake to me, even though my family all swear to the truth of it. (It's a weird habit to have: writing out YGS stories and *not* submitting them.) This story, though, has been on my mind for the last month, since I described my parents' first American house's location Aaron94 in the comments to his story, "The House With The Furnace."

My parents had bought a brand-new single-level ranch. It was a comfortable, calm house with a decent front lawn and -most importantly- my brother and I got separate bedrooms again after a sojourn in a cramped apartment near dad's work. There were a few things that were odd about the house; I did not care for the steep staircase into the cavernous basement, as the stairs had "open" risers. I'd always felt a bit uncomfortable in the basement, partly because there were only two tiny windows (which were both located under the deck), and the washer and dryer were installed against the end wall. I resented having to remove laundry from hampers in the bedrooms, carry it along the length of the house, guide it through an awkward U-turn in the kitchen, take it down the steep stairs, and heft it all the way across the length of the house *again* in order to be washed. There were positive aspects to the house, too, as it did have a substantial deck which stretched half the length of the back of the house, and there were lovely views from all of the windows. As dusk approached, I wasn't terribly fond of the view through the sliding doors, across the deck, toward the decrepit abandoned cottage in the northeast corner of the field. As I told Aaron94, my brother and I explored it, against our parents' specific instructions to stay out of it, but it was a sad, decaying structure, filled with the moldering possessions of the previous inhabitants, and collapsing slowly into its own basement.

My parents' home had been built in the one habitable lot on the 8-acre meadow; the seven other 1-acre lots, including both the collapsing cottage and the already-poured concrete basement downhill from us, had failed the State's percolation tests. The 10-acre meadow opposite our house was mostly sloping marshland draining into a brook to the south, which then, in a perverse quirk of Massachusetts topography, flowed along the southern and western boundaries of our meadow, heading northward.

I am including all of this detail to illustrate that the house was pretty normal and was surrounded by New England countryside: wooded hills, a dairy farm, maple trees, an elm-lined brook, etc. Juxtaposed against this quiet, rural habitat I witnessed three inexplicable objects whose behavior seemed to obey their own version of the laws of physics, but were definitely interacting with the space occupied by my newly-constructed home.

It was either the second or third summer we lived there that I had been playing outside with our dogs, and I became thirsty. I climbed up the deck stairs, entered through the sliding doors into the dining area, and turned left into the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of juice from the fridge, and stood with my back against the kitchen cabinets which lined the wall abutting the deck. I was about half-finished with my drink when I was seized with the certainty that I should look down at the floor. A silver-grey cylinder, about 4" or 5" long emerged through the kick-plate under the cabinets. It was rotating slowly clockwise as its center-pivot proceeded at a steady pace across the kitchen floor and disappeared into the baseboard radiator on the wall that separated the kitchen from the basement stairs. The cylinder seemed to taper towards each end, so it resembled an old-fashioned fountain pen with the cap on. It appeared to be completely solid, as I could not see the linoleum through it as it moved, and the odd detail which struck me at the time was that the silver and grey colors seemed to be fluid --or viscous-- in their appearance, swirling around each other with no regard for the momentum of the object. The fact that the object was able to phase through walls was intriguing, but I had no idea why the same effect did not apply to the kitchen floor.

Had that been a one-off event, I'd have put it down to a mild hallucination due to dehydration and left it at that. Indeed, if the autumn object had not been airborne, I'd probably have forgotten it completely.

In the autumn, though I believe it to have been the autumn of the next year, I had a fight with my parents (well, mum) in the living room, stormed off into my bedroom, shut (slammed) the door, and sat immediately behind it to prevent anyone else entering. I was upset and agitated, so I sat still, trying to fight back tears, when an object of the same silver-grey coloration appeared. It was about the size of a sheet of typing paper; initially, I thought that slamming the door had dislodged a sheet of homework from my desk. The rectangular object was clearly thicker than a sheet of paper, and it was very slowly flapping as it rose through the air on the other side of my desk. It would form a downward crescent as it rose, then continue to rise --though more slowly-- as it became flat and raised its ends into a "U" before accelerating upward with the next flap of its extremities. I was transfixed. I began to recall the fountain-pen shape from the kitchen, and I remember wondering If this silvery-grey object would behave in the same manner by disappearing through the ceiling, when the bloody thing vanished at a height of four feet off the floor. It disappeared in the manner of a popped soap-bubble, and I felt disappointed that this levitating, flapping rectangle had cheated me of a cartoonish noise to accompany its cartoonish behavior. However, as I was furious with my parents, I could hardly go into the living room and ask that they help me find a reasonable explanation for evanescent metallic objects which I couldn't prove existed.

Some time later (I *think* it was spring, but I don't remember this one as clearly as the other two) I think I was reading in the living room. While I sat on the sofa, I saw there was a sphere that lingered only for a moment, out of the corner of my right eye. It bobbed along in my peripheral vision, like metallic balloon held by an invisible child. I turned to look at it as it continued to proceed forward at a leisurely pace, when my German Shepherd barked, once, next to my left ear. I looked at the dog, who was looking at the sphere, but when I turned back the sphere was gone. I don't know if it popped, hid, or was confused by the tropical fish tank, but it was no longer there.

This last event was about 25 years ago; I can state with some certainty that I've seen strange events and inexplicable occurrences, but I have never seen another one of those quasi-solid, peculiar objects which appeared to obey some of the laws of physics, but not all of them. All three were in the same house, which was undergoing final construction when my parents bought it; they appeared at different times of year, they did not proceed in the same direction, they did not have the same shape or motion, but they shared a weird swirling, metallic exterior.

I was in three different states of mind with these encounters (exhausted, furious, and preoccupied, respectively), and --before anyone asks-- no, I was not under the influence of any illegal substances. (Basically, as an adult, I'm on medication to stop my brain from doing what other people's brains do when they get high; I was never interested in trying drugs because I had enough trouble staying in touch with reality, but that's a different story entirely.) I'm happy to discuss the events, as always, but it's more to entertain suggestions from everyone else on YGS, as I'm flummoxed by the whole thing.

-Biblio.