Favorite Quotes

[Gentian]

You know this story: it’s night. A man drives along a lonely country road. He sees lights in the sky. They swoop down, engulf the car. He blacks out. When he comes to, he is driving along that same stretch of road. He’s traveled maybe a quarter of a mile, but his watch says he’s been gone five hours. It’s nearly dawn. When he gets home, his wife notices that he is covered with little scars that look like healed-up burns. He says he’s sore and itchy all over.

Over the coming months, the man will begin to recall being taken into a strange circular room, and being experimented on by small, pale, dark-eyed creatures. It’s a classic abduction scenario. Except… the truth is, this man who comes back with all his memories and relationships, he isn’t a man at all. He’s a thing made of sticks and stones, and he doesn’t even know who he isn’t.

The real man is still in the clutches of the beings that took him. They’re still doing their experiments. They’re swapping his eyes around. They’re repositioning his internal organs. They’re taking out his hair one strand at a time and slicing off his nose and sewing on a different one. They’re draining his blood out. And all the time he’s conscious. And all the time, each different procedure is turning him into one of them. And worst of all, they are doing it to him for no reason. They’re not learning anything. They’re not even doing it for fun.