u/oniric_vic

​

I remember being six years old and thinking I was stupid.

That is probably the first thing you should know about me.

I had recently come to the United States from Mexico, and I didn't speak English well enough to understand most of what was happening around me. I remember classrooms where everyone seemed to know the rules except me. I remember watching other children answer questions while I tried to figure out what the questions meant.

Eventually, they put me in a class called D1.

I don't remember what the letters were supposed to mean.

I only remember what the class felt like.

It was where they put the children who were behind.

And I was behind.

I had already been held back a year because of the language barrier. At six years old, I didn't understand the educational reasons behind it. I understood something much simpler.

I was not where I was supposed to be.

There were children in that room who struggled with things that seemed obvious to me, and there were things they understood that I couldn't. I don't remember thinking any of them were stupid. I remember thinking that I was supposed to be like them, and somehow I wasn't.

I was creative. That was the one thing I had always been good at.

I could make things up.

I could draw.

I could imagine strange things.

But if you had asked me whether I was intelligent, I would have laughed.

I wasn't.

At least, that's what I believed.

Then they gave me a test.

I don't remember the name of it.

I don't remember what organization administered it.

I don't even remember exactly what the questions were.

What I remember is the feeling.

There were things on that test that didn't feel like school.

I remember being asked to look at things and make decisions about them. I remember trying to understand what the adults wanted from me. I remember that some of the questions seemed almost meaningless, and yet I somehow knew what to do with them.

There are memories from that period that I have spent most of my life assuming were unrelated.

That's probably why it took me so long to realize how strange they were.

I remember being taken places.

I remember observatories.

I remember adults who weren't my teachers.

I remember rooms that I couldn't identify.

I remember cards being held in front of me.

Someone would hold a card where I couldn't see it.

Then they would ask me what was on it.

I don't remember whether I was good at it.

I remember that they kept doing it.

That is a different thing.

Children don't usually ask why adults are testing them.

They assume adults know what they're doing.

So I didn't ask.

Or perhaps I did, and I simply don't remember the answer.

There is another memory I have always had trouble placing.

I remember being given something to consume during one of those trips.

I don't know what it was.

I can't tell you what was in it.

I only remember what happened afterward.

The closest comparison I can make comes from adulthood, years later, when I experienced LSD for the first time.

That experience produced a sensation that was immediately familiar.

Not exactly the same.

But familiar enough that I remember thinking:

I've been here before.

That thought bothered me.

Because if my memory is correct, the first time I ever experienced something like that was when I was a child.

And I don't know what that means.

I want to be very clear about that.

I don't know.

There are things I remember, and there are explanations I have constructed around those memories.

Those are not the same thing.

What I do know is what happened afterward.

Within months, something changed.

My English improved.

Not gradually in the way I would expect from a child learning a second language. I seemed to absorb it. I started reading far beyond what anyone expected from me. I began taking mathematics that I had no business understanding at my age.

And then they moved me.

I didn't simply return to my normal grade.

I skipped it.

Then I skipped another level.

I went from D1 directly into advanced classes.

I remember the day my classmates applauded me.

I remember how strange that felt.

Because these were the same children I had once believed I belonged with.

And suddenly I was leaving.

I didn't understand why.

I only understood that something about me had changed.

Or perhaps something had been recognized.

For years, I thought that was the end of the story.

I grew up.

The people from those classes disappeared into the ordinary machinery of life.

Some became names I could barely remember.

Some became faces without names.

Some disappeared completely.

My cousin had been involved in the program too.

That always seemed strange to me, although I didn't think much about it at the time. There were so few of us selected from the school that having someone from my own family there should have felt significant.

Instead, it simply became another childhood fact.

Another thing that happened.

Another thing I forgot.

Until recently.

A few months ago, I watched a video online.

It had nothing to do with my childhood.

Nothing to do with school.

Nothing to do with me.

It was one of those videos you watch because the algorithm decided you might be interested in it.

I almost clicked away.

Then I heard something that stopped me.

The video was discussing intelligence agencies and their historical interest in altered states of consciousness, psychological experimentation, on ESP and unusual forms of human perception.

And then I heard the word.

Gifted.

I don't remember the exact sentence.

I remember the feeling.

That same strange sensation I had experienced years earlier when something familiar appeared inside a completely unrelated experience.

I paused the video.

I watched it again.

Then again.

And suddenly I was six years old.

D1.

The test.

The cards.

The trips.

The observatory.

The thing I still cannot identify.

The children.

The feeling that, somehow, I had been taken somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.

I began searching.

Not because I believed I had uncovered a conspiracy.

I didn't.

I was simply curious.

That's always been my problem.

If something is strange enough, I want to understand it.

And if I can't understand it, I want to look at it from another angle.

Sometimes I want to make something from it.

That's probably why I never learned to leave strange things alone.

I started looking for the names of the other children.

At first, it was almost fun.

A childhood archaeology project.

Old schools.

Old photographs.

Old classmates.

People I hadn't thought about in decades.

Then I found one of them.

He was dead.

I thought that was sad.

Nothing more.

People die.

We grow older.

That is what happens.

Then I found another.

Dead.

Then another.

And suddenly I wasn't researching my childhood anymore.

I was counting.

There were fewer of us than I remembered.

Or perhaps I remembered too many.

I couldn't tell.

That was when I started having the dreams.

The first one was lucid.

Completely lucid.

I knew I was dreaming.

I was standing somewhere I recognized, although I couldn't explain how I recognized it.

And one of the children was there.

One of the children from those trips.

He looked exactly as I remembered him.

Not older.

Not younger.

Exactly as he had been.

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he said my name.

I asked him what he wanted.

He told me he needed my help.

I asked him with what.

He gave me a name.

A name I hadn't heard since I was a child.

When I woke up, I wrote it down.

I don't know why.

Maybe I was afraid I would forget it.

Maybe some part of me already knew that I shouldn't.

The next morning, I searched for the name.

I found it.

And that was the moment I understood that something was wrong.

Not because the person existed.

Because he did.

But because I had remembered something I had forgotten for more than twenty years.

And the dream had been right.

That was when I went back to the beginning.

Not the beginning of the dream.

The beginning of me.

Back to the classroom.

Back to D1.

Back to the children who were chosen.

Back to the tests.

Back to the cards.

Back to the places I couldn't remember the names of.

And eventually, back to a word I had heard many times as a child without ever asking what it meant.

GATE.

At the time, it was just the name of a program.

I never thought about the word itself.

I certainly never imagined that one day I would look back at it and wonder whether it had ever meant anything else.

I didn't know then.

I still don't know.

But I have spent enough time looking backward to understand one thing:

Some memories don't disappear.

They wait.

And sometimes, all it takes is a dream to remind them where they belong.

Chapter Two —

The Girl Who Knew Everything

She was born two days before me.

Two days.

For most of our childhood, that meant nothing. It was just one of those facts adults occasionally brought up when they talked about us.

She was older.

Not by enough for it to matter.

But she liked to remind me anyway.

My cousin was smart.

Not smart in the way people sometimes use the word when they're being polite about a child who gets good grades. She was genuinely intelligent. Sharp. Focused. She noticed things.

She understood people.

She understood school.

She understood things that I didn't even know I was supposed to understand.

I was different.

I was distracted.

I was always somewhere else.

I drew things. I imagined things. I got lost in my own head. I could spend an entire afternoon thinking about something that had nothing to do with whatever everyone else was doing.

She would look at me sometimes like she couldn't understand how I could be so oblivious.

I think she looked down on me.

I don't say that with bitterness.

She probably had good reason.

She was the one who seemed destined to understand the world.

I was the one who kept wondering what was behind it

We were close enough in age that we experienced many of the same things.

Including the program.

That is something I didn't think much about when we were young.

I should have.

There were so few of us.

It should have been strange that someone from my own family had been selected too.

But when you're a child, coincidences don't feel like clues.

They just feel like life.

My memories of those years are scattered.

Hers always seemed more organized.

If I forgot something, she usually remembered.

If I misunderstood something, she corrected me.

If I was being stupid, she told me I was being stupid.

Sometimes I hated that.

Sometimes I needed it.

I don't remember ever thinking that one day she wouldn't be there to do it.

That thought simply didn't exist.

When you're seventeen, you don't understand that people can disappear permanently.

You understand death.

You don't understand absence.

Not really.

Not the kind that lasts.

When she got sick, everything happened quickly.

Pancreatic cancer.

Six months.

That's how I remember it.

Six months between the person I knew and the person we lost.

There are details I remember vividly, and others that have almost completely disappeared.

Hospitals.

Conversations.

Adults speaking quietly.

The strange atmosphere that settles over a family when everyone knows something is happening but nobody wants to say exactly what it is.

I remember watching her become weaker.

I remember knowing she was going to die before I understood what that meant for me.

And I was seventeen.

Maybe eighteen.

I don't remember being mature about it.

I don't think I could have been.

I was a kid pretending I wasn't.

I went on with my life.

I went to school.

I did ordinary things.

I laughed.

I got distracted.

I probably thought about myself more than I should have.

And then she was gone.

Just like that.

Except it wasn't just like that.

It was six months.

Six months of watching someone disappear while everyone around you slowly learns how to live with the fact that they're going to.

I don't think I ever learned.

Not completely.

For years afterward, I thought I had dealt with it.

That's another lie we tell ourselves when we're young.

We confuse the absence of crying with acceptance.

We confuse continuing to live with moving on.

I continued.

I just never really understood what I had lost.

Because I hadn't only lost my cousin.

I had lost the person she was going to become.

And I had lost every conversation we were supposed to have.

Every argument.

Every stupid joke.

Every correction.

Every opportunity for me to ask her something I didn't know I needed to ask.

That last part would take me years to understand.

Because there was something about our childhood that I had always assumed I could return to.

If I ever wanted to understand those years, I could ask her.

She had been there.

She remembered things better than I did.

She was smarter than me.

She would know.

At seventeen, I didn't realize that I was watching one of the last people who could answer my questions disappear.

Her mother never recovered from losing her.

Years later, my aunt took her own life.

I don't know if grief ever explains something like that.

I don't think I'm qualified to explain it.

I only know that it left another empty space in the family.

My cousin's younger brother is still here.

Thank God.

He's still part of our lives.

But loss doesn't disappear simply because someone survives it.

It changes shape.

It becomes something everyone carries differently.

For a long time, I didn't connect any of this to my childhood.

My cousin's death belonged to one part of my life.

The strange memories belonged to another.

The program.

The tests.

The trips.

The cards.

The things I couldn't explain.

They were childhood memories.

She was my cousin.

Cancer was cancer.

Death was death.

That's how I kept the pieces separated.

Until I started looking backward.

And then I realized something I had never considered.

She had been there too.

She had been selected.

She had gone through the same system.

She had been one of the children.

And she was gone.

That thought bothered me more than it should have.

Not because I believed there was a connection.

I didn't.

At least, not then.

I simply wondered what she remembered.

I wondered whether she had remembered the same things I had.

I wondered whether she had ever thought about them again.

I wondered whether she had ever looked back at those years and thought that something about them was strange.

And then came the question that I wish I had never had to ask myself.

What would she have told me?

I will never know.

That is the part that still hurts.

Not because I believe she had some secret answer.

Not because I believe she knew something terrible.

I don't know what she knew.

I only know that I can't ask her anymore.

So I started looking for other people.

At first, I was simply trying to find the children I remembered.

The people who had been there.

The people who had sat in those rooms.

The people who had taken those tests.

The people who had gone on those trips.

I thought there would be dozens.

There weren't.

I found names.

Then I found photographs.

Then I found obituaries.

One person was dead.

Then another.

Then another.

Some people had disappeared from the records I could find.

Some had moved.

Some had changed their names.

Some simply seemed to have vanished into ordinary life.

And suddenly I was doing something I hadn't intended to do.

I was counting.

Not the living.

The missing.

I kept thinking about my cousin.

About how intelligent she had been.

About how she would have approached this differently.

She would have made a list.

She would have found the records.

She would have looked for inconsistencies.

She would have told me when I was being ridiculous.

And maybe that is why I kept going.

Because for the first time in my life, I wanted to ask her something and couldn't.

So I began asking the dead.

Not literally.

Not at first.

I searched their names.

I searched old schools.

Old programs.

Old photographs.

Old documents.

I looked for anything that might tell me what had happened to us after we were chosen.

And eventually, I found something I wasn't looking for.

A name.

A name I hadn't thought about in more than twenty years.

That night, I dreamed about my cousin.

She wasn't there to answer my question.

Someone else was.

One of the children.

He was exactly as I remembered him.

Not older.

Not changed.

Just a child standing somewhere I could not identify.

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he said my name.

I asked him what he wanted.

He told me he needed my help.

I asked him with what.

He gave me a name.

The same name I had found earlier that day.

I woke up before sunrise.

For a few seconds, I didn't know where I was.

Then I remembered.

My cousin was dead.

The child in the dream was dead too.

I reached for my phone.

I wrote the name down.

And for the first time, I wondered whether I had been looking in the wrong direction.

Maybe the question wasn't what had happened to us.

Maybe the question was what had happened to the children who came after us.

I didn't know what that meant.

I still don't.

But I knew where I had to start.

With the names.

With the records.

With the people who were still alive.

And with the one question my cousin would have asked before I ever got the chance:

What are you actually looking for?

Chapter 1

1st letter

"Inheritance"

Son,

If you are reading this, then it means there are things I failed to say while I was still around to say them properly. Maybe that is weakness on my part. Maybe it is just the way men in this family were taught to carry things.

My father was the same way with me. He believed a man’s duty was to stand between his family and the darker parts of the world for as long as he could. He did it well enough that I grew up thinking evil was something simple. Something human.

I learned later that there are places in this world where something older than us lives quietly beside it. Not evil necessarily. Not good either. Just old. Old enough that men stopped understanding it a long time ago.

The land around our home carries some of that in it. I felt it long before I ever understood it. Your grandfather did too, though he never spoke on it directly.

A man can live his whole life pretending these things are not there if he wants to. Most people do. Truth is, most of the time these things want as little to do with us as we should want to do with them. There are laws to this world whether men recognize them or not. Boundaries.

Respect matters.

Fear matters too.

I know now that part of being a man is understanding there are burdens beyond the physical ones. Strength is not only protecting people from hunger or violence. Sometimes it means standing watch over things they should never have to see.

If I kept that weight from you, it is because I loved you enough to want your childhood left untouched by it for as long as possible.

Chapter 2

2nd letter

"Kitty"

There is one thing I lied to you about, and I ask God to forgive me for it if lying to your own child is truly a sin.

Kitty did not die because of a raccoon.

I told you that because you were young, and because I could not stand seeing you look under those floorboards afterward like something down there had stolen a piece of the world from you. Truth is, it stole something from me too.

I knew the moment I saw what was left of that poor thing that a line had been crossed.

Up until then, whatever lived out there had kept its distance. So had I. That is the way it is supposed to be.

But when something starts creeping beneath a family’s home, beneath the place your children sleep, then a man has responsibilities that go beyond fear.

I need you to understand this clearly: I did not go looking for these things out of hatred. I did it because once the line was crossed, somebody had to answer for it.

Maybe your grandfather understood that long before I did. Maybe all fathers do eventually.

The hardest part of being a man is realizing protection is temporary. You cannot keep darkness out forever. You can only hold the door shut long enough for the people you love to live some peace before the darkness reaches them too.

3rd letter

"The raccoon"

P.D

-I found this letter again while cleaning out the old cabinet near the kitchen.

I decided to leave it untouched besides this little addition because whether I like it or not, these words still carry truth in them. Maybe one day they will matter to you the same way certain words once mattered to me.

If that day never comes, then I pray this only reads like the ramblings of an overprotective old man. God knows I would prefer that over the alternative.

But if it does come, if you ever find yourself feeling that same weight sitting in your chest late at night while your family sleeps down the hall, then maybe this letter will help you understand the burden a little better than I did when it first reached me.

Letter:

Son, if you are reading this as it was originally intended to be read, then I am most likely dead.

Before anything else, I need you to know something I should have probably said more while I was alive. I loved you. I loved all of you more than I ever knew how to put into words. Men in this family were never very good at talking. We showed things differently. I hope somewhere along the way you understood that.

There is also something I lied to you about, and I ask your forgiveness for it.

What killed the kitten was not a raccoon.

I told you that because you were young, and because some truths place a weight on a person that they never fully put back down afterward. I wanted to buy you a little more time before that weight ever reached you.

That night when I told you to stay in your room and sleep beside your mother, I had already found what was left underneath the floorboards. I knew then that something had crossed into our home that had no business being there.

There are things in these woods that have existed longer than any family that ever settled these mountains. My grandfather knew it. His father knew it too. Most folks around these parts know enough not to go looking for them, even if they pretend otherwise during daylight hours.

Usually there is distance between us and them. That is the way it is meant to be. You leave them alone, and they leave you alone.

But sometimes that line gets crossed.

And when something steps beneath the home where your family sleeps, a man has responsibilities beyond fear.

At this moment I am sitting at this table with a loaded shotgun beside me, trying to gather enough courage to walk back out into those woods before sunrise. I would be lying to you if I said I was not afraid. Any man who says otherwise around things like this is either stupid or already dead.

But courage was never about being unafraid. Your grandfather taught me that much. Courage is understanding there are things bigger and older than you in this world and standing your ground anyway for the sake of the people sleeping under your roof.

I do not believe man can conquer nature. I think only a fool would believe that. But I do believe God gave men enough strength, enough intelligence, and enough faith to protect what has been entrusted to them for at least a little while.

If I come back home, maybe one day when you are older we will sit together and I will tell you the things my grandfather once told me.

He used to speak about these things sometimes after drinking, though never for very long. He called them walkers.

I never knew how much of it I truly believed growing up. Part of me thought they were just old mountain stories meant to keep children from wandering too far into the woods after dark.

But I remember one night clearer than the others. He told me when he was a boy, something out there tried to lure his younger brother deeper into the forest by wearing the voice of their father.

Said his brother swore he could see their daddy standing between the trees calling for help.

My grandfather knew better.

He said there was something wrong about the way it moved. Wrong about the way it smiled.

He told me he grabbed his brother and stood there shaking with a knife in his hand until whatever it was finally stepped back into the dark.

I remember laughing about it when I was younger. Thought it sounded impossible.

I do not think that anymore.

Because tonight, before I found what was left of that kitten beneath our floorboards, I could have sworn I saw something standing near the tree line watching the house.

And even from that distance, it looked like you.

That is why I am going back out there tonight.

Because whatever is wandering these woods has started looking toward my family . I am writing this in the hope that you never have to carry the burden I am about to walk into tonight.

But if the day ever comes when darkness steps across your door the same way it stepped across mine, then understand something clearly, fear is natural, but doing nothing is a choice.

Protect your family.

Protect your home.

And if God is willing, protect whatever goodness still exists inside yourself while you do it.

I love you, Isaiah. More than I was ever capable of saying out loud.

Undying love: your Father