Nystar the Dark Planet

By Barbara Geist

In 2009, while they slept one night, ninety-nine percent of the people of Earth were suddenly gone. Finding what happened to Earth's people is daunting and dangerous. Meredith, or Mere, the narrator with her friends begin to recover from the shock of it. They find, two people, she and the others were beginning to count on are taken another night

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Sep 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641113106

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

EARTH:

S

ome of what I am about to tell would not be known by Earth's peoples for some time. First, let me tell you who I am and what happened to the peoples of Earth. I am Meredith, the narrator of the Obliteration Story, what would soon be acknowledged as the abduction of Earth's people to another planet in another galaxy. The event occurred on the sixth of June 2009, Earth time. I was a student in my senior year at college on Earth. I lived in a beautiful apartment house with four, then five other apartment dwellers off campus. We, who were left on Earth would slowly realize that everything was different. If it hadn't been for an affable golden retriever, my apartment friends and I might have starved. I say might because after the event, all was new. After the realization of the scope of the abduction, all people, young and old, listened and watched a TV personality named Big Papa for general information. After a while, we, the apartment dwellers, became complacent. All depended on Big Papa to inform us and find solutions to our local problems. Many people are less frightened we will disappear, if we avoid the big cities. It is thought the threat is over. But is it really?

Well, let me begin. Early in the twenty-first century, an anomaly called the Obliteration brought an end to the population explosion on the planet Earth. On the sixth of June 2009, ninety eight percent of Earth's people disappeared from the planet. Only a few an undetermined number of people were left on Earth. Everything about the population's disappearance was mysterious, especially in the beginning.

I think if I tell you about the man with the movie camera early, you will start to realize the vastness of the abduction and the magnitude of panic those poor people who were taken must have felt. A photographer took a movie of what happened. When most of the people of Earth were taken, we didn't see his movie at first. I fortunately was not taken, but it is difficult to decide whether to tell you what the movie guy knew first, or how I became slowly aware of what had happened to our population, or another thing. I will mention the other thing first. Then I will go into the other subjects, later.

Apart from the plight of Earth's people, the other thing was that there was another sentient alien race in our galaxy. They had involved themselves before with us, and although they were unknown to us in the past, they now decided to help in our time of need again. Yes, without our knowledge again too. Some saw the weird fog that the man with the movie camera captured of the event. Oh! There was one other narrative of the event by a couple out in a field. It is kind of interesting too. I'll mention it with the home movie. Perhaps, I should collect my thoughts a little better; I seem to be all over the place with this narrative. Okay, here go my collected thoughts, then the narrative.

The day the obliteration happened, we knew nothing yet about any other aliens. Our involvement with the interesting nearby aliens shouldn't be such a stretch later, after a short explanation of their reason for helping us. And now that we know there are aliens in the universe, other aliens besides Earth peoples, the narratives will be known as The Chronicles of Nystar and the Tales of the Directional Verses, Leonian Verse, and Others or the Tales a shortened name for the series of the books.

I'm Meredith, and for the moment, my life was just as yours. It seemed like I was in a dream, but a conflicted one. This dreaming, for some reason, would soon awaken in me a weird, psychic ability. The hidden, psychic awareness would display itself in dreams. These vivid visions were what was really happening, but I thought them just awful nightmares. They haunted me throughout the years of Obliteration. For the moment, and for the past four years, I was a college student who lived on the outskirts of a sleepy college town. I had two study haunts: the cliff point and the Victorian library. I will tell you about them soon. Whenever I got restless studying too long, I would escape through a dream, a meditation in one of these two places. It relaxed me. I visualized a year of seasons and usually started at the beginning of a school year. This time it was the fall of 2008.

So, on June 5, 2009, after breakfast, the rest of the day was spent at the cliff studying and thinking about 2008. One more week, then finals would be over. I went in and out of the dream that day. I am very partial to descriptions and would go to the cliff point, would leave the tree where I nestled in its roots, and would crawl over the grass to the rocks that hung over the cliff. I closed my eyes and dangled my legs. I became light headed and could feel myself flying, soaring over the valley to see what could be seen. Oh, what marvelous sights appear when Mother Nature waves her magic wand and sprinkles orange, red, and yellow leaves on the trees to make a patchwork quilt of the valley. But this was not to last. Slowly, the winter came, and the quilt gave way to a white blanket of snow. I quit the point, wrapped myself warmly, and drank hot chocolate. Instead, the Victorian library was where my studying would continue. This library expanded to an entire first floor of the apartment building. Two Persian rugs split the room in two. On one side, there were library tables in a row with stuffed straight chairs surrounding them. There were large Victorian lamps hovering above this right side of the room. On the other side, there were several large couches and overstuffed chairs with lamps on tables spread around facing each other and in a row. At the far end of the room, the rest of the books were packed into bookcases. The owner never cleaned out the basement books. The room was a reading room now, but at the far end, there were still several rows of bookshelves filled with books. As nice as the comfy couches were, I would study in the window seats between the rest of the books in bookcases pressed flat against the walls between the windows. Six beautiful windows were recessed into the walls and delighted the senses. I would pull the curtain closed and hide. When I changed my subject, I moved to a new window piled high with pillows, but seclusion there was not to last either.

The cold would abate. The mittens were put away. I would leave the library haunt to go to the point again. By now, it was spring, and Mother Nature used her creative wand to change the valley to pastels. A sheet of violet heather and flowers of pink and white covered the valley. The colors had all but faded by June. This day the weather was balmy and seductive. The cliff hadn't been so lovely for a long time. It was especially dark in the green folds of the rolling mountains. The clouds were like fluffy pillows and would hover above a bed of fog most mornings.

I finished my studying and daydream; then I went home, ate, and jumped into bed at nine. Around midnight, I woke out of a deep sleep. It was pitch black. Someone forgot to turn the floodlight on again. I felt weird, but eventually a fitful sleep ensued. I had dreams this night. I could not remember them at first. Around four, for no apparent reason, I sat bolt upright and looked out the window. The sky over the town was lit up with a violet fog. How long it had been that way only the spirits knew, but it lasted a few more minutes. Then, the condensation became less dense. Not long after, I had a horrible nightmare. In the dream, thousands of people were swept away in an instant. I woke with a start. Their cries haunt me, even today. Even while writing this part of the story, panic and fear invaded my being. At the time, there was only a nagging feeling that something horrifying was happening, but in the morning, only a vague depressed feeling remained. The feeling something was just not right continued. It was a feeling I had before when I had a brother. The day he was five and I was still ten, he was hit by a car. He died at the hospital. I woke up with the same feeling this June 6.

Around seven, my alarm clock, which I'd named Nagy hag, was ringing. I hated the ring that notified me it was wake-up time. After punching the snooze button five times, I hurriedly got ready for class. I remember thinking, You should prepare everything the night before, because you like to push that snooze button. If it weren't laid out, maybe something would be forgotten. It came to mind, The weather was quite pleasant yesterday, and it was good for the spirit. It also came to mind, Your thoughts are random; I hope concentration on the exams won't be a problem. I think my thoughts were random this time because when I woke up at seven, I was in the midst of a dream. The dream was about a green fog in a window of a door in a back hall of someplace not familiar to me. I remember the fog was bright. There must have been a spotlight in back of it. I was watching the door, and there came a wiggly line in the shape of a man right through the glass window.¹

Now how about that for imagination? I asked myself as I awoke. Hmm, maybe there was some reason for those horrible nightmares. I thought back to what I had eaten. Nothing in my diet should have caused that barrage of wild dreams, like the ones I had last night. Well, I had to get up this time when the snooze rang, random thoughts or not.

Besides having disconnected thoughts, it would be difficult to guess my thoughts, I lived off campus in a modern apartment house we called the mansion. A nineteenth-century robber baron's three-story library, which he originally gave to the town, was converted into a one-story reading room with books on the first floor, and two floors of apartments to make money for his estate. Each of the apartments was extremely beautiful and modern inside in contrast to the older Victorian library and outside stone walls. At the time, the apartment house suited my dreamy mood. There were four apartments in the complex with an entrance hall to the library. The hall also contained the front stairway to the apartments on the second and third floor. The steps and hall were enclosed.

Also, there were two apartments to each floor. On the outside of the building, there were small porches and steps down to the ground on either side of the complex. My side had the parking lot. The other side had a walkway and a tree-lined cliff that hung over the college town.

The interiors of the apartments were a contrast to the aged Victorian library. They had ultra-modern kitchens and baths. Lots of stainless steel with black plastic filled up the area. The microwave, dishwasher, and fridge were all the most up to date. There was a whirlpool and shower in each bathroom. There was also a magnificent heat lamp. It had several settings for warmth and tanning. The rest of the apartment had well-worn furniture. I didn't have a job, and my parents decided it would be good for me to rough it for a while. They thought it would make me appreciate wealth, when and if it came to me. I thought to myself, not to my parents, If this were roughing it, I would do it forever.

The apartments were large and roomy, but the beauty of the place lay in the attractive library. Each apartment roomy—that is what we called the other renters—met in the library when we had a problem or gripe. The apartments on each floor did not meet at all points. For some reason, the robber baron had a skylight over the middle of his library. When the apartments were renovated, the skylight and access to it were left in place. There was a large opening in the library between apartments that went three floors up to the skylight. Around the room were columns that held the bathrooms together upstairs and downstairs and supported the above apartments. The first floor was library only. On the other two floors, there were balconies above the interior of the library. On rare occasions, we would converse from the balconies. There was a roof that electronically closed over the overhanging glass skylight. It was something added at renovation and was used in rough weather. I never remembered the metal dome being closed over the skylight, except during a blizzard we had the first year I lived here. A metal dome over the glass dome could be closed, when it snowed or was cold or too hot.

One of the apartments was empty. Joe and his girlfriend, Laura, were across from me. Shawn and Randy, his dog, were under my apartment. Everyone was friendly, and we would chat in the entrance hall at various times during any given day. Sometimes, we would go to the library downstairs and sit and talk. The rest of the building had a permanent roof over the third floor. I was allowed to stay here because I was doing well at school. If my grades slipped, I would have to go to a dorm. All that wouldn't matter soon because I was a senior, and my graduation was imminent.

Joe and Laura were secretly married. Joe was an FBI agent working undercover. He was very intelligent—so much so that he skipped grades and did extremely well in college, and he also did postgraduate work. He met Laura while working undercover. Laura was burnt out from school. They would go to Laura's family soon. Her parents would still be here. However, for now, time seemed to stand still for all of us. Laura and I commiserated in the past on how her parents would not like her being married to Joe. They didn't know about her marriage yet.

Well, I was ready to go to school by now. It was June 6 and the first day of exams. I prepared to leave by the outside door. As I did Randy, Shawn's dog, began to bark. They, the two of them, were always going out the door for Randy's walk as I left for school. I opened the door to the outside, and out came both of them. I walked down the steps from the porch. My apartment was on the third floor. It was just a typical day. When I think back to that day, there was not even a hint that most of the people on the planet were gone.

Nice morning, I said in greeting. He was aware it was finals time. I'm beginning to be glad I'm finishing up school. Silly me, I didn't figure Shawn liked me. I kept rubbing salt in the wound. I am eager to graduate and go and soak up some rays at the shore.

Yeah, he said abruptly. We need to tell Al all the outside lights are out.

Hmm, I said. I noticed the light went out for good last night.

I would go get the spotlight one, but Al wouldn't pay me, said Shawn.

I know. You want me to call him? He probably won't try to make a female pay.

Okay, if you would. That light will probably cost at least forty-five dollars.

Don't worry, I said. I won't get the light, and I'll make Al be the landlord he should be. We both laughed. By the time we finished our conversation, he and Randy were both out of sight. It was just a typical day. There wasn't even an inkling of our loss at first.

The light on the other side of the apartments, on Joe and Laura's side, had been out for weeks. That wasn't my problem, but the spotlight kept turning on and off. Last night it was out. We needed to get it fixed quickly, because of wild animals. Also, there were homeless men hanging around the trash, especially on pizza night. For this reason, and the fact that Randy would bark at all noise in the parking lot, I wanted the lights fixed.

Al didn't want to fix anything for the tenants.

I'm not for fixings, he would often say. I'm the landlord. Basically, I thought he was lazy. He wanted to collect rent and not fix things when they were broken. That light being out was that significant? I thought soon after. Why were we not taken?

Many times, I look back on the life we had before that day in June 2009, the day we began to call Obliteration Day. Were our lives better? Maybe? Of course it was for me, but what of the billions of other people, those who lived here on planet Earth. Nothing prepared those who survived anywhere for what happened that weird night called Obliteration.

_______________

1 When our people were taken Obliteration Night, an emotional rift occurred in our galaxy. An alien race on a nearby planet, Nyponse, sent Tackon, an invisible envoy, to observe the cause of the emotional upheaval. Tackon might be able to be visible. He latched on to Meredith's dream and went to find her, but he lost track of his portal, and unbeknownst to her, he began to live with her. His emotions were hard to control. Perhaps because he could feel so much, from the people left on Earth, he would seem neurotic. Meredith sensed the anomaly caused by Tackon but soon attributed the feeling to Obliteration jitters. Tackon, also an empath absorbed human emotions, causing an emotional condition from which he needed to escape sometimes. His first escapes were to a secluded cabin in the mountains away from people but near her. His effect was a calmness of nature on the human from which he fed. The transference came from his touch on both the humans' shoulders and an extreme gaze into the humans' eyes. The humans felt the intensity but didn't comprehend their extreme feelings were being absorbed by an alien—not just an alien but an invisible shimmer being. The human was not affected except to have a strange feeling of inner peace.

CHAPTER 2

Awareness

T

he general populations, those who saw anything of the kidnapping and survived the abduction, were mostly only aware of the light violet mist, or nothing at all. Those who were in New York working on the docks in the early hours of the day saw a dense purple substance much like ink in water, only it was in the air. It seemed to become a wall of smoke. They were taken. However, by chance, there on the opposite side of the purple substance was a man on Liberty Island. He watched the event as it occurred. As a matter of fact, the guards at the Statue of Liberty thought him a nuisance because he would fish off the rocks on the island and start a fire on the grounds to keep warm. The guards would tell him to shoo but did little to move him. He had a movie camera, binoculars, and a tape recorder and some idea he would make a documentary about fishing for a sports magazine. But this night, he was about to do a service for all mankind. He was the only one who saw the opening where the event began and some of what happened. He recorded and filmed some of the event and left it on the island. Evidently, he edited the first day's filming. He made his comments before he showed each segment. This is what he left us.

I was in my tent. In fact, I woke from a restless sleep, he said. "It felt like someone or something was watching me out above the water. I thought about it for a few minutes. That was really stupid. I was on an island with no one but the guards. Nothing could stay stationary out there on that choppy water and look at me too. I looked at my watch. It was twelve fifteen. Finally, I opened my tent. I didn't have the tent zipped up all the way. The zipper was broke. Sure enough, out above the water, not fifty feet away, was this visage of a pointy-eared, long-faced alien. I took my binoculars out and had a look. It was only an image of his face, not the rest of him. It was much larger than any face I had ever seen. I began to film the creature. It was about three and a half feet high and two feet wide. He didn't have much substance. I guess he was a shadow. He had vacant eyes that were much darker than the night. There was no glow from the lights of New York in his eyes, nostrils, or mouth, which he now opened. Through the rest of the shadowy face, you could see the city behind him. I was mesmerized. I just looked and looked.

"Five or ten minutes later, it occurred to me he might be the devil. I saw long pointy ears close to his head. That sort of startled me, so I slowly zipped up my tent to around my face. It was strangely weird. I couldn't stop watching the thing. I didn't turn on my light because I didn't want to alert it to my presence. Yeah, like it wasn't looking at me anyway…After about fifteen minutes, the alien's long face retracted. Kids use the expression ‘scrunched up a bit.’ The eyes went down with the rest of the face. The pointy-headed miscreant receded, and slowly the face turned into a star shape with smaller star eyes, nostrils, and a mouth. The smaller stars positioned themselves in a circle in the middle of the newly formed star.

Then the orifices did the oddest thing. They began to spin in a circle at the same pace and speed. Slowly, they moved toward each other. Then they formed one swirling mass. A couple of minutes later, they slowed down, reforming into a star shape. Now there was just the one big star within a gigantic star. I thought the whole thing was just not logical. It was less scary than the alien, but I still wasn't happy with my next-door neighbor. Around twelve thirty, a purple substance spurted out of the thin air from the void, from the inner star shape. The void area was about two feet across by now. At first, the purple substance was a trickle. Eventually, it filled the void, and it gushed out of the inner star.

The star-shaped darkness changed as it formed a circle. At the same time, the outer star also turned into a circle. When I looked up, the mass between the circles, now a glimpse here and there, looked like glitter or muted stars but really were the city's lights. The man still did not have the flashlight on the visage. Then, as I watched, the thick purple smoke came out faster. When it did, the inner and outer circle increased in size. The substance came out into the air. It formed a wall of purple fog, and slowly the fog moved up about sixteen feet and down four feet. This made it just above the water. The fog diffused toward the city. Then for no reason, it stopped right before it hit New York…I don't know why, but the fog was not going north and south, he said. From where it started, it was about a mile or two wide, maybe more, of purple smoke. He showed us this part. There was a pause here. He turned off the camera. Later, he resumed his story.

The purple smoke went north and south, forming a continuous wall. I could not see the end of it in either direction. The camera was off for this part only. As it spread, the dark purple turned lighter, and it became a violet mist. I will let you see that and the rest on my camera. The inner circle formed into a larger circle also. It increased so much, it almost touched the outer circle, he said. Then after about three hours, I turned on the camera again. Quickly, within moments, I saw the transparent violet cloud go toward the city in waves. You see! It rolled away, like a mist on a moor. I watched as some of the dark fog turned into a violet pod over to the left there. Then, smoke and pod went toward the west. All this took place by three fifteen this morning. When I saw the fog move away from here and toward New York, I looked at my watch. He was at a distance, and it didn't even occur to him that there might be something in the pod.

He couldn't see the wave as it went west. Like a tsunami, it took all mobile living things in its path, or so it seemed. The thick wave spread further and further west, picking up humans and animals in its wake. It had now expanded from the North to the South Pole. Sometimes, the wave was almost transparent. Other times, the wave was so thick that the people engulfed couldn't see anything outside their particular pod. It ebbed and flowed as the sea, trapping the people within its sticky borders similar to sea creatures caught in a net. Light to dark purple surrounded them as the shrinking plasma strengthened the goo. Meanwhile, the man knew none of this. When he calmed down, he slept. While he slept, it became light. The guards went home. They had not seen what he had seen. Later that day, after dozing, he did the editing. He noticed the guards did not come to the island that day. He ate a hearty meal at lunch, did some fishing, edited his movie, and fell fast asleep in his tent for most of the rest of the day. When he awoke, it was dark. He started a small fire. He noticed the night guards did not come back to the island either. He thought it strange because the statue had been heavily guarded since September 11, 2001. As the embers died, he saw the purple coming toward him from the east. He took the tape recorder and turned it on again.

It is about the same time as last night, he said. In his haste to not miss anything, he did not go to his tent to get the flashlight. The guards did not show up this morning, and the night guards didn't show either… In a few moments, he said, I see something. It looks like purple fog, like last night. He scrunched down in the rocks. What he saw next was astonishing. Oh! Look! The purple wave is coming from the east. There is the circle. Look! What I am saying is you can't see it, but the circle has stopped coming toward me. There is a gigantic ship. It looks like bubble pods going into the ship. He got the movie camera, put it on a rock, and pointed it toward the circle. There are pods trailing it…Wow, now the circle is all lit up. It is awesome. It took him a few moments to recover, and then he continued. The pods are disappearing into what looks like that opening in the ship; the ship is going through the circle. It's a couple of miles up in the air. Both ship and circle are gigantic. Oh…Lordy. It looks like something is in that pod going into that ship. I'm going to look at it with my binoculars…Oh, God. You could tell from his voice that awe had turned to gruesome shock. I think there are people in those pods. The pods look like eyes. He was horrified. You could hear him breathing heavy. I'm going to turn on my flashlight, he said. We heard nothing more. He turned on his high-powered flashlight to look at the phenomenon. Before he could grab the camera again, zap, he was taken in what would be the last pod. He looked at the tape recorder and camera and the embers of his campfire as his small pod hit the next pod. It appeared he was on a roller-coaster ride as his pod bumped and moved quickly into a larger pod. He began to experience some sticky substance on his face and hands. His pod moved through the gigantic portal window, into the mother ship and he fainted.

Oddly, the camera caught the last glimpse of the circle. The lights around the outside became bright, dimmed, and then went out. Was that the alien that appeared like an evil genie? In an instant, the alien changed to a horrible devil appearance, becoming a frightening aberration. At that moment, it had the most hideous, grotesque appearance. The pods and ships transformed again into a dark, snakeskin appearance and had a strange gothic look. In an instant, the ship disappeared through a circle, leaving a residue similar to liquid plastic. Two large eyes peered through that fog residue. Then, the circle changed to an appearance of smoke from a candle just snuffed out.

The only other account we salvaged was told by a man and a woman on the ground. Elderly and confused, they hid. For years, they thought everyone was taken. When the couple finally came into the office later, the Command tape-recorded the ordeal for posterity, after which they returned home safely.

We were walking home across the field, the woman said. We fell on our backs and watched the scene unfold in front of us.

We saw a plane going west, said the man. The creepy, crawly purple fog came close to us. It was close to the ground also. It surprised us when it leapt toward a 747 flying in the night. We were dumfounded when the plane was engulfed. The emergency doors on either side came open. We were having some trouble breathing from the fog, and it was dark, but we looked up again. The plane kept on going, but the people from the plane were captured in that fog. From what we could see, the violet fog that encircled them turned into a pod of mucous substance. The pod gently allowed the people to fall from the plane, into a smaller, darker pod. The darker pod then fell into a lighter, larger pod that looked like eyes below them. After the pod transformed, the fog engulfed them in that there slimy-looking pod contraption. The two bystanders also saw the pods stop for a moment. The purple substance inside was purged. It was as though its purpose was to make it easier for the people to breathe."

After the purging, the woman said. "The fog was replaced by clean air from above the pod. We couldn't see much. We were coughing from the smoke that surrounded us now. We lay flat due to slow asphyxiation.