Abduction

Dead was the light. Night had come and the only sound was that of the leaves weighing in the wind. At the corner of a street, a young lady could be seen wandering, as if the darkness was illuminated and her path was as clear as day.

“Curious.” I said watching from my window, as I do on occasion. The emptiness that shadowless night brings warms my cold little heart.

But this night did not fill my hunger for the absence of things; no, no it did not. Almost as quickly as I registered the woman’s movements did I notice the low humming of sound followed by the persistence of light in the form of a faint ring that seemed to follow this lady as her movements became more pronounced.

It was happening again. Finally, again. So long had I watched the night hoping to see it that I almost forgot why the darkness called to me. Twenty three years ago—no wait, nearly—no, actually twenty three years ago to the date, as a child I had watched a man taken from the dark. Beamed up, more like it. But I was a child; I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know what I saw. So I watched, and I observed the night.

A halo emerged around the woman, a ring of chasing white light wrapped her every movement, but she didn’t seem to care. In fact, she seemed to be the one leading the light.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!” I proclaimed as the shadows casted by the halo illuminated what I had not been able to see. No less than a dozen men and women were following in the obsidian light impossible to see except for the flicker of recognition granted by the momentary shadow she allowed to trail her.

The once-abductee I had thought I was observing had become the abductor… but no more than a heartbeat later, I realized she was not in control of her faculties. As the halo of speeding light wrapped around her fingers, weaving between her legs, she was elevated in the air, suspended by nothing more than the fibers of the universe itself.

And then she was gone. The light, however, remained—but what happened next shook me to my core. A man moved from the back of the impossible-to-see horde and into the halo; now he was in the lead. And I watched as they moved farther and farther away from me, until history repeated itself and he was swept into nothingness and the cycle repeated again.

As the sun flooded the sky hours later, the warmth of the star was only eclipsed by the safety its illumination granted. I turned on the tele to realize I was not the only person to be granted audience by the dark lord himself. Over 103 people reported abductions of no less than a dozen people each.

The invasion had begun.