I Came Back Home and They Tried to Kill Me.

I don't know where to start. I don't know how to make this make sense. If this even can make sense.

Last week my uncle, the last living relative I had in my hometown, died. With him gone, the police and other prominent members of the town had me followed away from town. They also took some pictures which had revealed after my mother's death that I had had a sister who died before I was born.

The police warned me not to get involved. They said it would be better if I got away while I still could. They said that the people who were at my uncle's house after his "suicide" were dangerous people. People capable of making someone, a child, disappear.

In spite of that, I had to know. If I'm being really honest, what I wanted more than anything else was to finally put my past to rest. That's the real reason I came back to Oregon after my mother died. The feeling throughout my whole life that the town I'd grown up in was rotten, backwards and wrong.

After I was sure the police had stopped following me, I turned around and came back to my mother's house. I'd been staying there and doing research on the town. I'd started with some of the prominent members of the town and their families.

What I learned is that many of the older adults who "run" the town, from the fire and ambulance services, to the schools, construction, police, commerce, and even the mayor have something in common. They all have past records of being homeless. Almost every well-known person in town that I could think of had something like this. Suspiciously missing from this list was Pastor Charles, the massive man who operated the local church. This wouldn't necessarily mean anything, of course. However, it did seem strange that all these prominent people had come from around the country, and in fact the world, to this one small town and had all done extremely well here.

I began to shift my search to what might have drawn them here. In the 1960's through the 1980's, jobs had been as plentiful as the trees here. Then in the 1990's, those jobs had dried up.

I found a few old scans of newspaper articles from the 1990's (since none of the people who were still here were involved in the fishing or timber industries), but none of them showed any kind of attraction to this town in particular. Good schools, fast growth, but little else. So I went to the library, where they kept a near-complete collection of local newspapers and found a front-page article from 1985, which included a black-and-white picture of a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of a huge pharmaceutical plant. A man in a black suit who I didn't recognize was holding the scissors in the age-old pose, but it was the people behind him that shocked me. There they stood, half of the people I felt were responsible for whatever was wrong with this town. And my father in a white lab coat.

I went to print the page article and got an error message about paying a fee to the librarian. Stupidly, I went to the front desk. As I approached, the girl working there did a double take, and then slowly got up and walked to the back room.

It was time to leave.

I got in my car and scribbled down what I could remember from the article. "Newport Pharmaceuticals Plant Opens Doors." "55 new jobs." "November 13, 1985."

I'd never heard of any kind of plant near here or "Newport Pharmaceuticals." As far as I'd known, my father had moved here shortly after he was born, and the whole time I'd been growing up, he'd never had a job for longer than a year.

I headed back to my mother's house to see what I could find on the internet. I hid the car as before and walked up to the front. I was walking up the driveway when I saw the neighbor sitting on the front porch. She'd seen me, so I couldn't get away, though she was smiling as if she was happy to see me.

She said she was locked out of her house, and came to see if my mother had a spare key. She must have been going absolutely senile, because she didn't even seem to realize that she hadn't seen me since I was 18. In fact, the last time I'd seen her was after one of my mother's fits when she'd kicked me out of the house. I'd ended up going next door and having dinner. Even though I'd had to sit through an hour of her and her husband tell me about how it wasn't that bad and that I should forgive my mother, the food had at least been good.

I told her that my mother was dead, and she looked so sad. "Oh no. Oh, you poor thing," she said, coming closer with her arms outstretched. I half-heartedly returned the tiny woman's hug, eager to get inside where I wouldn't be seen, when I thought I felt an insect sting me on my ribs.

I went to brush it away, but didn't feel anything remaining on the spot where I'd felt the bite. Then I realized that the old woman was smiling widely again. I started to feel dizzy, and tried to escape back to my car, but before I could even make it off the porch, I was unable to walk. Suddenly, several people came from inside the house and carried me into a car.

They drove me to the lake, and loaded me into a small boat. Two older men, one who owned a furniture store in town, and the other who I'd seen before, but didn't know his name, took me in the boat to the deep center of the lake.

I don't swim. I haven't been able to get over my fear of open water since I was 12 years old, when I saw something terrible lurking deep under this same lake. It was dark now, the only lights were the colored running lights. I fought to move, to fight, to get away, to scream. Anything. I couldn't move. I could barely breathe, my chest felt like it was being crushed. The two men were waiting for something that I couldn't see, and after what felt like an hour, I finally gave up. I felt cold, and tears streamed down my face as I lay in the bottom of the fishing boat.

One of the men broke the silence, "There. Let's do it."

One grabbed my arms as the other grabbed my ankles, and with a grunt, they heaved my body like a bag of cement over the side of the boat.

I know that I drowned. I felt every second of it, clearly as I am sitting here typing this out. The fear forced the precious air out of my lungs and I sank, serene and peaceful, down into the black.

Inside my mind, a primal panic broke loose again, creating chaos but my body remained motionless. The last thing I remember was the intense pressure, and the sensation of losing consciousness.

Then, impossibly, I woke up. It was almost like going through a door, on the one side was one world, the world you feel when you're awake, the "real world." And then on the other side, I woke up into a completely different world, in a different place. I wasn't in the lake any more. I stood up in the middle of an empty house I'd never seen before. There was enough light to see around myself, but it didn't seem to be coming from anywhere, like maybe I was glowing.

I walked from the living room into the dining area, which had a large table and was set for seven. I heard a sound, like a child giggling and small footfalls coming from the doorway on the other side of the room.

"Hello?" I tried to shout loudly, but no sound came out. I ran through the doorway into the kitchen, and heard more footsteps sounding like they were going upstairs. I ran after the sound and came to the top of the steps. The door on my right was open slightly, and I could hear a child laughing and talking on the other side. I pushed it open slowly, and there sat my sister who I'd never known, playing with a pair of knitted dolls. She like she was about four years old, just like she'd looked in the pictures I'd seen of her.

She looked up at me as I walked in with a big, sweet smile and then held out one of the dolls for me to take. Jesus Christ, I got down on the floor in that dark, otherworldly house and played dolls with my dead sister.

Then the sound of a door opening and closing came from the bottom of the stairs. My sister looked sad. "You have to go," she said. "I hope you come back. I don't like it here. He's not nice."

I tried to ask her who? but still no sound came out. Heavy steps were coming steadily but slowly up the stairs.

The bedroom door opened, but all I could see on the other side was blackness, then a huge, bone-white hand shot out of the darkness, grabbed my whole head and pulled me through the door. I woke up in the lake again, able to hear something crashing through the brush on the banks. I dragged myself onto the shore, and heard a woman's shrill voice yelling "Oh thank God, you're alive. Are you okay?"

The woman's name is Nicole. She took me out of the lake and to her small house in the woods near the lake. I'm alive, and feeling better now, thanks to her. I don't know what to think anymore. Tomorrow, I'm leaving the state and going back to my old life. I think it's clear that what's going on here is beyond me. If any of you have any idea of what's going on here... please, help me.

I should never have come back home.