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night, Carl slept on the living room sofa, with a small night light glowing dimly. From Ted’s bedroom, he could see down the hallway to the sofa, and when Ted awoke around three a.m. he glanced up. There was no noise or movement as far as Ted could tell, and he did not know why he had awakened. Peering down the hallway, Ted saw a tiny blue light blinking above Carl, who was still asleep on the sofa. He also saw shadows, two or three of them, faintly moving around that area. But before he could respond and get out of bed, a strong feeling washed over him and he lay back serenely. Ted sud- denly felt that he knew what was going on with the blue light, and it didn’t bother him. In fact, the whole situation seemed perfectly fine to him, and he immediately fell back asleep. An hour later, Ted awoke again and sat up, warily alert. He looked down the hallway and saw nothing out of the ordinary. But he then remembered the dream he had just had and became agitated. He had dreamed that he saw Carl strapped down and someone using some sort of device on Carl’s body. This person, or whatever it was, had a contrap- tion inserted into Carl, and something was being removed and placed in a small bag. That was all Ted remembered, but it was upsetting. He got up quietly and tiptoed into the living room. Carl was sleeping, and Ted saw no signs of disturbance. Reluctantly he went back to his bed, but this time he couldn’t sleep. And when Carl woke up, Ted asked him if he remembered any- thing going on during the night. “No,” Carl said, “I slept just fine.” “How do you feel?” Ted asked. “Fine. Why?” Ted shrugged and let the matter drop, saying nothing about the dream. Surely it was just a dream, he told himself. The blue light, the shadows and rectal probe, everything could have been a nightmare. About a week later, he got a phone call from Carl late one night, and his friend was very disturbed. “T’m sorry to bother you like this, I know it’s late,” he told Masquerade of Angels 214 Ted, “but I just had a bad dream, and I’m pretty shaken up.” “Tell me about it,” Ted said. “What happened?” It was not like his friend to be so upset by a dream. “All I remember is being with some strange people,” Carl answered, “and they were teaching me how to use this real unusual looking headphone set.” “What did the people look like?” “T don’t remember,” Carl said, “and I can’t remember what the headphones were for.” “So what’s got you so upset?” Ted asked. “T don’t know, I don’t know,” Carl repeated, but his agitation was evident. “This has got me real scared, though.” From his own experiences, Ted knew what the headphone scenario might indicate, but he said nothing to Carl, who had not heard anything about Ted’s regression. He began to won- der if it was safe for him to have guests in the house any more. Marie’s strange encounter the year before came to mind again, and Bud’s missing time episode. Then there was the blue light above Carl, and Ted’s disturbing dream. Now here was Carl’s dream, and all its implications. “Am I being used like bait?” he asked Barbara the next time they spoke by phone. “People have strange experiences when they come to visit me.” “T doubt it,” Barbara replied. “From all the research, it doesn’t seem likely that people would be abducted just because they’re around you.” Ted felt she was right, that abductions probably begin early in life, but it didn’t make him feel any better about what had happened to his friends. And he was miserably fright- ened whenever he thought about the things that had been done to him, so much so that he could not bear to be in the mobile home alone any more. After reliving the memories of his death and the cloning of a new body, he feared the aliens might come back, as they had promised to do from time to time, and perpetrate new outrages upon him. He asked his friend Larry, who happened to be black, to move into the trailer for a while, at least until he had time to recover from his shattered sense of reality. And even with Larry’s presence in the house, Ted had trouble going to bed Masquerade of Angels 215 The Light - Twenty-One The Light - Twenty-One