The Strange Light at Salem House and other stories

By Paul Tiberi

Three stories to capture your imagination.

One a journey to a post-apocalyptic world where humans have become pets and, more ominously, a potential source of breeding stock for an alien race.

The second, a story of an unwelcome visitor. Is it the delusions of mind or is it a poltergeist or spirit bent on some unknown

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Tiberi
• Release date: Oct 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9798985017700

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was the year of our Lord, 2052. Eleven billion people now roam the Earth competing to survive. Earth’s resources to feed this massive amount of people were close to exhaustion. No matter how hard they tried, scientists and conservationists could not keep up with the food supply demand. Countries hoarded food supplies. Trade was at an all-time low. It had become a dog-eat-dog planet.

As the population increased, people grew accustomed to eating many odd things to survive. Algae, seaweed, other ocean, and water vegetation, as well as fish and animals—never considered food sources— were now consumed on a daily basis. Domestic animals disappeared by the thousands as people grew desperate for a meal. Many fish, fowl and other wildlife teetered on the verge of extinction.

Massive migration to free countries precipitated the population rise; no wars had occurred in the last thirty years. The result was a free-wheeling society in every country where sexual activity was now commonplace among teenagers as early as age thirteen.

Things had gotten out of control. Every minority culture had spokespeople and politicians lobbying for their rights to live and do as they pleased. No one had the balls to go against the mob. Consequently, no one really saw this coming.

Because of the current overpopulation and world tension, war had broken out on many fronts. The Chinese—now the Earth’s richest nation, with population of 1.5 billion people—still faced massive starvation. They instigated the war with America over unpaid loans and the refusal to pay with food supplies. China now had the largest army on Earth. It was rumored that China provoked a war because she needed to reduce her population and was willing to commit mass genocide in order to do that.

China suffered the death of one million military personnel in the three-year-old old conflict with NATO forces. Although they were willing to expend some military people, they had no intention of losing the war. The Chinese allied with Russia who also had their reasons to fight America.

Russia had, for many years, been estranged from America and never recovered from the penalties metered out by NATO in 2018. Investigations uncovered overwhelming evidence that Russian intelligence intervened in the 2016 American Presidential elections—electronically and cybernetically—to elect David Trumpkins the POTUS.

Trumpkins, a known Soviet sympathizer after a few years of investigation, was impeached. Things unraveled very quickly after that.

In the middle of this tragic backdrop was a major scientific discovery. The Mars Rover sent back analytic information revealing signs of water and possibly basic life forms on the planet. For as long as space exploration had gone on, Mars was considered a barren, uninhabitable, planet. But now these latest reports suggested something intriguing. Nothing could be seen by the rovers or the world’s most powerful telescopes. Red terrain, mountains and craters were all anyone could observe. But interestingly enough, several huge canyons, which held very large cave like openings big enough to fit an aircraft carrier, had also been discovered. Could the ancient life on Mars have gone underground when the surface became uninhabitable?

These were the mysterious questions looming before mankind in the summer of 2052.

Chapter 2

They had come to Earth for thousands of years before 2052. Many scientists and astronomers believed that space travelers or visitors from other planets had come to Earth and created the many unexplained phenomenal structures all over the world. Man had no explanations for how mankind of those eras could possibly build those structures without other intervention or help - the pyramids, Stonehenge, statues on Easter Island, a large and sophisticated temple in South America, the interlocking stone blocks of the Cusco Fortress, some weighing three hundred tons and transported twenty miles to their building site.

Researchers readily came up with more rational explanations to answer for these totally irrational structures, but none were really convincing. Cave pictures depicting men in helmets, alien-looking beings drawn by primitive cave dwellers a million years ago, cannot be tossed aside. More recently, massive power outages, accompanied by UFO sightings and cornfield cryptic blown stalk inscriptions, had convinced many that we were experiencing visitations of unknown origin.

Many believers were saying that it had to be coming from the closest planet to ours. Mars was the planet that could possibly have sustained life at one time and unbeknownst to them, they were correct.

Mars is almost five billion years old. It was possibly inhabited by life forms earlier than Earth, many millions of years ago. At one time, millions of years ago, Mars had a livable atmosphere and climate for extraterrestrial life. There is evidence that water oceans were on the surface of the planet and rivers flowed through. It was much more temperate than the cold that exists there now. In its southern hemisphere, there is a huge volcanic mountain and also a cavernous crater, the size of the United States.

It is here that this story takes place. Far below the surface of the planet they called Anthos, the Ancients who lived there started making the transition to subterranean levels as their atmosphere was being stripped away by the solar winds. The Ancients, who were called Anthosians, had a plan to live below the surface in huge caverns and hollowed out spaces, large enough to support life, grow sustainable food and drink from the underground springs. They would move all of their space transport vehicles to accessible areas from where they could continue their travels. It took hundreds and hundreds of their years since an Anthos year is twice that of Earth. They were largely successful for a very long time but then something went horribly wrong that changed their grim future.

Chapter 3

His eyes followed her as she walked toward him from the far side of the enclosure. She had a grim look on her face. Miranda was usually covert in her expressions. She did not like the guards to know what she was feeling. It was something she learned to mask in the time she had spent here. They could use it against you if they sensed it and they usually did. They were highly sensitive to your movements and facial expressions, your voice, and the way you interacted with others.

The Mugabi were bred to be guards and watchers, protectors also, and they were the ones who carried out the orders. They were the ones who watched the captives and fed them, who let them out of their enclosures, closely guarded.

They were created and bred thousands of years ago to serve as the Ancient People’s soldiers and guardians. They did their masters’ bidding without question. To describe them, one would first say they were inhumanly tall - seven and a half feet tall - and their bodies were long and lean, almost like African Watusi Warriors. The similarity stopped there. They were not at all human-like. Their heads were large, with pointed, upright ears and wide eye slits which inside resided red, beady eyes. Their noses were snouts and they possessed long mouths with many pointed, razor-sharp teeth. Rat Heads is what they were called by the captives who lived here.

They also had long, spindly legs and arms, at the end of which were hands and feet, more like paws containing long, sharp talons. They were more animal than human in appearance, but they also had a primitive intelligence far smarter than what they showed. Because they possessed these traits, they could receive commands without vocalizations, as no one or anything on this planet except for the ones who were taken here, spoke vocally.

All communication between the resident beings was done through eye contact, motions, grunts, or guttural sounds similar to animals. One also sensed some sort of telepathy between them. Sometimes it was hard to know what they were trying to convey but one didn’t hesitate too long to get the message, or you would receive a painful prompting. The Mugabi were usually not too patient with the captives who made up this unlikely zoo.

Chapter 4

When Miranda stepped up to Rory, she greeted him with a hug. Rory was pleased to receive it but hoped that the Mugabi assigned to guard them had not seen it. Miranda had been Rory’s mate for some time now. They had been taken from Earth, along with the others, as captives when the Anthosian ships visited Earth in one of their routine expeditions. The Ancients had been coming here for thousands of years but not revealing themselves. Their planet was alive and thriving then, but things were much different now. The planet Anthos, which Earthlings called Mars, had burned itself out through wars, environmental calamities, and astrological events, stripping the planet of its natural environment.

The few remaining survivors were barely hanging on and were searching for ways to resurrect their species and possibly relocate it. Their forays to Earth now included gathering missions to fill huge transport ships with water, which was severely lacking on Anthos, and taking some of Earth’s species to be studied, experimented with and possibly cross-created with their own genes.

On these new voyages, at first they had taken human specimens, then later took animal and plant species. They needed to study all human behavior in order to learn as much as they could about them firsthand. Their past visits, thousands of years ago, were with more primitive beings who were fascinated by them, but modern technological humankind was more suspicious and cautious and perhaps warlike. These takings were carried out very secretly in isolated places where no others could observe them. Usually they would take their species in pairs, male and female.

Miranda and Rory were two of about a dozen humans in their own enclosure. They were paired off by the Mugabi, with no choice given to them. Usually, they had mates of the same age group.

They lived in the same enclosure together which was contained in a very large cavern the size of ten football fields. The ground was dirt and rock. The whole underground area was lit by luminous indigenous rocks in the walls of the cavern that glowed just bright enough for them to see. They all had separate areas, by couples, that contained crude bedding made from the planet’s vegetable stalks which were soft and silk-like. On these they slept, and when the Mugabi commanded them, they coupled with their mates, having sexual relations.

Their hosts had a curious interest in having them procreate every few days and when ordered, they would have to comply at once. This order would involve all the couples in their respective places, requiring them to respond so that they resembled one big fuck wagon until they had all exhausted and spent themselves, satisfying their guards that they had participated enthusiastically. To facilitate these periodic fuckathons, the human captives were not given any kind of clothing to wear. They were always naked and slowly got used to being uninhibited with each other.

If they didn’t comply, the light sticks the Mugabi carried quickly persuaded them to.

The captives were fed protein sticks of unknown origin, made from perhaps one of the remaining vegetations the residents were able to grow in the cavern. It was enough to sustain them, but it was also mostly tasteless. Mugabi guards would place enough for them to eat at the entrance of the enclosure. They drank a colorless, iron-tasting water from a bubbling natural rocklike fountain in the middle of the enclosure which then went into a stream-like crevice from which they bathed upstream and deposited their human waste downstream, all of which then emptied into a hole in the ground about fifty feet away.

It was all very primitive, but they did not have any choice. They were captives on a strange planet, which they knew nothing about. and they were not the only species from Earth sharing that large space.

Chapter 5

None of the residents of this planetary zoo could figure out what the fascination with them having sexual relations with their respective mates was about. They only knew that they were forbidden to do it with anyone other than their mate and also at any other time than when it was commanded. Anything else was punished by the Mugabi. It was said by the older members of their enclosure that the Ancients were interested in human genetics and that any babies that were born from these unions were quickly taken away and never seen again. In Miranda’s and Rory’s time there, no births had yet occurred.

It was hard to say how much time had passed since they were brought here. There was no accounting for time. Day and night were the same here in these huge caverns. The lighting from the rock walls was constant. One could get a very inaccurate account from the sleeping periods, but Anthos’ days were much longer than Earths’ and the small group had adapted to them.

Human interaction was not the only thing being observed by their hosts. All around the human’s enclosure were the same invisible walls which provided a see-through barrier to the next one, but also possessed a fixed border. It was like being in a giant aquarium looking into the next, but you couldn’t reach through it. When you reached its boundaries it was like hitting a glass wall, but there was no glass. Instead, there was some kind of transparent force field. Bordering the human enclosure were additional enclosures containing wildlife from Earth, also taken on the visitations. Just like the humans, the aliens had taken these animals in species pairs. It was like a huge planetary Noah’s Ark.

The animals would constantly forget that the force field existed between them and would go charging at their human neighbors, only to hit the field and almost knock themselves out. The humans, after a while, found this to be oddly entertaining. Sometimes their instinct would be to forget and run away or close their eyes and brace for impact, only to see an animal bounce off the invisible wall.

Rory took the opportunity of this unique boundary to get up close to some beasts he was interested in observing. It was like being on a safari without any fear of being trampled or eaten. In particular, he had taken a liking to a very large and majestic male lion that he had come to call Elvis. The play on words amused him. Elvis, the rock and roll performer from the past, had been nicknamed the King. And here was the King of Beasts, hence, the name Elvis. Rory called Elvis’ mate, a beautiful young lioness, Cleo, after the Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra.

There were times when Rory stood side by side with Elvis in their own enclosures and they would look at each other with curiosity. All about these enclosures were various animals paired up with other animals that their hosts had deemed would get along and hopefully not attack each other. There were elephants, zebras, horses, cows, buffalo, deer, moose, and animals of that sort in one enclosure. In another were birds of various species, including birds of prey, like eagles and hawks. In another were gators, turtles, frogs, and lizards. In another were smaller animals, like rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, and gophers. All in all, there were many varieties but certainly not every species. There were none from the sea, which would have required a much larger container that the Ancients were not willing to provide or maintain.

All of these beasts were fed the same kind of protein sticks. Some were made into ball-like shapes and put in their enclosures, along with water streams for them to drink from. After a while, Rory could tell that the animals were being somewhat drugged to take away their natural predatory instincts and to keep them under control.

Maybe it was because of this that he and Elvis had slowly started to develop a unique relationship that almost seemed like a man and his