He Said

By John Amerson

He said: Long before Earth and the stars that you see in the night sky were created, there were thousands upon thousands of planets throughout the universe supporting life. The inhabitants of the planets live in peace. The gods were pleased. Yes, I said "the gods," not one, not just your god but all the gods. Even back then no one knew how many there were, how they came to be, or where they came from. Some of the inhabited planets were only a few million miles apart. As the inhabitants of the planets began to venture out into space they encountered other races and cultures. Wars broke out. And soon the whole universe was filled with warring planets determined to conquer one another. The gods became angry. Mankind had become a disappointment. The gods decided to put an end to all the violence. Your scientists got the big bang theory practically right. It wasn't the creation of the universe. It was the destruction of the universe. Earth and what you see in the night sky is the aftermath, the rubble, you might say, of a universe that had been home to thousands upon thousands of inhabited planets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642981605

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He Said

John Amerson

Copyright © 2018 John Amerson

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64298-159-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64298-160-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

Hello,

My name is John Carl. What I am about to tell you I’m sure you will find hard to believe. In fact, I know you will find it hard to accept because I was there and I still do not think what I saw, heard, and did was real. You will not find that I have used any of those five- or ten-dollar words to exaggerate, create suspense, or glorify anyone or any event in the pages that follow. Also, I have no proof to back up what I am about to reveal to you. Isn’t that a shocker! My story is probably like hundreds of other similar stories that have gone untold. I am or was just an average, everyday person who had the fortune or misfortune to meet someone who was literally from out of this world.

The reason I have decided to go public is I have felt for some time now that I am being watched. You know that feeling you got as a child when you walked down a dark or dimly lit hallway after watching a scary movie. The hair on the back of your neck would stand up or you would get a cold chill and flinch, but when you turned around there would be nothing or no one there. Well, imagine being an adult and having those same childhood feeling while walking down a public sidewalk in broad daylight. If you are reading my story, I have probably already disappeared by choice or have met my fate in some freak accident. Just for the record, the latter of the two would not have been my first choice.

My goals in telling my story were to recall to the best of my recollection the events as I witnessed them happen. Then, go public and hopefully be discredited, laughed at, and considered a crazy harmless crackpot and no longer a threat to the Caretakers. If after reading my story you come to the conclusion that the previous sentence is true, then I have done my job. If, on the other hand, you start to believe that we are not alone or it strengthens your assumptions that we are not alone, then I have failed and I am in deep doggy do.

PS: Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Throughout my story you will see where I have mentioned specific days, dates, and times. The reason I am able to do this is after my father passed away a few years back I had the grim task of going through his personal effects. My father was always asking me if I remembered what we were doing or what I was doing or what had happened on some particular day in years gone by. I never could figure out how my father could remember all those days, dates, times, and events until after he had passed away. In going through my father’s personal effects I found journal after journal going back over sixty years. He had taken a minute or two each evening of each day to write down just a sentence or two or maybe a short paragraph describing the events of each day of our lives. He would record the day, the date, the time, and the day’s weather, what we had for lunch or what I, he, or we did on that particular day in time for future reference. In a short paragraph or sentence or two he recorded the events of every day of my childhood. As I glanced through my daddy’s daily journals, treasured memory after memory that I had forgotten brought smile after smile to my face and tears to my eyes. After reading a couple of pages of my daddy’s journals I decided to start taking a minute or two of each evening of each day and record the events of my life one day at a time as my daddy did.

Sincerely,

John Carl

Background

Well, I guess I should give you a little background on myself before I get started with my story. A short road map of my life, so to speak. This way you will know where I’m coming from and maybe how I got myself into this predicament at this point in time in my life. I was born in September of 1951 in Savanah Georgia. I wasn’t dropped on my head at birth. I wasn’t born crazy, off my rocker, or with a screw loose. I grew up in an average American family in an average American neighborhood. A loaf of bread cost twelve cents. A Coca-Cola cost six cents, and a gallon of gas cost a whopping eighteen cents.

As a child I got Western Union telegrams from Santa Clause at Christmastime telling me that he had heard that I had been a good little boy and that I was on his nice list. I still have the telegrams today. They are framed and hanging on a wall in my home right beside my high school diploma and awards I have received throughout my thirty-four-year career as an insurance salesman.

Santa Clause, his sleigh, and reindeer would land on the top of our house every Christmas Eve night about twelve o’clock midnight. At least I thought that was what they did from the time I was old enough to believe until I was twelve years old. I guess you could say that I had led a very sheltered life. But in my defense, most children like me believed everything their parents told them in those days. As a child it never dawned on me that my parents would fib to me, especially about someone as important as Santa Clause. So when my parents told me Santa Clause was real and reindeer could fly, I believed them.

Years later I found out that my daddy had gotten a couple of his friends from work to come over each Christmas Eve night around midnight. They would climb up on top of our house and run back and forth across the roof with sleigh bells in their hands. Again, in my defense, what was I to believe? It was Christmas Eve night, there were noises on the rooftop, and the sound of sleigh bells filled the night air. It had to be Santa Clause.

I did not hear either of my parents utter a bad word until I was fifteen. My daddy had just bought a brand-new automobile. It was a black 1966 Mercury with red interior. The evening of the next day my daddy and I were sitting at the kitchen table and my mama was cooking dinner, which we called supper in those days. All of a sudden Mama said, I backed into a light pole in the grocery store parking lot this morning and put a small dent in the left side of the rear bumper of the car. There were about thirty seconds of silence, and then I heard my daddy speak a word that started with an F. That was it. Just that one word, nothing else. Even at the young age of fifteen I knew that, that said it all. It summed it up in a nutshell, so to speak. Because neither one of my parents said another word before supper or during supper. And to the best of my memory I don’t recall hearing either one of them say anything the rest of the evening.

The worst thing students did when I was attending junior high and high school was to sneak around behind the gym or cafeteria at lunchtime and smoke. As I look back over the years those were the good ole days, the innocent days, the happy days. What I wouldn’t give to just be able to go back and visit.

When I turned fifteen I got a part-time job at a grocery store bagging groceries and stocking shelves after school. After I graduated from high school I spent two years in college while still working at the grocery store part-time. I eventually dropped out of college, became a full-time assistant manager for the same grocery store and got married. Six months after I had gotten married I was getting a divorce but not before I had switched jobs. I was recruited as an insurance salesman for a debit insurance company. My wife’s insurance agent at the time had told his manager that a policyholder of his had gotten married and her husband might be a good candidate for employment. My wife and I went for an interview, and I was hired by the district manager. I’ve spent over half my life in the insurance business, some thirty-four years before retiring from the insurance business in 2006. I can’t help but wonder that if I had just walked away from the insurance business one year earlier, a month earlier, or even a week earlier, maybe none of what I am about to share with you would have happened to me. Or would it?

Chapter One

Tuesday Evening—The Encounter

You know, in everyday life, people make hundreds of simple decisions without giving them a second thought. Ninety-nine percent of the decisions are usually good decisions, but it’s that 1 percent that can sneak up from behind and bite you.

My story starts out one afternoon last December around 5:00 p.m. It was a Tuesday. I remember because it had been a cold, cloudy, and rainy day. The temperature never got above fifty degrees, and it drizzled all day long. The sun never showed its face the entire day. Oh, by the way, my name is John Carl. I’m an insurance salesman and collector of insurance premiums for a debit insurance company. I run a route similar to a mailman, except I work a different route each day of the week Monday through Thursday. I go door-to-door collecting monthly insurance premiums and try to find new clients to sell insurance to on the routes. On Friday mornings we have office meetings. The meetings usually start about 9:00 a.m. and last to about eleven thirty or twelve o’clock. After the meetings are over we are finished for the week. It’s the perfect job for someone who doesn’t like working inside, working at night, and who wants their weekends free. Their two-and-a-half-day weekends free.

During the spring, summer, and early fall months I usually worked in the streets up until about 7:00 p.m., weather permitting. But during the winter months my workdays were shorter especially when daylight saving time kicked in. I’d lose an hour to an hour and a half of daylight each evening.

Now here is where that 1 percent of decisions I mentioned earlier came into play. The 1 percent of decisions that turn out to be bad decisions that will sneak up from behind and bite you when you least expect it.

On this particular day I knocked off work a little earlier than usual because of the rain and cloud cover, blocking out the sun. Also because it was less than a week until Christmas and I just wasn’t in the mood to work. To be honest I tend to get a little lazy during the holiday season. Now I could have went on home or drove back to the office to get organized for the next day’s route. I did neither. It was early yet, a little before 5:00 p.m. My being unmarried and without a girlfriend did not encourage me to want to rush home to an empty house even though I did have Lucky, my pet Labrador, to keep me company. Instead I decided to swing by a club where I knew some of my coworkers usually stopped off after work to unwind. They would make a brief pit stop at this particular club on their way home to have a drink or two or three and check out the new attractions.

I personally only go to places like I’m about to mention to you once in a blue moon these days. Just now and then when I’m feeling a little down or discouraged because I haven’t reached my production goal in sales. I go just to try to pick up some salesmanship pointers to improve my selling skills. Okay, now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, how could an insurance salesman improve on his insurance-selling skills by going to a club? Well, it wasn’t just any club. It was the hottest go-go club in town. Yelp, that’s right, it was a strip joint. Its name was Uncle Happy’s. Why that name? I’m not sure. Maybe, I guess because once inside, people would start feeling happy and good about themselves and start smiling. Which could have something to do with the fact that Uncle Happy’s was a place where half-naked women pranced around in high heels, teasing the customers and making men like myself wish I was thirty years younger, good-looking, and rich.

Now, before you go getting the wrong idea about me, let me explain. I go to observe professional salesmanship in action. Some of the women who work in the club are persons from whom salesmanship pointers can be learned. Women will come over to where you are sitting or standing and ask you to buy them a drink. If you say no, maybe later, or not right now, they will excuse themselves but they will return and hit on you again in a little while. They will just keep coming back over, trying to wear you down. They’re persistent. They keep trying and trying to talk you into buying them a drink, thus making a sale. Most of the women have no tack or personality. They are in the club just to make a quick buck. They just walk over to where you are and ask you to buy them a drink. No hey, hi, hello, or what’s your name? But every now and then there is that one woman who knows how to get you to let down your guard and want to buy her a drink. She does this with salesmanship. By treating you like you are the most important person in the room and not just a dollar sign. She’ll start a small talk conversation with you, and before you know it she’s got you laughing and having a good ole time. Then without any warning she’s got you hooked on wanting to spend more time with her to the point of buying her a drink or drinks to keep her talking to you. The key word is spend. She sold you on the idea of wanting to spend time with her. Being persistent without applying pressure to reach the end goal of selling. This is true salesmanship and a person from whom I could learn from.

But as I drove into the club’s parking lot on that miserably cold and rainy evening, I could see business was slow. The happy hour crowd had already come and gone, or it just never showed up. There were several cars in the parking lot, but none of them looked familiar. I should have just turned around and drove out of the parking lot and went on home or back to the office. But here again is where that 1 percent of decision-making came into play. I pulled into a parking space about twenty feet from the front porch of the club. That parking space would come in handy in case it was pouring down rain when I got ready to leave. I switched off my car’s engine. Then I exited the car and ran toward the club’s front porch. As I ran up the steps to the porch I noticed a handful of people standing to my left at the far end of the parking lot. They were just standing there in the rain, and none of them had an umbrella. I could see four men and what looked like two women. I thought to myself, they must have been at the end of the line when common sense was being passed out and lost out. It was only about forty-five degrees outside according to my car’s thermometer, and a light drizzle was steadily coming down.

I walked across the porch to the front entrance of the club. The entrance consisted of two solid gray steel cafeteria-style doors. The kind that you would find in most old schools or hospitals. I grabbed hold of the door handle of the left door with my left hand and pulled the door open and walked into the club. As the door closed behind me, the cold, the rain, and the disappointments of the day just faded away. I looked around the club for any sign of my coworkers as I walked passed some empty tables and chairs on my way over to the center square horseshoe-shaped bar. I could see that none of my coworkers were in the club. There were about twenty to twenty-five swivel back barstools surrounding the horseshoe-shaped bar. Only about a third of the stools were occupied. All the men sitting at the bar looked like they were used to manual labor except for one. He was sitting at the center bottom of the horseshoe-shaped bar. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. He wasn’t dressed up like a businessman, nor was he dressed to do manual labor. He was dressed casual, you might say. So, I took a seat at the bottom left corner of the bar, about three stools from the center bottom adjacent to him.

There was a four-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall just to the left of the main dance stage. The mirror actually gave me a perfect view of the front door from where I was sitting. I could easily get my friend’s attention if any of them were to walk through the front entrance of the club and still not miss any of the excitement on the dance stage.

I guess the gentleman to my right had just ordered some food because as I was sitting down the bartender, who was a young long-haired blonde dressed in Daisy Duke cutoff short shorts, was placing a hot taco salad on the counter in front of him. The taco salad was close enough that I could smell it. The bartender then walked over to where I was sitting.

Bartender: Hello stranger, my name is Alice. What can I get you?

John Carl: Hello, Alice, my name is John Carl. How about a beer, make it a Miller Light, and what’s good to eat?

Alice: Everything.

Alice handed me a menu.

John Carl: That gentleman’s dinner smells pretty good. Let me have what he’s having.

Alice: Okay. One hot taco salad coming right up. You want it with hot peppers or without?

John Carl: Surprise me.

Alice: You got it.

Alice turned around and started walking over to the service counter.

The man sitting to my right: Excuse me, sir. My name is Jack. Are you an honest man?

I looked over at the man.

John Carl: Hello, Jack. My name is John Carl. I can honestly say that I am as honest as the day is long. I was raised that way. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Jack: The day is only about twelve hours long. The night is also only about twelve hours long. You know, AM and PM.

I looked back over at Jack.

John Carl: Say what!

At that moment Alice the bartender returned with my Miller Light and set it down on the counter in front of me.

Alice: Did you want something else?

John Carl: No, thank you, I was just talking to Jack.

Alice turned around and walked back over to the service counter where a waitress was waiting with an order for drinks.

John Carl: Well, sir, if you want to get technical. I was referring to the length of time it takes the Earth to make one complete rotation. Which is twenty-four hours. That is the length of a day as I learned it in school way back when. It has nothing to do with AM or PM, day or night.

Jack: My mistake. But tell me, John Carl. If you found something of value and if you knew who it belonged to, would you return it?

John Carl: Of course.

Jack: I heard you tell the bartender that you wanted a taco salad like I’m having. Here, you can have my salad. It’s on me.

John Carl: Oh no, I couldn’t.

Jack: Please, I insist. Company’s coming. I won’t have time to enjoy it myself.

Jack motioned to Alice the bartender to come over to where he was sitting.

Jack: Alice, please give my taco salad to John Carl. It’s on me. I’ve got to leave in a few minutes.

Alice: You got it.

John Carl: Thanks, Jack.

Alice picked up Jack’s taco salad and silverware. She turned to her right and proceeded to walk over to where I was sitting and placed the salad and silverware down on the counter in front of me. Jack leaned back in his barstool with his beer in his right hand, resting it on the counter. Then he glanced to his left looking behind me in the direction of the front door while taking a drink from his beer bottle.

Jack: I’ll have to leave in a little bit. Now promise me you won’t throw that taco salad out. That you will eat the entire salad.

John Carl: Okay. I promise.

Jack: Think of it as a box of Cracker Jacks.

John Carl: A box of Cracker Jacks.

Jack: Yeah, a box of Cracker Jacks.

John Carl: Okay, it’s a box of Cracker Jacks without the box and without the prize in the bottom of the box. I appreciate it. Thanks again, Jack. I owe you lunch, by the way. What company’s coming? Do you come in here often?

Jack then leaned forward, placing both of his arms on the counter while still holding his beer bottle in his right hand. He started to stare straight ahead at a television mounted on the wall behind the bar.

Jack: Uninvited company. If they ask you, you don’t know me and you’ve never seen me before tonight. It’s for your own good. I’m in here now and then. Why?

John Carl: Because, I owe you lunch. I always pay my debts.

Jack: I’ll find you. I promise. We’ll meet again.

John Carl: Great, and thanks again for the salad.

No sooner than I had thanked Jack for the salad I heard a noise behind me. I glanced up at the mirror on the wall. I saw both front doors of the club open wide. In walked five men dressed in business suits. At first they looked like insurance salesmen to me. But right behind them came four more men dressed in black who acted as if they were some kind of backup to the men in the suits. The four men looked to be wearing some kind of SWAT gear but without any weapons in sight. The four men positioned themselves around the club, staying in the shadows with their backs up against the wall. Three of the five men wearing suits positioned themselves around the horseshoe-shaped bar where Jack and I were sitting. They did not sit down; they just leaned on the counter, facing in the direction of where Jack sat. A fourth man took up a position on the other side of a barstool about two