by Julie Helms

Created on: September 02, 2011

The Gray stared down impassively at his subject. The man lay motionless on a polished titanium table. A silver domed ceiling overhead glowed by an unseen light source. Medical instruments were lined up precisely.

Only one thing interrupted this serene, sterile scene. Though the man was completely paralyzed, he was screaming inside his mind. The Gray, a telepathic being anyway, could hear the screaming.

As he picked up the next impossibly painful device, his mind wandered back through the ages, remembering similar scenes but with different surroundings.

This present age worshiped science. Scientists were the priests to the people, the gatekeepers to knowledge. So the daemons delivered what the culture unequivocally accepted: advanced aliens from another star system with superior technical abilities. Few questioned the feasibility of such a thing, they were eager to believe.

Back three centuries the Gray had morphed his appearance a bit differently. Then the culture was superstitious and easily believed in every sprite, leprechaun, brownie or troll, real or imagined, that crossed the threshold.

At that time, the Gray was a faery. Not a modern tinkerbell, but the true faery that inspired absolute fear and obeisance in the poor masses. He carried on his usual abductions, but the destination he flew them to was faery hills, not spaceships.

The Gray prodded his victim again and meandered back a few more hundred years in his mind, possibly one of his favorite time periods! As a jinn he wore opulent jewels and terrorized people with his fangs and claws. He flew these abductees to remote caverns where he pierced their brains with his long fingernails. The legends said he flew on “magic carpets” but that was just a thought planted in their minds. He always flew the same way.

He began to think back further to the time when the Christ walked the earth, but that was a bad time for the daemons, so he cut those thoughts off.

The Gray calmed his prisoner's mind, deeply buried some of the memory, then fed him garbage theology. He knew tomorrow the man would excitedly share about this encounter and how special it made him feel. Fools! Haven't they noticed that this “advanced alien race” apparently hasn't discovered anesthesia yet?

Through time, it was always about the torture of the human race and it always would be.

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