The Exile

I am the black hooded shape reaching out to you from the darkness of the night. I journeyed through the doorway ripped, like a jagged black mouth, in the center of your sleeping brain. You cower in terror, knowing the suffocating feeling of something heavy and black, sitting on your chest; but no, even that's not quite right. no human mind could approximate the thing that I AM. Nothing human could process ME, for I am the absence of all that is spiritual light. I moan, and beyond, in the chasm between, you hear the gibber and wail of the damned as they writhe in convulsive agony; kept, like twisted slaves in a perpetual stew of relentless conviction.

I'll turn your brain like a piece of meat on a spit, over an open flame. But here, in this place, there is NO LIGHT. Not now. Can you see my fingers? Long, gauntleted, claws reaching out to touch you, to twist you, to torment you in this place that is not a place but is a deeper shade of midnight than the infernal pool of ink that surrounds me. Beside me, I come with my white stallion steed. He has the face of an insect, the arms of a mantis, and the curved, bony back of a half-starved nag. Oh, you can see the jutting white thighbones as he jerks like a puppet, sways like a marionette, his slash of a grin separating his face, a hideous mockery of a human smile.

We have come from worlds beyond, a rocky coastline that could be another planet or simply another place. There is not one growth of vegetation here; this world is an empty, barren coast, a damp, dew-encrusted shore on the coastline of infernal longing. Inside the cave, inside the mind; is where I hold court.

***

"I used to have a dog, but we don't play anymore." --Zem

"I wrenched Dog backward and got GOD. Now God barks."--Aleister Crowley.

It was perhaps thirty-three years ago that I woke from uneasy dreams and thought I was floating under a tree. Then I realized that this was impossible. Those were NOT tree branches. Those were fingers.

Before me, standing by my bed, was the Hooded Man. Call him Night Hag, Sleep Paralysis, Alien Abductor, or what-have-you. I call him "The Exile." Or, he calls himself that and has intimated it to me.

His image, coupled with that of the praying mantis entity, is an obscure part of alien abduction literature. This literature was not widely available in any detail in 1990. With the advent of the internet, I discovered others who have had identical experiences. In a Batman comic, I saw, seemingly drawn at random, the exact image of the Hooded Man ("The Exile") and the Praying Mantis. In some way that cannot be explained, HE LIVES.

"I used to have a dog, but we don't play anymore."

This is what he told an old girlfriend, who encountered him while using an Ouija Board. An entity calling itself ZEM. I have used that name now, for both my book publishing as well as my name as a tarot reader, for many, many years. His most potent symbol appears to be the "Eye in the Palm," which I was shown in a vision around 2001, or 2002, as the final image of a series of burning scrolls being held and then cast away by beings that were meant to depict extraterrestrials. The vision included a world set to apocalyptic blaze by the war between primitives, instigated by a self-realized "Cube from Space." I know, I know, hard to believe. But I was not sleeping. I simply passed out, had the vision, and awoke. Twenty-odd years later, here I am, and I have become a professional fortune teller.

I can't explain any of this. Science puts it down to "sleep paralysis," a condition you can investigate quite easily for yourself; a simple neurological malfunction of the dreaming mind. But then why is it a Hat Man, a Hooded Man (image of the Grim Reaper) a praying mantis "alien"; why is it always so similar?

The legendry of the Hag, of being "Hag-ridden" goes back into the mists of antiquity. What are our stories of vampires, of the incubus and succubus, the strange night terrors that have plagued man since medieval times? The cursed old woman who crawls atop the sleeping, inert form, to steal the breath? She reeks of charnel things, of sulfur and brimstone. Hell erupts like a furnace shooting black coals of wanton terror at the sleeping self.

What is IT?

For decades of my life, I have anticipated his coming again and dreaded it. I suppose when, finally, I shuffle off this mortal coil, I will meet him again, out of my flesh, and into HIS world. I remember the last time an emissary of that Other came calling. I was in a car, parked at night, explaining this to an old girlfriend, that began to cry. Ahead, standing at the side of the street, I saw what I took to be a young man in a hooded sweatshirt.

"I used to have a dog (god), but we don't play anymore."

In other words, the "Exile".

She suddenly started the car and sped off. I asked her why. She said, "He was back there, staring at us."

I said cautiously, "I saw what I took to be a man back there."

"No," she said. "Not a man. HIM. He didn't move. He didn't budge. Not even when the wind blew."

Not even moving with the wind...

***

Occasionally the bed will shake. Books fly from their shelves. Electrical appliances operate themselves. I get mysterious phone calls. Voices of all I can take to be spirits appear in my audio recordings. I've seen the shadow of a "Hat Man" on the bedroom wall, fading, over a hanging of the Hindu goddess of death, Kali.

Occasionally, when doing readings for clients, the dead appear, full-blown, in my mind. I'm not a medium in the sense that I go looking for dead people. But there they are, and I describe them, and the client confirms this for me. I suppose I've been touched this way since the moment of my birth; my earliest memories are, ironically, of dying.

Floating out of my body as a child sick with pneumonia, toward a light in the ceiling, I could see the image of a little girl reaching toward me, beckoning me, to come forward and quit this life. But I, connected by the "silver cord" Spiritualists speak of, reentered my body, to a life marred by so many factors, but one so unusual at the same time. (Who was she? Was she an incarnation of "Zem"? There is another story to go along with my suppositions, but I'll have to save it for another time.)

It is a life touched by The Other. By the Power. By something ineffable within ME.

I can't describe it, and I am growing tired.

In the book The Making of a Serial Killer by true crime author Sondra London, the Gainsville Murderer Danny Rolling describes sitting in a cemetery at night, parked, smoking a joint, when a tall, menacing "shadow person" emerges from behind his truck, coming forward. He was a man convinced that the "Devil walked the earth in the form of man," was Danny Rolling, who succumbed to the blandishments of the devil that took his soul. In this instance, though, the "shadow person" was the "Hat Man," as described by Heidi Hollis in her book of the same name. Paranormal investigator the late John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies, likewise documents a spate of "bedroom invasions" by hooded, monk-like phantasms that were described as very large and menacing, with no face and glowing red eyes, in his book The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings.

I'll close with a familiar line from the cursed, haunted, ill-omened film Poltergeist from 1982. Its young female leads (Heather O'Rourke and Dominique Dunne) rest eternally, peacefully we hope, not far from each other in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in Los Angeles, California. In that movie, the late actress Zelda Rubinstein, describing the spirit that is with the vanished Carole Anne, says of it, "It tells her things only a child could understand [...] To HER, it simply is another child. To us, it is the Beast."

Or perhaps better referred to as The Exile.

Sleep tight.

Note: My first article on the Night Hag, called ..."Night Hag", was posted by Vocal on the same day, four years ago, when my grandfather suffered a major heart attack and died. I'm not sure if one was somehow connected to the other, but it is a striking set of circumstances. To read that article, go here:

To read of another revenant, one that seems eerily similar, but may simply be the conjurings of mass hypnosis or delusion (but might they not all be that?), read this: