The typewritten pages ended there, with the last page only half filled with ink, but Pamela had made hand-written notes at the bottom, which went on for a few pages.


    A few months later I happened to be speaking with Larry E. who was in the hospital. He told me about something he saw while he was staying in the fire-watch tower on January 26, 1948. He had went up there with some friends to watch the storm. They were above the clouds, and they saw rain start to fall upwards. Same as Carolyn Shoemaker, but I didn’t make the connection for a few months.


    The same date as Carolyn’s plane-flight, and I trust her to remember the date accurately, so they were watching the same storm, just from a different vantage point.


    I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence anymore so I called up Larry at the fire watch but I couldn’t get in touch. He wasn’t in the hospital either. Checked that. Came to find out he had been fired. Then gone missing.


    Found was an address for Larry in Amador.


    When I went there, the whole house was gone. Just a mailbox and an excavator sitting near the foundation, and a pile of old lumber.


    Came to find out Larry was in prison. When I finally got in a room with him, he was having a full on breakdown.


    Told me he gave ‘a 5-year-old child’ to one of the ‘mossmen on the mountain’—told me he figured he was already tripping when it started, but later on he said it was raining all day, before he took any acid, because he only took the acid when his friend arrived and gave it him, and when he watched the rain it has just been him and the 5-year-old kid he was supposed to get rid of. I didn’t tell him that was my brother.


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Note: I don’t know why I called them that. The mossmen. But that’s not a bad name for them. Larry was playing with my brother, kind of swinging him around in the air. He was going to throw my brother off a cliff into the lake when something came out of the lake below that made his stomach roll over.


    Under the cloud-cover, little things like small, wet men, skin the color of charcoal began to crawl up the cliff, as if they weighed nothing. Their legs floated behind them, and they climbed with their hands. As he retold the story, it reminded him of a video he had seen of astronauts on the international space station, clinging to the runs of a ladder while their bodies lifted behind them, held down only by their spines and muscular contractions, and not by any natural force of gravity.


    When Larry got back to the watchtower, there was one waiting inside for him. Tall, slender, naked, but in the light of the flashlight, his skin was dark green, like moss. The mossman asked for my brother, never taking his hand off the ceiling, and he was flexing as if to keep himself from floating up off the ground.


    But Larry couldn’t believe he was weightless. He said it seemed fake, but the ceiling tiles flexed under its hand, as if an enormous bulk were pressed against the ceiling by gravity just as hard as our feet are pressed into the earth. If it had hair, the hair would have fallen upwards.


    I asked if he really saw all that. He said yeah. I have no idea what actually happened. If his trip was that bad.


    I asked if anybody looked for ‘the kid.’


    ‘Just you,’ he said.


    I didn’t tell him it was my brother. I got my revenge on the way out. Larry won’t be any more trouble.